Closing Keynoter Mac McIntosh’s Wish Lists for B2B Marketing and Sales, Part One

May 25th, 2006

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh is described by many as one of America’s leading business-to-business marketing consultants and an expert on the subject of sales leads.  His firm, Mac McIntosh Incorporated, located in North Kingstown, RI, specializes in helping companies who sell products or services to other companies to:

• Generate more high-quality sales leads.
• Nurture and qualify leads as being sales-ready.
• Convert leads into new business and sales revenue.
• Track and measure marketing results and ROI.

Mac’s consulting clients include dozens of industry leaders like ADC, CardScan, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, NSK and Sigma-Aldrich, as well as many small and medium-sized companies you may not have heard of—yet.

In addition to consulting, Mac conducts marketing workshops and seminars for leading associations and corporations around the world, writes regularly for leading marketing and business publications, and is the publisher of Sales Lead Report®, a newsletter with more than 14,000 B2B marketing professionals as subscribers.

At NEDMA ’06, It’s a Brave New World, the New England Direct Marketing Association’s Conference and Exposition, Mac will be delivering the closing keynote (June 15, 4:30-5:30 PM), entitled “How to Get Your CEO, CFO, the Folks in Sales, Your Agency and Your Client to Buy Into Your Marketing Plan.”

But you don’t have to wait till the conference to hear from Mac. Today, he’s going to share with us just a few of his many wishes for B2B marketing pros. Tomorrow, he’ll do the same, only for those on the sales side of the equation. Here’s Mac…

•I wish that more marketers would interview a couple of their company’s prospects and customers every week. This will help them to better understand their prospects’ and customers’ needs and points-of-view, allowing the marketers to better craft and target their marketing messages. It would also give the marketers a lot more credibility with management, product development, finance, and sales.

•I wish more marketers would start treating the company’s sales people as though they were the customer. (They are the marketer’s customer. The end buyer is the salesperson’s customer.) This approach will allow marketers to better focus on supporting their company’s salespeople and driving sales and revenue with their marketing programs.

•I wish more marketers would make the time to regularly accompany their company’s sales people, reps, dealers or distributors on sales calls. This would give the marketers a better understanding of what the salespeople are up against and what sales tools marketing could and should provide to assist salespeople with demonstrating, proposing and closing sales.

•I wish more companies would stop wasting the sales leads they invested hundreds or thousands of dollars each to get. How? By putting in place marketing programs designed to nurture those leads until they are ripe and ready for sales attention.

•I wish marketers did the work required to better understand the true value of sales leads to their companies. If they tracked and measured cost-per-inquiry, cost-per-qualified-lead, cost-per-closed lead and the average sales value of leads that close, they could demonstrate their contribution to the company’s sales goals and use the same information to justify their marketing budgets.

Remember, there’s more from Mac – right here – tomorrow. Do stay tuned….

Note from Mac McIntosh: Giving credit where credit is due, not all the items above were my ideas. I enlisted the aid of a small group of business-to-business sales and marketing professionals who subscribe to Sales Lead Report®. They include Peter Altschuler, Bob Derr, Tracy Emerick, Dianna Huff, Mike Wallen and Kristin Zhivago.

Entry Filed under: Speakers