Bob Marsh   This is probably one of the key things that differentiates the decent salesperson from the great ones. Pushy for me is the salesperson who uses tactics to try and “close” me, or, as in the case of one vendor they were calling me 2 times a day. Unless maybe they are the only one who sells that particular product or service, which would be rare. Tagged: B2B , b2b sales , customer 2.0 , Sales , Sales Intelligence , sales productivity , sales prospecting. Sales Sales Intelligence sales productivity sales prospectingHow do you spot it? MORE >>

By Holger Schulze Major shifts are taking place in B2B marketing that started a few years ago but have accelerated in recent months – in the marketplace as well as inside vendor organizations. In the “old days”, the mainstream marketing approach was to interrupt and engage prospects, educate them on the vendors offering and move them through the sale cycle towards a transaction – a very vendor and product centric approach. Make sure your content is problem and solution focused and doesn’t only talk about your product. What business problems do they face? MORE >>

For years, B2B marketers have been worried about competitors' products and solutions. They spent a considerable amount of effort trying to differentiate their features and prove their offering is better than another company's version of something similar. As technology continues to shorten product time-to-market and allow for rapid updates and improvements, it's also enabled marketers to become publishers, applying even more pressure to move faster to produce more information than competing vendors. It's just not as simple as buying a product anymore. MORE >>

Curation, by itself, is not enough to differentiate you. You are reinforcing someone else’s thought leadership With positive vendor profiles increasingly available for a fee and an increasing number of smaller firms that even provide product reviews, analyst content has lost much of its lustre. But if you believe content curation is your ticket to thought leadership and differentiation, you will be sorely disappointed. B2B marketers are looking for a shortcut to thought leadership , but the shortcut many are taking lead somewhere else completely. MORE >>

It’s a problem members across the marketing spectrum are complaining about: a variety of pressures, like shrinking consumer wallets and business budgets, and ease of quick price comparisons and research, are causing consumers and business customers alike to recast products as commodities. It means that brand and minor product differentiators fall out a customers’ buying equation, undoing a good deal of the hard work marketers have done to attach non-product factors (for instance, branding or insight/services for B2Bs) into the decision. Commoditization. MORE >>