Buying today has become more sophisticated and has a multitude of variables that did not exist even a decade ago.    It is fair to say that many organizations are adopting specific buying strategies whereby decisions are often made well ahead of any sales involvement and the decisions are more about who to purchase from versus what to purchase.    Without investing in informing buyer insight, executives will be in the dark on how to craft buyer experiences that makes them part of an organization’s buying strategies. Buyer Insight. MORE >>

Posted in Buying Cycle Conversion Conversion Optimization Customer Customer Experience Personalization Strategy. And it’s obvious why: buying cycles are longer, buyer mentalities are different, and products typically require more investigation before a purchase. But the reality is that B2B buyers are very similar to B2C consumers— whether it’s buying a new car or new enterprise software, consumers want to be educated and informed. And they certainly don’t want to be bored to death with encyclopedic catalogue-type information. MORE >>

Send pertinent messages related to where your prospect is in the buying cycle offering them information to help move them from one stage to the next. Automation sifts through leads, qualifies them and keeps them in follow up mode until they move forward or drop from the buying cycle. To be sure both are on the same page, ask these questions about closed leads: How long were their sales cycles? When during their buying cycles did they enter the marketing funnel? Then sales can complete the cycle. It’s another to close them. MORE >>

For many B2B organizations, the sales process, or more correctly called the buying process, is a long one. It can be 6-9 months, with some cycles as long as 12-18 months for very complex products with many decision makers on the customer-side. Supporting the various points along those cycles has always been the role of B2B marketing. The right now of consumer advertising is about seeing an ad, or some other campaign marketing tactic, which could be a Facebook landing page or a promoted tweet, and being able to go to a store (bricks and mortar or online) and buying it. MORE >>

Social media, content aggregation and curation , user-generated content and other developments have dramatically changed the B2B buying cycle over the past few years. Marketers need to think like publishers not only to improve their company’s visibility in search (which is where 93% of B2B buying cycles now start ) but also to address the differing information needs of buying team members, at different stages during the decision process. Prospects often don’t surface until much later in the buying process than they did just a few years ago. MORE >>