How to End the CMO Revolving Door

Business management has a history of popularizing new concepts and then demonizing them with the same energy when they appear to not deliver the spectacular results originally promised. The chief marketing officer is becoming a poster child for this phenomenon and is in danger of becoming more road kill on the highway of discarded management ideas. In fact, not too long ago Verizon eliminated its companywide CMO position, claiming that the restructuring aims to move marketing execution closer to customer-facing operations.

There is a pattern involved here, one that … Read more →

How to Setup an Effective Marketing Organization

I’m honored to be one of four expert panelists kicking off B2B Marketing Week today at a Focus.com Roundtable Online Event: How to Set Up an Effective Marketing Organization.

As a marketing organization, you know you want to leverage the latest strategies in lead nurturing, content marketing, and lead management. The question the top experts in Marketing Operations are … Read more →

Moving from Marketing Manipulation Madness to Marketing Operations 2.0

From creativity and enabling technology, we've come up with all sorts of tricks and tools to perpetuate a marketing manipulation madness (MMM) that no longer works. In our quest for attention and immediate gratification, there's a trail of junk littering the Information Superhighway:

  • Pop-up ads hoping to get us to hand over our money.
  • Ill-timed or irrelevant offers in our e-mail or on websites that distract us from quickly finding what we need.
  • Complicated user interfaces and commerce platforms that serve the vendor need to sell but not the buyer need to buy what we need.

This constant commotion is fatiguing to most of us and makes it exceedingly hard to separate a compelling … Read more →