Your company is building a relationship with a potential customer who does not want to experience an abrupt change because something triggered a move to a different system or organization. Company size is irrelevant. Marketers are deluged with information and opinions that purportedly inform you how to do your job better. Although there’s a lot of useful stuff out there, sometimes misinformation and myths masquerade as expertise. We want to set the record straight about some of the common mistakes we’ve seen in the marketing automation space. Lead nurturing requires lead scoring. MORE >>

Web Marketing Analyst:  This person is primarily responsible for the company’s website. In recent years we’ve noticed a sea change in the skills, knowledge and roles required to be successful in marketing. Increased CMO turnover indicates unprecedented pressure to generate results. That pressure, coupled with massive changes in technology and customer behavior, demands a mastery of several new knowledge domains. CMOs will need assistance from experts and specialists. We therefore think these roles in the demand generation process are (or will shortly become) critical for success. MORE >>

How different is a highway billboard with your company’s URL from your presence on a social media site?  But aren’t both fundamentally about making your company’s presence known? We are perplexed by the endless debate about whether or not inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing. It’s a distinction without much of a difference, especially because standard definitions for both do not exist. Specific marketing tactics may appear in either column, depending on who’s doing the categorizing. Other definitions seem to revolve more around digital versus physical channels. MORE >>

You don’t help your company – or your career – when you ask your management repeatedly for additional funding or make frequent excuses for poor performance. Planning and forecasting are critical skills for B2B marketers. These processes are, unfortunately, a combination of science, art and black magic. Nonetheless, we need, on average, to do better. Here are three excuses we think marketers should never use. You should have known about this up front and planned for that expenditure. That statement sounds like an open-ended venture for which an undetermined level of funding is needed. MORE >>

We think these are salient factors when considering the differences between small and large companies: Sales cycles for complex products and services are longer. Usually – but not exclusively – complex offerings come from larger companies. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the engine of the current economic recovery in the U.S. As a segment they are growing faster than large enterprises, which means we are seeing commensurate growth in the number of computerized solutions for that segment. What do these differences mean in practical terms for SMBs? campaign management. MORE >>