One way to think of content marketing is equipping your prospects with the right information about your products during the right time in their buying journey. You can think of sales collateral in a parallel universe — equipping your sales team with sales content and materials they can use to enrich a prospect’s experience with your… Read more »
According to the Content Marketing Institute, around 58% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads and convert them into paying customers — i.e., they have confidence in the idea of a content marketing sales funnel. However, the Content Marketing Institute also reports that only 43% of successful B2B marketers document their content strategy… Read more »
In the industrial sales process, there are two critical components to writing a winning proposal: knowing how to structure it and then using the right proposal software. I hate to tell you, Microsoft lovers, but opening Word and creating a file on your desktop no longer cuts it. In the first post in this two-part… Read more »
Let’s admit it. Most people hate writing proposals. To avoid the hard work of creating this all-important deliverable, we fall into the trap of cutting and pasting from previous documents, dumping in pages of data in an attempt to overwhelm the prospect, talking about ourselves and what we know best, or selling an easy deal… Read more »
Industrials have been notoriously slow to move into the digital world and Customer Relations Management (CRM) software is an important piece of the puzzle that continues to puzzle most. In the U.S., 97% of the Fortune 500 B2Bs use a CRM system. But you don’t have to be a $500-million enterprise to use a CRM. Advances… Read more »
It’s almost football season and there’s an adage any pigskin fan is guaranteed to hear at least once this fall: defense wins championships. It might be true in sports, but when the legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant uttered this phrase some 40-odd years ago, he surely didn’t have B2B sales and marketing in mind…. Read more »
Imagine: You find someone you’d like to connect with on LinkedIn. You email them to ask if you can “pick their brain.” A coffee date is set. You’ve just become part of the phenomenon that’s taking over industrial sales: Zombie Coffee. This no-frills networking strategy fueled by a lethal combination of LinkedIn, caffeine, and brain… Read more »
