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Put Marketing at the Core of Your Growth Strategy

Harvard Business Review

Companies that make the decision to put marketing at the core of their growth strategy outperform the competition, according to McKinsey research. Yet their research also showed that few CEOs recognize the potential for marketing as a growth accelerator. The first is to define what you need from marketing.

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How B2B Marketers Can Get Started with Social Media

Harvard Business Review

Many B2B CEOs still believe that social media isn’t right for them. But social media marketing can offer B2B marketers a range of benefits if they take advantage of it, from increasing engagement and influencing decision making before the sales call to customizing sales messages and enhancing their company’s reputation.

B2B 8
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Quantifying the Impact of Marketing Analytics

Harvard Business Review

Marketing analytics is becoming big business. of their marketing budgets on analytics and expect to spend 11.1% In the end, analytics effectiveness boils down to two questions: Do marketing analytics improve profits or ROI? And are companies using marketing analytics effectively? For marketing ROI, the figure is 0.61%.

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Put the “and” Back in “Sales and Marketing”

Harvard Business Review

Nowhere else in the executive suite of a typical corporation are two functions as closely intertwined as sales and marketing. Yet for all the shared responsibility, the marketing and sales relationship has often been a contentious and lopsided one, with sales dominating in B2B sectors while marketing leads in B2C ones.

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Marketing Can No Longer Rely on the Funnel

Harvard Business Review

One of the central concepts of marketing and sales is the funnel — through which companies are supposed to systematically move prospects from awareness through consideration to purchase. What we found says as much about the future of business as it does about the future of marketing.

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Moving Beyond Company Organization Silos: Lessons from the Aviation Industry

Leading Blog

A study by McKinsey specific to the business-to-business (B2B) area suggests that businesses that optimize QTC for end-to-end accountability significantly outperform peers that don’t. There is, on average, a 30 percent loss of efficiency in operating this across the siloed functions of sales, I.T., logistics, and finance. finance, I.T.,

Industry 271
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How to Get Your Salespeople to Execute Your Strategy

Harvard Business Review

McKinsey & Co. research on B2B purchases indicates that 25% of the buying decision depends on the interaction with the sales professional. Many companies in my experience have a similar disconnect between their intended market or customer type and their actual client base.