Mary Sullivan on Customer-Centric Marketing at SDForum Marketing SIG Tonight

November 13th, 2006 Sean Murphy

Mary Sullivan has prepared a great presentation on “It’s All About Them: Customer-Focused Messaging“ for the tonight’s SDForum Marketing SIG at DLA Piper Silicon Valley.

Mary offers a messaging framework for moving beyond product-centric features and product-centric benefits to demonstrating your understanding of a prospect’s problems, needs, and wants. If you want to see more samples of her thinking for startups see her two blogs “Way to Grow” and “First Year”

The meeting starts at 6:30 with networking, Mary’s presentation will be from 7-8:15PM. I have previewed it with her and was struck by the number of thought provoking suggestions for marketing folks–and software startup founding teams–used to focusing on features.

Just a brief note on the SDForum Marketing SIG, our promise is “Practical tips and techniques for anticipating, identifying, and satisfying customers needs for emerging technologies profitably.”  There is an sdforum_marketingsig Yahoo Group that has an archive of the presentations for 2006. We are guided by this quote from “Management: Task, Responsibilities, Practices” by Peter Drucker on the importance of marketing:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only these two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

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