Articles & Speaking

Bruce writes and speaks on a variety of topics related to his areas of expertise.  Recent examples include:

Re-Inventing Product Management with LOVE

(Pragmatic Marketer)
The critical role of the product manager is in the process of changing significantly, and both companies and product managers need to adapt. While product management is among the most critical roles in any company, it’s a role whose importance is underheralded in most organizations. The extent and nature of the changes to the role mean that those that fail to re-invent themselves—or don’t try—are likely to find themselves displaced. Read the article: text | print (page 16)

Segment Your Way to Greater Profits

(The Pricing Advisor / Professional Pricing Society)
An examination of how software companies often fail to understand how different customer groups value their products. This leads to firms offering both excessive price discounts and too many licensing vehicles. Companies can develop an integrated approach that targets the right pricing strategy and product offerings to different groups, in this case: "business professionals," "aspriants," and "general users." Read the article.

Open Source Lessons for Managing Your Company

(ManageSmarter / Sales and Marketing Management)
Open-source has revolutionized how software is developed and sold, delivering more options, better reliability, and lower costs. Wikipedia offers solid evidence that the open-source model extends successfully to other types of efforts, as well, with some companies even seeing benefits in open-source hardware. The mainstreaming of two-way communications such as blogs, wikis, and social media is enabling the next open-source opportunity: management. Read the article.

Filling Your Campaigns with LOVE

(Sprout Social Media Summit)
We need a new model if brands are going to better engage with consumers.  This model needs to:

1. Help us understand the consumer – company relationship
2. Focus on interactions, not just transactions
3. Follow relationships as they evolve.

Listen to the presentation on SlideShare.

Using LOVE to be Lean and Mean

(Sandhill.com)
If a competitor made a concerted effort to come after your market, how would your customers react? What can you do to build the type of bonds that survive-or even thrive-in tough times? The Lifetime Value Opportunity Equation (LOVE model) provides CEOs an actionable framework for using consumer relationships to make your organization more competitive (and efficient and innovative). Read the article.

Who’s Making Money on the Web

(Sandhill.com)
While failure for the high-tech entrepreneur is less likely to result in death, the parallels between the Gold Rush and the current Web-based economy are many. In both cases, participants must to adapt to a new way of life, with new rules. Or rather, no pre-existing, fixed rules. Read the article.

Recessions Are Good for Your Business

(Sandhill.com)
Can your business grow in a down economy? Any business that helps customers do more with less should do very well; something to which the booming SaaS / on-demand software market can attest. But, unless you are in a hot growth market, the same-old, same-old will not produce results in 2009. And, if you are in a hot-growth market like enterprise SaaS solutions, doing the right things during a down market will act like a competitive force multiplier. Read the article.

Is Your Business Model Built for the Long Haul?

(Sandhill.com)
Despite public statements to the contrary, most of us know full well that more technology company business models are built around the technology than are built around customer relationships. The problem is that all technology either becomes obsolete or a commodity given enough time, meaning that centering your business model around a specific technology often leaves you one wrong move away from putting your very business survival at risk. Less thought about, but perhaps even more important is that technology-centric business models limit your offerings and growth potential, so they are associated with lower valuations over the long term. Read the article.

VARs Adapt to New Realities

(Sandhill.com)
Technology businesses come and go, but as a category VARs are the survivors of the technology world. Today's successful VARs are built increasingly around service and support and less about selling products-the reseller part. In fact, some of the VARs no longer resell hardware or software at all while others will source hardware or software only if the customer requests it. Those that continue to actively sell products are increasingly encouraging their customers to implement Linux and open source-based solutions that allow the VAR more control than they can get with the big traditional vendors. Read the article.

The SaaS Channel: A Work in Progress

(SoftLetter)
As ISVs push SaaS applications into the mainstream, ISVs and VARs need to consider likely changes to the channel economic model. One of these changes is likely to be a shift in the balance of power toward full-service VARs. While ISVs will find some of these changes hard to swallow, they need to keep in mind that this is the cost of extending the reach of their applications into additional market segments. Read the article.