The Super Bowl, Patriots versus Giants, February 5th just 2 short weeks from the day they clinched the pinnacle spot in professional US Football. Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin will spend the 2 weeks prior to the game planning game-day strategy. If you ask these coaches what’s their formula for success they’d tell you that it’s all in the fundamentals: planning, focus, and execution.
Author Archive
4 Building Blocks to Using Content for Lead Generation
Developing content for each sales stage shows buyers you really understand their challenges, and you want to help. It thoughtfully nurtures leads, giving them carefully crafted information at the right time. And it makes buyers more likely to continue consuming your information and begin building a relationship with you.
Is Sales Dying? What Can ‘You’ Do About It?
Across the world, B2B sales people are finding it harder to sell. Leads aren’t coming into their CRM as they were. People are making buying decisions without involving the seller. Numbers of calls to reach decision makers have rocketed (this is backed up by a recent UK survey, which found a rise from 4 calls to 40). Many, however, were in strong denial as here….
Getting The Most Out of Marketing Automation With CRM Integration
Arguably the most important value-add of implementing a marketing automation system is the alignment of marketing and sales. By being able to share lead information in real time, you can ensure that you are presenting the best messages to the right prospects at the exact right time. But all of this cannot happen on marketing automation alone. Better alignment is only possible through tight integration of your marketing automation platform with your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Creating Content to Fuel eMarketing Programs
One of the biggest issues in content marketing is determining what you should write about. In fact, the development of engaging content is one of the top challenges reported by B2B marketers. I recently wrote a blog post about why writing is a critical skill for B2B marketers, but being a great writer won’t help if you don’t know how to develop content that will catch and keep your prospect’s attention.
One of the things marketers learn when they choose to deploy a marketing automation system is that it takes a lot of content to fuel the engine. This means you need to shift how you think about content development in order to generate the right kind of fuel without overwhelming limited marketing resources.
Best Practices in Marketing Validation
Regardless of how talented the sales team may be and how aggressive the approach, a poorly conceived product offering will inevitably lead to disappointing results, if not outright failure. In today’s highly competitive product and business markets, failure is simply not an option.
Beyond Marketing and Sales Alignment
Since every company is a system perfectly designed to produce the revenue it is producing if you want more revenue you have to change the system design. This means you have to tune the organizational effectiveness to support the sales process; you have to recognize that everyone affects sales results by the decisions they make daily and how effective they coordinate customer facing actions. Sales results are the scorecard for the entire company, not just the marketing organization. Revenue is a downstream measure of the organizational effectiveness upstream.
Improving Data Quality in CRM
Bad data sucks. It kills CRM adoption, it reduces campaign performance and it confuses people. Up to date, accurate data is the blood that keeps the sales organization moving. Without good data, it is hard to find prospects then turn those prospects into customers.
To improve data quality, we recommend a five step process.
A Model for Aligning Sales and Marketing Processes
Sales and Marketing alignment is a complex issue involving culture, processes, politics and egos. All of this may seem daunting to an eager sales or marketing manager who simply wants to drive improved revenue results in their company by getting Sales and Marketing to collaborate more effectively.
Regardless of the complexity and obstacles, there is one relatively simple (but not entirely easy) step that companies should take immediately. This is to identify the stages of the buyer’s journey and align their sales and marketing processes to it.
Segmenting IT buyers in Your Marketing Automation Campaigns
For many new users of marketing automation tools, one of the biggest challenges is segmenting the CRM database in a way that drives results. We’ve assembled some simple best practices that you can use to build better campaigns.
