About Me

[Update: While marketing is a continuing interest, I left its ranks last October to pursue a life-long love affair with bread - baking it, that is.  So late in life I find myself as an apprentice baker, struggling daily to produce baguettes that draw "ahs" instead of "hmmms."  Bread is an interesting problem for marketing: either it looks good and tastes good or it doesn't.  No amount of spin can alter that.]

I specialize in Web-based marketing. My background is in sales and marketing, along with broad-based research expertise. The and taught me that marketing unconnected from sales amounts to little more “putting lipstick on a pig."  Also that sales adrift from marketing is anarchy – yes, the strongest survive, but fratricide isn’t a good organizational strategy generally.  For over 15 years I've worked at developing tactical approaches that bridge the divide between organizational sales and marketing silos to help them create and successfully execute campaigns to bring products to market and continue to gain after-market share.

Expertise I offer to clients includes:

  • Overall development of go-to-market and after-market strategies for software products
  • Web-based lead generation programs to increase sales pipelines, shorten sales cycles, and gain new customers at a lower cost of acquistion
  • Creation and execution of webinars as effective marketing tools
  • Market research, including focus group facilitation, telephone and one-on-one interviews, quantitative studies
  • Business and market intelligence
  • Tactics for improving customer service
  • Creation of marketing collateral

In a larger sense, however,  I've spent most of my life as a learner - and if I could call that a profession, I'd lay claim to it.

I have a Ph.D. in philosophy of technology, but in my case that speaks more to an underlying temperament - to wander intellectually and wonder about things that interest me - than to a life's vocation in a particular discipline.

Traditionally this kind of untrained curiosity has been branded with the derogatory appellation of “dilettantism.”

But after many years and much thought, I’ve reached the conclusion that the term “dilettante” has gotten a bad rap. In my experience, “dilettantism” is what allows new connections to be made and new perspectives to be glimpsed – all courtesy of curiosity married to life experiences that may be outside the scope of a particular discipline.

So this blog is dedicated to curiosity and dilettantism – here with respect to ideas that occur at the intersection of marketing, research and the web – but in a larger arena – to the way we approach life.