At a recent Focus Roundtable on Sales and Marketing alignment (or the lack thereof), we acknowledged the frequently discussed differences between the people who work in sales jobs and the people who work in marketing jobs. Marketing people think of their company’s prospects as a either a homogenous group or grouping of groups (segments), and they communicate with these groups through vehicles that are designed to reach masses of people. Read More

I enjoyed speaking on the Focus Roundtable a few weeks ago  on the topic of sales and marketing alignment, along with Dan McDade of PointClear, Tim Sullivan of Sales Performance International, and Karen Hayward of Centerbeam. You can listen to the recording of the event here.

I applaud Google for using its enormous influence to fight back against the content farms, such as eHow and WikiAnswers, which clog search results with weak but heavily search-engine-optimized content to fuel ad sales.

In a recent post, I told about my favorite discovery as we interviewed B2Bs for our new white paper, “Secrets of Case Study Winners.” That discovery was that the “winners” created bene Read More

I'm looking forward to serving on the panel of Focus.com's Roundtable on January 28, "How To Achieve Stronger Marketing & Sales Alignment." The panel is a well-rounded group of experts on both the Sales and Marketing sides, and I expect the discussion to be lively.
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Our new white paper, “Secrets of Case Study Winners,” outlines quite a few specific strategies for B2B companies to create successful case study programs. Read More

a·lac·ri·ty [uh-lak-ri-tee] –noun 1. cheerful readiness, promptness, or willingness.

I recently heard this advice from an experienced business consultant: instead of loving your clients and being tough on your vendors, it's time to love your vendors and get tough on your clients. His rule-of-thumb is contrary to conventional wisdom; I was intrigued and asked him to elaborate.

In Part 2, I started my list of ways B2B marketers can charge our campaigns with emotional engagement. It’s a technique that Don Draper uses in every pitch (as in this clip on YouTube), and that we can learn from in today’s world of analytical marketing techniques. Here are some additional techniques for content marketers.

In Part 1, I described the contrast between 2010 and Don Draper’s 1964 in B2B marketing. Today, marketing is largely a numbers game. But Don Draper understood the “delicate, yet potent” value of emotional engagement with the buyer. How can we marry emotional engagement with today's analytical tools that help us manage our efforts?