Articles in the 'Marketing Process' Category
10 Minutes to Better B2B Marketing
I was attending a fitness class at my health club this past weekend and the instructor was talking about how full the club was in early January and how many of the people were “New Year’s resolution” exercisers who would probably be absent within a month. He said that many people have noble intentions and set major goals, but they take an approach bound for failure, by overdoing it in the early stages – for example, exercising every day for
6 Tips to Prepare for B2B Marketing Victory in 2012
With only about three weeks to go in 2011 I hope you are turning at least some of your thoughts to what you will do in the coming days to ensure that 2012 is your best year ever. I know it is tough to close out the year strongly while simultaneously planning for the future, but it vitally important that you do so.
Year-end planning reminds me of the cartoon where the guy is standing in waist deep water swatting at
Does Your Marketing Produce Accolades or Action?
MCI was a powerful company in the 1990s. And while MCI was known for producing very cool advertising – unfortunately, the business results never seemed to match the messaging “creativity.” This is just one example – how about the many $1 million plus Super Bowl ads that have produced a lot of attention but virtually no results. Some of these advertisers were start-up companies that wasted their entire promotional budgets on just one advertisement. Clever yes… effective, no. Good marketing…hardly.
Perhaps the
How Marketing Can Double the Effectiveness of Your Sales Force
I was talking to a former colleague yesterday and she made the claim that as a marketer, she had no control over the sales process and little or any impact on revenue. Regardless of whether this is true at her particular company, B2B marketers should (and do) have substantial impact on sales revenue. In fact, there are many instances where upgrading the marketing function can bring a much larger boost to the top line than hiring more sales people.
To put this
Marketing Strategy: Too Broad, Too Narrow or Just Right?
Getting your marketing strategy just right is critical for B2B marketing success. On the “too broad” end, lots of B2B companies, desperate for recognition and revenue, try to be everything to everyone. One of our Fusion Marketing Partners teammates worked for a company whose small C-level and business development team had dozens of potential deals cooking, not one of them anywhere near the one-yard line. The company’s core position changed with every potential new partner. In the excitement of infancy,
How to “Engineer” a Marketing Fiasco
Here’s the all-too-common scenario: A team of highly skilled engineers rolls out a product that passes beta and actually starts to get some traction (usually through networking with people they already know). Encouraged by their first few orders, the company promotes those engineers or product developers to fill the marketing and sales roles. Who better to sell the product than the person who built it? Besides, the product is so good, it will sell itself, right?
We have seen a few companies
10 Winning B2B Marketing Habits to Adopt in 2011
It’s been a while since I have neglected to end a year without doing some type of planning and goal setting for my business (or whatever company I was working for at the time) and my personal life. Like the saying goes, it’s hard to hit a target you don’t have, and goal setting is the best way to establish those targets.
Perhaps you are equally committed to goal setting. After you have set your SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and
The Pros and Cons of B2B Marketing Outsourcing – by Christopher Ryan
As a CEO or business owner, you have some tough decisions to make about your marketing and sales operations. Traditionally, this has involved hiring one or more marketing personnel, and paying them a salary (sometimes with a bonus) as your in-house marketing department. I worked in this model for two decades, earlier as a marketing manager and later as the marketing (and sometimes sales) department head.
In many ways the in-house model works well, but it does have its challenges. Fortunately,
Bridge the Gap in B2B Marketing and Sales by Christopher Ryan
Of all the talks and presentations I do about B2B marketing and sales, perhaps my favorite is called How to Bridge the Gap Between Sales and Marketing. This is a subject that resonates with both the marketing and sales audiences, as well as CEOs and business owners. We have some fun with the presentation but the message is deadly serious: marketing and sales need to be in alignment for the business to reach its potential.
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