Expert insights. Personalized for you.
We have arrived at the #5 thing I believe every CEO should know about marketing. In case you are new to the series, you can find #1 – #4 ( The “Ante” , Not all marketing is the same , B2B buyer journey , and B2B website purpose ) in our blog. #5 MORE
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. MORE
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. MORE
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. Knowledge and Skills Inventory. MORE
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. MORE
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. MORE
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. Of course, the part of that original statement that is most important is “when done right.” MORE
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. In other words, while his sales team works at home, they follow up on leads MUCH faster. MORE
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). MORE
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? Two reports that ask/answer the right questions for a conversation. MORE
B2B website purpose. As websites have evolve d , I am still surprised to find many B2B websites are basically all about the company and what they do or what they offer. That may sound strange to you as a CEO. MORE
This is probably the one thing that every CEO wants to know about marketing – what are the best key metrics to use for making marketing investment decisions and then to evaluate those marketing investments. MORE
Many CEOs tell me about marketing companies that call them or email them to sell them automated nurture, or paid search, or SEO, or other services that they assure the CEO is what works. There are certainly some marketing tactics that one might consider fundamental to many business operations, but the real truth, and the #2 in my series of 7 things every CEO should know about marketing is that tactics that work for one or more companies do not necessarily work for your business. MORE
This third blog post of the “7 things a CEO needs to know about marketing” series focuses on the B2B buyer journey. You may believe your company sells stuff to the market – like your products or services, however, that is your seller view and not a buyer view. MORE
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. In other words, while his sales team works at home, they follow up on leads MUCH faster. MORE
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. Failure to Deliver Quality Leads. MORE
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. MORE
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. There are three things: Webinar hosting tool. MORE
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. Sales Challenge. MORE
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. MORE
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.), MORE
Industrial email marketing may not get the same attention and love as it used to because of social media. However, don’t abandon it because it is still highly effective when targeting engineers and technical professionals. MORE
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. Why do I recommend this approach? MORE
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. MORE
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. MORE
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. MORE
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). I get it. Your management team wants to measure every dollar you spend. MORE
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 ). MORE
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. Value Proposition. MORE
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., MORE
thePoint
OCTOBER 5, 2020
This is probably the one thing that every CEO wants to know about marketing – what are the best key metrics to use for making marketing investment decisions and then to evaluate those marketing investments.
thePoint
AUGUST 24, 2020
We have arrived at the #5 thing I believe every CEO should know about marketing. In case you are new to the series, you can find #1 – #4 ( The “Ante” , Not all marketing is the same , B2B buyer journey , and B2B website purpose ) in our blog. #5
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thePoint
JULY 21, 2020
This third blog post of the “7 things a CEO needs to know about marketing” series focuses on the B2B buyer journey. You may believe your company sells stuff to the market – like your products or services, however, that is your seller view and not a buyer view.
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.
Speaker: Matthew Hawk, President of B2bTrainers
The term “sales enablement” applies to a dizzying array of best practices and technologies. In addition, there is tremendous competitive pressure not to fall behind. No matter where you are in your current sales enablement strategy, one thing is key: success ultimately rides on the habits of your sales managers & marketers. In this webinar, Matthew Hawk will lay out an in-depth schematic for your next-level sales coaching, demonstrate the key activities that comprise success, and walk you through several examples of sales coaching cadences that apply to all salesforce sizes.
thePoint
JULY 10, 2020
Many CEOs tell me about marketing companies that call them or email them to sell them automated nurture, or paid search, or SEO, or other services that they assure the CEO is what works. There are certainly some marketing tactics that one might consider fundamental to many business operations, but the real truth, and the #2 in my series of 7 things every CEO should know about marketing is that tactics that work for one or more companies do not necessarily work for your business.
|
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.
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).
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. In other words, while his sales team works at home, they follow up on leads MUCH faster.
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. In other words, while his sales team works at home, they follow up on leads MUCH faster.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
Every sales forecasting model has a different strength and predictability method. It’s recommended to test out which one is best for your team. This way, you’ll be able to further enhance – and optimize – your newly-developed pipeline. Your future sales forecast? Sunny skies (and success) are just ahead!
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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. Why do I recommend this approach?
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? Two reports that ask/answer the right questions for a conversation.
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.
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.
Speaker: Christopher Ryan, Founder and CEO of Fusion Marketing Partners
Sales & Marketing departments that work together guarantee higher acquisition, better nurturing, and more effective sales. Join Christopher Ryan for this insightful webinar, presenting the wide funnel lead nurturing model. Don't miss out on this opportunity to get your teams working together and your revenue performance optimized.
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. There are three things: Webinar hosting tool.
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. Value Proposition.
thePoint
AUGUST 10, 2020
B2B website purpose. As websites have evolve d , I am still surprised to find many B2B websites are basically all about the company and what they do or what they offer. That may sound strange to you as a CEO.
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.
Speaker: Jay McBain, Principal Analyst – Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems
We are in the middle of a major transformation of how companies go to market – in fact, 76% of global CEOs feel that their current business models will be unrecognizable in the next 3 years. Join Jay McBain from Forrester as he unpacks these future trends.
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.,
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. Sales Challenge.
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.
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. Failure to Deliver Quality Leads.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
Sales enablement is the strategic process of providing sales teams with the content, guidance, and mentorship needed to engage targeted buyers. It’s all about equipping sales professionals with the tools they need to put their best-selling foot forward. And if sales teams want to continuously sell better -- and faster -- their sales enablement process must have a game-winning strategy. It's time for you to start selling smarter - and hitting your sales number - with the best B2B database in the market. Get started today.
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.
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). I get it. Your management team wants to measure every dollar you spend.
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 ).
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.
Speaker: Ruth Stevens, President of eMarketing Strategy
In a pandemic, it’s more important than ever to focus on retaining and expanding current customers. So, how can sales and marketing support the retention effort? Join Ruth Stevens as she dives into this fast-paced session and reviews the 7 key strategies for current customer marketing, to enable sales and expand customer value.
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.
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. Knowledge and Skills Inventory.
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.
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. Of course, the part of that original statement that is most important is “when done right.”
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
This eBook highlights best practices for developing a pipeline management process that helps sales leaders and their team C.L.O.S.E (you’ll see what we mean in this eBook) more revenue through data-driven prospecting, stage analysis, and subsequent sales enablement.
Industrial Marketing Today
MARCH 3, 2021
Industrial email marketing may not get the same attention and love as it used to because of social media. However, don’t abandon it because it is still highly effective when targeting engineers and technical professionals.
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