More than two decades ago, Michael Porter warned about the dangers of relying on benchmarking and “best practices” to produce business success. In a landmark article in the Harvard Business Review, Porter drew a sharp distinction between operational effectiveness – which often involves identifying and implementing best practices – and real business strategy. Porter argued…
Some pundits contend that account-based marketing will create better alignment between marketing and sales. In reality, ABM can be a catalyst for improving sales-marketing alignment, but it won’t cause such improved alignment to magically materialize. The adoption of ABM will quickly uncover weaknesses in the relationship between your marketing and sales teams, and that’s a…
Demand Gen Report’s 2018 Marketing Measurement & Attribution Benchmark Survey makes one point abundantly clear: Measuring marketing performance is both a top priority and a major challenge for most B2B marketers. Eighty-seven percent of the survey respondents said that measuring marketing performance is a growing priority for their company, but more than half (54%) also…
Salesforce recently published the fifth edition of its State of Marketing report. The new report is based on a survey that was fielded between August 13th and September 23rd of last year, and produced 4,101 responses from marketing leaders (manager or higher). Survey respondents were from North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. The authors of the…
In my previous two posts, I’ve discussed the expanding role of marketing in driving business growth. Recent research shows that many marketing leaders now believe they are primarily responsible for leading growth efforts in their organization, and that CEOs and other senior executives share this belief. The recent research also shows, however that leading growth…
Marketing has always been associated with revenue generation and growth, but a rising number of marketing leaders now contend that business growth is the raison d’etre of the marketing function. Recent research shows that many marketing leaders believe they have become primarily responsible for driving growth in their organization, and that this belief is shared…
The role of marketing was a major topic of conversation last year, and there is a widespread belief that marketing’s scope of responsibility has expanded. In the August 2018 edition of The CMO Survey, eight out of ten (79.6%) of the survey respondents said that the role of marketing in their organization had broadened over…
This will be my last post of 2018, and I want to thank everyone who has spent some of his or her valuable time reading this blog. My goal for this blog has always been to provide content that readers will find to be informative, thought-provoking, and useful, and I’ve been immensely gratified by the…