Most companies aren't very natural when it comes to blogging. They try to make everything a "how to" article or they report things in 3rd person like a journalist. That's pretty boring and un-natural. People don't talk that way. Commerce doesn't get done that way. With this post, I'm going to get back to blogging the way I used to blog: more like a teenager's diary. 

I'm going to start by sharing some of the conversations I had last week. Met a few new interesting people doing cool stuff and talked to a few old friends. If you're interested in getting some time with me to talk about your sales and marketing, you just have to leave a comment on this post.

If I know you and you want an intro to anyone below, let me know. Otherwise, just reach out to them. None of them barked or bit. 

1. Neerav Mehta, founder of Red Crackle, a 5 person Drupal web development shop. Neerav and his team are very technical. So they often find themselves working for technical buyers who need help designing and developing custom drupal sites. 
2. Steve Ka, of Intralearn. I've known Steve for the better part of a decade now, when we last collaborated on some nightlife promotions. He runs sales and channel development at Intralearn. They are launching a new product that is a lightweight LMS for Sharepoint users called NanoLearn. Any company who uses Sharepoint and needs to verify that their internal teams are learning something can benefit from NanoLearn, especially if employee training is required for legal compliance. 
3. Andrew Teman and I had beers last week. Andrew is founder of We Make Heart and was most recently a VP at Hill Holliday. His agency specializes in working with larger brands who are seeking new ideas for grabbing serious share. Andrew has seriously legit experience across traditional and the many facets of digital marketing, and has been helping clients bridge the two. Lots of agencies talk about this. He's done some cool stuff that actually brings digital into the real world and vice-versa. 
4. Douglas Barth, founder of SimplyDirect, Jon Kennedy, sales at SimplyDirect, and I spoke for :30 minutes last week so we could learn more about each other's companies. I recently received a personalized message via email with an invitation to take a survey. I would normally ignore these things, but the email was compelling, I was interested in the topic and they offered me a free gift to complete the survey. It was also only a few questions and they offered to send me the results if I took it. I visited the company's site who ran the survey and discovered SimplyDirect, a sales prospecting service that helps companies reach executive decision makers. 
5. I caught up with Brent Hodgins, founder of Mirren Business Development, Hillary Miller, VP of Training at Mirren and Stephanie Ostrander, Event Manager at Mirren - last week. Brent and I began collaborating a few years ago when I first attended his Agency New Business Conference in NYC. Brent spoke at the Inbound conference last year and we sent a whole crew to his conference last year. Look forward to working together more. Brent said that he hears about HubSpot everywhere he goes. :-) 
6. Rick Kranz of Overgo Studios lead a small group discussion last week, where he talked about his agency's marketing plan for next year. Rick is an online video marketing expert. So, in addition to learning about a few new video creation tools, we talked about the value of video when it comes to making your company more personable/relate-able. Rick told a story about how he walked into a prospect's office and everyone already knew his name. He had never met them, but they had been watching his videos. In order to make his marketing even more personal this year, Rick launched a new blog appropriately called, "Grow Your Business with Rick Kranz" or "Rick's blog" for short.