Thursday, September 29, 2016

Marketing & Sales Students! Please post here for Fall 2016

Marketing & Sales Students! Please post here for Fall 2016. Just click "Comments" and paste link with short summary. Thank you!

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Sauers Spring 2016 Students, Please click Comments here below to post! Thank you!

Sauers Spring 2016 Students, Please click Comments here below to post! Thank you!

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Sauers Fall 2015 Students, Please click Comments here below to post!

Sauers Fall 2015 Students, Please click Comments here below to post!
Thank you!

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Dr Sauers' Summer 2015 Students - Click "Comments" to post here!

Dr Sauers' Summer 2015 Students - Click "Comments" to post here!

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Dr. Sauers' Spring 2015 Students - Post Here! Click on "Comments" and paste your links.

Dr. Sauers' Spring 2015 Students - Post Here! Click on "Comments" and paste your links.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Fall 2014 Sauers Students - Please post your link to your projects here!

Fall 2014 Sauers Students - Please post your link to your projects here! Click on Comments to post -- Thanks!

Friday, May 10, 2013

Hi May-March 2013 Entrepreneurship Students! Please click the "Comments" link below and post!

Hi May-March 2013 Entrepreneurship Students! Please click the "Comments" link below and post! This is a fast and easy way to show what we're doing here in some of these classes at SPC. Thanks so much.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Hi May-July 2013 Sales (MAR4413) Students! Please click the "Comments" link below to post!

Hi May-July 2013 Sales (MAR4413) Students! Please click the "Comments" link below to post!  Thanks so much - Dr. Sauers

Hi May-July 2013 Marketing (MAR3802) Students! Please click the "Comments" link below to post!

Hi May-July 2013 Marketing (MAR3802) Students! Please click the "Comments" link below to post!  Thanks so much - Dr. Sauers

Friday, February 22, 2013

Spring Entrepreneurs - post here! Click the "Comments" link below to add you link to your Slideshare.net PowerPoint.

Spring Entrepreneurs - post here! Click the "Comments" link below to add you link to your Slideshare.net PowerPoint.

Spring Marketing Projects - Post here! Click the "Comments" link below to add you link to your Slideshare.net PowerPoint.


Spring Marketing Projects - Post here! Click the "Comments" link below to add you link to your Slideshare.net PowerPoint.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Market Tests - Students can also post here! Please click the Comments link to post.


Market Tests - Students can also post here! Please click the Comments link to post.

Thursday, September 20, 2012


20 Biggest New Marketing Mistakes

20 Biggest New Marketing Mistakes

When an entrerpreneur, business person, or new marketer starts marketing, there are definitely some common naive mistakes one would do well to avoid. Are you going to fall victim to the most common, biggest marketing mistakes? 

Let's learn what they are and how to avoid them. After all, the success of your job and maybe even your company is depending on you.

Mistake #1: No identified customer pain point.

Marketing's job is to deliver and communicate value to the customer. How do you know what value is? As the founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, famously says:
"Every big problem is a big opportunity. If you don't have a big problem, you don't have a big opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem."

Mistake #2: No one clearly repeated logical solution. 

IMC. 9 times. 

Mistake #3: A sleepy solution. Does your target yawn or turn away when you share your solution? 

You need a purple cow

Mistake #4: Thinking low price matters. 

Mistake #5: Thinking marketing is the same thing as advertising. 

Mistake #6: Not selling.

Mistake #7: Thinking marketing is evil. Or, becoming evil yourself because you're "in marketing." Old marketing is evil. Hard-sales paradigms are irritating and ineffective. Win-lose relationships all utimately end up as lose-lose.  

A good marketer knows that marketing is the long-term process of inviting new friends into a customer community or tribe, engaging with them, solving their problems (i.e., creating value), and thanking them for being a loyal friend. 

Mistake #8: Over-empahsis on acquistion in lieu of retention and thanking. 

Mistake #9: Selling by telling, not by listening.

Mistake #10: No early internal stakeholder buy-in.

Mistake #11: No clear goal. 

You can either pick an awareness, acquistion, retention, or viral goal. "All of the above" is not an acceptable choice. 

Mistake #12: No measures and no measurable objectives. If you're not measuring it, you're not winning it. What is your marketing ROI? What's your estimate of $spent/$made? (Hint: if your "$spend to $made" ratio is more than 1, you lose.) Did you make a budget for what you want to do? Did you predict what revenue the campaign might bring in within a specified period of months? Did you turn your overall marketing goal into a few measurable objectives (i.e., acquire 25 new customers in the next 2 weeks)?

If so, congratulations: You're in the top 80% of all marketers. So now what? Did you spend approximately what you budgeted? Did revenue approximate about what you predicted? Did you achieve the measurable objective? No? Well then, "Lucy, you have some 'splainin' to do." Do a full lessons learned post-mortem and pivot.

Mistake #13: No one person's name "owns" the task.

Mistake #14: Not listening to customers Everywhere. 

If you call up a customer for a testimonial but don't troll the blogophere or Google "customer complaints" for your company, you are enjoying your own selective perception of reality. Set up a Google alert; troll Twitter, target market forums, and Facebook; and dig a little deeper. 

Mistake #15: Okay - this one is not fair because it is really hard even for very experienced, great marketers to do: You can't figure out if new sales (or no sales) are due to a certain marketing campaign or effort or due to something else.

Can we say, "extraneous, confounding variables?" They are everywhere in the real world. Marketing does not exist in a sterile lab. The real world is messy, non-linear, chaotically fast-changing, dynamic. Good luck measuring your control variables to hold them constant or even knowing what they might be. 

Mistake #16: No understanding of customer lifecycle (not only their buying cycle) and triggers, schedules, events, and touch-points.

Mistake #17: Telling the product information, not reflecting the customer's emotional need. And not responding with reassurance to the customer's changing trust levels over the long-haul. 

Mistake #18: No early customer-stakeholder buy-in.

Co-create. Let the tribe build it. Crowd-design it with your customer community or even just a similar demographic to your target market.

Mistake #19: Not targeting. You have a new product to market or you have an old product that needs to be revived. Are you really going to market to everybody? Really? Why? "Because we're awesome" is not an acceptable answer.

When you market to "everybody" you wind up marketing to nobody. Our society is more fractionalized than ever before, not less. Your marketing will have much more power if you define all of the customers you are not serving -- and let it be most of the market. Polarize: be on the same side of your chosen demographic segment and against everything they are against. You will literally either niche or die because the way to get across the valley of death of no sales is to "bowl down the first bowling pin." W

Mistake #20: Not recognizing that the medium is the message. 

A marketer's job is to be the voice of the customer in the company. You're the customer advocate. It's your job to gently remind everyone in the company that the sole purpose of the company is to please the customer. You need to patiently shift all-to common vestiges of the production, sales, and managerial mind-sets away from "what we make, what have we sold, and what are our people doing" to what pleases the customer. In lean thinking, whatever is not directly delivering value to the customer is waste. 

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Sauers Students - Please post your "Market Tests" here. Click the comments and post. Thank you!

Sauers Students - Please post your "Market Tests" here. Click the comments and post. Thank you!

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Open Call to Business: Do you need a market test?

Please contact me, Dr. Amy Sauers, at sauers.amy@spcollege.edu if you are a small to large business developing new products or repositioning existing products or services. My Marketing students are interested in completing your projects. We have a great team of active learners and doers here and are looking forward to your project.

Sincerely,
Dr. Sauers

Friday, February 4, 2011

Servant Leader Tony DiBenedetto Inspires SPC Entrepreneurs!

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Happy lanedeli

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Thursday, September 2, 2010

Week1

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Student Entrepreneurship Essay Contest!

Student Entrepreneurship Essay Contest



NACCE is sponsoring an essay contest:


“How Entrepreneurship Education at Community Colleges Benefits Students”


Limit 500 words or less. Apply your HS 5-paragraph essay skills to ensure…


• Power of the message of the essay


• Clarity of thought


• Spelling, punctuation and grammar


• Overall evidence/expression and comprehension of the topic


Winners will receive a $500 stipend to cover the costs of travel plus a complimentary hotel room for two nights to attend the 8th Annual NACCE Conference where they will read their winning essay to the audience.


Here is when and where if you win!


Conference is Oct 10-13, 2010, Sun-Wed… Step into paradise at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort at


Universal Orlando®... Savor the comfort and service of this luxury hotel with its exotic South Seas flavor. Enjoy activities and entertainment galore at the resort, and take advantage of the exclusive resort-wide privileges and experience two amazing theme parks at Universal Orlando®!


Click here to submit a nomination by August 18th, 2010:


www.nacce.com/?Awards

Please email me letting me know you submitted so I can cheer you on! -Dr. S, sauers.amy at spcollege.edu

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Mentor: Amy Sauers

1) Your name and company background: Amy Sauers - The Customer Dr., SPC, Revolution Money, market research, VivaVidi - Family Memories Forever, CustomerReportCard.com.


2) Your areas of expertise: Marketing, Market Research, Customer Analytics, Metrics, Entrepreneurship, Customer Relationship Management.


3) The kinds of startups you are interested in mentoring: All of my students! Any SPC student.


4) Your contact information (or you may provide this to me, the faculty representative, separately): Sauers.Amy at spcollege.edu

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Sign Up to Become a Mentor Today!

Sign Up to Become a Mentor Today!

It's easy: Please join this blog and post the following items:

1) Your name and company background

2) Your areas of expertise

3) The kinds of startups you are interested in mentoring

4) Your contact information (or you may provide this to me, the faculty representative, separately).

I will contact you with next steps. Thank you so much for your service to our student entrepreneurs!

For more information, please contact me, Amy Sauers, at Sauers.Amy at spcollege.edu.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Student Entrepreneurs Celebrate!

The students here at the St. Petersburg College of Technology & Management are very excited to share their projects that stress business innovation. It is time to celebrate!
On May 19th, at 6-8:30 p.m., in room 2-430 at the Epicenter, we will begin the Business Innovation Celebration with Keynote Speaker: Erik Sander (UF; V2R Group), continue with featured panelist, Tonya Elmore (Startec), hear from the students, and host a reception to launch the Incubator Annex.

This evening on May 19th will be a great time to share student success and collaborate for the future. We have some very exciting innovations to share and hope to see you there!

Friday, May 7, 2010

Welcome to EIncubate!

Welcome to EIncubate the blog that helps incubate entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs and mentors may join/follow this blog and I will post about all of them. In this way, we can help entrepreneurs take their businesses to the next level.

My first post is for entrepreneur, Amy Sauers, who is building the SPC Entrepreneurship Incubator (EIncubate) Amy (email sauers.amy at spcollege.edu) is seeking mentorship in building an entrepreneurship incubator and co-working space. Thank you!