Forget about the 4 Ps you learned about at University. It's simplistic and unhelpful. It's about 30 years old and it's a consumer concept anyway. Just erase it. I've got another very simple paradigm for you. You might say simplistic. I don't think it is but you be the judge. Marketers spend their effort on basically three things: Getting the market ready, getting the channel ready, and getting the two talking in B2B, in complex B2B, which is the world that you live in and I live in. Three things marketers do: We call the first READ MORE ›

  Most salespeople understand that we need to understand our customers' pain points. Marketing does too, but not enough. Marketing likes to be the bearer of good news. This makes Marketing nice, comfortable, happy, but unproductive. Your ability to meet a need and solve a problem will be tested, and testimonials and case studies will play a key role. But that's very late in the buyer's journey, and is largely in the hands of your salespeople. Marketing's job should be to find the right kind of buyers, work out which of them are sufficiently troubled to act, READ MORE ›

  Your competitors want to eat your lunch so how do you stop them? Or better yet, how do you eat their lunch? Well let's start with ‘do you even have any competition?’   In the Chasm from Jeffrey Moore, we learned that in the very early stages of any kind of market, you just don't have any competition. You're the only one providing this innovative new solution, nobody else can. In that circumstance you just don't have any competition. So, the first question is do you have competition? The second question is who are your competitors? In READ MORE ›

  So the Head of Sales says that she needs more salespeople and Head of Channels says you need more channels. Who's right and who's wrong? What I'm going to show you today is how to choose the absolute best channel for your chosen target market. You remember Geoffery Moore's Market Maturity Model, in which we learned you need to set your strategy according to what most of your buyers are ready for. Early market I want to talk more about sales channel. Imagine the very early part of the market. The market doesn't yet know how READ MORE ›

There is no 'correct' definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). For your business, negotiation and alignment between Sales and Marketing is key. Together, you need to negotiate how qualified the leads need to be before Marketing hands the leads over to Sales. In other words, at what stage sales takes over. All the way through the funnel, there's a trade-off between quantity and quality. In this video, Hugh gives some key points on what an MQL really is and how to frame this negotiation.

  How much energy should you spend on positioning versus demand versus channel? Forget about the 4 Ps you learned about at University. It's simplistic and unhelpful. It's about 30 years old and it's a consumer concept anyway. Just erase it. I've got another very simple paradigm for you. You might say simplistic. I don't think it is but you be the judge. Marketers spend their effort on basically three things: Getting the market ready, getting the channel ready, and getting the two talking in B2B, in complex B2B, which is the world that you live in READ MORE ›