Last month, I was immersed in face-to-face dialogue with senior B2B marketing leaders from well-known companies who were attending Forrester Forums and FLB events, and one thing was blatantly clear. These leaders are so focused on their initiatives, campaigns, and programs that they have lost sight of the thing that matters most: the customer.

In one setting, I led a discussion group about big data. Rather than debate what big data really means and how it can be captured, I focused on how it could be used. I asked the members to think about the different touchpoints their firm has with customers at each stage of the customer life cycle and how the experience delivered at each of those touchpoints could be better informed by the new types of data that are available today. Most struggled with it, because they are not used to thinking about interactions from the customers’ perspective. Instead, they think of it as actions by their marketing and sales teams.

Next, I had the opportunity to sit down for two days of one-on-one meetings with senior marketing leaders who were attending Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum. Naturally, they were asking about the B2B customer experience, so I asked each one how their company goes about capturing information about how their customers buy. The answer was the same: We don’t have much of that information today.

HubSpot has been on a tear, claiming close to 7,000 clients using its Inbound Marketing software to generate leads at the top of the funnel. Most of these clients are self-employed business owners who do their own marketing and small businesses that have a couple marketers on staff.

At its Analyst Day yesterday, HubSpot’s Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah shared some new capabilities of what HubSpot now calls All-in-One Marketing Software. The news should surprise no one, as Brian was clear when he acquired Performable last June that the company wanted to expand from top of the funnel to middle of the funnel and move further up-market to the medium-size enterprise space.

 Here are a couple of my takeaways from the day:

•  Expanding into middle of the funnel makes perfect sense, as the B2B marketing leaders I work with who are trying to transform marketing from providers of "air cover" to drivers of demand have to drastically increase the flow of new leads into the funnel to make it worthwhile to automate the engagement of those people as they move through the funnel. When HubSpot’s SMB customers improve top-of-funnel performance, they move the demand-gen problem further down and are using tools like Eloqua and Marketo. Now these folks can have a single platform for managing the top and the middle.

As marketers, we think of ourselves as social. So why is it that almost 50% of B2B marketers surveyed say that they primarily use social media as just another channel to push messages to their target market?

And those are the ones who are attempting to use social media for demand generation. There are still many who are not. One marketer I talked with recently believes that social media is only useful for marketing to consumers and the gimmicks that B2C marketers use would never work for B2B. To some extent that's true, but B2B and B2C marketing are both about people-to-people communications and eliciting emotional responses, which social is perfect for doing.

I was giving a presentation to a marketing team a few weeks ago, and one of the senior folks in the room said that his buyers are too old, too senior, and too busy to be on Facebook. But we were able to show him that his demographic of buyers does use social media when learning about solutions the company sells. Forrester's B2B Social Technographics data shows that business decision-makers use social media for business purposes, and when it comes to creating content and sharing opinions, they do it more for business than personal reasons.

Social media can be harnessed for generating demand, but you have to recognize how it's different from your other channels and use it differently. 

• Social media is about relationships, so it requires you to engage in two-way conversations and participate consistently.
• Social media is real time, so you need to be monitoring the conversations and taking action on them in real time.
• Social media enhances and amplifies other channels, so it cannot be used in a silo.

I have to admit it; last year, I predicted that 2011 would be the year B2B marketing leaders get the cooperation from their sales leadership counterparts to align marketing and sales around the new buyer journey and finally create a single, integrated, end-to-end, brilliantly shining, awe-inspiring, world-hunger-solving, lead-to-revenue process. 

I likened the chasm that exists between marketing and sales to the similar dysfunction that plagues Washington D.C. — Democrats and Republicans with deeply-rooted differences, who stand their ground, point fingers across the aisle, and blame the other side for everything that's wrong with our country. (Notice that I give both parties equal blame for the dysfunction.)

Well, now that we're in an election year, nothing seems to have improved, and the polarization seems to have intensified. The ability of B2B marketing and sales teams to work together to create demand is still, well . . . politically challenged.

There are lots of reasons for this. In fact, my friend and fellow demand-generation expert Adam Needles (@abneedles) just blogged this morning about our inability to manage demand as an operational process. He said:

"Clearly modern B2B demand generation is failing. And all of the great messaging and creative, smart tradeshow sponsorships, and new technology investments that we throw at the problem cannot help if we are unable make a critical leap. We must be able to manage demand as an operational process."

The window to apply for a dot-brand or dot-category generic top-level domain (gTLD) opens on Thursday, January 12th. Have you driven your company to a decision on what to do? 

Many of the 50-plus marketing leaders I've talked with about this program in the past six months still haven't figured out what they would do with a domain registry but are concerned about another applicant getting their string. This is a very real concern, and I have addressed this and several of the other most frequent questions I've been getting on this topic in my recent report, "It's Decision Time For gTLDs."

So if you don't have your gTLD application ready to submit, what should you do now? First off, don't get so stuck in the hype about the risk of cybersquatters or of someone else getting your dot-brand. Stick to the advice we gave back in June to evaluate this opportunity strategically, looking at what new business initiatives or models you could deploy with the ability to own and operate a registry.

It is not for everyone. In fact, of the 50 companies I've talked with, fewer than 15 have a strategic initiative in mind for gTLDs. It seems like a no-brainer for a pure web-based business, but what about the brick and mortars? Is the Internet core to how you do business? How you attract, sell to, and service customers? How do you distribute your products and services? What about your supply chain? If these questions are relevant, then you need to be taking a closer look.