Just because you’re marketing to businesses, doesn’t mean you have to hide your personality. Many solution providers tend to de-emphasize personality. They shy away from using their CEO, president or some other spokesperson in their organization. I’m not sure why perhaps it’s because they believe, incorrectly in my opinion, that it is not professional. However, using personality to help drive the marketing of a business can be highly profitable. In fact, some of the largest tech companies are run by people with over sized personalities and these personalities are used to market the business...


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One of the goals of StreetSmartVAR is to empower solution providers as gatekeepers. As the expert bringing knowledge, advice and offers, you are the ‘owner’ of the relationship with your customers. Don’t underestimate the power in being the gatekeeper! May be it’s because of the recession, I don't know, some solution providers have forgotten how important they are to clients. It’s true that large vendors like IBM or HP have huge sales forces that seem to dominate the enterprise market but for the many small and midsized businesses, solution providers are (more...)


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I ran into an interesting old December 2008 post on the The VAR Guy’s blog (it’s a blog a highly recommend). In it he described a success secret that Red Hat uses to sign lots of business. I thought he was right on the money on this, and furthermore I believe the concept is something that most if not all IT companies can you use especially IT solution providers. (more...)


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We all know follow-up is critical to keeping customers and making sales. But can there be a wrong way of doing it? First of all, let’s agree that the whole idea of “follow-up” is to form a relationship with a customer that communicates trust and the value that you offer to them. If all you communicate to them is how low you’ll go in price or what is the latest upgrade promotion on the new technology solution buzzword of the month then you aren’t (more...)


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I sincerely believe that the #1 crime in marketing technology is being boring. My experience is mostly with IT solution providers where being boring is a big problem. All you have to do is go to one solution provider’s site read the company description and compare it to their nearest competitor. The descriptions will nearly  be  identical with the same buzzwords and phrases. You’ll find the same with (more...)


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Targeting a certain niche in your business can be liberating. There are some real clear-cut advantages to going this route. Here is a big one (more...)


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