What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources?

I recently wrote about the need for B2B organisations to transform their marketing from a cost centre to a revenue centre. It's a topic that is attracting an increasing amount of attention, and I'm delighted that Dan McDade of PointClear has agreed to share his experiences of this critical transformation is a guest article for the Inflexion-Point blog. I think you'll enjoy his perspectives - over to you, Dan:

Applying solution selling in today’s increasingly well-educated and often justifiably cynical buying environment requires a profound change in mindset and selling (and marketing) behaviour that many companies never manage to properly master - but the ones that do usually reap substantial rewards.

If you are a B2B sales leader, you may want to look at this. CSO Insights have just published their 2012 Sales Management Optimisation study.  As always, the conclusions from their latest research make compelling reading.

Described as “The most important advance in selling for many years” by no less an authority than Neil (SPIN Selling) Rackham, The Challenger Sale is subtitled “Taking Control of the Customer Conversation”, and with good reason.

I recently received a LinkedIn message from someone whose profile I had accidently visited, saying something along the lines of “I just noticed that you visited my profile on LinkedIn. Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with.” This is the second time this has happened in the past couple of weeks, and I hope that it doesn’t become a habit, because this feels awfully like stalking.

We want our customer to agree with us, right? So why am I suggesting that the last thing you want is for your customer to start by sharing your point of view - at least in the first call? Because there’s a hidden problem if that first conversation goes too smoothly.

According to many marketing leaders I speak to, B2B marketing budgets are coming under increasing pressure. These marketing leaders are being asked by their Managing Directors and Chief Executives (and let’s not forget their Finance Directors and CFOs) to justify what their marketing budgets are actually buying them. Many, as a result, are having to do more with less, and being asked to demonstrate marketing’s contribution to revenue.

How can you simply and succinctly explain what you do to a potential prospect or other interested party, and make them want to learn more? How can you ensure that your story is consistently communicated in every marketing message and in every sales conversation? The key is to make the story simple and uncomplicated - the sort of story that can be laid out in three short sentences and told in the time it takes to ride in an elevator (or a lift, to us Brits).

When you’ve been a customer for more than 20 years, you can sometimes get into the comfortable habit of assuming that the vendor always has your best interests at heart. Which is obviously a dangerous idea - but not nearly so dangerous as a vendor who takes their customer for granted, or who refuses to trust that their grievance is genuine.