B2B

Why not to cut marketing during the COVID-19 crisis?

Why not to cut marketing during the COVID-19 crisis?

As I work to provide marketing strategy and planning for customers during this COVID-19 crisis, I see many B2B businesses choosing to cut their marketing spend as part of their cost savings measures. I certainly understand their motives, but I strongly suggest that those businesses continue their marketing, and perhaps even increase their marketing spend and cut elsewhere. Why do I recommend this […]

Reporting that creates the right marketing-sales conversation about leads

There are many ways that marketing and sales go about measuring their efforts for their own purpose. You have marketing waterfall reports. You have sales forecast reports. You have sales activity reports. You have marketing media metrics. But what about the kind of report that sales and marketing should share together and talk about the most? Which reporting creates the right marketing-sales conversation about leads?

Two reports that ask/answer the right questions for a conversation

While some […]

Putting trade show dollars to work

Note: Be sure to check out the Trade Show Dollar Challenge at the end of this post.

Putting trade show dollars to work. Many companies are tightly squeezing their dollars right now, and that is understandable. One easy target is to pocket unspent or refunded trade show dollars as quick savings. This too is understandable. However, what if you can save a good portion of those 2020 trade show dollars while also investing today in a […]

What will your customers know about you when the COVID-19 crisis is over?

For many businesses today, the first reaction to the current social and economic crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic is to cut costs by downsizing staff or reducing paid hours, by shutting down production, or other measures. Every business will have to make hard choices. However, if your business, any type of business, firmly believes that you will survive this and you want to grow quickly after this is over, then you need to remember […]

Failure to Launch …not the Hollywood movie

A recent Harvard Business Review article forwarded to me titled, “How to Sell New Products,” is packed full of powerful lessons for anyone wanting to launch any new B2B product. The article was based on research including one-on-one conversations and surveys of B2B sales people and early on reveals this gem of a quote:

“… found that people who excel at selling new products have […]
2021-01-20T01:25:22+00:00March 5th, 2020|Marketing Leadership, Sales Leadership|

B2B Webinars: Build or Buy?

One conversation that catches my attention with B2B marketers is the “why don’t we just host and promote our own webinars instead of spending all those dollars with media companies?” That’s a great question and the answer is based on a clear understanding of what a webinar “is” and “what media companies sell.”

Anatomy of a webinar
The first thing is to have clarity on the required properties of a successful webinar. There are three things:

  1. Webinar […]

B2B Marketers: The most important questions to ask sales

B2b marketers, when you get sales leadership (or better yet, even just a few of the truly good sales people) in a room, what information should you get from them to create more success for both marketing and sales in your organization? What are the most important questions to ask sales?

There are two key topic areas where your questions will serve you best — value propositions and lead quality/quantity.

Value Proposition

What is your sales team pitching?

What is your sales team pitching: When your sales team sends an email to a prospect to pitch a product, what do they say? It’s very likely that many of you have no idea. You make an assumption that if you have given sales leadership or the sales team the right product/service brochures or other collatoral, or you have given them an approved presentation, or they have sat in a meeting where they were given […]

2023-03-20T18:32:57+00:00February 12th, 2020|Messaging, Sales Enablement, Sales Leadership|

Where Messaging Matters

You wrote your messaging (some call it value propositions) for your brand and each of your products, now what do you do with that messaging? If you only use messaging in advertising or in a powerpoint or document that you want sales to share, you will miss an important step. Where messaging matters: Everything customer facing

Where messaging matters: Your overall brand messaging and specific product messaging should be used in every customer facing […]

2021-01-21T19:45:42+00:00February 4th, 2020|Branding, Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Messaging|

Improve sales effectiveness with cloud-based sales enablement and automation tool

Product Release: Improve sales effectiveness with cloud-based sales enablement and automation tool. The right message and collateral at a salesperson’s fingertips!

Solution Pitch, a cloud-based sales automation tool, is simply something that sales people dream of and likely don’t have. Now their dreams have come true – your salesperson can use their mobile device or any browser to quickly locate and send their prospect the perfect solution pitch every time.

Sales Challenge

Once a salesperson qualifies […]