Shadow Pipeline – accounting for the missing dollars

Well its summertime, a time when we turn down the volume of campaigns and look at the business impact we were able to drive. It’s my favorite time of year to reassess based on our stated strategy and tweak our tactics to match. But can you really get a good handle on the business impact [...]

July 14th, 2010 | Category: Business Intelligence, Interactive Marketing, Lead Generation, ROI, Sales | 2 comments

4 C's of B2B Marketing

We’ve all heard about the four P’s of marketing.

Product
Price
Placement
Promotion

The four P’s were created mainly to describe the ideal “marketing mix”. The term “marketing mix” became popularized after Neil H. Borden published his 1964 article, Concept of the Marketing Mix.

I would argue this killer combo of marketing is mainly for B2C marketing and thus it is [...]

January 19th, 2010 | Category: Branding, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Strategy, Thought Leadership | 49 comments

Interview with Leading Sales Expert: Jim Keenan

I had a chance to interview Jim Keenan, the author of the blog A Sales Guy – specifically to get his take on what marketers need to be doing to help sales more. Here is his take …

1) Why do you think it so hard for marketers to tune into what is effective at the [...]

October 5th, 2009 | Category: Sales, Strategy | One comment

Hey Marketer – When was the last time you talked with a customer??

It’s an odd dynamic I see in play today – in today’s ever connected environment marketers tell me they feel even more removed from direct customer interaction.

As a former sales person, I used to schedule “ride-along” time with my sales team just to get out on sales calls and hear how we position ourselves in [...]

August 12th, 2009 | Category: Customer, Sales, Social Media | 8 comments

Marketing Metrics: Rethinking them Again!

It always seems that marketing metrics is a fertile topic to discuss and write about but after reading a few recent Forrester research reports I think they really helped me to crystallize how I am going to be tracking metrics going forward but they also gave me a sense of what importance I should give [...]

July 21st, 2008 | Category: Lead Nurturing, Pay Per Click, ROI, Sales | 14 comments

What Sales Really Thinks About Marketing?

Does Sales really care about leads? Maybe not.

If you ask Bill Binch, VP of Sales from demand generation software provider Marketo, he prefers pipeline and bookings to leads. Ironically, as much as lead nurturing and lead scoring can help generate pipeline and revenue, by framing the discussion around leads too many marketers ignore the [...]

July 14th, 2008 | Category: Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Podcast, Sales | 5 comments

Sales is from Mars and Marketing is from Venus – a CEO’s Perspective

Nothing focuses the sales force on sales like a quota. But what does a CEO use to focus Marketing? Can Marketing really begin to source leads for Sales? And how can you really optimize the relationship between Sales and Marketing?

This podcast is the first in a series we’ve set up along with B2B marketing software [...]

March 2nd, 2008 | Category: Advertising, Branding, Podcast, Sales, Web 2.0 | 6 comments