Numbers to watch: Chinese consumer price indices (decreases in this number are not good), interest rates, and Chinese companies’ marketing spend abroad. Can you believe it’s September already? Here in the US, Labor Day has come and gone, kids are back in school, the pools are closed, traffic is (very abruptly) much worse, and there’s a tiny hint of chill in the air at night. Summer’s passing means an all-out sprint to the end of the year – Q4 is a critical period for most businesses, including ours at CEB. What are you keeping an eye on? Digital backlash.  MORE >>

Here’s a hint—if your content is primarily intended to make you look smart or establish your company’s expert credentials, that doesn’t cut it. Your customers live in a noisy environment.  They are constantly bombarded with messages.  You’re trying to break through and it’s tough. At best, a typical B2B supplier can expect to get 12% of a customer’s total share of attention across the purchase process. That statistic comes from comprehensive research on B2B buying and content marketing that we here at CEB have just completed.  Enter: content marketing.  Or does it? Again, conservative. MORE >>

For solutions-focused organizations (which is most B2B companies these days), we’ll help you enable salespeople to select the most appropriate solutions elements and help salespeople surface unarticulated customer needs. It’s a perennial complaint we hear from B2B marketers: “We did all this work to put together a great sales tool/piece of collateral/campaign, but Sales refuses to use it! What’s going on?” Others get frustrated and quit. So what seems to be the problem? Collateral development. MORE >>

Here’s a quick summary of how to integrate digital into your disruption or commercial insight efforts, including tips from best-practice companies. Before releasing a disruptive idea into the market, leading companies ensure they understand the current level of openness to the new idea. A few companies have done this well. Smart companies craft well-planned content strategies that consider each of the channels and formats in which a key insight will work best – and work out when/how to push each idea. Cisco is a great example here. They took three important steps.  MORE >>

Many B2B customers today find themselves unpleasantly surprised, when companies design offerings for them that they never asked for. Customers complain that companies claim to design products “just like they wanted”, except that they never wanted it! Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies better understand and serve their customers? Progressive companies use various touchpoints used by their customers to discuss their jobs, to understand the desired outcomes better. can imagine feelings of shock and disappointment. Switch gears to marketing. MORE >>