SUMMARY: Last year, we published an excellent how-to article on creating a customer-centric marketing and sales strategy featuring Kristin Zhivago. A B2B Summit 2011 keynote speaker in Boston, she will again present her presentation, “The Buyer’s Funnel and Your Political Power: Joined at the Hip” at the west coast leg of the Summit in San Francisco, Oct. 24-25.
This article, and Zhivago’s presentation, explain why you want to listen to your customers, what questions you want to ask them, and how this knowledge will improve the entire buying funnel and help provide Marketing political clout within an organization.
by David Kirkpatrick, Reporter
The sales team wants leads. Business leaders want revenue growth. When these objectives aren’t achieved at the desired (and perhaps unrealistic) pace, Marketing usually takes the brunt of the blame. This is perhaps one reason why CMOs have the shortest tenure of any C-level executive — barely surpassing two years according to a Spencer Stuart survey from 2009.
One way to turn marketing and sales into a seamless revenue-generating process is to turn the focus of B2B marketing on the customer. Kristin Zhivago, President, Zhivago Management Partners, has been addressing the issue of improving the alignment of Sales and Marketing for more than 30 years.
As a business growth consultant, or as she calls it “revenue coach” for CEOs and entrepreneurs, Zhivago has worked with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Zhivago has developed tactics that turn the entire marketing and sales process into a way to understand what customers want to buy, and how they want to buy it.
Zhivago’s upcoming book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to sell the way your customers want to buy, will cover these strategies in detail.
Here are some of the things B2B marketers can do to make the sales and marketing process more customer-centric:
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