Is Your Brand Identity Working for You?

If you are creating a new company, product or service, be thoughtful in how you develop your brand identity. It may sound funny, but we see it all the time; someone in the company thought an icon they found online was cool and it became the logo. It’s meaningless to their customers and prospects, and most of the time, even to them! This haphazard approach extends to other brand elements such as photography and typefaces.… Read More

Emotion as a Motivator

I recently ran into an article online from a marketing expert that said B2B buyers operate on logic alone. That’s ridiculous. Buyers are human, emotional beings and those emotional drivers play out in all aspects of life—including business decision making. Business buyers are motivated by a combination of logic and emotion.  Logic serves the responsibility to their employer and emotion serves their personal considerations. For example… Logic Does the product or solution address our needs?… Read More

Get Perspective with Outside In Thinking

When was the last time you looked at your business objectively as an outsider? Stood in the shoes of your buyers and considered what their experience with you is like? Took a critical eye to your marketing messages and claims? When was the last time you asked for feedback? While it can be a little unnerving, taking an outside in approach is one of the most impactful things you can do to deliver more value… Read More

Be Fearless

Recovery is slow. Jobs are lost daily. Budgets continue to be scrutinized and cut. When surrounded by the unknown, human nature moves us to operate from a place of fear. This is true both personally and professionally. What happens when marketing is managed by fear? > We lose focus > We no longer reflect > Mistakes are no longer an option > Indecision causes delay and lost opportunities > We don’t get smarter Here’s an… Read More

Creating Actionable Data that Ensures Lead Generation Success

End of the Debate of “How Many Leads are Enough?” by Capturing Critical Campaign Metrics

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve found in my work with marketers is a lack of tracking lead performance at every step of its life cycle. I’m not just talking about how many leads made it over to the sales team, I’m referring to all of the actions that happened before your suspects became a lead, and what happened to them after they converted to a prospect. For marketers to be able to diagnose which… Read More

Avoid Channel Conflict with Mindful Segmentation

We’ve been fortunate enough to work for companies on all sides of the b2b channel—technology provider, VAR and distributor. On any given day, when we ask our clients how their channel is performing, the most common response is “it needs some attention”—good for us, but concerning just the same. When you look closer, there are usually some good things going on… and then some things that are not so good. Therein lies the problem. Channel… Read More

How Many Leads are Enough?

How to Implement Lead Goals to End the Debate between Sales & Marketing

As a marketing professional, how many times have you heard someone from the sales group say this: “We could hit our quotas if we had enough leads.”   Or conversely, as a sales executive, how many times have you heard some derivation of this statement from your marketing counterparts: “We just had a ton of people attend our last Webinar/read our newsletter/visit our booth at the tradeshow, what happened with those leads?”   If you… Read More

Defining Leads and Implementing Lead Scoring

The First Step to Define How Many Leads are Enough

Let’s talk about what a real lead is. This is the first step you need to take if you want to end the debate of “how many leads are enough”. If you ask every person in both Sales and Marketing to define a lead you are likely to get different answers from everyone unless you have established a clear definition and are managing people to adhere to it. Think about the situation that real buyers… Read More