B2B Marketing 101: The Basic Math of B2B Marketing

If you’re a B2B marketer, you’re probably in one of two groups – you either hate anything to do with numbers or you love it. I love it. It’s also the reason why I became a marketer; the combination between art and science.

B2B Marketing 101: A/B Testing

My marketing professor used to answer every question about marketing tactics the same way – “it’s testable.” Her voice still echoes in my head every time I consider a subject line or a new channel, and I still open my notes from her class every once in a while. So in my biased opinion (what opinion isn’t biased?), testing is one of the core marketing arts that any marketer should master and practice regularly.

CEO Thoughts: 6 Steps to Marketing and Sales Alignment

Being a sales guy by trade and training, I have plenty of passion for sales and marketing alignment. And for anyone wondering what I’m talking about, clearly you have been fortuitous in where you landed for your first job! Let’s just say that misalignment is the rule more than the exception in my experience.

So without further ado and from more hard lessons than I care to list, here are my 6 steps to marketing and sales alignment. Note that in reality, these 6 steps are about aligning your go-to-market processes, at least for your own direct sales channel.

When eProspecting is the Preferred Choice Over eMarketing

“The role of the B2B sales person is increasingly challenging in the current economic climate. Less than 25% of the leads captured on your website are ready to speak with a sales rep, says Jon Miller, VP Marketing @ Marketo. Meanwhile, a study by CSO insights found that only 6 out of 10 B2B salespeople make quota each year and almost all companies (95%) raise quotas annually.

So, the difficulty for marketing in generating qualified inbound demand combined with the pressure on sales people to meet increasing quotas presents quite a challenge. In fact, according to Dave Green, Director of Marketing Best Practices at MECLABS, more than 75% of marketers say that generating high quality leads is their number one business obstacle today. Add in the high cost of sales people trying to do their own prospecting in that vacuum of “not enough qualified leads” and we have something of a quandary.

The Marketing Funnel is Not Dead

As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time listening, thinking, writing and discussing marketing strategy and tactics. After reading commentary from IDC and Forrester Analysts and select others declaring the death of the marketing funnel, I’m not buying it – and neither should you. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, ‘the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!’

B2B Seasonal Traffic Trends

One of the first trends we saw from the report is the clear cyclicality in the B2B space with first quarter of 2012 and from September to mid-November, showing the strongest performance in terms of traffic.

The Highlights: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

We’ve had a lot of industry coverage and engagement with our 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Since you’re a busy marketer, I wanted to put together the highlights for you to easily read and share in case you missed it last week!