Posts tagged as:

b2b

Understanding B2B Campaign Responses – Building a Methodology

SIGMA Marketing Group has recently completed an analysis of past B2B campaigns and we have discovered some important findings that are now guiding our campaign designs. We discovered that prospects respond at a significantly lower rate than customers. It’s also clear that response rates vary by the methodology used to conduct the marketing touch, with email prospecting consistently performing at the lowest response rate. We found that prospect response rates vary depending on the relationship the company has with the prospect, for example if the prospect is a past customer they are more likely to respond then other prospects.

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B2B Social Media Landscape Appears to Be Wide Open

As I’m reading the “Fall 2010 Social Business Report” from NetProspex, I find that my biggest assumption about social media in the B2B space is entirely true. We can all agree that social media is still an emerging multi-channel, multi-faceted medium for marketing communications. We can further agree that while there are experts out there, we are all still learning what works and what doesn’t. Currently working in the B2B social space myself, I have come to believe that many (or most) B2B companies have not grasped the relevance nor the value of social media usage as it pertains to their business.

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The 7 Features You Must Include in Your B2B Sales Playbook

An effective B2B Sales Playbook can energize your sales team and make them more productive in closing new sales. With a playbook they will have fewer unproductive calls and reduced time spent in pre-call planning efforts. The sales playbook is an important tool that Marketing often uses to provide invaluable marketing information and sales tips.

Sales playbooks exist in many styles and forms, selected are key features that are common to those that are the most successful.

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Sales Enablement 101 – Getting Started.

Taking sales force to the next level will alway require management buy-in. Sales Enablement dashboards and toolsets are certainly available, but there is an investment that goes along with that. Selecting the right vendor who will look inside your sales organization and create a unified view across all customer data is key. If you need to help your management team buy-in to this sales methodology, be armed with case studies and success stories, whether you work with a B2B or B2C sales organization. This is a new frontier, and you are fortunate to be on this side of it.

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B2B Sales Enablement: Using B2B Sales Optimization Dashboards

In the B2B sales world in which I live, my view of B2B Sales Enablement focuses on bringing together both internal customer information (sales, contact history, etc.) and external firmagraphic information (SIC Codes, Sales volume, locations, etc.) and presenting that in an easy to understand, access, and use format. In addition, it includes ranking of prospects by potential and by timing, allowing the rep to focus his efforts on those opportunities that are most likely to generate the highest return in the shortest time frame.

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Don Draper and the Long, Winding Road to Cross-Channel Marketing Success

As most B2B and B2C marketers look in the mirror halfway through 2010, it’s a time for a brief pause to reflect on what it takes to successfully integrate and measure multiple marketing channels. Let’s face it, the last 10-15 years in the marketing business have been like no other in our lifetime and the next decade promises to be even more interesting and exciting. Makes me want to watch another episode of Mad Men to pinch myself on how far the marketing industry has come. Imagine Don Draper (chief character in the excellent AMC series, Mad Men) in a room full of web analytics folks? And no one was smoking or drinking?

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Lead Generation: Are you using B2B marketing analytics?

Certainly, lead generation has value and should be an element of every sales and marketing organization. However, “leads” come in all shapes and sizes. They come from traffic generated at a trade show, from a web visitor downloading content from your website, from a direct marketing campaign or from a web seminar, among other efforts. Yet, some of those “leads” are simply your competitors trying to find out what you are up to. Other “leads” are companies that you cannot afford to sell to due to their limited budgets. And still others are just interested in the topic with no project in mind, or authority to act.

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Analytics by every other name… Have B2B Marketers watered down the idea of Analytics?

From the buzz at a typical industry trade show, you could get the impression that everyone has reached the pinnacle of achievement – optimized marketing analytics. Once you scratch a little deeper, the reality is a much less mature marketplace than appears at first glance. We really need to break through the buzz word clutter, define best practices in analytics, and talk about a new way to do business in the B2B market – adapted from our B2C colleagues who are often using very sophisticated marketing analytics.

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Get Smart: Make Sure Insights from Marketing Analytics Reach Your Sales Force

Armed with an intelligence-based “playbook” of identified and prioritized account level opportunities for each product/service in the portfolio, the sales representative has a focused territory plan, with resources aligned to drive customer and market share growth, while shortening the sales cycle. Don’t leave the sales process out of the mix when applying marketing analytics and insights. Now that’s getting smarter!

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