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What’s old is new again. The phrase applies to many areas from fashion, movies, science and indeed technology. History is one of the best and most underutilized research tools. Consider how business, economic … Read more
A question I often get is “How much investment should marketing make in advancing its capabilities?” It is a fair question. Many marketing budgets are limited and R&D type efforts are stymied … Read more
Both my wife, as well as my former boss referred me to Star Trek themed thoughts on how to approach marketing. When they both agree, I tend to listen. William … Read more
This is a guest post written by Anand Thaker, an advisor, entrepreneur, connector and fellow futurist in the Martech ecosystem. In the spirit of illustrating how marketing technology is thriving beyond … Read more
The common thread for sales and marketing alignment relates to leads: qualification, hand off, common performance indicators, etc. These are definitely must have on-going, discussions for every B2B complex sale organization. However, we’ve … Read more
Evolving Definition – Marketing Operations While the definition of marketing operations continues to evolve, the common basis revolves around optimizing marketing (and to some degree sales) performance. Like a CIO/COO … Read more
With dozens of clients and projects under successful completion over the last year, as a team, we’ve been reviewing commonalities among many of those projects. One of the most interesting discussions focused organizational “culture”.
To digress just a bit, David Cummings, once referred to a book at a local start-up event called “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni which discusses organizational health.
It’s been only a few months, but B2BCamp is launching again in Boston. For those new to the event, its an unconference for marketers and sales. A few peers … Read more
Capterra, a software directory website, recently released the results of a research study comparing the popularity of various Marketing Automation vendors. The comparison focused on available stats from Alexa, Compete, Google … Read more
It seems all that I’ve been posting lately have been about conferences, well, here’s another 🙂 I wrote about other sponsored roadshows like this one which provide you the opportunity to receive strong thought leaders to you as well as offer an opportunity to network. KUDOS to 1) event planners for making this happen and 2) those on the road at each conference.
Silverpop, my former alma mater, hosted an informative event here in their hometown of Atlanta as the next to the last stop of the tour. Hosted at the Intercontinental Hotel, the meeting rooms where in close proximity to each other. It was nice to catchup with former colleagues who are new friends as well as new faces at Silverpop and Atlanta marketers.
I arrived a bit early and had the opportunity to reintroduce myself with Adam Stienberg (@adams472) co-founder of PlacePunch, Silverpop’s newest acquisition. The company offers a location-based loyalty program platform via the common social networks. This is a differentiating new social offering on top of social sign-in (via janrain) and the Share-to-Social feature introduced by the company in October 2008. Great offering for their B2C base. I was told that Adam’s preso on the usage of location-based marketing was one of the B2C crowd’s favorite. Congratulations Adam and Chris.
So I attended the Pardot Users Conference in Atlanta, GA. Users conferences, when well done as this one, can really boost confidence in the system and provide a great opportunity for face-to-face time. When I arrived, there were a sea of smiling Pardot folks in grey shirts guiding us around and answering questions. The W Hotels are trendy and the event venue for the conference here was no exception.
My knowledge of Pardot was limited, but engaging two new of our clients who are users, there was no greater motivation to get up to speed quickly. Also with the chance to get to know another marketing tech company and it’s product, I was very much looking forward to the event.
For those of you new to Pardot,
New Perspectives
There are lots on-going about marketing and sales alignment. However, as marketing begins to recapture the role as an operational center of an organization, marketing will need to look beyond the revenue silo to increasingly learn and leverage support from other parts of the organization. In this “new perspectives” series, we’ll explore how marketing operations will impact other parts of the organization:
Read moreNew Perspectives Pt.1 – MIS and Marketing Alignment
I’m a huge Seth Godin fan and hope to be as inspired as his writings demonstrate. If you haven’t already, I suggest buying his book “Permission Marketing“. His notions … Read more
While spending any time in this space, you’ve probably stumbled upon a variety of operational and technological themes. In building and maintaining a sales/marketing ecosystem, there are many moving parts to consider.
Here are a few common areas of focus we face:
I had the opportunity to attend the Marketo Revenue Rockstar (#RocktheRev) event at the W Hotel (you know the one where the elevators make you disco) in downtown Atlanta. … Read more
As many of you have come to learn, Steve Jobs has passed today at 56. He was not only a true innovator (317 patents as of April ’11), but an … Read more
Lead Scoring! Social Login! Marketing/Sales Alignment! Multi-Channel Marketing! Big Data! BINGO
You’ve probably been in this situation or similar to it:
Supporting the marketing/sales organizations, operations folks are constantly meeting various demands while balancing the theoretical vs. practical. In the foray, we struggle find the opportunity to step back and regroup to understand the changing buying process. The newest book Balancing the Demand Equation, by Adam Needles, Chief Strategy Officer @ Left Brain DGA serves as a guide to do this.
A bit of a disclaimer: In my search for as much B2B marketing advice as I could find, I followed Adam through his blog “Propelling Brands” then had the pleasure of working with him at Silverpop, an Email Marketing Automation firm.
Balancing the Demand Equation is about the changing B2B environment where relevancy and efficiency matter most, but marketers are currently unable to deliver.
Adam discusses two themes:
Okay, we’ve got WAY too many resources out there to help us evaluate features, price and capabilities of a marketing automation system. However, too often issues crop up beyond these … Read more