Bummer, we have to wait another week. Apparently ICANN is concerned about possible tampering with the TLD Application System (TAS), as they rightly should be, so they have closed it down for a few days, resulting in the application window for new gTLDs being extended from today to next Friday, April 20th. As it states on its site, "Recently, we received a report of unusual behavior with the operation of the TAS system. We then identified a technical issue with the TAS system software."

Not that this shouldn't make a difference to you, because if you haven't taken a stand on gTLDs for your company and don't have your application all ready to go by today, you're most likely gonna miss the boat anyway. But as a marketing leader, you need to make sure you have someone paying close attention to the program over the next few weeks.

We've been expecting that ICANN will post the public portions of all the applications on its site by April 30th (don't be surprised if this slips a week as well). By reviewing this posting, you'll see who is applying and what strings they are applying for. Whether or not you have applied for your own gTLD, make sure you go through the list to see if someone has applied for a string that may violate a trademark right for your company or one of your brands. It will be up to you to file a legal rights objection if this happens. It is most likely to happen if you've got a company or product name that is a commonly used word, like United.

Carlos Hidalgo from The Annuitas Group reminded me in his blog post yesterday that at last year's DemandCon, I decided to be a little provocative in my keynote by claiming that "the marketing funnel is dead." I couldn't resist, especially given that the conference logo is a funnel. I didn't get the oohs and aahhs I expected, and no one threw tomatoes.

I went on to explain that the funnel still serves a purpose, but it no longer reflects today's buyer journey, as my colleague Steven Noble articulated in his report "It's Time To Bury The Marketing Funnel." In a nutshell, buyer behavior is less funnel-like than ever before: Buyers don't move in a linear fashion, they don't necessarily narrow their consideration set as they move through their problem-solving process, and, if you deliver a great experience, they buy from you again.

What does a buyer's problem-solving process look like? It's a customer life cycle (see the picture on the right), where business-to-business (B2B) buyers 1) discover they have a problem or an opportunity and get to a point where they realize they need to change the status quo; 2) explore their requirements and the options for solving the problem; 3) select the best solution and acquire it; 4) and engage with the solution provider and with their peers as they implement the solution . . . and so on and so on.

It's a constant tradeoff for B2B CMOs, who want their marketing people to be totally in tune with the customers and markets they serve: "How much should I decentralize by aligning people closely with business units, industries, or regions" versus "How much do I centralize to maximize quality and minimize redundancy?"

I know as a marketing leader that I was constantly trying to figure out the right balance, and it seems like a pendulum. I would hire or assign a few marketing specialists to work with dotted-line reporting to line-of-business heads and then realize that each of them were using their own tools and struggling with the same issues, so I would look for work functions that I could bring back into a centralized role.

To help marketers manage the pendulum, I recently interviewed a dozen CMOs and organizational consultants to gain insights on this. There's no single best org structure that works for all companies, so don't ask me for one, but there are a set of drivers that can help you figure out where on the centralization/decentralization spectrum you should be for the different work streams or functions you need to perform. There are market factors, functional factors, and business factors.

For example, here are some market factors:

• Breadth and diversity of product lines. Companies with narrow or closely-related product lines can centralize more functions, whereas companies with diversified product lines will find it necessary to move people closer to each product line.

My colleague Chris Stutzman reports from the 2011 ANA Masters of Marketing conference that Association of National Advertisers (ANA) CEO Bob Liodice used his keynote presentation to continue to hammer ICANN's generic top-level domain (gTLD) initiative. Maybe he should listen to Dana Anderson, SVP at Kraft Foods, who spoke about how "lasting change happens in leaps and bounds, not through incremental shifts."

I've been advising companies since ICANN's announcement in June on how to evaluate the .brand or .category opportunity, and most of those companies haven't found a bona fide new business opportunity that justifies the investment in a gTLD. But with few exceptions, they're looking at ICANN's plans as one of the biggest opportunities since the dawn of the Internet to take more control of their brand online, which is why the ANA argument troubles me.

The heart of the ANA’s arguments come down to claims that it will cost brands billions of dollars in defensive registrations to protect their trademarks from cybersquatters and other web perpetrators of all sorts. But let's dig into that a little deeper:

• Will it be billions of dollars? I have yet to see ANA produce any data to support its claims that the costs will be staggering.
• Will there be squatters on your .brand gTLD? If you are a brand owner with any IP rights to your brand, there’s no way a perpetrator will win an application for your .brand TLD. Even if one could, no squatter will spend $185,000 on it.

In several of my recent reports, I've made claims about the current state of B2B demand generation. Call me Mr. Doom And Gloom, but from my perch, and from my experience in B2B sales and marketing, it's not a pretty picture. To back up my claims, I decided to survey B2B marketing and sales leaders to gather some data points on the real state of affairs.

Just for kicks, I asked people to give a word or phrase that summarizes their view of the state of demand generation, and the word that appeared most frequently in the responses was "disjointed." Hmmm, how fitting. And there's no shortage of contexts for how that word fits. Disjointed between sales and marketing, disjointed channels, disjointed messages. Shall I continue or enough said? Some of the other words and phrases offered are:

• Challenging
• Chaotic
• Confused
• Evolving
• In flux
• In transition
• Too much noise

Some of the other findings? 

• In 42% of companies, marketing creates leads and sales tools and throws them over the wall to sales.
• Fewer than one-fourth of respondents have defined a lead-to-revenue management process that their marketing and sales teams follow.
• Forty-four percent of respondents say that prospects view communications from them as "disjointed" or "hit or miss."

The good news is that B2B marketing and sales leaders are planning to make big changes over the next 12 months to address many of today's shortcomings. For more stats and insight into what their plans are, see my report The State Of B2B Demand Generation: Disjointed.