b2b marketing tactics

How to make an unrefusable offer

Want to receive more blogs like this? Subscribe to our twice weekly B2B marketing insights! If your prospect is looking for anything other than the proposal you put on the table – you have already lost. Stop reading, go home, and promise to never do that again. Your buyers have a certain concept of what they need. Whatever that concept is, is rarely shaken at the proposal stage. If someone other than you shaped that concept, then walk away. Nothing we can share with you will undo the stupidity of failing to invest that time up READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to really upset your market

Being the nice guy to customers is always a good idea. But with prospects, we need to really upset them. Seriously! A prospect might engage with you if you’re nice, but that’s not why they’ll buy from you. They will only buy from you (or anyone) if they think they a problem that needs fixing. And they will only buy from you if they think you can solve the problem better than the other guy. In this week’s blog, Hugh shares his ten favourite tactics to get your prospects in a lather.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to create compelling content

“What am I expecting my audience to do differently tomorrow?” If you can’t answer this question after consuming a piece of content, then what was the purpose of the communication at all? All too often we finish building our content piece, summarise what we have written, and then fizzle. Or we deliver a vague or unrelated product pitch. In his latest video blog, Hugh demonstrates how to reach a convincing and persuasive conclusion with your content. He shares a sure-fire method to building compelling content and stresses how important it is that your content takes your buyer one step forward READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to produce high quality video blog on limited budget

Many people are discouraged to produce their own video blogs at the risk of looking cheap and nasty. However, video production technologies have improved so drastically over the past few years that it no longer requires large monetary or time investments to produce high quality video blogs. No longer can the excuse of poor production capabilities be used as an excuse not to tell your story! Direct from Frankfurt, Germany, Hugh demonstrates first-hand the ease and effectiveness of producing video blogs on a limited budget. He shares with you an array of products, tools, and tips you READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to get buyers interested in your business brand

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what buyers think about you or your brand, if they don't think about you or your brand. It doesn't matter how much better you think you are than your competitors, and it certainly doesn't matter how enthusiastic you are about your own business and products. So the question remains, how DO you get buyers interested in your brand? The answer - you don't. In this blog, Hugh explains why you need to get buyers interested in a conversation, rather than in your brand. Earning the right to help your buyers with their READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to position your brand in the category

We get this wrong all the time. Businesses seek "brand awareness" in order to position their brand prominently in a given category. Unfortunately, while this is all fine and dandy in theory, it is inevitably followed by salespeople complaining about the marketing departments feeble attempt at positioning the qualities of their products and services relative to competitors. Getting your image right sounds like the over-riding priority, but the issue for many businesses is having their brand considered by buyers at all.. In this blog, Hugh helps us think about positioning a little differently, and suggest two approaches and eight tactics we READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics|

How to find contact details for your ideal target market

I want leads, I want their names, and I want it now. There's a strategic piece to this and a tactical piece to this. I'm going to show you today some of our favourite tactics for finding the right names and the right buyers. But along the way I am going to argue very strongly that you need to get the strategy right first and then I'll show you how we get the names. Well there's a strategic piece to this; of course, I need to have the right buyers - people who are likely to have READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Tactics, Velocity|

The #1 Sales issue: inability to communicate value

For three years in a row, the highly influential benchmark and advisory firm Sirius Decisions has reported that the number one revenue inhibitor in complex B2B sales environments remains the average sales person’s inability to communicate value. You’d hope that we would have made more progress in solving this. I believe one of the reasons that we haven’t is that most of the effort has been spent focusing on the value of our solutions and not on the cost to the prospect of not dealing with the problem. Personalising our value Of course, we need to find READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Sales, Tactics, Velocity|

How to choose content to get buyers across your funnel

Do you lead or do you demand? I read a great article from the Content Marketing Institute asking whether we should focus on lead generation or demand generation. I'm going to show you how to answer that question for yourself. In the article, the Content Marketing Institute - a very highly regarded organisation by the way - argue that your content strategy can't deal with both Lead Gen and Demand Gen. Lead Gen is all about names and Demand Gen is all about shaping behaviour. Well, I'd argue content strategy must deal with both. What about positioning, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to close more deals by closing less often

The harder you work on closing, the less successful you are at it. That has always been true for sales and I am going to show you why it's true for marketing, as well. In a recent blog I showed you why trying to make your funnel flow faster is folly. Apologies for the alliteration, but basically, we can't go faster or slower than the buyer wants us to go and I showed you why that was the case in a recent blog. In this blog, I am going to show you why our focus shouldn't READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|