Sales & Marketing

Modern B2B marketers make themselves accountable for total customer success, taking proactive steps to be more integrated with product teams and sales, and avoiding the world of handoffs. As we move deeper into the twenties, too many marketers celebrate tactics: views, clicks, downloads, contacts. There are more bad marketers than good ones, and the imbalance is degrading the reputation of the whole function. How often have you seen a head of marketing parade around the new w

High-involvement buying is about judgment more than throughput Marketing Qualified Leads were never a bad idea. In fact, in the right context, they work quite well. In consumer markets and transactional B2B categories, where decisions are fast, risk is low, and buyers act independently, digital signals like downloads, clicks, and demo requests can be strong indicators of intent. Scale matters. Speed matters. And attribution, while imperfect, is directionally useful. The probl

Role clarity for commercial teams and pursuit tactics to win more deals. Most commercial teams do not lose deals because someone failed to try hard enough. They lose because three functions with different jobs assume they are doing each other’s. Marketing builds a narrative nobody in the pursuit ever uses. Sales improvises positioning on the fly because the battlecard never arrived. Product bends the roadmap to win a single account and, in doing so, makes the next ten account

When, where, and how to talk about the different aspects of your organization. Every organization tells stories about what it does. The strongest brands don’t just tell stories; they create a system for how they speak. That system underpins their verbal expression. While many think of brands in their visual terms — logos, colors, and design — verbal expression defines how a brand uses language: the words, names, and phrases that give shape to how it creates and communicates v

Role clarity for commercial teams and pursuit tactics to win more deals. Most commercial teams do not lose deals because someone failed to try hard enough. They lose because three functions with different jobs assume they are doing each other’s. Marketing builds a narrative nobody in the pursuit ever uses. Sales improvises positioning on the fly because the battlecard never arrived. Product bends the roadmap to win a single account and, in doing so, makes the next ten account

Branding builds the identity, marketing creates the momentum, and advertising buys the attention. Arguments about branding, marketing, and advertising usually land as a punchline in the Hollywood version of this debate. Inside a real organization, the three do different work, answer to different numbers, and fail in different ways. The trouble starts when the words get used interchangeably. One team says it is “doing brand” while running a four-week promotion. Another says “d

What the tools do, and what sellers stopped learning to do Walk into any B2B sales organization today and you will find an impressive stack: CRM, conversation intelligence, intent data, enrichment tools, sequencing platforms, deal forecasting, AI copilots added to everything. The pitch is appealing: more pipeline, better targeting, less guesswork, a seller who can do the work of three. Leadership buys in because the math looks clean. Sellers buy in because it appears to make

The sales rep archetype Hollywood taught, the three it never filmed, and the one worth becoming Somewhere out there is a young rep who learned the job from Alec Baldwin. Coffee is for closers, always be closing, steak knives for second place. They watched a man in a good suit humiliate a room and thought, that’s the energy. Or they took their notes from the boiler room, or any of the dozen films where selling looks like a blood sport you win by wanting it more than the other

How Sales and Marketing Evolved Together …and Apart Sales and marketing have evolved alongside the wider history of commerce, from ancient barter to today’s AI-mediated, word-of-mouth-driven markets. The eras of sales, branding, marketing, and product innovation are staggered and overlapping rather than cleanly sequential, which is why they keep colliding in today’s internal debates about “who drives growth.” And why is there so much frustration between two teams that share t

Importance of Pursuit Strategies and Deal Management Most B2B sales teams treat pursuit management as something that begins once a deal is visibly in play: an RFP arrives, a prospect signals interest, and the opportunity enters the pipeline. By the time that happens, the most important decisions have often already been made. Strong pursuit management starts earlier, with a harder question: Is this pursuit worth chasing, and can we realistically win it? In some organizations,

Selling and marketing the diagonals that cut across your business Most B2B companies organize their business in ways that feel obvious and rational. They group offerings into horizontals that answer the question, “What do you make?” They line up around industries that answer, “Do you make things for companies like mine?” They split around regions that reflect where they operate and how they manage regulation, culture, and local go to market. Horizontals, verticals, and geogra

Why the next era of marketing is more about being discoverable rather than clamoring for attention For most of modern business history, marketing was explained through a simple framework: push and pull. We built awareness through advertising and brand campaigns, then pushed products toward the moment of purchase through promotions, displays, and pricing tactics. Along the way, entire marketing philosophies formed around awareness, differentiation, and the belief that if you c

None of them start by talking about your company or products first There are countless ways to structure a company or product narrative. Every strategist, marketer, and sales leader seems to have their own formula. But the best stories share one simple truth: They start with the person on the other side of the table, and they end with you. They begin with a problem, a shift, or a tension in the market that your customer feels in their business. They start with a person in m

Why the current case study model struggles in an AI-first search environment, and easy ways to address it In B2B sales, few assets are as powerful and as consistently mishandled as the client case study. As B2B research increasingly happens through AI assistants, summaries, and “best answer” environments, case studies are no longer just sales collateral. They are becoming inputs into how your company is explained, evaluated, and trusted before a seller is ever involved. Every

The importance of earning the permission-to-be-believed in sales presentations Most sales presentations start at the wrong place. You have seen this movie: the first slide is a logo grid, the second is a timeline, the third is a methodology. Ten minutes in, no one has yet mentioned the problem your CFO brought you into the room to solve. They start with credentials. With slides full of logos. With frameworks, data, and confident claims about what works. They begin by asking t