This may seem to be a nit... a picky complaint… but there is a lesson here.

I like my dry cleaning service. They pick up from my house and they return the clothes a couple of days later.  They charge my credit card and when they make a mistake (like when they wrecked a pair of pants) they include a note and offer compensation.

In general, this “invisible service” works pretty well; until it doesn’t. I say invisible, because I never have any personal interaction with them.  Just notes back and forth.

There’s a song by Hunter Hayes called “Wanted” – you can watch the video here – and it was really strange because the last time I listened to it, it made me think of marketing.

(nod to Michael Lewis)

I had a long time client of mine pose this question to me recently. He went on to say that in looking back overthe four years we had worked together we had implemented a lot of change.  

We had updated the website and spent a lot of time on seo, we had put in place a clear content marketing strategy. We were blogging. Doing videos. We were blogging and following up o

n website visitors, we were nurturing the names in his database on a regular basis. We had implemented referral marketing programs and made networking as effective as we could with his current staff and we were regularly participating and leveraging social media.

1. What is a qualified lead (asked to your sales manager) that should be accepted by sales?
2. What is a qualified lead (asked to your marketing manager) that should be passed onto sales?
3. What happens when a qualified lead that a salesperson is working on either delays the purchase, or turns out to not be so qualified after all?

Here’s our experience with most small and mid-sized companies (B2B, generally selling services or technology).

This is a guest post from fellow Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Phil Singleton.  Thanks for such a great post!

Website and web development technology has come a long way since the birth of the Internet. From the first point-and-click websites, through Flash based websites to today’s mobile-responsive websites tricked out with slick HTML5 slide-and-scroll animation and parallax effects, the look and feel of the Internet has changed dramatically over the years. Of course broadband Internet connection has help speed things align too, literally. More importantly, the purpose and use of websites have changed so much, that the word “web site” is now misleading, because your company’s website is now so much more than just a site on the web. Here’s a quick overview of where we started and where we are today:

You may have heard that our smart phones are to blame for the slower service in nice restaurants. If not, you should read this article. In essence it says that since we are busy taking pictures of our food, ourselves and our groups, service takes longer.

I had the opportunity to do three presentations at the eXtremeCRM conference two weeks ago in Las Vegas and I wanted to give a shout out to the folks from The Portal Connector for Dynamics CRM for the way they leveraged social media for B2B marketing during the conference.  (They took the same approach at the Microsoft WPC) 

I could not agree more with Tim Reisterer and his recent article in the Sales and Marketing magazine. (You can read the article here, on pages 22-23.)

It’s a great article and dead on point. Personas are an excellent way for marketers to paint a broad picture of those they are trying to attract, helping unseasoned marketers get a grip on the idea of whom they’re writing to and creating programs for. Personas also help shape the language you use in your marketing collateral and tactics while providing a common language to use inside an organization as they talk about different prospective customer roles.

If you look at my résumé before I founded Leading Results, you’d see someone who was a bit schizophrenic in their sales and marketing career. I have had as many marketing roles as I have had sales roles. Why? Because when I had a sales job, I would often get frustrated with the effectiveness of the marketing to find me sales leads. Or the reverse: I’d have a marketing job and get frustrated with the effort – or lack thereof – that sales would put into the leads I generated. In either case, I’d shoot my mouth off and get told, “Okay, you go do it.” So I did.

I’m older and wiser now.

It sometimes seems that sales gets all the glory while marketing does all the work. It’s not true, but it does seem that way at times – though those times may be a-changing with the impact of the search engine on buyer behavior.

But I’ll assume that as a smart marketer/finance manager/consultant, you know all this, and still want to go and be a sales rep. Here are seven things you should be sure you know as you go:

Notice I didn’t say new customers. Or prospects. Closed business – people that actually pay you money for your products or services – should have the biggest impact on your go-forward marketing. However, there are lots of caveats to this.

When you are early in your business, before your business model finally gels, any customer that pays you is a good customer. This is one of the most treacherous times and one of the best times to let your closed customers influence your marketing strategy. But, and it’s a big but, you have to be careful in the questions you ask and the way that you listen to the answers.