Sales — B2B Digital Marketing

B2B Sales and Marketing Integration

April 22, 2012 By Eric Wittlake 1 Comment

Last 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…]

Is Your Business Ready for Marketing?

January 31, 2012 By Eric Wittlake 16 Comments

Businesses turn to marketing to drive revenue, but are you really ready?

Before investing in marketing you must ensure other key areas of your business are ready first.

Your Product or Service. If your offering isn’t ready for the market, your marketing will not solve your problems.
Your Sales Organization. If your sales organization is not ready to sell your new offerings, your marketing will not solve the problem.

Sales Readiness

If marketing is driving demand for a new offering but sales is not ready to close on opportunities, the immediate impact of your effort will be lost. The impact doesn’t stop there, the lost credibility also hurts future opportunities. [Read more…]

The Hidden Message from SiriusDecisions: Serve Your Audience

May 9, 2011 By Eric Wittlake 4 Comments

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…]

Connecting Thought Leadership to Sales

March 21, 2011 By Eric Wittlake 5 Comments

Perfect alignment

Chris Koch’s most recent headline really caught my attention: Three Ways to Link Marketing to Revenue without Metrics. Beyond a great headline, he has great advice for marketers to ensure content and thought leadership is tightly connected to sales.

Here are Chris’s three key points:

Connect ideas to offerings: tell a story that extends from vision to implementation
Use ideas to attract and nurture leads
Train salespeople to use and talk about ideas

[Read more…]