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 [...]

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 [...]

Some readers may feel that the next two statements contradict each other.
1. Let people say what they’re going to say to you.
2. Don’t just cede the conversation to whoever walks by.
I would argue that grassroots feedback loops (including most social media conversations) entail doing both.
Leading involves listening, following, knowing when it is not your turn [...]

One of the paradoxes of marketing and sales is “monetizing relationships.”
We typically hate to be sold. The harder the sell, the more we hate it. However, we typically like to buy. Any person who has had an experience of spending their own money knows this. Many of us have been blessed to be able to [...]

A friend and colleague was recently describing common failings noticed at marketing departments, especially in startups, with a number of companies where he has consulted (not as a marketer).
His first observation:
What marketing VPs do often looks like voodoo to him. And a lot of it looks like a me-too game. “If I pull up our [...]