From the category archives:

b2b

The Social Media Bandwagon Has Become a Supersonic Jet.

As a Social Media marketer with SIGMA Marketing Group, I am still amazed when I meet business savvy folks who have not yet adopted social media usage in any way, shape or form. There are varying degrees of usage and unique formulas for different business types and vertical markets, but I don’t care who you are… Social Media is here to stay, and will continue to evolve rapidly. I recently wrote an article on social media usage by industry, which focused primarily on B2B Social Media, but it provided some interesting insights about what industries have adopted social.

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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 Marketing ROI – Are You There Yet?

As the 2010 Direct Marketing Association conference (DMA:2010) wrapped up, I took a minute to reflect on the conversations I had with a wide variety of marketers over the past few days. As a B2B marketer, I have a special interest in the state of B2B direct marketing so I focused on the conversations that I had with other B2B Marketers and compared them to the conversations that I had with our consumer marketing brethren.

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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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Part of leveraging social media in the B2B space is understanding that it is not just about the “business” per se. It’s about understanding the channels through which your brand can and will be found and optimizing each and every touch point with the right information. In this post we explore the various components of a LinkedIn profile and provide suggestions on how to leverage those parts and pieces.

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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Is Web Analytics Alone Enough to Understand Your Web Interactions?

We’ve discussed this at length in previous posts… Perhaps the fact that we keep bringing it up my elude to the fact we believe this to be critical to marketing successes in the future. The Web Analytics Association defines web analytics as “…the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.” From a web design perspective, that’s an appropriate description. However…

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Cookie Cutter B2B Sales Methodologies Don’t Work.

No sales cycle should ever be looked at from a cookie cutter approach, but this is especially true and examining the B2B sales process. In B2B transactions, there is no way to fully predict the decision making hierarchy, as every organization has a different marketing or purchasing structure with unique buyer types. This can make your B2B marketing messaging a challenge.

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