It makes up 80% of Cisco’s business. It makes up 60% of most technology companies’ revenue. It’s not health care insurance costs: it’s the channel. Yet even in 2010, the channel remains the ugly stepchild of direct and inside sales. Even as office overhead and direct sales salaries continue to rise and companies are in [...]
Gartner Group has released its annual prognostications about who will be spending what on information technology next year. Here’s what I found interesting: * Sustained IT spending growth won’t be back until 2012 or 2013. By that time we’ll have decided what to call the decade that ends in 41 days. One bright note is [...]
If you missed the October 2nd episode of “This Week in Social Media” you can listen to it here. On this week’s broadcast we discussed social media measurement, and despite widespread adoption of social media, measurement still lags. A recent eMarketer poll shows that only 16% of marketers currently monitor their social media programs. It’s [...]
An acquaintance who works in the medical field recently pulled a string or slipped into a disguise and got a seat at the Target national sales and marketing meeting. What impressed him was less the scale and scope of the event but the level of messaging consistency. The word for 2009 at Target was Value, [...]
This past week MITX, the Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange, held one of its well-attended and well-executed breakfast seminars (note to event planner: two black plastic catering trays of carb-bomb ‘pastries’ does not constitute breakfast: in many lands, people are known to eat fresh fruit). Panelists included the full range of online stakeholders: a media planner, [...]
