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Karen Hayward
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Recent Posts
Beyond the Buzzwords: How CEOs Can Build a Truly Resilient Business
In every keynote, article, and boardroom conversation, “resilience” gets tossed around as the Holy Grail of leadership virtue. But resilience is more than just surviving economic turbulence—it’s about turning disruption into a competitive edge.
Too many CEOs treat resilience as a slogan rather than a strategy. Real resilience is built in advance, not claimed during a downturn. It starts with clarity regarding where you are in the economic cycle, where you’re headed, and how to align your people and resources accordingly.
Rebooting Your Marketing Strategy to Meet B2B Buyer Expectations
Wed, Oct 21, 2015 — Before the digital marketing boom, sales teams were the hunter-gatherers – the ones that had to go into the forest and slay or harvest what our company would subsist upon. In those days, the typical B2B marketer was asked to sharpen the arrows, restring the bows – and hope that our prep work was good enough to ensure an acceptable bounty. When the sales team shouldered 100 percent of the prospective buyer’s journey, it was up to us to ensure the prospect knew about your company, could call or visit the office for more information, and were loaded down with a highly polished set of sales materials (and telephone script) that hooked them on the notion that yes, we are the definitive answer to their problem.
Learn from the Lost Bid, and Win the Next One
Mon, Oct 6, 2014 — Winning is wonderful; losing is lousy and finding out why you have won or lost is serious business. It is also insightful and critical input to your marketing and sales execution effort. The main goal for most organizations selling services or products is to win more business faster and more cost efficiently. And this often involves a bidding process. We can all relate to the stifling anxiety that comes from waiting for a response—and when unsuccessful at garnering the bid—those moments of depression. It can be an expensive and time-consuming effort to prepare a bid for a major opportunity. With that said, companies often move on to the next prospect without considering the data that may be indispensable for future pursuits. Why a company won or lost a client’s business is just as important as the business itself, since it predicts future business.
Aligning Your Stars
Mon, Aug 4, 2014 — The Recipe for Revenue Success: Sales and Marketing Alignment As someone who loves to cook, today I am sharing a tried and true recipe for a successful lead generation program. I marvel at the fact that CEOs continue to be disappointed by their marketing outcomes. In fact, 70 percent cite that Marketing isn’t delivering for them as expected. Art Saxby, Chief Outsiders CEO, has expertly covered the difference between Sales and Marketing in his recent blog so we have clarity between the two functions and expectations. This standout recipe calls for Marketing and Sales to be in perfect harmony. To achieve this requires collaboration and agreement on a number of definitions, targets and metrics—and leadership from the CEO. I was recently speaking to a highly experienced, top industry performing Sales Representative who told me, “I never got a decent lead from a marketing team EVER – I had to develop all of my own opportunities. Yes, I got dozens of business cards – but they weren’t close to what I would consider a lead.” This is a fairly common theme I often hear from sales executives. The marketing team delivered against their “Lead targets,” which were the names scanned off suspects walking by the company booth at a trade show. So what’s the solution? Fundamental Marketing and Sales leader dialogue and agreement is the difference between success and failure. Marketing needs to be seamlessly filling the top part of any sales funnel and Sales needs to be executing the follow-up engagement.