Liberty Club | The Upside of a Downturn: Building Broker Business on a Budget
With advertising budgets dwindling and businesses feeling the impact of the economic downturn, it’s easy to feel discouraged. Over the past few years, one thing has become abundantly clear: the economy will never return to what it once was. So how can business people begin preparing for the dawning of a new economy?
It starts with getting back to the basics, finding business faults and the innovating to succeed in a completely new marketplace. This presentation, which I delivered on June 9, 2010 at the Liberty Club at R2L in Two Liberty was meant to address just these issues in front of a group of Philadelphia brokers. Brokers have been hard hit by the downturn and it really is time to take advantage of the upside: this is a prime opportunity to build broker business on a budget.
This presentation, which specifically examined the broker sales funnel, studies ways to find efficiencies by preventing pre-existing prospects from falling out of the funnel and by creating evangelists who will fill the funnel on a broker’s behalf. Of course, a look at how to repair that funnel with social media and emerging technology is central to fully leveraging the true upside of this downturn.
Boston’s Microsoft BizSpark Meetup | Marketing Startups
One of my favorite things about Boston is the thriving start-up community—even in rough times. I enjoyed being the featured speaker at the Boston BizSpark Meetup, organized by Marsh Sutherland of Social Grow on February 9, 2010. I spoke to a group of about 50 professionals involved with start-ups on how to market start-ups. The presentation is below:
The underlying message of the presentation is that smart and sound strategy is the best policy to battle competitors who can out-spend you and your company. Indeed, start-ups face a key opportunity to out-think and thus, out-perform competitors by tapping into the power of new marketing.
Tuesday’s presentation emphasized the power of social media within the new marketing landscape as well as the importance of consideration of the value proposition companies present consumers and influencers with along the way. Thanks to the wonderful audience for some great conversations!
Consumer Electronics Show 2010: CES10
On January 6, 2010, I made my second speaking appearance speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I spoke about how to determine the Return on Investment (ROI) for Social Media specifically in the marketing and advertising spaces. As detailed in the presentation, widely it involves strategic incorporation of metrics from the beginning of initiative design and a willingness to explore Return on Brand Investment (ROBI) and Return on Consumer Investment (ROCI).
Thanks to Jeff Pulver for hosting a great event and to the other speakers at Social Media Jungle who gave some very rousing presentations. The speaker list is here, in order of appearance:
CEA Industry Forum | Social Media and Business: Where’s the Money?
Back on October 20, I was out in Phoenix, AZ to speak on a panel at the Consumer Electronics Association Industry Forum as the advertising agency voice on a panel entitled Social Media and Business: Where’s the Money? The panel, moderated by Jesse Thomas and with Kelley Feller, was recorded by the CEA and is available here or with the player below.
Lots of talk about social media strategy, objective setting, sales funnel, measurement and, of course, scalability.
Out-Think | Microsoft Incubation Week | Windows 7
On October 7, I had the pleasure of speaking at Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows 7 at the Microsoft Technology Center. I gave a presentation entitled “Out-Think | Marketing Start-ups, From The Ground Up,” which reviews the basics of branding both B2B and B2C start-ups.
Out-Think is my philosophy that smart and sound strategy and positioning (out-thinking) is the key to battling against competitors who can out-spend your brand or company. We also spoke about social media basics and the importance of creating an easy-to-remember value proposition to communicate to their consumers.
I spoke with a wonderful group of very impressive start-ups, who are hard at work, learning about some of the unique features of Windows 7 and drawing from Microsoft’s off-shore developers to get their products up and running! The start-ups are surely worth checking out at their respective websites:
My presentation was also recorded using Panopto, which will pair audio/video with the presentations I gave and be available here as soon as I have it ready to go.
Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week | Windows 7
This past April, I had the pleasure of speaking at Microsoft’s 2nd CRM Incubation Week, where an elite group of startups had the opportunity to leverage Microsoft’s resources to build next generation business solutions on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Platform.
Now, on October 7th, I’ll be returning to Microsoft to speak to a new group of startups who will be building applications based on some of the unique features of Windows 7, during Boston’s Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows 7. I’ll be speaking about building start-up brands and how to use Web 2.0 and social media tools to promote them.
Looking forward to meeting all of the participating start-ups there and sharing some actionable insights.
Consumer Electronics Association Industry Forum
After a summer of very intensive and all-consuming work with Oxford Communications in Lambertville, NJ, I’m looking forward to returning to speaking more often this fall upon my return to Boston.
I’ll be speaking out in Phoenix, AZ on October 20th at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Association Industry Forum as the agency voice on a panel entitled Social Media and Business: Where’s the Money?
I’m also looking forward to attending some of the other sessions and events during the forum—especially since it serves as the launching point for iStage, which is a competition between all of the hottest new developments from start-ups and established companies alike. The winner gets a space and lots of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas come winter.
Microsoft CRM Incubation Week | Microsoft Dynamics
On April 23, I had the pleasure of speaking to lots of promising start-ups at Microsoft’s CRM Incubation Week, where leading start-ups had the chance to tap into Microsoft’s resources to build next generation business solutions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Platform. There were certainly some interesting projects being developed when I popped in for my session!
I joined the teams to speak about the power of the ability to OUT-THINK (rather than out-spend). We talked about how to build a brand as a start-up and how to use Web 2.0 and social media tools to execute on a brand promise and support a newly developed solution. A big thank you to all the wonderful people I met and to Microsoft for having me and sending me off with a very nice, MIcrosoft Dynamics CRM backpac
WIND/North: Online Personal Brands
On April 8, 2009, I was had a wonderful time speaking at WIND/North to an audience of about 70 people eager to jump-start their personal brands as they transition to new career paths.
The organizer, Fred Nothnagel, had enjoyed seeing “How We All Became Elvis” so much that he asked me to speak from that deck, shown below or on my SlideShare.net profile.
I had a wonderful time hosting the Mobile Marketing Roundtable on behalf of Pongr yesterday. We had a great group of attendees around the table to participate in the conversation. Thank you to those of you who attended for a great time and really interesting conversation!
If you are interested in being invited to a future Mobile Marketing Roundtable, please feel free to be in touch at MMR [at] ben-grossman [dot] com. We’re looking forward to hosting more roundtables in the future focused on keeping up with, innovating, and connecting the mobile marketing industry. If you’d like to get a taste of where we started today, you can check out and comment on the presentation I gave pre-conversation. The folks over at SlideShare were nice enough to dub it a ’Presentation SuperStar’ and are featuring it on their homepage today.
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