I was recently on vacation and could not help but notice this tired, yet sage advice from the Salty Dog Cafe in South Beach Village on Hilton Head Island.
One of my goals during my vacation was to re-read David Meerman Scott’s, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (fourth edition, just released). I did get through most of Scott’s fourth edition and came away more convince than ever that industrial marketers are sitting on a powder keg of opportunity. Yet, many industrial marketers are not aware of this global phenomenon that is right under their posteriors.
As Scott says, “I’m absolutely convinced that you will learn more by emulating successful ideas from outside your industry than by copying what your nearest competitor is doing. Remember, the best thing about new rules is that your competitors probably don’t know about them yet”. This is especially true for our industrial marketing friends.
Then, as I am having a coffee at the local cafe in Hilton Head I get a Google Alert on my smart phone. I have set up Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) so when anybody on the web uses a query and publishes something with critical keywords that interest me I get an “Alert”. I had set up Google Alerts to focus on critical keywords in my industry such as “industrial marketing”, “industrial lead generation”, etc.
(Google recently added tabs to its Gmail service so that your “Primary”, “Social”, “Promotions”, “Updates” are segmented by colored tabs for easier reading. This feature makes monitoring these “Alerts” less time consuming and unobtrusive.)
So…at the cafe I get an “Alert” that a respected industrial marketer by the name of Jared Fabac just published a book titled The Industrial (Marketing) Revolution. I immediately went back to our condo and downloaded the book to my Nexus 7.
Nirvana!
Fabac has written the book that I have wanted to write for some time. I would still like to write a similar book only with success stories from industrial marketers that I have actually worked with…marketers that have embraced the “new rules” as well as the specifics of actual execution. Many of these books lack information about actual execution.
To summarize Fabac’s book; “The time is now for industrial & b2b marketers to understand what must be done to remain competitive. In 5 years, it will far too late”
Salty Dog Cafe has it right, “If you ain’t the lead dog the scenery never changes“
STOP what you are doing right now!
Go to Amazon.com. If you are a Amazon Prime member you can easily look up these books and read the first couple chapters using the “Look Inside” feature or you can go to Fabac’s web site (http://www.industrialmarketingrevolution.com) and get Amazon Preview for free. This will take you less than an hour. If what you read rings true for your company then purchase these valuable resources and execute what they suggest.
Get help if you need it, but you must first change your attitude about industrial marketing and embrace the new “rules”. Then with the concepts that Scott and Fabac skillfully expand and get started NOW.
Once you read either of these books you will know exactly where to shift budgets and resources to get started on these critical tasks.
“By Tom Repp”
