Business owners rightfully expect marketing activities to lead to sales, but how should this work? The question is even more urgent when the focus is on selling to other businesses instead of individuals (so-called business to business, or B2B sales). How can marketing activity supporting industrial equipment and professional services sales? The only way marketing communication will positively impact topline growth, otherwise known as “sales in the income statement,'' is through a tight interconnection between “marketing” and “sales”. A valuable exercise is to visualise this interconnection, otherwise known as the purchase funnel. Take a piece of paper and list all your marketing and sales activities and draw a line that connects it to your prospective customer and a potential sale. This line represents the purchase funnel of your business. It's seldom straight, meaning it may start with someone seeing a post on LinkedIn, then taking a detour to your website before g

It is the dream of every business owner to have a single agency that can make all their marketing pain disappear. This agency will come in, understand the business, do all the marketing activity that needs doing and, importantly, do it precisely the way the business owner wants it done. My view? Such an agency doesn't exist, and if it does, please comment on this post with your secret. From my experience, the one-stop agency hardly ever delivers one-stop service. They always drop the ball somewhere, have a weakness they don't know of, or don't admit too, and more often than not fail to offer a real holistic solution. But one cannot blame the agencies. They need all the business they can get and will hardly ever say no. They know of the need for "full-service" agencies and often market themselves as such, despite it not being the full story. The reality is that marketing is much too broad, too complicated and too fast-moving for a single agency to be able t