Ask Three Questions to Ensure Your 2019 Go-to-Market Strategy is a Success
Other
It’s almost Fall – back from the beach, leaves are changing, and starting in October, it’s 2019 strategic planning season. As we have written in previous blogs, the discipline of go-to-market strategy development and execution is changing rapidly. The traditional exercises of branding, messaging, new …
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The Power of Personas
Buyer Journeys
I’ve always been intrigued by the ability of an effective coach to enhance the skills of a highly successful athlete. How do you motivate a decorated veteran like Serena Williams to compete at Wimbledon? How does Michael Phelps’ coach inspire him to break yet another …
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Why Storytelling is the New Market Intelligence KPI
Market Insights
Recently, a client pulled me aside after an intelligence readout and asked for 5 minutes of my time in a one-on-one setting. As a professional services provider, situations like this make you brace to hear that your contract may be in jeopardy. Instead, what she …
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Should You Fire Your Sales Force?
Sales Coverage
Ok, maybe firing the entire sales force is a little radical. But wait…put yourself in the shoes of a product exec trying to grow her business unit within a mid- to large-size enterprise. Here is what many, many executives are experiencing in the digital transformation …
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Let’s Talk About the HiPPO In the Room. Five Steps to Activate Data-Driven Sales and Marketing
Other
Increasing Data and Analytics Usage is the #1 Marketing and Sales Priority for B2B Companies No one will be surprised to hear that – according to a recent Forrester study1 – 82% of B2B companies believe that increasing the use of data and analytics for …
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The Six Chapters of the Social Insights Story
Market Insights
In 2018, it seems that almost everything that could be said about social marketing has been said. But, when we talk to executives with “social media” in their title, whether in B2C or B2B, there is one area that still comes up as a huge …
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MarketBridge Now Offers Deeper Customer Insights for Web Visitor Intelligence and Audience Targeting
Marketing Analytics
MarketBridge announced it has entered into a distribution agreement with Dun & Bradstreet, the global leader in commercial data, analytics, and insights for businesses.
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It’s Time to Redefine Go-to-Market Strategy
Other
Eighteen years ago we wrote a bestselling book on Go-to-Market strategy. Almost everything in that book is now totally obsolete. The Channel Advantage (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999) outlined how to build and manage multiple sales channels from field sales to inside sales to channel partners to …
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Debunking 3 Myths About Sourcing Market Intelligence From Social or Public Data
Market Insights
Invariably as I discuss market intelligence with a prospect the question gets asked, “So where do you source your data from?” I always cringe when that topic is broached. Not because I have any reservations about the strength of using social monitoring or publicly available …
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How to Cross-Sell at Scale – Part 2
Cross-Selling
By now, everyone knows that cross-selling (including upselling/cross-selling a new product) is an unbelievable source of profitable revenue growth. Yet, there is a challenge. To be successful, a cross-sell sales play or marketing campaign must provide highly targeted, very tailored offers to each prospect. “Carpet …
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3 Core Components of Successful Content Personalization
Content Marketing
What is content personalization? Put simply, content personalization is the process of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Unfortunately, a content personalization strategy can be challenging to define and even more challenging to implement successfully. According to a recent …
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What About Small Data? Part 2
Marketing Analytics
Getting Back to Growth by Playing Small Ball The ADBUDG curve is a 40-year old handy heuristic for modeling marketing spend vs. return. It was first used for broad-reach advertising. The concept is pretty simple: The curve starts out flat, as dollars are invested to …
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10 Step Checklist for Creating Actionable Segmentations and Personas
Marketing Analytics
For all of the talk around one-to-one marketing, human beings still need frameworks to understand their world, and marketers are no exception. The word “segmentation” might be ubiquitous among marketers, but it’s difficult to find two people who can agree on what segmentation really means …
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How to Build a Product-Centric Data Science Organization
Marketing Operations
Realistically, most data science is heads-down, unpredictable activity. Typically, a data scientist is given an objective, such as “tell me the part-worth of TV in my advertising mix”, or “come up with a classifier to put a lead into the correct segment,” and has to …
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6 Step Framework for Marketing Content Optimization
Content Marketing
In today’s marketing landscape of channel proliferation, ultra-savvy buyers, and chronic shortages of time and attention, investing in really good content might be the highest ROI decision a CMO or CRO can make. Really good content performs in a non-linear way, but what is it …
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What About Small Data? Part 1
Marketing Analytics
Big data remains all the rage. After exploding onto the scene in roughly 2012, with the popularization of the Hadoop framework, the big data lens still dominates the “LinkedIn press.” This myopia is certainly not without its merits; machine-generated data contain vast amounts of signals …
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How to Cross-Sell at Scale – Part 1
Cross-Selling
Cross-selling is the fastest, most profitable path to incremental revenue growth, period. With existing accounts and existing buyers, companies already have contracts in place, relationships established, and the data needed to identify new revenue opportunities. Assuming a vendor only has a 30% share of the …
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Coming Full Circle: Bringing Art Back to Marketing Science
Marketing Analytics
Yesterday was my first day (back) on the job at MarketBridge leading marketing analytics. I’ve been gone for nine years, and it is truly great to be back at this special organization. This return to my roots, with person after person telling me “welcome home,” …
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Why MarketBridge Hired a Chief Analytics Officer
Marketing Analytics
Ok, forget the lofty title. The last thing most companies need is another new C-level position. Nevertheless, every company from a Fortune 500 titan to a 20-person law firm needs the equivalent of CAO. Why? And what is the role of a Chief Analytics Officer? …
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5 CEO Principles for Developing an Applied Analytics Strategy
Marketing Analytics
Image: Hunter Haley As both topics of AI and Facebook data usage gain greater attention from the media, customers, investors, and regulators, it’s time for CEOs to get deeply engaged in an Applied Analytics Strategy. So what is an Applied Analytics Strategy? Applied analytics is …
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MarketBridge Wins Two Silver Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service in 2018
Other
MarketBridge won two Silver Stevie® Awards for Sales and Customer Service during the 12th annual Stevie Awards.
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Marketers – You’re Doing it All Wrong. How to Chop the Funnel in Half + Gain ROI.
Marketing ROI
In the past, my team and our clients have spent a lot of time, energy, and budget at the top of the funnel. Whether it be creating valuable content, writing clever emails, delivering webinars, or attending large tradeshows/events – we all have our “fingers crossed” …
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Sales Prioritization: Turning Art Into Science
Sales Coverage
The art of selling parallels the discipline of time management. Selling, like time management, is knowing how to prioritize and manage your time. Today, most sellers go through a manual process to figure out who to touch, when to do it, and what to say …
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5 Considerations Before “Investing” in Your Sales Stack Strategy
Sales Coverage
The single question that I get asked the most as a Sales Operations lead is “When?!” In today’s tangled web of sales stack tools, data and analytics, sales leaders want to know “how quickly can we can install all the new shiny sales tools?” But …
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6 Key Sales and Marketing Trends of Q1 2017
Other
Lessons Drawn from 100s of Executive Conversations… Every business quarter, MarketBridge has the privilege of speaking with hundreds of B2B sales and marketing leaders. Based on these conversations, we noticed six sales and marketing trends that have emerged. The below six trends sum up what …
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