Our Most Popular Posts - 2015 Edition

This will be my last post of 2015, 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, so 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 highly inefficient, and it describes how much improvement is possible through the implementation of best practices.

Why Content Marketing is the Best Way to Build the Brand - Some respected 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 method 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 issues. 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.

Customer Experience is the New Competitive Battleground in B2B - One of the most widely-discussed topics in marketing circles over the past few years has been the growing importance of providing outstanding customer experiences and managing customer experiences effectively. This post describes the findings of several research studies which show that customer experience has become a new basis of competition and a primary driver of competitive advantage.

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's time to move beyond mere "alignment" and actually integrate the marketing and sales functions. For more about this topic, see Four Key Ingredients in the Marketing/Sales Integration Recipe and Why Marketing-Sales "Alignment" Is No Longer Enough.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Illustration courtesy of Republic of Korea via Flickr CC.