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September 20th, 2011
by Mary Gospe
 There were several key announcements by Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, at this year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Over 45,000 people attended the event while 35,000 streamed it live. It was the first time I had to wait in line to cross Howard at Fourth to get to the keynote.
The theme of the conference was the “social enterprise” – showing how social media and new collaboration tools are changing the way we do business. According to the Salesforce.com press release issued on August 31st, the social enterprise leverages …”social, mobile and open cloud technologies to revolutionize companies’ relationships with their customers.”
Here is a quick summary of a few of the announcements made during the keynote that sales and marketing professionals will find of interest. All offerings are scheduled to be available in late 2011. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: dreamforce 2011, salesforce.com
Posted in Marketing, Sales, Social Media | No Comments »
July 1st, 2011
by Mary Sullivan
 In my last post I described the demographics and content usage of respondents to our recent survey of KickStart Accelerator (our newsletter) subscribers. This time, I’m reviewing results on the questions we asked our readers in that same survey about their current marketing and sales practices and initiatives. Since these were all “check-all-that-apply” questions, the percentage totals will exceed 100%.
Bear in mind from the last post that our responses were predominantly from people in smaller to mid-sized B2B companies that sell tech products or services. Here is how they responded to questions about how they are engaging with customers:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: customer, Marketing, Sales, survey
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
June 21st, 2011
by Mary Sullivan
So much has changed in marketing and sales in the 9 years since we founded KickStart Alliance. Because we wanted to learn how our readers are operating in 2011, in April we sent a survey to our newsletter subscribers rather than publishing our usual monthly newsletter. The response rate was lower than we anticipated, at 4%, so we followed up in May asking for additional respondents. That generated just one more survey response. So while there wasn’t enough data to be statistically reliable, we’re sharing in this post some of what we did learn.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: content marketing, Marketing, Sales, social networks
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 6th, 2011
by Mary Gospe
By guest blogger, John Love.
I attended a webinar a couple weeks ago on content marketing entitled “Stay Relevant: Map Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyers Journey” featuring Tom Pisello, Chairman & Founder, Alinean Inc. The presentation started with a number of statistics to build credibility in white papers as a viable and engaging offer for prospects. And indeed they made a good case here (I’ll let the presentation speak for itself). The webinar was really to promote “interactive white papers,” which are dynamically customizable documents based on a quick survey – e.g. the examples might change based on industry, role, company size, location, etc. I wasn’t particularly impressed by those, but as with all such presentations, there were a couple nuggets that I thought were valuable and worth sharing. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Alinean, content marketing, JLC Marketing, John Love, mapping content to the buyers cycle, Tom Pisello
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
May 5th, 2011
by Mary Gospe
Charlene Li, CEO & Founder, Altimeter Group, coauthor of Groundswell and author of the newly-released book Open Leadership, spoke at the Northern CA DMA club last week. Here are some highlights from her presentation entitled “Social Media Revolution and Evolution” in which she shared her social media expertise from three different perspectives: past, present, and future.
Past: Coherent Strategies
It’s amazing to think of the global impact social media has brought in such a short period of time. It was only in May of 2007, four years ago, that the Facebook platform launched. Now with 650 million users, Facebook is easily on its way to 1 billion! The iPhone App Store launched in July 2008, less than 3 years ago. How did we get by without the 350,000 apps now available?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment »
March 23rd, 2011
by Mike Gospe
Download an excerpt — The Marketing High Ground
If you are interested in the best practices surrounding persona development, drafting crisp positioning statements, and crafting messages that are relevant and meaningful to your persona, you’ll want to read The Marketing High Ground. Available in May 2011 on Amazon.com, this book is the essential playbook for B2B marketing practitioners.
Tags: leadership, Marketing High Ground, messaging, personas, positioning statement
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
March 15th, 2011
by JanetGregory
 Are you doing the right things? Are you doing things right?
Selling methodology and selling systems need to adapt quickly to accommodate changing business strategy. Product management priority should focus on portfolio responsiveness, where the portfolio is your collection of product, services and solutions. Marketing’s magic of messaging must adapt to changes in buying patterns and market needs. Sales can often be a bottleneck between the multifaceted vendor portfolio and the complex customer world. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: customer centric selling, Forrester Research, outcome selling, Sales, sales enablement, Scott Santucci
Posted in Marketing, Sales | No Comments »
March 14th, 2011
by Mary Gospe
At last week’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I attended the panel discussion “Practices & Technologies used by Top-Performing Inside Sales Organizations” led by Anneke Seley, CEO and Founder of PhoneWorks and co-author of Sales 2.0. On the panel, Sales 2.0 co-author, Brent Holloway, Regional Sales Director, Verint Systems; Matt Benelli, Group Vice President – Sales, OracleDirect; and Jennifer Brandenburg, VP Corporate Sales, Good Technology. Here are some of the key points from the discussion. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: good technology, inside sales, oracle, phoneworks, sales 2.0, sales development, verint
Posted in Sales, Social Media | No Comments »
March 3rd, 2011
by JanetGregory
Is your sales force getting the company to reach its strategic objectives? Most CEOs say NO. At the Forrester Research “Technology Sales Enablement Forum” in February George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, talked about the problems that sales faces, how CEOs would intend to fix the problems and how Sales Enablement can help.
CEOs say that there are five major problems faced by sales in achieving objectives: 1) keeping up, 2) calling too low, 3) presenting price and not value, 4) they have the wrong people in the sales organization and 5) sales is not growth oriented. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CEO, Forrester Research, George Colony, outcome selling, Sales, sales enablement, sales technology
Posted in Sales | No Comments »
February 16th, 2011
by JanetGregory
Today I attended the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Sales Operations Forum. The topic “Unlocking Sales Manager Value” was filled with best practices for both sales managers and the sales operations managers that work with them. The session was hosted by SAP & Baker Communications with sales directors from VMWare and Black Box providing real world practical insights. Below are my notes on Sales Manager Best Practice (SM-Best) and Sales Operations Best Practice (SOps-Best) to support it.
SM-Best: Coach in the day and in the moment. Coach one-on-one. Coach one-on-many in team meetings. Help reps prep for sales calls.
SOps-Best to support coaching: Provide real-time access to information. For existing customer accounts historical purchasing patterns are vital. To support new prospect coaching, supply buying patterns for first time customers, industry segments, business demographics, key applications or other relevant data. Dashboards of team and rep performance are coaching basics.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: coaching, pipeline, recognition, sales manager, sales operations, sales process
Posted in Sales | No Comments »
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