Previously, PR experts assumed that the CEO was the only credible media expert within the organization. That has changed. Many companies rely too heavily on their CEO for media opportunities and are underutilizing their other leaders. Also, journalists now crave experts with functional experience, especially to share use cases, implementation lessons, and adoption challenges.
In 2024, Yanni Pappas was two months into his first full-time job as a business development representative (BDR) at Workshop-an Omaha-based company that provides internal communications teams with email marketing tools priced from $5,000 to $100,000 per year-when he got transferred to a new role. Now working as a "special products BDR," he was cut off from his company's inbound lead system, making his task of landing demos with prospective customers infinitely more difficult.
Lead management in B2B has evolved into a systems challenge that spans teams, platforms and the entire revenue lifecycle. It is a complex engineering discipline that requires a holistic, lifecycle-driven approach rather than a simple marketing-to-sales handoff. In a recent strategy session, we examined what it takes to build a lead management engine today. We concluded that many organizations are still attempting to solve 2026 problems with a 2010 mindset.
With digital trends accelerating, it's more important than ever that marketers know how to build strong, data-driven marketing strategies. Data-driven marketing is a type of marketing strategy that is based on using consumer information to develop and optimize marketing campaigns and messaging. It is extremely impactful because marketing efforts are based on online trends and are specifically tailored to the organization's target audience.
