Choose Your Own Marketing Adventure: Carlos Hidalgo on Working With Large Marketing Organizations and Delivering Hard News

Choose Your Own Marketing Adventure: Carlos Hidalgo on Working With Large Marketing Organizations and Delivering Hard News: by Veronica Maria Jarski
Here at MarketingProfs, we’re hard at work pulling together the final agenda for our B2B Forum 2013 this fall. We couldn’t do it without the insight of a select group of trailblazers in the B2B marketing space. Some of those advisers we are highlighting here, in a series of interviews centered around this year’s B2B Forum theme, “Marketing is full of choices.”
Now through the event kickoff in October, we’ll occasionally feature those Q&As on the Daily Fix, so you’ll get plenty of tips and insights about the adventure known as B2B marketing.
Our Q&A guest today from the B2B Forum 2013 is Carlos Hidalgo. Carlos brings more than 20 years’ experience as a B2B marketing thought leader, known for his vision on Demand Process, Demand Transformation, and marketing automation. As CEO and principal of ANNUITAS, Carlos drives strategy and leads ANNUITAS core practice teams to Transform Demand for clients. Most recently, Carlos was named one of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management for the fourth year and was named as a Who’s Who in BtoB Marketing in 2011 and 2012. Prior to ANNUITAS, Carlos was responsible for global SMB marketing at BMC Software. Carlos received his bachelor’s degree in business communications from Cedarville University in Ohio.

1. What marketing tactic would you choose if you could only have one?

I would choose to use the one that was most preferred by my buyers and customers.

2. What challenge have you faced lately, and how did you choose to resolve it?

Any time you have to deliver bad news to a client, it is a challenge. That their marketing and sales organizations are not operating at optimal levels is not something a client wants to hear. The way I handled this was to use the facts to support the statements and then provide a well-documented approach to how they could improve their overall Demand Process and increase their overall value to the organization.

3. What tools do you turn to most for your marketing?

Social media is such a large component of what we are doing to align to our buyers. The use of our blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ to draw folks is one of the most used aspects of our marketing. I would say the second or 1a is our marketing automation solution. Having the ability to deliver key content through the buying cycle at the right time, engage in a one-on-one context with our buyers, track their online behavior, and act on it is key for our marketing and sales approach.

4. Which ‘Princess Bride’ character do you most relate to?

Why, the Dread Pirate Roberts (also known as Westley), of course! And it may not be why you think. While Westley is the hero of the story, gets the beautiful lass, and defeats the dreadful Humperdinck, I relate more to Westley because of his time in the Fire Swamp and his battling of the ROUSes (Rodents of Unusual Sizes). It is not too different than working with large marketing organizations that are trying to navigate the changes in their companies and become high-value organizations. I actually wrote a Daily Fix blog post about marketers and their Fire Swamp.