I recently found a great new service on Product Hunt. My new PA is an artificial intelligence (AI) application – Amy - and she's insanely clever. Let me show you how to save hours on scheduling using this service, and then I’ll ask you a question about how AI should be applied to planning. I would love to hear your feedback. https://www.youtube.com/embed/GZ55qScQpfI Below is the test email exchange between my new AI personal assistant (Amy) and myself, as well as a couple of my internal colleagues (Nick and Brett), to set up a meeting that is READ MORE ›

Let me share a story that will probably resonate with many of you… “My father was a printer, his father was a printer, and I am a printer. I’ve got three generations of ink under my nails and I know this business back to front. There are a lot of guys like me, who have been running small print shops for years on end, yet struggle to compete online. Acquiring small print businesses at the right price has been a primary source of revenue growth for us. I’ve been able to execute this growth strategy many READ MORE ›

[av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/V3y4qX0PICs' format='16-9' width='16' height='9'] What do good marketing plans look like, what's in them, and how do you build them? Good marketing plans are buyer centric. They're all about the problem that the buyer has and that you solve. They're built together. They're complete. They're benchmarked compared to the market. They're compared to actual performance, or the plan versus actual, and they're constantly iterated. To answer the question, we went Googling and we found five articles. We always look for five, so there's four from Google and one from BuzzSumo because we want READ MORE ›

No marketer worth his or her salt would ever copy a marketing plan from one company and hope that it works for their own. Equally, we'd be fools to not look at a marketing plan sample or three before beginning. My recommendations:      Assemble a library of marketing plan samples that you like for whatever reason.      Build a sales and marketing plan, not separate plans.      Keep it short      Use our marketing plan sample at FunnelPlan.com as the basis of your next plan. Let me show you a few marketing plan READ MORE ›

Marketing planning forces you to think about the market, what problem you most want to solve and how you solve that better than the rest. To choose your focus in terms of companies, roles, sales channel, to identify the messages that you need to take to market and how you'll take those messages to that market and communicate all that to the team, that's the why. Let me now show you the how of great B2B marketing planning. The first step of how is to get your team together, at least sales and marketing, but try for READ MORE ›

[av_video src=’https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yq3545alSdA’ format=’16-9′ width=’16’ height=’9′] What’s the best way to build a Sales and Marketing Plan? I’ve pulled up five articles to help answer that question. Whilst none of them actually got it right individually, collectively they did a great job. Your path to building a Sales and Marketing plan has eight steps. Build your business plan first – your Sales and Marketing plan defines how you will win the business mandated by your business plan Do your homework before planning. Include research, market and competitor analysis, extract sales objectives from revenue targets). READ MORE ›

Imagine a perfect list of the normal elements in a marketing plan, and then: Break acquisition and retention into two plans, or risk blurring the two messages and offers Put the buyer in the centre. Specifically: what problem they have that you solve? how you solve it? who most has it? who else solves it? Separate strategy from tactics Insert velocity in between AS velocity informs your choice of tactics Do it all on one page rather than summarising a too-wordy document This week we're in familiar territory - how to build a marketing plan. We READ MORE ›

Hi. What is the funnel process, and what's the difference between a good funnel process and a great funnel process? Today we're going to take a look at five sites that offer answers to that, and then we'll offer our own views on what a great funnel process looks like. It starts with the premise that everything that we do in marketing, and frankly, in sales, is about moving the buyer from somewhere to somewhere, and you need to know what the ‘somewheres’ are. Where are you now, and where am I trying to get you READ MORE ›