Category: B2B Marketing
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In an earlier post, I explained why companies need different marketing content for customer acquisition vs. customer retention. Put simply, when the objective is customer acquisition, your content needs to weaken the grip of the status quo and convince your prospects to make a change. When the goal is customer retention, the exact opposite is…
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Yesterday, I performed a Google search using the term “sales and marketing alignment.” My search produced 239,000 results. When I limited the search to the past year, Google still returned over 50 pages of results. So clearly, sales and marketing alignment is still a hot topic in the B2B sales and marketing world. Marketing and…
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A few weeks ago, I published a post that discussed how to weaken the grip of the status quo. When your objective is to acquire new customers, the status quo is often your toughest competitor because most potential buyers have an inherent preference for their existing methods and processes. In most cases, no sale can…
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A few weeks ago, I published a post that discussed some of the major findings of a survey conducted by Target Marketing magazine regarding the marketing practices of small and mid-size companies. Recently, Clutch (a B2B market research firm based in Washington, DC) published the results of its 2017 Small Business Digital Marketing Survey. Because…
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Business leaders of all kinds regard the identification and implementation of best practices as one of the most powerful management tools at their disposal. And why shouldn’t they? It seems immanently reasonable to identify the practices of high-performing companies and then emulate those practices. Marketing leaders are particularly enamored with best practices. After all, marketing…
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In a recent article for dmnews.com, Mike Colombo, the CMO of Cloudwords, argued that many CMOs aren’t ready for a seat at the C-suite table. According to Mr. Colombo, many CMOs aren’t winning a seat at the “grown-up” table because they’re still relying on performance metrics that are inconsequential to company leaders. Recent research has…
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When Theodore Levitt taught marketing at the Harvard Business School, he frequently reminded his students that “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” The point Professor Levitt was making is that people don’t usually buy a product or service because they want the product or service itself. What they…
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One of the most profound business developments of the past few years has been the proliferation of companies using subscription-based business models. Of course, subscription-based businesses aren’t new. We’ve been subscribing to newspapers and magazines for decades. What is new is that more and more kinds of goods are being repackaged as services and sold…