What’s the not-so-secret but often neglected success factor in B2B direct marketing? Simply this: your in-house prospect list (house file) can be your most important asset in a successful direct marketing operation. And this is equally true whether you are communicating with prospects at their email addresses, physical addresses or telephone numbers. A house file can vastly decrease your cost of lead and new …
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Should You Use a Marketing Consulting Firm? by Christopher Ryan
I was doing a talk about branding and positioning to the Peak Venture Group last week and was asked an intriguing question from a technology start-up CEO: Should I hire an in-house chief marketing officer (CMO) or outsource this role? Here is a rough synopsis of the answer I gave this gentleman. Note that my …
Salespeople: Are they Dinosaurs or Something Else? – by Christopher Ryan
I read an interesting discussion on LinkedIn titled: How soon will the internet turn your salespeople into dinosaurs? Not surprisingly, this discussion generated a lot of comments – 132 to date. Some agreed that sales reps are an endangered species while others took the opposite approach, maintaining that sales professionals are essential to the success …
Do You Need a Coach to Be Successful in B2B Marketing? – by Christopher Ryan
I read a posting by Patrick McClure at the Sales Lead Management website titled The First Fundamental of Success: Get a Coach. McClure points out that every Olympic athlete has a coach and this is one of the reasons why they are able to obtain such high levels of performance. So how does coaching apply …
Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing by Christopher Ryan
I am a marketer by trade but as a consumer, I get as annoyed as anyone by the persistent and unrelenting intrusiveness of push marketing techniques. As hard as we try to get away from unwanted promotions (TiVo, Sirius Radio, cable, etc.), marketers find new ways to track us down and share their messages with us, …
Is the B2B Marketing Services Industry Broken? – by Christopher Ryan
I just read an interesting article at Hubspot.com titled Is the Marketing Services Industry Broken? The article makes a rational case that services firms are failing to provide good value to their clients in many important ways. And while I believe many of these types of generalizations are tough to justify, there is indeed some truth in the …
Pricing Strategies in B2B Marketing
There is no magic bullet in pricing. However, we can all agree that maximizing our value to customers is a very good thing for both the top line and bottom line. I happened to attend a very good presentation on this subject at the Inverness Group meeting in Denver. The speaker was Jonathan Bein, Managing …
Nine Questions to Develop Your B2B Branding Strategy
The first step in developing a branding and positioning strategy is to determine your starting point through a series of nine questions. The first question is: What is the scope of your branding problem—is it to position an entire organization or simply to position a product or series of products?
Bridging the Gap Between B2B Marketing and Sales by Christopher Ryan
If you are a marketing manager at a company that uses direct sales representatives, these people can be either your best friends or worst nightmare. Chances are they are somewhere in between, but the point is they can make your life easier, or they can be a constant source of irritation. In fact, careers can …