We’ve just released an important new piece of thinking, in which we describe a new phase of the buying process, what we call the epiphany stage. It occurs before the awareness stage, before buyers have even articulated a business need. Marketers need to understand the benefits of the epiphany stage and how to take advantage of them.

Customers and prospects don’t want those three-day junkets to the Caribbean or celebrity meet-and-greets at the golf tournament. Here’s why and what they want instead.

Focusing only on filling the sales funnel reduces the efficiency of sales and is one of the reasons that 60–80% of leads simply fall by the wayside. Marketers need to create a lead-nurturing process in which prospects qualify themselves. For marketers, it’s a way to save money, resources, and frustration and to earn accolades from the sales organization.

We are in the middle of one of the most important budget cycles in marketing history. In this interview, ITSMA President and CEO Dave Munn discusses ways to justify preserving important marketing programs in the face of unprecedented budget pressure.

In far too many cases the marketing in our industry can become so, well, grandiloquent that our communications confuse rather than clarify and alienate rather than disarm prospective clients. Here are some of the problems we’re causing with our language.

There are certain marketing processes that should never leave the four walls of the organization—they are simply too strategic. Here’s the list.

I recently spoke with marketing analytics guru Pat LaPointe of MarketingNPV, who will be joining me and Samir Bagga of Satyam on my December 16 online briefing, What You Need to Know About Marketing Analytics. Pat and Samir will talk about ways to do analytics cheaply and easily. I’ve excerpted a recent conversation with Pat here.

It’s no surprise that our recent Marketing in a Downturn survey found that marketers are trimming budgets. But we still have to conclude that marketing today is more strategically aligned with the business than it was during the last downturn, in 2001. Why? Marketers are making successful business-based arguments for preserving budgets. Here are some examples of how you can make these arguments, too.

ITSMA’s Annual Marketing Conference in early November became a testing ground for presenting and refining our views of how marketing must adapt to the recession in 2009. We saw four themes emerge from the presentations, our research, and our discussions with ITSMA member attendees.

Social media marketing is cheap, so in this economy, you’re going to be doing more of it, whether you like it or not. But the only thing scarier for marketers than being responsible for a corporate blog where people can say anything they want about you and your brand is the prospect of having to sustain it—to keep coming up with smart, thoughtful things to say. Forever. Here are seven tips for making your efforts more effective—and less intimidating.

One CIO told us recently: “The next salesperson that asks me what my point of pain is, I am going to throw that person out the door.” The challenge for marketing is to equip the salesperson with the knowledge necessary to begin the conversation with those pain points. Here’s how you can do that.

Marketers have two basic choices for a launch strategy: try to blow the market open overnight or parse your resources and focus on building success gradually. Peter Fader calls these extremes “penetration” and “skim.” Fader, who is a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, thinks all new product and service launch campaigns are grounded in one or the other.

When we asked people about their biggest challenge in marketing automation, 70% said money. But everyone always says that. It’s a bit of a red herring. Our belief is that it’s the relationship with IT that’s really getting in the way here.

How should B2B marketers focus their community efforts to provide compelling content for members and business value for their companies? For some answers, we went to Bill Johnston, who blogs about online community strategy and runs the Online Community Research Network.

It’s much easier to focus on cross-selling and up-selling existing customers. Indeed, in ITSMA’s recent survey on penetrating new accounts, we found that just one-third of the marketing budget is devoted to acquiring new accounts.

Though Account-Based Marketing would seem to be a time- and resource-intensive proposition, interviews with leading practitioners found that ABM is indeed scalable. But there are conditions.

Most marketing materials are too broadly focused and too complex to help salespeople in the heat of the sales cycle, says John Aiello, CEO of sales enablement software provider SAVO. Here, Aiello offers tips for creating types of content that will work better for salespeople and for tapping into the “black market” of content and competitive intelligence that salespeople develop on their own.

Everyone obsesses over the sales funnel, but have you created a marketing funnel to feed it? Here, Brian Carroll explains why you need a marketing funnel and offers four other tips for making B2B lead management more effective.

As soon as you join an organization as a new marketing leader, it’s vital to conduct a comprehensive research investigation to assess the business and the market—even if your new boss is against it. Bob Baginski, ITSMA’s senior vice president and longtime services marketing veteran, has laid out a five-step framework to help marketers acquire broad and deep knowledge of the state of the business and the market.

For years, lead generation in B2B has been like making cream: Skim the best from the top and forget about the rest. Paul Dunay of consulting company BearingPoint is determined to change that. He has developed a process for retaining the people who aren’t hot sales leads and nurturing them until they heat up.

To help marketers find their place along the vertical market maturity path and develop appropriate marketing strategies for each stage, ITSMA has developed a conceptual framework. The framework gives companies an agreed-upon way to gauge progress of vertical market competence and perception and match the right marketing strategies and resources along the way.

Pity the poor buzzword “solutions.” Some would argue that it has so many meanings that it has none at all. For most companies, it is a swap-out word for a product or service—the idea being that a solution sounds more valuable than a plain old product or service.
If you’ve hung around with ITSMA for a [...]

ABM is an ambitious strategy that views a company’s most important customers each as a market of one. Though the concept is simple, the follow-through is not. As Unisys discovered, ABM implementation has significant challenges, including organizational change, shifting marketing competencies, and close coordination with sales. Though Unisys has not yet completed its ABM journey, it has used the principles learned in a customized ITSMA ABM training program to start along the path—and learned some valuable lessons along the way.

In case you’re still wondering, the online marketing train has definitely left the station. But what’s more surprising is how the emergence of online has busted up marketing’s overall priorities. Behind the perennial mantras of differentiation and sales force enablement—which top the list of priorities this year as they almost always do—marketers have shifted their priorities dramatically.

As economic fortunes tighten, the need for marketers to learn more about customers will become even more important. How can marketers warm up new accounts in these tough times? ITSMA’s 17 and Kathy Macchi offer some practical advice.