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Whether you are in a start-up or second stage growth, taking your current size into consideration is important in evaluating and prioritizing marketing tactics and spend. In a recent webinar, Launch Team’s President Michele Nichols discussed the many approaches to developing your marketing mix and how companies in the technology space can help find leads and connect with potential customers. She also elaborated on:

• Specific types of tactics that are working for customers
• How to identify what tactics are advantageous and what are outdated.

As the digital landscape expands, more and more small to medium-sized businesses are utilizing marketing automation tools to take their sales process to the next level. Most often it seems that companies this size narrow their choices down to competitors HubSpot and Salesforce’s Pardot. We had two of our team members compare and contrast the two tools. Sarah Campagna and Sarah Holland break down both tools’ offerings and share tips to consider for integrating marketing automation into your sales process for 2018 and beyond.

For the first time in over 100 years, there are four generations in the workforce. Differences in communication styles among these groups can have real implications for your marketing.

Whether you’re launching your first product or expanding internationally, a strong marketing plan is essential. Ensuring continued growth requires new perspectives and new strategies in many areas of the business. We’ve created a guide with sales and marketing best practices for five different stages of growth. Here are some highlights:

Sometimes changing your brand demands real change internally. Your customer’s perception is reality, and a true brand can be seen and felt in every part of the organization.

Recent research predicts that R&D expenditure for medical devices will grow to $34 billion by 2022, but top line growth is slowing. And while this increase in R&D investment is a positive sign, uncertainty in healthcare reform is causing some paralysis in the market. How can companies overcome this risk aversion and really sell?

It's the fourth quarter, and everyone is under pressure to close the year strong. For most companies, that means a mandate to cut spending and close more deals. However, one of those instructions often undermines the other. Marketing budgets are often the first to experience cuts, and these cuts can feel self-defeating. Marketing creates sales, and a healthy marketing and sales pipeline is key to sustainable growth.

Making this argument may not change your Q4 reality, though. Instead, we offer some practical suggestions of marketing and sales activities to stop, and some to start, to meet your budget and sales targets. 

More than a Product Manager

The role of the product manager is increasingly important in industries like medical devices, where time to market is accelerating, and optics and photonics, where emerging markets are driving demand for product innovation.  

There's a lot more to budget planning than deciding how much to spend where. For some, it's setting a right-sized investment in marketing to match their growth goals. For others, it's optimizing their marketing budgets by shifting resources to what's working best today—namely, online channels. This shift involves a broadened focus on bringing in leads through websites, targeted social media, regular blogging, opt-in email subscribers, etc.

At a recent panel discussion, I was asked to share experiences in sales and marketing with an audience of Entrepreneurs’ Organization accelerator founders, along with fellow panelists Don Davis of Empire Automation Systems and Ron Valentine of ITX.

Just back from SPIE’s Defense & Commercial Sensing (DCS) conference in Anaheim, and preparing for XPONENTIAL in Dallas next month, we’re noticing that the emerging drone market presents real promise as well as challenges.

The optics, photonics, and imaging exhibitors at SPIE DCS share a common challenge with XPONENTIAL’s component exhibitors—a great deal of unknowns in:

• UAV adoption curve
• UAV applications to invest in
• Requirements
• Regulatory environment