Recently I’ve been in touch with a number of CMOs from different growth companies and I asked them what’s the biggest pressing issue for them right now. They all had a common theme: what to measure and how to report it 🤷‍♂️

I just finished reading the book Originals, by Adam Grant. This was a very special gift from a good friend as I was leaving the company we had been working in together for the past five years.

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a magnificent researcher at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His work revolves around the basic idea that, in the end, even the largest organizations are run by individuals, whose brain works in a certain way, given their past memories and their instincts. …

In the first part of this article I addressed how to accelerate the sales closing process with B2B customers. Using return on investment (ROI) as a justification, it is possible to shorten the sales cycle and ensure decisions come faster from within the buying organization.

ROI is the #1 thing that matters for B2B customers when making a purchasing decision. This means that, after they have signed the contract with you, they’ll keep exploring future alternative solutions that are cheaper. Remember: their goal is to increase ROI, which in turn means they won’t settle with your solution if they can…

For the past ten years, I’ve been working for companies that offer software solutions to other companies, that is, business-to-business (B2B) products and services. From 2007 to 2013, I was working as a product marketing manager for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, and from 2014 onward I’ve been working in strategic marketing roles offering software to device manufacturers (OEMs) and enterprises working with the Internet of Things (IoT).

If one thing I learned about B2B markets during my career is that business-to-business models, although very monetarily rewarding, can pose two huge challenges for sales & marketing organizations:

1. Sales cycles can be…

If you use social media as one of the main channels for your digital marketing, specially LinkedIn, you probably know already how hard it is to make a post that brings enough (justifiable) return to your marketing organization. Most posts require a number of hours of creative work, plus a prominent budget for promoting the post online, often resulting in pretty low ROI.

Last summer, I published a post on LinkedIn that was not prepared by any marketing effort, nor it was promoted by using a budget. I simply posted a personal opinion about something that happened to met recently…

During the past two years I’ve read a handful of very interesting business books that helped me in my daily job as a sales & marketing professional. In fact, I’ve been filtering through dozens of books that come with flashy titles and tell you how successful you’ll be in business, to come down to a very narrow list of the very best that truly helped me in my career.

I’ve compiled the top 5 learnings from five of these books in this article:

If you haven’t ever heard the term “inbound marketing”, you should stop reading this and go do something more interesting. But if you have, you’ll know “inbound marketing” is extremely hot at the moment. No matter whether you work in a startup or for a large corporation, these days everybody working in marketing seems to be sold to the promise of making a huge sales leap by solely relying on a content strategy and inbound tools. However, my experience tells me that “inbound marketing” is a broken promise, especially when it comes to B2B marketing.

As a background, I work…

As of writing this, I work for Tuxera, a growth company that builds software for self-driving cars and is based in Finland 🇫🇮, Northern Europe. My main job as the Head of Marketing is to lead their marketing strategy to support the fast growth in the coming years (i.e., keep above 30% YoY).

Last year, I had one of the rarest work situations as a manager. We had just hired our new communications manager who, after only six weeks of trial, decided to leave the company. Completely shocked, I had a debriefing session with him to learn what we could…