B2B marketers, take a look at the August 2009 CMO Survey, published by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and The American Marketing Association. I'll bet the results to-date are heavily weighted toward B2C companies. But over time, as the study becomes more well known to B2B companies, and if the study's lead researcher Professor Christine Moorman keeps splitting out B2B from B2C responses, that apparent imbalance may change.
I am especially interested in seeing a break-out of the findings on page 28 of the survey report slides -- the one with the bar chart that says "sales and marketing work on an equal basis in organizations." This is an exciting finding. But again, I wonder, "How many of those respondents are from B2B firms?" Today, I'd wager "not many."
In my work, I found a lot of evidence that equalizing marketing and sales is what a number of professional service and B2B firms are indeed attempting. But many PSFs and B2Bs don't see how imperative this marketing / business development integration really is. And improving the combined effectiveness of marketing and sales can be an uphill battle if a firm hasn't first identified its structural and cultural impediments to integration!
So I developed two self-assessments, for firms in professional and business service sectors to diagnose their structural and cultural integration barriers. Unlike the CMO Survey, this diagnostic provides instant results about how to overcome the barriers specific to each firm, and is totally confidential for each respondent (in other words, I don't collect or analyze the responses).
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