Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

This is especially crucial as organizations continue to evolve in transforming their business model from product-centric to customer-centric models. Where views on which segments best represent ideal target customers can become muddied over a decade or more. Customer Segmentation.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles Segmentation Profiling 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 26, 2012

There have been many means tried for SMB segmentation whether it is by size, type, vertical, products, solutions, and etc. The attempt here is to answer some tough questions that help to bring more focus to an SMB strategy: Who are our best customers in the SMB segments and why? In what SMB sub-market segments are our best customers?

SMB 100

SMB Enterprise Management Buyer Personas Marketing Management 100

Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 13, 2015

Content Deluge Is Counter-Productive. By doing so, organizations can best position themselves as helping customers to make better-informed decisions on how they can achieve their goals. And, guard against applying such a perspective generally across all customers. The so-called second layer.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking B2B Sales Research 100

Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 19, 2010

.  That is, the usual forms of this is who we are, here is our product introduction, what features and benefits we have, and you can all guess the rest.    One buyer put it this way in an interview: “look if I call and reach a rep and they start out with something like here is my product, click, I hang up. 

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Trends Conversion Buyer Personas 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 16, 2010

  In a B2C market, understanding persona goals and aligning strategies to help consumers accomplish their goals determines how a product or service is positioned.    Understanding each set of goals can clearly make a difference in how a product is positioned and where it is placed for distribution. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Demand Generation Agencies Social Media Correlation 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 27, 2011

  In the design of products as well as in experience design, stories presented as scenarios began to appear in the mid to late 90’s as a way of imagining the usage of products in a contextual environment.    All good stories have good context as well as good narratives.    Related articles.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Storytelling Touchpoints Interactive Marketing 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 18, 2012

This is how a VP of Sales in the software industry put it to me recently in my research: “Here is what it looks like…we are actually selling more of our product into our larger accounts than ever before….but…over So the net-net has been that we are just holding on as best we can to these larger accounts.

SMB 100

SMB Enterprise Management SME Work Management 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 7, 2010

During the previous decade, we’ve seen a growing acceptance for the use of buyer personas to help guide effective product, sales, and marketing planning.   Some have written that all you need to do is go to a few of your best sales people and have them come up with a buyer persona composite you can use.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking User-Generated Content Barriers 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 5, 2010

.   The Buyer Persona blog written by Adele Revella of Pragmatic Marketing has also made the term much more visible and Adele has written very thought provoking postings on why buyer personas are important to product managers as well as sales and marketing professionals.   It resides with one man and one man only – Alan Cooper.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Work Management Forrester Marketing Management 100

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 26, 2015

These two are: CEOs and CMOs have a growing concern about the relevancy of their products and services in the digital economy. In complex B2B environments, important insights can oftentimes best be seen rather than heard. CEOs and their organizations are finding it hard to keep pace with new digital technologies.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas B2B Paid Search Agency Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 13, 2008

Yes, sales wants these things and marketing is more than happy to oblige because they need to see successes in their product marketing strategies. Dave's point that the gap is best defined through culture, philosophy, and business orientation gets to another crucial point.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Conference Marketing & Strategy Webinar Metrics 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 4, 2011

  Initially, research was conducted on users to help inform product and/or service design.    The focus was on understanding user goals and how to design products or services that helped users to achieve their goals.    The story and narratives of users were told through personas. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Research Ideal Customer Profiles Demand Generation Agencies 100

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

  As senior leaders seek to gain a market edge, they focus on developing teams that are adept at understanding how their products and services make an impact.   This impact is best understood through the lenses of a buyer persona as he or she serves three distinct groups: User Personas. .   Buyer Persona 2.0

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas B2B Sales Forecasting Marketing Management 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 1, 2015

The goal for a B2B CMO, in today’s digital economy, is to strengthen the common view of customers by which their organization can make informed decisions on how best to be relevant. Buyer personas are thought of as a tool specific only to new endeavors in content marketing, campaigns, and product launches.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles B2B Marketing Paid Search Agency 100

Tony Zambito

JULY 18, 2011

  No easy task for much of today’s management structure still is focus on pushing products and services out to customers.  and its all the same – they are just pushing (product name removed – sorry!)   They can disguise it all they want with white papers and all but it still comes down to pushing a product on me. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking Ideal Customer Profiles Opt-out 100

Tony Zambito

JULY 10, 2011

  Organizations implemented simple to complex strategies designed to find buyers and persuade them to hear what they have to say about their products, services, and solutions being offered.    As buyer personas evolved, a prevailing notion was that buyer personas came with a “best if used by” date. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Top of Funnel Peer-to-peer Marketing Funnels 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 21, 2011

  It is either Best Buy or Office Depot.    The buying experience through Apple’s retail distribution is designed to make people feel at ease learning, exploring, touching, and talking for as long as they want about an Apple product.    Contrast this with the other Tablets.    Marketing. . 

Distribution 100

Distribution Buy Marketing & Strategy Marketing 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 16, 2010

The Playbooks are designed to enable strategy, buyers, sales, and marketing in a way that creates alignment to best serve buyers’ goals.”. Buyer personas, archetypal representations of buyers and their buying processes, serve as guides to marketing strategy, sales strategy, customer and sales messaging, and content development. "We've

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Marketing & Strategy Enterprise Management Buying Cycle 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 12, 2010

.  These new discoveries as well as degrees of uncertainties has created a third monumental evolution in the use of persona development to inform strategies on the design of products and services, customer conversation, marketing, and business models that foster engagement with customers. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Business Social Media Lead Ranking 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 3, 2011

  Depending on the complexity of markets, products, and services, it can be even more.    If you have no idea about consumers or buyers in a new market and how they may respond to your products or services – then buyer persona research is right for you.    I think you get the idea! . 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Organization Viral Marketing Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 5, 2011

  These days are certainly the best of times and could be the worst of times.  Collaboration : buyers want to participate in several aspects related to research and development, product development, knowledge sharing, customized servicing, and an ongoing dialogue.   That is, until now. 

Buy 100

Buy Buyer Personas B2B Lock-In 100

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 15, 2010

These types of questions can help create an understanding of who the target buyer is and how best to approach from a selling and perhaps content marketing perspective. The Not Yet Discovered : through the investigative process of buyer insight gathering, new roles, markets, product needs, and etc. · What motivates them?

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles Profiling Lead Ranking 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 8, 2011

  In this illustration, marketing labeled their production “content marketing” but from a cultural standpoint produced it much like it had before – without much input from sales.    The corporate niceties followed true to form – everyone saying how great everything was and off they went back to their respective camps. . 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Content Marketing Content Buying Cycle 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 12, 2011

  This may be especially true in B2B organizations where inbound competencies haven’t been developed and measurements for productivity are based on outbound calls, appointments, and deals.    I do not subscribe to the notion that B2B Sales will face extinction much like when the Roman Empire fell and the city of Rome burned. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas B2B Sales B2B Buying Cycle 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 7, 2010

  Tactical operations related to marketing communications and product information focused on what to tell buyers, what not to tell buyers, and who was the deliverer of the information. .   Seller-focused organizations have had the ability for many years to orchestrate, construct, and organize the information flow to buyers.

Transparency 100

Transparency Buyer Personas Correlation Deliverability 100

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

  Most sales and marketing teams are working from lists of market segmentation data that is focused on markets, roles, company names, products, employees, and the list can go on and on – and on.   Unfortunately, oftentimes with little focus on the goals of buyers. Humanistic.   Goals Not Roles. .   Goals Not Roles.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Segmentation Ideal Customer Profiles Buying Cycle 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 15, 2010

  They created four toll free 800 numbers depending on the type of product and service you wished to order.   Since the four products and services were distinctive enough and potentially reach different types of market segments, this approach seemed to make sense.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Work Management Validation Marketing Management 100