Tools and those who enable their misuse
To get a data architect I know worked up, just ask him about how customers end up buying the wrong tools.
How about sales people who push federation tools on those who actually need data warehouses?
“It all sounds extremely sexy,” says my source, who works for a major business intelligence vendor and whom I can’t identify. [...]
Lessons from LucidEra on BI for the mid-market
Here are two tips from LucidEra veterans Ken Rudin and Darren Cunningham about BI in the mid-market: Forget “freemium” — the new term for free service leading to paid service — and be wary of users’ ability to analyze data.
Rudin co-founded the company and in June saw it fold for lack of renewed funding — [...]
Two analysts’ paths
Yesterday I asked business analysts at the Tableau conference in Seattle about their work. Here are two quick sketches.
• One of the two arrived at her present employer six years ago to do the company’s first analysis of its website sales. She used several years of accumulated data to show which content was making money [...]
Rejecting stale tech marketing words
Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you alone despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they?
Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One tweet [...]
Fooled by proximity?
Almost the same moment I read that for the fourth year in a row executives rate BI the top tech priority in 2009, I hear Tableau Software’s news: last week saw the most downloads of trial software ever. “Not by a little, by a lot,” says marketing and PR VP Elissa Fink.
The poll of Australian [...]
Some of us like to name things in BI
Stephen Few’s damning review of a new BI tool prompted a weeks-long discussion-turned-scholarly-fistfight over definitions.
Does jargon sell tech products or not?
Those of us in the tech world who shun jargon may forever remain an underclass. We may never rise to the mainstream, where today tech-centric vendors rule. So I’m delighted when I meet another one of our clan who declares proudly his rejection of tech-speak.
Don Farber, vice president of sales and marketing at KnowledgeSync, says [...]
Play terminology by ear when selling to the mid-market
Those who sell BI software to mid-size companies get to be good at nailing down what shoppers want. These shoppers are smart and hard working. But when they shop for technology, the shopping list may be just a problem, a wish, or a fantasy—known only by a description.
I just spent Monday and Tuesday helping a [...]
The trouble with IT marketing
Why does so much IT marketing put features out in front instead of benefits?
A word from the marketing-crimes division
This public service announcement opens on a CSI-like scene. Let’s call it “CSI: Marketing Crimes Division.” The lieutenant asks the lab guy, “What have you got?”
“It’s a tough one,” says the lab guy.
Lying before them under bright lights on a stainless steel examination table is the weapon: an email printed on plain white paper. The [...]
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