Right Content at The Right Time. Digital Rules OK? Or Does It?

Posted on Jul 19, 2011 in iDeclare Blog | 0 comments

I recently met with a number of people while working on new client opportunities.

I met the head of EMEA for a leading SaaS project and portfolio management vendor, the head of private equity at an investment company, the principal of a B2B sales training company and the head of education business strategy at a global software company.

Each meeting had a very different emphasis in terms of our open agendas and we discussed hugely varying subject areas from creating value propositions, content and communications, sales enablement, customer reference and insight to demand generation and go to market planning.

We talked about how fast the pace of change is in the B2B sector and the seemingly tremendous and far reaching effects of digital – from iPads to digital content, demand generation and how internal social media platforms can produce outstanding results in helping to enable a sales organisation with corporate, solution, product and industry propositions.

All great stuff.

What happened at each of the four meetings was very interesting. Either during the course of each meeting, or at the end, each contact handed me a……. BOOK! Not the promise of an email or a link to a web address, but a BOOK – a printed one!

What interested me greatly was that in each case each book highlighted an area that each company represented or provided thought leading solutions to the issues, challenges or practices forming the subject areas covered by the book.

So, not only did I enjoy and will hopefully benefit from having these new client meetings, but their business is now differentiated in my mind as I have something tangible to remind me of their company and what they stand for and I can do a better job in working with them to overcome some of the challenges they have. And, my reading list is getting longer by the week!

I feel that we should take a little time to reflect on what we want to achieve through our marketing and business development and we need to think more about what are the right tools for each job marketing needs to do. I think it is all about making the right careful investment in order to achieve a measurable return.

What do you think?