Our Most Popular Posts - 2014 Edition

This will be my last post of 2014, 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 blog post has been viewed, and 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 are our five most popular posts.

An Inconvenient Truth About B2B Demand Generation - If you're a B2B marketer, measuring the dynamics of your lead-to-revenue funnel is critical to understanding how well your demand generation system is performing. This post shows that the demand generation system in many B2B companies is horribly inefficient and illustrates how much improvement is possible through the implementation of best practices.

Why Content Marketing is the Best Way to Build the Brand - Some respected marketing industry experts have argued that content marketing has made brand marketing or "building the brand" obsolete. This post argues that building the brand is still an essential marketing objective for B2B companies and that content marketing is now the best marketing tactic to use for branding. For another perspective on the importance of brand building, see Why B2B Branding Still Matters.

Use an Importance-Performance Matrix to Get Marketing and Sales Talking - A perennial favorite. 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. An importance-performance matrix won't tell you how to resolve conflicts between marketing and sales, but it will identify the issues you need to address.

It's Time to Integrate Marketing and Sales - Marketing and sales "alignment" has been a hot topic among B2B marketing and sales professionals for some time. This post argues that it may be time to move beyond mere "alignment" and actually integrate the marketing and sales functions. In a later post - Four Key Ingredients in the Marketing/Sales Integration Recipe - I discussed four critical requirements for integrating marketing and sales.

Why BANT No Longer Works for Qualifying Leads - One of the most widely-used methods for qualifying B2B sales leads is known by the acronym BANT, which stands for Budget-Authority-Need-Timeline. This post argues that BANT is no longer an effective way to qualify sales leads. In a later post - Rethinking the Value of of BANT (It's Not as Outdated as Some Suggest) - I revisited this topic and argued that the BANT criteria can still be useful for qualifying leads if they are used at the right times to answer the right questions.

Happy New Year, everyone!