Where are Your Marketing Dollars Going?

I’m reading another great book, “Data-Driven Marketing” by Mark Jeffery. In it, Jeffery cites some revealing stats. He looked at marketing budgets of hundreds of companies and found something really interesting. He defined different buckets or categories as to where each company’s marketing dollars were going. Here are the buckets: Lead Generation Branding and awareness Customer Relationships Shaping Markets Infrastructure What’s interesting about his findings was that the leaders (those companies that had better results) spent more money on their infrastructure and creating systems that allowed them to market more effectively. The point here is that businesses that were short-term Read more [...]
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The Astonish Results Start-Up Culture

Lately I’ve been thinking about the Astonish Results culture and what makes it special. Astonish is a start-up. We began back in 2006, focused on the mortgage industry, then changed our focus on insurance and have been growing like crazy ever since. According to a great article by Greg Gottesman. There are three reasons why a start-up is successful: -          Team -          Timing -          Product I can honestly say (and the numbers don’t lie) that we have all three. So what are the characteristics of a great start-up (Astonish included)? Here’s my top 8 list. Quickly changing and evolving At Astonish, things are always changing and always evolving. Read more [...]
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Where Have all the Software Engineers Gone?

At Astonish Results, we’ve been having a tough time hiring the people we need for our business. We need talented software engineers to develop and maintain our products. We need people that understand programming, but can also think critically. We need folks that understand our business. We’ve been posting jobs and searching the normal channels to find the employees we need. It’s been incredibly difficult to find these people and the people we do find, tend to either have too little experience or want a boat load of money (even when they can’t even program in the language that we want them to – C#, .net etc). This is what is happening in the employment economy these days. If you’re Read more [...]
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