“Social selling” is the buzzword du jour in the Sales world, where reps are beginning to go out of their way to launch Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn presences that help drive key marketing messages and influence the research buyers are doing on their own. 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. What are you keeping an eye on? Let us know in the comments section. Digital backlash.  MORE >>

The promise of content marketing is that if I can look smart enough and be helpful enough to customers with my content, I’ll get their attention, trust and maybe even their affinity.  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.  Or does it? MORE >>

Our resources in the Marketer’s Playbook will help you create tools that help Sales identify the most promising deals, collaborate with Sales to design tools, and launch tools in a way that stimulated adoption and usage. 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. We’ll also help you design advocate-friendly, shareable collateral that drives internal consensus. MORE >>

Digital media can help introduce doubt around current assumptions, disseminate new ideas broadly, and add social proof/credible support to those new ideas. Next, Cisco began to participate helpfully in conversations – using customers’ own language so as to be accepted.  This helped Cisco build acceptance and understanding for its ideas and created strong early demand for its radical new product. When telling customers that some of their fundamental beliefs about how their business works may be wrong, it helps to have some credible back-up. LinkedIn vs. Facebook). MORE >>

We’ve gathered some of MLC’s research over time to help marketers identify what their customers want. The following will help marketers gain an insight into their customers’ mind: Identify Customer Jobs and Outcomes: The customer world is made of a number of units of work flow – the jobs. How would you feel if you were served a dish which you never ordered, instead of the one that you really wanted? can imagine feelings of shock and disappointment. Switch gears to marketing. Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies better understand and serve their customers? MORE >>