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?
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.
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.
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 still be a bad picture even in 600 DPI digital form! So it is with personas and the content marketing that comes from them. Mark Schaefer noted the same thing in a recent post arguing that "customer personas may be an outdated marketing technique"... but his advice is not bother taking any photos!
Free Personas: Worth Every Penny
The most valuable part of any research is the insight. That nugget of truth that expands your understanding and guides strategy and messaging. Digging for insights isn’t easy—you have to go beyond the surface and get some dirt under your nails. And gasp! you may even have to talk with people outside your organization to widen your own (narrow?) perspective and blow up those assumptions you’ve been operating from for way too long.
Content is in the Eye of the Beholder
We cram a lot of hopes and expectations into content marketing—that prospects will have a preference for our brand and use our content as stepping stones in their consideration journey. Expectations do not decrease. We need content to work harder.