Marketing is the interface a company builds to interact with the marketplace and the customer base. The marketing group, combined with the sales force, is the point in the company where the market understanding resides. This should be the group that drives the company, that sells the marketing vision and message internally, and if that is not happening or doesn’t seem appropriate, there is something seriously wrong.
Big M Marketing focuses on the broader more strategic use of marketing have having solid processes in place to take advantage of this. I sought the advice of Dave Guzeman president of Mindpik and author of a recent book called – Driving Marketing Success with Big M Marketing.
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About Dave
Dave Guzeman Mindpik’s Mastermind, has combined sophisticated technical savvy with keen marketing instincts for over 30 years. A veteran Silicon Valley marketer, Guzeman founded the Mindpik consultancy in 1988 to develop sales and marketing programs for new product launches, startups and turnarounds. Guzeman directs all of Mindpik’s efforts to build business plans for capital acquisition or sales of companies or products to targeted markets. Mindpik clients have included semiconductor powerhouses like Signetics (now Philips) to inventive start-ups like Music Semiconductor and u-Nav microprocessors.
Prior to starting Mindpik, Guzeman held executive marketing positions including VP of Marketing at Zilog and VP of Marketing & Sales at ZyMOS. At the latter, he was responsible for introducing the industry’s first PC clone chipset, a release that triggered the PC clone avalanche.
Guzeman started the Advertising and PR department at Intel in the mid-seventies where he worked with the company’s founding partners to launch the legendary 8080 microprocessor which set the architecture and instruction set Intel still uses today.
Guzeman came to Intel from Teledyne Semiconductor, his first stop in Silicon Valley, where he served as the Digital Product marketing Manager after graduation with a BS in Physics from Aurora University in Illinois.
Tags: Strategy and Tactics
Great podcast guys, I found the ‘distribution channel vs. actual costs’ method of pricing very insightful and I feel the six principles of Big M marketing could be of real relevance to our own company.
It’s a shame the ‘$1,000 – $20,000 pricing black hole’ wasn’t covered in more depth though, I felt that question was left unanswered. Perhaps it could be the subject of a future podcast? I think it would be of real benefit for those in the B2B sector who aren’t sure how best to sell their mid-priced products/services economically.
Good question. Ask yourself what sets the bottom of that range ($1,000) and what sets the top ($25,000)? The bottom is a matter of trust. How willing are biz people to commit that money to a company they’ve not heard of? Everything you can do to raise your profile and increase credibility will help. The top end of the range is set by the cost of having a sales person make an in-person call. Handling a lot of the information process on the web lowers that cost by reducing the number of face-to-face calls required. And in most industries, third party sales groups are used to bridge this gap as well since their cost per salescall is so much lower. Their presence in the sales process can also help reinforce your own credibility by providing either a local or a vertical-market presence.