Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 9, 2020

Over time, we can build assumptions about how things work. Built Into Company DNA. How things are supposed to be. Or we cement assumptions about what people think. Or how we expect people to behave. Oftentimes, we can create an over-reliance on past data and experiences to shape our assumptions about the present and the future. .

Marketing Analytics Tools 318

Marketing Analytics Tools Validation Planning Intent 318

Tony Zambito

MARCH 12, 2017

B2B companies are faced with the most transformative era in business history. More so than in consumer oriented markets, B2B markets had a degree of predictability that companies often relied on. As companies become flat organizationally, we are seeing the rise of collaborative teams and units. Illustration by Gregory Cresnar.

Buyer Personas 251

Buyer Personas B2B Digital Transformation B2B Sales 251

Tony Zambito

MARCH 2, 2022

This build-up to the moment we are now in calls for corporations to examine their stand on ESG. As of this writing, we are beginning to see some oil companies begin to respond. Additionally, we have seen major tech companies, like Apple, ban the sale of their products to and within Russia.

Order 147

Order Business Planning Demand 147

Tony Zambito

MAY 19, 2021

For instance, many companies are still wedded to old funnel thinking first presented by Elmo Lewis over a century ago! It will mean that you will need to build out a hybrid between digital and human interaction. This changes a lot about how and what we know about buyers. 4 – Be practical with digital first.

Differentiation 244

Differentiation Top of Funnel Buy Buyer Personas 244

Tony Zambito

MAY 17, 2021

Here is how it sounds from an actual buyer interview with a VP, Marketing for a Global 1,000 company: “One of our big goals for this year is to increase our ABM function. Understanding the new buyer mindset and building organizational DNA to think like buyers become critical to ABM or ABX success. Get more responses if you will.”.

Account Based Marketing 224

Account Based Marketing ABM Buyer Personas Intent Signal 224

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 27, 2018

If B2B companies are not thinking about this, planning for this, and doing something about this – they will bound to be in big trouble. A result of more and more B2B companies trying to improve their customer experience capabilities. This also means building in mobile capabilities across platforms.

B2B 165

B2B Amazon Buyer Personas Fulfillment 165

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 23, 2018

Data : Buyers are increasingly reliant on and building predictive data operations to help with their decision-making. Look for an increasing number of Data Scientist building user-friendly decision-models for buyers to use. More and more companies are moving accounting and finance operations to the digital cloud.

Digital Transformation 184

Digital Transformation Buyer Personas Work Management Marketing Management 184

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 3, 2018

For the past few decades, solution-based selling was the dominant theme in building sales organizations. B2B companies can find themselves out of synch on the experience front if they fall behind on being able to provide an experience that customers are receiving from competitors or from other similar industries.

Enterprise Management 169

Enterprise Management B2B Thought Leadership Urgency Marketing Work Management 169

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 28, 2016

And, let’s not forget that B2B companies believe they may have 3-4 unique buyer personas. Thus, such companies can wind up with devoting resources towards developing over 500 content creations! Equally important is building in adaptability to multiple media platforms – factoring in print, digital, and mobile. Stopping Waste.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas B2B Content B2B Sales 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 8, 2015

How new buyers and repeat customers are interacting with organizations today is putting many companies on the spot to adapt. Companies can be lulled into a false belief that their customers preferred way of interacting has not changed much. Towing a company line of “our customers have always done it this way” mentality.

Buy 100

Buy Buyer Personas Acquisitions Correlation 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

  At the same time, we have seen companies who have done admirable innovation of truly unique experiences that cut across an entire organization’s functions.  As we look to the future, the C-suite will in effect become the producers and directors of the experience theatre a company builds. 

Trends 100

Trends Content Wikipedia Custom Publishing 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 11, 2011

  We look at opportunities via company name, whether they are Global 2,000 or Fortune 500, deal size potential, and other few factors that likely make up segmentation.    Setting them down the path of building what are more buyer “title and role” descriptions and profiles masked as buyer personas. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Segmentation Buy Work Management 100

Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

  If companies have not adapted their businesses to enhanced online and social capabilities, they may very well be placing artificial barriers in front of their buyers who are seeking an entirely different straight re-buy or modified re-buy experience than in the past.    Follow @TonyZambito. .  Related articles.

Buy 100

Buy B2B Barriers Fulfillment 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 4, 2011

  They have helped companies to gain insights into market opportunities, find out why challenges exists, depict buying processes, and how to map critical sales and marketing strategies to the goals of buyers.    Mainly, buyer personas are presented as a means of templated profile building. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Research Ideal Customer Profiles Demand Generation Agencies 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 24, 2011

  That means companies are going to have to get pretty good at qualitative research and buyer persona development.    Design thinking and experience design methods are the building blocks for buyer experience design.  The second intersection is experience design.    Related articles. . 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Fulfillment Design B2B Sales 100

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 10, 2012

Building A Tribe Of Buyers ©All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden. Several executives I interviewed in the last six months of 2011 are saying it best: “What we’ve learned is that buyer personas, building tools for sales, creating lots of content, and etc. Fourth, companies are experiencing missed opportunities.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking B2B Marketing Buyer Personas B2B 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 22, 2017

Fundamentally reshaping markets in five years’ time compared to the fifty to seventy years it may have taken to build up a market. In the past few years, the yellow cab companies have been unable to stem a rapid decline from the onslaught of Uber, Lyft, Juno, Via, and other ride platforms.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Digital Transformation Enterprise Management Account Based Marketing 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 23, 2010

To pursue excellence in building top line revenue growth takes a high degree of focus.    Buyer persona development, as I have made the case often recently, is not an exercise in profile building.  .  It was a treasure trove of imparted wisdom I will never forget.    Three: Give your teams playbooks.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Wikipedia Ideal Customer Profiles Social Media 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 3, 2011

If you are able to build an in-house practice, bring on people who have the requisite background in anthropology and ethnographic research.    Several Fortune 100 companies, such as Intel, have moved in this direction in the past decade.    Then a third-party option should be explored. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Organization Viral Marketing Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Tony Zambito

JULY 6, 2011

About a dozen years ago, I became involved with personas through fate by meeting Alan Cooper , at the time he just finished his landmark book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum , and becoming enamored with personas as a process to build more user friendly products.  Another misconception is that buyer personas are role personas. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Peer-to-peer Ideal Customer Profiles Psychographics 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 14, 2011

.  In fact, it is fair to say that the buyer will view the value of their relationships with sellers based on a high percentage of their experiences with the selling company.    Today, B2B companies will need to catch up to B2C advancements in this area if they are to have a future in buyer relationships. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Buyer's Journey Wikipedia Social Networks 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 1, 2015

In companies that have historically been a sales-driven culture, communicating the need to attain a deeper understanding of buyers via buyer persona development can be an arduous task. We are reaching a point in time, however, where users, buyers, and customers desire B2B companies to be relevant to their goals and future.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles B2B Marketing Paid Search Agency 100

Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

To develop a loyalty building Buyer Experience Strategy in today’s digitized world means executives need to raise their qualitative Buyer Insight Intelligence Quotient.    This disruptive event meant that the numbers companies collected could hardly be used for predictable strategy planning.    Does it help? 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Enterprise Management Marketing Automation Services Social Media 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 14, 2016

I am afraid this can happen when companies are misguided in buyer personas, which are buyer personas in name only. Triggering an ongoing cycle of meetings, field building, data collecting, and reporting on buyer and customer data. And, more importantly, truly informs on customer strategies.

Buyer Personas 102

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles Profiling CMO 102

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 31, 2016

One of the most interesting studies to come out on content marketing is the recent Forbes Insight and PWC survey of 369 executives, which indicated many companies are lacking a content strategy. One way, it seems, is in building brand trust. Out Of Alignment With Business And Customer Goals.

Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Ideal Customer Profiles Leads Lead Marketing Qualified Leads 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 5, 2010

Some companies just get it.   All things being equal, customers and buyers don’t give a hoot which company might be marginally better or worse.   And once you do, you can build a content marketing strategy around it. Image via Wikipedia.   UPS does.   What is it? .   Just as is the case for UPS.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Content Marketing Wikipedia Marketing & Strategy 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 14, 2010

  The building awareness of the term and the idea of using buyer personas in marketing on a mass level can be traced to David Meerman’s Scott book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR.  The rise in popularity of buyer personas has also meant a rise in people getting them wrong.  Here is what is bugging me though of late. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Rules Ideal Customer Profiles Social Media 100

Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 5, 2010

  While relationship building will remain important, reliance on this alone will not be enough. The year 2011 will be the beginning of companies adapting more intensely to the changing landscape of buyer behavior caused by the lasting effects of the recession and the advent of the digital and social age.  

Trends 100

Trends Buyer Personas AIDA Buyer's Journey 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 5, 2011

  In essence, this transformation is creating a mandate for B2B companies to adjust their approach to marketing and sales accordingly.  Building : traditional transactions, simple to complex, involved a lot of presenting and receiving until the buyer basically says – I’ll take it. 

Buy 100

Buy Buyer Personas B2B Lock-In 100

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

Here is a portion of what he said: “As more buyers wait to engage with sales and as more companies, in order to attract potential buyers, open up their content, the need to meet your audience’s needs before you know who they are is likely going to be one of the next revolutions we see.”. The Waiting Game.

Demand Generation Agencies 100

Demand Generation Agencies Wikipedia Demand Generation Buyer Personas 100

Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 12, 2010

  For the past thirty to forty years, sales have focused on relationship building, methodology, and processes.    The driver of sales experience was more than the combined percentage of the three other drivers defined in the study – company and brand, product and delivery, and value-to-price ratio. 

B2B Sales 100

B2B Sales Buyer Personas Multi-Channel B2B 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 29, 2010

.  Buyer personas, derived from a rich and robust process of getting to know customers and buyers experientially, can serve as the media for executives to tell the story about their buyers and how their company will help to continue the story. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Rules Marketing Automation Services Wikipedia 100

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 18, 2015

And, began the era of marketing fulfilling the role of going beyond just brand advertising, but also building awareness and enabling buyers to research solutions. As time progressed in the early decade of 2000 to 2010, reliance on the sales representative for product and solutions information began to diminish.

Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Ideal Customer Profiles Profiling Buyer Personas Marketing Management 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 7, 2010

  To gain a deeper understanding of buyers and their buying processes, an understanding that yields insight, companies need to engage in a level of qualitative interaction with their buyers.   More importantly, how companies responded to the insights and the results attained.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking User-Generated Content Barriers 100

Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

  Creating a new way of thinking that transforms the company that is in harmony with its buyers.   One company who understood this is HP.  .  Such a composition can be written and designed when executives can harmonize around the 4 B’s of Buyer Experience Innovation.  Buyer Insight.

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Buyer Personas Buyer's Journey Digital Marketing Funnels 100

Tony Zambito

JULY 18, 2011

Related to from push to pull , much of the intended efforts in building buyer personas – whether executed correctly or not – has been about how to message to buyers.    Let the words of a buyer captured in a qualitative interview speak to this: “Look, I get all kinds of stuff from (company name removed – sorry!) . 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking Ideal Customer Profiles Opt-out 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 22, 2011

  The term is widely misunderstood as a profile building tool as opposed to a method for researching buyer behaviors and serving as an interface and narrative to inform strategy.   The social age is creating a transformative shift that I suspect many companies are finding tough to adapt to. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Viral Marketing Research Planning 100