B2B Sales and Marketing Integration

Join #B2BChat on Twitter every Thursday at 8:00 PM EasternLast week Danny Hanssel (@dannyhanssel) us as the guest moderator and leader for #B2Bchat. Danny lined up a great set of provocative questions for the group on aligning B2B sales and marketing.

As always, the #B2Bchat participants shared a range of perspectives from both sales and marketing experiences. The variety of responses and the disagreements among participants on reporting structures, aligning goals and the best approach to training is its own additional insight into each of the questions. Clearly, sales and marketing have a long way to go in order to be fully aligned if marketers can’t even agree on the best approach! [Read more…]

4 Problems Killing Thought Leadership Marketing

Chris Koch shared Four Reasons to Hate Thought Leadership earlier this week. He made some great points in his call to end the use of the phrase thought leadership, but ultimately I disagree with his conclusion. We don’t need to stop using the phrase, we need to start using it right.

The problem is thought leadership has become a catchall for any marketing that includes content. Unfortunately, looking back, it isn’t surprising that this happened.

Here are four of the underlying problems that created the situation. [Read more…]

Marketers Ruin Good Marketing Opportunities

Innovative marketers constantly put new ideas into practice, and some of the most effective new ideas quickly become marketing best practices or emerging trends.

However, when marketing ideas initially move from early adopters to the majority of marketers, they tend to lose their luster. The incredible results the early adopters reported are not repeated.

This happens for two primary reasons: [Read more…]

Just Say No to Marketing Advice

All Marketing Advice Should Include a Disclaimer

Your strategy is your direction; it should never be prescriptive. The strategy you develop should be unique to your business, an outgrowth of the challenge or opportunity you are facing and the environment surrounding your target audience.

The problem is, marketing advice is prescriptive. It may sound important and be delivered with authority, but it is still prescriptive. Here are examples of marketing advice I have recently come across (or even written): [Read more…]

The Hidden Message from SiriusDecisions: Serve Your Audience

SiriusDecisions’ B2B Sales and Marketing: Forging a New Alliance was an impressive event last week, and I was glad to have the opportunity to attend. Between companies sharing their own cases on sales and marketing alignment and the planning frameworks, examples and data from SiriusDecisions analysts, it was a three day information firehouse.

Underlying the content I saw a common thread: sales and marketing needs to serve prospective customers. Here is my view on how a service attitude towards prospective customers underlies three of the key messages from SiriusDecisions. [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…]

Social Media Success Starts with Commitment, Not Pilot

One of the biggest differences between social media and most other marketing channels is the idea of developing an audience. As a marketer, this may not seem all that new at first — you have a marketing database already, right? But an audience isn’t a database.

An audience chooses to listen to or engage with you. You earn your audience, by listening and engaging, by entertaining or by providing value. On Twitter, @comcastcares, @oatmeal and @thisissethsblog are good examples of each of these. More importantly, unless you are @charliesheen, developing an audience takes time. It takes hours (and hours), but it happens over weeks, months or more. And there is the rub for marketers.

[Read more…]

Three Ways Click Rates Are Killing Your Brand

Splat!Despite numerous calls for the demise of the click rate, it lives on as a standard fixture in nearly every benchmark and performance report. It lives on, its very existence reducing the effectiveness of your brand campaign.

Click rates live on for a simple reason. No other metric is (1) common across all advertisers and publishers and (2) accessible by publishers. Until an alternative performance metric can broadly be measured by those selling advertising space, click rates will remain a fixture.

The problem is, click rates hurt brand campaigns. [Read more…]

Why B2B Marketing Is Not Social: An Unexpected Insight from SiriusDecisions

The most important thing I learned at this week’s SiriusDecisions Roundtable in Portland was not something Jonathon Block or Jay Gaines shared, and it wasn’t from a conversation with another attendee. It was the silence of Twitter

Mind you, this was an event about social media and website optimization. Half of the content was focused on how to use social media throughout the sales cycle and the increase in demand this drives. [Read more…]