Recently had the pleasure of gaining
John Holland’s perspectives on the keys to high performing sales teams. The titles of John’s best-selling books, in many ways, nicely summarize his thinking.
CustomerCentric Selling and
Re-Thinking the Sales Cycle. A summary of our recorded 30 minute conversation:
On Tuesday, Facebook
annnounced that their Timeline profile would now be available to users worldwide. Although it's currently available only for personal profile pages, many have predicted that brand pages will soon follow.
When old becomes new again, ISVs look to telecom for pricing inspiration. For decades, the telecom industry has been honing what other industries are only now getting into – business models that start with simple subscriptions then add complex pieces such as sign-up/activity/event fees + bundles + add-ons + incentives + promotional products. SaaS operators are evaluating new ways to create multiple revenue streams from each customer by blending limits and usage (usage being the “activities” in which end-users engage in consuming or interacting with goods and services).
What is geosocial and how does it provide ways for people to link products and services?
Email marketing plays a fundamental role in today’s marketing efforts. Whether it’s attracting new customers, nurturing leads, developing loyalty or transactional messaging, there are standard best practices for email content. Marqui’s email content best practices can be applied to all emails including promotions, e-newsletters, triggered campaigns, drip campaigns, win-back or client education programs.
The importance of great content cannot be overstated. Without content, there is no marketing. Period. So what is content marketing? To make things simple, let's start with what it's not:
Content is part of the front line of your business which is why you can’t afford not to pay it the attention it deserves. What is content strategy? And what should you do once you've hired a content strategist?
Niel Nickolaisen poses the question, "How do we deliver the right products, in the optimal market windows, at the lowest cost, while increasing productivity and meeting customers' changing needs and innovating?"
Learn about understanding channels in terms of your customer, getting marketing campaigns to work together to achieve the outcomes you're looking for and measuring only what is important.
If you're a B2B company, LinkedIn’s network is the ideal platform to connect your business to over 120 million professionals. Here are five ways you can improve your company’s presence and begin increasing your lead flow.
It’s impressive to meet sales leaders with the confidence that they’ve locked into highly repeatable best practices with their sales teams. What we’re seeing with our clients is a vastly different picture. When viewed thru the lens of how much buyer response Reps are earning from their sales efforts, pretty clearly some of today’s practices aren’t nearly as valuable as some might think*.
My friend Ardath Albee regularly offers sharp perspectives on the effective use of content in sales and marketing via her
Marketing Interactions blog. She recently asked a brilliant question: ‘
what does a click really mean?’ She and I recently had great fun debating the issue.
You may have heard some buzz around the notion of gamification. The term has been characterized by some as the next frontier in web and mobile, one predicted to become as central to marketing as social media has become.
This year, the explosion of mobile internet consumption has brought with it an unprecedented wave of developments in mobile website design. In just one year, the mobile web landscape has changed dramatically, and the growing popularity of HTML5 and CSS3, amongst other developments, has played a pivotal role in expanding the realm of design possibilities. With that in mind, here are the top mobile website design trends for 2011:
Landing pages are an important aspect of higher education institutions’ conversion tactics, but, if your landing pages aren’t converting your prospects to leads, then they’re most likely not optimized. Your landing pages are meant to prompt a certain action and by make them appealing, targeted and credible you increase your chances of turning your visitors into viable leads. So—how can you improve your conversion rates?
As any sales manager or CFO can attest, improving sales performance is a tough, time-consuming, task. You implement enabling technology. You recruit great sales skills. You gain access to valuable information. Your team uses these resources and tries hard. Yet, still, sales performance lags what everyone senses it could be. If only there were a way to improve the sales impacts of sales efforts.
Recently had the pleasure of comparing notes with
Lisa Nirell, founder of
EnergizeGrowth, and a blogger with FastCompany. Following are excerpts from our conversation.
You have likely heard about the business benefits of a strong Twitter presence: competitive intelligence, increased brand awareness and customer engagement, to name just a few. However, if the Twitterverse is still foreign to you and your colleagues, check out these tips for starting and maintaining a meaningful dialogue:
Recently on LinkedIn, over 150 Sales + Marketing Executives shared their views on the #1 reason for failure in sales. Several things really struck me from the conversation to date. Learning’s gotten little air time. Nor has better coaching. The need for it. The lack of it.
Google's new +1 button, released on July 1st (try it yourself above this post!) is Google's foray into social or "curated" search
At the
AA-ISP Leadership Summit, forward-thinking sales leaders compared notes on what best-in-class inside sales teams are doing to improve their performance. Industry leaders briefed attendees on the results of their initiatives + reflections on industry trends.
Last year, Seattle-based comedy bloggers
Cheezburger Network (ICanHasCheezeburger, IHasAHotDog, FailBlog, MemeBase) introduced "Cheezburger Collectable Trophies" to an already extremely active member community.
The
Sirius Decisions Summit is an annual opportunity to get a fresh take on what best-in-class firms are doing to improve their revenue performance with the help of their marketing + sales teams. Sirius Decisions’ analysts brief attendees on the results of their on-going research. Their clients share their tactics + experiences improving their own revenue performance with Sirius Decisions’ assistance. Attending vendors share their latest product innovations + client achievements. Over coffee, everyone shares their impressions, concerns, + improvements they’re looking to achieve. It’s a remarkable assembly of growth-focused folks looking for ways to improve their businesses and overcome their barriers to doing so.
It’s as important to measure the success of your blog as it is any other aspect of your online presence and there are several key data points that can help you track your blog’s effectiveness accurately. When it comes to blogging metrics, meaningful ones are generally related to how many people come to your blog and how engaged they are once they get there.
Effective demand generation is crucial for building interest in your organization’s products and services but many organizations are confused about the key elements of building demand.
At the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) conference which wrapped up last Saturday many new and emerging technologies were discussed, not the least of which was QR codes.
We’ve talked about what these codes are in the past and what they can do for your mobile marketing, but SXSW really highlighted the popularity of this technology, especially through the marketing at the event itself.
During a recent vacation I had an opportunity to test my own decision making with respect to the value of consumer ratings. Deciding where to dine out is always one of the pleasant challenges of any holiday.
Facebook recently patented “Curated Search” , which is expected to use algorithmic search results similar to Google or Bing, then weight those results by what users in or near your Facebook network have shown interest in.
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, a community is defined as, “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location.”
In this podcast,
Steven Forth and I discuss our respective takes on the importance of improving the effectiveness of sales conversations and pricing negotations.
Most organizations likely place social media responsibilities primarily (or solely) with marketing, but a
recent interview with Cisco’s Marketing Director on WebWorkerDaily, now part of
GigaOM provides some insightful tips and makes the case for spreading it throughout the company, especially to customer service:
Despite the fact that social media is rising in popularity and sophistication, most businesses still have some common misconceptions about the basics of social media marketing. Social media isn’t right for all organizations, but those that aren’t taking part because they have the wrong idea about certain aspects may be selling their online marketing short.
I’m sure that most internet marketers have heard of the lead nurturing process and can recognize its importance to pushing leads through the sales cycle. One of the most overlooked parts of this process, and, in my opinion, one of the most important is content mapping.
Kevin Davis' new book,
Slow Down, Sell Faster, thoughtfully explains how sales people can speed up business-to-business sales by slowing down to get into synch with each customer's buying process. The key to this, in Davis' view, is to match the focus + timing of sales efforts to each buyer's needs.
Blog posts should be optimized just like any other content on your website and that includes making sure that your blog posts are search engine friendly.
