Guidance for All Stages of Business Development

Is it "Day 1" in your business? Have you read Bezos' 2016 letter to shareholders? He cites three core principles that Amazon relies on to stay relevant. strong customer focus - essentially qualitative or 1:1 observation rather than quantitative, aggregated data; process should enable not constrict embrace external trends - you're not going to chang...
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"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." JFK “The good old days weren’t all that good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems” Billy Joel "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower "We always overestimate the change ...
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Tweaking around the edges When US manufacturers faced the wrath of low cost imports in the 80s & 90s they reacted in various ways. Some folded their tent and quit. Some soldiered on enduring greater misery as margins collapsed and buyers' demands became more outrageous. But a few....a few decided to seize the challenge. They did so in different way...
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A digital company moves to Boston General Electric is a very different company than when Jack Welch handed the reigns to Jeff Immelt. A casual comparison reveals not only different leadership and management styles, but also very different corporate strategies. Based on the market's embrace of Welch, perhaps his style and strategy were appropriate f...
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It's a tool...not a solution or method I hear a lot of people asking this question. Of course it's not always HubSpot they're asking about - it could be Marketo, ActOn or various other marketing automation tools. (When I hear Pardot I groan inwardly - another company that got roped into the high-price, long-term contract for an overly complicated C...
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Tasks, decisions & initiation Seth Godin had a great post recently. Like much of what he writes, it's direct in it's prescription but general in its context - and broadly applicable since readers can read and reflect from their own perspective. Tasks, decisions, and initiation... Doing, choosing, and starting... Each of the three adds value, but on...
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Typos & Broken Links We've all had that moment of realization that the carefully crafted email, proofed by 3 people, had a mistake. It may be a minor typo, perhaps an incorrect date or time for an event, or the common broken link problem. Maybe you see it in the copy you receive yourself. More commonly some sharpshooter in the company points it out...
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B2B Marketing stereotypes There are many stereotypes in the world of B2B marketing for manufacturers. Two are relevant here. The naive soul who develops a project brief to "create a viral X" - could be video, infographic, article, tweet, etc. Everyone in the know guffaws at the idea that viral could be somehow engineered and deliberately created. T...
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"Gmail is normally spam mail" I hear that a lot - often in the context of discussing website lead conversions with capital equipment manufacturers.
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Search rankings are irrelevant! At least if you don't pay attention to whether they do you any good. Of course rankings are important - and probably becoming more so as voice search returns single answers instead of lists. But almost everyone assumes that rankings equal traffic. And generally if you're doing the right B2B marketing things to increa...
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