What velocity do you need? And what does your current velocity tell you about what you should change?

5 Ways to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Alignment between Sales and Marketing has been a challenge for organisations through the ages. Now, fundamental changes in your buyer's behaviour are increasingly creating misalignment between these two functional areas. Misalignment breeds inefficiency. Propose to close rates fall, the quality of leads fall - cost of acquisition increases. The buyer - your target customer - is fundamentally changing the way they buy. They are researching the problems they have differently, they are operating independently, forming opinions of their needs and the solutions they require before dealing with a selling organisation directly. Their buying journey has effectively changed, and Sales READ MORE ›

By |Tactics, Velocity|
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Marketing Funnel isn’t dead

The marketing funnel isn't dead. Sorry Forrester, Aberdeen and HBR, it's just that you never understood it. The funnel is an old metaphor, and only a loose one: lots of buyers at the top and a few at the bottom, and our job is to move them through. The flaw in the metaphor is obvious: not all buyers move through - even if you are infinitely patient, and so it's more of a sieve than a funnel. This is the basic idea that I began with when I wrote 'The Leaky Funnel' in 2003 when I introduced two READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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Marketing automation delivers scale, but not confidence

  Want to receive more blogs like this? Subscribe to our twice weekly B2B marketing insights! Get your copy of our 2014 Sales and Marketing Alignment Report Is Marketing automation really worth the effort and expense? In this week's blog, Hugh delves into findings from the 2013 Sales and Alignment report to show how marketing automation delivers scale, but not always confidence. Even firms just planning to automate marketing have improved efficiencies in marketing's contribution to revenue and customer retention. That's got to be something to consider.

By |Strategy, Tactics, Velocity|
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Crossing the Chasm – moving up through the gears

One of a series of articles celebrating the lasting impact of “Crossing the Chasm” It’s more than 20 years since Geoffrey Moore published the first edition of “Crossing the Chasm”. Since then, it has become a classic, and has cemented its position as the one must-have book that every B2B technology marketer needs to have read. I’ve been applying the principles since 1991 - the year in which the book was first published - and the timelessness of the core concept is striking. But the world has moved on in a number of significant respects, and the READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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How much does content marketing actually cost?

Last year, content marketing spread like wildfire. Now, over 91% of B2B marketers are currently using content marketing, according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute. And even more excitingly, content marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective tactics for lead generation. Despite this, businesses are somewhat lost when it comes to the numbers. Even now, business owners are still doubtful about their content marketing spend. Some common questions are: How much should I spend on content marketing? What portion of my marketing budget should be allocated to content marketing? How much READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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Stand Out by Helping Out: How Customer Centricity Can Help you Win Business

Imagine for a minute that it is the 1920s and you have been doing the washing by hand your entire life. You have had to fetch water eight to ten times a day from a pump, well or spring to do your washing. Your mother did her washing by hand and so did her parents and everyone before them. Recently you’ve heard about machines in commercial plants that can do a lot of washing automatically and you know people are now buying these machines for their homes. You also, after some contemplation and discussion with friends and READ MORE ›

By |Strategy, Tactics, Velocity|
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Crossing the Chasm and the mitigation of risk

When Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” first appeared 20 years ago it became an instant hit and an inspiration to successive generations of technology marketers. In fact, I can’t think of any single book that has had a more powerful (or, in the early days, disruptive) impact on how I think about taking technology products to market. Moore explained that the adoption curve for new technologies is marked by a profound disruption in customer behaviour between early adopters and the pragmatic buyers that represent the vast majority (and all of the profits) in most B2B markets. The READ MORE ›

By |Sales, Velocity|
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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 |Alignment, Tactics, Velocity|
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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 |Sales, Tactics, Velocity|
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Why marketers are now your best salespeople

I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but the research we read from many marketing research firms such as Forrester, Gartner and IDC tells the same story over and over again. Today's buyer OWNS the buying cycle more now than ever before. Salespeople are losing control and being pushed further and further down the buying decision process. Of course it varies greatly with product complexity and market maturity, but Forrester's research confirms that today’s buyers might be anywhere from two-thirds to 90% of the way through their journey before they contact the vendor. Similarly, READ MORE ›

By |Strategy, Tactics, Velocity|
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