need to learn better ways to do things, including best practices. Remember watching cartoons about Aladdin and the magic lamp? always hoped I’d find a magic lamp on a beach somewhere and I’d be granted three wishes. Didn’t you wish you could have three wishes too? Well today I’m setting aside my marketing hat, my BI hat, and my corporate sustainability hat. I’m putting on my customer hat and asking for three wishes I know  your marketing team can grant me. Here are my three wishes: 1. want a real relationship with you. want to know that you are real people. MORE >>

The outline I like best is the one I learned from white paper guru—Mike Stelzner, author of the book “ Writing White Papers.” In Part One , we talked about planning for your white paper. You need to understand your purpose. White papers require a fair amount of effort, so you should be clear on what you expect to achieve. You also need a well-defined topic. Did you do your homework from last week? Great, let’s get started. find it’s easiest to begin with an outline. It goes like this: Introduction – Open with a compelling fact, statistic or story that draws the reader in. MORE >>

Feedback - Sap interviewed hundreds of stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, NGO’s, partners, and analysts, to best understand their priorities for SAP. SAP just released their 2009 Sustainability Report and I must say I am impressed. They have really raised the bar for corporate sustainability reporting (CSR). Not only are they one of the top reports in the BI and even the software vendor category, but they’re report is top of the line for all CSR reports. His two-minute message gives a high-level overview of their strategy and progress toward sustainability. MORE >>

In this case, I suggested an e-book on competitive analysis best practices, since they provide a service that consolidates competitive and market information. Read a great post by IDC’s Michael Gerard about solution selling. was fortunate to experience that for the first time several years ago by a very successful vendor rep who has since become a good friend. thought by now, every sales organization practiced solution selling-but I was wrong. However, only one in five buyers will tell you that he/she is generally approached by sales reps prepared to discuss solutions.” MORE >>

Bottom line, you are always in the eyes of your customer so make sure they are seeing the best side. This week I had the opportunity to attend the 2009 Tableau Customer Conference. Tableau is a business intelligence company which is my niche and they specialize in visual analysis  and data visualization. struck a deal with them to do some conference blogging in return for a press pass. Something you might want to think about for your own B2B niche. Anyway, I must say I’m thoroughly impressed with this company. They are relatively small but you’d never know it. MORE >>