The Most Popular Posts at B2B Marketing Directions

This will be my last post for 2012, and I want to thank everyone who has spent some of his or her valuable time reading this blog. I hope that you have found the content here to be both thought-provoking and useful.

Thanks to analytics, I can see how many times each of my posts have been viewed. I thought this would be an appropriate time to share which posts have been most widely read. This ranking is based on cumulative total reads, and therefore older posts obviously have a built-in advantage.

So, in case you missed any of them, here, in order, are the four most popular posts.

Use an Importance-Performance Matrix to Get Marketing and Sales Talking - This post explains how to use an importance-performance matrix to capture the degree of agreement or disagreement between marketing and sales regarding key demand generation activities. The matrix requires marketers and salespeople to evaluate an activity along two dimensions - how important the activity is, and how well the company is performing the activity. An importance-performance matrix can reveal where significant gaps exist between marketing and sales. It won't tell you how to resolve conflicts between marketing and sales, but it will identify the issues you need to address.

Stop Depending on Your Salespeople to Generate Leads - This post explains why B2B companies should not rely primarily on their salespeople to generate new sales leads. Depending on sales reps to generate leads is a long-standing practice in many B2B companies, but changes in the attitudes and behaviors of business buyers make this practice less and less effective.

Stop Trying to Measure Marketing ROI - For the past several years, CEO's and CFO's have been demanding greater accountability from the marketing function, and they have been pressing marketers to prove the value of their activities and programs. In this environment, return on investment has become the "gold standard" for measuring marketing performance. This post explains why you can't use ROI to measure the value of every marketing activity.

It's Time to Fix the Marketing Supply Chain - Marketers are facing tremendous pressures to drive increased revenues and maximize the return produced by every dollar invested in marketing. So, it's understandable that they focus most of their attention on developing more effective marketing campaigns, creating more compelling content, and generating more sales leads. This post explains why the marketing materials supply chain represents a large, and largely untapped, source of both cost savings and revenue-enhancing improvements.

Happy New Year, everyone!