Welcome to the blog of the most strategically-biased branding, marketing agency, advertising agency, interactive agency, digital marketing agency and Web design agency serving the Pacific Northwest.  We gladly serve Bend, Oregon, Portland Oregon, Eugene, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and all 50 United States.

SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales is happy to announce their Pacific Northwest office now serving Portland, in Portland where other Portland marketing agencies serve. 

We’re excited to join the variety of Portland marketing agencies and marketing agencies serving the Portland area.

SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales brings decades of strategic brand marketing agency experience now serving the Portland demographic with other Portland marketing agencies who also act as marketing agencies serving the Portland geographic area.

SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales is committed to providing a return on investment (ROI) for every client every time, serving Portland businesses along with other featured Portland marketing agencies, and serving as marketing agencies in Portland. SalesFish promises to be number one in providing overall ROI for their clients.

What differentiates SalesFish from other Portland marketing agencies serving as marketing agencies in the Portland area, is our integrated marketing and sales model.

As a world class marketing agency helping west coast B2B organizations seeking world-class marketing agencies, SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales has provided over 60 billion dollars in quantifiable sales for their clients.

We know of NO other marketing agencies or marketing agencies serving the Portland area that can make such boastful claims.

The reason SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales can make such claims is because as marketing agencies go, we provide B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales. 

In serving Portland businesses within the Portland marketing agencies community who also serve as marketing agencies in Portland, we at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales commit to being the best.  SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales will now bring their B2B Sales, B2B Telemarketing and B2B Telesales model to Portland.

We hope to provide our sales model to other Portland Marketing Agencies as well, knowing that in a down economy, sales sell.

Stay tuned! We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales Agency, Marketing Agency, Advertising Agency, Interactive Agency, Digital Marketing Agency, Web Design Agency, B2B Telesales and B2B Telemarketing thank you for joining us in the commitment to unwavering strategic marketing and sales.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically-biased branding, marketing agency, advertising agency, interactive agency, digital marketing agency and Web design agency.  We gladly serve Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and all 50 United States.

In this week’s entry we want to discuss how outsourcing to a marketing or advertising agency is GREAT resourcing!

We believe a great strategy for any organization is to outsource your marketing activities to a world-class advertising and marketing agency.  In the immortal words of famous business author Jim Collins it’s just Good-to-GREAT business!  The benefits of having your own on-demand marketing department, marketing agency, advertising agency, interactive agency, digital marketing agency and Web design agency are endless. 

One of the greatest advantages of having YOUR own marketing or advertising agency is the immediate TEAM aspect.  From the day your organization decides to hire their own brand marketing agency, marketing agency, advertising agency, interactive agency, digital marketing agency and Web design agency, you have a full service strategic marketing team ready to assist your organization in REACHING their marketing and sales goals. 

Your marketing agency, advertising agency, interactive agency, digital marketing agency, and Web design agency brings the added benefit of decades of proven experience working in multiple categories and solving multiple complex marketing and business challenges.  Instead of managing and hiring internal resources, which soon become siloed, you have the improvement of becoming a great marketing maestro with a great team to conduct.

Stay tuned! We at SalesFish Brand Marketing Agency, Marketing Agency, Advertising Agency, Interactive Agency, Digital Marketing Agency, Web Design Agency, B2B Telesales and B2B Telemarketing thank you for joining us in the commitment to unwavering strategic marketing and sales.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically-biased branding, marketing, interactive marketing agency, Web design agency and advertising agency, serving Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and all 50 United States.

In our last entry we discussed the importance of research, qualitative surveys, and understanding your target market’s true needs and wants.  Okay, now that you executed your qualitative research, now what? 

Did you complete your research to understand the needs and wants of a particular target market segment regarding a product or service? Or did your research ascertain information for the purpose of creating intellectual property, such as a brand promise (tagline), advertising campaign, Web design and/or product development?

You may have used your research to understand the buying behaviors or preferred communication methods of a target market.  You can pass this information to both your sales and marketing departments.

Bottom line:  Did you capture the information you need to make intelligent business or marketing decisions?  If not, re-tool your survey instrument to reflect the information you’re trying to capture. Then execute again.    

Stay tuned! We at SalesFish Brand Marketing, B2BSales, B2B Telesales, and B2B Telemarketing thank you for joining us in the commitment to unwavering strategic marketing and sales.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically-biased branding agency, marketing agency, interactive marketing agency, web design and advertising agency.  We proudly serve Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and all 50 United States.

In previous posts, we discussed the importance of discovering your brand’s promise.  For this week’s entry we journey back onto the trail and subject of strategic marketing. 

One of the fundamentals of disciplined strategic marketing is research. Today we discuss creating a qualitative research campaign. Our first goal is to understand our target market and what we want to accomplish regarding qualitative research and getting in their head. 

What is our methodology and how do we plan on obtaining the information we need from our target market?  By creating a quality survey instrument promoting questions invoking the mind of our target market. This instrument will reveal our target market’s specific emotions regarding their needs or wants concerning a particular product brand or services, etc.

Whether in person or on the phone, it’s important to have qualified marketing professionals executing the surveys. Like doctors, these professionals understand the process of obtaining qualitative information. 

We also recommend for each survey instrument executed you pay the target a fee for their time.  Not only does this guarantee the quality of your campaign, it also speeds up completion time.

Stay tuned! We at SalesFish Brand Marketing, B2BSales, B2B Telesales, and B2B telemarketing thank you for joining us in our unwavering commitment to strategic marketing and sales.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically-biased branding, marketing, interactive marketing agency, Web design and advertising agency.  We serve Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and all 50 United States.

In this week’s brand marketing entry we journey off the path a bit but promise to stay relevant for future posts. The rabbit trail comes to us via Ellis Booker in the publication BtoB Online: 

The conventional wisdom that marketers struggle with a broken, dysfunctional relationship with their counterparts in sales may not be entirely accurate, according to the results of a just-completed survey by BtoB and SaaS solution provider Genius.com.

The “B2B Marketer Skills Snapshot Survey,” conducted in March and April, asked marketers to rate their skills, favorite success metrics, challenges, technology adoption and use of social media.

Asked about job difficulties, 39% of respondents put “working with the sales team” toward the “not difficult at all” side of a 1-to-5 scale. Many more respondents (73%) said “doing more with less resources” was “difficult” or “very difficult.”

Contacted after the survey, a number of respondents agreed the marketing-sales relationship had improved in the past few years.

“If anything, I would identify it as a strategic change,” said Tracey Fanelli, senior VP-marketing and communications at Wells Fargo. “Over the last five or so years, I think b-to-b marketers are realizing that they can’t be successful without creating better alignment with their sales partners.”

Ernest Thompson, director-corporate marketing and branding for Guardian Industries, a global manufacturer of glass, automotive and building products, said the recession made it “prudent to get along and build something together.” But he added there were other trends, too, helping push sales and marketing together: “Technology makes it easier to communicate in real time, and that enhances the relationship. Organizationally, there’s a trend toward compensation schemes that apply to both sales and marketing.”

While the survey found more than half (56%) of respondents do not have their compensation tied to sales goals, 22% said that between 1% and 25% of their compensation was tied to such goals.

In other companies, the breakthrough was technical. That was the case at ADP Canada, said Heidi Schwende, online marketing manager. “Eloqua now feeds our customer relationship management system [from] Salesforce.com,” she said.

The survey did uncover a seeming inequity in information sharing between marketing and sales organizations. Asked how much data are shared with sales, 17% of respondents said “10% or less.” But when asked how much data they received from sales, 31% said “10% or less.”

“The survey demonstrates that a majority of marketers are struggling to connect all of the pieces necessary for building and maintaining a successful, sustainable and scalable marketing program,” said Scott Mersy, VP-marketing and products at Genius.com. “By stepping up to new channels, technologies and processes, like social media, marketing automation and lead nurturing, marketers hold the key to effectively reaching their goals and proving marketing’s impact on the top line.”

The survey found more than half of respondents (55%) ranked their skills in being “sales-driven” (able to map revenue back to marketing tactics) as “strong” or “strongest.” On the other hand, this axis had the highest percentage of “weak” or “weakest” self-ratings, at 17%.

Interestingly, regarding their two top strengths, marketers ranked their “strategic” capabilities (defined as the ability to “see market trends and leverage them”) slightly above “creativity” (defined as the ability to “constantly come up with fresh approaches”), 71% to 69%.

Asked what would most help to alleviate their challenges, “increased budget” was the clear winner, followed by “bigger team/staff.” This result was consistent regardless of the size of the organization.

Among other findings of the survey:

Asked to rank in importance the metrics they use to judge the success of an online campaign, revenue (87%) beat out gross measures such as click-through rate (53%) and Web site traffic (48%), seeming to indicate that, online at least, marketers have come to align their metrics with bottom-line business objectives.

When asked about the goal and mission of the marketing department, the largest percentage of respondents picked “to drive qualified leads,” with more than half (52%) saying this was marketing’s “most important” mission.

Conducted between March 19 and April 5, the e-mail “B2B Marketer Skills Snapshot Survey” collected 544 responses, 68% from primarily b-to-b marketing organizations.

Stay tuned! We at SalesFish Brand Marketing, B2BSales, B2B Telesales, and B2B telemarketing thank you for joining us in our unwavering commitment to strategic marketing and sales.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically biased marketing and advertising agency, serving Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County San Diego and all 50 United States.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically biased marketing, and advertising agency serving Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County San Diego and all 50 United States. 

In our last discussion we spoke about the definition of branding and the importance of creating positive emotional ties with your company’s product or service.  While creating your company’s emotional ties, you must consider your brand promise as the very foundation of your brand and its identity. 

All brands seek to behold a promise in the mind of their target market.  This means your brand promise must be true and relative to your target audience as well as something you can back up. Let’s use a great example of BMW and their Ultimate Driving Machine brand promise.  If BMW was less than ultimate in their performance and service, how would their promise fair with their customers?  BMW wouldn’t exist as a top tier player in the automotive space. 

Great brands learn to deliver from the inside out.  They also have more stamina in a down economy.  And while I’m certain BMW took a hit during our current economy, we don’t see a lot of negative press on them.  True brands stand the test of time.  They understand the discipline it takes to not only communicate their promise, but to back it up from the time a prospect speaks with a sales professional, through the customer acquisition process and most importantly all service and support processes.

Does your company or organization currently have a brand promise?  Is it something true, relative and believable to your target audience?  How did you create your brand promise? 

Stay tuned for the path to creating a solid brand promise.  We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in the commitment to unwavering strategic marketing.

Welcome to the blog for California’s most strategically biased marketing, and advertising agency, serving Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County San Diego and all 50 United States.

In marketing the word brand is probably the most misunderstood word in the marketing dictionary.  Many marketing practitioners assume just because they’re spending millions on pretty pictures and tactical ad-hoc marketing, they’re branding.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Branding is a disciplined process.  Brands don’t happen by accident.

A brand, formally defined, is an emotional tie one has with a product or service.  And all brands seek to behold a promise in the mind of their target market.  For example if you wear my running shoes you can Just Do it (Nike), or if you drive my car you enjoy the Ultimate Driving Experience (BMW), or if you use UPS, they ask What Can Brown Do For You Today?

Who’s the first to come to mind when you think fast food?  If you said, “McDonalds” then you know that branding is physiological.   Once a brand enters and owns the mind of their target market they forever own that mind space.  This is why branding doesn’t happen by accident.  It must be executed through a disciplined process of Strategic Marketing.

If your organization desires to be brand driven rather than commodity or transactional driven, then get ready to say NO a lot.  Say NO to ad hoc marketing and communications and NO to marketing that isn’t measured and integrated with SALES & SERVICE.

Stay tuned for future relevant content that speaks specifically to building a world-class brand from the inside out.  We at SalesFish Brand Marketing & Sales thank you for joining us in the commitment to unwavering strategic marketing.