What’s Working in Marketing

This isn’t just an attention grabbing headline. Something’s going on with the way our brains work and it’s especially prevalent with the younger generation. Is Google making us stupid? it’s a great question first asked several years ago by tech author Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. Now he’s got a whole series of books on [...]

Your buyers’ time is extremely valuable. In a recent survey of automation end-users, we found that buying teams are getting bigger. In fact, 4-5 people are now influencing the short list and purchase decisions, on average. And your customers are keenly aware of the challenges this presents as they want to reduce the buying cycle [...]

Many of the marketing and sales techniques we take for granted were invented over 200 years ago by Josiah Wedgewood (yes, of Wedgewood china fame). The NY Times wrote an interesting article in 2009 about a sad event…Wedgewood’s bankruptcy. Josiah was an unlikely hero. He was the 13th child of an impoverished potter; a childhood [...]

The theme for the upcoming ISA Marketing & Sales Summit “In Search of the Holy Grail: Integrating Marketing and Sales”, and the Summit is running a blogging contest to win a iPod Touch if folks blog about a topic relevant to the upcoming Summit.  So, here’s my “entry”… although I’m not really qualified to win..I [...]

I happened to listen in to a webinar last week by Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li from the Altimeter Group about “Understanding Your Customer’s Social Behavior” that highlighted emerging behavior characteristics that we are discovering in the social networking world.  The  days of targeting by geography, gender, age are taking a backseat now that virtually [...]

By now, most of the marketing people we meet in the B2B space are past the “try social media” hype and are looking for ways to integrate their offline and online marketing programs to work together cohesively.  If you are one of those people, then I have some good news for you today. Apparently, users [...]

It’s a challenging time for selling anything lately.  We get that.  And we wanted to help get some answers about how companies in the automation industry can put their best foot forward and succeed despite the challenges out there.  So recently I had the opportuity to interview Julie Fraser from Cambashi, and recorded a podcast [...]

Just wandering through MarketingSherpa’s Business Technology Buyers 2008-2009 report. Interesting data about the top influences on the buy cycle, broken out by stage. Not surprisingly, word of mouth, web sites, and search engines made it into the top for every stage. Note that word of mouth has been supplanted by manufacturer web sites in the [...]

Who knew? Really, there is an entire discussion around how all these Web 2.0 technologies influence the buying cycle, specifically of technology products.  There seems to be extra evidence surfacing that indicate technology products are well suited for blogs and influencing buyers. In yesterday’s BtoB Online, a report indicated: More than half of blog readers [...]

Last week we posted an article about the decline in print advertising spend across many well-known, well-read publications.   In that posting, it was discussed that there was not a supporting view of how much of those dwindling dollars in print advertising were going to online advertising.   Well, no sooner did we publish that post that [...]