Strategy

How to design a buyer-centric B2B solution

Can you for once stop talking about a product and how good it is? Businesses use the term solution when what they really mean is a packaging of a product or service and not a solution at all. Today, I'm going to show you how to build solutions that customers can't resist. Start with the customer Of course, we're going to start by talking about the customer. Think about this, a vendor creates a product or service and they love it, they take it to market and they get a bit of traction with that product READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Why your B2B marketing plan may be worthless

Marketing creates a plan. It's a great marketing plan and any dispassionate viewer would say it's just a beautiful marketing plan, but it's completely and utterly worthless. If Marketing has a great plan but nobody else buys into it, then it's a useless plan. I'm going to show you today, how to get buy in to the plan and the planning process. In our research into alignment, we found that each department, if they own the planning process, they introduce different flaws. If Sales owns it, Marketing owns it, Finance, Operations etc. Each of them introduces READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to choose the right market for your business

If your growth is not what you need it to be, don't blame your product. It might be that you're selling to the wrong market. In B2B marketing, it's easy to blame your solution - it's too expensive, out of date, lack features, isn't competitive. In this video blog sales funnel guru, Hugh Macfarlane explains how to choose the absolute best market for your product or service, and how to get the team to buy into that strategy.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

B2B Marketing: The Trouble with Thought Leadership

Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine Strategy & Business first coined the term “thought leadership” in 1994. I wonder if he knew what he was starting? It’s nearly impossible to find a B2B focused marketing plan that doesn’t include it as an objective, but in my experience - and maybe yours - the term is widely and wildly misused. It’s not just the rash of so-called thought leadership programmes that are no more than a clumsily disguised piece of product propaganda. Those are easy enough to spot and discard, and do not do any READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Strategy|

A B2B Marketing Qualified Lead is whatever Sales wants it to be

There is no 'correct' definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). For your business, negotiation and alignment between Sales and Marketing is key. Together, you need to negotiate how qualified the leads need to be before Marketing hands the leads over to Sales. In other words, at what stage sales takes over. All the way through the funnel, there's a trade-off between quantity and quality. In this video, Hugh gives some key points on what an MQL really is and how to frame this negotiation.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

B2B marketing strategies for choosing between branding or demand generation

How much energy should you spend on positioning versus demand versus channel? Forget about the 4 Ps you learned about at University. It's simplistic and unhelpful. It's about 30 years old and it's a consumer concept anyway. Just erase it. I've got another very simple paradigm for you. You might say simplistic. I don't think it is but you be the judge. Marketers spend their effort on basically three things: Getting the market ready, getting the channel ready, and getting the two talking in B2B, in complex B2B, which is the world that you live in READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to find a needle in the haystack

Mature marketplaces provide clear targets for new growth - the firm demographics have already been mapped. But how can you segment or target for growth in the virgin territories where little is known of who's buying what and why? In "early adopter" markets, the number of potential buyers is initially small, and finding a business with the right profile is like a combination of "blind man's bluff" and finding a needle in the haystack. That is, you don't yet know what you're looking for, and even when you do they are hard to find. The surest way READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Why you need to find your market’s pain point

If a prospect has a need, they may be willing to spend time with you. But that’s probably all they’ll really end up spending. On the other hand, if they have a problem – that is; too much of a bad thing or too little of a good thing – they may then be willing to actually spend money… and this is the kind of prospect you want to be spending your time on. A problem is a bad thing for the prospect, but an opportunity for you – a gap, deficiency or impediment, even a fear READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Linking Buyer’s Journey, Your Pipeline & Revenue Goals

The changing shape of the buyer's journey has introduced a raft of new issues for sales leaders who are trying to manage sales pipelines and generate accurate revenue forecasts. Prospects are leveraging the internet and business social media to do their research - and engaging sales people later in the decision making process. In fact, the latest research from the CEB suggests that the typical B2B buying-decision process is 57% complete before a salesperson is even actively involved. By that time, the prospect is a long way down the path of scoping their needs, establishing their priorities, READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Strategy, Tactics|

How to build the case for an inbound marketing budget

Even though inbound marketing is now an essential part of most company’s marketing strategy, one question still persists in the minds of many business owners and executives: How much does it cost? It’s a valid question because inbound marketing is as much a change in process as it is an investment in digital marketing. What's the right level of spending? A recent Gartner survey showed that, on average, US companies spend 2.5 percent of their revenue purely on digital marketing activities and its expected to grow by 9% in 2013. So if your company generates, say, $5 million READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Strategy, Tactics|