Alden Cushman

Years of benchmarks and inquiries with clients have uncovered a number of common issues involving channel partners. Many B2B suppliers lack knowledge of effective investment strategies to fuel channel growth. Similarly, most organizations have no measurable way to align channel programs to overarching business strategies, and channel incentive strategies often fail to drive desired performance […]

How can you improve the performance of your B2B sales organization? Set higher quotas? Provide higher commissions or accelerators? Increase training? Hire more sales specialists or, perhaps, administrators? Which levers should you push and why?

OK, an inflammatory headline to be sure – but when it comes to measuring things like demand creation waterfall conversion rates, it couldn’t be more true. As organizations put in place the processes and technology to measure and track waterfall conversion rates and average cost per lead, they’re also realizing that such metrics vary by line of business, target market, product line, region, and even country.

Well, we knew it was just a matter of time before Google issued its own credit card, right? Many companies issue branded credit cards, and now we have Google AdWords Business Credit Card (announced October 8), a formal evolution of its earlier pilot program of extending AdWords credit to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Here’s a tale of two benchmarks, both SiriusDecisions customers. We recently benchmarked their marketing and sales budgets; both have annual revenue of less than $50 million, are primarily software vendors, and have similar average selling prices and sales cycles.

While we’ve all become accustomed to seeing footage of coastal areas being battered by hurricanes, Irene had a surprising impact recently on the northeastern United States. Some places got hit very, very hard by flooding and downed power lines, others less so. I don’t want to minimize the event in any way, but I did […]

LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) went public recently. With luck, your broker “got you in” at the $45 initial offering price, then sold the same day when it peaked above $120 (the price at the time of posting is in the mid $60s). What can we learn from that initial public offering (IPO)? Plenty of folks speculated […]

It’s not easy being me — or you, for that matter. When you really think about it, as individuals and organizations, we are often pulled in opposing directions. For example, we often strive to be better than others: special, unique, to stand out. It’s that 30-second elevator pitch challenge: If you can’t communicate your unique […]

How’s your budget? Is it everything you hoped for or wished for? In most cases, the answer year in and year out is “No.” And that’s to be expected when various business functions within your organization are competing for a limited amount of funding. It is a zero-sum game; more funding for one area means […]

We’ve all suffered through one of those conversations with an endless series of questions: “What are you doing? Why? What are you doing? Why?….” As many know, sometimes the only way to end the cycle is to answer with: “Why not?” Well, during the past year we’ve noticed a somewhat troubling trend in marketing data […]