Chris Ryan: Revenue Growth Strategies
B2B Marketers: How to Win the Trust of Your CEO
As a chief marketing officer (CMO) or senior B2B marketing professional, there are few things as satisfying as earning and maintaining the trust of your CEO, and for that matter, the rest of the executive team. Conversely, if you do not have this trust,...
Become a B2B Revenue Marketer or Get Left Behind!
A couple of decades ago, I was speaking at B2B marketing and sales conferences on the topic of: Bridging the Marketing and Sales Gap. My subtitle was Marketing is from Mars and Sales is from Venus, which I paraphrased from the extremely popular book...
To Connect with Elusive B2B Prospects, Turn Marketing and Sales into “Sherpas” for the...
I recently participated in a LinkedIn comment thread posing the question of whether B2B or B2C marketing was more fun. Naturally, this sparked a spirited dialogue. As a long-time B2B marketer, I have immensely enjoyed my profession, but it has its challenges. You have...
How to Choose and Implement a Successful B2B Pricing Strategy
In my March column for CustomerThink, titled "Pricing to Win in B2B: The Mindset to Achieve More Revenue and Profit," I discussed the mindset attributes needed to achieve solid pricing results: courage, differentiation, and relationships. Assuming you are now equipped with this ninja pricing...
Pricing to Win in B2B: The Mindset to Achieve More Revenue and Profit
The key to a good pricing strategy is to structure your pricing model for short-term profitability and revenue while simultaneously building long-term relationships. This is a tough balancing act but achievable if your mindset is based on courage, differentiation and relationships. These three attributes...
How Digital Strategies Can Support B2B Revenue KPIs
Last month, I had the opportunity to share thoughts on a webinar about how digital strategies contribute to organizational objectives with Michael Spinosa, President of Unleashed Technologies. As a fractional CMO, this subject is vitally important to me and my clients and should be...
Bravery: An Underrated Virtue for Chief Marketing Officers
My last CustomerThink column was B2B Marketing’s Role in Driving Revenue With Integrity. I’m not surprised that it received a ton of views because the subject of integrity resonates with both marketers and the CEOs they work for. The same is true for another...
B2B Marketing’s Role in Driving Revenue With Integrity
It is critical for everyone on the revenue-generation side of the business (including you folks in the marketing department!) to understand their vital role in generating revenue and profit while doing so in a way that protects valuable company integrity. When the CEO and...
6 Lessons B2B Companies Can Learn from Amazon
Let me start out confessing that I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. I bet a lot of you reading this suffer from the same malady. Amazon is like the giant squid threatening to swallow up Tokyo – seemingly unstoppable. They gobble up entire...
How to Maximize the Value of Customer Discovery Calls
As I write this, the world is dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Chances are, your customers are facing their own share of uncertainty and perhaps, a vastly reduced workload. This presents an opportunity to get them on the phone and have a conversation that...
Align Marketing and Sales to Streamline the Buying Experience: 4 Imperatives
In Deloitte: The Future of B2B Sales is “Experience Selling, Bob Thompson relates a discussion he had with Harry Datwani, a Principal at Deloitte Digital about his company’s research on the B2B buying experience. According to Datwani, the study was conducted because the B2B...
CEOs: Stay Ahead of the (Sigmoid) Curve to Grow Revenue in 2020 and Beyond
In the early 2000s, I was an investor and advisor to a company that sold a fairly well-known sales force automation (SFA) tool. Like most software at that time, it was sold in boxes containing CDs. We used to call unused software of this...
Should Your Company Brand be Distinctive or Descriptive? 6 Lessons Learned
Everyone has an opinion when it comes to branding. Over the course of my career, first as a client-side marketing executive, then as a revenue-growth consultant to B2B companies, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in dozens of major branding projects (e.g. what to...
How to Use Pricing as a Competitive Advantage: 5 Strategies
Properly pricing products and services is always something of a challenge because it seems that everyone has a different view on the matter. Also, good pricing is both an art and a science which means that different personalities approach the topic entirely differently. Executive...
Are You Wasting Time and Money on Content Marketing?
As an avid practitioner of content marketing, both for our clients and my own company, I’ve heard (and expressed) a lot of opinions and comments about content marketing, ranging from: “It doesn’t work, so why the heck are we doing it?” “I think it might…
Six Ways to Make Your Company More Valuable in 2019
Welcome to a new year full of potential and promise. Before we get too deep into the year, why not take one or more actions that can propel your company to new heights? It’s not just about marketing and selling better, or about creating...
The Right Diagnosis is Crucial for Marketing and CX Improvement
A B2B software client was facing declining quarter-over-quarter sales. Their answer was to hire two additional sales reps. Unfortunately, the new reps were expensive and did not get the revenue back on track. After an analysis of the competitive landscape, we diagnosed the issue as...
7 Ways Marketing Can Boost Your CX Performance
Everybody is talking about customer experience (CX), but like many other hot industry terms, it can mean different things to different people. I like the Wikipedia definition: “Customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This...
How Mapping the Buyer’s Journey Can Lead to More Revenue
The process of capturing the methods by which prospects make a purchase decision is called buyer journey mapping. The goal of buyer journey mapping is to align the way you sell with the way prospects and customers prefer to buy. You have no doubt...
Creating a Profitable Revenue Model: Go-To-Market Strategy, Pricing, and Presentation
Selecting and implementing the most effective revenue model can be the one activity that most rapidly accelerates your revenue growth. People often confuse the revenue model with the business model, but the revenue model is actually a subset of the business model, which also...