B2B Marketing

A high tech firm was looking to prioritize their plans for the coming year. The full senior management team was in attendance. In reviewing their efforts the head of marketing noted that they were averaging 12,000 hits per month on the company web site.

Unfamiliar with the term, the CFO asked what ‘hits' were and before the marketing executive could answer the sales executive said. "It's an

As I have been marketing B2B propositions for several technology firms, some things have become very evident and I am sure many of the points will resonate with my sales and marketing peers:

• Complex sales with different buying influences and politics imply that as a seller, you are going to have multiple points of touch before you close the sale. I like the term ‘moments of truth' to explain that

I was recently directed to an article suggesting that Trader Joes, MTV and iPod were all born during times of recession and if handled correctly a downturn can be a good thing for a company. The article went on to suggest that whilst everyone else may be turning their backs on advertising, companies should be advertising more.

I am not sure it is totally correct to suggest that if handled

In B2B tech industries, unless you are a leading brand and are almost guaranteed media pick up from your press release distribution activities you are going to be hard pressed to make serious headway into engaging with media.

One way is to use your customers as advocates for the company and pitch their success stories to the journalist community. That's a very good tactic and an approach that I

Lead Management or Customer Acquisition Management is designed to generate new business revenue, increase visibility and improve the attitudes of potential prospects and therefore nurture chances of future business development.

Typically an organisation will engage in some form of lead generation activity which will invoke a response from prospects and therefore generate leads. The lead

The 4 P's of marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) is the generally accepted ‘recipe' of areas to consider when looking at any strategic position of a product in the marketplace and whether you agree or disagree that you should add more P's into the mix or not, such as People and Packaging etc, I feel strongly that the recipe is flawed, quite misleading and does not force the strategic

I have been considering an idea called ‘Consumerisation of the Enterprise' which seems to be a fundamental paradigm shift happening right now. The younger generation, just entering the workforce, is more accustomed to the use of technology and Internet enabling tools. They are the Facebook, Youtube and mobile phone generation who have grown up with expectations around what technology can do and

Segmentation has always fascinated me. There is actually a school of thought that proposes that we should de-segment markets (more of that when I discuss Value Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy in another section). Here is the problem as I see it. I was in a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona last year. It was a fondue restaurant and a real nice set up. As I walked in I had a big smile on my