It is a central part of my business, but I never stop being amazed by the array of surprising insights (to my clients) from doing deep-dive customer interviews. I create significant value talking to people that my clients deal with regularly. How can that be? It’s not because my clients don’t care about their customers. So, why [...]
Archive for the ‘Marketing & Strategy’ Category
Better Insights
November 28th, 2011 
Bruce La Fetra 
Posted in Featured, Marketing & Strategy 
Tags: clarity, customer interviews, customers, insights, reading between the lines 
No Comments »Back to the Future
November 20th, 2011 Bruce La Fetra When organizations are small a few people can each do a lot. This helps foster intimacy and highly nimble organizations. Because of this organizational intimacy, hierarchies and reporting can be a bit grey, so just stepping in and doing something that needs to get done doesn’t ruffle feathers. Often it is encouraged. This is a [...]
Smiles to Dollars
October 27th, 2011 Bruce La Fetra New research from Nancy Rothbard at Wharton links better employee morale to increased company performance. That sounds like the realm of HR and I’m a marketing guy, so the question for my clients is, “How can Marketing leverage this effect?” Below are four things Marketing can do to improve employee morale. Note that making killer [...]
Lessons from Steve Jobs for the Rest of Us
October 13th, 2011 Bruce La Fetra The past week saw lots of advice about the secrets of Steve Jobs’ success. Guy Kawasaki concisely distills what he learned from Steve Jobs into 12 lessons. It’s a good article with lessons worth reflecting upon. But what if you’re not a once-in-a-generation visionary leading a team of crack engineers with billions of dollars [...]
Five Benefits Your Customer Reference Program Should Deliver (but probably does not)
April 5th, 2011 Bruce La Fetra You wouldn’t hire a new employee without talking to references, and yet many companies fail to leverage their own references when new customers apply a similar level of due diligence to major purchases. A customer reference program can do a little, or a lot. At a minimum, a customer reference validates key information communicated during [...]
There’s still no substitute for good marketing
October 8th, 2010 Bruce La Fetra Marketing automation applications such as Aprimo, Marketo, and Eloqua promise to revolutionize marketing the way that ERP and CRM systems did to other parts of the enterprise over the past 15 years. Unfortunately, for those that remember, the adoption process is likely to be similarly painful. ERP and CRM vendors certainly didn’t talk about it, [...]
To Many People, Pricing Is a Black Art
August 19th, 2010 Bruce La Fetra Too many companies are haphazard when it comes to pricing, thinking good pricing methodology is a black art. Does this really matter? It does. A lot. Research by McKinsey determined that for Global 1200 companies a one percent improvement in selling price on average resulted in an 8.7 percent increase in operating profits. Unfortunately, you [...]
Google Falls to Microsoft (at least in healthcare)
August 6th, 2010 Bruce La Fetra At first glance, Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health appear quite similar. When these two companies go at it, a review of past battles informs us how this conflict is likely to turn out: Google will triumph over Microsoft yet again. This time, it’s not turning out that way, so it’s worth a deeper look. Microsoft’s [...]
The Strategy of Less Is More
June 21st, 2010 Bruce La Fetra Of all the decisions we make as business leaders, saying “no thanks” to a potential customer willing to pay us money is among the most difficult. The more your business is in need of orders and revenue, the harder it is to turn away a paying customer. Sometimes, however, it is absolutely the right thing [...]
Getting more value for your research dollar
May 27th, 2010 Bruce La Fetra Most of my consulting projects include a research component. Since clients generally call on me to help them make key decisions about markets, products, customers, or channels, working from the right information is critical. Knowing what kind of research, and how much, is needed to fill in the gaps thus has a major impact on [...]