When it comes to 2016 budget planning, there are many competing priorities to satisfy the needs of the sales and marketing teams. According to Gartner Research, by 2020, 85 percent of customer relationships will be managed without ever meeting in-person. In this increasingly virtual environment, it is essential to invest in the right resources to […]
Our Sales Guru Jason Forrest wants you to know about a major trend coming to B2B sales that could influence your bottom line and strategy in 2016. As he always does with his reports to B2B News Network, Jason offers his take via a pithy video, embedded below. Let us know if you agree with Jason’s […]
Tech companies are snapping up B2B sales professionals, which has created a demand that’s just not being met. In turn, these companies aren’t meeting their potential for growth. According to a recent report in The Business Journals, technical sales and sales management positions have always been hard to fill. With the enterprise tech market heating […]
Everyone in the B2B world has heard about proverbial Silicon Valley garage startups that grew into the likes of Apple Computer, Hewlett Packard and many other household names. But exactly how did those firm founders and first chief marketers do it? At the Growth Marketing Conference in San Francisco, several successful entrepreneurs revealed the secrets of their […]
Welcome to the latest edition of the Hashtag Team, our weekly round up of the most shared and buzzworthy B2B content on social media. ‘Tis the season for 2016 predictions! This week’s roundup features articles about data and marketing automation trends for the year ahead, along with some customer retention strategies, an infographic about the […]
Traditional outbound sales revolved around dialing a list of numbers from a Yellow Page book. Those days are over. Nowadays, most sales come from email or at least start off with an email before leading into a call. At InspireBeats, we live by email for both our customers as well as our own outbound. We’ve […]
Welcome to the latest edition of the Hashtag Team, our weekly round up of the most shared and buzzworthy B2B content on social media. As always, we’ve used Nexalogy to easily sift through piles of social data and discover these articles, and have collected them here to keep you in the loop. This week, we […]
Have sales and marketing changed their strategies and tactics to address the fact that buyers are buying much differently than they did just five years ago? Multiple research studies are providing a compass. The studies indicate that over 60 percent of the buying process for many business products or services is concluded before the buyer […]
Read this post by Wilson of the Inspire Beats blog team on recognizing the best time to follow up with a prospect and how to do so effectively. Reprinted with permission Following up with a prospect is extremely important. I was personally able to close a few of my recent deals as well as our customer’s deals […]
Proposals, quotes, contracts, reports and updates: the documentation that pulls salespeople away from their customers and into their offices. Now a startup wants to make that simpler for B2B professionals. Pandadoc is a new software solution that claims it can automate all the content collateral sales departments are required to produce, monitor and update. The […]
In a world of rapidly evolving buyer expectations and behaviors, B2B sales and marketing leaders need to provide their teams with tools necessary to achieve customer success and improve business results. Essentially, B2B businesses live and die with their sales forces. The key factor is how many sales leads they can churn through in what amount of […]
You’ve designed killer landing pages for your B2B website, filled it with compelling copy and strong images that encourage action from your readers. Now what? It’s time to measure the effectiveness of your landing pages. Analyzing it gives you important insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your lead generation efforts. You’ll find out which pages are working […]
This article is part of the SAP Sponsored Content Series. To download the full report (registration required) cited in this article, click here. The path to making purchases is no longer flowing in one direction. Very few customers do all their research and shopping at the point of purchase. Instead, most people turn to social media, websites, magazines […]
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 […]
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, […]
With customers’ ever-rising comfort levels to purchase and self-service online, and increased pressure on businesses to develop end-to-end Web enabled applications to accommodate, it seems the value of human capital in sales and service is diminishing. From a business end, consider that businesses must hire, train, coach, performance manage, payroll, incentivize, and provide benefits to […]
Customer referrals are one of the most powerful endorsements a business can obtain. Personal endorsements generally carry more weight than other routine marketing channels. While a flashy ad may catch attention and even generate a sale, this sale is not necessarily going to convert to the buyer becoming a loyal customer. Especially if the customer […]
Google Analytics has updated a useful tool that helps businesses track and analyze customer interaction paths from first click to purchase. The aptly-named The Customer Journey to Online Purchase launched in early 2013 as Google recognized the need for website owners to better understand how customers act from their first visit through conversion. The tool utilizes […]
A slew of made-for-business apps for iPhones and iPads have been launched thanks to a collaborative effort between Apple and IBM, the outcome of a partnership forged earlier in the year between the two tech rivals. In a press statement, Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services, said: “Our collaboration combines IBM’s industry expertise […]
It’s a B2B company’s worst nightmare: your client is so slow to pay for your services/product, and you don’t know if you’ll ever see payment. Unpaid and overdue invoices are too often a reality in the B2B space, thanks to a client’s sloppiness or internal turmoil never communicated to others. Delta Inc., a Baltimore firm providing […]
