The Wealthy Business - by EnergizeGrowth

Five Primal Lessons in Marketing and Publishing from Guy Kawasaki’s APE

An overview of "APE," the new bible of self publishing, from Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch.

Last year, Guy Kawasaki was preparing to speak at an annual conference. He had just published his ninth book, and contacted Penguin Publishing to fulfill 500 digital orders of Enchantment. The publisher, to his dismay, said that they could not fulfill the order. He was slightly upset.

As disgruntled anchorman Howard Beale said in the film Network, many authors are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore.

Wisdom 2.0's Compassionate, Chaos-Reducing Brand Of Leadership

Where can you go to meet a Tibetan nun, the CEOs of Ford and LinkedIn, an acclaimed mindfulness teacher, and an African drummer--all in one event? Wisdom 2.0. Behind the curtain of this four-day utopian festival are dozens of important takeaways for any business leader.

This conference began four years ago when author and conference host, Soren Gordhamer, raised this question: How can mindfulness and technology peacefully co-exist in a metrics-driven, impersonal Web world?

I attended Gordhamer's fourth annual gathering in San Francisco with 1,700 other personal development junkies (full disclosure: Wisdom 2.0 gave me a free ride for the event). I arrived in search of insights that would help my clients and readers, most of whom are high achieving, innovative, tech-savvy, exhausted leaders. In my recent CMO survey, the majority of them told me that they struggle with managing their personal effectiveness and leading their teams.

Latest CMO 2013 Trends Report and Videos Now Available

“infographic provided by Carousel30.
For full infographic, visit www.energizegrowth.com/cmo2013.

I am excited to share the results of my latest research on 2013 CMO trends, success stories, and recommendations.

In a nutshell, CMOs and VPs of Marketing face four major hurdles in 2013. Thanks to the 24 x 7 nature of customer interactions, new buyer dynamics, and web-based decision making tools, the rules of the marketing game have forever changed. Customers and boards expect them to be data-driven, sales-savvy demand centers, and bold brand ambassadors.

 

Guest Blogger: Building Powerful Customer Communities

 Editor’s Note:  I’m pleased to showcase Bill Lee’s recent Harvard Business Review post on the power of building customer communities. Bill’s breakthrough ideas align with my previous posts on the power of spearheading customer advisory councils. Enjoy the post.

Bill Lee is president of the Customer Reference Forum, Executive Director of the Summit on Customer Engagement, and author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset (HBR Press, June 2012).

What are your customers telling their friends and colleagues about your business? As I described in my last post, your prospective customers and buyers increasingly learn about you from their peers — including your current customers — while tending more and more to ignore traditional sales and marketing communications from corporate. Companies are now taking advantage of this new marketing reality, becoming more skilled at getting their customers to advocate for them, create peer influence in their markets, and make important contributions in areas like product development and services.

Creating and capturing such value from customer relationships doesn't just happen, no matter how stellar your products and services are. It requires an enhanced value proposition, what I call a Level 4 customer value proposition.

B2B Marketing Strategies From "The Challenger Sale"

I just attended a seminar to showcase of The Challenger Sale, a recently released bestseller that reveals some credible studies on changing buyer and seller relationships. Co-author Matt Dixon, a Director of Research with CEB (formerly Corporate Executive Board), outlined some important trends in B2B sales and marketing. If you are in the throes of channel and global field sales planning for 2013, you need to recognize these:

1. Consensus decision making is becoming de rigeur. Today's corporate decision makers are very risk averse. Just when salespeople think they have a strong inside supporter, the buyer will ask them to gain buy-in from a variety of evaluators from other departments. As Dixon stated, "for salespeople, it is now a game of herding cats."

Four Steps to Becoming a Modern Marketer (Video)

Four Steps to Becoming a Modern Marketer

“I used to be magnetic; now I'm downright electrifying."

That aphorism came from best-selling author Jeffrey Hayzlett during one of his recent keynote sessions. 

Can you say that your marketing organization is electrifying? Do you feel that you are part of something big—I mean, industry-changing big?

Sadly, the recession has created some collateral damage in the business landscape. It has caused many companies to lose the courage and self-esteem to think like modern marketers. As a result, their organization views them as cost centers, not profit centers--and, hence, the first area that gets cut during a downturn.

4 Timeless Qualities Of Strategic Marketing Leaders

Being a marketing leader in today's economy reminds me of my first solo cross country flight in 1988: even when I think I'm totally in control, bad things can happen.

I prepared one week in advance for this adventure from Stratford, Connecticut to Concord, New Hampshire. I had all of my sectional charts clearly marked, and the forecast was clear blue skies and calm air. As I crossed the invisible aerial border from Connecticut to Massachusetts, something strange happened.

I was headed for an airport--but it wasn't the Concord airport. In fact, it had two runways. It took me several seconds to realize it was Manchester airport, a military base. Visions of armed military guards greeting me and my Cessna 152 were scary. Even though I had meticulously prepared for this day, my plans were almost thwarted.

It's All About Trust: Growth Insights from a Marketing Master

I just returned from my regular pilgrimage to an Alan Weiss event. As usual, Alan never disappoints. Here are some insights from our session that you can immediately apply to your annual planning activity.

photo courtesy of Gary Hallquist

Guest Post: B2B Marketing = Shift from Sales “Push” to Demand “Pull.”

Here is a guest post from my friend Charles Gold who has been a software marketing executive for nearly 20 years.  He serves as CMO at Sonatype, where he has helped propel the company's growth to category leadership.  Charles believes passionately  marketing is rapidly becoming *the* thing that distinguishes software market winners.  Read Charles' blog on software marketing at www.cgoldmarketing.com and find him on Twitter at @chasgold.

Have you bought a car recently?  How much information did you get from the sales person?  Not much, right?  You probably did your research online, read reviews, determined fair pricing, and checked in with your network on Facebook. Then, and only then, were you ready to talk to a sales person.  You had self-educated, and were ready to enter a buying process.

Sales take place when a buyer has convinced him or herself of the value of a purchase -- and generally not until then. Like so many things, it’s true in B2C and it’s true in B2B.

Four Essentials For Modern B2B Marketers

The four "Cs" shaping electrifying, modern marketing include: conscious content, CMO reporting, courage, and culture.

I used to be magnetic; now I'm downright electrifying."

That aphorism from best-selling author Jeffrey Hayzlett encapsulates the overall mood at the Eloqua Experience 2012 conference in Orlando.

I recently attended the annual gathering of 1,400 Eloqua employees and enthusiasts. The Eloqua Experience 2012 conference resolved a hunch regarding the current source of marketing innovation. Based on the profile of the attendees and marketing award winners, the most electrifying participants represent traditionally innovative industries: high technology and cloud-based marketing companies. Furthermore, traditional marketers are still roaming the earth in droves, and continue to outnumber the modern B2B marketers. (Eloqua sponsored my media pass.)