by Giancarlo Sopo

Sometimes it's tough to find truly great marketing advice on the internet because it seems as though everyone has an opinion (including yours truly). But if you haven't done so already, make sure to check-out "Rethinking Marketing" from the January-February 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review. I recently re-read it while creating a marketing plan for a client and was struck by how "spot-on" the authors were -- especially for B2B marketers.

The authors' main advice to companies is to shift the focus away from pushing their products to building value for their clients. Here are the key points:

• Companies should leverage technology to understand and interact with their customers, rather than solely depending on one-way communications. In other words, if your business has a social media account, use it to engage your customers and fully appreciate their needs, not just to push information their way.
• Focus on building long-term relationships with your clients that are a constant source of value to them, not just on individual products. Let's be clear, having great products is important, but it's only important to the degree to which it helps your existing clients or new ones address their known and unrealized needs.
• Restructure the role of the CMO as the Chief Client Officer. I'm not sure that I agree with all of the organizational recommendations by the authors, but the general premise that marketers should see their jobs within a company as their clients' best friends is 100% right -- especially in B2B settings.
• Metrics and incentives need to be realigned to focus on the customer. The authors argue that rather than looking at product profitability, current sales, brand equity and market share as their chief KPIs, they should instead be emphasizing customer profitability, customer lifetime value, customer equity and customer equity share. If your business has solid fundamentals then this approach should allow you to achieve exponential growth. If your fundamentals aren't there, then stressing out about product profitability and market share won't do you any good.

A customer-centric approach to marketing is the right model for B2B companies.

The one cautionary point, as Professor Clay Christensen noted in The Innovator's Dilemma, is that focusing too much on your customers, at the expense of having a good pulse on greater market trends, can result in the type of myopia that leaves you vulnerable to disruptive technologies and competition (see: Blockbuster which thought that what their customers wanted were nicer brick-and-mortar rental stores).

However, if you have a great team that is responsive to its customers, invests in innovation and has an eye toward the future, you are setting yourself, your company, and most importantly, your clients, up for growth.