With all of the dramatic changes in media, technology, and buyer behavior that we have witnessed in recent decades, CMOs should devote a lot of time to rethinking the optimal structure for their department. Should their team be organized around functions, geographies, customer segments, or something else entirely? How well is their team aligned with the business, and is the team adaptive to changes in the market? Which functions are essential to the success of the marketing effort? … [Read more...]
Chapter 22 – Marketing Budgets
Very little happens in marketing without money. Securing enough money to support an organization’s goals is a fundamental responsibility of a CMO or a VP of Marketing. Most heads of marketing learn from experience how to get what they need. Unfortunately, many of them have to learn the hard way, through errors and inadequate budget allocations. The reality is that many marketing executives simply lack basic skills in building, presenting, and defending budgets. Remember that when an … [Read more...]
Chapter 21 – Showing Results – ROMI, Dashboards,KPIs and Forecasting
Many marketing teams struggle to demonstrate their value. Marketing is often judged by executives who have no marketing experience and operate under basic misconceptions concerning the marketing function. Moreover, these biases can affect marketing’s working relationships with other teams. For these reasons it is critical for Marketing to objectively demonstrate its contributions to the business. Creating cool ads and splashy events may be fun, but metrics have a longer-lasting and … [Read more...]
Chapter 20 – Test and Measure – Lather, Rinse, Repeat
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a favorite management maxim. It is commonly attributed to the legendary manufacturing quality guru William Deming, although nobody is certain who really coined it. Regardless of whether Deming actually said it, however, he would no doubt agree that in marketing, as in any process-oriented task, measurement is a natural precondition to improvement. Professional marketers should take heed. Marketing efficacy can be improved only through continual … [Read more...]
Chapter 19 – Channel Partner Programs
In Chapter 18 we explained what channels are and why so many companies choose to utilize them. In this chapter we focus more specifically on channel partner programs, which are formalized groupings of sales and marketing activities designed to attract and retain channel partners. Many of the foundational elements of channel partner programs are table stakes for playing the game of channel distribution. Smart companies understand that well executed channel partner programs can create a … [Read more...]
Chapter 18 – Marketing and Selling through a Channel
Most Americans know Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Viagra, and the Apple iPod. They probably also know the manufacturers of these products -- Kellogg’s, Pfizer, and Apple – and the name of their local supermarket, drug store chain, and big box store where they can buy them. Most of them, however, probably have never heard of the McLane Company, McKesson, or TechData. These three firms are multi-billion dollar companies that distribute Corn Flakes, Viagra, and the iPod, respectively. Distributors are … [Read more...]
Chapter 17 – Sales Enablement
Recall from Chapter 1 that Peter Drucker defined a successful marketing strategy as one that sells the product without the involvement of the sales force. Drucker’s thoughts notwithstanding, in reality very few products are so wonderful that they sell themselves. As a general rule, selling products and services requires a sales force that is well prepared to answer questions and lead a prospective buyer to a sale. In most organizations, the marketing department’s role is to arm the sales … [Read more...]
Chapter 16 – Presentations
Presentations are used in every marketing program. Your CEO may burnish your brand at an industry conference as part of your reputation programs. Webcasts may be a critical part of your demand generation, and your field sales force may need to learn the company pitch as part of sales enablement. Presentations are used all the time by analyst relations teams as part of market intelligence programs. But for as important as they are, why are there so many bad ones? Think about it –How often … [Read more...]
Chapter 15 – Collateral and Other Assets
Marketing devotes a great deal of its time and money is spent to creating collateral. Also known as sales collateral and marketing collateral, the term refers to the collection of documents that a company produces in support of a sale. The name derives from the “in support of” or “accompanying” definition of the word “collateral.” When applied specifically to marketing, collateral most commonly consists of product data sheets, brochures, white papers, and similar documents. Marketers also … [Read more...]
Chapter 14 – The Website
It’s funny to think that the Web, which hundreds of millions of people use every day for shopping, dating, gaming, news, and socializing, began as a technology to help improve, of all things, physics research – a topic of interest to only a fraction of the world’s population. Yet today the Web is huge. According to What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, himself a chronicler of the early days of the Web, it holds more than a trillion pages. Twenty years plus since the first website was created … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- Next Page »