The Biggest Missed Opportunity in B2B Lead Generation

Lead Generation Opportunity: All Other Sources Are More Important for Lead GenerationWhen the success of your business is less important than the success of your marketing, something is seriously wrong.

Yet this is exactly how most B2B marketers approach lead generation today! You don’t care about the number of leads your sales team has. Instead you care about the number of marketing sourced leads.

We all know B2B marketing measurement is imperfect, yet we momentarily suspend all reservations in order to judge our effectiveness based on results attributed to our efforts instead of the results for our business!

This is crazy folks! [Read more…]

Three Reasons Marketing Is the First Budget Cut

Monopoly Money and DiceMarketing budgets are often one of the first budgets cut, time and time again, yet marketers continue to claim companies are making unwise decisions. To support the case, you point to research and cases showing companies who invest in marketing during a downturn come out stronger.

Is the answer turning marketing into a profit center, as some have claimed? For a few companies, particularly those with a direct response marketing model, this might work. But it isn’t the solution in most cases. [Read more…]

B2B Marketing Has a Perception Problem

Do you care if potential prospects see your services as high value or a complete rip-off? Of course you do.

This is about the perception each individual has about you. This is about your brand.

Perceptions are created by experience with your products, service and people, through what other people say about you (even competitors) and through your own marketing.

No one buys from a company they distrust or pays a premium for a solution they see as a low cost provider.

However, in B2B, the value of perceptions have been set aside, in favor of the new holy grail of B2B marketing: lead generation. [Read more…]

The Path to Value from Content Curation

Increasingly, marketers are adding content curation to their marketing activity, often with objectives of sharing a certain amount of content each day. Ardath Albee (@ardath421) has a sample to-do list for a content marketer in Show Quantity the Door.

Three weeks ago I published Three Reasons Content Curation is Overrated, my reaction to research published on eMarketer and advice we frequently see about curating content in order to establish thought leadership.

That doesn’t mean curation is not valuable. It may be one of the primary ways you stay in touch with your audience. But the path to value from your curation is a winding one. [Read more…]

9 Marketing Words That Have Lost Their Meaning

Thought Leadership Marketing ComicThe following 9 terms are so overused or misused in B2B marketing that they have lost nearly all meaning. If you are using these terms today, it is time to stop and explain what you really mean.

Otherwise, we may hear you, but we will think you mean something completely different. [Read more…]

The Importance of Woozles in B2B Marketing

The role of brand in enterprise B2B marketing can be a subject of debate (my friend Maureen Blandford even wrote a book “Branding Doesn’t Work in B2B“). With complex buying processes, multiple stakeholders, and a high touch sales process, how important is a brand? And what does that have to do with a woozle?

Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Woozle’s live in the hearts and minds of Pooh and his friends. And most importantly, woozle’s change behavior in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Like a woozle, your brand [Read more…]

Are Your Company Values a House of Cards?

House of CardsCompany values cannot be merely said, they must be lived. Lived by every single employee of your company, internally and externally. Prospects and customers experience how you live your values in every interaction.

All it takes is one misstep for the perception of your company and brand to unravel. If employees are not living your values, including internally, it undermines all of the effort that has gone into creating those values.

I experienced this earlier this year. A vendor inadvertently forwarded an internal email chain. And it was damning. [Read more…]