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 …
Category Archive
for: ‘Business to Business’
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 …