Jim Markisohn

Jim Markisohn

Recent Posts

The Answer to the Ultimate Marketing Question

Posted on August 21st, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: Company Communication, Marketing Best Practices, marketing goals

The number 52 represents the total number of contacts per year the best performing companies are making with customers and prospects. ..

Are They Talking Behind Your Back?

Posted on August 14th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: Brand Representation, Employee Communications, Employee Representation, Marketing Communications

When your employee engages in conversation with a stranger and the discussion turns to what each does for a living, what are they saying about your company? Employees who can (and will) evangelize a company’s value proposition, brand, capabilities and culture are invaluable to any organization. ..

Don’t Waste Your Field Sales Team on Cold Calls!

Posted on August 7th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: Cold Calls, Lead Identification, marketing, sales team

I have never quite understood why companies will utilize their outside sales team to make cold calls...

Sustaining your Marketing Efforts

Posted on July 31st, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: Good marketing parctices, Marketing efforts, Marketing programs

Good marketing is a symphony of concurrent activities with events and programs being launched – and followed up on – day in and day out. ..

Demand Generation or Demand Location?

Posted on July 24th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: Brand awareness, Channel partners, Demand creation, Distributors, resellers

Having product or technology expertise may help the channel partners “pitch the vendor’s wares” but it can’t take the place of the vendor’s need and responsibility for creation of brand awareness and loyalty and familiarity with the technology...

Building a Target Customer Profile

Posted on July 17th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: marketing goals, Marketing success, Target customer profile

Effective marketing starts with having a plan outlining tangible goals and then proceeding to build a connection between your company and customers and prospects – linking their business problems with your ability to provide solutions. ..

Winning football teams and winning sales and marketing teams have a lot in common!

Posted on July 10th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: football teams, marketing goals, sales teams

There is an ages old debate between sales and marketing people which attempts to define the purpose of marketing – namely, does marketing exist to provide sales with the materials and support they need (e.g. collateral materials, lead and demand generation programs, etc.) or does marketing in fact, direct and enable the efforts and success of a professional sales organization? In my view the answer is surely the latter...

Why you need a marketing plan

Posted on July 3rd, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: goals, growth, marketing plan

Every company needs a marketing plan. Why? One reason and one reason only: to achieve and sustain accelerated, profitable growth! If a consultant, agency, outsourced marketing company or any other so-called “expert”, tells you anything else (e.g. to build awareness for your brand), run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. Building a brand can be an important tactic in reaching your goal — but it is not, in and of itself, a sustained, long term goal. Nor are lead generation, customer loyalty programs or value propositions. All might have their place for your company – but they are NOT goals...

Taking the time to do marketing right

Posted on February 18th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: company goals, marketing, marketing campaign, ROI

I can name that tune in… 60 days! Remember the old game show where contestants would play a game of “chicken” – daring each other to correctly identify a tune in the fewest number of notes? Well, a version of that same game is played out in businesses everyday as lack of timely commitment by management causes marketing people to agree to insanely short (and ultimately unproductive) time frames to create, and launch (and generate ROI for) marketing programs and events...

Market Expertise Doesn’t Reside Solely in the Marketing Department

Posted on January 15th, 2012 in Thoughts by Jim
Tags: maketing plan, market expertise, marketing department

A recent meeting with a client provided a vivid reminder of this fact. As we are often called upon to do, the purpose of this meeting was to examine the viability of creating a sales and marketing plan to address a specific vertical market – in this case, healthcare. In addition to the usual collection of technologists and sales experts and people from the marketing department, we were fortunate enough to have the presence of the company’s VP of Operations. Despite not being a sales or marketing person, this person was definitely the MVP of the meeting. ..

Work

  • MCG Developed Zayo Dark Fiber Site Using Responsive Design

    It used to be that you could create two versions of your website, one for computers and one for smart phones. But with so many mobile devices and screen sizes available, those days are over. ...

  • TSANet Website and Social Media Campaign

    The Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet) needed to be more effective in promoting their mission of resolving customer support issues through collaborations between multiple technology companies. ...

  • Confio Monster Artwork

    Confio requested extraordinary design and artwork to help bring its database and VMware administrator perfomance software to life. ...

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