After years of silence
and indifference
I gave up
and stopped chasing
Tag Archives: sales
Bias For Action? Prove It.
(Imagen 4)
The next time I send something to a company that claims a “bias for action” as one of its Key Super Duper Principles, I plan to call the company five minutes later and say, “Hey, it’s 9:53. I submitted a request at 9:48. Why aren’t you talking to me yet?”
The same goes for all Key Super Duper Principles. If a company says something is critically important…then its customers, prospects, partners, employees, and competitors will all be watching to see if the company is serious.
On Evaporating Prospects
(Imagen 4)
Have you friends frequently and warmly connected with you…until they didn’t? Becoming former friends, ignoring and abandoning you, becoming silent and indifferent?
Sales prospecting can be similar. Someone eagerly wants your product or service immediately. But they delay in getting back to you, plead that other critically important issues have arisen, then go silent entirely, their former desire evaporated.
I’m sure some hard-boiled salespeople believe EVERY prospect can convert, but it ain’t so. And my earlier advice applies to business prospects as well as to personal relationships:
“If my former friends’ focus is elsewhere, my focus won’t impede on theirs.”
Why Your Attempted Webinar Registration Wasn’t Confirmed
(Imagen 4)
Companies ask you to register for webinars with your corporate email address and job title.
But how many companies NEVER confirm your registration?
There are at least three reasons why you may never get that confirmation email:
- It was marked as spam by your email provider, which reflects poorly on the webinar host. Has the host earned a bad reputation?
- The company’s confirmation system is messed up, which reflects poorly on the webinar host. If it takes forever to respond to a simple registration, how long will it take the company to deliver its product or service to paying customers?
And of course there’s a third reason: the company evaluated your registration and determined you’re not a qualified prospect. Maybe you work for a competitor. Maybe you won’t buy and will instead try to sell—which the company will deduce by my job title of “Product Marketing Consultant.”
Disqualification can be legitimate. The purpose of an awareness webinar, like an awareness blog post, is to identify prospects who will become buyers.
But over-disqualification has its price. If my registration for your webinar is never confirmed because of my “Product Marketing Consultant” job title…well, I guess I can’t talk about your webinar, can I?
Mitratech allowed me to attend its TPRM-focused “frame, assess, respond, and monitor” webinar…and I talked about it.
Just a thought.
Easing the Pain of Case Study Creation and Approval
Case studies are powerful marketing collateral for companies.
Why?
Because if you select your subjects carefully, your prospects will say, “That subject is just like me. And the company’s solution solved the subject’s problem. Perhaps the solution will solve my problem also.”
Ideally a company would want to publish dozens of case studies, so their prospects could find one case study—or perhaps two or three—that describe the exact same problem the prospect is encountering.
It’s hard to create case studies
But case studies are by definition more difficult for a company to create.
- For other types of content, the approval process resides completely within the company itself.
- But case studies by definition require approval by two companies…even if the end customers in the case studies remain anonymous.
Perhaps that’s why there are so few published, recent case studies.
On Tuesday I had the occasion to visit four technology websites.
- One had 5 case studies, all written in 2024.
- One had 4 case studies, all written in 2023 and all anonymous.
- One had 8 case studies, all written in 2021.
- One had no case studies at all, even though the company had clients who could be referenced.
And the approvals don’t just involve the end customer.
A former friend interviewed many customers but was only able to complete one case study; the approvals from company legal, other company executives, and the end customers were overwhelming, delaying the other case studies.
So how do you expedite case study creation and approval?
Three tips for creating case studies
Here are three tips to expedite the creation of case studies.
Creation tip 1: Get the facts first
If the sales rep, program manager, or the subject itself can provide the basic facts beforehand, then the interview can simply consist of confirming facts and filling gaps.
Creation tip 2: Outline the case study and tell your story
Whether you use the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) or some other method (I prefer the simpler problem, solution, result), take the facts you gathered above. Then fit them into the outline and into the story you want to tell. Then see what pieces of the story are missing.
Creation tip 3: Obtain a meeting transcript
Since the subject has already consented to the case study, they should consent to the meeting being recorded.
The most efficient way to do this is with one of the popular AI note takers, which lets the case study writer review the actual words from the interview without going back and forth through a video recording.
And AI note takers are more efficient than the way I used to transcribe case study interviews.
Three tips for approving case studies
Here are three tips to expedite the approval of case studies.
Approval tip 1: Read the contract
The language of the contract with the subject may have clauses regarding publicity.
If the subject wrote the contract, then it may prohibit any promotional publicity whatsoever, or it may dictate that any publicity must be approved by a high-level governing board in a foreign country.
If the provisions are onerous or impossible, don’t use that subject and find another.
Approval tip 2: Get pre-approvals, or at least grease the wheels
Let your approvers know what’s coming, and when you think it will come.
Once I submitted a case study for pre-approval even before the results were available. This subject had a lengthy approval process, so I wanted the approvers to see the first part of the case study as soon as possible.
Approval tip 3: Use every ethical method to get those approvals
While the case study may be critically important to you, it may be merely important (or even inconsequential) to the lawyer with 50 other tasks.
From the lawyer’s perspective, it may be better if the company does NOT publish the case study. Fewer potential lawsuits that way.
Do everything you can to expedite the approval. If the CEO is demanding a published case study in three days, say so.
If not…well, that’s why you’re a salesperson. Oh, you’re NOT a salesperson? You are now.
One final tip
You don’t have to go it alone. If your staff is stretched, or if your staff has never written a case study before, Bredemarket can help. Visit my content for tech marketers page.
Expanding Internal Content
(Imagen 4)
This week I’ve been expanding an internal document for a Bredemarket client.
I guess I could call it a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document for salespeople, although it contains more than just the FAQs.
Why expand it? Because we added new FAQ categories.
- Easy enough to expand if your document is designed for expansion from the start.
- And if you include a regular checkpoint (say, quarterly or monthly) to revisit your internal and external content.
- It’s a lot of maintenance, but it’s worth it in the long run. Do you really want to head into 2026 with Windows 10 installation instructions?
(Right now a lot of you are making notes to scrub Windows 10 from your marketing collateral. Good for you.)
Of course, FAQs aren’t the only content that product marketers create. There are others.
If you need help creating or maintaining your content, Bredemarket can help.
How (and Why) to Avoid Unreliable Business Partners
(Imagen 4)
Is there an easy way to detect potential business partners to avoid?
There are reliable business partners, and unreliable ones.
I’d like to share my thoughts on how to gravitate toward the former and away from the latter, and why this is critically important to your business.
What is a reliable business partner?
We all work with a variety of business partners: clients, prospects, vendors, agents, evangelists, and the like.
Some business partners are really good at:
- Paying you. On time, or even early; Bredemarket has enjoyed working with 2 clients with “net 0” terms.
- Setting expectations. While Bredemarket has its own system for kicking off a project, things work even more smoothly when a client answers your questions before you ask them.
- Communicating with you. Outside of a project in work, partners who take the time to communicate with you are valuable. Maybe the communication is “check back in a few months.” Or perhaps the communication is “Sorry, but we have no need for Bredemarket’s services.” Even the latter is valuable.
- Keeping in touch with you. Some partners go above and beyond the minimum. For example, an executive at one of my clients would check in with me and ask, is everything OK? Are we paying you on time?
When business partners pay you, set expectations, communicate with you, and keep in touch with you, you know that you can rely on them.
What is an unreliable business partner?
On the other hand, some business partners are really “good” at:
- Not paying you. This one’s obvious.
- Not setting expectations. Have you ever had a client who was vague about what they wanted, saying, “I’ll know it when I see it?” And then…they don’t see it.
- Ghosting you. In the consulting world, you often get a prospect’s urgent and seemingly important request for services. When you respond to the prospect’s questions, you never hear from them again. Apparently that urgent request was not that important after all.
After you pull these shenanigans on me, I quietly brand you as unprofessional…and unreliable.
How to avoid unreliable business partners
So how do you avoid the unreliable business partners? Here are three tips:
- Communicate your expectations. Take the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service as an example. I clearly communicate that I only offer 2 review cycles, you respond with comments in 3 calendar days, and you pay me $500 (as of June 2025) within 15 calendar days. (And some consultants insist that I should collect money up front.) And if you don’t meet my expectations, I gently let you know.
- Expect communications. If someone says they will get back with you by a certain date, follow up. Maybe not on the exact date, but remind them what they said. But after a couple of these reminders with no response…
- Don’t pursue lost causes. Many of us hold out hope for too long, reliving the movie quote “so you’re telling me there’s a chance.” Bredemarket has hundreds of contacts in its CRM, but the majority are flagged as inactive because there’s no longer a chance. If they subsequently reach out to me…we’ll see.
Why to avoid unreliable business partners
Obviously you don’t want to deal with unreliable people, but why should you be so proactive that the unreliable people avoid you altogether?
At Bredemarket, I continuously return to the topic of focus (ubiquity or docking or whatever). And if I focus on attracting reliable business partners, and convey that the unreliable ones should stay away, then Bredemarket’s reputation as a quality provider will be enhanced.
And the people that want me to halve my prices can go to Fiverr…or ChatGPT.
Stealing and Awareness
The reason that I redirected the purpose of my Substack posts is because much of my audience there isn’t familiar with the…um…minutiae of biometrics and identity. (For example, my reference to minutiae would probably go right past all but two of my Substack subscribers.)
My Substack audience is best served with awareness content.
But awareness content is not only informative and educational.
Awareness of you
It also makes prospects aware of your company…which is critically important.
Last month I said the following about awareness:
“Technology marketers, do your prospects know who you are?
“If they don’t, then your competitors are taking your rightful revenue.
“Don’t let your competitors steal your money.”
Perhaps steal is a harsh word, but it’s accurate.
Or perhaps a better word is indifference: your actions indicate that you don’t care whether customers buy from you or not. If you cared, you’d actually market your products.
Who needs marketing?
“Nonsense, John! We have a sales staff. Who needs marketers?”
Especially when content marketing may take up to 17 months to convert. That doesn’t help the current quarter.
But your sales staff cannot be everywhere. If your prospects don’t know about you and aren’t reaching out to you, then you have to reach out to them.
And the calls? “Hi, I’m Tom with WidgetCorp.” “With who?”
So how is that current quarter looking now?
You need marketing, now
Your current quarter and future quarters would look better if your secret salesperson were working for you. As Rhonda Salvestrini said:
“Content for your business is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic. It’s your secret salesperson because it’s out there working for you 24/7.”
But the secret salesperson won’t engage your prospects until you act to create that content.
Talk to Bredemarket about your content, proposal, and analysis needs: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
Before your competitors steal more from you.
How to Isolate Your Unfocused Company
(StealthCo picture from Imagen 3)
So what are you doing, Jane?
“I’m a Scrum Master. Very busy.”
Who are you working for?
“I can’t tell you. We’re in stealth mode.”
When will you emerge?
“When we are ready to blow the world away.”
Um, how do you know that you will blow the world away?
“Our leader says so. And she knows what she’s talking about. She attended Stanford.”
But is anyone checking your assumptions?
“Of course. All 23 employees…forget I said that number.”
But what about your prospects? What are they saying?
“We know they will love it!”
Did they say they will love it?
“We know they will!”
What if the prospects learn about your stealth product and decide it sucks? And all the years you’ve spent developing in isolation are in vain because of a lack of true customer focus?
“That won’t happen. Our leader knows what she’s talking about. She founded one successful company, and uses that experience to guide us remotely from Texas.”
Who is this leader?
“Elizabeth Holmes. Have you heard of her?”
Ending the Isolation
There are potentially valid reasons for entering stealth mode, including protecting trade secrets and keeping the competition away.
But…there is a risk if you also keep the prospects away from your stealth mode operations and fail to engage with them. Who knows—maybe your prospects might have some ideas of what they need, and that information might be good to know. Your unicorn rockstar fearless dear leader may not know EVERYTHING.
If you want to work out a strategy for getting prospects engaged, let me ask you a few questions. Book a free meeting at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
Go Forward. Move Ahead.
(Wildebeest bridge picture via Imagen 3)
A few of you know the particulars of this story about avoiding long-term risk for short-term gains. But the particulars aren’t critically important to most readers.
The business risk of new markets
One time a company wanted to enter a new market. This new market would completely change the way the company did business, both from a technological perspective and from a business perspective.
While the technological challenges were daunting, as usual the business challenges were even more so.
The biggest risk to the company was that the new market operated on a different revenue model, one in which revenue was deferred.
- In the company’s current market, revenue started at contract signature.
- But in the new market, the company would have to wait over a year and a half after the contract was signed before it received a dime of revenue.
In a publicly traded company, or even a privately held one, the powers that be are reluctant to undertake an initiative where they won’t get any revenue for 18 months.
“The quarter ends in less than 8 weeks. We want revenue NOW!”
So the company hemmed and hawed about entering the new market, scared of the financial risk. Finally it told its prospect that they’d enter the new market…if the prospect would make an immediate down payment. The prospect was not pleased and went with the company’s competitor instead. And the competitor continued to dominate this market.
For a time.
A few years later, the original company decided to accept the financial risk and, in the words of Devo, “go forward” and “move ahead.” And luckily for the company, it wasn’t too late. The company successfully entered the new market and became a dominant force.
Quarterly gains via risk aversion
We see this today, where a number of companies are struggling to survive. They do the prudent thing, letting go of the employees who don’t provide immediate revenue and concentrating on those who do. The engineers who can code something NOW! The salespeople who can get contract signatures NOW!
This isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do. If your firm is about to close its doors, you have to do whatever you can to keep the business operating.
But what after that?
Continue to act in a reactive way, chasing the next short term deal?
Good luck.
Bredemarket 