My New Year’s Resolutions to You

Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were fun and relaxing.

I, along with many of you, have spent the last couple of weeks reviewing the successes as well as the learning points 2011 offered. Also I have spent this time contemplating the areas of my life I am pleased with and will continue, as well as making commitments in areas I am dedicated to strengthening.

Thanks to the commitments I made to myself a couple of years ago I am in pretty good physical shape and am a healthy weight, so I will not bore you with the subtleties of my resolutions in this area. You are also probably not wildly interested in the commitments I made relating to my life with my family, friends and spiritual life.

What’s in it for you? Professional resolutions have always been a big part of my commitments for a given new year, but this year they are center stage under a bright spotlight.

Successful business-to-business communications and business development approaches have changed. Driven by technology, lean teams within most companies and corporate cost cutting, the way your customers make their way through buying cycles has changed. This said, the age old saying….."The more things change, the more they stay the same" certainly applies. Your customers are people and people do not change their views, perceptions and behaviors as quickly as technology changes.

So, I resolve to you to:

• Multiply my dedication to ongoing professional development so that I, along with the full Pharmaceutical Manufacturing team, can bring the latest marketing communications thinking and approaches to you. In fact, Putman Media has invested to send myself and one of my colleagues to American Business Media’s B2B Advanced Leadership Program at Northwestern University next week so stay tuned.
  

• Drive myself and our team to develop new and creative solutions to address your marketing communications and business development challenges.

• Continue to work to understand and meet our audiences’ information and knowledge needs.

• Not letting our commitment to the creation of leading edge editorial waiver.

• Professionally making recommendations to assure that your Pharmaceutical Manufacturing marketing communications programs meet and exceed your expectations.

I am excited about this year and look forward to working with you to achieve your 2012 goals and maybe to helping you to work on one or two of your own resolutions.

I wish you peace, blessings and success in the New Year.

Webinar: What Your Love Life & Lead Nurturing Having in Common?

Continuing on the dating/b2b marketing theme, the following is an Eloqua lead nurturing webcast that I think that you might find helpful. Click here to access the webcast.

Revisiting the B2B Marketing - Dating Comparison

Early in 2009 I wrote a posted entitled B2B Marketing and Dating - A Parallel for Consideration.

I wrote this post because I really do believe that the seduction effective marketing programs demand is in a lot of ways quite similar to dating.

Yesterday I had lunch with a couple of smart clients whose opinions and insights I really respect. That conversations simulated additional thought on the b2b marketing/dating comparison.

It might be easier for many of us to see the comparison I am making if we look at consumer marketing. There is no question that the marketing programs of car, perfume, clothing companies, as well as many other categories are working hard to seduce us.

Is there a comparable seduction required to sell solutions like valves, motors, business software solutions...? I contend yes. Of course, effective b2b marketing needs to be more informational than a perfume ad AND b2b marketers need to tap into different emotions. But, effective b2b marketing still needs to seduce human beings.

For instance, clothing companies targeting my demographic work to tap into the fact that every woman wants to feel pretty, most want to feel thinner, many want to express their personalities via the clothes they wear. So, to a prospective woman customer in her late thirties/forties, clothing companies will likely present a pretty, sensual woman who is thin (but not too thin) and who has a fun, dynamic and sparkling personality. What woman of my age does not want to feel fun, pretty and that she still has "it?"

We all are the same emotional creatures when we walk into our offices...we just tap into different emotions. We want to feel smart, successful, upwardly mobile, safe/we are making the right decisions, less burdened, less stressed, like a hero to our customers and colleagues. I believe most of us often experience quite complex and deep emotions via our professional activities. Career satisfaction study after career satisfaction study clearly demonstrate that our jobs are not "just a job."

I don't know about you, but I can begrudgingly accept not being as thin as I used to be and having a few wrinkles here and there. BUT, I cannot accept feeling that I am failing. I don't think that these feeling are particularly unique to me.

So as b2b marketers we do need to seduce our customers and prospects--can we make them know that they will be heroes, make them more effective/successful, convince them that as solution suppliers we will not let them down?

And....just as when we are dating, can we accomplish this in an appropriate fashion that respects and embraces the emotional beings we all are?

In a dating situation, if we try to move too fast or if we violate our beloved's trust we will experience a lot of rejection and quick cooling of budding passions. Similarly, in a b2b marketing situation if we violate trust, try to move too quickly our conversion rates will suffer horribly....or to look at it another way, many potential customers will abandon potential engagement.

Check out the parable within the B2B Marketing and Dating - A Parallel for Consideration post and let me know what you think.

The Difference between Social Media and Social Networks

by Greg Satell

Twitter is a social network, but social networks are not Twitter.

Much of the hype about social media obscures a vastly greater opportunity. Although social media types love to tell the rest of us that we “just don’t get it,” the fact is that very few social “gurus”s have actually taken the time to learn anything about social networks.

Happily, the joke is on them. Social networks are where the real money is. Read More

The Primal Forces that Drive Social Networks

Fascinating. You may need to "hang on" a little bit, but the network theories touched upon in this article, if strategically applied could have a powerful effect on marketing campaigns and approaches.

The Primal Forces That Drive Social Networks
by Greg Satell

Social Networks are revolutionizing how we view our world. People are connecting, businesses are being created or transformed, and the world seems like a smaller place. As with any transformation on a grand scale, a plethora of consultants, gurus, blogs, and how-to books have risen to meet the demand for information about the social revolution.

However, it is very rare to hear anything about the underlying forces that actually drive the social network phenomenon. Read More

Is Saving Children’s Lives Just Another Business Opportunity?

Pharmaceutical Manufacturing does several surveys and research studies over the course of the year to track pharmaceutical industry trends.

It is common market research practice to offer an incentive to survey respondents and for several years we followed the fairly uninspired practice of offering the chance to win one of three $50 gift cards, the chance to win an iPod or fairly conventional offers of this nature.

This year we decided that rather than standard survey incentives. we would donate money to a charitable cause in honor of survey respondents.

The Pharmaceutical Manufacturing team selected St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as our charity of choice. We felt good about the idea of helping to support, in at least a small way, St. Jude’s important work of “Finding Cures. Saving Children.”

In addition, based on our knowledge and coverage of the industry, we know that St. Jude is doing some outstanding work.

In December 2009 we deployed our first research study in which we notified our audience that we would make a donation to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in honor of survey participants.

In fairly short order we were contacted by the Corporate Affiliates department of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (I did not even think to call them in advance). Great I thought! One less phone call I had to make to determine where to send the checks.

We would not make huge donations ($150 - $200 at a time which is our typical incentive budget per survey—$1500 – $2,500 over the course of the year), but I believe every bit helps when you are working toward something big and important.

Although I certainly did not expect to be given V.I.P treatment, I did expect that our donations would be politely received and perhaps we would even enjoy some level of feigned gratefulness.

I was informed that St. Jude was not interested in “our opportunity” and that the minimum donation for their corporate affiliate program was $250,000.

As a highly specialized information source, I don’t even believe that Pharmaceutical Manufacturing benefits much from offering any kind of incentive for the completion of our surveys. However, I view our research incentive budget as a small opportunity for us to do a little bit of good.

The St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital does outstanding and important work, but their “business,” their “brand,” is not interested in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing’s “opportunity.” I am O.K. with that. Non-profits have been hit hard by this recession just as businesses and individuals have. Plenty of organizations are seeking donations of any size.

Maybe this situation worked out for the best. CharityNavigator.org, a resource I find to be quite helpful, features some interesting information that points to the potential need for St. Jude to improve fund raising and administrative efficiencies. Click here if you are interested in reviewing CharityNavigator.org's ALSAC-St. Jude Children's Research Hospital profile.

The Pharmaceutical Manufacturing brand is not ours, it is yours. Without our loyal audience and advertising supporters, there would be no Pharmaceutical Manufacturing. In this spirit, please e-mail me at tbecker@putman.net or post a blog comment naming the organizations you would like us to support. We will maintain a list of organizations we donate to on our website PharmaManufacturing.com.

Because we made a promise to the respondents of our 2010 Career and Salary Satisfaction Survey that we would donate to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a donation of $150.00 has been sent.

Please understand, our donations will not be huge. But as Mother Teresa so beautifully said, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”