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Are You Building a Business That's Ready to Scale - or Just a Business That Has Had Great Growth?
There is a version of business success that feels like momentum but isn't quite there yet.
What do I do with my Marketing Intern?
Sun, Jul 17, 2016 — Internships are an important part of today's marketing teams. They provide recent college graduates a chance to combat the catch-22 of needing experience to get a job that will give them experience, while employers can select from the cream of the crop, see how a potential employee will fare in a real-life setting, and even create a pool of interns to pull from in the future. However, the key to a successful marketing internship is to make sure their time spent remains a win-win situation for everyone.
The Rotten Truth about Low-Hanging Fruit in Business – and How to Guide Your Team to Success
Thu, Jul 7, 2016 — Consider the American apple grower, who seeks the sweetest, most desired apples from the top of his towering fruit trees. To reach them, he climbs a large commercial ladder to the very top, and works downward, dumping his fruit in a big, burlap bag around his neck and shoulder. If he were to pick the low-hanging apples first, that means he’d be working his way up the ladder with an increasingly heavy load – quite an inverted way to run an orchard business!
What is a Fractional CMO?
Thu, Jun 30, 2016 — A Fractional CMO is a marketing executive to help with customer acquisition, sales development and company growth. Your company gets executive experience without the full-time cost. The idea of a mid-sized company hiring a fractional executive is not new. Virtual CFOs, for example – pioneered by companies like Tatum and vcfo – have been around for decades. They can bring incredible value to companies where having a full-time CFO wouldn’t make sense, either fiscally or even practically due to the typical scope of challenges needing attention. Yet, as one private equity principal once shared with me, “I know what I’m going to get with a fractional CFO. But I don’t have that same level of clarity if I hire a fractional CMO.” It’s no wonder. Marketing, as a discipline or an activity, has a wide range of definitions. For example, most of us consider “marketing” as the activities we deploy to take our products and services to market, or attract customers to our business or offerings. Or in short, marketing is largely promotional activity. Yet consider someone who gets their MBA in Marketing. A syllabus from The University of Texas (PDF) shows most of the coursework is focused on disciplines not directly related to promotion. So what gives?
How to Eat an Elephant One Bite at a Time: Working Successfully with Your True Marketing Capacity
Wed, Jun 22, 2016 — It’s not the prettiest analogy ever written in marketing – but the American vulture is truly a great example of a creature that has perfected the art of “biting off one piece at a time.” Whether it’s a roadside meal here in my hometown of Richmond, or a massive, expired elephant in the African Serengeti, there’s only one surefire way for the big bird to eat its dinner – one patient, calculated bite at a time. Do you take the same approach to marketing your B2B business – or do you dive into an expansive, expensive marketing strategy like a man-eating piranha? Sure, you’re enthused about your brand and its new product – but have you truly invested the time to ensure that your customers will enjoy it, too?
Pick a Strategic Direction: What Alice in Wonderland and the Cheshire Cat Can Teach CEOs about Growing Their Business
Tue, Jun 21, 2016 — In the whimsical world of Lewis Carroll’s famous tale Alice in Wonderland, the author paints mind-bending pictures of some of the most pressing questions in modern society. Though many regard this classic as merely a children’s story, every modern CEO can appreciate several scenes woven through the book that can be applied, succinctly and directly, to the challenges of today’s global business environment.
Delivering on Your Brand’s Promise through Lifestyle and Culture
Thu, Jun 2, 2016 — Today’s brands offer a rich means of consumer self-expression. Like digital bumper stickers, the blogs and pages we follow and interact with on the Internet and social media are beginning to serve as a reflection of what culturally defines us as people. Whether or not we, as consumers, build a personal connection with the barrage of brands around us, can ultimately impact the fate of the brand itself. As former IBM chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner said in his interview with Spencer Stuart, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game.” Since a brand’s authenticity and lifestyle fit is so important to today’s customers, we know that we have to fortify our brand’s promise, so it means much more than a set of two-dimensional, written benefits on our website, social media pages, and product packaging. There are two distinct ways we can achieve this:
Are You Marketing An Organism Or An Ecosystem?
Wed, Jun 1, 2016 — People like to use metaphors. When we are trying to explain something, describe a situation, or develop an idea, we often compare the subject at hand to another thing that the listener may already know. Marketers use metaphors in many situations to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to grasp a concept or an idea behind a product. Terms like bandwidth, information highway, the cloud, data mining, and even internet and web are all attempts to transfer what we know about one thing to something inherently dissimilar – the definition of metaphor.
Making It Easy: Three Steps To Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience
Tue, May 24, 2016 — Why a commitment to consistent, small improvements in customer experience will lure customers back and cement customer loyalty over time Your nightmare has come true – someone has fraudulently charged a sheaf of frivolous, online purchases to your trusty Visa card. Luckily, the credit card company’s algorithms caught it and shut the scam down – but of course, nobody told you. You actually found out in a bustling grocery store on a Sunday morning, with a cart full of perishable food, two kids in tow, and a long, impatient line behind you. As a warm, gripping panic begins to squeeze your insides, you hope that a simple call to the card service center will be able to fix everything in a flash.
Sync Your B2B Sales and Marketing Strategies
Fri, May 13, 2016 — Once upon a time, many businesses thought of sales and marketing in a very black-and-white world–where salespeople were salespeople – and marketers were marketers. In this world, the customer’s journey (and, therefore, how you acquire customers) was well-defined and linear. The marketer built marketing plans to entice and interest the prospect, supported by ads, events, collateral pieces, and customer experiences. Once a prospect read the pamphlet, walked up to a snazzy-looking booth, or happened across an ad, the charismatic, bright-eyed salesperson would swoop in, perform deal-making magic, and put a lid on the transaction.