Five on Friday: September 25th, 2015

In this edition of Five on Friday, Insider Guide Diane Pierson talks pitch meetings, abandoned shopping carts, dressing for success, performing a link audit,

As an INSIDER Guide, I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products. Here’s my “Five on Friday” list for September 25th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.

1. How the Pitch Meeting Has Changed

Marty Fukuda, the COO of N2 Publishing, recently published an article in Entrepreneur.com on pitching your product to investors that’s worth a read. I also stumbled on a less-worthy article that nonetheless had a good point or two.  The upshot: while some best practices for pitching new products have changed, others are the classic pitfalls we need to prepare for.  The best (IMHO), I share below:

 

2. $2.520 Trillion in Opportunity?

“Almost $4 trillion worth of merchandise is predicted to be abandoned in shopping carts in 2015, and 63% of that is potentially recoverable.”  Reported at Business OnTapp.

3. Dressing for a Business Meeting – It’s Not What it Used to Be

While a suit or dress pants/skirt are still the most appropriate and best “dress for success” wardrobe elements, acceptable meeting attire has changed a lot in the past decade. As you can see in the Infographic below from Entrepreneur.com, jeans are now Okay. In spite of their growing acceptability, I’d still leave the T-shirts, hoodies and trainers (that’s sneakers to those of us in the States) at home.  Selling, requesting a loan or otherwise negotiating with a banker, lawyer or investor over 55?  Dress up.

 

4. Performing a Link Audit: Good for SEO and Good for Business

In general I find the white papers from digital marketing firm More Visibility to be worth a read, and this one in particular.  “Link Building Revisited” is a how-to primer on understanding those who link to your content, and how those links benefit you. Also illustrates another good reason to have some valuable content in front of the paywall.

5. Why the Head of Product Marketing is a Strategist, Not a Technologist

Rich Mironov, writing for Pragmatic Marketer Magazine, summarized the compelling reasons why the head of product should be someone with a market, product and strategy – not technology – focus.

“The [Heads of Product Marketing] push for strategic clarity and intended business results by asking irritatingly hard questions:

    • Why are we starting development if we haven’t validated this market segment?
    • How do our assumptions change when we shift technical priorities, pricing or sales/distribution models? 
    • Why should customers want to buy if we’re pushing features instead of customer benefits here?
    • Can we use off-the-shelf software for that instead of building something ourselves?
    • Does Sales concur with our revenue projections?”

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Diane


Diane Pierson has deep experience in product management and marketing, having delivered results to companies including Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, American Lawyer Media and Copyright Clearance Center. She has built products & services that have delivered over $100 million in revenue and knows what works, and what doesn’t, when executing product plans and strategies. She is also a contributor to Subscription Insider. (Read Diane’s full Bio)

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