Business Marketing Association Minnesota Chapter

There are many reasons innovation doesn't happen successfully in businesses. Sometimes it's because there's NO orientation or mandate to innovate. In other cases, there are NO perceived capabilities in place or NO processes for innovation. On November 4, 2010, Mike Brown, strategist at The Brainzooming Group and author of the ebook Taking the NO Out of InNOvation, led an exploration of how to remove roadblocks that hold back an organization and offered insights on how to drive innovation in the B2B space.

On September 16, 2010, Eric Scheel, co-founder and CTO of FICO (formerly Fair Isaac) took BMA-Minnesota on an exploration of the definition and application of Social CRM for B2B organizations. Attendees will receive a guided tour of the FICO B2B community that is changing the way their business drives sales and facilitates 24x7 client collaboration.

On July 13, 2010, BMA-Minnesota welcomed Sean Geehan, author of The B2B Executive Playbook and founder of the Geehan Group and Tom Webster, CEO at Intesource. The duo described the framework and key principles B2B marketers should use to develop a game plan for creating strategic relationships with clients that yield valuable business results to predictably drive revenue and earnings.

No one can predict the future, but on May 18, 2010, Futurist Cecily Sommers taught BMA-Minnesota meeting attendees how to understand and anticipate change in order to invent and own their companies’ and clients’ future.

Sommers’ media-rich presentation took attendees on a guided tour of the future, showing them how to manage long-term thinking in a world that demands delivery today, through four main ideas:

• The brain, business and government are wired for the “Permanent Present” and resist change
• There are four constant and predictable forces shaping the future
• Every strategic conversation should include three dramatic disruptions
• B2B marketers must manage an innovation portfolio that plans on the far and future, while delivering on the near and now

On April 20, 2010 Pollywog co-founders John Stucker and Devon Thomas Treadwell instructed BMA-Minnesota meeting attendees “to forget everything you know about naming for B2B because the rules are changing.”

Through a provactative presentation, Stucker and Thomas Treadwell took the audience on a journey through brand naming through the ages and how converging trends are affecting naming for B2B marketers. Along is journey they also discussed:

* What a Brand Name Needs to Succeed in the Digital Age
* Power Names
* Elements of a Power Name
* What a Power Name Does for a Brand
* Is Your Brand Working For You or Against You?
 

While the B2B decision-making process may be more complicated and involve more people than the B2C process, the two have more in common than many may think. In the end it’s all B2P: business to people.

Despite being snow bound in New Jersey on February 11, 2010, Dan Hill, Ph.D, president of Sensory Logic, Inc., and author of “Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success” shared with the audience via the Web a power presentation on the scientific basis of why everyone feels before they think, how B2B is really B2P, the guiding rules and examples of B2B marketing, and more.