If you’re a marketer who thinks you can hand a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to sales, breathe a sigh of relief and go back to nurturing prospects, you may need to look for another line of work. This is old-school thinking and has no place in a 21^stcentury integrated enterprise, especially if it uses a good marketing automation platform.

Sales is a partner, not an internal customer. You need to do everything in your organization’s power to support the people who are trying to convert that lead to revenue. It is a true fact that marketing’s primary responsibility is to produce hot leads for sales but it is also important to participate/contribute after the lead is passed to sales. This could include:

No doubt, it has been a tough week for customer service. Internal Revenue Service acting agency head, Steven T. Miller who is resigning from his post stated earlier this week:

“I can say generally, we provided horrible customer service. I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selections.”

And if that didn’t capture enough of America’s attention, how about the Maserati owner only identified as Wang who smashed his $420,000 Quattroporte with sledgehammers to protest the dealer’s poor customer service while shocked onlookers watched?

Of course, the normal customer service experience for disgruntled customers rarely take on the profound consequences as these two examples, but the importance of being able to successfully and calmly maneuver through a maze of frustrating obstacles before getting problems resolved can seem insurmountable to consumers at any moment. With that in mind, the better part of valor calls for the customer to wait until he is calm before instituting contact for a bad product, poor service, or any project requiring the help of an organization’s customer service department.

I stepped off the train in London this morning and it struck me how many genuine and knock-off Barbour quilted jackets were among the commuter throng. And it made me think about just how commonplace they’ve become to the point that they’ve diluted their own brand image. “By Appointment to Her Majesty” has now become By Appointment to Everyone. It’s the new Puffa jacket for this generation and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

And the same is happening everywhere else. Apple and iOS has become synonymous with smartphones and tablets but has only one product per line of business. Therefor it’s the same hardware you see people with and it’s becoming ubiquitous. They are gorgeous products, they work seamlessly, but they’re everywhere. And for me it’s destroying the perception of brand value.

Conversely, Android’s presence has been fragmented across a myriad of OEM devices and while this actually causes a headache for developers, for consumers they feel slightly more exclusive to owning an Android-powered device because of the opposite to Apple: Many products against one OS offers more choice and personalisation.

It’s almost seen as a left-field choice, exactly the same position that Apple were in during the old Microsoft battles. (Only designers and photographers used Apple back then…../sarcasm)

Are your prospects Painting by Numbers, on a Quest for the Grail, Lost in the Fog, or running around like Headless Chickens?

There's been a lot written - some of it by me - about the stages B2B prospects tend to go through in their buying decision process, and the need to align your your sales and marketing tactics accordingly. Of course, their journey is rarely linear: at any point they can choose to move forwards, revert to a previous stage, put the project on hold, or abandon the journey altogether.

But the stage your prospect is currently at isn't the only thing you need to be aware of when it comes to understand their likely buying behaviour: you also need to understand something about the state of their thinking about what they are trying to achieve, and how they think they might go about achieving it.

I wrote about the 4 different states of the B2B buying process last year, but I think it's worth updating and expanding the idea a little in this article. The 4 states of the buying decision mindset are defined by two axes: whether or not your prospect has a clear vision of where they want to get to, and whether or not they have a clear idea of how they are going to get there.