The closing sessions at the Marketing Innovation Summit for B2B at San Francisco’s AT&T Park examined best practices for creative and landing pages and account-based marketing (ABM) case studies. Demandbase’s Sarah Nels, an ad campaign strategy manager, took on the creative and landing pages best practices topic. She opened her presentation by posing the question […]
Many OEMs are now bringing their final assembly operations back to North America. That’s good news for the blue collar workforce but what about the supply chain partners back in China and other low cost locales? Can OEMs find new suppliers close to home? Should OEMs use the old suppliers and manage the value chain […]
Innovation. Many B2B leaders talk about it, but not many do anything about it. However, actionable advice in this arena was on display this week in San Francisco at the Third Annual Dell for Entrepreneurs Founders 50 Summit. On April 23, another bright and clear day in San Francisco saw the sun gleaming off the tower […]
Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) is not just for OEMs anymore. With up to 90 percent of OEM revenue coming from value-added resellers (VARs) or other channel partners, B2B solution vendors need to properly handle the middlemen that directly touch their end customers. Otherwise they risk losing control of the top line of their enterprises. The question […]
Many B2B companies have gone down the road of enterprise software upgrades for ERP, CRM, database or other legacy on-premises applications. But how many CIO pet projects have gone astray this way? How many CFOs have thrown good money after bad in a futile attempt to recover sunk costs? With consultant’s implementation bills piling up […]
Marketing is a big beast but advocacy marketing is a creature often neglected since it doesn’t get the spotlight as often as, say, content marketing. That changed in San Francisco on March 25, when B2BNN attended Advocamp, the first advocacy marketing event of its kind. In the elegant Hotel Nikko near Union Square, marketing specialists gathered to […]
A famous 20th century marketing pioneer, John Wanamaker, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” No business maxim uttered before or since has better captured the value proposition of marketing and its counterintuitive conclusion. At first glance, things have not changed much since […]
Many B2B marketers spend an inordinate amount of time on sales lead generation. But how strong are these leads? Traditional CRM systems provide some metrics on the likelihood of leads converting to sales. However, these metrics are based on retrospective rules. If only marketers had some source of intelligence that utilizes forward-looking data so that they […]
Traditional B2B marketing shows signs of ineffectiveness. Case studies and white papers do not have the same impact anymore. However, a new form of B2B marketing has begun taking shape: advocacy marketing. Currently, different sub-genres compete to show which is most effective. An early contender appears to be employee advocacy. Top tech marketers already pursue […]
North America supply chains are at risk due to climate change. Recently, business consulting firm Accenture and CDP issued a report on worldwide supply chain vulnerability rating Canada, the United States, Brazil and China behind Europe and Japan. Canada is ahead of the U.S. falling into the “inactive” area of Accenture’s sustainability matrix, meaning supply chains […]
Cash is king. The issue is collecting it right away. Or as an SAP-sponsored white paper puts it, the primary business challenge remains reducing Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). “Without automation tools, there is no way to sufficiently increase productivity to reduce overhead and improve performance at the same time,” write the authors at PayStream Advisors, […]
Businesses large and small are coming to grips with a new reality of digital marketing: more web visits are coming via mobile devices rather than laptops. Due to this trend, mobile commerce sales are predicted to increase by 32.2 percent in 2015, according to eMarketer. As a reaction, marketers have begun migrating their sites to a framework that accommodates […]
Sanjay Dalal often and very fondly quotes Peter Thiel, the first outside investor of Facebook. “You don’t have to start a company to cash in,” Dalal paraphrases Thiel. “A better option is to join a company with high growth.” Exactly what Thiel himself did in the case of Facebook. In high tech circles, that’s called eating […]
