marketing

Strategy is about deciding what to do and what not to do. In the same vein, choosing how to play is inextricably linked with choosing where to play. For a business, it comes down to choice – that is, assessing which markets are attractive and which the business is best placed to target.

In the past few months a cool new term has appeared on my radar. That term is, “revenue marketer”. Wish I had thought of it first. It defines a new level of marketing professional. While I’m energized by the term, sadly, I’m concerned that too many B2B marketers don’t have the right perspective and skills to play in this new league...

Charles Besondy, President of Besondy Consulting & Interim Management, writes... At two different speaking engagements this month I asked the audiences of marketers if they thought the lack of sales and marketing alignment was the biggest obstacle in their company to achieving significant revenue growth.  At both events (one a marketing conference, the other a webinar) the results were similar. Over 60% agreed that the leading nemesis to greater revenue performance was the lack of alignment between their department and Sales. The other 30% to 40% believed another factor was primarily to blame such as market/economic factors, resource restraints, skill gaps, relationship gaps, or process / tool gaps. So, why are Sales and Marketing so often unaligned?

A correspondent sent me a couple of funnel management articles this week. One simply posed a question (Do you know where your sales pipeline is?) without making any recommendations; the other deserves a response. In asking "Who changed the sales funnel", he suggests that the market has changed, and I agree. Customers do much more homework before engaging with sales people now, and this is a great opportunity for Marketing to make a big difference.

Chris Fell, Managing Director of g2m Solutions, writes... A recent blog article from Hubspot focused on how small and medium businesses should take the time to build credibility for their companies. They made the point that with emerging new media technologies and online tools, building reputation as a small business and communicating with customers has never been easier. Let's look at a few ways small business owners can build credibility on their own.

Chris Fell, Managing Director of g2m Solutions, writes... Modern marketing is all about engaging with your target audience and creating some interesting content that they would find enjoyable or interesting to consume. But, once you've developed some content, how should you leverage it?

Great plans don't come from inspired enlightenment, but from following a great process. Whilst we believe we have built such a process for integrated sales and marketing planning, in a time-poor world the processes need to change. But to what?

The Leaky Funnel™ is a marketing strategy book authored by Hugh Macfarlane. This business novel is packed with key arguments for a major change in the way businesses organise and manage their combined Sales and Marketing resources.