Posts by Matt Heinz
How to Innovate like a Minor League Baseball Team
Two years I was in a meeting with a couple dozen general managers of minor league baseball teams. It was the end of their season and they were together for the annual minor leagues Promotional Seminar, three days of sales & marketing best practice sharing.
Read MoreFailure Is The Only Path To Innovation
Breakthrough ideas don’t exactly respect your deadlines. Leaps in progress can’t always be planned. And if you work hard enough to create and deliver something truly innovative and successful, your path was likely littered with significant failure.
Read MoreBuild It and They Will Come
The opportunity and fallacy of “build it and they will comeâ€. Many businesses, startups, entrepreneurs and even VCs & board members assume their idea, product or service is so compelling that they simply need to build it and the throngs will arrive.
Read More11 B2B Marketing Trends to Watch in 2012
This isn’t exactly a list of predictions. Maybe it’s a wish list. In either case, here’s hoping that at least some of the 11 trends below are realized in B2B sales & marketing this year to help more companies accelerate their success.
Read MoreFire More Bullets in 2012
One of several points from Jim Collins’ new book Great By Choice is the concept of bullets and cannonballs. Simply put, a bullet is a test. It’s done to learn something with speed and minimal risk in mind. After a few successful bullets hit their mark, you conceptually have enough data or market validation to fire the cannon instead.
Read MoreIs your tagline this effective and efficient?
I drove by a high-end kitchen supply business earlier this week that has a great demo and training kitchen in the back. The banner outside of the building simply said: “Cooking Classes: Learn, Eat, Laugh.” – In those three simple words, you have an incredibly rich idea of what you might be in for.
Read MoreBoring Marketing Still Works
If your marketing wins an award for creativity, that’s pretty cool. If you test a cutting-edge new technology or channel, please let us know how it goes. If you’re constantly testing new, innovative ideas and offers and strategies, you’re doing the right thing.
Read MoreYOU Must Decide
The jobs where the boss tells you want to do are vanishing. At your company, they very well may be gone already. For some, this notion is quite scary. For years (maybe decades) information workers were used to coming into the office and being told what to do.
Read MoreSave a Dollar – Lose a Customer
Buca di Beppo, you may know, is a chain of Italian restaurants. Their particular focus has been rustic, family-style Northern Italian food. Although it’s a chain and has grown like gangbusters, until recently they seemed to have retained their authentic charm, which included great food, service, ambiance, the whole package. My foreshadowing skills are awful,…
Read MoreWho inspires you?
Are you inspired by people like you, or people better than you? We all look to others for inspiration. For ideas to emulate. To improve our personal and professional performance. But we go about that differently. Some of us look to those who are already well ahead of us. We look up, so to speak,…
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