How to Achieve Success with Social Selling

In a recent article, Forrester Research notes that the goal of social-to-sales efforts should be “to see how well social is driving customers toward the actions that create value for your company,” as opposed to just collecting Likes, Followers or +1s. Whereas the early days of social marketing were little more than eyeball-grabbing techniques, today’s […]

Get Better Reporting: Put the “Intelligence” Back Into Your BI Solution

Does your current business intelligence (BI) solution really support your business processes by enabling you and your team to draw intelligence and actionable insights from marketing and sales activity? For most organizations the answer is “No”, making the “BI” moniker a bit ironic. Most organizations struggle with reporting typically because, the reporting solution is hard […]

What Is the New Buyer’s Journey?

The Ultimate Guide to the New Buyer’s Journey – Part 1: What is the New Buyer’s Journey? We’ve all seen the stats from Gartner and Forrester by 2020, more than 80% of the buying process will occur without any direct human-to-human interaction. As a result, organizations need to rethink their customer engagement strategy. This means […]

Cold Calling is Far From Dead

Type “cold calling is dead” into a basic Google search and you receive over 50,000,000 search results. Many of which are provocative thought pieces around the shift in buying behavior and how technology has made the cold call obsolete. I agree that cold calling has forever changed, but it certainly is NOT dead. Even in […]

What is Digital Sales Coverage?

If you haven’t yet heard the newest buzzword in Sales and Marketing, be prepared to hear it a lot in 2014. So, what is Digital Sales Coverage? Before we define it, I find it helpful to think through the changes in commercial models that led us to Digital Sales Coverage. (2009 – 2010) – The […]

The Key to Channel Engagement: Help Your Partners Help Themselves

It’s a new era in channel engagement. If you are a company that relies on a third party to sell and support your products and services, then you have noticed that your world has changed, and…you are not alone! Your partners face the same challenges as you. Your customers are spending more and more – […]

Don’t Cast A Wide Net, Build the Pond: Taking the Long-View in Customer Engagement

“Fish Where the Fish Are Swimming.” It’s an old, oft-referenced axiom in Marketing. In essence: don’t waste your time casting a wide net. Focus your energy on finding where your customers are, and engage them in the perfect moment to hook and reel them in. Sure, it’s catchy (we’re Marketers, after all). But shouldn’t we […]

Part 7 – Lead Scoring is the Key to Sales Productivity

The core element in creating marketing and sales connectivity is the effectiveness of the lead management and lead qualification processes. Organizations cannot establish trust between marketing and sales if the lead hand off process is broken or ineffective. Marketing must have the ability to qualify leads before passing them to sales in order for the […]

The New Sales Coverage Model – Using Digital & Data to Drive Productivity

In an earlier blog post I discussed an emerging trend we are seeing when we engage with sales and marketing leaders to discuss how their businesses are changing in order to align to new customer buying behaviors. This new trend is a shift in the coverage model from traditional sales resources to digital platforms. As […]

10 Critical Steps to Successful Sales and Marketing Content Alignment

When organizations think of sales and marketing alignment, one of the main things they often focus on is demand generation. Additionally, content has grown as a critical component in successful selling, so companies must now take steps to align around content as well. It is important for sales and marketing teams to gain alignment and […]