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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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5 Steps to the Purposeful Integration of Sales and Marketing
Often it seems as if sales and marketing work for different companies, and often, they wish they did. However grim this may seem, truly effective b2b prospecting can’t be achieved without cooperation. Our experience is that sales usually follows-up only to 30% to 34% of marketing leads. The stated reason is no confidence. “Why should…
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Is Direct Marketing Dead? – Podcast
The internet is the greatest direct marketing medium every invented – Seth Godin. The Heart of Marketing’s newest podcast, Direct Marketing is Alive and Well on the Internet, features an interview with B2P’s Scott Hornstein on whether, in these heady times of digital disruption, direct marketing retains its relevance.
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The core reason b2b prospecting underperforms
The overwhelming majority of people working on any given b2b marketing campaign have never seen, met or spoken to a customer, and certainly not a prospect. They work from reports and results. They are separated, a gap to a chasm, from the often-conflicted humanity of the people that make the decisions. This separates your campaign…
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Content Karma: Crappy Personas = Crappy Content
I was going through some old family photos the other day. Wonderful memories of days long ago that I am digitizing to ward off the ravages of time. But, in one sense, I was preserving the ravages of time. Unfortunately, the copy can never be better than the original. A poorly-shot blurry old snapshot will…
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What I Learned About Marketing During A Pandemic From Dylan Thomas
What I learned about marketing during a pandemic from Dylan Thomas, et al Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, […]
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What You Can Do About The Future Today
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” ― Yogi Berra You may not have time to think about the future now – you’re too […]
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4 questions to ask at this point COVID time
Where were you on 9-11? Despite that date being roughly 6,800 days ago, it’s likely that you also remember exactly where you were and […]
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PERPETUAL WEDNESDAY!
For most of us, this is not our first rodeo. We’ve all survived 9/11 and the Great Recession and we will survive […]
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