The endgame for any B2B is your profitable sales goal. Too often in sales support/marketing strategy, B2Bs concentrate on tactics (What should our logo be? Do we need a brochure? Flash or no Flash on the website?). Without a direct connection to your sales goals, any effort in the marketing space is a waste of resources.

Technology executives understand Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). Building your marketing strategy is a process. And if you have the wrong perspective at the start of the process, the results of that process won’t deliver the sales support you need to execute your sales strategy.

Critical to avoiding GIGO is an understanding of the amount of time your prospect is willing to invest in considering your offer throughout the sales process. This varies greatly throughout the sales process, and Blandford will help you understand how to use that to your advantage and your competitor’s disadvantage. 

CEOs, VPs/Directors of Sales, VP/Directors of Marketing

For businesses selling to other businesses through people – a direct sales force, or perhaps execs may be doing the selling for smaller companies. Ideally for companies that are trying to make the big sale to the corner office or executive folks. Although companies that are selling to the “operational” level will find value too.

This session will provide you with the tools to build a marketing strategy that aligns to your endgame, i.e. your sales goals.

Come to this session with your best market analytics. Whether you have solid market-researched analytics, or simply your gut feel for your sales targets penciled in on a napkin, you want your big picture analytics by your side as we walk through the marketing overview. For instance, it’d be helpful to know:

1. Your sales goal for the year
2. Your stretch goal, if you have one
3. Your profit goal
4. The % of your revenue goal you expect to come from new business vs. growing your base

While we won’t be covering how to identify your market analytics, there’s a good chance you’ll tweak some of those numbers after the session.

Depending on the size of your business, it should take you the better part of a day to three days to build your own Marketing Strategy. Maureen will walk you through the strategy steps so you can have confidence running a marketing strategy session for you team and avoid GIGO. The strategy steps are effective for organizations of any size.

Finally, Blandford will walk through common marketing tactics to help you determine which ones might be most effective for your business.

What You’ll Take-away

Besides walking away with your marketing strategy outline and great clarity on which marketing tactics will work best for your organization, you’ll be better positioned to your marketplace with:

• An understanding of your prospect’s perspective of your offers
• A Brand New Value Proposition
• The best 5 questions you could ever ask your targets

And we'll leave plenty of time for Q&A to ensure you get your most-pressing B2B questions answered.

This session will benefit you if you:

• think you have a reasonable target, have decent to very clear differentiation from the competition, and still aren’t making the progress you’d like in the marketplace
• are compromising on price too frequently
• have spent too much on tactics that haven’t delivered

• Copy of the slide presentation
• 1 lucky paid attendees will also receive a complimentary two-hour consulting session, so you can dive a little deeper into your specific situation with Blandford.
• 3 lucky paid attendees will also receive a copy of Blandford's book, Branding Doesn’t Work in B2B.

1. Review "Sales & Marketing Harmony." We will send this document to you by email as soon as you're registered.
2. Listen to Blandford's interview with Business Week's Michelle Nichols, Savvy Selling columnist and podcast host, on reasons why business-to-business organizations should spend less on marketing and more on sales to increase revenues.

Maureen Blandford, CEO
The MindTime® Group

Maureen Blandford, a 20-year veteran in the software marketing business, is passionate about helping B2Bs with a direct sales force understand that in B2B, it’s people and how they perform in the sales and delivery processes that have the greatest impact on current and future customers... NOT branding. Let B2C have Madison Avenue's branding mantra.

If you’re in a business selling things to other businesses, branding won’t win you the sale. Corporate MarCom groups are under the wrong impression that the same principles that hold true for consumer purchasing hold true in the B2B space. They’re dead wrong, as Blandford's first book Branding Doesn’t Work in B2B explains.

Every year, MarCom groups waste millions of dollars on ineffective sales tools – dollars that could be spent on hiring, retaining, and supporting great consultative salespeople. Blandford helps B2Bs align marketing and sales support to a great consultative sales model so they can markedly improve their margins through more efficient sales cycles and great consultative selling.

“I agree with Maureen Blandford that branding is a money pit in many B2B companies. Why? Because marketing creates message mayhem instead of sales collateral that matches how salespeople sell, or how prospects buy. Successful B2B companies win not because they have strong marketing, but because their salespeople clearly communicate business value.”

— Gerhard Gschwandtner,
Founder and Publisher, Selling Power
Winner of 3 Gold Awards, American Society of Business Publication Editors

We first told you about Blandford's book back in 2006 in a tip story we did. We liked her ideas so much, we invited her back as a guest speaker for a Software University class later that year called Stop Branding Your B2B Product (and how to spend your newfound marcom dollars!)

Blandford's clientele include NCR, The IAMS Company, AT&T, Cincinnati Bell and Standard Register. Blandford holds a degree in Mass Communications from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her trend-bucking methodologies have also made her a featured speaker among business and marketing groups around the country.