John Ryan

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)  ...

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...

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...

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...