Insights Blog

After a rocky 2010 dominated by the Great Recession, we're gearing up for big things in 2011. EMM Group has identified seven developments that we believe will have a significant impact on how companies, clients, and customers interact over the new year.

It’s amazing to me how the same thoughts and concepts seem to circle through the management world over and over again. Take innovation. There is so much buzz and hype about how innovation is the panacea of any company’s growth problems. If only every company could start behaving like Apple.

Most companies have some sales or marketing capability improvement project running every year. Many of these projects however fail to achieve their desired objectives. Processes are created but not used. Dashboards are published but not leveraged. Training is imparted but does not substantially change organizational behavior. Our experience and analysis of such projects reveals that there are primarily two reasons for these projects falling short of their desired goals. (a) Many of these projects do not approach the capability development from a holistic perspective and (b) the capability development model applied is generic and not sensitive to the differences between demand generation activities and other parts of the organization.

Businesses that have mastered the critical processes of organic growth can increase their revenues, and take share from competition, even in an economic downturn when their customers are cutting back expenditures.

I visited Frost & Sullivan’s 10th Annual Sales and Marketing conference in Los Angeles earlier this week. At one of the events, a roundtable on bridging the sales and marketing divide, a fairly senior member of the audience expressed his frustration at hearing the same discussion for the past several decades. He complained that the same arguments were being made, the same imperatives were emphasized, but the silos are still standing tall. In fact, one of the questions raised by the panel moderator was whether the only way to bridge the divide is to make a drastic change like hiring a new CEO. What I found intriguing about the panel and audience discussion was the notion that sales and marketing are two separate functions that have to be somehow bridged. I believe that this is the wrong construct. As long as we refuse to think about them as one process of demand generation, we will continue to re-visit the same challenges.