Aligned to Achieve: A B2B Marketing Classic
Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin’s Aligned to Achieve came out yesterday and it’s a great book on an important and all too often overlooked topic: how to align sales and marketing. I’m adding it to my modern SaaS executive must-read book list, which is now: Aligned to Achieve by Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin Customer Success […]
Lead Nurturing, Fast and Slow
I’ll borrow the title of one of my favorite books (Thinking, Fast and Slow) to make a few important points about lead nurturing in this post. While there is a strong argument that buyers should be nurtured before, during, and after the initial sale, I’m going to speak in this post about pre-sales lead nurturing, the purpose […]
The Generational Conundrum
A recent post by Christine Comaford got me thinking about a few things: How do we make sense of what seems like disparate generational data? Should we be focusing so intently on Millennials? Just how deep is the generational divide? I’ve known Christine for a number of years and respect her opinions but I don’t agree with […]
5 Content Marketing Tactics to Create Killer Content
You don’t have to be a large enterprise to have highly effective content marketing. The key to creating killer content is to focus on Quality Headcount, Strategy & Technology. Here are five content marketing fundamentals to create killer content: 1. Hire a Content Marketing Lead with Vision This person manages the content development process. But they need to […]
The Non-Marketing Disciplines Driving Marketing
Marketing roles have sustained considerable disruption over the last few years. These disruptions are being driven by the rapid evolution of disciplines outside of the traditional marketing disciplines. Three are particularly interesting: Neuroscience: how the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of the brain operates. It is a wide-ranging discipline that seeks to understand how brain biology drives […]
Five Functions of Online B2B Review Websites
Almost three months now as CRO at G2 Crowd, and quite a lot of immersive research later, I have developed a way to look at the B2B online review market that I think provides a somewhat different perspective on the business and on the value provided to its different constituents. I’ve also started to collect […]
Marketing in 2016 Means Remembering the 5 Ns
Traditional marketing tactics — email, search spam, paid/rented email lists, outbound sales calls, display advertising, interstitials etc… continue their decline. As a result, marketers worth their salt are doubling down on inbound marketing, most especially mobile, social and content marketing as a means to drive engagement with their markets. In 2016, successful marketers will remember the 5 Ns: […]
The Four Personas Of The Modern CMO In A Digital World
Marketers Face Massive Challenges In Making The Digital Shift In interviews with over 100 digitally focused, modern CMO’s, shared common challenges in the transformation of their roles and with the support of new digital business models. The top 20 modern marketing challenges (not in order of importance) include: Delivering on a creative to commerce […]
Marketing is Too Important to be Left to the Marketing Department
It was HP co-founder, David Packard, of all people, who came up with one of my all-time favorite quotes on marketing, specifically that “marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” This quote is often mentioned in the same breath as these famous Peter Drucker quotes: “Because the purpose of business is to […]
Too Much Money Makes You Stupid — Let’s Make an Alec Baldwin Viral Video
There are two sayings I like when it comes to the unicorn bubble: “Too much money makes you stupid” “Any idea’s a good one when you’ve got $100M burning a hole in your pocket.” Startups are supposed to be focused. Startups are supposed to need to prioritize ideas and opportunities. Just as startups weren’t supposed […]
