Volume 342, Issue 3 · 7 articles
Alan Shimel's argument that Google's AI Overviews are engineered to make the click unnecessary - his "Google Zero" - lands as hard on technology vendors as on publishers, because organic search was always rented distribution that merely felt owned. Read more
In most enterprise deals the most trusted person isn't the account executive but the sales engineer, precisely because they'll say what won't work — yet that credibility is invisible outside the few accounts they're staffed on, living in the memories of a few dozen people and a CRM someone else owns. Read more
Advisors, speakers and fractional CIOs don't have a lead generation problem, they have a recall problem - and their visibility is event-shaped, producing four tall spikes and forty-eight flat weeks, with the moment that mattered almost certainly landing in the flat part. Read more
Top sellers are the hardest people in the company to reward - cash is already maxed, the incentive trip ends, and promotion into management is often unwanted - while the independent streak that makes them outperform is exactly what makes corporate advocacy mandates slide off them. Read more
Enterprise IT is a few thousand people per specialty, and a dozen professions orbit them with the same dependency and the same structural problem: the only contact their job naturally supplies is the contact that asks for something. Read more
Our vendor news sections were built for a defensive reason - filing vendor news under vendor names is what keeps the category sections neutral by construction - and the surprise was that those sections became some of the most-read material published: 2,438 vendor articles drew 172,639 readers and 250,861 clicks across volumes 339–342, counted as unique IPs with crawlers and scrapers filtered out. The explanation is the label. Read more
Sellers at large firms routinely stall on a personal newsletter because they haven't been approved to run one - and Scott McNealy's Sun-era mantra explains why asking is the wrong move: the person receiving an unprecedented request has no upside for yes and all the downside, so the safe answer is defer or decline, and a "no" on the record is far harder to reverse than a question nobody formally raised. Read more