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The Televerde Blog

• At the Intersection of Market Research & Demand Creation

  Larry Fleischman 10:57 am on September 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply   with no comments

  By Larry Fleischman, Practice Director, Branding and Go-to-Market Strategies & Solutions, Televerde 

  My peer Michelle Cirocco, Televerde’s Director of Sales, and I have embarked on a demand creation journey. In actuality we’ve always been on this journey, but now we have a better map to guide our way. The path is long. Sometimes it winds, sometimes it narrows, sometimes it broadens, and there are occasional switch-backs. Regardless, we know what’s on the path ahead because of a series of 10 mileposts we’ve identified to mark our way. 

  In our effort to share the map with you via our collaborative Televerde blog entries, we’ve already talked about the first two critical milestones – 1) Go-to-market strategy planning and 2) Data analysis & management. These first two points are so important to get right. If you’ve been to driving safety school to keep those dreaded traffic violation points off your insurance records, then you know the same things we do…  most accidents happen within the first 5-15 minutes of leaving your home. So let’s get out of the driveway and onto frontage road safely!  (More …)

   

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• Demand Creation Planning: Make the First Step the Right Step

  Larry Fleischman 10:36 am on August 18, 2010 Permalink | Reply   with no comments

  By Larry Fleischman, Practice Director, Branding and Go-to-Market Strategies & Solutions, Televerde 

  At Televerde, we’re always engaged in a process of trying to put the right context on optimized approaches to demand creation. But since everyone has a slightly different view of the world, it’s a little like herding stray cats. Fortunately, the Televerde cats are a little different – we have a home we always come back to so we’re not really strays. And we tend to “self-herd.” However, we do sometimes take different routes to return home. But then, a little diversity in input and mapping is never a bad thing if it gets you to the right place.

  We’ve all recently glommed onto an idea – actual a number of ideas – that resulted in the creation of a map all of us can understand and use to get home. And hopefully to get our clients home too. We call it our “Integrated Approach to Optimizing Demand Creation & Discovery.”  It’s really more of a strategy, but let’s think of it as a map so I can keep my little analogy intact for the purposes of this blog. (More …)

   

• The Bake-Off Pay-Off

  Larry Fleischman 2:51 pm on July 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply   with no comments

  By Larry Fleischman, Practice Director, Branding and Go-to-Market Strategies & Solutions, Televerde  

  Craig Burbidge, a VP Marketing with Hitachi Consulting, recently conducted a side-by-side comparison of Televerde’s sales opportunity generation capabilities with that of a rival for a 90-day stretch. Neither Televerde nor our competitor was aware of the “bake-off” scenario, which was deliberately intended by Craig. The objective was the same for both firms: Position Hitachi’s customer-relations software solution and supporting services to medium-size businesses and generate qualified sales leads. 

  By the end of the program Televerde delivered five times as many leads as our rival, and the leads were better quality according to Craig, who attributes this to Televerde’s persistence, a differentiator called out by journalist Victoria Barret in an article she wrote on Televerde that appeared in a recent issue of Forbes.  (More …)

   

• Kudos to the Community Builders: It’s Now Up to You to Keep It Vibrant

  Larry Fleischman 9:02 am on May 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply   with no comments

  Kudos to the Community Builders
  Neighbors: It’s Now Up to You to Keep It Vibrant

  By Larry Fleischman, Practice Director, Branding and Go-to-Market Strategies & Solutions

  Televerde joined SiriusDecisions last year after hearing references by multiple clients to the research firm. In the midst of so much incoming information from groups like MarketingSherpa, CMO Council, DMA, Gartner, Forrester and others, keeping up with all market chatter was, and frankly still is, a little overwhelming. Probably similar to how many of you keep up the pace, we tend to listen to the conversations that appear to rise above the rest. Sadly, sometimes that’s a function of volume – literally the companies generating the most amount of information. Because we all have email addresses, they’re just hard to avoid. 

  But what should reallygenerate the most attention are those conversations that appear to be the most sensible, relevant and timely. (More …)

   

• A Blend of Right Practices Makes the Biggest Impact

  Larry Fleischman 11:04 am on April 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply   with no comments

  A Blend of Right Practices Makes the Biggest Impact
  Six Ways to Optimize Demand Creation Program Performance 

  By Larry Fleischman, Practice Director, Branding and Go-to-Market Strategies & Solutions, Televerde 

  With a schedule of 50+ demand creation campaigns that Televerde implements for our clients on a monthly basis (650+ annually), undoubtedly we learn some things along the way about what works and what doesn’t. Clients rightfully expect us to share our knowledge with them and are never hesitant to ask us lots of questions about what we know that they should know. The question we’re probably asked most often is “What are the one or two practices we can engineer into our campaigns to improve the performance?” 

  The answer is never really as simple as “Just change this question or message in the discussion guide/script” or “Just add this data to the campaign.” Since each program is unique in some way, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all set of solutions. However, across all these implementations, one theme is common, which is that it’s typically a mix of several right practices in multiple areas of the strategy that makes programs more successful.   (More …)