Last week a prospective customer in India wanted to know whether he should have email newsletters (or webletters) as a part of his B2B marketing mix. I answered him with a question – “what do you want to achieve with an email newsletter?” And then a series of questions:   Is it to bring in new customers, generate leads? Establish expertise or build thought leadership? So customers will flock to you when they are... 

In the B2B segment, traditional marketing is losing its ground and people are more and more looking at Thought Leadership marketing towards differentiating their products and services in the market. Customer typically have started controlling the B2B messages and you need to be on the money to have an impact in your target customer space. 1. Write whitepapers that lets its readers know something that they already do not... 

All B2B marketing partners enter in saying that they will help you grow business. Ask them how? Response to this pointed question will reveal whether your would-be partner is a Marketing Falcon or an Advertising Parrot. If they give you a bag full of ‘strategic’ intent, initiatives and programs as part of the marketing mix – give it back to them. Ask them what they are? Be wary of ‘social media marketing’... 

Do your marketing initiatives result in positive return on the invetsment? This is the question that every marketeer should ask himself. If the answer is not in the affirmative, then it is time to throw away your existing marketing initiatives and improve what you do. Every marketeer or the marketing team has loads of wobbly ideas and huge list of programs. To list a few, it can be advertising, public relations, trade... 

Selling a product or a service becomes very challenging when the forces of commoditization are at play. It essentially boils down to cost play and the ones with a lower cost most likely will win the race. I would like to take the IT services industry as an example. 1. Many in this space have been opportunists and they went with the tail wind that existed in the space 2. Not many have really looked at differentiating themselves... 

Sales and marketing activities need to be tightly integrated for an organization to be successful in the market place.  Though they are pursuing common objectives, the thread remains that they don’t get along well with each other. The common arguments that are put forward are: Sales are the bread winners, hence they need to be deified; Marketing are the strategic brainy ones who position the offerings in the market... 

I have been having a number of discussions with some business incubators and the companies that have been incubated by them. General feeling in this community is that they don’t need marketing and they are not at a stage where they have to look at marketing. Their model is, let the technology evolve and then we will hire a PR and Advertising agency and go for a big-bang launch of their product/service. How so wrong,... 

Many a conversations that I have been having in the last couple of weeks points me to one weak area that most companies have. It is about their value proposition; too difficult to believe but that is the truth. The most important aspect of any business and the most neglected of it, is a value proposition that businesses offer their customers. Most value proposition that is created are listless and vague.  Without a... 

In my mind, all marketing activities need to be tightly integrated with the sales process; else it cannot be directly equated to the growth in your business. What is the point in generating hundreds of leads if they are not acted on? There definitely is no point. I have written about this and some more in B2B marketing essentials as a paper. You can get a free download of this by clicking on this image below. B2B Marketing... 

With the economy slowing down, there has been cuts in terms of spending across all functions. Marketing typically happens to be one of the first ones to receive a budget cut, for reasons beyond my comprehension. Slowdown or no slowdown, these in my mind are things that every B2B marketer should know and should implement, not in any particular order. TV and outdoor advertising spend needs to be curbed; if not, it can...