Christine Crandell
The Egoist, Strategist, and Tactician
Sales and marketing leaders come in all types of personalities and leadership styles. Figuring out what 'makes them tick' and how to get them to effectively work together is critical. The reality is that sales and marketing disciplines are very different –...
Startup America: Open Letter to Steve Case
By now a lot of you have heard of the latest government initiative in a string of efforts from the Obama administration to push the innovation agenda – Startup America – led by America's new startup czar and AOL cofounder Steve Case. Steve introduces...
Why Your Corporate Website Should Die
From the moment our new corporate website was born we were already planning its demise. Corporate websites have become the communications cornerstone of every business – or so marketing departments would have you think. The URLs show up everywhere: on business cards,...
2011: Redux of 2010
Popular consensus was that 2011 would shape up to be a stronger economic year than 2010. The rebound would be firmly established and, as a result, everyone had sugar plums of bigger budgets dancing in their heads. But the facts paint a different story. The...
When Sales Misses Their Number
It's that time of year for most companies – quarter- and year-end. I call it the 'twitchen time'. The time when sales becomes hyper focused on closing deals, bringing stragglers into this quarter, keeping score of Club eligibility, worrying about making 'the...
Marketing Operations’ Unlikely Owner
What isn’t measured can’t be managed. That is as true for marketing as it is for any operationalization of business strategy. It’s a sign of maturation in the sales/marketing alignment conversation that so much attention is being focused on the role marketing operations plays. Marketing operations...
PR is the Lost (Sales) Opportunity
Media relations is an area where sales and marketing have different expectations. Sales, not really understanding how PR works, see it as a key activity in ‘opening doors’ for them. It’s much easier to get an appointment when a prospect has recently heard of the company in...
Lessons From The Aligned
In the quest to find companies that know how to keep sales and marketing aligned, I interviewed a handful for truly remarkable CEOs. They aren’t gracing the cover of business publications, keynoting conferences or running for government office. They are remarkable in their achievements...
The Smoking Gun of Alignment
There used to be a time, before the tech-bubble bust in early 2000, when the route to CEO was through the CMO’s office. The belief was Marketing touched and coordinated all aspects of the business, knew how to build market share and understood how to...
Thinker, Blamer, Junkie
Here’s some good news in this perilous economic climate: The need to do more with less — and faster — is bringing sales and marketing teams together. Aligning sales and marketing requires a mindset change from scarcity of resources to be fought over to one...
Defining Sales and Marketing Optimization
The need to do more with less, faster has brought sales and marketing to figure out how to work better together. There is antidotal evidence that over one-third of all B2B companies starting talking about improving their sales and marketing alignment in the middle of last year. ...
Musing with Marketo
Over the past months I’ve gotten to know the folks at Marketo and their concept of revenue cycle optimization. At a high level, it’s about tightening the processes and feedback loops in attracting, acquiring, collecting and expanding sales opportunities. Marketo delivers automation technology for the attracting...
Marketing’s Big Disconnect Over Pay
Sales people, cynics have said, are coin operated – driven solely by financial incentives. Marketing people, on the other hand, are generally salaried and have their attention fragmented across a range of different activities including some with only remote ties to revenue generation. Yet...