Sales 2.0 Archives - Social Email Marketing

Contributor Ambal Balakrishan of Click Documents has this interesting series of posts, called ClickInsights, in which she asks B2B marketers to share their opinions about specific topics for her blog.

I like this approach and Ambal often contributes by sharing posts with us but this time I decided to pick and highlight some individual interviews Ambal did when writing one of her ClickInsights posts. Some of them date back from a while, but they haven’t lost their value.

In this post, I share the view of M. H. (Mac) McIntosh, one of North America’s top B2B marketing consultants and an expert on the subject of using marketing to generate leads and drive sales, on social media marketing in business-to business. By the way, you can download a free eBook by Mac, called ‘Lead Generation Tactics: A Recipe for Success’, here.

When looking back at this week’s earlier post regarding the shift from selling to buying, I remembered an article I wrote a while ago about what I then called ‘the pull customer’.

The marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0, social media or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of people in the marketing and communication process, customer-centricity, more focus on value and relevance and so on.

One of the changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have increasingly become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process. Remember those words? Push versus pull marketing?