John Ryan

John W Ryan

Speaker, Author, Marketing, Corporate Communications and Business Development Leader with over 25 years experience in US and international markets. Former Director at Webtrends, VP of Marketing at Tivoli/IBM and VP of Marketing at Siemens. Has helped many start ups and companies who want to go through marketing transformation. Author of the book, "Buyer Steps" in 2011 which is a buyer-centric view of the revenue growth effort.

10 Ways to Keep Your Marketing Leadership Job

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Posted on 2012-02-29

Chief Marketing Officers and Marketing Vice Presidents are too often blamed for what is a more systemic problem in their organization. Many will lose their jobs in less than three years. We want to be the quarterback, but it’s often similar to playing cornerback on defense. An intrepid soul who is expected to do great things with unpredictable support. Like an NFL football game, everyone has an opinion but few people ever played it at the level they are watching. What makes it even more daunting is the game seems to keep getting faster. Here are some ideas on how to shore up your internal support.

Be a buyer champion, jab, and speak in numbers

1) Know thy buyers. Do the analysis on markets, current customers, define best industries and buyer personas. Make sure you have hard data on your buyers. Help the rest of the revenue team stop wasting their valuable time focusing on low...

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B2B Marketers Topic: Is Your Marketing Aligned to Today’s Buyers?

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Posted on 2011-11-09

This is the first of a series of articles written from my book Buyer Steps. I am exposing my book one topic at a time through these articles. I would welcome feedback since my goal is to improve the book and thus help the users of the book improve their revenue efforts. The reason understanding the new buyer is important is so that we can start to get our senior management team’s minds right about the marketing and sales approach. Our first challenge is that many providers have not adjusted to today’s B2B buyer and their process.

21^st Century Marketing must address buyers who are

1) ...

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Buyers Rule – Target These 3 Areas to Get in Sync

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Posted on 2011-10-20

Many providers are still relying on their company’s viewpoint for their marketing. Since buyers can instantly share information in the 21^st century, it is best to adjust heavily toward helping the buyer reach their goals. Buyers want information in specific ways at ideal times to accelerate and improve their decision-making. Unless providers start building their marketing from the buyer’s perspective, they make everyone’s job harder than it has to be.

Target your audiences and markets.

Has your company defined the best groups that would want to research what you offer? Defining characteristics may be range of size, geographies, industries and motivation. This is your low-hanging fruit. You would be surprised at the number of companies who have not done this necessary work. One of the wasteful results out of not understanding audiences is that expensive salespeople spend time with companies that will never...

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Marketing and Sales - Jobs People Hate?

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Posted on 2011-08-08

I saw this morning that CNBC had a slideshow on Jobs People Hate. Marketing was mentioned as no. 10, indirectly mentioned as Product Management at no. 3 and coming in at no. 2 was Director of Sales and Marketing. The reasons they are listed? Lack of direction and an absence of opportunity for growth were blamed as the top two reasons for dissatisfaction.

Who wouldn't hate a job where there was a lack of direction and no room to grow? On the other hand, in today's economy, a pragmatist might ask, "who has the luxury of loving their job?" I wrote my book, "Buyer Steps" to help business obtain direction in their 21st century marketing and sales efforts. My experience would tell me that a byproduct of getting an organization moving in the right direction is more opportunity for everyone in the company.

A few questions for a marketing team:

1) do you truly understand your buyers from a persona, motivation and expectations standpoint? If you're not speaking...

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The Burning Platform Buyer and the Big Bang

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Posted on 2010-09-26

At the center of each 20^th century corporate sale was often the constant feeling that the buyer had to take immediate action. Their platform was burning and the buyer needed to make a decision. The provider would work hard to shove as much biased information down their throats as possible in a short period of time to secure budgets and get the Big Bang deal. The Eureka moment had been hit and a sales hero had been born. A selling practice was to always being in the buyer’s face with more information supporting that provider’s offering. Most 21^st century buyers are savvy to this flawed series of events. Today’s buyers use a more patient and informed process.

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If a Provider doesn't have a CRM solution, I am not your Customer

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Posted on 2010-08-25

About three weeks ago, we purchased a double-oven and dishwasher from the same nationally known retailer. Even as we sat in the store and the very affable salesperson was getting our information down, things didn't seem quite right. It took what seemed to be at least two hours to get out the door after we had chosen these appliances. The store manager came by to thank us for our business which was nice, but noticing how much time had gone by, I made a point of it to tell the manager that we liked our salesperson but couldn't figure out why the systems were so slow. He said that they've been complaining about them for "a long time" and that he hopes "corporate makes some changes soon". At this point, I guess we became "misery loves company" partners. As a marketing consultant, I started to remember all of the national television ads I had seen from this company and wondered why some of that money couldn't have been spent to help service their...

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Stories make it easy for all Employees to be Marketers

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Posted on 2010-08-02

It is the provider’s marketing leadership that is charged with helping buyers go through their steps. But the big cultural shift is when everyone in the provider’s company decides to be a marketer.

Stories are as old as cave drawings it seems. It’s the opportunity to describe what has happened to someone who took the leap to know something others didn’t know and came back to share their information. That gap between what they know and what they don’t know is what keeps buyers from progressing. Stories can motivate buyers to take the leap because they pin their rationale on the benefits they want. Perhaps the greatest thing about stories is it allows the buyer’s brain to learn raw information with context. Stories are needed to make it feel relevant.

Most employees will tell stories that show purpose in what they do for a living. People want others to know that...

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The Popular Myth of Big Companies and Innovation

0 comments 1,093 reads

Posted on 2010-07-27

I've read a lot of material lately about innovation. There are a number of people who characterize big companies as the following:
Bureaucratic
Corrupt
Slow
Boring
Vast wastelands of soul-crushing activity
Focused on status-quo

All of this leads to the inability to innovate.
There are plenty of examples that would support many of these characteristics. Admittedly, size does make it more challenging to be innovative and agile. But I would also argue that conventional wisdom is fueled by the size of the target itself. Having worked at a company of one to a company the size of IBM, my observation is that being small is not the critical determinant for excellence . I have seen innovation and speed come out of large companies just like small companies. We shouldn't kid ourselves. Smart risk-taking people work in big companies too. Likewise, I have seen small...

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FeedMagnet - Pragmatic Social Marketing on Display

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Posted on 2010-07-20

Social media can be a vexing component of the overall marketing effort. On one hand, hundreds of millions of people use it. On the other hand, how does a company make use of it? The power of the network is the number of people on the network itself. The beauty of a popular platform is that the more time that more people stay on the network, it looks like a good advertising opportunity. Unfortunately, the Digital Buyer can be very savvy about ignoring ads so it makes it particularly challenging to advertise with any great success. To address this, FeedMagnet takes the true value out of social network and puts back to work for the brand.

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Epic Advice for the Millennial Job Seeker

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Posted on 2010-07-20

Nothing is always true when it comes to people. Admittedly, the representation here of a Millennial candidate and Boomer takes a bit of a poetic license. It’s meant to help the Millennial keep their sense of humor, have some perspective and connect with what is usually a more experienced manager shaped by their generation. Recently I read an article in the New York Times called "American Dream is Elusive for a New Generation". It states that there is a 37% unemployment rate for the Millennial generation based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is for the recent graduate who is still living at home, surfing the Internet and trying to find a job. Keep your chin up and take action, we've all been there before.

While you are looking:

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