SAO Corvallis Chapter

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

5:30pm - 8:30pm

Location: Renaissance on the Riverfront
136 SW Washington Ave.
Corvallis, OR 97333
Google Map

RSVP TO: SAO by emailing Sao-info@thebec.com

$5 for SAO members or students, $15 non-members

Includes finger food and no-host bar

AGENDA:

5:30 - 6:15: Business Networking Time with finger food, no host bar
6:15 - 6:30: 30-Second Mic (give us your technology business elevator pitch!!)
7:00 Program: Go To Market: Best Practices

PROGRAM:

How well do you know your customer? Do you REALLY know your customer?

Highly successful businesses, products and services have one thing in common; they provide their customers what the customer wants and how and when the customer wants it delivered. Understanding unmet needs in the market may be necessary, but is not sufficient for success. In the launch of new products and new businesses the rule of thumb is 90% will fail within 1-2 years of launch. So how can you truly understand and drive the voice of the customer within your organization? How do you maximize your chances for success? What questions are essential to ask during each stage of product development? How can you get answers without a spending a fortune on 'formal' market research?

In this 1-hour interactive session, we will cover these and other questions that you want to hear about concerning marketing, market research and new product development. Specifically, we’re designing this event for you, SAO’s members. Simply click on the following link and answer a quick survey by March 3rd. You will see the results of this survey presented and integrated into the event itself, designed for you, the members of SAO.

• Go To Market Survey

In addition, this event serves as the kickoff for the Marketing Special Interest Group (SIG) for the Corvallis SAO. We're looking to provide a forum for communication and collaboration, where people with interests in marketing/sales/business development can come together with the aim of learning and sharing best practices. Locally, we know there's a great deal of wonderful technology ideas and solutions. We're hoping the Marketing SIG can enhance this technical acumen with better market understanding. How can we better understand our customers, their needs? How can we better reach them? We aim to explore these and other relevant topics. To ensure we are exploring issues relevant to you, we have asked a few questions in the survey mentioned above. Please provide feedback. The more we get, the better we can understand the needs of the local marketing community, and the more relevant we can make this group.

Special thanks goes out to InsightsNow for providing the time and resources to host this survey.

SPEAKERS:

• Paul Abel, Ph.D.

Paul Abel, Ph.D., Blue Research (http://www.blue-research.com/)

Paul Abel, Ph.D. Paul has been conducting research for over 16 years. Through his PhD in Psychology from the University of Washington he discovered his fascination for using data and analysis to discover first time ever findings. To accelerate the research pace and add variety to the projects he was working on, he decided to leave academia and joined Griggs-Anderson Research then Gartner Group as a market research consultant for Fortune 100 companies (IBM, Cisco). From the research vendor side he was recruited to the Corporate side to create a market research department for Intel Corporation. At Intel he later led executive-level strategic and go-to-market plans for next generation home and office client platforms.

Paul founded Blue Research, the regions' only full-service market research consultancy focused on the high-tech, science and healthcare industries. Paul has researched and surveyed a variety of audiences: from CXOs, to industry luminaries to engineers to middle managers on every continent. Blue Research services include focus groups, executive interviews, online and offline surveys. At Blue, Paul applies his research expertise to help companies find new market opportunities, define successful products, services, and marketing strategies. Trained as a public speaker, he delivers presentations to the press, analysts, government and industry leaders worldwide.

Paul also teaches graduate level marketing courses at the Oregon Graduate Institute/Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU). He holds a PhD in Neuroscience/Psychology from the University of Washington; B.S. degree from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

SAO CORVALLIS:

Tech Brew Pubs are a monthly event organized by the Software Association of Oregon, Corvallis Chapter (www.sao.corvallis.or.us). To join our Email Announcement List: TO ADD or REMOVE yourself from the sao-corvallis@peak.org mailing list, please go to http://www.peak.org/cgi-bin/majordomo?sao-corvallis:peak.org. This list is used to send chapter announcements and NON-commercial items of general chapter interest to local SAO members and others interested in the chapter.

We encourage you to join and support the Software Association of Oregon (www.sao.org). The state SAO office sends out a newsletter and a monthly calendar. If you are interested in receiving these please sign up here http://www.sao.org/Resource_Center/email_list_signup.php