The Fork In The Road

A Marketer’s Perspective of This Year’s SaaStr Annual

 

Last week, I attended the SaaStr Annual. This now-annual event is equal parts inspiration and celebration of companies who have achieved $0 to $100M and beyond in annual repeatable revenue (ARR). In other words, the number one goal of (almost) every SaaS company. Before I dive into why every marketer should attend similar entrepreneur-focused conferences, here’s my version of ARR:

Despite what some people think, SaaS is not a business model. It is infrastructure and a delivery model. Companies who have been successful with growing ARR have several characteristics in common: 

1. The ability to implement and repeat with little to no customization - Customers may be able to customize or personalize aspects of your service through their management dashboard, but if your developers need to get involved in significant customization for POCs, you are running a custom shop and will never be able to scale.
2. Integration with other preferred and appropriate software - For example, an analytics company not integrated into SFDC and Marketo with plans to add more integrations soon needs to reset its priorities. I say appropriate because integration and partners must match your core value. Check out MobileIron’s partner program. It’s my new favorite partner ecosystem example because the choice of partners fits perfectly with the company’s core offering and value.
3. Have hired the right type of sales and marketing executives - Since I’m a little too passionate about this subject to cover it in two sentences, I refer you to Jason Lemkin’s excellent blogs How to hire your (First) VP Sales (And not screw it up) and Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing — Or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them.

There are many companies that have billed themselves as X as a Service that don’t fit. As cloud has become more mainstream for large enterprise, many of these have moved on to referring to themselves as “cloud-based, on-demand.” 

So, why was a marketing executive like myself absorbing everything that was said that this year’s SaaStr Annual? Because marketing’s job is the work in sync with sales, not just send them leads through pneumatic tubes. Sales and marketing working harmoniously doesn’t mean marketing needs do everything sales wants. In fact, if this were the case, it would be to the detriment of the company. Sales and marketing need to have a “business first” approach. In other words, if I’m not watching everything that affects the business, I’ve failed at my job. 

A good marketing professional, whether an CMO or a product marketing manager, needs to understand corporate goals, including all aspects of sales goals, not just quota numbers. How does the product support what is being sold now and where the market opportunities will be in the future? Are the (sales development reps) SDRs delivering (sales qualified leads) SQLs that have a good chance of resulting in a signed – and implemented – contract? 

Yes, wading through a gaggle of entrepreneurs and SaaS executives is a very good way to spend a day. 

Four Myths of Branding to Forget

Brand building has been making a comeback. As one of the current marketing buzzwords, it’s thrown around in phrases like: “we need a brand expert” and “we want to build our brand.” While the term is used – or misused – outdated or just plain wrong, assumptions about branding persist. Here’s a list of five to forget immediately:

1)   Brand is only advertising/graphical

Although I often think common sense will remove these assumptions, unfortunately I’ve seen this repeatedly in very painful ways. Not too many years ago, I attended a sales and marketing kickoff that included the unveiling of a new corporate brand. The “Why should anyone would care?” and “Why is this relevant?” were missing. The CMO, who only had an advertising background didn’t have the experience or possibly the desire to bridge the gap between visual image and what was being sold.

There are great CMOs that have come from the advertising discipline, but each that’s been successful has embraced the full business environment. A company’s brand cannot sit separately from the rest of sales and marketing. Like an integrated marketing program that leverages themes to create a greater impact, a good brand program pulsates through every aspect of the company. 

2)   Quality technology wins over a strong brand

You silly, silly engineers. Don’t kid yourself into believing if you have a better product, people will naturally pick it. The reality is most people purchase what they know, not what’s the best after thorough side-by-side comparisons. Of course, the perfect company has the best product and a strong brand, but if you have to pick one, pick the strong brand. Just ask Syncplicity. What, you’ve never heard of it? Now owned by EMC, Syncplicity may be a better option than Box.com, but its market share is a fraction of its competitors.

3)   Brand development is a one-way communication

This was never true, and in a world with social media is even less so. In 2012, McDonald’s tried to promote how good it was for farmers and the freshness of its produce with a paid Twitter campaign - #MeettheFarmers. How could the McDonald’s marketing team not see what was coming when it morphed to #MDstories? While McDonald’s wanted to promote its quality, instead the brand was overwhelmed with individual negative experiences, nutritional facts, and ugly rumors. 

4)   Global brands and positioning are the same worldwide

I’d like to say that only a fool would think they can use the same brand attributes and messaging globally, but it would be rude to call so many people fools. Instead, let me give two simple examples. Marketing automation is a widely-used term in the US. However, when starting to sell in Europe, Marketo used the much simpler term of email marketing. How did it know to do this? By monitoring social media and general business conversation, the Marketo marketing team learned what terms where used and understood in the local marketplace.

Conversely, at this same time, I began working with Luma, a Belgium-based company that originally used the term marketing automation to describe its SaaS tool. Luma’s offering had nothing to do with email marketing and thoroughly confused US marketers. Even though technically Luma’s offering was automating part of the marketing process, it was more aligned with localized web-to-print offerings than what most marketers now define as marketing automation. Without listening and understanding what is being said in each region, companies are doomed to at best have missteps and at worse alienate potential customers.

All marketing trends are cyclical. Branding won’t stay the sought-after buzzword. That’s fine. What all marketers need to learn and embrace is branding’s role in an effective overall marketing approach.

The Art of Knowing When It’s Time to Give Up

Success sales today are part mathematics and part art.  Sales teams are assisted by a number of programs that help assess the readiness of a lead to move through the sales process. 

Marketing automation solutions such as Marketo and Eloqua include advanced lead scoring capabilities.  Marketing campaigns can now be created to automatically initiate depending on a lead’s reaction to a previous campaign.  For example, because Mr. Jones registered and attended our webinar about online security, he is sent an email through which he can download a related white paper.

Meanwhile, sales teams can also access real-time business and social intelligence through companies like InsideView.  Knowing the latest of what’s happening with prospects in real-time is something that wasn’t possible a few years ago.

When you add to all these solutions measurement and predictive analytics, it’s plain to see how much investment has been made in creating solutions to help the sales process.  To close a deal, it comes down to the art of the sale, which includes both skill and the gut feeling of how to approach and interact with any given individual.

With all the tools that are available to find leads and advance the sales process, what could be missing?  The answer: when to give up on a deal. 

By now, 100s of millions of dollars have been invested in helping marketing people qualify and nurture leads, and sales people to gather data on any company.  However, when it comes to when to give up on a lead, it is all left to art. 

Sales reps are by nature optimistic people.  They look at a prospect and think “I can convince them to purchase my product.”  To the credit of some of the great sales people I’ve known, they often close deals that initially seemed to be long shots.  Unfortunately, not every long shot is worth pursuing.

There seem to be a few reasons for this. First, if a lead is qualified, but the person is not the likely buyer within the target organization, the sales rep may get trapped in a cycle of having “good conversations” with one person after another, but never with the true decision maker or buyer.  A sales cycle that should be 45-60 days could easily become 9+ months if the initial lead doesn’t hold the budget.

Second, culturally, it may be impossible or unlikely that the sales target will come out and say no.  For example, this is often a surprise to US-centric sales teams, who may come out of a meeting in China thinking their project is moving forward only to learn later it wasn’t approved or would take several more trips to gain approval.  China is not the only place on the globe where people avoid saying no to a salesperson’s face, but it is known for it.

Third, if the sales process extends too long, it raises questions with the lead’s company.  “If we haven’t purchased already, do we really need it?”  In the end, these sales fall apart simply because there is no longer any momentum behind the project.

Honestly, I don’t have an answer for how to know when a deal is artificially lingering.  I’d love to see someone develop a formula that would help companies know when it’s time to pull the plug on a deal that will never close.  Sadly, as many a salesperson has realized firsthand, it is more popular to push revenue generators than something that will save time and money.  This means that in the end, we must continue to rely on the art of sale to not only close deals, but to know when to give up on them.

 

 

Death of the Playbook

I recently met with a CEO who asked me “so what’s your usual playbook?”  Wow.  There are a lot of problems with that question and the person who asked it.  First and foremost, any marketer who thinks they can create a playbook of tactics that will fit any given company should: (a) find a different career; (b) find an industry that hasn’t evolved in the last 10 years – hint: there isn’t one; or (c) work for someone who isn’t expecting much out of their marketing and sales teams.

Playbook marketing implies every situation is the same no matter the season, audience or product.  In other words, marketing is a series of tactics with no need for a brain to create the appropriate strategy. 

Companies who only hire demand generation professionals without balancing them with strategy are unwittingly falling into playbook marketing.  If demand generation efforts aren’t put into context of unique product value and audience, the result is likely to be raw leads that may not equal the most likely buyers.  Gathering a large number of these may actually slow the entire sales cycle.  “Good conversations” with leads who aren’t the right target mean at best your sales team will have multiple calls with several layers of contacts before they find the right person.  At worst, a large number of incoming, indiscriminate leads will distract your sales reps from closing deals.

Soon after Salesforce.com launched, Marc Benioff hired actors to protest in front of a Siebel conference.  Siebel called the police and a marketing legend was born. 

Clearly, this was not from a playbook, but it worked.  I’m now occasionally asked if we should add protesters at a competitors user conference, as if it is now part of a standard playbook. Benioff’s protest worked because it was pure guerilla marketing.  Most people hadn’t seen this before.  It was attention grabbing because it was fresh, creative and spoke to the target audience. 

Fortunately, this past week, I had two CEOs say “I’m willing to try anything if it will get results.”  It’s not surprising that each helms a successful company.  Their questions balance the need to be creative with the need to measure results.  Creativity without measurement is a waste of time and budget.  As more executives acknowledge this, I predict we will see marketing tactics continue to evolve.  Although the new approach is likely to include digital, social and guerilla marketing, it will also include tactics that continue to deliver positive results such as SEO, analyst relations and surveys.  The result will be continually improving marketing programs with improved ROI, and there is no playbook for that. 

 

 

Branding Roadmaps - The Overlooked Path

More than 10 years ago, I canceled merging my consulting practice with another successful boutique consulting practice.  We had already met with the attorneys twice and were about to start drafting the agreements.  I did this when it hit me what the new company would mean to my personal brand.  Frankly, the other managing partner had a habit of fighting with everyone: her own consultants, vendors and even clients.  In fact, my role with our joint clients was already starting to be “the fixer.”  

Canceling the partnership after we had already met with attorneys was a little expensive and a little painful.  I’ve never regretted it.  If we had gone forward, it had the potential to be very expensive (potential lost clients) and I’m certain very painful.  More importantly, I was in danger of having my personal brand damaged with negative general statements about the firm.

Brand perception, whether personal or corporate, is hard to change.  It is doable, and I’ve spent much of my career changing perceptions, but it is so much easier to get it right the first time.  Too often, companies think they’ll get their product where they want it and afterward possibly think about their brand.  Knowing what your brand is doesn’t mean you ignore the product; in fact, it supports the product roadmap.

Your company’s brand must be about the value and emotion you provide now as well as what it will be in the future.  If you plan to make a major switch in your product offerings, you need to build that into a brand roadmap so you don’t make a bold claim now that will come back to bite you in the arse later.

I’ve found people are much more forgiving – within reason – with product features needing to evolve.  But if your stated brand stands for one thing, but everything you do implies something else, your prospects and customers either won’t believe you or will assign their own definition of your brand.

The most successful companies boldly define their brands, then all company actions and marketing efforts support that positioning.  It doesn’t need to be overthought, but someone needs to be the company’s internal voice that says Does this make sense if we are an X company? For example, I couldn’t tell you what Burger King’s brand positioning was during The King advertising phase a few years ago, but I’m fairly certain it wasn’t “Creepy Fast Food Company.” Clearly, its advertising didn’t match what the company wanted its brand to project.

Another question to ask is Should we be doing this if we know in a year we will be doing Y?  Some companies, particularly tech companies, have the wrong assumption that you don’t need to transition brand positioning.  “Today we are this.  Starting tomorrow, we will be this other thing.  Don’t mention what we were before.”  This is confusing at best.  It’s possible to go from point A to B, but you need to connect the dots.  Just like with a product roadmap, you need to show the evolution, even if it is onto a new plain of existence.   

If you cringe when you meet with a company that doesn’t have a product roadmap or plan for how future offerings will be developed, what do you think of companies who haven’t defined who they, what they stand or where they are going?

 

Three (Duh) Ways to Improve Your Marketing

I spent a few days last week in a sales kickoff meeting.  Hungry for qualified leads, the sales team was quite enthusiastic about how we would improve the company’s marketing efforts.   Of course, I love this, but frankly, much of what I said seemed obvious.  Then I realized, for whatever reason, sometimes marketers think too hard and overlook ways they can make easy but significant improvements.

This leads me to give you three (duh) ways to improve your marketing:

1)   Make Your Sales Team Experts Through The Magic of Social Media

As a marketer, I tend not to like using people with sales and marketing titles as company experts. This means unless the topic is business strategies or international marketing, you probably won’t see me presenting at a conference.  However, social media changes this bias.  In the world of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, an expert is defined by the quality of their content.

Salespeople often aren’t given credit for being subject matter experts. Frankly, if they aren’t experts on your product or service, they aren’t worth having on the payroll.

The best way to make a salesperson an expert through social media is to lay down the ground rules, let them know what tools and mediums are available, then get out of their way.  A good example of this is Paul Lancaster, who for three years was business development manager at GoGrid, an IAAS provider. I first found Paul when I started following IAAS experts on Twitter. He got my attention because his tweets went beyond simply retweeting company news releases and included industry news and trends. Paul also co-authors blogs and video blogs, and of course posts on Facebook. He became so well-versed in the IAAS world that a year ago he because manager of cloud ecosystem at GoGrid.

2)   Give Prospects a Chance to Interact with You

Many B2B companies give their prospects few opportunities to show their interest. Outside of “download free trial” or “view a demo” buttons, websites often are missing call to actions (CTAs) that provide valuable information. This is akin to walking in the door of a store, having a clerk pick something off the shelf, and asking if you want to buy it even though you may not have looked at it. Isn’t a better in-store experience when you’ve looked at things that interest you, had someone there to answer your questions and then made a decision to buy?

Yes, you want the option to jump in at any time to try out the product/service, but what if the price point is $100K+ or there are multiple offerings?  You may get prospects viewing your demo, along with your competitors, but outside of a form of contact information, you’ve learned nothing about them or their needs that will help close the deal.

If your company doesn’t have a healthy supply of assets created to be ingested at different stages of the sales cycle, you’re missing the chance to have your customers tell you what is important to them, while also learning more about your product/service. 

Yes, it takes time to create a stable of case studies, white papers, briefs and videos. This is why several should be created at once. For example, a customer has agreed to a case study. Yay! Here’s what you will create:

1. Word version of case study to be laid out as collateral, of course
2. Slide version of case study for inclusion in sales deck when appropriate
3. Video testimonial
4. Blog or video interview blog
5. Three-five slides of a use case for conference presentations
6. Byline article about the problem addressed in the case study
7. Media pitches to interview customer who has accomplished X, Y and Z by using your product/service

Your marketing automation efforts should also go beyond email campaigns. By implementing trigger campaigns, you will provide breadcrumbs in the form of related assets that lead down a path to a qualified lead and then a sale. Trigger campaigns can be defined as If/Then campaigns. If I respond to information about X download, then I’m offered Y download. If I download Y, then I’m offered Z. Soon, I’m contacted and asked if I’m interested in the product/service related to XYZ.

Just as the sales process is a series of yeses, marketing is a series of offers to engage.

3)   Test Your E-Marketing

What? You say of course you test everything. Really? Then I’m willing to bet you are in the minority. Everyone SAYS they test thoroughly, but not really.

Here is a brief quiz to test your thoroughness:

1. When was the last time you clicked on every link on your website, including those that link off the site, such as news clips?
2. Have you tested your website and offering on multiple monitor sizes, with multiple connection speeds? Yes, there are still people on dial-up, but frankly my “super fast” cable line isn’t always super fast.
3. Do you have Flash on your website? If so, why? Have you not heard of iPhones and iPads?
4. Have you tested e-marketing that should pop to a landing page?
5. Do you recheck your links after they’ve been shortened for Twitter? Does every article or infographic load as you expected? 

If you answered yes to all these, congratulations. I have yet to find a perfect company. Take Zuora, which recently announced expansion into EMEA and a USD$36 million series D. I’ve recommended Zuora for years. It is one of the few companies I believe is close to being a sure thing for great success. Having said that, is it my job as a Zuora fan to tell the company there was a problem with its LinkedIn banner ad?  Soon after its new funding was announced, I tried four times over four days to download a white paper advertised on LinkedIn. Each time, there was a problem with its landing page. If this happens with a company that is at the top of its marketing game, imagine what is happening elsewhere.

Clearly this is a short starter list and there are so many easy ways to improve marketing programs quickly. What are your other (duh) ways to improve marketing?

 

Creative or Analytical? - It’s the Wrong Question

I’ve been waiting a few weeks to figure out how I can politely address what may seem like a pet peeve. I’ve finally decided to not be so sensitive and accept that some people will see themselves in the blog post and will need to accept they are less than experts when it comes to marketing.

Wow. What a buildup for what seems to be a simple question: Are you creative or analytical?  As I’ve moved into senior global marketing roles, I’ve been asked this repeatedly. Usually by CEOs who I assume are intelligent in aspects of business.  I’ve always been polite, in part because it’s usually been in the middle of a job interview when this question is asked.  Now it’s time for me to share what’s behind my very polite smile: What an incredibly stupid question!

Yes, there are people in the marketing discipline who lean heavily toward creativity or analytics. However, do you really want to hire one of these people to head your marketing efforts?

Marketing executives, especially in high growth companies, must have a penchant and passion for both.  Only working through a “playbook” of marketing tactics neglects great opportunities to engage prospects.  For companies with a technology without widespread awareness or adoption, working through a series of marketing tactics because you think that’s how marketing is done, may ensure your solution is never seen by the most qualified prospects or that it’ll take a lot more money to get on their radar.

At the same time, I hate, hate , HATE, “gee whiz marketing.” These are super-cool marketing efforts done solely for the purpose of looking super-cool.  Marketing must be done for a purpose.  Sometimes this is lead gen, sometimes it’s awareness, sometimes it’s positioning for a liquidity event.  One of my earliest professional memories was promoting the Clay Court Championship in Pittsburgh, PA.  Our budget was just above USD$ZERO for an event spanning several days and a client willing to try something for the sake of drawing attention to it.  What I came up with was a celebrity charity tournament to be held on the first day of the event.  In Pittsburgh, “celebrities” were mostly media personalities, or in other words, TV  news anchors.  As planned, the celebrities that were invited to participate came with camera crews to show how the stations were supporting the community.  Each then ran it on the evening news.  The result was a measureable increase in attendance both from the previous day and also in comparison to previous years. 

Marketing must be a mix of creative new ideas and previous efforts with a proven track record. Both need forecasted results and ROI, and just as important, thorough measurement during and afterward. The measurement also needs to be the right measurement. For example, measuring lead generation on incoming leads is only a portion of what should be happening.  Ultimately, lead generation should be graded on how many leads reach the opportunity stage and the percentage of projected revenue in those opportunities.  It is also a mistake to assume public relations’ and analyst relations’ efforts cannot be measured.  There is always a way to measure. It takes someone who is creative and analytical to develop a metrics that fits the discipline and the company.

So, I ask again: Would you really want to hire someone who doesn’t have a passion for creative marketing to discover new ways to reach prospects, develop solutions and position your brand AND the analytics to continue to improve your (M)ROI?

 

Benioff Wins This Round

Whether Oracle actually cancelled Marc Benioff’s keynote speech or simply “rescheduled it” to Thursday, a day Benioff couldn’t be there, is immaterial. Oracle World is clearly huge and very focused on all things Oracle. I walked on the bridgeway above Howard Street yesterday and even from the outside, you can see it dwarfs the Dreamforce conference from a month ago. However, if someone thought moving/cancelling Benioff was a way to avoid giving him a voice, they calculated very, very wrong.

Now, no matter what Oracle and its partners announce, Benioff will always be mentioned in any news coverage of the event and, possibly more importantly, the gossip/Twitter streams, and blogs like this one. That means a whole lot of money is being spent and Benioff gets the last laugh.

I missed Benioff’s alternative talk this morning at the St. Regis Hotel – which happens to be across the street from Oracle World – but what he said doesn’t matter. What will remembered is the already famous tweet I saw retweeted dozens of times in my Twitter feed starting yesterday afternoon.

Whether you like Benioff or Larry Ellison, no one should question Benioff on this one. I’m not sure if Ellison actually made the call to cancel Benioff’s keynote or if it was someone else’s idea. If it was some else’s idea, their boss should be asking why someone who can’t think through potential ramifications is in a position to make these types of decisions. Anyone who knows Benioff, his reputation or has read his book should have seen this exact course of action happening, including the “street protest.” If this truly was Ellison’s idea, it is another example of what happens when people can’t tell their leader he has a bad idea. Either way, today, and this particular Oracle World conference, belong to Benioff.

 

What’s Coming and What Could Hold Us Back

Last week, I attended Dreamforce, Salesforce’s conference. Like the now defunct TechCrunch 50, it is a great place to see a lot of very different companies; in this case with a thin layer of similarity. It is the common ground of Salesforce integration that makes the companies so ripe for assessment and comparison. 

I met some old friends, saw the next version of some familiar technology and had a few people lie to my face.

I’m not necessarily in the market for new vendors/technology, so for me it is a perfect time to skim the surface of new companies. There are definitely some interesting things happening.

Without a doubt, social has become more integrated into the mainstream consumer experience over the last 18 months and will continue to expand into the enterprise in creative ways. Having said this, the next significant wave seems to be new ways to leverage business intelligence and predictive analytics. This makes sense given both the technology evolution and the desire for companies to prepare for whichever direction the economy/business may go.

So getting back to the people lying to my face. Enterprise sales and marketing have often sold ahead of what is actually generally available. I get this. If you assume it will take at least two to three months to roll out new software that could push the software into the next release. With the increasing adoption of SaaS and PaaS, this is becoming less likely, but in many cases could still be a legitimate assumption. For startup companies with limited resources, there is also the development plan that builds what customers want, also called customer-sponsored development. If customers understand the timeframe of receiving newly-developed capabilities, this also seems a legitimate approach. I am not labeling either version of this selling technique as a bold-faced lie. 

Unfortunately, there are companies so eager to close deals, they promise features and capabilities that are several releases into the future. If prospective customers don’t know this timing, this can only be seen as intentionally misleading, and if the company in question is promising what it does not intend to deliver, it can be defined as fraud. This has happened throughout the history of business, but combatting it is more important than ever. 

Although the percentage of companies guilty of this might be small, their reach is large. Dreamforce is a good illustration of the reach of SaaS companies. Obviously, main companies around the world use Salesforce. Now these companies are starting to, or are about to start making significant investments with other SaaS vendors. If what they purchase does not meet baseline expectations, it damages the reputation of that vendor, the cloud computing sector and potentially the bottom line of the business that purchased it. “Bad seed” companies can only survive for so long, but it’s the potential for them to drag the rest of us down a peg or two on their way down that will hurt.

 I love startup companies and I love optimism. All I need now is a BS meter for the next conference. 

 

Integrated Marketing: The Only Way to Guarantee Fully Optimized Marketing

For years, I’ve preached the benefits of integrated marketing, so it is time I write about it here as well. Too many companies silo their marketing approaches into narrow disciplines without creating a plan for them to support each other.

The answer is not to only hire generalists without any expertise, but in addition to these focus-area experts, senior marketing executives must be responsible for creating an integrated marketing approach.

One of the easiest ways to begin to create and implement an integrated marketing approach is with a themed approach. Take for example these four potential themes that could run in three or four month cycles over a year:

1)      Cost Savings

2)      Time to Market

3)      New Approach to Old Problem

4)      Sustainability

Messaging related to themes would then be woven into product marketing, analyst relations, demand generation programs and public relations. Like a product launch, the timing of each effort and tactic should be plotted so as to support each other. For example, the analyst relations outreach and thought leadership push would be a few months ahead of the demand generation and messaging to existing customers.

It should go without saying that although the themes and core messaging are the same, each piece must be tailored to a specific audience type. This is even true within the same marketing function. For example, your buyer could be a business unit leader, while the end user (influencer) could be at the staff level. While an attribute such as “easy to use” will resonate with the influencer, it is only a nice additional benefit to the business unit leader looking for a more strategic reason to approve the purchase.

Early stage tech companies sometimes mistake their product attributes for their brand. Others mistake public relations for a brand strategy. A good brand strategy is the perfect example of integrated marketing because it:

• requires articulating the company vision
• influences the product marketing approach and messaging
• determines if the product roadmap is legitimate
• is justified though leadership/analyst relations/public relations/social media
•  is sold as a concept to prospects through demand generation/advertising/ SEM

A siloed marketing approach will never see these commonalities. At best, companies without an integrated marketing approach are wasting time and money by duplicating efforts. At worst, they are weakening their brand and confusing the marketplace.