This is one of my favourite topics. I will let it out right away, it should reside with Marketing and this post will tell you the reasons why it should remain with Marketing. Few things to look at: 1. Only 25% of the b2b leads buy in the first six months; 25% buy between the 7th and 12th month; 25% buy between 13th and 18th month and the remaining after 18 months 2. Sales focus is only on immediate revenues and they... 

I had a discussion with one of my customers today and he was talking about launching a video conferencing solution that allows for interoperability and interoperability is the key here. They have been successful in implementing this for corporations in UK and it wasn’t straightforward for them to replicate it here. The market that they are looking at is pretty large in India and the quality of the sales force is... 

Your product is definitely superior to your competitors and you understand the space and that is the reason why you have come up with this product in an already crowded market. Though you have innovated well, it is not disruptive innovation that is going to displace the competition. In this scenario, what strategy should you adopt towards your market development? Should you look at expanding your market or should you... 

Look at this scenario: An IT Services company that understands the difference between Marketing and Sales, where marketing does the lead generation and sales does the prospecting Their marketing has expertise in outbound activities and not so much on the inbound activities. Their focus is so much towards outbound that the marketing organization does not have the bandwidth to optimize or improve on their  inbound... 

Signing up for booth space in any industry event is an expensive affair and you definitely should strive to make the most out of that investment. This requires loads of planning upfront and you should set up your booth in a way that it attracts maximum visitors. You need to grab the attention of someone in 2-3 seconds as that is the time that it takes for a visitor to walk past your booth. You need to plan well and... 

My website receives a lot of traffic but not even a small percentage of this traffic gets converted into leads or customers. Is this a statement that you identify yourself with? This was the statement that was made by one of the marketing heads of an IT services company. They have outsourced their search engine optimization activity to an expert organization and they were doing a fair job of getting traffic to their... 

I’d like to have channels that can sell my product so that I can focus on building and delivering my product well. This was the statement that was made by one of the up and coming entrepreneurs during a casual conversation. As a matter of fact, he does the selling himself at this moment and there is a healthy pipeline and good traction in terms of number. He was also giving the examples of SAP and Microsoft, which... 

Many B2B companies have challenges related to data on their target segments. This invariably affects their prospecting activities. The challenges include data acquisition, data management, lead management, analytics and tracking ROI. Everyone is doing their bit to improve on these challenges and many a times this is done in an adhoc manner and has its own highs and lows. These challenges exist in more companies than... 

One of my friends made a statement ‘People buy leads, and they search for vendors’. This casual statement set me thinking and I was trying to figure out the significance of this statement with respect to IT service providers. IT service providers in the traditional sense would fall under the vendors category and they still do prospecting as the active sales tool as opposed to marketing. To set the context...