Are Marketing and Sales the Odd Couple in Your Business?

By David Mills
on February 07, 2022

Lip service marketing and sales alignment can lead to reduced growth

They do make strange companions. One is seasoned by thousands of customer conversations, while the other is focused on the latest digital communication tools. Alignment pairs the marketer who is just now mastering the details of the product or service, and the salesperson who knows every way to slice the product and solve a long list of customer challenges. The idea that they need to be aligned in the same workplace when they have different goals, different levels of experience, a language unique to each group, and even distinct pipelines can raise some eyebrows or lead to lip-service alignment.

Convert the Growth Manager Honeymoon into Momentum for Growth

By David Mills
on January 25, 2022

The honeymoon period is an important initial period for new growth managers, marketing directors, chief marketing officers, RevOps leaders, and nonprofit executive directors, along with all the others who step into a new role to lead growth for their organizations. It’s an important first phase of work, because team members are more forgiving, expect that you’ll need to be brought up to speed, and no milestones have yet come due. It’s a time in which you can understand the context and the challenges that you now own.

Find a Growth Pathway in 2022 - From SaaS to the Revolutionary War

By David Mills
on January 19, 2022

Achieving a growth pathway takes momentum that can overcome the odds. 

Like hungry soldiers at Valley Forge, they are all tugging on our attention -more than 8,000 different marketing software systems, plus a small army of one-person bands that decided one day to keep working from home and use some of that software. Is that the army that you need?

The Authentic Growth Leader

By David Mills
on January 14, 2022

The rapid pace of change since 2020 has thrust many leaders into the role of growth leader for their organization.  For some it is recovery, and for others it is a response to big new opportunities. Growth leaders can be found in almost every industry and with a variety of job titles. Some have a growth title like "growth manager, while others are working in RevOps. Most don't have a special title at all because they've added the growth leader job to their existing position. Whether they are an owner, a partner, a C-suite leader, or a department head, a growth leader's job has a single central characteristic: their desk is where the buck stops for company growth. 

Story Collaborative and Greentec recognized for prestigious web design with award

By David Mills
on January 14, 2022

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE      

Story Collaborative Wins at the Annual Web Excellence Awards Competition

By David Mills
on January 10, 2022

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE      

3 Reasons Website Choices Become a Management Concern

By David Mills
on December 06, 2021

There are lots of choices about how and where websites are built and hosted. Normally, that's less a management decision and more something for marketing and IT to work out.

But a number of big factors are moving decisions about whether to use WordPress or HubSpot, or Apple or Microsoft onto the manager's list of concerns. One is security, and the other is the central role that websites now play in sustainable growth.

Busy work you don't need - Single Hack Impacts Million+ WordPress Websites

By David Mills
on December 01, 2021

We rely on our websites, now more than ever. Whether you are recruiting employees, nurturing donors or looking for more customers, the digital journey is a must-have, but hacking can stop all of that.

When Godaddy announced that it had allowed 1.2 million WordPress users to be compromised, it added fuel to the already significant fire of security concerns around this much-loved open-source website software.

A Tale of Three Hacks

By David Mills
on November 30, 2021

Here's a tale of 3 hacks and 3 WordPress Websites

Guess what the websites for a local coffee shop, a digital communications company, and a national training company have in common? They all thought that hackers would have little interest in their websites.

Halloween is coming- FrankenPress Still Haunts Marketers with Cobbled WordPress

By David Mills
on November 02, 2021

The heavy load of custom WordPress development, code updates, and time-consuming marketing with cobbled-together resources can strip away a marketer's biggest advantage - speed.

If you have the average number of plugins needed to just run your website, plus additional marketing services that have been cobbled together to support all the channels and target audiences you're trying to reach, then you probably don't have an effective website. You instead have a FrankenPress, a sum of parts that doesn't lead to an effective whole. Even if your website looks good, cobbled-together resources from both the website and the marketing tools add-ons is slowing you down and keeping you from effective marketing.