As I watch the Google Alerts pop up for my brand name, I am struck by two things.
1. Some affiliate marketing writers (who frankly sound half a step short of MLM’ers) have glommed onto the idea of invisible marketing being a terrible thing. Who wouldn’t want their name in lights?
2. Other marketing writers (who sound [...]

I love lead scoring. When done right, it lets you think like a customer.
The problem is that it’s just too easy for marketers to think inside the box, instead of like customers.
Lead scoring programs are rather complex to set up. Certainly more so than a garden-variety email campaign. They require weighted averages, multiple decision criteria, [...]

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?

CMOs, how do we make a difference when the available pool of paying customers has shrunk?
In a B2B company of not-unlimited means, it is easy to spend a lot of money on marketing without seeing value for the spend. Here are 4 spends that are limited, scalable, and accountable. Each can drive [...]

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 [...]