thePoint

JULY 6, 2020

The Marketing Ante. What do you, as a CEO, need to know about marketing? If you have a marketing professional in a leadership role on your team, you might initially think you don’t need to know that much. Of course, how do you know if they are doing a good job? If you are a CEO that has part-time marketing staff, or maybe just tactical marketing support (graphics design, email marketing, etc.), and/or directly makes decisions on hiring and maintaining outsourced marketing services, you likely ar

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thePoint

MAY 21, 2020

The goal of any B2B lead generation program is to ultimately generate as many actionable leads as possible for the sales team. There are certainly plenty of topics around an approach, but the one area I want to focus on now is the absolute commitments that marketing and sales must make to each other to create an environment that will produce success.

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thePoint

MAY 19, 2020

One very obvious phenomenon during the COVID-19 crisis has been the great increase in online live and recorded webinars and full-on virtual events (multi-session events). We have been directly involved in increasing the use of both and both creating and project managing these events. Here are some best practices for today’s virtual events to keep in mind: Develop guidelines for the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts).

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thePoint

MAY 12, 2020

Do stay-at-home B2B salespeople perform differently? This week I had an interesting conversation with one of my clients. He manages a B2B sales team and pointed out an interesting statistic that has emerged regarding how his sales team is performing during this “stay-at-home” period. Basically, his sales team has improved by 70% in terms of the average time for first follow-up on leads.

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thePoint

MAY 12, 2020

What interesting sales data points are you seeing right now? This week I had an interesting conversation with one of my clients. He manages a B2B sales team and pointed out an interesting statistic that has emerged regarding how his sales team is performing during this “stay-at-home” period. Basically, his sales team has improved by 70% in terms of the average time for first follow-up on leads.

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thePoint

MAY 7, 2020

Why not to cut marketing during the COVID-19 crisis? As I work to provide marketing strategy and planning for customers during this COVID-19 crisis, I see many B2B businesses choosing to cut their marketing spend as part of their cost savings measures. I certainly understand their motives, but I strongly suggest that those businesses continue their marketing, and perhaps even increase their marketing spend and cut elsewhere.

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thePoint

JANUARY 23, 2020

Product Release: Improve sales effectiveness with cloud-based sales enablement tool. The right message and collateral at a salesperson’s fingertips! Solution Pitch, a cloud-based sales enablement tool, is simply something that sales people dream of and likely don’t have. Now their dreams have come true – your salesperson can use their mobile device or any browser to quickly locate and send their prospect the perfect solution pitch every time.

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thePoint

APRIL 13, 2020

There are many ways that marketing and sales go about measuring their efforts for their own purpose. You have marketing waterfall reports. You have sales forecast reports. You have sales activity reports. You have marketing media metrics. But what about the kind of report that sales and marketing should share together and talk about the most? Which reporting creates the right marketing-sales conversation about leads?

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thePoint

APRIL 6, 2020

Note: Be sure to check out the Trade Show Dollar Challenge at the end of this post. Putting trade show dollars to work. Many companies are tightly squeezing their dollars right now, and that is understandable. One easy target is to pocket unspent or refunded trade show dollars as quick savings. This too is understandable. However, what if you can save a good portion of those 2020 trade show dollars while also investing today in a marketing tactic that could deliver MORE leads than you would have

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thePoint

MARCH 25, 2020

For many businesses today, the first reaction to the current social and economic crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic is to cut costs by downsizing staff or reducing paid hours, by shutting down production, or other measures. Every business will have to make hard choices. However, if your business, any type of business, firmly believes that you will survive this and you want to grow quickly after this is over, then you need to remember that what you do and don’t do now will matter greatly.

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thePoint

MARCH 5, 2020

A recent Harvard Business Review article forwarded to me titled, “ How to Sell New Products ,” is packed full of powerful lessons for anyone wanting to launch any new B2B product. The article was based on research including one-on-one conversations and surveys of B2B sales people and early on reveals this gem of a quote: “… found that people who excel at selling new products have traits and behaviors different from those of people who successfully sell existing product lines—and that the best co

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thePoint

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

One conversation that catches my attention with B2B marketers is the “why don’t we just host and promote our own webinars instead of spending all those dollars with media companies?” That’s a great question and the answer is based on a clear understanding of what a webinar “is” and “what media companies sell.”. Anatomy of a webinar. The first thing is to have clarity on the required properties of a successful webinar.

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thePoint

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

B2b marketers, when you get sales leadership (or better yet, even just a few of the truly good sales people) in a room, what information should you get from them to create more success for both marketing and sales in your organization? What are the most important questions to ask sales? There are two key topic areas where your questions will serve you best — value propositions and lead quality/quantity.

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thePoint

FEBRUARY 12, 2020

What is your sales team pitching: When your sales team sends an email to a prospect to pitch a product, what do they say? It’s very likely that many of you have no idea. You make an assumption that if you have given sales leadership or the sales team the right product/service brochures or other collatoral, or you have given them an approved presentation, or they have sat in a meeting where they were given the right information, that they will all be able to communicate effectively when writing e

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thePoint

APRIL 4, 2019

So far, we have examined two possible barriers that limit or even prevent timely lead follow-up – lead bottlenecks ( How to Waste Perfectly Good Leads – Part 1 ) and the failure to deliver leads to the right person ( How to Waste Perfectly Good Leads – Part 2 ). In this final article of the series, we’ll look at the remaining two barriers, which are the failure to deliver actionable leads that inspire follow-up and the lack of accountability.

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thePoint

MAY 23, 2016

Manuel Yanez, CEO of Vosman Branders is a brand evangelist, marketing and brand equity professional. He believes that media has changed drastically and brand building through traditional media is now less effective as new opportunities have emerged. Digital media and the democratization of information are the main challenges facing brands today. Digital has to be considered as part of the media mix.

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thePoint

MAY 23, 2016

Increase Your Webinar Attendance. Webinars are one of the most effective demand generation tools when done right. Why is that true? It is because you get a room full (virtually) of qualified prospects who want to be there to hear and see the content provided on a topic which you control. They are a captive, qualified audience. That is not an easy thing to accomplish as an in-person event.

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thePoint

MAY 25, 2018

Chapter 3: Defining What Success Will Look Like. For a smaller marketing department, it is even more crucial to create and implement a plan quickly to inspire confidence, expand your budget, and grow your marketing investments and success for the company. You can’t hide behind much when it’s just you. Amazingly, I have discovered that in marketing groups of all sizes, one of the fundamental weaknesses has been clearly defining what success will look like for marketing, for sales, and for the com

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thePoint

MAY 25, 2018

Chapter 2: Filling the Gaps. With your inventory scores in hand (see Pre-requisite Work), we are ready to locate those gaps in knowledge, skills, or time and start considering what will be a priority in either hiring (as budget allows) or outsourcing in order to accomplish your now-progressing marketing mission. Pre-requisite Work. As I stated in Chapter 1 – Taking Inventory , the logical place to start is to map out the current knowledge and skills you can competently bring to the table yourse

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thePoint

MAY 26, 2018

Chapter 1: Taking Inventory. To ensure the success of your marketing efforts as a one-person (or small-staff) B2B marketing shop, you must start by mapping out your shop’s current knowledge or skills in three categories: those which you can competently bring to the table yourself, those which you believe you can learn to provide, and those which you are willing to outsource.

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thePoint

MAY 26, 2018

Introduction. Being a one-person (or very small staff) marketing shop in today’s marketing world is likely going to feel quite overwhelming. Just considering marketing technology choices alone, chiefmartec.com is now charting 7,040 different solutions available for you to evaluate (see Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic ). Even removing that daunting task, you, or your small team, are tasked with the responsibility of – take a deep breath – marketing strategy, market research, mar

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thePoint

JULY 14, 2018

Chapter 4: The Stuff You can’t Skip (just because you lack resources). As a one-person or small-staff marketing department, there is likely a tension between executing campaigns/tactics that are visible to the rest of the company and internal marketing investments (which are foundational to delivering the quality and results for those campaigns/tactics).

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thePoint

NOVEMBER 7, 2018

In this day and age it isn’t uncommon to find a diverse mix of channels and tactics in demand generation and marketing plans, and this is to be expected as each tactic has different strengths and weaknesses. The big question for marketers, however, is how to demonstrate how these diverse tactics effect conversions or e-commerce sales. The answer to this big question is conversion attribution modeling or methodology– which we can define as a set of rules that dictate how credit for conversions or

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thePoint

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

If you have ever fished, you know that having the right bait greatly increases your chance of catching fish compared to just having a plain steel hook in the water (it’s shiny but not fooling anyone!). If marketing content is a fishing analogy, then your content is the bait. When engaging marketing prospects to respond (generate leads), there is one truth you cannot change: if you don’t have the right content, you will fail.

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thePoint

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

You wrote your messaging (some call it value propositions) for your brand and each of your products, now what do you do with that messaging? If you only use messaging in advertising or in a powerpoint or document that you want sales to share, you will miss an important step. Where messaging matters: Everything customer facing. Where messaging matters: Your overall brand messaging and specific product messaging should be used in every customer facing material you produce (e.g., company brochure,

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