Process improvement is a sophisticated science (and art) in the real world where stuff gets moved (logistics), stored (materials management), built (JIT, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile), and so on.
Most marketing people don’t think about what they do in terms of process improvement.
These two disciplines should talk to each other.
If you’re a B2B [...]

You won’t find a foolproof, set-it-and-forget-it solution to marketing automation, salesforce automation, revenue generation. Make better processes by understanding the limits of process.

To get anything done in a B2B complex sale, you’re not just Selling to The Senior Executive Wo/Man.
That’s why it’s complex.
It’s tempting, especially for salespeople, to depend on just a single contact, champion, or coach inside the client company. Giving in to this temptation? Watch for l-o-n-n-n-g sales cycles, clients who [...]

The real beauty of Kevin’s article When will CMO heads roll? isn’t the observation that corporate marketing budgets are broken and that change is amazingly slow in coming.
That’s an easy target.
What I like is his description of who is changing.
He describes an actual target market that a marketer can begin to get [...]

Three things we now expect every January on the internet:
– New year predictions.
– New year resolutions.
– Reviews of past years’ abandoned resolutions and failed predictions.
Why?
Humans crave the power to know and control the future. We also are creatures of habit & don’t change gracefully — not even to adapt [...]

Okay, typically I stay in my little marketing geek world and don’t try to tell tales on the technologists.
However, I must tell you what some of us were discussing, glass of wine in hand, recently. On the subject of enterprise software.
In our little social group, many of us have witnessed the desire to hit [...]

Why do sales people hate prospecting?
Many sales people believe they must do things that seem unrelational, with the very people with whom they need trusted relationships, in order to sell.
B2B sales people are also trying to help people follow through with big changes. Most people love change about as much as they love a root [...]

In the real world, there’s always tension between the do-it-right-the-first-time mentality and the figure-it-out-as-we-go mentality. It’s fun to watch this unfold. Couples ordering dinner. Teams developing a project plan. Boards hashing out priorities.
Any time we’re doing something for the first time, we learn as we go. In industries and companies undergoing fast change that’s a [...]