Absent good answers, thought leadership initiatives quickly fall prey to more traditional priorities around lead generation and sale support. The irony, of course, is that good thought leadership has increasingly become a prerequisite to making lead generation and sales support actually work with high value deals. Absent something interesting to talk about related to core customer issues, would-be buyers pay little attention to straight-on sales pitches. How should we produce and package thought leadership content? How should we promote it? How can we measure success? MORE >>

It is, after all, a pretty labor-intensive approach, and it requires a lot of negotiating with sales and account teams. Internally, ABM can help prove the value of marketing, improve relationships with Sales, and strengthen focus on core customer challenges and potential solutions. I know we're all focused heavily on figuring out how to "socialize" everything in marketing these days (with good reason) and, especially as the 4th quarter looms, on doing whatever we can to help close sales before the end of the year. One would certainly hope so!) Don't skip this step! MORE >>

Ranjay Gulati’s more recent Reorganize for Resilence provides similar testimony, evidence, and examples of the power of customer centricity for solutions development, marketing, and sales (you can watch my partner Steve Hurley’s interview with Ranjay on our new  YouTube channel ). Michael Shrage’s recent Harvard Business Review post, Great Customers Inspire Great Innovations , got me thinking: Why, amid so much evidence of the power of customer-centric business, are so many companies still mired in inside-out operations? Why do we hear so much talk but see so little action? MORE >>

Marketing folks in B2B are obsessed with aligning marketing and sales. The problem, at least from my humble perspective, is that the discussion tends to rotate around the idea that marketing needs to align more fully with sales. These types of initiatives certainly can be useful, but they risk reinforcing the standard industry view that marketing is ultimately the junior partner of sales and that the alignment problem is mainly one of marketers straying too far from the daily and quarterly demands of the sales force. Witness the seemingly endless number of "sales 2.0" MORE >>

But our sales people have less time for relationship building and often little credibility in the executive suite. Beyond sales, it is difficult to know which face-to-face programs are worth funding. Research, sales, services, and delivery are obvious, but we also have thought leadership programs, social media and networks, executive relationship programs, reference management, key account management, customer councils, collaborative solutions development, and probably many more. An even higher number of the best performing CEOs, 95%, stressed the point. Well, sort of. MORE >>