By Whitney Satin

More than 70% of B2B marketers are racing to position their firm as a thought leader, but as our research on Insight Marketing shows, the success rates of these efforts are questionable at best.  Marketers invest a lot of time to arrive at edgy insights that have the potential to reframe how customers view particular business challenges, but these insights often fail to stick.  Why is that? 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 »

By Whitney Satin

One of my favorite analogies about the evolving dynamic between sales and marketing involves a comparison of golf and basketball (thanks, Sales 2.0 for Dummies!).  In traditional sales- or technology-driven organizations, Marketing often takes on the role of the golf caddie, setting up the shot that Sales takes with customers to land the deal … the figurative hole-in-one.

But a lot has changed in recent years, leading many B2B organizations to question this somewhat subservient relationship.  It’s no question that the purchase funnel has grown in complexity, requiring that reps demonstrate an increasingly deep level of customer understanding as they engage with more and more stakeholders to close every buying decision.  At the same time, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of collaborative technologies available to sales and marketing teams, making possible huge advantages to those companies able to get the right information to the right individuals at the right time. Read More »

We may not have the jet-set, champagne-fuelled ceremonies of the B2C ad world, but our 2009 B2B MarComm Awards are just as exciting, if somewhat lower scale. 

MLC Members can access the links in this post, including our showcase of all 50 entries to see the high quality of work and get ideas for your own campaigns. Despite the consistently high standard across campaigns, we had to select a few that stood out from the rest.

We are pleased to announce 8 finalists that excelled in terms of campaign focus, target understanding, message relevance, and channel impact:

2009 MLC B2B Marcomm Awards Finalists

• Alcatel-Lucent | Hotel Experience
• Motorola | Two-Way Radio Lead Generation Campaign
• National Instruments | Energizing Engineers at NI Week
• Qwest Communications | Voice of the Customer
• Telecom NZ | No One Will Know You Are Gone
• Telstra | Enterprise & Government Productivity
• TELUS | Who Knew
• Thomson Reuters | ProLaw Office

Read More »