It’s really not unusual to find people crying in the ladies room at work. Often it has to do with boyfriends, football pools or American Idol. But sometimes it has to do with a truly nasty day at work. day full of stupid questions, wasted effort and the profound feeling that no matter what you do nobody is really listening to you. Such was the issue of the lady sniffling away in the stall next to mine the other day. It turns out she has sent the same information to the same group of people half a dozen times and was being publicly flogged for her failure to communicate. Nobody reads stuff. MORE >>

Okay maybe your agency doesn’t suck at B2B marketing. If that’s the case, thank the deity of your choice and keep it to yourself. The chances are, however, that you and your agency are not quite seeing eye-to-eye on how to do things. If you work for a company that is also a consumer brand and you share an agency, you likely spend much of your day thinking terrible thoughts as you try, again, to explain how business people are different from teenagers even though they are both carbon-based. came up with just three reasons (if you have more, please let me know): 1. Things like: Profitability. MORE >>

Just like a tennis or a golf swing, you only hit your target with a great follow through. m writing this about a month after that disgraceful convention of lazy sales people  I wrote about earlier. And I’ve been tracking the follow-up by same. One week out: I had a form email from a company thanking me for visiting their booth (I hadn’t) and inviting me to contact them in France. ll get right on that. Two weeks out: Another form email from a rep I actually did meet with but who couldn’t be bothered to look at the notes he made on the back of my business card and reference our conversation. MORE >>

It’s not enough to put good people who know what they are doing at your booth. The booth itself requires a lot of thought and planning if you’re going to make the best use of their time. One of the mistakes a lot of companies make is trying to say too many things with their booth, particularly small booths. We’ve all seen those ten-foot pop-up jobs absolutely crammed with images, words, flashy bits and screens. think they’re scary, personally. don’t know where to look, I haven’t got the slightest idea what they sell and I’m a little terrified to ask. If you theme it well, nobody will notice. MORE >>

I’m writing this on the plane home from a very good event. Well run, nicely attended, good media, great presentations, fabulous food and, well let’s just say there were some booths. . For the first time in a while, I was not exhibiting so I was actually more of a customer than a competitor to the 200 or so exhibitors. had exactly an hour to get around the show floor between meetings so I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t have time to speak with all the people I needed to. really shouldn’t have worried. This was one of the poorest collections of sales people ever assembled on one show floor. MORE >>