Sales Enablement needs to be squarely aligned with the sales process. Unfortunately, getting sales enablement wrong can lead to persistently low adoption by your sales force. If you are finding that your sales teams aren’t using the materials you are creating for them, the diagnosis is probably Sales Disablement.

You couldn’t ask for a broader scope of work:

The American Marketing Association defines a marketing channel as “a set of institutions necessary to transfer the title to goods and to move goods from the point of production to the point of consumption and, as such, . . . consists of all the institutions and all the marketing activities in the marketing process.”[1]

It is amazing how closely the requirements for a well-designed channel marketing program align with the requirements for engineering mission critical power systems. This is one of those instances where Life imitates Art, or more precisely, Channel Marketing imitates Power System Automation. Let’s do the comparison:

The strategic pillars of mission critical power systems are to Protect, Control, Monitor, and deliver Reliability. Compare this to the strategic focus of channel marketing:

Analytics that follow the marketing process can help drive growth, lead innovation, drive accountability, and redefine the customer experience.  For Integrated Marketing Management to be optimized however, the creative expectations of sales teams and partners need to be taken into account.

I was asked recently what books have had the most impact on my professional life and found that several came to mind quite quickly. These are the books that contributed to the conception, establishment, and development of ALPHA.

The biggest tech trade show in the United States is just a few hours away, and as I prepare for my flight to Vegas (Baby) I’ll be attending my very FIRST CES conference along with my fellow colleagues from ALPHA; Katharine Belloir and Stephen Olshansky. Seasoned CES-ers Steve Greene and Erik Williams will be there too, getting in this year’s action.

Article from today's Triangle Business Journal regarding my visit to China with the North Carolina Trade Mission.

Channel Marketing is a distinct marketing discipline that is undergoing a tremendous amount of change at the moment. From B2B2C, more has to be accomplished with less – more demand, more leads, and more sales with less staff and less budget. Channel marketers have responded to the challenge by turning to technology that bridges the gap between Marketing and Sales, enabling the delivery of content and marketing assets to partners and end-customers.

Times change and so do the things associated with those times. Braces are no longer so nerdy. This is because they have successfully been re-branded as ‘appliances’ by orthodontists. And remember those paper 3-D glasses you used to get at the movies? Those have been replaced by RealD glasses that are fashionable enough to require security guards outside the cinema exit, making sure moviegoers drop their RealDs into the collection bin.

I spent one summer project managing a $1.8m campaign on the British Airways account. The program offered free flights to build awareness of BA’s international flight routes, with an underlying strategy to build a database of opt-in promotionally responsive customers from scratch.