B2B Marketing

 A high tech firm was looking to prioritize their plans for the coming year. The full senior management team was in attendance. In reviewing their efforts the head of marketing noted that they were averaging 12,000 hits per month on the company web site.

Unfamiliar with the term, the CFO asked what ‘hits' were and before the marketing executive could answer the sales executive said. "It's an

 

I have seen quite a few hit and miss lead scoring solutions in the B2B world.  Hot/Warm/Cold. ‘A' lead, ‘ B' lead, ‘C' leads and so on but whilst this type of categorization might well be appropriate for organisations who  just don't generate the quantity of leads to warrant time and attention for more sophisticated methods, such scoring solutions can become problematic due primarily for the

A few years ago I had a series of golf lessons and remember the instructor teaching me to do the exact reverse of what my intuition was telling me. Rather than attack at the ball as hard as I could he told me to loosen up and concentrate on the swing. It felt strange at first but the advice paid dividends as my accuracy and range improved significantly.

I witnessed a similar counter intuitive

 

B2B sales can be very complicated and protracted affairs and involve multiple points of touch at different stages. To add to the complexity, they can be with different organisational stakeholders at different points in the sales cycle.

As a marketer your job does not stop at the brand awareness  building stage but you should enter into a dialogue with your future customers well into close stages

As I have been marketing B2B propositions for several technology firms, some things have become very evident and I am sure many of the points will resonate with my sales and marketing peers:

• Complex sales with different buying influences and politics imply that as a seller, you are going to have multiple points of touch before you close the sale. I like the term ‘moments of truth' to explain that

Lead Management or Customer Acquisition Management is designed to generate new business revenue, increase visibility and improve the attitudes of potential prospects and therefore nurture chances of future business development.

Typically an organisation will engage in some form of lead generation activity which will invoke a response from prospects and therefore generate leads. The lead