She is obviously a deep thinker about all things marketing and one of her slides stopped me in my tracks. It virtually sums up in one picture what I believe to be a significant shift in sales vs. marketing responsibility for selling products. wrote a lengthy post about this titled “ How Marketing Became Responsible for Everything, and How to Fix it “ Ardath sums it up nicely in one picture. The dark blue dashed line indicates how far Marketing has moved down the buying funnel time-line. It may be reality, but it means the Marketing group is now selling. MORE >>

I just finished a short paper on how B2B marketing has put itself in the position of being responsible for just about everything marketing and sales related. Here is an excerpt from: “How B2B Marketing Became Responsible for EVERYTHING (and how to reverse it)&#. “B2B Marketers are killing themselves trying to make everyone happy. Everyone is looking at marketing to make it happen. If you’re a B2B marketer, you may feel like the success or failure of your company rests entirely on your shoulders. Tags: B2B Marketing MORE >>

In this day and age of self-service information, why are inside sales reps fighting so hard to reach cold fish like me when warm, interested prospects are right under marketing’s nose visiting their corporate website? While most of the attending vendors appear to have tools that help with outbound selling , EchoQuote™ is an inbound tool designed to capture sales ready leads directly from your corporate website and get them to sales in seconds without going through marketing. It’s true Marketing/Sales alignment. hope to see you there! MORE >>

It seems almost daily that I have a conversation with technology marketers about whether or not they should publish pricing on their websites. The visitor did not have to give up any information to get the pricing; good for them, but bad for the vendor marketing team and their B2B lead generation efforts. The bottom line is that pricing is valuable to an early-stage end user, publishing it is like throwing marketing dollars down the drain. B2B Marketing B2B Sales Lead ConversionYou move on. Finally, you land on a site that surprises you. MORE >>

The marketing/sales person quickly analyzes whether it is a friend or foe. Tags: B2B Marketing B2B Sales EchoQuote Tips Lead Conversion Have you ever had a person fill out a contact form on your B2B site and put in the comments “DO NOT CALL ME!&# ? We periodically review EchoQuote requests for our newer clients and we sometimes get these. But why so angry ? think web users are finally sick and tired of sneaky ways being used to get their information so a sales person can “help&# them. Guess what? The request is routed to the appropriate person/group for approval. MORE >>