Nearly all of our focus is on driving incremental revenues through predictive analytics via sales. That’s all good, but what prospects and customers see and use, interact with and judge are the actual sales and marketing communication vehicles. No matter how precise the analytics and the lead scoring in marketing automation systems, there needs to be an option for the recipient to “just take a break.” We call it correcting for outliers. We faced one such moment on an overseas trip. When I powered up the Blackberry, a message popped up from the carrier: INTERNATIONAL ROAMING: Calls $2.50/min, Data $0.008/KB. Internet use and emails can really put a shocking dent in your Euro budget (or Rupee or Yen). Like my finding out later it cost $40 per hour of connectivity via the satellite card. Sure, I could limit how many minutes I’d spend on calls, but with email it’s not easy to keep track of data in KB units. I really liked the convenience of getting emails on my Blackberry without messing with new devices or sim cards. Determined not to be taken in by my carrier for all the non-work email communications, I wanted to “opt-out” for a limited …Read More
Tag Archives: marketing
Sales and Marketing Alignment: Would you put your livelihood in the other guy’s hands?
In a recent issue of BtoB magazine, sales and marketing alignment was the subject of a special report. As I read the articles, I observed some broad themes: Marketing manages the call center Inside sales is nurturing leads longer Technology gains a more prominent role All of these ideas were solid, and they have a track record in many organizations. These well-recognized trends shared by industry leaders were very illuminating. We might think there’s progress, at last. Maybe it’s just me, but I felt the “let’s bring this together and make it work dammit” sentiment I was picking up was missing something completely. Whenever I try to solve problems, my instinct is to search for a similar situation at another place, explore how it was solved, and capture any lessons learned. There are not many problems that nature and human history haven’t already encountered. My approach is not perfect, but often it breaks the thinking rut I’d be in. As a private pilot, one such place I go searching is aviation. I thought of the relationship between the Air Force and the Army. They each do different things and have a parallel life for the most part, but in modern day warfare …Read More