First, the facts: according to a survey by the Economist, 58% of B2B Marketers claimed that among their top objectives was to position their firm as a thought leader.  Seventy–seven percent of Marketers consider thought leadership marketing one of the most important tactics for 2010.

But what is thought leadership and why are we so focused on it? Read More »

(Note: This is Part 4 of our 6-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Part 2, “Selecting Metrics“, can be found here. Part 3, “Marketers Squeezing Productivity“, can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August and September for a new installment!)

As you’re preparing for another year of marketing planning, ask yourself these three questions:

• Do our marketing plans reflect our company’s overall strategic objectives?
• Are our marketing plans based primarily on incremental changes to last year’s activities?
• Even if we know that marketing is making progress, can we tie our activities to business objectives?

We all know what the answers here should be, but how many of us actually get it right? Read More »

We just came back from an innovation session kindly hosted by W.L. Gore and Associates (best known by consumers for the GORE-TEX fabric).  We spent a half day discussing the challenges of pre-funnel product and service innovation, and we were treated to a tour of Gore’s Capabilities Center.

One of the big lessons for me was the importance of organizing for innovation – but not the way you think.  Yes, one of the big questions we hear is about organizational structure, but what became clear during our session was that changing the way you look at your world, including your existing products and services and assumed customer needs, is a critical step to being more creative — even more than how you organize your people. Read More »

We just held our inaugural business-to-business meeting looking at our content engagement strategies and what it really means to be a thought leader (and whether that’s even the right goal).

Not surprisingly, when talking about current challenges, we had lots of conversation around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

For Marketing to support that, one thing we need to do is engineer our content to make people want to share it.  But how? Read More »

Our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance.  Along the way, they amassed a huge dataset from their Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys about over 1,000 managers – and talked to over 100 different companies about the current environment and the skills they’re focused on for first-line managers and up.

They found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently – certainly differently than most do today. Read More »