being a marketing retard I'd love to hear a few bulleted pointers.

This is off the top of my head; there are far more details on John's website (link above).

1) Realise there are normally a number of people within an organisation which you need to sell to, for instance :
* The Buyer (e.g. MD)
* The Technical person (e.g. Techie/IT Manager)

So any promotional message will probably need to have two forms, for example :

"Our widgets will provide a 20% cost reduction and increase efficiency by 50%" (MD)

"Our titanium widgets are created from pure blah from blah by blah blah for foo bar" (Operations/Technical People)

Normally the MD won't know anything (or care) about the technology involved - so using acronyms or similar is pointless. They are looking for benefits - i.e. cost reduction, risk reduction, competitive advantages, legal complaince etc.

The technical person, on the other hand, may be driving the purchase of a new system because the old one is failing - and you can probably sell to them through technical jargon (assuming you've picked the right jargon!).

2) Find some Key Customer Values - i.e. what is the customer looking for - this is not likely to be "PHP Web applications"; it's more likely to be "a web based beer widget tracker" or what ever

3) Segmentation - analyse your customers, and determine what is common amongst them - for instance, it may be that you are selling to county councils or small businesses or schools. When you identify a common segment, you need to understand and be ready to anticipate their requirements which may be driven by legal changes, fashions (e.g. virtualisation) etc. Once you can do this, you'll be speaking their language - hence #2 will be easier.

It may be that your segment is IT Managers for medium sized businesses - this is far easier to market to than trying to market to all 60 million people in the UK.

4) From this segmentation - see if you can identify other potential prospect customers - this could be through your existing customers who will often know who their competitors are...

5) Keep in contact with your customers - have a mailing list and "spam" them e.g. twice a year - this may be to say "we now do xyz" or to blow your trumpet about projects you've recently completed. Doing this helps keep you in the customers mind when they decide to buy something in the future (and of course follow on business when they realise e.g. you can integrate google maps with their existing project).

6) Figure out how many contacts you need - given that you may have a 1-2% return on any "mailshot" if you're lucky and it may take perhaps 20 "touches" before someone inquires about $product, you may find that you need e.g. 2000 people on your mailing list. Ideally you should have at met them all.... and not just be "buying" contacts from someone else.

7) Log contacts with people (we're writing a contacts system for this which will be integrated with asterisk and email, and will probably get released under an OSS license soon) and make sure you get plenty of details from someone. Also, if it's a large organisation make sure you have at least two contacts in the organisation, in case someone leaves.

That's all that comes off the top of my head for the moment. Seeing as how it was only two morning workshops there was a limit to the amount of stuff we could cover - especially once we both start talking about our own individual problems etc.

Above all - marketing is a long term thing - don't expect immediate results.