Dan O'Shea

A new piece of research from Accenture suggests that marketing executives are increasingly handicapped by internal corporate hurdles, such as inefficient organizational practices, budget constraints and poor integration with other business functions, among others. Some of you might be thinking right now, “I didn’t need Accenture to tell me that.”

Meanwhile, the research also pointed out that customer expectations are applying more external pressure on marketers. It turns out that customers want more value for money, have higher quality expectations and want lower prices. Again, maybe not a news flash.

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In the past few years, environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes that once were difficult to even get approved at some companies have become something worth celebrating. The green movement has gone from being a niche cause to a popular trend to a whole new way of doing business.

For B-to-B marketers, the best advice is: If you are green, start talking about it.

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Do big industry trade shows have a future?

There are many reasons why B-to-B companies might be growing tired of their industry-specific trade shows:

–Travel is both expensive and an increasingly huge hassle

–It’s hard to figure out if/how the thousands of dollars you spent on a booth and materials and a cocktail reception actually will make its way back into your pocket as revenue.

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Apple announced its newest iPhone this week, which means business folks will soon have a new gadget that they can’t put down day or night. Along with earlier generations of the iPhone, the Droid, the ever-expanding family of BlackBerrys and other mobile devices like the Apple iPad, mobile technology is rapidly changing how productive business people can be while away from the office. In fact, it’s changing the very definition of the word “office.” The office, nowadays, is everywhere and anywhere—and always.

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I recently wrote a story for Chief Business Marketer about Cisco Systems’ efforts to leverage social media marketing tools. The company, one of the most well-known high-tech brands in the B-to-B space, sponsors numerous blogs and has a presence on every social media site you can imagine.

It was interesting then to hear LaSandra Brill, senior manager of global social media at Cisco, say that the San Jose, Calif., company was still in the process of figuring out how to best measure the effect of its social media marketing efforts. Shouldn’t you have a clear-cut way to quantify such programs in mind from the very beginning?

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I used to have a friend who was a great fan of awkward social moments. The same faux pas that made the rest of us cringe actually fascinated him. He claimed to study such moments, not to see how people extricated themselves or apologized, but to observe whether or not they could turn the misstep or misunderstanding into an experience that somehow ended happily. He said it helped him in his job working client relations for a company that sold telecommunications equipment to businesses, ranging from small family firms to Fortune 500 corporations.

He would say, in what is probably now and may have been then a well-worn aphorism, “The real selling doesn’t start until the first customer complaint.”

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