4 Tools to Create Consensus that Wins More ABM Sales
Your Top Competitor is not Your Competitor Consider this: fully 60% of B2B opportunities every year are lost, not to another provider, but to "no decision" or the status quo, according to a recent enterprise sales study. There is no competitor out there that can come close to killing more deals. Fighting the status quo means that, more than anyone else, you are competing against your own prospect even while you are trying to win them over!
2 Keys We’ve Found to Increase ABM Success
Marketing, as life, often gives you the test and then the lesson. Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a lousy place to go this route. The stakes are higher. This is marketing to win an important account, a big investment with a substantial payoff. It’s marketing under a microscope, where minor areas of miscommunication can have a major impact.
6 Ways to Improve Website Performance
Company websites are central to a brand’s online presence, even with the profusion of other digital touch points on social media and elsewhere. Even if it’s not where you first contact a prospect, it is where most B2B and many B2C prospective buyers end up at some point. As a result, the website is where it’s critical that your brand demonstrates to each of your prospect audiences that you understand them. While building brand affinity is patently important in the B2C world, it is surprisingly even more important in B2B where clients don’t just buy products, they form long-term, high-stakes, vendor relationships. Who you are is at least as important as what you’re selling. My vantage point have is B2B, but most points will apply universally.
Your customers are changing in 2016: 2 surprisingly simple ways to keep up with them
It is inevitable, and absolutely certain, that our customers are changing. We all are in a maelstrom of information, technology developments, demographic shifts, economic volatility, and geo-political uncertainty to name a few. We change every second of every day. It’s a fair guess that customers and prospects do, too. What you need to know is how are your customers changing and what that could mean for your relationship. As in any relationship, if you are not proactive, you have no chance of influencing the relationship and you will discover that only once it’s over!
Use your Company’s Top Problem to Power its Transformation
As you start this year, you have a surprising asset to make this a great year: your greatest weakness. That’s right. Your biggest pain could be your biggest gain. This is no pep talk. This is no self-help psycho-babble. This is an objective, historical observation. I’ve got the stories to prove it. I’m going to share just one famous example. But contact us – we’ve got more. First, the bad news Years ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I had the good fortune to be part of a team that turned around an old stogy relic of the past into a cutting-edge pioneer of e-business. That company was IBM.
7 Best Practices to Boost Your B2B Prospecting
We've recently completed interviewing CEOs worldwide about their company's purchasing process, and their individual contribution. It has reinforced our view that some or all of what companies think they know about their prospects is yesterday's news. The pace of change is astounding: Basic needs are being redefined Channels of marketing delivery are changing Roles and responsibilities to the decision making process are in flux.
Pigs Posing As Buyer Personas: Four Ways To Finger Fakes
In marketing circles these days, it has become “fashionable” to include buyer or prospect “personas” as part of your marketing toolkit. And for good reason-these life-like descriptions of your prospects as individual people can help you hone sharper content marketing messages, deliver them more effectively, and unite your team. Piggy Buyer Personas But there’s a hitch. All those grand promises depend on the quality of the work that went into your buyer personas and the polish that comes out.
B2B Prospecting Is Not What You Think. It’s Personal.
During a research interview on behalf of a highly innovative tech manufacturer, I asked a customer, what this company’s greatest strength is. The answer-my sales rep. B2B Prospecting Is Personal It’s a tenet of my marketing belief system and a strong competitive differentiator. The better we understand our prospects and customers as people, the better we can communicate with them about their goals and challenges. Are We Making B2B Marketing More Personal or Making More Marketing?
The Voice of Customer Research: The Heart of Buyer Personas
The Heart of Marketing's newest podcast, How to Gather Voice of Customer Insights That Transform Your Business, features an interview with B2P's Scott Hornstein on how voice of customer insights put the “person” in persona. Per John Olson, host of The Heart of Marketing, What’s the difference between a customer profile and a persona? It is the difference between data and insights. Data will tell you a customer bought. The persona will tell you why. Voice of customer research captures the preferences, expectations and aversions of your customers. It digs deeper into customer feedback to ask, “What do you mean by that?” That’s what puts the ‘person’ into your persona.
A Smart 4-Step Formula to Identify B2B Prospect Opportunities
Not all B2B prospects are created equal. Some are ready to buy now, some later, some not at all—yet marketing tends to invest the same in each one, which is inefficient at best. I’d like to suggest a simple four-step formula that will bring an early identification of B2B prospect opportunities and allow us to gauge our marketing investment in a prospect per potential return. The formula is based on the concept of “propensity to buy” or the likelihood that a given prospect will purchase. Understanding and measuring this concept enables us to focus on real opportunities.
Latest Survey Learning: 6 Marks of Business-Building Buyer Personas
If you’re old enough to remember when Al Gore invented the internet, it’s been interesting to watch the world of technology marketing become the world of marketing technology… But be careful what you wish for. We have taller and taller technology stacks that promise more ways of reaching more prospects than ever before, but our research with B2B marketing directors shows that many are feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of toys they now have.