When we talk with heads of marketing about what “good” information flow between sales and marketing looks like, you can imagine the usual suspects that pop up: marketing updates provided to the sales team, sales providing feedback on messaging that’s resonating (or not resonating), and some type of ongoing win-loss analysis.

One conversation that stood out for us, though, was a conversation we had with the marcomm team at TELUS last year (TELUS is one of Canada’s top telecom service providers).  We were discussing their “Who Knew” marketing communications campaign (a submission from last year’s B2B MarComm Campaign Awards), which was an initiative that targeted influencers and decision-makers at medium and large businesses in Ontario. Read More »

Did you know that social media exemplars (the roughly 10% of brands driving significant business results via social media) aren’t spending all that much more on their social efforts compared to non-exemplars (brands not seeing business results)?* 

Turns out, it matters much more where you point your social efforts than how much financial and people resources you put behind those efforts. Read More »

At first blush (okay, pun intended), it’s hard to imagine anything that would be fit for print in a post on a marketing blog.  But in reality, NASA and the nudists in question are but two examples of an increasing trend we are seeing as marketers.  If I said the answer is “open source innovation” would that allow for too many bad jokes?  The truth is NASA has been a proponent of open source innovation since 2003 and in 2002 market researchers at Moen Faucets recruited 20 nudists to be videotaped while bathing to enhance their product development efforts.

Whether co-opting outsiders into helping you innovate as NASA does or getting creative with your ethnographic research as Moen did, we are seeing more and more members reaching out to their customers – and even their non-customers – for innovation help.  Already NASA’s Centennial Challenge Program has resulted in technological breakthroughs orchestrated by a “regular guy” from Maine working alone in his dining room as well as a group led by an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Read More »

Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh released a book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, last Tuesday, recounting his experience as the creator of the Zappos brand, from start-up phase to its eventual sale to Amazon last summer. The book looks great – full of insights on how Hsieh created the Zappos culture of employee and customer happiness. Having had a number of positive customer service interactions with Zappos myself, I’m excited to read about how he scaled his vision across what became a $1.5 billion business.

In advance of the book release, though, Hsieh released an excerpt to Inc. magazine, detailing how that vision created conflict between he and his investors – venture capitalists who sat on the Zappos board: Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

My colleague Aaron dubbed 2010 “Year of the Re-Org” in January – and the member interest we’ve seen in organizational structure bears this out.  As planning season rolls around, we’ve been examining various org designs.  We’ve identified six archetypes that optimize to different benefits: Read More »

The FT’s wonderful Lucy Kellaway recently wrote about how the odd white lie can be a useful thing and, in general, I think there’s something to be said for the “occasional bromide” to make the days pass more smoothly.  But that got me thinking about instances where these kinds of social niceties might be causing real damage.

Specifically, I’m thinking about the white lies we tell ourselves concerning the desirability of Marketing generating leads for Sales.   As part of our current research about gaining commercial alignment, we asked sales and marketing executives to force-rank their priorities.  Somewhat surprisingly, ‘lead generation’ appears toward the end of that list, with sales executives ranking it as an even lower priority than their marketing counterparts. Read More »

Social media enables any employee in any function to interact directly with consumers.  This makes employee engagement more important than ever – both to limit reputation risks and capture new opportunities for employee advocacy (i.e., employees promoting the brand online).

As a very first step, companies should limit downside risks by implementing a social media policy (MLC members, click here for tips and examples).  In addition to defensive guardrails, companies should also offer simple guidelines or training to help engaged employees make the best use of social media.

Beyond this, now is a good time to redouble efforts to measure and boost employee engagement. Indeed, 46% of executives agree that surveying employee satisfaction and acting on the results is the best way to protect online reputation. Read More »

By Whitney Satin

When it comes to buzzword bingo about the issues B2B marketers care about most, “customer loyalty” makes a pretty strong showing.  It’s no secret that—on average—cross-sales to existing customers are much more profitable than new business acquisitions.  And even as we inch our way closer toward economic recovery, it’s heartening to know that current customers present the best opportunity for profitable growth in any economic environment.

MLC has spent a significant amount of time on the loyalty question, trying to understand what companies with high levels of customer loyalty do that’s so much better than the rest of the pack.  We’ve surveyed marketers, we’ve surveyed sales reps and sales managers, and, perhaps most critically, we’ve surveyed B2B customers. 

Interestingly, the data all points to one resounding conclusion: Read More »

When we started exploring innovation from a marketing perspective a few months ago, Andy Armstrong left a copy of Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor on my desk—a fantastic read on market-driven innovation.  I was only a few dozen pages into the book when I hit a particularly insightful piece of guidance:

“Make a list of the cultural trends that influence your consumers’ behavior.  Take your time; all of the items on this list will not be immediately apparent.  Stay with it, and you will gradually observe more and more.  Be a good observer.  Remove yourself from your own cultural perspective.  Look for the absurdities, the incongruities, the things that don’t necessarily make sense.  You will begin to laugh as you start to see the culture from the outside.  (Laughing is a good sign).”

Bogusky’s hypothesis underpinning this advice is simple: consumers are participants in a culture first and an economy second—they’re much more likely to spend their hard-earned dollars on culturally relevant products than culturally ambivalent products.  If a brand wins the cultural relevance game, they’ll likely see the economic benefits as well. Read More »

When it comes to loyalty program enhancement, most marketers are squeezing basis points of response out of email marketing or are micro-tweaking status tiers and reward levels.  Of late, however, we’re noticing a handful of brands pursing discontinuous innovation, which seems to fall into one of three categories: Read More »