OMMA Marketing Tech: How to Make That Pitch Stand Out

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining a ridiculously sharp group talking about evaluating marketing technologies. MediaPost covers the highlights (ignore that they call it OMMA Programmatic instead of OMMA Marketing Tech); I’ve included some excerpts below. Thanks Jess Joines for moderating a stellar session.
Excerpts:

“Vetting the Vendors” at OMMA Programmatic on Wednesday addressed these issues with a panel led by Jessica Joines, co-founder & partner at Industry Index, a firm that ranks marketing technology vendors in the digital advertising ecosystem.
The panelists said it’s impossible to look at every email they receive in which vendors seek meetings. David Berkowitz, principal of Serial Marketer, his own consultancy and former CMO at MRY, said he’s spent a decade trying to create best practices around the issue. He keeps an “Idiots Tab” in Gmail for bad vendor pitches [note: this is not exclusively for bad pitches]. Some pitches are a “total waste of time,” Berkowitz said. Vendors need to know that “no” means “no.” Emails that are too long won’t be read. And those addressed to the right person at the beginning but conclude with a different name, will be pitched…
Berkowitz said he asks himself, “How likely am I to learn something during the meeting? That’s the question. It doesn’t matter whether the company is large or small. If they help me see something in a different way, it’s a meeting I’ll take.”…
Berkowitz added that so many companies claim to do everything, while they’re not particularly good at anything. Plus, many vendors don’t make good use of content marketing to market themselves. This type of marketing helps him learn new things.