Do you surprise the prospect based on their behavior? Or, do you ask for permission to move them into sales? Or, maybe you have a "good relationship" already so it isn't really a surprise?

We all know about B2C and B2B communications. You might even know about G2C. But what about B2E? Are we missing the boat?

It's tempting to try to research your way into a strategy. But, as Andrea Fishman points out in a ClickZ article, research can be misleading. Unlike Andrea, I don't think this is a problem with poor research. I think it's a problem with all research. And the solution is not to get better at research. Instead, I suggest we try something else.

At first, this seems an absurd question. Of course, the individual owns it. But, is this accurate? And what do we mean by "own"? What what is owned? What if you work at a company? What if that company supports your LinkedIn activity? What if that company pays you to make contacts? To be sure, there are many questions of ownership. In this discussion, I'd like to focus on one, specific question: who owns the expressions about your current employer?

Website overhauls often cause a rousing and lively discussion leading to long meetings, lists of lists to be collected, strategic decision-maker input, and sometimes even talking to the end users about the site. And it seems inevitable that all of these goals and ideas need to be wrapped in a cleaner and newer interface design with a dash of the latest marketing trends. And it has to be better than your competitors (or other departments). Then the technology questions hit.

We spend a lot of our time working very hard to get sales and marketing teams to work together. And this involves questions like the following. What is an effective way in which marketing teams can refer leads to sales teams? What do sales teams do with the leads handed to them from marketing? What happens if the leads are not fully qualified, or if, after qualification, it is deemed that the client is not ready for a company’s services but soon will be?

Strategy and tactics are two of the most common terms in the marketing world. Yet, perhaps because they are so common, it’s hard to know what they really mean. The trouble with this is two major challenges. If we don’t know what these things really are, then how can we evaluate them?

At first, it seems that delivery and sales are unrelated and that salespersons have nothing in common with account managers. This is not just a question of personalities. The roles themselves are often seen as completely distinct. Indeed many account managers loath selling, and many salespersons are uninterested in delivery. But is this distinction accurate? And even if it's accurate about the current state of affairs, should we tolerate this distinction?