Trade advertising is virtually (and probably appropriately) dead, as decision makers don't have time to read trade journals, and most magazines have simply stop print publishing.

Direct mail is spectacularly expensive, lists are nororiously bad, and most decision makers don't have the patience to read anything longer than a stock quote.

Banner advertising click-thru rates have become vanishingly small due to media clutter and information overload. Your ads often end up on inappropriate sites. You can't identify visitors unless they fill out a form (which most visitors won't do). Even if you use a lead (IP) tracking service, most so-called "leads" turn out to be just tire-kickers resulting in a cost-per-actual-qualified-lead that is beyond prohibitive.

Inbound and content marketing have also, for most companies, turned out to be nothing more than expensive time-sucks. While they give the appearance of pro-activity and marketing savvy, they simply feed a bottomless bit bucket where content goes to die - giving lie to the idea that virtually any of the buying decision is made before the customer ever talks to a salesperson.

Trade shows, of course, are notable by the lack of decision makers in attendance - if you can even find an appropriate venue.

Networking turns out to be extremely time-consuming. Most of the people you meet would rather sell to you than buy from you. And, as with trade shows, decision makers rarely participate.

Using third-party reps lacks control. And they only target prospects that they're already talking to instead of bringing you into the new accounts you actually want to get into.

Public Relations still has value - if you can get the attention of an influential editor. But, of course, this often means you have to actually know the editor if you want to get published.

Email marketing, the go-to method that everyone thinks is free because they ignore the cost of creating content, usually gets your mail server condemned for spamming. Bounce rates are astronomically high, and click-through rates are microscopically low, leading to, at best, response rates where there are more digits to the right of the decimal point than the left. And, at the end of the day, the good lists you want are simply impossible to acquire.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are useless if prospects don't know to look for you.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an expensive arms race that only the arms dealers like Google can win.

Pay-per-Lead (PPL) marketing is simply a scam.

Social Media Marketing for B2B is like whispering in a hurricane, as most people who post to any of the thousands of "open groups" on LinkedIn have found out.

And doing your own prospecting is even more expensive, and it suffers from the classic Catch-22 of sales: If you're working with clients, then you can't be on the phone prospecting; but if you're on the phones prospecting, then you can't be working with clients. Besides which, nobody likes making cold calls; and, whether it's true or not, everyone says that no one likes receiving them either.

Forget about the fact that very few business owners would even consider investing in market research (most likely because they think they already know the answers, and it's a bit expensive). Most market research is so separated from sales that the payback only comes in long beyond the planning horizon.