At one time, the demarcation between sales and marketing was simpler.
Relationships were what sales needed:

One to one, person to person,
company by target account company,
highly situational, mano a mano.

That’s the world of selling.
Markets are what marketing tried to influence.

Given enough time and money, you could drive statistically measurable movements of trends and beliefs through populations, groups, [...]

Is lead nature — who the prospect is — that matters in B2B marketing?

Or what I do to keep in touch and build a relationship — lead nurture — that predicts lead value and conversion to sales opportunity?

In a world of limited time, finite means, and pressure for results, what not to do?
When marketing is under-resourced, it tends to stop listening to the customer (if it ever did), because listening requires a cessation of action. What happens next? Recycling whatever you said and did in the last campaign. Talking to all [...]

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 [...]

This is the part where we admit that your customers can’t predict their own behavior.
What people tell you they like or think or want to do is different from what they’re actually going to do.
Especially if your business objective involves parting customers from their money for any reason.
The answer?
Test.
Create a situation where a couple of [...]

Now that we’ve admitted that we aren’t customers, we can progress to step 2: actually talking to a customer.
Ironically, the closest many marketing people come to the sales cycle is the 2-way glass in the focus group facility.
Which is nice. But you’ll learn the most, and fastest, about your customers (in the B2B complex sale) [...]

Step #1: Stop assuming that your perspective is an effective surrogate for the perspectives of real customers.
That’s right. The first step toward customer centricity is to admit you’re not a customer.
This is still true if you : (1) used to be a customer, (2) sell every day to customers, (3) take customer service/tech support calls [...]

People ask this all the time. (Which is fantastic, by the way!)
“Why Invisible Marketing? Isn’t marketing about getting visibility?”
Well, here’s how I think about it.
I have enjoyed, talked about, and experienced deep emotional connections with super-cool Superbowl ads for products I’ve never bought and companies with whom I won’t do business.
But I earn a living [...]