The sales funnel, the oldest, most illustrated and beloved marketing paradigm passed away today of old age. Originally, constructed to approximate the rational buying sequence for B2C and B2B customers, the Funnel leaves no immediate heirs.

Shopping was never really linear. Prospects take multi-directional, multi-dimensional and idiosyncratic paths to surface needs, identify buying criteria, list potential [...]

A simple but important principle of email marketing has emerged from recommendations we are developing with a client. This principle is one of those fundamental techniques that everybody knows but few put into practice. That principle is: Don’t boil the ocean. Allow each element to have one, and only one, purpose.

The purpose of the subject [...]

Lessons from an Earthworm

Aerating the Soil

Most managers would agree that every employee should give 100% as the company strives to succeed. There is a theory called the “feedback loop” (Bateman-Snell, 2007, p.41) that reveals a hidden basic of knowledge management. This theory suggests that organizations are a system that takes resources from the surrounding [...]

“Consumers instinctively judge brands in much the same way they judge other people.”
– Chris Malone, chief advisory officer of The Relational Capital Group

Pop Quiz: How would customers rate your organization on characteristics like “honesty and trustworthiness” and “acts in the customer’s best interests?” While those may seem like far from relevant concerns [...]

As the advertising industry prepares to a weeklong celebration in New York, its sobering and weirdly appropriate that the masters of brands ignore their past. Few of us want to admit that the fundamental concepts, approaches, techniques and strategies we use day-in and day-out were invented and perfected before we were born by long-forgotten pioneers [...]

The Secret to Knowledge Management is the Pie

Knowledge management is about the acquisition of knowledge by an organization that contributes to its success. The collection of knowledge that resides in an organization is called its intellectual capital. Elements of knowledge management include human capital, structural capital, and relationship capital. The human capital is often [...]

Attain Exponential Growth in Today's Marketplace

Here are two of the best deployable initiatives to integrate into the business environment to attain exponential growth in today’s marketplace.

Initiative 1: Accommodate employee differences.

Essentially there are three generations that share the workplace environment.

The Baby Boomers (1946-1964) who are quite work-centric: hardworking and very independent. The Boomers are goal-oriented [...]

In increasing numbers, (more than 500 million, in fact), people of all ages are “Facebooking” as a means of reaching out to long-lost high school friends and keeping in touch with far-flung family members.

But the business case for Facebook is also building for purposes of marketing business, adding value and empowering customers. [...]

Now that social networks have achieved global scale, the conversion shifts from quantity to quality. The process of sorting, filtering, weighing, segmenting and valuing social networks as marketing tools is important because American’s spend nearly a quarter of their time on social networking sites and blogs and 85% of users engage brands in the social [...]

I’ve been working on an e-book with Mac McIntosh, the B2B sales lead expert. We polled our respective blog and Twitter followers for the top 10 B2B marketing mistakes, one of which is “jargon.” This mistake is a perennial favorite — and one which countless marketing experts and copywriters have complained and written about [...]