So it’s been said that marketing is like sex… everyone thinks they’re good at it. I can assure you, at least when it comes to marketing, everyone is not.

A recent MIT Sloan School survey of more than 4,000 managers found that only 28% could correctly list three of their firm's top strategic priorities. Only 28%! Given that, it’s no wonder that even the best laid strategic plans fall flat mid-year and victim to a strategy-execution gap.

So... you feel like you have a new business idea, product or service you want to pursue. Now what? You need a framework so you’re not going at a reinvention or pivot willy-nilly.

Trade shows and events are typically one of the largest marketing expenses for B2B firms. They can be magical from a brand awareness and PR perspective or, on the downside, a total boondoggle for sales and marketing teams. I often hear sales folk enthusiastically evangelize an event without being able to quantify the number of sales qualified leads generated or demonstrate conversions to sales after their return to an office.

Most growth-focused businesses have processes in place for ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, but what does it mean to have a truly customer-centric business, particularly as it relates to marketing?

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an intrepreneur, one of the biggest determiners of success and, ultimately, growth, is how you respond to failures or setbacks.

Trying to envision what’s on the horizon in 2019 and how it might impact your strategic planning? The innovation we see in the market research industry impacts the way we research and, subsequently, interact and market to consumers on many levels. Trends like mobile, passive data collection, artificial intelligence and machine learning have been consuming media attention in 2018— but there are even more innovate marketing and research methods we can glimpse in the pipeline.

When I work with early-stage firms, I’m often advising on fundraising where potential investors focus on one key question... "What is your competitive moat?"

Although we’re just a little over a month past the halfway mark of 2018, now is the time to start thinking about strategic planning. Not the plan itself... but the plan behind the development of the plan.

Scaling sales is the number one challenge most businesses face. Whether you’re struggling to drive lead generation, responding to incoming leads, staffing a sales team, or modeling sales compensation, sales likely takes up more headspace than you may like to admit. In truth though, we often make sales much harder than it has to be.