B2B Marketing Best Practices
Welcome to the Best Practice Reports area. We hope you find this information helpful to you as you’re evaluating your demand creation approaches and planning ahead to make improvements. We update this page regularly with fresh reports so plan to visit again soon to access the latest information. If you would like more information about any of the information in these reports, don’t hesitate to contact us at 1-888-925-7526 or info@televerde.com.
Top 15 Ideas and Practices for Web & Social Communication
Along with Donna Kent, Televerde’s SVP, I recently attended the Business Marketing Association (BMA) 2011 International Conference in Chicago. As Televerde’s representatives at the event, our goal was to glean as much useful information and best practices as possible about B2B marketing. Mission accomplished!
We dedicated three days to learning from the industry’s best practitioners, service providers, researchers, authors and consultants from credible and authoritative organizations like Siemens, Forrester, Avnet, IBM, Accenture, Xerox, Google, Salesforce.com, Dell, GE, and so many more.
The Impact of Bad Data on Demand Creation Program Performance and Sales Revenue
According to SiriusDecisions, using an example of a prospect database comprised of 100,000 names at the outset and a campaign response rate of 2%, an organization with strong practices throughout its sales pipeline will realize nearly 70% more revenue than an average organization purely based on data quality. Also from Sirius, between 10% and 25% of B2B marketing database contacts contain critical errors. This leads to seriously sub-optimized demand creation program outcomes. Those are powerful metrics!
Do Your Vendors Know Your Growth Strategy?
A number of Televerde’s senior executives attended the SiriusDecisions Summit last week in Scottsdale, Arizona – Televerde’s backyard. We love their summit for a lot of reasons – it’s local so we can affordably send multiple staff, we get to meet and network with many of our current and future clients, and we get the latest insight from the SiriusDecisions expert analysts. My personal favorites are Jay Gaines, Tony Jaros and Megan Heuer because they are good at boiling down the ocean to the core, actionable stuff that all sales and marketing execs need to be focused on.
Demand Creation Strategy: Make the First Step the Right Step
(This is the first in series of Televerde Best Practice Reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) We’ve recently glommed onto an idea – actual a number of ideas – that resulted in the creation of a map all of us can understand and use. We call it our “Integrated Approach to Optimizing Demand Creation & Discovery.” The Integrated Approach map is comprised of 10 mileposts.
Data and Demand Creation: The Shortest Distance Between Two Points
(This is the second in series of Televerde Best Practice Reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) Accurate and enriched marketing data is pivotal to the success of all go-to-market strategies and programs, yet it is often overlooked or even ignored. Well-conditioned, accurate and recent data has a significant impact on the return of your total marketing investment, the quality of your sales opportunities, and the accelerated discovery of these opportunities.
At the Intersection of Market Research & Demand Creation
(This is the third in series of Televerde Best Practice Reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) Leveraging market knowledge is critical to creating a well-informed demand creation strategy. It results in accelerated market and account penetration. It generates intelligence and insight that makes conversations with individual contacts much more relevant and compelling. It enables the most appropriate messaging and positioning strategy. And it’s the most effective way to validate or disprove market assumptions and to identify and close potential gaps in the market approach.
Demand Creation & Discovery – Are We There Yet?
(This is the fourth in series of Televerde Best practice reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) Now that you’ve completed all the pre-work necessary to embark on a successful demand creation “trip,” the next logical stop on our journey is the design and execution of integrated Demand Creation & Discovery programs: In Televerde’s environment, these programs are driven by an integrated, dialogue plus digital-based methodology. Our agents are all experienced market specialists who are highly trained and have specific competencies organized along four key dimensions.
At the Crossroads of Demand Creation and Nurture
(This is the fifth in a series of Televerde Best Practice Reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) We know that not all prospective customers we engage through our sales and marketing efforts are always ready to buy when we’re ready to sell. Nor are they even ready or willing to speak with a sales rep at the time we’re prepared to talk with them. We also know that, unfortunately, too often Marketing allocates significant resources to generate qualified leads that either don’t make it to the pipeline or, if they do, don’t progress through it because sales reps aren’t as on top of things as they should be. The need for nurture occurs as your demand creation programs are in play.
In Support of the Sales Rep. And the Sales Opportunity!
(This is the sixth in a series of Televerde Best Practice Reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) If you haven’t figured it out by now, Televerde is a strong advocate of deploying a truly integrated approach in order to optimize demand creation strategies and programs. The optimization results in what we’re all hearing needs to be delivered today – more, better and, you guessed it, faster!
Genoming the Open Sales Opportunity
(This is the seventh in a series of Televerde Best Practice Reports on the 10 stages within an integrated, optimized demand creation strategy.) An integrated approach to demand creation doesn’t end when an opportunity has been won or lost, and certainly not when it’s still open. It’s at the “open” stage when reliable, first-hand, fresh intelligence about the opportunity is the most critical to keep it moving through the pipeline. And ideally, to accelerate its momentum using a prescribed method based specifically on the intelligence you have about it.
How Marketing Automation Can Strengthen the Sales & Marketing Alliance
How Marketing Automation Can Strengthen the Sales & Marketing Alliance While the biblical story of the parting of the Red Sea may or may not be entirely accurate, there’s no doubt about the gap between sales and marketing. Now that’s a sea that definitely has been known for its “part!” This is still the case for some if not, sadly, many organizations today. If sales and marketing have a Moses who can control the opening and closing of the part in our sea, its name is “Marketing Automation.” And what we need it to do now is close the gap. In Televerde’s view of the world, that is happening.
Six Ways to Optimize Demand Creation Program Performance
With a schedule of 50+ demand creation campaigns that Televerde implements for our clients on a monthly basis, undoubtedly we learn some things along the way about what works and what doesn’t. Clients rightfully expect us to share our knowledge with them and are never hesitant to ask us lots of questions about what we know that they should know. The question we’re probably asked most often is “What are the one or two practices we can engineer into our campaigns to improve the performance?”
When Is the Market Research Good Enough
There’s no question that market research, if designed well and with a purpose, is hugely helpful to marketing strategies and programs. The challenge though is that too frequently marketers avoid doing it because of this false assumption that research has to be uber-comprehensive, designed to meet all the requirements of statistically fail-safe samplings, conducted frequently over extended periods, analyzed by well-trained analysts, and presented in a report packaged for suitability to their company’s top execs. And then there’s the issue of limited funds and time to conduct the research in this exhaustive and potentially expensive fashion.
Three Ways to Optimize Sales Demand Creation
As a B2B outsourced demand creation agency that works with high-tech companies to identify new customers, accelerate sales opportunities, and discover fresh, actionable market insight, we’re continually tasked with improving sales pipeline performance and growing top-line revenue in measurable ways. It’s complex stuff, which is why many organizations struggle with it.
