For almost exactly two years, I've been working as a marketing consultant, providing advice, strategy and planning help to technology companies, primarily in the Bay Area, but also in Boston, Austin and Toronto. When I started as a marketing consultant,...

I’ve been speaking at a number of conferences recently where marketers and sales people are quite interested in adopting a demand generation discipline within their organization. Frequently, a marketing manager or director will ask me the steps necessary to start...

Over the past three weeks, I've had a couple of in-depth conversations with business leaders about whether it's better to get a jump start on your marketing automation initiatives by outsourcing to an agency or to develop the organizational capacity...

The following is not a post about marketing, but since a lot of you have picked up on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook that something is going on in my family now, I share this post with you. Two weeks ago,...

If you do a search for "sales and marketing alignment" on Google, you'll see we've been talking about this elusive concept for more than 20 years. So if some of the brightest minds in management and systems thinking have been...

Consider this job description on LinkedIn: Pre-IPO startup looking for a marketer with experience in advertising, trade shows, long-cycle product management, public and analyst relations and big-budget campaigns. Must be able to create 18-to-24-month marketing plans and adhere to them...

Content marketing is a gaping maw, endlessly begging for a variety of words and pictures and videos, insatiable in its need for the new and better and more attractive. Some of the hottest trends in B2B marketing this year --...

Recently, I was introduced to Sharon Drew Morgen, an Austin-based, marketing veteran and NY Times best-selling author who created a buyer-centric sales and marketing model long before those of us in the demand generation discipline started teaching the process. Sharon...

This is an all-time favorite of The Innovative Marketer radio show listeners. And the principles are even more releveant in today's content marketing-obsessed B2B circles. Enjoy. A lot of authors have written books on copywriting, but Chip and Dan Heath...

Yesterday on a Focus roundtable, I asked the panelists to make a prediction about what, if any, Salesforce.com would announce in the area of marketing automation at their big Dreamforce conference in San Francisco next month. Their consensus: nothing. I...

While the summer might be seeing its dog days, the world of demand ten is just heating up. The Marketing Automation Institute launched this month and demand gen marketers are commanding significant salary premiums for their expertise. Is the industry...

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post for the Post Click Marketing Blog called, It's a Good Time to be a Demand Generation Marketer. In it, I wrote about the tremendous opportunity and near-zero unemployment a talented demand...

Last month, the New York Times printed an article in collaboration with the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Default Major: Skating Through B-School.” In the article, Times writer David Glenn reported on the concern that business spend less time...

Wham! It's a beautiful thing -- when a prospective customer's need briefly crosspollenates with something you are providing. Maybe it's a captivating trade show exhibit. Or an online advertisement. Or a compelling piece of video. Or a Tweet. You have...

HubSpot's been in the news this week after a gargantuan investment by Sequoia, Google and Salesforce.com, among others, with a D round that totaled $32 million. Compare HubSpot's web site with any B2B publication and you'd be hard pressed to...

I've been fortunate in my career to often work with people much smarter than I. I'm constantly learning from social media experts, PR pros, demand generation leaders and general marketing smarties. It's a privilege to be part of such a...

Ardath Albee is someone all marketers should be paying attention to. Not only because she's a superb writer about B2B marketing, and not only because she's author of the indespensible book eMarketing for the Complex Sale, but also because she...

A lot of attention is being paid to lead scoring these days. Lead scoring is simply prioritizing and ranking incoming or existing leads according to some criteria. After helping a few dozen companies set up their own lead scoring systems,...

Don't do these things: - Increase your Google ad spend - Sign up for another trade show - Go out and purchase lists - Fire your agency - Hire a new agency - Tell yourself "this was a bad week...

Continuing my interview with Carlos Hidalgo from Annuitas ... Top tip for making companies successful with marketing automation Steve: You've done a lot of client engagements, where you've helped people thinking about implementing process before they touch the technology. What's...