Every marketer should take a sales guy to lunch: Madlibs with Steve Gershik

Every marketer should take a sales guy to lunch: Madlibs with Steve Gershik:
Today’s Madlibs features my good friend Steve Gershik who may have the best combination of brains and humor of anyone I know. Really. He is that funny and that skilled at mixing humor with b2b marketing. I always try to get him to do webinars with me because I laugh and learn. (which is the best combo I know). He is currently applying his years of best practices as the VP of Marketing for StackMob and being awesome. I hope you enjoy his Madlibs, I certainly did. (As I expected I would…)

1. The b2b buyer is now smarter about your product than most B2B marketers and sales people.

2. The biggest innovation in marketing is technology that connects marketing results to activities.

3. The coolest thing happening in b2b marketing is predictive analytics.

4. My favorite marketing book is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

5. My favorite social media channel is Facebook for friends; LinkedIn for colleagues.

6. Social media for b2b is in need of a revised focus on the buyer, not the seller.

7. b2b video is an excellent idea to drive rapport-building with prospective buyers. It helps communicate information, culture and confidence.

8. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is myopic. So is the idea of a waterfall, a pipeline or any other metaphor that leads marketers to believe that leads flow in a linear fashion.

9. The first thing every marketer should do is take a sales guy to lunch.

10. Content marketing is a more pleasant and interesting form of interruption marketing.

11. The biggest mistake marketers make is to believe that “x is dead.” Conversely, dismissing new technologies (like mobile) as “not relevant to B2B.”

12. The biggest myth in b2b marketing is “the buyer is in control.” There are so many factors in control of a B2B buying decision: buying centers, power considerations, politics, cronyism, rapport and timing. It’s impossible to say that anybody is even in control of the sale.

13. My favorite marketing technology besides marketing automation is CRM.

14. Besides revenue, the metric every marketer must track is Sales Accepted Leads -> Sales Qualified Opportunities.

15. My most forgettable marketing experience is dead to me now.

16. Mobile marketing is still in it’s infancy. In the future, mobile marketing will simply be called, “marketing.”

17. The next “hot-thing” in marketing will be predictive analytics or “how to use big data in a way that most marketers can understand.”

18. In 2015, marketing will continue to try to figure out how to tie marketing activity to financial outcomes.

19. Over the next couple years in marketing, I can’t wait to see when the wave of technology tools that enable mobile marketing will crash on the shores of the industry.

20. Madlibs with the Funnelholic is fabulous. In fact, they really should be called Fablibs.

Steve Gershik is Vice President of Marketing at StackMob, a mobile applications platform provider that helps developers get to market quickly at an insanely lower cost. Previously, he served as VP marketing at companies like Eloqua, TOA Technologies and Sirius Decisions. He’s co-founder of DemandCon and an instructor at the Marketing Automation Institute.