Especially his point about the role of B2B marketing being to support sales.

When you peel back all the layers of marketing objectives, strategies and tactics, at the core is the objective of helping your company’s salespeople, reps, resellers and distributors sell the company’s products or services.

The best B2B marketers see their companies’ sale team and channel partners as their customers.

Their primary marketing objectives become filling the sales pipeline with qualified, sales-ready leads and helping their salespeople and channel partners close more sales.

How do they accomplish this? They start by creating awareness, then focus on generating, nurturing and qualifying leads.

In today’s world, where the Internet allows prospects to be in control of the buying process instead of salespeople controlling the selling process, marketing’s assistance in selling the company’s products or services is even more important than ever.

As Morris Hite said in his book Adman, written more than 20 years ago, “Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t.”

The best B2B marketers also help their companies’ salespeople and channel partners by creating the sales tools (i.e. sales literature, presentation materials, templates for sales letters, proposals, follow up emails and more) that are needed to successfully close more sales.

- M. H. (Mac) McIntosh

>http://www.sales-lead-experts.com

But I would challenge his assertion that the “first step” in marketing/sales is telling prospects what you’re selling and why it’s good. They don’t care. I’d argue that the real first step is to target the relevant pain or opportunity your prospect is experiencing and articulating why your product/service is the best way to either overcome the pain or achieve the opportunity. Without that critical, customer-centric focus, we end up making clutter rather than connections.