I was driving on the I-85 highway in Charlotte, NC when I noticed my car began to slow down. With speeds that are typically above average, I-85 is the worst place for this to happen. Car after car zoomed pass me. In the meantime, my car continued to slow, 60, 50, 40 … I quickly realized that I was in trouble and needed to pull over. At the next available exit I did and the car suddenly shut down in the middle of the right turning lane

Petrified, I immediately called my insurance company who promptly sent a tow truck. What followed was perhaps one of the worst customer service experiences I will ever have.

I recently attended the first meeting of the West Chester PA HUG.  For those of you who don’t know what HUG is, it is a HubSpot Users Group.  As a marketing consultant in the area, I was excited to see this group form.  There were about 25 partners, end users and people who were interested in learning more about HubSpot and InBound marketing.

We spent most of the evening covering the buyer persona.  This is a semi-fictitious representation of your ideal client; the kind you want lots more of. A buyer persona is more than a demographic representation of this person.  It takes into consideration their goals and challenges, how you can help them. It also looks at their objections and how your respond. We've written about these before as well.  Check out the post here.

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.