Gartner’s Future of Sales research report predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur via digital channels, with 72% of marketing budget currently going to purely digital channels. What does this mean? Your targets are spending more time online not only researching products but also converting to customers. …
How B2Bs Can Embrace the Shift to Digital Buying Read More »
In my blog, Has Social Media Failed SMB B2B Businesses? Part 1 – The ROI Problem, I shared an issue we hear a lot – How do small-to-medium (SMB) sized B2B businesses show a dollar-based return on investment (ROI) with social media? Until social platforms mature to the point where these companies can make predictable …
Dale Rensing, Porter Consulting Senior Market Analyst You want to maintain your customers’ attention and keep them coming back to your website with fresh and interesting content. If they see the same old, same old every time they visit, they are likely to lose interest and it will be much harder to appeal to them …
Blogs – the key to keeping your web content fresh Read More »
Al Morgan, Director of Solution Marketing and Dale Rensing, Porter Consulting Senior Market AnalystAs we’ve discussed, solution selling is different from other sales in the fact that you need to bring multiple stakeholders to the conclusion that your solution is the best option. By identifying specific stakeholder personas, you can craft your content to target their specific pain points. And by understanding where and when to target them along the buyer’s journey, you know what pieces of collateral you need to create to bring your message to their doorstep.
Now we’d like to give you some practical advice on the last mile: four marketing tactics to get your message absorbed and acted on. The tactics are Social Media, Direct Marketing, Sales Tools, and Gated Content.
Everyone wants a full pipeline. A full pipeline means more opportunities, and all things being equal, more closed business. But – are all things equal? Is your pipeline stuffed with wheat or chaff? From a marketers point of view, we need to do everything we can to help sales winnow the chaff quickly, consistently and positively.
Fast Fail is an approach widely applied in software development. This concept is described in the article, Fast failure: The secret to fostering more IT innovation than your competitors. The author explains, “Without failure there can be no innovation, learning, or transitioning in an organization, and the organization that never fails often stagnates and becomes irrelevant. What’s difficult is learning to accept failure, and encouraging that behavior throughout your organization.”
By Al Morgan, Director of Solution Marketing and Dale Rensing, Porter Consulting Senior Market AnalystIn our previous blog on solution selling, we discussed the importance of understanding your customer well enough so that you could create a profile for each stakeholder in the decision-making process. In this blog, we will focus on mapping content to different points in the buyer’s journey. Applying best fit marketing tools at each point can help you get your messages to the right stakeholder at the right time.
Although there are variations, the buyer’s journey encompasses three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Marketing tasks vary by stage, requiring marketers to influence customer thinking in different ways across the journey.
