Sometimes winning projects can make one forget to gather competitive intelligence. Here is a list of questions one should ask the clients during a de-briefing:

Customer Details

Organisation name
Name, title

Opportunity Details

Products
Deal Value (License fee, Annual License fee, Consulting)
Main decision-makers (Name, title, role)
Main competitors (Organisation, products)
Main reason for win/loss

Process

Engagement – when first engaged
What did customer know about us [...]

Dale Underwood, of Echquote writes compellingly of how the rise internet has dis-intermediated the sales department:
By 2005 it got to the point that there was almost no reason to directly contact any sales person to find product information. Just Google it.
Usually, lead is captured at the website in exchange for a free report, or whitepaper. [...]

I came across Almost Perfect via Hacker News, a candid first-hand account of the rise and fall of WordPerfect.
It is so interesting to see how WordPerfect was blind its impending death. I am not singling out WordPerfect here, rather as a theme how corporations are all blind to their eventual death. The singular theme [...]

I love lists, and occassionally a well-written lists deserves to be copied, and recopied, verbatim.
The following is from Drayton Bird, who has a list of 14 weapons of marketing (in the comments section).

Research
Advertising
Sales Promotion
Point of Sale
Packaging
PR
Product placement
Guerrilla
Word of mouth
Workplace marketing
Sales people
Experiential [sic]
Sponsorship
Cause related marketing

On top of this, audiences often overlooked but often more important than [...]

You have to read the story behind this quote about developing software on top of the .Net 3.0 framework:

“I want to develop for the .NET 3.0 framework”
I don’t think you could find a smaller market segment if you tried. Perhaps writing software for Bulgarian asparagus farmers?
Joel On Software Discussion Group

Ken McCarthy, John Reese and several other marketeers are reporting the phenomenon known as GoogleSlap. This is the GoogleDance of Adwords, where cost-per-click has risen markedly for sites which offer “suboptimal” experience for users. Apparently any attempts at lead-generation now costs $1 per click, vs. $0.20 in the past.

One way to bring the topic of Wiki up is to look for trigger factors. When people leave the company, don’t their laptop hard drives get wiped? That’s a massive loss of knowhow. No executives would go unconcerned about how much informal knowledge about a project that gets flushed.
The main objections to wikis are:
1) adoption. [...]

I stumbled on to the affiliate marketing blog today. Today there are hoardes of people writing no-brand articles / essays on the internet trying to make money off ads and affiliate sales. Tell you what, it doesn’t sound like a great way to make a living. Magazines on newstands suffer great mortality rates. True, that [...]

If you have heard “the money’s in the list” but have not been able to build a big list or profit from your list you are going to love this…
http://www.thelistfx.com/ls/?secrets=2282
Keith Wellman put together one of the best list building and profiting courses I have seen in a long time…and no it’s not expensive ;)
Thanks,
Chui

Joi Ito remarks that parked domains are denying people useful domain names. Apparently this is big business.
How about a botnet of traffic to scam parked domain engines? So that it appears that the traffic is profitable when it actually isn’t?
Incidentally, Fabulous.com is Publicly Listed on the ASX, and is based in Brisbane. YTD profit? 4.2 [...]

Why are people spam blogging?
Researchers Kolari, Java and Finin at University of Maryland reports:

Creation of fake blogs from hijacked content for hosting profitable context-based advertisements
Realize a link farm intended to unjustifiably increase the ranking of affiliated sites

Interestingly, here’s their splog detection approach:

Splogs feature high paying Ad-Sense keywords
Inbound links do not follow the power-law
Pings all time [...]

Can someone tell me what’s the catch to this ruse?
Get It Free – IPod Nano.
Err please don’t sign up. It’s probably a phishing site.
Update: Looks like they are a marketing firm. You’ve got to get 5 people sign up to Amex, Netflix, etc. before you get your iPod.

Just a heads up for people who have bought the infoproduct creator (thanks for the pizzas since you’ve clicked through the affiliate link!).

Hi guys, I’ve been studying James Brausch’s weblog for the past week and he’s fair dinkum intelligent about selling things on the internet. Like James, I’d gone out on my own before and did pretty shockingly, but unlike James, he tried again and worked out how to do it a bit better the second time around. When it comes to making a buck on the internet there are plenty of gurus out there, some charging outrageous amounts. I just happen to like James, because his tone of voice and approach suited me. That’s probably because he was a software engineer at a medical equipment firm.

These folks here RSS and News Aggregating Shit Splogs are trying to confound search engines by stringing together RSS posts and news posts and then using that to organically boost their page ranks.
These pages then link to pages like this one which certainly violates the terms of use of Google Adsense. Reported to the [...]

I was looking for a CMS that can run a typical software site, but ended up looking at Hot Banana. This looks interesting:
Landing Page Manager – All aspects of Landing Page creation and management is looked after by Hot Banana. Landing Pages have built-in lead tracking from multiple lead sources (search engines, affiliates, email campaigns [...]

This is the most creative use of a banner ad that I’ve ever seen. (That’s a gif file, posing as a text-ad appearing in the top fold of a major online daily newspaper)

Which then leads to this powersqueeze page.

So MySpace has to monetize their website.
And I happen to be listening to daughter of the late Ken Gidden on the System Seminar blog. Here’s Ken’s list of 11 Income streams for websites

Adsense
Display ads, newsletter ads – premium positional listing for a year
E-books
Newsletters
Subscription
Affiliate programs
Directory submissions
Tagged on to the content website, directory submissions

Three way linking A-B, [...]

Gary Halbert was playing with Google Maps and pops out a few outstanding ideas of using it to do direct marketing.
Go read Marketing from Outer Space.

Question to the audience:
“are resellable e-books rights the new Ponzi schemes of the 21st century? It simply doesn’t matter what the contents are, people are buying the rights to on-sell the rights to other people?”
Here’s an example: there’s one site which sells master rights to 75 e-books for $30. The titles aren’t even given, [...]