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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s book review time again. Perhaps you’ve heard that sales people have a rant about marketing people (and others) who don’t understand what sales people do. Today’s book is a nice little vaccine against Complete Sales Ignorance.
The Elevator Summary: Most books about selling are of little use in understanding the psychological world of selling. Sandler [...]

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 [...]

Which of these is true for your company? How are you going to fix it?

Your customers are focused on their own issues — and don’t see you as relevant to those concerns. Are you talking to the wrong people or companies? Are you trying to sell too broadly? Do you simply need to better [...]