As an ISV in the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, wouldn’t it be great to know that your brand and marketing messages were reaching the right audiences – and also avoiding the wrong ones? Wouldn’t it be great to have that strong sense of comfort in knowing that finally, yes finally, there was a way for you…
Convergence is the most newsworthy event of the year in the Microsoft Dynamics calendar and that holds true for MSDynamicsWorld.com (MSDW) readers, many of whom attend the event and thousands of others who flood our web site as we provide hour-by-hour reporting from the event as we did in 2012 and 2011. This year, give…
As an ISV, or any B2B organization for that matter, your sales pipeline is a living, breathing entity—almost like a baby. It must be fed, nurtured, carefully looked after, and it requires attention constantly. Marketing is the fuel that powers any sales pipeline, because it provides the constant flow of leads that sustain it. As…
Between our newsletters, webcasts, white papers, and Decisions promotions, we send out lots of emails. We try to be very careful about finding a balance between reaching the broadest audience and not sending irrelevant messages to our readers. So we’ve made extra efforts in the last couple months to make sure that only the most…
Online trade shows and similar events have become quite popular in the last few years. Before diving in, ISVs need to understand that they are much different than in-person trade shows, and should therefore be treated as such. For example, it’s essential to realize that attendees can quickly navigate a virtual trade show with their…
Partners specializing in Microsoft Dynamics are increasingly looking to ISVs to help extend application capabilities, but partners are also becoming ever more demanding in the criteria they use to assess ISVs from the perspective of the business relationship. For one thing, the partners want proven outfits, rather than beginners. In the same vein, they want…
When the curtain goes down on the Microsoft Dynamics conference where you’ve been manning your company’s booth, how do you judge success? Chances are, you look at a few things—the number of business cards dropped into your fish bowl, the number of people who stopped by to look over your brochures and product samples, and…
Marketers can’t escape the call of the online marketing gurus – inbound marketing, outbound marketing, working the funnel, demand generation, social media b2b marketing, and so on. With the New Year upon us, there’s inevitably an itch to get moving, especially when you consider the possibility you might be missing out on an important new…
One of the top items on every ISV’s wish list in these tricky economic times is how to generate more sales leads. While everyone seems to want more leads, do you know what you’d do if you were deluged with sales leads? A number of our clients at MSDynamicsWorld.com have been generating impressive numbers of…
ISVs that truly understand what this means are more successful than those who don’t. It’s not difficult to train someone on how to go through the motion of selling something, but it’s almost impossible to make an outside group as passionate about selling it as your core team. You are the passionate product experts. Your…
Perhaps you’ve heard the statement, “At the end of the day, it’s all about leads.” This is true to a large extent, but at the end of the day, it’s also about your cost per lead. Successful ISV marketers know how many leads that they received from each marketing program, as well as how much…
Google Ad campaigns can be effective in driving a lot of traffic to your website, but they can be incredibly expensive, both in time and money, if you’re not careful. I’ve seen several ISVs make mistakes in trying to run their own AdWords campaigns. Without too much effort you can end up spending thousands of…
What’s the best way to start, or strengthen, a partnership with a VAR? Investing in traditional marketing efforts is a fine start, but then what? How do you make your solution stand out to a VAR among your competition? Do you find ways to make it easier for a VAR to sell your solution? Many…
In our daily conversations with ISVs, we’ve noticed some common trends in their marketing strategies. Some of these trends lead toward success, while others seem to lead to stagnation, if not outright failure. What separates a successful ISV who’s able to consistently generate new customers and VAR partnerships, from a struggling ISV who can’t seem…