The Cluetrain Manifesto 10th Anniversary Edition was written by Rick Levine (@ricklevine), Christopher Locke (@clockerb), Doc Searls (@dsearls), David Weinberger.
For those of you who never read it, let’s cut to the chase… [Read more...]
10+ Years Later, Clue Unglues
August 30, 2010 By 3 Comments
The Leads are Beautiful, Wish You Were There…
August 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
We’re taking a break from a multi-paragraph blog this week, and we’re not going to go on any major Marketing Automation diatribe, but – If you haven’t been on vacation this summer, you should leave and go on it. However, you could rest a lot better on the beach if you had already shored up your lead management process and had implemented a marketing automation system to help with your lead nurturing and scoring. While you were away, leads could be building up qualification for engagement by sales. Coming back to a sales force that is confident with the leads you are submitting to them would almost be as good as the vacation itself and make it that much easier to go back to work.
Promise us you’ll do it by next summer if not sooner (Florida is a lot nicer in the wintertime!) Just a thought…
5 More Challenges for Sales & Marketing Alignment
August 16, 2010 By 1 Comment
US Navy Blue Angels
Last week, this blog listed some of the challenges that a B2B Marketing organization faces for Sales and Marketing Alignment. Aligning those departments is not that easy so you’re not getting off the hook just yet. This week there are five more to think about and have some comfort in knowing that your organization is not the only one that needs to go through such an exercise for understanding the following: [Read more...]
5 Challenges for Marketing & Sales Alignment
August 9, 2010 By 3 Comments
More and more organizations are realizing that the talent and resources of Marketing need to be “reeled in” to support sales. While “branding” is important, remember this: A brand is merely the promise of an experience. In order to experience the brand, one must generally purchase the product or service of the brand. In order to purchase the product or service of the brand, you need to provide a selling channel. A selling channel needs support. Capische?
Sales has a quantifiable objective: Revenue. One either achieves/surpasses it or one does not. The way to achieve/surpass a revenue objective with the highest probability of success is to align appropriate organizational resources, most notably in Marketing and Sales. The coordination of these resources is known as Marketing and Sales Alignment. And for the most part, Marketing needs to learn to paddle in the same direction as Sales, sometimes warning them where the rocks, eddies, and rapids are. There are some fundamental challenges in attaining alignment:
LeadsCon, Day 2: Any Marketing Automation in There?
July 28, 2010 By 1 Comment
Day 2
The second day of LeadsCon was interesting than the first day – and it appeared that more people were in the audience too. [Read more...]
LeadsCon, Day 1: Any Marketing Automation in There?
July 28, 2010 By 1 Comment
Day 1
Yesterday, The Marketing Consigliere asked What will LeadsCon Offer Marketing Automaters? Over 1,000 filled the conference room for the initial sessions. Jay Weintraub (@jayweintraub), an organizer of the event, kept a good tight schedule of some impressive panelists. This was a different world for The Marketing Consigliere, who primarily advises in B2B Marketing world. The event was focused towards the B2C marketing world, where a pay-per-click and CPM frame of mind tend to dominate. Of interesting note: [Read more...]
What Will LeadsCon Offer Marketing Automaters?
July 26, 2010 By 2 Comments
The Marketing Consigliere loves New York pizza and will find any excuse to go get some. What better excuse than this year’s LeadsCon? Smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, LeadsCon, like a hot fresh pizza straight out of the oven, will offer much to chew on and digest.
Jep Castelein (@jepc) of LeadSloth had indicated that he would not be attending since he was concentrating on lead nurturing and lead scoring as opposed to lead generation. Was he being smart in not attending?
Stay tuned for a review once the Marketing Consigliere has sat in on some sessions and made a round of the exhibitor floor…
Happy Third “Blogiversary”
July 19, 2010 By 1 Comment
This is the third anniversary of this blog. Similar milestones were previously acknowledged in 2009 and 2008 with much joy and pasta, but this year is extra special. Although it is still referred to as “The Marketing Consigliere” Blog, and written in the third person narrative, it is undergoing change as it figures out what kind of Marketing blog it wants to be when it grows up.
Earlier this spring the blog moved from its own domain to be under the Allinio brand. The whole site migrated to WordPress 3.0 when it was still beta. Some plugins were trashed, others were added, like the WP Touch, which formats this site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones. Book reviews have been a little more frequent, and the “Cinque Domande” (Five Questions) for startup executives has struggled because it’s hard for both the interviewer and interviewee to find the time to conduct the interviews. [Read more...]
