Reach ‘Escape Velocity’ – Geoffrey Moore’s book review
You can find Escape Velocity, by Geoffrey Moore here: https://amzn.to/170aoPU
Reach ‘Escape Velocity’ – book by Geoffrey Moore
[av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/E4ZUXAqPumA' format='16-9' width='16' height='9'] Find Escape Velocity, by Geoffrey Moore here: https://amzn.to/170aoPU
The key to better response rates? It’s all about speed
In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, two researchers reported on how quickly businesses responded to online leads. (It was an American study specifically looking at online leads, but I believe it holds true for most countries.) Drawing on work across over 1,000 businesses, they found is that 37% of companies responded within an hour. That's pretty good. At the other end of the spectrum, 23% of businesses didn't respond at all. That's possibly not a good idea. The researcher's conclusion was that businesses are not responding fast enough. Because whilst 37% is good, READ MORE ›
Hurry up and wait! How to reduce sales cycle length
In B2B marketing, we often fret over the length of the sales cycle - it's always too long. If the economy gets nervous the funnel slows even further. So we're asked something like "how do you make your funnel flow faster?", "how do you reduce the sales cycle?" and "how do you make buyers act faster?" - all variations on a theme. To answer this, we need to understand why and where the funnel is slow. And that means today we need to expore the mind of the buyer, the efficacy of tactics, buying roadblocks, and READ MORE ›
How to create a marketing plan
Marketing plans are an essential part of every marketing initiative. Whether you’re constructing a plan for a multimillion dollar company or a small start-up, a marketing plan is crucial in that it ensures your marketing objectives are aligned with your business goals and strategy, and helps keep you focused through assigning tasks and establishing timelines. It also needs to be individually tailored around the product or service being offered. This individualisation can make it particularly difficult to decide how to create a marketing plan. It can take hours to develop a good plan of action and do READ MORE ›
Basic sales calculator tells a misleading story
How many leads do we need? A basic sales calculator will help you work out how may proposals and leads you need to meet your sales target. And it will be wrong. Adding just a small degree of sophistication to your sales calculator will deliver you a very different conclusion, resulting in a very different plan. In this week's show, we'll build a basic back-of-the-envelope sales calculator, and share a great free tool that will give you a result that will astound you. You need a lot less market than you think. All right, so bear with READ MORE ›
Buyer readiness stages: Making your content work more
The probability of closing a marketing lead is 46% higher for companies that let their marketers change their CRM to use customised stages. This goes up by another 28% if those renamed stages are buyer-readiness stages, not seller-activity stages. But only 24% of marketers make this change. Why? And what are the buyer readiness stages, anyway? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfrLc8gLgZY In our sales and marketing alignment study published a couple of years ago, we found that only 24% of marketers had changed the stage names from the out-of-the-box configuration given by the CRM vendors to buyer readiness stages (the stages READ MORE ›
How to beat your competition by ignoring them
B2B competition strategy is like just every other aspect of strategy - there is no 'of course' approach to strategy for addressing your competition. Anyone who tells you that you always need a competition strategy in B2B is spending too much time looking behind them, and not looking at where they are going. In sales and marketing, where we are going is to the buyer. Often, the best B2B competition strategy is to ignore the competition all together and just focus on the buyer. Except for that strange stage where you can't and you actually have READ MORE ›
Your channel partner strategy plan begins with ‘who’
Your channel partner strategy plan needs to begin with "who"? But like so much of strategy, the "who" question isn't "who should my channel be?", but "who is my buyer?", and therefore "what sort of channel do my buyers need?" We're arguing here that your channel partner strategy plan needs to be based on what your buyers need, not on what you need. What type of channel your buyers need, and how many channel sales people you need to provide to meet that need, changes as the market matures. We'll show you how to work out your channel READ MORE ›