Despite all the advancements in lead generation, lead scoring and automated lead nurturing, the age-old tension between marketing and sales is alive and well. CMOs still complain that sales can't keep to the script and close the deal, while sales directors still complain that many of the leads they get from marketing are useless garbage because the targeting and messaging...

"I really believe that marketing won't help you grow your business," says Jon Ferrara. A dangerous lead given the audience of this column. But suspend your disbelief just for a moment. As the founder of Nimble, a relationship management app for those of us with thousands of contacts and no time to nurture them, Ferrara gathered 100,000 Nimble users and converted...

If there's one lesson Alex Reed could share with his fellow business-to-business marketers it would be "just stand out." It's a lesson he's taken to heart during his 10 years at the immodestly named Big Ass Fans, the industrial-strength fans that you'll find in gyms, warehouses, atriums, and other giant rooms around the globe. Having taken over the global marketing...

No chief marketing officer understands how to scale a marketing program quite like Denise Broady. After getting her start consulting at small shops, then becoming the global chief operating officer at SAP's industry cloud organization, she's returned to another small company called WorkForce, which specializes in making timesheets, as she puts it, "sexy again." Its headquarters in Livonia, Michigan, belies the...

When Connie O'Brien became chief marketing officer at U.K.-based Tungsten Network in 2016, the company's awareness was largely limited to Europe. Its marketing was pretty much confined to investor relations. O'Brien was tasked with building a marketing machine from the ground up. "I had to figure out how to create some resonance with our prospective customers as well as the suppliers...

Eponym. Feel free to Google it. Though not an everyday term, it is the ultimate acknowledgement of cultural acceptance. Eponyms like FedEx, Kleenex, Jacuzzi, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape and Chapstick all continue to lead their respective categories. But others like Formica, Bubble Wrap, Plexiglas, Popsicle, Realtor, Windbreaker, Novocain, Dumpster, Stetson and even Ping Pong have long lost their original corporate association...

Walking around the studios of New York Public Radio in New York City, you're confronted with conflicting realities: one symbolized by a primitive radio microphone from 1924 and the other by an advertising poster from 2016 with the headline, "More Influential than Russia." As pioneers of FM broadcasting, it's not surprising that New York Public Radio is the largest public radio...

"I'm just suggesting, humbly, that better products are easier to sell," says Jerome Nadel, senior VP and chief marketing officer at Rambus, a public software licensing company in Silicon Valley. This begs the question, are better products really too much to ask for? For decades, the answer for many CMOs has been, unfortunately, yes. Like it or not, it has traditionally...