Marketing as Smog
Many b2b prospects have expressed that unfocused marketing communications are noxious - clogging the air and littering the landscape, substituting quantity for quality, volume and weight for insight. Surely, if our message is everywhere, and if we speak loudly, our prospects will flock to our door. Sure - ask the people of Mexico City or Beijing, how's that breathing thing coming along. Ask them about the view. I think marketing is doing way too much talking.
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!
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!
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.
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 from its potential. We are not fishing on the shores of Lake Abundant – it’s harder than ever to differentiate ourselves, to find, nurture and motivate the prospect as the world become increasing atomized.
If You Build It, They Will NOT Come… Until You Know Who “They” Are
Instigation: IBM has enjoyed a remarkable reputation, especially in mid-range computing, but were surprised to hit rough territory when they introduced a new office solution for physician practices. Expectations were high because this new offering was much more than an upgrade. In fact, it addressed both clinical and financial requirements in ways that outpaced the competition.