B2B Nation: Recent Episodes
B2B Nation
B2B Nation is a podcast from TechnologyAdvice that shares expert opinions and advice for B2B marketing professionals. Listen along as Director of Custom Content Mike Pastore sits down with entrepreneurs, CEOs, and thought leaders to learn about the complex avenues available to B2B marketers.
Operating in a space dominated by large, well-known brands poses a challenge for companies in any sector. In the SaaS software market – and in CRM in particular – the challenge can seem monumental.
Clare Dorrian is the CMO of SugarCRM, where she and her team are leading their challenger brand up against heavyweights like Hubspot and Salesforce.
The advantage held by many challenger brands is that they are often more agile and can pivot more quickly than the leading brands. On the other hand, challenger brands have less margin for error, so they need to make well-informed decisions.
RELATED EPISODE: What’s Working in B2B Cybersecurity Marketing?
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Clare about what it’s like to operate as a challenger brand today, which tactics and messaging are working for SugarCRM, and what we think is head in 2024,
Episode Guide
3:20: What is the message Clare and her team want to deliver to CRM buyers?
5:08: Advice for CRM buyers.
9:28: What are the channels and tactics showing results for Clare and her team?
17:14: The role of in-person events in Clare’s strategy.
19:17: Three things that get Clare excited about 2024.
27:23: What is Clare’s favorite tool?
The biggest change in the purchasing process for business technology over the past decade is the role of business users. IT no longer makes all of the decisions about technology. Instead, it’s the business users who use the tech on a daily basis who do much of the work.
The area of low-code development, which allows business users to create workflows and automations for business processes, is a perfect example of this evolution.
Business users and IT both take part in the purchase process for low-code solutions. And each role has its own part in managing the solution once it’s deployed.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we talk with Mike Donaghey, Chief Commercial Officer at CMW Lab, a workflow software vendor, about the modern buying committee, how vendors market to diverse committees, and Mike’s favorite too.
Episode Guide
4:02: How are business and IT teams involved in today’s purchase process?
6:29: How does CMW develop messaging for diverse buying committees?
7:57: How do diverse committees impact the sales cycle?
8:47: Do diverse buying committees require casting a diverse net for prospects?
11:11: What to make of the in-person event channel?
11:48: What should we expect from 2024?
14:29: What is Mike’s favorite tool?
Audience marketing is essentially the practice of building an audience of prospective buyers for your product or service that you inform and educate until such time as they’re ready to buy.
Sounds pretty intuitive, right? It is. But it’s often a tremendous challenge to pull off successfully.
Most marketers work in an environment where it’s difficult to play the long game of audience building because leadership wants revenue now. So while audience building can generate significant returns over time, what’s a marketer under pressure to deliver now to do?
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, I’m talking to Bolaji Oyedije, a marketer with 20 years of experience in the B2B sector, about how marketers can combine short-term and long-term activities to meet their immediate needs for leads, opportunities, and pipeline, and revenue.
We also discuss how to have the “long-term vs. short-term” conversations with leadership, how to earn the trust of today’s audiences, and Bolaji’s favorite tool.
Episode Guide
2:56: What, exactly, is audience marketing?
4:10: Audience marketing takes time many marketers don’t have
8:48: The danger of too much focus on short-term opportunities.
12:10: Goodbye BANT, hello FAINT
14:07: Can you convince someone who isn’t in market to become in market?
18:38: “I want content professionals to make content like a comedian...”
21:00: How does Bolaji recommend marketers have the long-term vs. short-term conversation with leadership?
29:32: What is Bolaji’s favorite tool?
More than 15 years after it happened, you can still find videos online of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer chanting “Developers! Developers!” more than a dozen times at a Windows conference in 2006.
You can’t blame Ballmer for his excitement. Put the right combination of tools, technology, and ideas in the hands of a developer and you’ve got the foundation for a number of applications and platforms we use every day.
RELATED PODCAST: How Business Users Change the Game of B2B Marketing
Since Ballmer’s viral developer movement in 2006, the focus on developers has only intensified. The concept of “shift left,” which moved testing, quality assurance, and performance monitoring earlier in the software development lifecycle, meant putting more tools into the hands of dev teams early in the process with the goal of eliminating costly fixes later in the lifecycle.
Roee Kriger is the CEO and co-founder of Metis, which creates tools for database observability tools designed to help developers create applications with confidence.
His team’s go-to-market strategy focuses on differentiation in a crowded market, meeting developers where they are, and self-service experience.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Roee about the challenges of marketing to developers, why you won’t see the familiar social media icons on the Metis website, and his favorite tools.
Episode Guide
1:58: Rosee identifies the two biggest challenges of marketing to developers .
3:42: How does the GTM strategy at Metis address the challenges of marketing to developers?
5:05: It’s all about marketing and selling to the end user.
6:38: Why it’s important to nail your PLG motion.
7:14: What does Metis do to meet developers where they are?
10:53: Are developers more likely to give feedback to improve products?
12:29: What is Roee’s favorite tool?
How many times, B2B marketers, have you sat on a pipeline call reviewing open opportunities and heard someone comment on how long an opp has been open and what can be done to move it along? Quite a few times, no doubt.
Outreach from the sales rep, an open opportunity nurture sequence, and even executive outreach are all possible solutions. But wouldn’t it be better to avoid the problem to begin with?
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we talk with Trinity Nguyen, VP of Marketing at UserGems,about her team’s approach to closing deals faster. And it relies on a rather old tactic from the B2B marketing toolbox – personas.
Trinity’s team discovered that when three personas were involved in the buying process,her company closed more sales. The personas were dubbed “The Three Musketeers,” and today Trinity and her team strive to marketo to these roles to get them involved as early in the process as possible.
RELATED ARTICLE: How Business Users Change the Game of B2B Marketing
Also on this episode, we’ll talk about Trinity’s hopes for the second half of 2023, the most important relationship she has in her organization as a marketer, and Trinity’s favorite tools.
Episode Guide
3:03: Trinity explains the “Three Musketeers” her team targets in prospect organizations.
6:27: What has Trinity learned or changed because of the current economic conditions?
8:50: What is Trinity looking forward to in the second half of 2023?
11:50: What’s the most important business relationship Trinity has right now?
13:48: The importance of customer experience in the SaaS space
16:10: What is Trinity’s favorite tool?
Because we live in a world surrounded by technology, we often equate innovation with devices and software. But innovation is about taking a different approach to just about anything. If you can make something faster, more efficient, and more productive, you’re innovating.
During times of economic uncertainty, innovation and experimentation are often cast aside in favor of short-term returns. Testing out new systems and approaches carries risk, and companies and their employees have a lower tolerance for risk during a slow economy.
If you slow your pace of innovation too much, however, you can find yourself at a disadvantage when things pick up.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Jonathan Sedger, DIrector of Innovation and Partnerships at B2B marketing agency Twogether, talks about how B2B marketers can use innovation to improve outcomes for their customers and prospects and help achieve goals quickly and efficiently.
RELATED EPISODE: How Economic Conditions Help You Rethink Your Marketing
We’ll also touch on creating a culture and frameworks for innovation and experimentation, Jonathan’s favorite tools, and more.
Episode Guide
2:37: Where do many businesses go wrong in their approach to innovation?
4:00: What are some strategic approaches to innovation worth trying?
5:47: How do companies approach experimentation today?
8:55: Jonathan shares the framework his team uses for innovation and experimentation
9:43: Which technologies are Jonathan and his team experimenting with right now?
10:49: What are Jonathan’s favorite tools?
Resource constraints are hitting B2B marketers hard. The teams are often smaller than they were two years ago. The tools are fewer. But the goals are often headed in the other direction.
Many marketers are tired of hearing “Do more with less.” And a better approach to economic uncertainty might be rethinking what your company is doing to see if it still makes sense. That’s true in both your messaging, where prospects are in a different reality than they were two years ago, and in your tactics.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking with Ting Ting Luo, VP of Marketing at Orum, a sales tech company that aims to make sales calls as efficient as email.
Among the topics we discuss: Ting Ting’s career journey from management consulting in one economic downturn to VP of marketing in another; building the marketing team at Orum from the ground up, and the challenges her team faces when marketing to prospects whose tech investments are under increasing scrutiny from executives.
Episode Guide
2:40: How did beginning her career during the 2008-2009 downturn impact Ting Ting’s career journey?
5:00: Does the volume of information at people’s fingertips help or hamper their outreach efforts?
9:19: How the new dynamics of tech purchases change the sales-marketing dynamic.
12:00: How macroeconomic conditions are affecting the buyers’ journey.
14:49: How Ting Ting built her marketing team at Orum.
17:30: What are the most significant challenges facing Ting Ting and her team?
21:05: What are Ting Ting’s favorite tools?
Resource constraints are hitting B2B marketers hard. The teams are often smaller than they were two years ago. The tools are fewer. But the goals are often headed in the other direction. Many marketers are tired of hearing “Do more with less.” And a better approach to economic uncertainty might be rethinking what your company is doing to see if it still makes sense. That’s true in both your messaging, where prospects are in a different reality than they were two years ago, and in your tactics. In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking with Ting Ting Luo, VP of Marketing at Orum, a sales tech company that aims to make sales calls as efficient as email. Among the topics we discuss: Ting Ting’s career journey from management consulting in one economic downturn to VP of marketing in another; building the marketing team at Orum from the ground up, and the challenges her team faces when marketing to prospects whose tech investments are under increasing scrutiny from executives. Episode Guide2:40: How did beginning her career during the 2008-2009 downturn impact Ting Ting’s career journey?5:00: Does the volume of information at people’s fingertips help or hamper their outreach efforts?9:19: How the new dynamics of tech purchases change the sales-marketing dynamic.12:00: How macroeconomic conditions are affecting the buyers’ journey. 14:49: How Ting Ting built her marketing team at Orum.17:30: What are the most significant challenges facing Ting Ting and her team?21:05: What are Ting Ting’s favorite tools?
The modern marketing and sales organization often integrates several platforms to deliver a comprehensive view of prospects and customers.
But when it comes to recruiting talent, the systems are often years behind what’s available to marketing and sales. Recruiters, for example, often can’t target potential employees the way their colleagues in marketing can target potential customers.
Add all of this up, and it means pain points for recruiters and hiring managers.
RELATED EPISODE: Why You Need Brand to Support Demand in B2B Marketing
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Sam Kuenhle, VP of Marketing at Loxo. We’re going to talk about a different approach to recruiting and hiring talent, his team’s challenges and goals, and the difference between content that matters versus content that converts.
Episode Guide
2:28: Sam explains Loxo’s approach to HR tech.
6:41: What are the challenges Sam and his team face at Loxo?
10:18: Creating content that matters vs. content that converts.
14:27: The impotence of messaging around customer needs.
16:23: Sam shares some of the goals he and his team are working on in 2023.
18:39: What is Sam’s favorite tool?
The modern marketing and sales organization often integrates several platforms to deliver a comprehensive view of prospects and customers. But when it comes to recruiting talent, the systems are often years behind what’s available to marketing and sales. Recruiters, for example, often can’t target potential employees the way their colleagues in marketing can target potential customers.Add all of this up, and it means pain points for recruiters and hiring managers. On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Sam Kuenhle, VP of Marketing at Loxo. We’re going to talk about a different approach to recruiting and hiring talent, his team’s challenges and goals, and the difference between content that matters versus content that converts.
Businesses in the technology sector understand the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) better than most. But the full scope of AI’s potential lies beyond tech, in industries that have been slower to adopt tools that can rapidly analyze data and help manage risk.
The construction industry, for example, touches almost everything we do. But it’s an unlikely place to find tools like predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. But like any area of the economy, construction companies and their leaders are interested in tools that will help increase speed, better manage costs, and make more efficient use of resources. And that’s where artificial intelligence can help.
Stephanie Seril is VP of Marketing at Avvir, which uses AI to help construction companies and their clients compare projects to digital twins and identify errors long before they become expensive and time-consuming to fix.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Stephanie talks about the challenges Avvir faces in its marketing, how marketing tech to an industry like construction differs from her days in Silicon Valley, and why steel-toed boots are now part of her work attire.
Episode Guide
2:10: Stephanie explains what Avvir’s technology does and who uses it
4:08: What are some of the challenges Stephanie and her team face when marketing Avvir’s solutions?
7:51: How does marketing tech outside of the tech industry compare to Stephanie’s roles in tech?
10:07: What are the most effective messages and tactics for Avvir?
14:46: What is Stephanie’s favorite tool?.
ChatGPT and other generative AI tools that create content are capturing a lot of attention. But content is only one application of generative AI. It can generate just about anything in terms of data.
Getting AI and machine learning projects off the ground remains a significant hurdle for many businesses. One of the biggest obstacles companies face is access to the datasets they need to properly build and scale their machine learning models.
Let’s say you work at a financial institution and you want to use machine learning to improve customer service or help introduce cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Because of the sensitive nature of customers’ financial information, training the tech on real data isn’t a good idea.
That’s where synthetic data comes into play. MOSTLY AI generates synthetic data that looks and acts just like an organization’s real data. It can be used to train machine learning models, so they can work with seemingly real data without introducing additional risk.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Sabine Klisch, VP, Global Marketing at MOSTLY AI about the market for synthetic data, challenges, and goals for the year ahead.
Episode Guide
2:13: Sabine explains the concept of synthetic data and why it’s important to MOSTLY’s audience.
4:42: What is the most effective message for MOSTLY’s target audience?
8:08: What are the goals Sabine has set for herself, her team, and her brand in 2023?
10:16: What are the challenges Sabine expects to face as 2023 continues?
12:34: How the popularity of ChatGPT helps raise the profile of all applications of generative AI.
15:23: What is Sabine’s favorite tool?
There are some things about the art and science of media buying that haven’t changed much in recent years. But other elements of media buying are in a constant state of flux. Social media is one example. Would you have predicted even one year ago that brands would be skittish of Twitter but taking a serious look at Reddit?
Jason Gladu is the president of Avani Media, a demand gen agency that specializes in working with B2B tech companies. Back in early 2021, Jason joined the B2B Nation podcast to talk about media buying strategy. The episode was so popular, we decided it was time to revisit the subject again.
RELATED EPISODE: Why You Need Brand to Support Demand in B2B Marketing
In this episode of the podcast, Jason guides us through the media buying landscape of 2023. This time around we’re talking about the impact of economic uncertainty, old approaches to media buying that are making a comeback, and the quest for more engagement and shorter sales cycles.
Episode Guide
1:42: What has changed the most for B2B media buyers in the last two years?
4:46: What is the “temperature" of marketers and media buyers right now?
8:08: Are media buyers still setting aside precious budget for testing?
10:10: How has the media that marketers are buying changed in the past two years?
13:30: What are the most overlooked opportunities for marketers buying media today?
15:37: What are the downsides of being “safe” with your media buys?
20:05: What is Jason’s advice to marketers for the rest of 2023?
There are some things about the art and science of media buying that haven’t changed much in recent years. But other elements of media buying are in a constant state of flux. Social media is one example. Would you have predicted even one year ago that brands would be skittish of Twitter but taking a serious look at Reddit?Jason Gladu is the president of Avani Media, a demand gen agency that specializes in working with B2B tech companies. Back in early 2021, Jason joined the B2B Nation podcast to talk about media buying strategy. The episode was so popular, we decided it was time to revisit the subject again. In this episode of the podcast, Jason guides us through the media buying landscape of 2023. This time around we’re talking about the impact of economic uncertainty, old approaches to media buying that are making a comeback, and the quest for more engagement and shorter sales cycles. Episode Guide1:42: What has changed the most for B2B media buyers in the last two years?4:46: What is the “temperature" of marketers and media buyers right now?8:08: Are media buyers still setting aside precious budget for testing?10:10: How has the media that marketers are buying changed in the past two years?13:30: What are the most overlooked opportunities for marketers buying media today?15:37: What are the downsides of being “safe” with your media buys?20:05: What is Jason’s advice to marketers for the rest of 2023?
Location, location, location. That’s the age-old advice given to real estate investors. And like the age-old advice given to many areas of life and business, today it’s often tweaked just a bit. Location, location, location – and data.
Today’s real estate investors and developers have access to millions of data points to help them gauge the potential of a property. That level of insight is especially helpful during times of economic uncertainty, when investments carry more risk.
Max LeBlond is the Director of Marketing at Local Logic. According to his company, location impacts 48 percent of a property asset’s value. That’s why decisions fueled by location data provide a competitive advantage in today’s real estate market.
RELATED EPISODE: How Business Users Change the Game of B2B Marketing
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Max talks about the proptech market, what 2023 has in store for the Local Logic team, and more.
Episode Guide
3:22: Max explains the proptech landscape.
5:24: What gets Max excited about 2023? What are the challenges his team will face?
6:58: How proptech tools create value during economic uncertainty.
9:04: What are the goals Max and his team are trying to achieve in 2023?
11:00: The role of events in the Local Logic marketing strategy.
11:50: What is Max’s favorite tool?
Location, location, location. That’s the age-old advice given to real estate investors. And like the age-old advice given to many areas of life and business, today it’s often tweaked just a bit. Location, location, location – and data.Today’s real estate investors and developers have access to millions of data points to help them gauge the potential of a property. That level of insight is especially helpful during times of economic uncertainty, when investments carry more risk.Max LeBlond is the Director of Marketing at Local Logic. According to his company, location impacts 48 percent of a property asset’s value. That’s why decisions fueled by location data provide a competitive advantage in today’s real estate market. In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Max talks about the proptech market, what 2023 has in store for the Local Logic team, and more.
The pressure is on finance teams to better control spending and account for every dollar spent. And that probably doesn’t sound like a great time to be pitching new software to finance roles. But if tracking and managing an organization’s spending is the primary focus of your product, this might be your time to shine.In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Idan Gol, VP of Marketing at Mesh Payments. Like many marketing teams, Idan’s team is trying to convince businesses of the benefits of its platform at a time when many are working to reduce their spending. And Mesh Payments is not the only one in the increasingly crowded spend management space trying to make their case. In the episode, Idan talks about standing out in the payments and spend management space, goals for 2023, lessons from 2022, why “efficiency” will be vital to marketing in 2023, and more.
An increasing number of B2B revenue organizations are aligned around their product and customer lifecycle. Marketing generates awareness, sales closes deals with customers, and customer success is tasked with increasing renewals and lowering attrition.
But just because the teams are organized in such a manner doesn’t mean the motions are carried out correctly.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Greg Bond, who leads enterprise sales and channel partnerships at email marketing vendor Constant Contact.
RELATED EPISODE: How Business Users Change the Game for B2B Marketing
Throughout his career in B2B, Greg has held almost every imaginable title in the revenue organization, including sales and customer success roles. Our conversation touches on the lessons he’s learned across his journey, the challenge of marketing to marketers, goals for 2023, and more.
Episode Guide
2:03: What are the biggest lessons Greg has learned from a career in revenue organizations?
8:51: What are the challenges of selling into marketing and revenue roles?
15:00: What are Greg’s goals for 2023?
16:54: What will we be talking about in 12 months, at the start of 2024?
20:33: What is Greg’s favorite tool?
Branding might be the most undervalued aspect of B2B marketing. Just take a look at any list of the dominant brands in the world, and you might see a B2B brand or two, but branding remains synonymous with the B2C world.
But the lack of investment in branding is putting many B2B brands at a disadvantage. Demand generation is the dominant marketing philosophy in the B2B space, and your demand gen efforts are much more effective when your brand works to support demand.
Without brand recognition and trust, B2B buyers are much less likely to respond to demand gen tactics and give up personal information.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we talk to Jordan Liebman, Vice President, Global Demand Generation and Brand Marketing at Blue Jeans by Verizon. Among the topics we discuss are the state of branding in B2B marketing; Jordan’s career journey, from agency to brand and from B2C to B2B; and the trend toward consumer-like B2B experiences and more.
Episode Guide
2:40: Why Blue Jeans by Verizon provides self-service B2B purchases for its customers
7:34: Jordan discusses his career path, from agency to brand and B2C to B2B
13:19: What do B2B organizations get wrong about branding?
18:37: How does brand support demand gen tactics in B2B marketing?
21:39: What are Jordan’s goals for his team, brand and himself for 2023?
24:15: What is Jordan’s favorite tool?
27:01: What’s the short-term future for popular social media platforms?
Branding might be the most undervalued aspect of B2B marketing. Just take a look at any list of the dominant brands in the world, and you might see a B2B brand or two, but branding remains synonymous with the B2C world.But the lack of investment in branding is putting many B2B brands at a disadvantage. Demand generation is the dominant marketing philosophy in the B2B space, and your demand gen efforts are much more effective when your brand works to support demand.Without brand recognition and trust, B2B buyers are much less likely to respond to demand gen tactics and give up personal information. On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we talk to Jordan Liebman, Vice President, Global Demand Generation and Brand Marketing at Blue Jeans by Verizon. Among the topics we discuss are the state of branding in B2B marketing; Jordan’s career journey, from agency to brand and from B2C to B2B; and the trend toward consumer-like B2B experiences and more.
Twenty years ago, software vendors that wanted to sell into an enterprise organization would target the tech team and its leadership. They could develop and distribute whitepapers and product guides, and attend the conferences where technology leaders went to talk shop.
Today, everyone is a software buyer. And that requires a radical shift in the way software vendors market their tools, support their customers, and even develop their products.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to John Ragsdale, Distinguished Researcher, Vice President of Technology Ecosystems at Technology Service Industry Association (TSIA). John and his team spend their time helping enterprise technology companies that are TSIA members evaluate their own business and technology needs.
RELATED EPISODE: The Rise of ‘Product’ as an Engine for Growth
With business buyers now playing such a prominent role in technology purchases, many enterprise software brands find themselves struggling to provide consumer-like experiences in their marketing, customer success, and sales motions.
John discusses these challenges and more in our 35-minute conversation.
Episode Guide
4:27: What do the technology companies John recommends to TSIA members have in common?
9:15: John identifies an under-valued revenue source for tech brands.
10:31: How business buyers have upended the world of software marketing.
13:22: What are the biggest barriers to providing top-notch customer experience in tech?
18:58: What are the growth opportunities technology companies are not taking advantage of?
24:45: What guidance does John provide to TSIA members that the B2B Nation audience would benefit from hearing?
26:30: Why software vendors have gone sour on customization.
30:50: What is John’s favorite tool?
Twenty years ago, software vendors that wanted to sell into an enterprise organization would target the tech team and its leadership. They could develop and distribute whitepapers and product guides, and attend the conferences where technology leaders went to talk shop.Today, everyone is a software buyer. And that requires a radical shift in the way software vendors market their tools, support their customers, and even develop their products.On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to John Ragsdale, Distinguished Researcher, Vice President of Technology Ecosystems at Technology Service Industry Association (TSIA). John and his team spend their time helping enterprise technology companies that are TSIA members evaluate their own business and technology needs.RELATED EPISODE: The Rise of ‘Product’ as an Engine for GrowthWith business buyers now playing such a prominent role in technology purchases, many enterprise software brands find themselves struggling to provide consumer-like experiences in their marketing, customer success, and sales motions. John discusses these challenges and more in our 35-minute conversation. Episode Guide4:27: What do the technology companies John recommends to TSIA members have in common?9:15: John identifies an under-valued revenue source for tech brands.10:31: How business buyers have upended the world of software marketing.13:22: What are the biggest barriers to providing top-notch customer experience in tech?18:58: What are the growth opportunities technology companies are not taking advantage of?24:45: What guidance does John provide to TSIA members that the B2B Nation audience would benefit from hearing?26:30: Why software vendors have gone sour on customization.30:50: What is John’s favorite tool?
One of the challenges B2B marketers face today is the perception that their brand is boring. As a new generation of B2B buyers takes control of the market, many of the tried and true – but potentially stale – tactics that worked in the past might not produce the same results.
That’s why today you see more video content in B2B marketing, more brand building, and more top-of-the-funnel content that plays to emotions. This new generation of buyer expects the messages they see from B2B firms to be on par with B2C marketing.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Megan Noel of Trava Security about introducing humanity, emotion, and education into your B2B marketing.
RELATED: Follow B2B Nation from TechnologyAdvice on LinkedIn for more B2B marketing resources
We’ll also discuss how Megan’s background in education helps her succeed with what she calls the “new marketing” and increases the appeal to Millennials and Gen X buyers who don’t research products and services by the same rules previous generations of B2B buyers used.
Episode Guide
1:38: How will B2B marketers adjust to the changing demographics of the B2B audience?
4:58: What is the biggest challenge Megan’s team will face in 2023?
9:30: What does marketing bring to Meghan’s interest in education and how does her background in education impact marketing?
12:44: What is Megan’s favorite tool?
One of the challenges B2B marketers face today is the perception that their brand is boring. As a new generation of B2B buyers takes control of the market, many of the tried and true – but potentially stale – tactics that worked in the past might not produce the same results.That’s why today you see more video content in B2B marketing, more brand building, and more top-of-the-funnel content that plays to emotions. This new generation of buyer expects the messages they see from B2B firms to be on par with B2C marketing. In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Megan Noel of Trava Security about introducing humanity, emotion, and education into your B2B marketing. RELATED: Follow B2B Nation from TechnologyAdvice on LinkedIn for more B2B marketing resourcesWe’ll also discuss how Megan’s background in education helps her succeed with what she calls the “new marketing” and increases the appeal to Millennials and Gen X buyers who don’t research products and services by the same rules previous generations of B2B buyers used. Episode Guide1:38: How will B2B marketers adjust to the changing demographics of the B2B audience?4:58: What is the biggest challenge Megan’s team will face in 2023?9:30: What does marketing bring to Meghan’s interest in education and how does her background in education impact marketing?12:44: What is Megan’s favorite tool?
A surprising number of the daily activities that take place on revenue teams remain manual. Sellers still create reminders to follow up with prospects or customers. Data is manually entered into CRM applications and other tools, increasing the likelihood of human error in the process.
It’s a little hard to believe when you think about it. The combination of automation and business process tools was supposed to save us from all of this, wasn’t it?
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Jim Kaskade, CEO of Conversica, joins us to talk about Revenue Digital Assistants (RDAs). These assistants are AI-powered bots that can take some of the manual, time-consuming tasks that hold back marketing, sales, and customer success teams. They don’t get tired, sick, or stressed. And they can work at a scale that most revenue teams can’t replicate.
RELATED EPISODE: How to Succeed in the Age of the Anonymous Buyer
Jim also discusses the cultural shifts that make it possible for companies to deploy AI-powered assistants, the messaging that helps his team appeal to revenue leaders, and more.
Episode Guide
5:22: Why do revenue organizations still have so many manual processes?
9:28: How do digital assistants work for revenue teams?
21:31: How comfortable are businesses using AI in their revenue organization?
26:03: Which messages are resonating with Conversica’s customers?
30:18: What is Jim’s favorite tool
Some people encounter a problem at work with no obvious solution and find a workaround. Others see roadblocks as part of their job or the task at hand and learn to deal with them. And for other people, the desire to solve a problem impacting their daily work fires up their imagination.
Chad Waite came across a problem while working in partner marketing that lacked an obvious and easy-to-use solution. Many of his partners wanted co-branded materials to use in their own marketing efforts. So many materials, in fact, that his colleagues in creative couldn’t possibly deliver what was needed.
That experience led Chad to start PieceKeeper, a platform that helps marketers keep their promotional materials on brand and in compliance, without requiring a designer to make every single tweak along the way.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Chad shares his story as a marketer turned martech entrepreneur. If you’ve ever thought about solving a seemingly unsolvable problem at work by building the solution and turning it into a calling, this one's for you.
Episode Guide
2:26: Chad shares the story of PieceKeeper 6:31: What is it like to go from marketer to co-founder? 9:27: What has Chad learned from his start-up experience? 12:03: The role of customer feedback in a product-led start up. 17:23: Chad shares his thoughts on what’s ahead in 2023. 22:33: What are Chad’s favorite tools?
Every business needs to think about cybersecurity. As a result, there’s a huge market for the growing number of vendors selling the tools and platforms that help keep businesses, their users, and their data safe. And that means noise.
For B2B marketers in the cybersecurity space, cutting through the noise and reaching information security professionals is a daily struggle. You can’t scare people into buying your product. You can’t chase after every company that’s suffered from a breach or ransomware attack.
But you also can’t make the mistake of treating all of your prospects alike. Every business and industry operates in its own cybersecurity environment. They all face unique challenges and circumstances that marketers and sellers can’t ignore.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, our guest is Sawsan Hamawandy, head of global demand generation at Heimdal Security. Sawsan has held both marketing and sales roles in B2B organizations. Our conversation covers the Dos and Don’ts of cybersecurity marketing, how marketing can help accelerate the sales cycle, bridging the sales-marketing gap, a look ahead to 2023, and more.
Episode Guide
3:08: What is working in cybersecurity marketing today? 8:52: How can marketers bridge the gap between sales and marketing? 14:08: How can marketers influence the sales cycle? 20:35: What are Sawsan’s thoughts on the year 2023 for B2B marketers? 30:45: What’s the difference between marketing for large and small organizations? 35:46: What is Sawsan’s favorite tool?
An increasing number of technology vendors are making artificial intelligence (AI) central to their products and their messaging. For B2B marketers that like to talk about ROI and value, AI presents a conundrum: How do you balance the use of AI with business outcomes?
AI is a foundational technology that is incredibly complex to explain, especially to business buyers without a deep technical background. That means marketers need to know their audience – their role, their industry, and the challenges they’re looking to solve.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re talking to Stephen Gold, the CMO of SparkCognition. His company makes tools built on AI to help businesses better predict outcomes and improve processes for everything from manufacturing and transportation to cybersecurity.
RELATED EPISODE: How Your Target Market Changes When Everyone is a Tech Buyer
Our discussion covers the challenges and opportunities that face marketers when everyone seems to be talking about AI today, whether AI even matters to business users looking for better outcomes, and what gets Stephen excited about what’s ahead in 2023.
Episode Guide
2:28: How does SparkCognition make its message stand out when AI is such a hot topic?
5:28: How do you find the balance of talking AI tech vs talking business outcomes?
7:00: How does SparkCognition handle the challenge of targeting diverse industries?
9:18: “You’ve got to present technology in a way that resonates with the way that industry thinks, acts, and operates.”
12:04: How does SparkCognition develop the subject matter expertise across the industries it targets?
13:44: What gets Stephen excited and nervous about 2023?
18:11: What is Stephen’s favorite tool?
B2B marketers that want to put their brand where the conversations are taking place need to understand how to use social media. That might sound obvious given the dominance of social media today across B2B and B2C audiences, but all social media platforms are not created alike.
LinkedIn is the first platform that comes to mind when most people think about B2B social media, but video content on TikTok has broad appeal. There might also be less noise for your B2B offer on Facebook. You can’t forget about Twitter either.
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we’re joined by Cat Anderson, head of marketing EMEA at Sprout Social, to talk about why social media remains such a challenge for so many B2B organizations.
RELATED EPISODE: Which B2C Tactics Will Help Improve Your B2B Marketing?
Among the topics we’re going to cover are how to choose the right platforms for your social media efforts, the right KPIs to help track performance, and Cat’s thoughts on marketing in a down economy.
Episode Guide
2:45: Why do B2B organizations struggle with their social media strategy?
6:25: What’s the relationship between company size and social media strategy?
9:39: Which social media platform is right for your brand?
13:35: What are the most important KPIs to consider in your B2B social media?
16:00: How does social media fit into marketing’s plans when the economy slows?
18:43: What is Cat's favorite tool?
The great promise of digital advertising was the ability to measure performance and optimize programs. And unlike traditional forms of media, marketers using digital ads would have detailed visibility into attribution.
Digital advertising has helped brands big and small reach their target audience using a number of platforms and networks. Self-service tools and reporting allow even part-time marketers to launch campaigns and track their progress.
But digital advertising hasn’t always lived up to its potential. There are a number of platforms where businesses can buy ads, including giant media companies like Google and Meta. Each has its own reporting tools, which makes cross-channel measurement a challenge for many marketers.
The ever-changing privacy landscape has also made it more difficult for marketers to get accurate attribution data and will likely get more restrictive moving forward.
RELATED EPISODE: Which B2C Tactics Will Help Improve Your B2B Marketing?
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we talk to Clay Cohen of Measured. His company helps marketers make more-informed marketing decisions around their media spend with a special focus on incremental media contributions.
Join us as we discuss the importance of unified measurement of media, how privacy regulations and vendor moves to protect data impact digital media, and how marketers should approach an economic slowdown.
Episode Guide
2:30: Are marketers properly understanding and using the vast amount of data generated by their media?
5:33: Why are marketers reliant on last-touch attribution despite all of the tools and data at their disposal?
9:16: What is the impact of privacy regulations and data privacy policies on media tracking?
15:17: How will a down economy impact how Clay and his colleagues market their tools?
19:22: What is Clay’s favorite tool?
Account-based marketing is such an integral part of the strategy for so many B2B marketing teams that it is hard to understand how marketing worked before ABM burst onto the scene.
The early promises of ABM included increased efficiency and better alignment between marketing and sales. When marketing knows exactly which accounts it needs to target, there’s less wasted effort. And when sales and marketing collaborate to identify those accounts, they are (in theory) on the same page.
Today, B2B marketing is in a new phase of ABM. Beyond identifying accounts to target, marketers are combining account names with other forms of data, such as intent, to fine-tune their list even more.
RELATED EPISODE: How to Succeed in the Age of the Anonymous Buyer
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we talk to Randi Barshack, CMO of ABM platform vendor Rollworks, about the evolution of ABM, how her team works to stand out in the very crowded market for marketing technology, and how marketers should approach their work in a weak economy.
Episode Guide
1:52: Have we reached the point where ABM is now the standard for B2B marketing?
5:13: Does Randi think ABM has helped align marketing and sales?
8:33: How does Randi help her brand break through the noise in the crowded martech space?
12:13: Randi’s advice for maintaining and growing demand in a down economy.
15:58: What is Randi’s favorite tool?
Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on your organization’s products to acquire and retain customers. With the demand for digital products and experiences at an all-time high, it’s not surprising to see product-led growth gaining popularity.
Digital products and the experiences they deliver are significant differentiators for many organizations. Today’s consumers expect seamless experiences across channels that make it easy to accomplish their goals and get what they need without delay.
This emphasis on product as an engine for growth puts roles like product management and product marketing in the spotlight for many businesses. It also requires businesses to maintain the resources required to continually create and improve products that deliver even when market demands shift.
Product development agencies help businesses create products from conception to go-to-market strategy. They are, in many ways, the next generation of development shops that did the coding and testing to bring digital products to life.
RELATED EPISODE: How to Market Your Tech to Software Developers
On this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, Margarita Mangino, Chief Growth Officer at product development agency Uruit, talks about the rise of digital products and product-specific roles in organizations, the challenges of transforming your go-to-market message, and how marketers should approach economic instability.
Episode Guide
2:01: What’s the difference between marketing services and capabilities and marketing products?
5:00: What’s the biggest challenge Margarita and her team face in their marketing today?
7:57: How does marketing to product teams differ from marketing to IT roles?
10:40: What is Margarita’s advice for marketers with economic stability on the horizon?
13:44: The advantages of offshoring work to Latin America.
17:19: What is Margarita’s favorite tool?
There has been a lot of attention on the healthcare industry over the past two and a half years, and it hasn’t all come from consumers and the news media.
Healthcare is more complicated than it was 20 or 30 years ago. There are more specialists involved in care, more facilities, and more data. That’s one reason why healthcare is a popular area for technology companies that want to help the market innovate. It’s still widely seen as a sector where the information isn’t always widely shared, the data isn’t easily converted into decisions, and manual processes remain in place.
Tech companies looking to market solutions to healthcare providers are also finding complexity and a high number of influencers behind purchase decisions. Roles like Chief Medical Information Officer and Chief Nursing Information Officer simply did not exist in years past.
On this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Wendy White, CMO of healthcare collaboration platform TigerConnect. We discuss how the pandemic played a role in Wendy’s move to healthcare tech marketing, what’s working in marketing for healthcare tech, and the role of virtual and in-person events in TigerConnect’s strategy.
Episode Guide
2:15: What was it like to move into the healthcare industry during the COVID pandemic?
3:46: Why collaboration and communication present such a challenge in healthcare.
5:13: What makes marketing to healthcare organizations different from other verticals?
6:46: What’s the biggest marketing challenge for TigerConnect?
7:58: What is the one tool Wendy cannot work without?
10:35: How much are in-person events contributing to TigerConnect’s marketing?
12:03: “We’re all about having quality conversations.”
People don’t remove their B2C hats when they’re researching products in their business life. That’s why B2B marketers are often reminded that some of the tactics and platforms that have the “B2C” label deserve a look in B2B marketing. It’s all marketing to people, after all.
But B2B purchases are still made by a committee of people, each with their own preferences around content and their own needs to be met. And that’s why B2B marketers are asking questions.
Can one-to-one strategies work in B2B where no single person has purchase authority? Can personalization, which is a cornerstone of many digital experiences for consumers, work in B2B? Do social platforms other than LinkedIn influence members of the B2B buying committee?
RELATED EPISODE: How Customer Advocacy is Evolving in B2B Marketing
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Chuck Moxley, CMO of digital experience vendor Blue Triangle and co-author of An Audience of One. We’ll look for the answers to these questions and more.
Episode Guide
2:04: Chuck discusses his book and the idea of personalized marketing vs. mass marketing
3:53: The three major shifts in the way people consume media and choose brands today.
4:54: How B2C concepts like personalization apply to the B2B world.
7:53: What do B2B marketers get wrong about personalization and 1:1 marketing?
12:18: “You’ve got to stop thinking ‘B2B and all the rules that used to be…’”
12:40: How does buying by committee work with personalization efforts?
15:28: What is Chuck’s favorite tool?
Content marketing is more than distributing thought leadership and offering eBook downloads to attract leads. Your organization’s content can continue to serve your revenue organization (and your customers) as they interact with your sales and customer success teams.
But your content can’t serve anyone if your team doesn’t know where to find it or can’t be reasonably sure it’s up to date and on-brand.
Sales enablement plays a pivotal role in making sure the entire revenue organization has the tools and content it needs, And when it’s working, the right content, at the right time, for the right customer or prospect helps create those “these people get me” feeling we all aim to achieve.
RELATED EPISODE: Does Your Sales Enablement Match the Modern B2B Experience?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Nikki Dawson, head of EMEA marketing for sales enablement platform Highspot. Nikki discusses how it is that as much as 70 percent of the content organizations create goes to waste, what’s working in demand gen for Nikki and her colleagues around the world, and how marketing, sales, and sales enablement can better work together in an effective revenue organization.
Episode Guide
2:17: Investing in and creating content is just the first challenge
5:14: How is Highspot helping its customers solve sales enablement challenges?
7:58: What’s working for Nikki’s team in their demand gen efforts?
9:00: How do different marketing tactics perform in different global regions?
10:40: What is Nikki’s favorite tool (other than Highspot)?
Content marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing tactics in B2B, but has the content evolved to keep up with the audiences?
Experiences and interactivity are more commonly found in B2C marketing efforts where the audience is large and the resources are often more plentiful than in the B2B space. It’s simply difficult to justify the cost of the developers and designers needed to create interactive experiences.
Juan Rubio is the CEO and co-founder at Genially, a platform that allows users to create interactive experiences without the need to code or have a deep understanding of design. The idea for Genially came from Juan’s background as a biologist, where he longed for affordable tools that made complex topics like climate change and green energy easier to understand.
RELATED EPISODE: Zero-Party Data and the Future of Interactive Content
In this episode of B2B Nation, we are talking to Juan about the opportunity for interactive content creation, where interactive experiences go from here, and what Juan loves about what he does.
Episode Guide
2:58: Why don’t we see more interactive content in B2B marketing?
7:03: “When we are talking about communication, we’re talking about marketing and learning.”
7:40: Where do interactive content and experiences go from here?
8:55: What does Juan think is the best part of what he does?
10:08: What is Juan’s favorite tool?
Online quizzes and product builders seemed to find a home on the Internet the week after it was invented. And while you might joke about the answer you received when you took that quiz about the type of superhero you would be or the pet dinosaur you should own, you’re generating real data when you answer those questions.
Data generated on a company’s website and then used by that company is called zero-party data, and it’s valuable because no one else has it. That makes zero-party data a goldmine for marketers.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Saksam Sharda, creative director and CIO at Outgrow.co, about zero-party data and the future of interactive content. While quizzes and product selection tools are almost as old as the Internet itself, the future of interactive content could someday include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and personalization at scale.
RELATED EPISODE: How to Build a Content Strategy Across the Buyers’ Journey
Imagine combining the power of AI technology with an easy-to-use, low-code, or no-code platform everyone can use. That makes generating third-party data at scale possible and drives business outcomes. What kind of superhero are you then?
Episode Guide
2:23: What is the killer application for interactive content? Is it zero-party data generation?
4:30: What is Outgrow.co’s approach to interactive content?
6:00: Where does interactive content go from here?
8:18: What has the Internet forgotten about the way people choose products?
10:25: What did Saksham learn about marketing over the past two years?
13:30: What is Saksham’s favorite tool?
How well do you understand the content you have and the gaps that exist in your content strategy? Creating content at scale requires a level of visibility that many editorial organizations struggle to achieve and which many B2B marketing organizations can’t even imagine.
Jeff Coyle is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse, which built a platform that uses AI to help build out a holistic content strategy that helps brands and publishers demonstrate expertise and meet their buyers across the journey.
In this episode of B2B Nation, Jeff discusses his approach to content strategy, how he convinces content purists that data and AI are the tools they’ve been waiting for, and what the future of B2B content looks like amidst industry consolidation and complicated partnerships.
RELATED EPISODE: You’ve Scaled Your B2B Creation. What happens next?
Episode Guide
2:23: Jeff explains his approach to content creation.
3:46: The inputs Jeff looks for to inform content creation.
6:09: “You need to be there at every stage of the experience.”
8:03: How does Jeff convince content purists to rely on data and AI?
16:26: Where does B2B content go from here?
25:33: Jeff predicts consolidation around B2B tech and content.
27:29: “What’s Google going to do?”
29:38: What are Jeff’s favorite tools?
Scaling B2B content creation remains a significant challenge for many companies. The demand for content assets, including papers, videos, and articles for marketing, the website, sales outreach, and more never seems to end.
With the right mix of in-house resources, reliable partners and freelancers, and clever strategies, B2B vendors can scale their content creation to help meet the demand. But that isn’t the end of your content challenges. Keeping all of that content consistent in voice, up to date as your brand and products evolve, and in compliance with industry regulations remains a requirement.
Christopher Willis is the CMO and Chief Pipeline Officer at Acrolinx, a content governance solution that uses artificial intelligence to help keep your content up to date and aligned with your brand.
On this episode of B2B Nation, Christopher discusses content creation and governance, content effectiveness, pipeline creation, and more.
Episode Guide
2:36: How does Acrolinx help marketers improve the quality and impact of their content?
6:20: The connection between content governance and content impact.
9:35: The challenges of scaling and maintaining content in the enterprise
17:09: How Christopher got the title Chief Pipeline Officer.
21:00: What are the important lessons about marketing Christoper learned over the past two years?
23:38: What is Christoper’s favorite tool?
Many organizations are putting Revenue Operations roles in place and growing the role into an entire team. But confusion around the RevOps role, the functions it performs, and where it goes as the revenue team matures continue to be an issue at many organizations.
Revenue Operations is not the same as a Salesforce Admin, but in-depth knowledge of your organization’s CRM is vital to the role. Nor is RevOps simply a sales operations job, as it should support the entire revenue organization from marketing to customer success. And maybe that’s why a definition of RevOps is so hard to develop.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to revenue operator Asia Corbett from Bread Financial about how to grow the RevOps function at your organization, how to grow into a RevOps role yourself, and how RevOps will evolve in the short and the long term.
Episode Guide
2:15: Asia’s thoughts on getting started in RevOps
4:49: The first step in developing a RevOps roadmap
7:43: What are the common misconceptions around the RevOps role?
10:40: What kind of experience makes someone a good fit for RevOps?
14:47: What would we be discussing about RevOps one year from now?
18:00: What is Asia’s favorite tool?
Software developers are the builders in their organizations, and like a lot of builders, they feel strongly about their tools. You can’t market to software developers the way you market to senior business leaders.
Developers are more hands-on. They like to try before they buy. And marketing to software developers often means taking a bottom-up approach to selling your tech. Get your tools in the hands of the builders, and they will show their leaders what’s possible.
On this episode of 2B Nation, we’re talking to Yonatan Shelach of JFrog about how to market to software developers, what some marketers fail to understand about developers, and the outsized role developers play in the decision-making process in many organizations.
Episode Guide
2:26: The challenges of targeting software developers
4:05: What does Yonatan think businesses fail to understand about developers?
5:34: What’s been Yonatan’s most effective strategy for generating demand over the past two years?
6:43: What is the most important skill in B2B marketing today?
8:27: What is Yonatan’s favorite tool?
How are we going to develop the next generation of female revenue leaders? It’s a complicated question because the lack of women in revenue leadership roles today makes it hard to develop leaders for tomorrow.
Women are sorely underrepresented in leadership roles. And that’s as true of revenue teams as it is elsewhere in many organizations. Women in Sales Everywhere (WISE) developed out of a passion project at CloserIQ with the goal of developing female revenue leaders through mentoring, networking, and professional development opportunities.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Cassie Yettru, general manager of WISE, about supporting women so they can move into leadership roles on revenue teams, what women value most in career opportunities and the importance of clearly defined development opportunities.
WISE's individual membership program allows women in sales or sales-related roles to network with peers, find mentors, and attend exclusive member-only events. WISE is offering 10% off membership to all B2B Nation listeners using the code B2BNATION10 — learn more and apply here. Apply the discount code during checkout.
Episode Guide
2:19: Where was Cassie given support and encouragement in her career?
4:00: What are some of the aspects of a job women value compared to men?
5:19: Who is most likely to pursue professional development? And who should?
6:34: Why are younger professionals less likely to explore professional development?
8:45: Where is the market for HR tech, training, and professional development headed?
11:02: What is Cassie’s favorite tool?
How to Make the Transition from Lead Gen to Demand Gen
Moving your marketing from a lead generation strategy built on MQLs to a demand generation strategy built on revenue and pipeline is often discussed in B2B marketing circles. But if you’re making the transition, it needs to go deeper than the label.
Among the challenges you’ll face in the process are communicating the benefits of demand gen to a leadership team that likely favored the concrete results of lead gen over the abstract nature of branding. You may need to take a look at your martech stack and see how it needs to be updated with your strategy. And let’s not forget: you need to show results.
In this episode of B2B Nation, Adam Holmgren from GetAccept joins us to discuss his transition from lead gen to demand gen and how he helps other marketers in the EMEA region make the pivot. Among the topics we’ll discuss are the state of demand gen in Europe, how demand gen differs from lead gen and branding, and whether martech is too often guiding the strategy in B2B marketing.
RELATED EPISODE: 5 Ways Lead Gen Has Changed in the Past Decade
Episode Guide
2:00: “The current state of demand gen in Europe is traditional lead gen confused as demand gen.”
3:20: What are some distinctions between lead gen and demand gen?
4:55: Does Adam make a distinction between brand awareness and demand gen?
6:54: What is a relatively easy change SaaS marketers could make with a big ROI?
8:32: How much is martech leading the strategy in B2B?
11:50: What is Adam’s favorite tool?
Whether you call it organic marketing or inbound marketing, strategies that bring prospects to your brand in search of a solution to their problem stand in contrast to outbound strategies that are usually more costly.
As B2B marketers pivot from lead generation to demand generation, organic and inbound tactics are gaining traction once again. Creating content that demonstrates your company’s expertise and increases your brand awareness are commonplace across B2B.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Vicki Frost, global director of content and campaigns at Vertiv, about organic marketing in the B2B space, content development, the role of analytics, and – of course – the age-old questions about whether you should be gating your content.
Episode Guide
1:57: What does Vicki think is the biggest, most positive change in B2B marketing?
2:37: What are some of the most common mistakes B2B marketers are making today?
4:10: Which content formats are having the biggest impact for Vicki’s programs today?
5:24: Is there a B2B content format that marketers or the audience wouldn’t miss if it disappeared?
7:14: Where does Vicki stand on gating content?
10:04: What is Vicki’s favorite tool?
15:30: What would we be talking about if we had this conversation one year from now?
Maura Rivera is the CMO of Qualified, a conversational marketing vendor that infuses Salesforce data into chat to give the sales team a better idea of who is visiting their website. In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Maura about marketing in a space with a dominant brand, B2B marketing tactics she’s re-examined over the past two years, and why conversational marketing goes beyond chatbots.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Michael Sciano, Sr. Customer Marketing Manager at Airship, about how customer marketing is evolving from formulaic PDF case studies to a customer advocacy strategy that creates fans and eventually a community around your product.
On this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Patrick Quinn of BigCommerce about how to design and launch an influencer marketing campaign for your brand.
For decades, businesses hired famous people like actors and athletes to work as the face of their brand and influence their target markets. It was largely a one-way relationship because that’s how the media worked at the time.
Influencer marketing is a new twist on the idea for a new medium. Online influencers aren’t famous in the same way that Ronald Reagan was when he was the face of General Electric. If you’re over a certain age, you probably have no idea who most of today’s influencers even are.
But influencer marketing is quite common in B2C circles, and now it’s coming to B2B.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Dana Freker Doody about growing online communities, measuring their effectiveness, and what her journey from journalism to B2B marketing taught her along the way.
Dana Freker Doody is the VP, Marketing and Communications, at Juno, an online platform that helps turn an audience into a community.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Valerie Smyk, chief revenue officer of Kangaroo Rewards, about how businesses of all sizes and industries can use loyalty and rewards to grow their business.
We’ll be discussing how loyalty programs can help your business improve brand affinity, increase average deal size, incentivize customer referrals, and more.
Episode Guide
2:00: How difficult is it to start and maintain a loyalty program?
6:28: What don’t most people know about loyalty programs?
10:50: The messages that resonate with companies exploring loyalty programs.
13:07: “You can reward spending behaviors and also behaviors that are intrinsic to your brand values.”
14:20: Using loyalty programs to increase customer referrals.
15:46: “Advertising will help you bring in a customer, and a loyalty program will help you keep them.”
16:43: Loyalty programs for any industry.
19:06: “Everything that is loyalty and rewards comes back to psychology.”
21:50: What is Valerie’s favorite tool?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Tucker Stoffers of Divvy about how his team markets its fintech solutions and how B2B marketing for people in finance roles differs from tech roles.
Episode Guide
2:40: The challenges and opportunities of marketing in the B2B space.
3:51: “People just don’t bank the way they did 10 or 20 years ago.”
5:36: Which channels, tactics, and messages are resonating in fintech?
8:46: How fintech reduces friction for finance roles.
9:50: What’s the biggest change in Tucker’s 10 years in B2B marketing?
12:50: The role of the dark funnel and dark social in the future of B2B marketing.
13:46: What is Tucker’s favorite tool?
The “Great Resignation” has everyone talking about career goals, skills development, and job opportunities. With so many people moving around within industries or moving from one career path to another, there’s a lot of demand for skills training, which, like everything else these days, is increasingly taking place online.
Brian Finnerty is the VP of Marketing at Udacity, a company that focuses on skills development and talent transformation. We talked to Brian about what he thinks are the essential skills required to succeed in B2B marketing today. The transformation of marketing over the past decade means today the discipline includes roles for soft skills like creativity, hard skills like data analytics, and people skills.
We’re also going to discuss the pros and cons of marketing in a space that has everyone talking right now, the marketing lessons of the past year, and his view of in-person and virtual events moving forward.
Episode Guide
2:30: Does the worldwide focus on the job market and careers create challenges for Brian’s team to cut through the noise?
4:51: What are the essential skills required to succeed in B2B marketing today?
9:17: The most underrated skill in marketing today is…
11:56: How long does Brian think “The Great Resignation” lasts?
15:30: What happens next with in-person and virtual events?
19:50: What marketing lesson did Brian learn in the past year?
20:42: “It’s the story, not the channel that determines your success.”
21:14: What is the tool Brian can’t live without?
In this episode of B2B Nation, Nathan Burke, CMO of cybersecurity vendor Axonius, shares with us the five ways he thinks B2B lead generation has changed in the past decade, what his company is doing to keep pace with the changes, his marketing challenges, and more.
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In this episode of B2B Nation, we explore the experiences of women in the technology industry with Jamie Porter, senior director of marketing at MNJ Technologies. We’ll discuss Jamie’s experience in the tech sector and how she works to help other women achieve success as well.
Among the topics we cover are coaching and mentorship as well as the roles women in tech seem to actively seek out versus the roles they are guided into taking.
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In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Eric Dates, Director of Growth Marketing at Ncontracts, about how marketers can influence the dark funnel and dark social conversations, coming to grips with not being able to see and measure everything we do, the impact of LinkedIn on the B2B marketing community, and more.
Episode Guide
1:26: Messaging for complex topics in a world of text skimmers and soundbites.
3:18: The obstacles that the dark funnel and dark social create for buyers.
7:00: What have the last two years taught Eric about marketing?
11:30: Why Eric thinks B2B marketers and their community are the biggest advancement in marketing in the last 10 years.
14:45: Does martech give marketers more space to think creatively?
18:35: What gets Eric excited about the next two years?
22:28: What is Eric’s favorite tool?
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James Stanton is the Vice President of Marketing at Empyrean, an HR tech vendor. For James, moving beyond the MQL means looking at prospects through the lens of “opportunities,” which sounds a lot more aligned with how B2B works but does present some challenges of its own.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to James about MQLs, his company’s experience outsourcing practically all of its digital marketing functions, and more.
Episode Guide
3:09: Is this the year marketers drop MQLs, and what’s the replacement?
4:17: “In this humble marketer's opinion, the MQL is dead. It’s done.”
4:41: What metric will James be watching if not the MQL?
8:30: Tips for explaining plans to ditch the MQL to your leadership.
11:45: The challenges of moving from MQLs to demand units and opportunities.
14:52: How and why James is outsourcing Empyrean’s digital marketing functions.
22:40: What is James excited about in the business world in 2022?
27:00: What is James’ take on in-person events?
29:15: What is James’ favorite tool?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to David Melendrez, an account manager at AMD, who manages the relationship between AMD and one of its biggest and most strategic partners: Dell. David’s job at AMD is to make sure the Dell team has all of the knowledge and tools it needs to grow market share and nurture the relationship between the companies.
In our discussion, we talked about the unique nature of working with a single client, how two very large organizations cooperate to market and sell their products, and David’s journey to a front-row seat for one of the biggest turnarounds in tech history.
Episode Guide
3:20: Even with one customer, making new contacts is critical to success.
5:00: What types of conversations does David lead with his customers at Dell?
9:10: David’s unorthodox journey to his role at AMD.
11:44: What is the most important skill for managing a large, complex relationship like the one between AMD and Dell?
13:31: How do AMD and Dell work together to market Dell products with AMD technology?
17:31: What is David’s favorite tool?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Wayne Bulsiewicz of Simplus, an Infosys company that helps its customers get more out of their Salesforce deployments. Wayne and the Simplus team are growing their content strategy by creating marketing Centers of Excellence around the specific industries that Simplus targets.
Episode Guide
2:03: How do you define “experiential marketing,” and how does Simplus use it?
4:30: How does Simplus measure the results of its content marketing experience?
8:45: What Simplus does to help customers maximize their Salesforce investment.
11:05: How the “centers of excellence” approach helps Simplus overcome its marketing challenges.
13:59: What should companies look for when staffing a center of excellence?
16:15: How does the Simplus sales team align with its centers of excellence?
17:10: What gets Wayne excited about marketing and business in 2022?
21:20: Why is Wayne so high on email and newsletters?
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One of the challenges that many B2B startups face is how to effectively market their product in a way that fosters growth without breaking the bank. It’s also not unusual for startups to launch their marketing efforts before building out a fully staffed marketing team.
Eyal Katz is a former anthropologist and search engine marketer for SAP who started an agency that specializes in taking early-stage startups to their growth phase. In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Eyal about startup marketing, what gets him excited about B2B marketing in 2022, and more.
Episode Guide
4:43: The importance of writing as a marketing skill.
6:10: The most effective marketing tactics for B2B startups.
10:14: How to decide where your marketing tactics should go after the initial campaign.
14:17: Common marketing mistakes and misconceptions startups have around marketing.
19:38: What gets Eyal excited about B2B marketing in 2022?
24:46: What is Eyal’s favorite tool?
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In this week’s episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Pedro Ramos, Executive Director of Performance at OMD EMEA, about leadership in the B2B marketing space, and how coaching and mentoring helped him grow his career.
We’ll also discuss some of the conversations young marketers will be jumping into as they start their careers, including humanizing B2B marketing, the challenges of leadership in an industry that changes so quickly, and more.
Episode Guide
1:35: What makes for effective leadership in an environment like a B2B agency?
3:48: Leading teams through times of change, in B2B marketing or the world in general.
7:10: How do you lead through something you’ve never experienced before?
8:39: What did Pedro learn from mentors and coaches in his career?
11:33: Pedro’s advice for people just starting their careers at an agency.
13:55: What gets Pedro excited about 2022 from a business perspective?
17:30: Will 2022 bring a focus back on the B2B buyers?
21:17: Are Pedro’s favorite tool and the tool he can’t work without one and the same?
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In this episode of B2B Nation, Emily Gaylord, a global marketing campaigns manager for OutSystems, talks about the challenge of targeting technology tools to business people, picking the right tone for the right target audience, how marketing for the IT channel differs from marketing to users, and more.
Episode Guide
2:26: The unique challenges of marketing tech to business roles without alienating IT
4:00: What is the most effective way OutSystems reaches its market?
5:33: Why each role in the buying process requires a different marketing campaign.
7:13: What’s the difference between marketing to the IT channel vs. user marketing?
9:00: What Emily expects to see more innovation in B2B marketing in 2022.
10:49: What is Emily’s favorite tool?
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A universally recognized brand is a powerful tool for the brand’s marketers, but it can also serve as a target -- for unhappy users, for hackers, and for the competition.
When it comes to recognizable brands in B2B tech, Microsoft sits near the top of the heap. In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Sylvia Harn, global media director at Microsoft, about how her team plans to use the Microsoft brand and its muscle to help market new products in 2022. Microsoft recently announced news around a pair of cloud solutions at its Ignite conference, and brand power will be essential to its success.
Both Microsoft Mesh, a new entrant in the metasphere market, and its Zero Trust security, will be up against other well-known brands in their quest to build market share.
Episode Guide
3:10: How does Microsoft’s brand muscle help and present challenges to its marketers?
5:47: How will Microsoft take on high-profile competition in the metasphere space?
10:44: How will Microsoft compete in the crowded Zero Trust security field in the coming year?
13:41: Sylvia’s thoughts on social media marketing in the current atmosphere.
19:00: How Microsoft protects its brand on social media.
26:12: What gets Sylvia excited about 2022 and marketing for Microsoft?
29:05: What is Sylvia’s favorite tool?
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In this episode of B2B Nation, Mike talks with Bolaji Oyejide, the Senior Director of Demand Generation at Bevy.
Bolaji and his colleagues at Bevy believe that the secret to establishing relationships with prospects is through community, not marketing. And they practice what they preach, using the Bevy platform to create communities of like-minded prospects, helping them connect with each other and see Bevy in action in the process.
Episode Guide
2:05: What is a “community-driven” event?
9:39: How does Bevy help build community-driven events?
16:56: What types of organizations are Bevy’s ideal customers?
22:54: What is Bevy’s most effective marketing message?
30:22: Bolaji commits to joining us at DemandFest
30:57: Is there something Bolaji needs to make his job easier?
34:45: A few minutes on Bolaji’s series of children’s books
39:02: What is the tool Bolaji can’t work without?
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In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Christopher Bray, a cybersecurity sales and marketing veteran with experience working for some of the best-known brands in the security market. Today, Christopher is Chief Revenue Officer at Aura, a consumer cybersecurity vendor that changed its message once the pandemic further blurred the lines between home and office.
Aura’s leadership found an opportunity in the remote and hybrid work environment to take its B2C cybersecurity solution into the B2B market. And rather than re-engineer its solution for enterprise users, Aura made the decision to approach corporate human resources teams about making Aura available as an employee benefit. Through this approach, organizations could help protect their employees in their online consumer lives, while simultaneously protecting the business that now runs through their home networks and devices.
Episode Guide
2:47: How Aura developed a customer-first approach to marketing cybersecurity.
6:44: Remote work and the home office changes cybersecurity marketing.
9:00: How Aura took a B2C security product to the B2B market.
10:02: What does the B2B sales process look like at Aura?
12:00: What do you think we’ll be talking about one year from now?
15:50: What is Christopher’s favorite tool?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Jon Carlson, Sr. Marketing Director at Allego, which makes a sales enablement platform that helps sales reps learn and access resources at the right place, at the right time. Our discussion covers the evolution of the sales enablement function and its tools, what to look for in a sales enablement leader, how Allego markets its solution, and more.
Episode Guide
3:01: When should an organization think about dedicated resources for sales enablement?
6:00: What is driving the broadening of the sales enablement function and its tools?
8:59: How does the blending of the marketing and sales functions change sales enablement?
14:43: What should B2B vendors look for in a sales enablement leader?
19:05: What messages are resonating with Allego’s customers and prospects?
24:24: What is Jon’s favorite tool?
In this episode of B2B Nation, our guest Paul Fifield estimates that half of the world’s companies are in the B2B space, and that the Go To Market teams in many of those organizations are essentially learning on the job. B2B sales and marketing, Paul explains, simply move too fast for traditional higher education to keep pace.
As co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy, an online learning platform dedicated to training and developing Go To Market teams, Paul is on a mission to develop the skills necessary for Go To Market roles and rethink corporate training more broadly.
With more tools available to help capture the voice of the customer, and more data on customer behaviors available than ever before, it’s never been easier to understand the challenges and goals of B2B customers. So what is preventing some B2B firms from thinking more like their buyers?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Erik Newton, vice president of Milestone Inc., about why the customer-centric mentality is proving such a challenge for B2B firms. We also discuss why competitor obsession tends to overrule customer obsession in B2B, and whether the line between marketing and sales is blurring as a result of the modern customer journey.
Episode Guide
1:36: Why is thinking like a buyer such a challenge for many marketing organizations?
2:45: Are marketers that focus on inbound marketing more customer-centric?
3:57: Listening is central to thinking like a buyer.
5:14: Customer obsessions vs. competitor obsession.
8:19: Ideal customers vs. solving ideal problems for your customers.
11:21: Does the reliance on attributes like job titles leave opportunities on the table?
12:47: Is the line between marketing and sales starting to blur?
17:40: Thoughts on the state of B2B content.
25:50: What is Erik’s favorite tool?
Ike Singh Kehal and his team at Social27 spent much of 2019 re-thinking online events and virtual experiences. A few months later, with the global pandemic shutting down in-person events of all sizes, Social27 found itself flooded by inbound inquiries from marketers and event professionals looking to make a pivot to virtual experiences. Even Ike, Social27’s CEO, found himself giving demos for more than 12 hours straight on some days.
In this episode of B2B Nation we talk to Ike about marketing in a world where suddenly your product is in very high demand, about how marketers and event planners need to consider personalization instead of massive events, and whether or not online event fatigue is just an excuse for low-quality content.
Episode Guide
2:10: How did the increase in demand for event platforms change the way Social27 markets its platform?
6:56: The shift from quick fixes to long-term, strategic thinking in the events space.
10:19: How hybrid and virtual events can improve the B2B event experience
15:17: Is personalization the key to improving the B2B event experience?
20:14: Convincing attendees that new event models will work for them.
24:25: Helping event teams champion a new model for events internally.
27:10: The challenges of disrupting the traditional event model.
29:54: What is Ike’s favorite tool?
For B2B organizations, determining the right targeting, messaging, and channel for their marketing often requires a great deal of research and testing. And that’s true whether you’re working with paid or organic media.
In this episode of B2B Nation we’re talking to Naira Perez, who runs Springhill Digital, a boutique agency that manages paid social and search channels for its clients. According to Naira, paid social and search face many of the same challenges as other B2B marketing channels. They struggle to reach audiences in a sea of messages. They tend to be more effective for branding than for converting sales. And perhaps unique to paid social, the audience moves from platform to platform when it grows bored.
Episode Guide
2:01: What are the strengths and misconceptions around the paid social channel?
4:14: How paid social performance has changed in the past three years (and why).
6:43: What are the strengths and misconceptions around paid search?
8:34: What are the common mistakes marketers make with their paid social and search?
13:14: How do you align paid media with demand gen and other marketing efforts?
16:24: How does the current state of social media, “big tech” and regulation affect marketers?
21:19: How do marketers keep up with the transient nature of social media users?
27:00: What is the one tool Naira cannot work without?
Today’s technology vendors talk a lot about agility, and few teams need to be more agile than the B2B marketers trying to sell emerging technologies. Take, for example, Relative Insight, a language analysis vendor that started out helping protect children online.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to James Cuthbertson, CRO at Relative Insight, about how the killer application, target market, messaging, and demand generation plans of the company continue to evolve in this emerging space.
Episode Guide
1:46: How businesses (and marketers) are using language analysis tools.
3:11: Why saving time is not the killer application of language analysis.
4:49: What does the buying process look like for Relative Insight’s prospects?
7:01: The importance of setting up your customer for post-sale success.
8:05: How does demand gen change as a business narrows down its audience?
9:30: How does marketing change for emerging technologies when compared to established tech?
11:11: Where buyers and sellers get frustrated with today’s B2B process.
14:26: Where will language analysis be a year from now?
15:54: Is differentiation more challenging with emerging technologies?
16:39: What is James’ favorite tool?
Not only is public relations changing alongside marketing, but the two seem to be converging. The KPIs for PR activities increasingly include SEO metrics, inbound traffic, qualified leads, and conversations.
In this episode, we talk to Dmitry Dragilev, an entrepreneur, do-it-yourself PR advocate, and founder of JustReachOut.io, about the challenges of getting noticed in a noisy market, tips for getting recurring press mentions, and what Dmitry thinks many PR agencies and past approaches to press outreach were getting wrong.
Episode Guide
2:00: How has PR changed in the last 10 to 15 years?
3:15: Dmitry’s first encounter with Walt Mossberg from The Wall Street Journal.
5:19: How has the balance of power shifted in PR?
8:07: Tips for companies having trouble getting noticed in the press.
11:52: Has the importance of the PR pitch changed in today’s world?
14:40: The convergence of PR, content marketing and SEO.
17:15: Are SEO rankings becoming the metric of choice for PR?
19:30: The lure of getting mentioned in the big publications.
23:20: What is the one tool Dmitry can’t work without?
Agencies have been a part of the B2B marketing and advertising landscape for years. As the marketing landscape shifts, first from print to digital, and now into a data-driven and analytical mindset, it got us wondering: “Where do agencies fit in this new B2B reality?”
To get some answers, we turned to Keith Booton, founder and CEO of Ivor Andrew, an integrated agency located in the Chicago area that specializes in the B2B industrial market.
According to Keith, full-service integrated agencies can help businesses diagnose problems with their marketing, offer a strategic approach to building markets, and also execute the tactics used to reach B2B buyers.
Episode Guide
2:18: What is the value proposition for agencies today?
5:49: How has the value proposition for agencies changed in the last 10 to 15 years?
8:22: How are businesses judging their relationships with agencies in a data-obsessed world?
10:10: Misconceptions about working with an agency.
11:21: How does Ivor Andrew market itself to B2B marketing organizations?
13:34: How will agencies need to evolve in the next 10 to 15 years?
17:15: What is Keith’s favorite tool, the one he cannot work without?
Jason Reichl is CFO of Breadcrumbs and the former CEO of GoNimbly, and he is a long-time supporter of RevOps. For Jason, the RevOps methodology is a way for companies to focus on one thing: increasing revenue.
In his view, RevOps changes the organizational structure by introducing the role of revenue operators, but it also changes tactical components of sales and marketing, such as how leads are scored, which data helps drive revenue, measuring the right KPIs, and more.
Episode Guide
2:37: What’s wrong with the way most companies are scoring their leads?
5:08: How many companies are doing little to no lead scoring?
7:13: B2B marketers are awash in data. What is the data that really matters?
11:44: Indicators and KPIs that lead to revenue.
15:20: Growth from existing customers vs. new customer acquisition.
22:23: What does it look like when revenue operations is done well?
29:30: The importance of customer experience in B2B.
It seems like our voices are being recorded all the time, by phones, collaboration tools, smart speakers and more. The “voice of the customer” (VoC) isn’t a new idea for marketing and customer success professionals, but better technology is changing the game. It’s now easier for marketers to search for and share the important parts of calls, for example.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Mike Adams, CEO and cofounder of Grain, which is one of the tools helping businesses capture customer voices and unlock their value.
Episode Guide
2:33 How much did technology limit the way businesses used the voice of the customer in the past?
8:30: How are companies capitalizing on their voice of the customer strategy?
10:08: Better customer service and support with modern voice of the customer tech
12:07: Which teams and roles are making the best use of voice of the customer data?
18:30: What is up next for the voice of the customer space?
22:02: What’s the future of video calls?
26:10: What’s the one tool Mike Adams can’t work without?
In this episode of B2B Nation we take a look at the B2B marketing playbook as it existed before the COVID-19 pandemic and ask the question, “Is it time to re-think any of this moving forward?”
Our search for a guest who could help us answer that question led us to none other than Gaetano DiNardi, head of growth and demand generation at business communications provider Nextiva. If you’re familiar with Gaetano’s social media posts, you know he’s not afraid to speak his mind and to share thoughts that run counter to the conventional wisdom on B2B marketing.
The B2B marketing essentials we re-evaluate in this episode include martech applications, content marketing, influencer marketing, in-person events and more. If you’re thinking about how your B2B marketing might change in a post-pandemic world, give this episode a listen.
Episode Guide
4:11: Are all of these investments in martech paying off for B2B marketers?
9:20: Is the proliferation of technology and data distracting marketers from the fundamentals?
11:28: What’s wrong with a lot of the content marketing strategies being used in B2B today?
16:40: Is there a place for influencer marketing in B2B?
25:50: What will be shaping conversations about B2B marketing in the next 12 months?
27:00: Thoughts on the future of in-person events.
32:27: What is Gaetano DiNardi’s favorite marketing tool?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Kristjan Mar Hauksson, digital marketer, SEO and inbound marketing expert and the co-author of Global Search Engine Marketing: Fine-Tuning Your International Search Engine Results.
Today’s B2B marketers put a lot of emphasis on being found by prospects using organic search. But they can’t stop there. Not all inbound traffic should be treated equally, which means marketers have to look for intent signals in the data they capture to understand who is a lead, who is a browser and who is a job seeker.
Among the topics we discuss in this episode are lead qualification, the under-utilized and over-utilized channels in digital marketing and whether we’ve hit the point where there’s too much data involved in online marketing.
Episode Guide
2:45: Advice on understanding the intent of your website visitors
5:06: What can you learn from visitors to your About Us and Contact Us pages?
7:56: Preferred methods for qualifying leads from inbound visitors
11:26: Is there an ideal organizational structure for marketing and sales?
14:19: How customers owning the buying journey changes marketing -- and doesn’t
16:14: Do B2B marketers under-value Google and social media platforms?
19:04: How well do B2B marketers understand the nuances of cross-cultural marketing?
24:37: Kristjan’s under-utilized B2B marketing tactics
28:52: Is the influx of martech tools and data responsible for over-complication?
30:41: Kristjan’s favorite apps and tools
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Paul Cowan, CMO of Freshbooks, about marketing software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to small businesses. SaaS marketers tend to move more quickly than other B2B tech marketers, and that’s especially true of those targeting SMBs.
Small businesses move fast, make decisions more quickly and look for ways to easily research and compare technology solutions before making a purchase decision. They lean heavily on experiences, from the buying experience to the product experience, when evaluating vendors. And small businesses tend to grow, which means some SaaS vendors have a built-in level of churn, as their customers sometimes outgrow their platform.
Episode Guide
2:08: How do SaaS marketers think differently about tech marketing?
5:00: The connection between your product experience and your marketing
8:17: How can SaaS vendors protect against customer churn?
12:59: Are your SaaS users aware of all of the features available in your product?
15:23: What happens when your SMB customers outgrow your SaaS application?
17:41: How much does brand value still matter in the modern buyer’s journey?
21:27: Which business strategy is right for your SaaS application?
24:00: Where do you think is the next disruption SaaS marketers need to prepare for?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we are discussing how to create memorable content for B2B audiences with Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer of Corporate Visions, and the author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions.
Dr. Simon is a neuroscientist who studies how people react to and remember content. We’re going to discuss the role of imagery and images in your content, tips for business storytelling, thoughts on creating more memorable audio content, and more.
Episode Guide
2:46: What triggers audiences to remember the content they consume?
6:24: What are the common mistakes people make in their presentations?
10:27: Balancing imagery and text in presentations.
16:44: Best practices for storytelling for business.
23:16: What would be updated or changed if Impossible to Ignore were written today?
28:32: Tips for creating compelling audio and social audio content.
34:29: What is the one tool Dr. Simon can’t work without?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Todd Grossman, CEO of Talkwalker Americas, about how brands can effectively track the conversations that matter to them on social media.
This space used to be called social media analytics, then it was called social media listening. Today, it’s often described as “conversational intelligence,” and it delivers a detailed analysis of what is being said about a brand across social media platforms.
As Todd explains, Talkwalker’s technology can analyze social media platforms, podcasts, blogs and more. Its reporting goes deeper than vanity metrics like shares and likes. It includes details on who is taking part in online conversations and analyzes the sentiment of the discussion.
We also talk about the future of social media and social audio, the disinformation problem and Todd’s favorite productivity tools.
Episode Guide
3:22: How social media monitoring evolved into conversational intelligence
5:04: Examples of conversational intelligence in action
7:39: The type of reporting that conversational intelligence delivers
9:15: Battlingdisinformation on social media during the pandemic
11:42: The effects of disinformation and toxicity on social media
13:57: How do social audio and Clubhouse fit in?
15:30: What will be the popular social media conversations one year from now?
16:49: What are Todd’s favorite tools and applications?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co-founder of Casted, about using podcasts as part of your content marketing strategy.
If you’re considering launching a podcast for your B2B brand, or if you want to improve the podcast you’re currently creating, Lindsay has some tips for you. Our conversation covers how to create a compelling podcast for your audience, as well as how to make your show an effective part of your content marketing mix.
Episode Guide
1:44: Lindsay’s first “podcast moment”
3:48: What explains the sudden popularity of the podcast format?
6:20: How did podcasts fare when people weren’t commuting?
7:50: What’s the state of the branded podcast world?
11:50: How do podcasts stack up against other content formats?
15:14: Dealing with objections to podcasts as a marketing tactic
20:49: What do B2B listeners want to get from podcasts?
23:00: How do you choose a host for your B2B podcast?
26:25: What is Lindsay’s favorite tool, the one she can’t work without?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk with Eli Schwartz, a growth advisor, SEO expert and author of the best-selling book Product-Led SEO, about his approach to search engine optimization and digital marketing.
The concept of product-led SEO is a significant departure from a lot of the books and advice focused on organic marketing. Unlike content-led SEO, which focuses on keyphrases and content creation, product-led SEO begins with the idea of the product and experience your business wants to offer to its customers.
Eli says if there’s one thing he wants marketers to learn from his book, it’s that SEO needs to be treated like any other marketing channel. It should be judged by its return on investment. And if the effort your organization puts into SEO isn’t leading to an increase in sales, then it’s not a tactic worthy of your resources.
Episode Guide
2:19: What is product-led SEO?
7:00: The importance of brand SEO
7:53: SEO is a marketing channel
9:42: SEO funnel awareness and optimization
13:02: Overlooked and overvalued SEO practices
14:54: The lost art of linking
17:05: More on brand SEO
18:41: What is the biggest message of Product-Led SEO?
21:38: Tools for tracking your organic channel
22:53: Thoughts on Google’s Page Experience Update
28:16: How would this conversation sound if we had it one year from now?
32:57: What is Eli’s favorite tool that he can’t work without?
37:30: Why is SEO advice needs to evolve
For many people, a successful career doesn’t always lead to career happiness. There are a number of explanations for this disconnect, including ultra-driven and ambitious personalities, Imposter Syndrome and the feeling that you and your work are unnoticed or under-appreciated.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Terry McDougall, a former corporate marketer who today runs her own business as an executive and career coach. Terry is also the author of Winning the Game of Work: Career Happiness and Success on Your Own Terms.
Terry’s goal when working with her clients is to teach them to shift their mindsets and learn new skills so they can enjoy more success with less effort.
Episode Guide
2:24: Motivations for moving from corporate marketing to career coaching.
5:40: The impact of our own high expectations.
10:50: How to overcome Imposter Syndrome.
16:13: Balancing career and personal happiness early in your career.
17:52: The three ways to add value in the workplace.
21:07: What is the life that you want? How do you get it?
23:12: The connection between remote work and career satisfaction.
29:47: What does Terry miss most about corporate marketing?
32:14: What is the one tool you cannot work without?
On this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Tracey Fudge, founder of The Thrive Agency, about the level of noise in B2B marketing and whether all of the information being created and data coming back to marketers is generating significant value.
Tracey has a background in corporate sales, and she came to the realization several years back that almost everything she was taught about sales and marketing no longer applied in today’s environment. Instead of holding sales conversations whenever prospects needed information, people were self-educating using available online resources. As a result, the number of online resources increased dramatically, and continues to grow at an exponential rate. The challenge now is trying to stand out in all of the noise.
Episode Guide
2:00: Why the sales and marketing tactics taught in the past no longer apply.
6:35: What types of content are people engaging with?
8:47: Does a background in sales help improve your marketing?
10:45: What do businesses really mean when they use the term “value”?
14:45: Tips for marketing in the very noisy social media space.
17:26: Have marketers figured out how to make sense of the data their work generates?
21:00: How has the pandemic affected B2B marketers?
23:53: Authenticity in marketing has never been easier.
26:00: What might this conversation sound like one year from now?
27:50: What is one tool you simply cannot work without?
In this episode of B2B Nation we talk to April Dunford, a product positioning expert and author of the book Obviously Awesome. April shares with us the story of finding her niche in product marketing, the methodology she uses to help create positioning as outlined in her book, advice for businesses and marketers looking to create a new category and more.
April didn’t set out to enter the world of product marketing. In fact, she didn’t set out to do marketing at all. But early in her career, she was put in charge of marketing a failing product and had every intention of ending its life. Before she could do that, however, she found six customers who said they loved the product -- they just didn’t use it as it was intended. And so began a career focused on properly positioning products for the market to ensure they succeed.
Episode Guide
2:24: How did product positioning become your niche?
5:31: Common mistakes marketers make with product positioning.
7:43: The danger of falling in love with your idea of what a product is.
10:57: Do you really want to create a new category?
20:29: A new category creation success story
22:30: The signs your product positioning is weak.
24:15: The product positioning methodology outlined in Obviously Awesome.
31:38: How do you get the various teams in your organization on board with your positioning?
In this episode of B2B Nation we talk with Ajit Sivadasan, who leads online sales for Lenovo across B2B and B2C in 35 countries. Ajit’s role allows him to bring a unique perspective on the convergence of B2B and B2C buyers.
As Ajit tells us, the old way of segmenting and identifying customers into B2C and B2B buckets is no longer applicable. In our digital world, an IT executive might buy a personal device on Monday and data center solutions on Wednesday, and marketers and customer experience professionals need to understand these tendencies in order to succeed.
Our conversation also touches on digital transformation at Lenovo, the essential skills marketers will need in the coming decade and more.
Burnout is becoming an increasingly popular topic one year into the global pandemic. More than half of marketers say they have felt the effects of burnout in the past year, according to one survey. And many of the prospects marketers are trying to reach are also suffering from burnout, making them less receptive to marketing messages.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Rob Bogue, co-author of Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery,about what burnout is and how we can work to overcome it in ourselves and in our teams.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Georgia Watson, an award-winning sales enablement expert from IBM, and Aimee Dunn, who handles the sales enablement function here at TechnologyAdvice.
Our conversation touches on the essential skills for sales enablement, whether it matters where the sales enablement function resides and the importance of marketing and sales enablement alignment.
Sales enablement roles can vary significantly from one organization to another. The role can sit on different teams, such as marketing or sales, or it can stand on its own. Sales enablement pros can come from varied backgrounds, such as learning and development, sales or marketing.
The core responsibility of sales enablement, however, is often the same: to ensure B2B sales teams understand the often complex products they sell, the value proposition for prospects and how the products help customers meet challenges and reach their goals.
What can B2B vendors, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, learn from the way people buy bed sheets online?
People in the market for bed sheets can go online and get thousands of search results for bed sheets from the major names in e-commerce. Large online retailers get strong search results in part because they replicate their product pages thousands of times, if not more, so they look familiar to search engines.
Conversely, there are thousands of SaaS vendors in the market, but they each create their own product pages and sell their applications differently. This can work against their search engine optimization (SEO) because the crawlers haven’t seen these pages thousands of times.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Geoff Atkinson, the founder and CEO of Huckabuy, which develops software to help vendors make their sites easier for search engines to read. Geoff got his start in B2C marketing at Overstock.com. And what he’s seen four years into his B2B experience is that many of the tactics and strategies from B2C are helping him grow his B2B SaaS company.
Think about it: when software buyers start their buying process with a search engine query, complete most -- if not all -- of the buying journey online, and do their best to avoid phone calls, they’re acting quite a bit like a B2C shopper who is buying bed sheets.
In this episode we discuss:
- The convergence of B2B and B2C marketing
- Why too many B2B SaaS firms start their SEO initiatives too late
- SEO funnels
- Google’s Page Experience Update and more.
What makes managing people so difficult? It’s probably that we’re all different. But in the business world, we ask our leaders to manage teams of people: each with their own needs, wants, styles and personalities. It’s a big ask, and the larger the team, the larger the challenge.
Whether you’re an experienced manager of people or early in your leadership career, leading your team became a lot more challenging in 2020. Individual styles and personalities carried over into remote work and affected how people dealt with their own health, as well as the health and safety of their families and friends.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to James Sherer. In addition to working on his PhD in business administration, James is an executive with the retail arm of Marathon Petroleum, which most people know as the Speedway brand. He’s also involved in a pair of entrepreneurial ventures: Salesology, which aims to help align marketing and sales, and Eventology, which applies a project management framework to event management and production.
One thing that was clear from our conversation is that there is good news for marketers managing people. Many of the skills you use in your marketing can help you effectively manage your team. Talking to people and promoting ideas is messaging and content creation. Managing people, like marketing, isn’t one size fits all. And that empathy you had to develop talking to your customers in 2020? It can come in handy as you lead your team through an unpredictable 2021.
It seems like we hear most about the manufacturing sector when we’re being told about the trouble it’s in. Politicians bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs. Local economies suffer when manufacturers close their doors or re-locate their plants.
Manufacturing in the US is not without challenges. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) will tell you, however, that manufacturing output in the US has risen pretty consistently over the past decade.
If you work in B2B marketing, or aspire to work in B2B marketing, there are some interesting things happening in the manufacturing sector that are worthy of your attention.
First, digital transformation is taking hold in manufacturing, and it’s upending decades-old business models. In the past, manufacturers often sold through distributors. That meant brand awareness and end-user customer experience were not priorities for many manufacturers. But as manufacturers increasingly turn to the Internet to sell direct to customers, all of that is changing.
In addition to transformation, there’s the global pandemic, which as it has in other sectors, is acting as an accelerant for change. One example: manufacturers that make personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to adapt from selling gloves and goggles to a select few businesses or distributors, to promoting products to a vastly expanded market when the pandemic arrived.
Andrew Walker is the CEO of Shift7 Digital, a digital agency that specializes in helping manufacturers navigate digital transformation. Andrew has a front-row seat as digital marketing changes the manufacturing sector. He joins us to talk about it in this episode of B2B Nation.
Inbound marketing is one of the most popular revenue-generating strategies for B2B firms. When done well, inbound marketing turns your website visitors into prospects, and hopefully into customers.
If you want to reap the rewards of inbound marketing, you need to be knowledgeable about the tactics that help drive people to your site, including SEO, social media and email marketing. Once you start attracting visitors, you need to keep them and convert them with your skills around quality content, forms, lead nurture cadences and tools that help you identify, measure and communicate with your prospects.
Mastering inbound marketing requires most every tool in your marketing toolbox.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we dive into inbound marketing with Andrea Moxham, founder of Horseshoe & Co. Andrea is an inbound marketing expert who specializes in helping clients use HubSpot to grow their revenue and turn their site visitors into customers.
Among the topics we cover in this episode are content, forms, the gating of assets, social media, website experience, chatbots and more.
Media buying is almost as old as marketing itself and it’s undergone similar changes to the larger marketing landscape in recent years.
There is, of course, the infusion of data into media buying. We collect it and analyze it in hopes that it will help us find our very niche audiences, which often consist of a very specific person who is part of a group of people deciding whether to make an investment.
Other changes impacting media buying include media consumption itself, which has changed significantly in the past 10 to 20 years. Or has it? Because newsletters and podcasts -- neither of which is new -- are the current darlings of online media. And there’s the year 2020, which was defined by changes that may or may not stick now that we’re in a new year.
We recorded this episode of B2B Nation at DemandFest, a half-day virtual event hosted by TechnologyAdvice. To discuss the state of media buying, we’re joined by Jason Gladu, president of Avani Media, a B2B media buying and demand gen agency, and by TechnologyAdvice CEO Rob Bellenfant, who takes some questions for Jason from the audience during the event.
It’s hard to grow your business without marketing. Businesses that have good products and services are great. And businesses with good products and services and a strong marketing strategy are even better. But marketing isn’t the only way to grow your business.
Your business -- and even your marketing organization itself -- have hidden growth potential. If you take a look at your people, your processes, and your organizational structure, you might find it. If you’re spending most of your time planning email blasts and designing landing pages, then you might miss it.
Can you do things more efficiently? Are you using out-dated processes that don’t meet your needs or goals? Is your organization full of ad-hoc processes that haven’t kept up with your tech stack? These are among the questions to ask as you look to become more efficient and more aligned.
Joining us for this episode is Karen Kimsey-Sward, who has spent her career helping B2B leaders grow their businesses by better managing their people, their processes, and their profits.
Among the topics covered in this episode:
- What are the signs your organization isn’t reaching its true growth potential?
- How do you evaluate and identify areas for process improvement?
- What should businesses be thinking about as we head into 2021?
When a lot of marketers think about search engine optimization (SEO), they think about keywords, and maybe header tags, and backlinks. But SEO is evolving so it can keep up with developments at Google.
To talk SEO today means talking about intent, clusters, reputation, and expertise.
Harry Sanders leads an award-winning SEO agency in Australia, started an online learning resource for people who want to learn more about SEO, and has even done contractual work for Google, all by the age of 23.
Harry and his agency, StudioHawk, are the developers of the DIRTy SEO approach to search engine optimization, which focuses on Delivery, Infrastructure, Reputation and Trust as the foundational elements of a modern SEO strategy.
Among the topics we cover in this episode:
What are the best resources available to learn about SEO?
What is the concept of DIRTy SEO?
What does Harry really think about Google?
Learn more about Harry’s agency at studiohawk.com.au.
Learn more about SEO training from HawkAcademy at hawkacademy.co.
There are more roles in marketing, open to more skillsets, and more areas of interest than ever before.
The advent of marketing technology (martech), the rise of marketing operations (marketing ops), and the infusion of data and analytics into all things marketing are creating opportunities for people with talents who might not have found a home in marketing a decade ago.
Where will your career in marketing take you next?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re joined by Kate Carnevale of IBM, who shares her career journey, from journalism school, to political communications, to a marketing agency, to a small healthcare company, to managing global campaigns for one of the world’s most-recognized brands.
Among the topics we discuss:
--How does working for a large enterprise differ from a small business in addition to the budgets and resources?
-- How does the marketing itself change when you go to work for a global enterprise?
-- Can you still find opportunities to be entrepreneurial or “scrappy” in a large organization?
If your small business lacks the expertise to understand, master, monitor, and optimize campaigns across these tactics, you might turn to someone like John Mann. John is a consultant who specializes in helping small businesses and entrepreneurs find and execute online marketing strategies that grow their business.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to John about how he helps small business owners make sense of all the online marketing options available to them, the misconceptions his clients often have about digital marketing, his favorite tools, and what the future holds.
You can learn more about John Mann here: www.nashvilleseoconsultants.com/
It takes a lot of time and energy to build a valuable brand. Your brand is more than a logo or a tagline. A good brand creates emotions and feelings, and it helps you define the moments and create the connections that lead to satisfied customers.
Think about everything that goes into your brand: Your products and services, your company culture, your voice and your messages. And then look at how quickly all of that was disrupted in a few weeks in 2020. Suddenly your brand was dealing with a global pandemic and issues of racial injustice. You probably didn’t see that coming.
Today, social media is the place where brands go to engage with customers, develop connections, and start conversations. Social media is also the place where B2B marketers can establish their own brand and share the knowledge they’ve accumulated in the field.
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Chantelle Marcelle, a marketing consultant with more than a decade of experience in marketing, branding, public relations, and communications, about what it takes to build your personal and corporate brand on social media. You can learn more from Chantelle at http://www.chantellemarcelle.com/.
Change is hardly a new concept to B2B marketers. You’re dealing with an influx of technology and data. You likely have responsibilities for revenue growth few marketers had a decade ago.
The year 2020, of course, is delivering even more change, from remote working to a steep economic downturn that most people weren’t expecting. With all of this change around us, we started asking a few questions:
--Why is it some people seem better wired to weather change than others? --Why do some people seem better equipped to effect change in their organization? --Are change agents born or developed? --Is there a connection between the way a prospect or client handles change and the types of messages that resonate with them?
For answers to these questions and more, we spoke to change management expert Rob Bogue. As it turns out, an understanding of change management can help B2B marketers in a number of ways:
--Change management helps B2B marketing leaders more quickly make changes their teams support --Change management helps team members understand how they can effect change --And understanding the science of change is critical to understanding your clients and prospects, who are looking to create change by adopting new products and services.
Podcast Guest
After two decades of getting frustrated that the technology solutions he was building weren’t always changing the way organizations communicated, collaborated, and worked, Rob Bogue started studying the successes and failures of his customers. He started reading about psychology, neurology, marketing, history, management, sales, leadership, innovation, engagement, and dozens of other topics. He realized that technology projects are almost always thinly veiled change projects, and without the discipline to introduce change management practices into the process, clients wouldn’t succeed. He now offers an online course called Confident Change Management, which is designed to help people understand the tricks, tips, tools, and techniques they need to successfully navigate change.
Sales and marketing organizations are both tasked with adding new clients and growing revenue, but despite these shared goals, their strategies are often out of alignment (at best) or completely at odds with one another (at worst).
Research on the topic says that B2B firms that tightly align their marketing and sales teams are better at growing revenue, shortening the sales cycle, and increasing conversion rates. But sales and marketing often operate in different silos and report into different parts of the leadership team, making alignment a challenge that continues to work against their common goals.
In this episode of the B2B Nation podcast, we look at the issue of sales and marketing alignment through the eyes of a veteran B2B sales leader. Bill Caskey has been training B2B sales teams for more than 30 years and hosts a pair of podcasts of his own on B2B selling.
Our conversation covers:
--The continuing disconnect between sales and marketing that haunts many B2B organizations --Account-based marketing (ABM), which aims to align sales and marketing efforts --A look to the future of B2B marketing and sales.
Podcast Guest
Bill Caskey has been training B2B sales teams for nearly 30 years. He works with sales and organizations to ensure their sales team is communicating the highest possible value to clients and prospects. He is the host of two podcasts, The Advanced Selling podcast and The Bill Caskey podcast. You can learn more at www.BillCaskey.com.
What is it that makes a B2B buyer receptive to your marketing? Is it who they are? Is it the situation they’re in? Or have they reached the point where the status quo -- the legacy software, the time-consuming manual process, the spreadsheets that connect data from various sources -- is simply no longer tenable?
In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at sales training firm Corporate Visions, about the science behind decision making. According to Tim, when you measure the effectiveness of marketing tools like personas against neuroscience and behavioral economics, you find personas might actually do more harm than good if you’re trying to identify your buyers. We also discuss another common mis-step: using the same messaging for new prospects and existing customers.
Podcast Guests
Tim Riesterer is Chief Strategy and Research Officer of marketing and sales consulting and training firm Corporate Visions. He is responsible for leading the strategic direction of the company in thought leadership, positioning and product development. He also leads the company's consulting team globally, including staff and certified contractors.
Aimee Dunn is the Director of Sales Enablement at TechnologyAdvice. Prior to this role, she led the Customer Success team at QuinStreet B2B, which was acquired by TechnologyAdvice in early 2020.
For years, the IT channel consisted of value-added resellers and systems integrators that racked servers, connected brand offices, and made sure everyone had a working PC.
As the industry moves to the cloud, the channel must follow. Many channel businesses are re-making themselves as manager service providers (MSPs), but the service provider business is a far cry from the days of old.
In this episode, we talk to Howard Cohen, a 35-year veteran of the IT channel, about where channel businesses can get started with their marketing efforts, how they can differentiate in a crowded market, and how to identify their areas of specialization.
Nadjya Ghausi, the head of marketing at Prezi, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. We talked about the challenges that presenters deal with to make engaging presentations, how to create an experience that the audience will remember, how looking at the presentation lifecycle can improve customer interactions, and more!
Mike Poyser, the VP of analytics at Aimia Americas, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. We talked about moving to the customer lifetime value mindset, searching for signifiers of longevity that marketers can measure, how to engage with super-customers and scale that to a broader customer base, and more!
Andrew Dumont, marketing expert and former CMO at Bitly, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. We talked about the similarities between account-based marketing (ABM) and inbound marketing, how those two tactics can work together, and how to increase customer retention and reduce churn rate through customer expansion tactics.
Marylou Tyler, a sales process expert and author of the book Predictable Prospecting, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. We discussed the three main buckets of sales leads, how to start effective conversations with leads, effective cold calling and prospecting techniques, how technology affects cold calling, and more!
Shari Medini, co-founder of Push Pull Marketing was a recent guest on B2B Nation. We discussed how brands and businesses of all sizes are moving to small community marketing, how Medium.com works as a small community marketplace, how you can use targeted personas in marketing automation, and more!
Sangram Vajre of Terminus and Max Altshuler of Sales Hacker were recent guests on B2B Nation. We discussed the problems of technology and training, the benefits of casting a narrow net with personalized messaging, building customer advocacy by building relationships, how sales and marketing can work together to achieve revenue goals, and more!
Nicole Lazzaro, the CEO at XEODesign, was a guest on B2B Nation. We talked about the science behind what chemicals influence happiness, designing desirable brain states to help you get more done, and more!
Joel Capperella, an expert sales and marketing consultant, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. We talked about the state of sales and marketing alignment, strategies to help improve the relationship between marketing and sales, how this alignment might evolve in the next five years, and more!
Hana Abaza, the head of strategy at Uberflip, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we talked about the "good and the ugly" of content marketing, how to improve your content strategy to increase sales, how content shapes customer advocacy and loyalty, how marketers can automate better, and more!
Jon Miller, the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagio, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the strategy that makes up ABM, how ABM changes marketing and sales processes, how to implement account-based sales development, a real life example of ABSD, the CO:LLABORATE conference, and more!
Herman Man, the Vice President of Product at Xero, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed virtual reality (VR) versus augmented reality (AR), how businesses can use AR and VR to their advantage, the future of small business accounting, and more!
B2B Nation was invited to an exclusive CEB Expert Roundtable interview. Brent Adamson, author of "The Challenger Sale" moderated the discussion. The panel included Nick Toman, Head of the Sales Leadership Council at CEB, author Jill Konrath, and Lori Richardson, CEO of Score More Sales. This is the Third Session of the roundtable where the panel offered practical tips for overcoming complexity. Enjoy!
B2B Nation was invited to an exclusive CEB Expert Roundtable interview. Brent Adamson, author of "The Challenger Sale" moderated the discussion. The panel included Nick Toman, Head of the Sales Leadership Council at CEB, author Jill Konrath, and Lori Richardson, CEO of Score More Sales. This is the Second Session of the roundtable where the panel discussed complexity on the customer side. Enjoy!
B2B Nation was invited to an exclusive CEB Expert Roundtable interview. Brent Adamson, author of "The Challenger Sale" moderated the discussion. The panel included Nick Toman, Head of the Sales Leadership Council at CEB, author Jill Konrath, and Lori Richardson, CEO of Score More Sales. This is the First Session of the roundtable where the panel discussed complexity for the sales rep. Enjoy!
Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and CMO at Terminus, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed how account based marketing began, how account-based marketing works for channel sales, the FlipMyFunnel methodology, the upcoming panel at CO:LLOBORATE with Jon Miller of Engagio and Justin Gray of LeadMD, and more!
B2B Nation was invited to an exclusive CEB Expert Roundtable interview. Brent Adamson, author of "The Challenger Sale" moderated the discussion. The panel included Nick Toman, Head of the Sales Leadership Council at CEB, author Jill Konrath, and Lori Richardson, CEO of Score More Sales.
In this episode, the panel discussed the complexity of the salesperson’s job and how that complexity impacts productivity, advice for sellers within the complex sales cycle, eternal complexity of the customer’s lives and how empathy can improve communication, advice on what sellers should do with newfound free time if processes are simplified, and more! This expert roundtable was recorded live at the CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Adam Maude, a senior director at CEB, and Jessica Cash, head of sales and marketing solutions for new product development at CEB, were recent guests on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the Challenger sale, why the Challenger method is more effective than traditional relationship building, and more!
Claire Tassin, a Senior Executive Advisor at CEB, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the biggest challenges that small business marketers are facing, strategies marketers use to better target smaller buying groups and single decision-makers, what small business marketing will look like five years from now, and more!
Kevin O'Malley, the Vice President of Marketing at SalesLoft, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed some of the biggest challenges facing B2B sales teams, what's changed with the modern buyer, ways salespeople can temper automation with a more human touch, how sales reps use email analytics to close deals, and more!
Shafqat Islam, the Co-Founder and CEO of NewsCred, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed brand storytelling, how marketers can use data to drive business results with content, how brand storytelling is customer centric, and more!
Rick Karlton, an advisory leader for the Sales Leadership Council at CEB, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed some of the biggest challenges in B2B sales today, how B2B organizations are trying to alleviate the complexity of the sales cycle, where B2B sales goes in the future, and more!
Allen Gannett, the CEO at TrackMaven, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed how to become a more data-driven marketer, how Snapchat can be used for B2B, the best social channels for paid media, Content Marketing World 2016, and more!
Jack Kosakowski, the Global Head of B2B Sales Execution at The Creation Agency, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed why social is relevant to sales, how to prove the ROI of social efforts, the future of social selling, and more!
Dominic Ambrosio, the managing consultant of marketing solutions at CEB, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed commercial messaging and what means for B2B, commercial insight versus thought leadership, how businesses can create a commercial insight, CEB Sales and Marketing Summit 2016, and more!
Michael Brenner, the CEO of Marketing Insider Group, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the history of content marketing, what valuable content really looks like, understanding the ROI from content marketing efforts, Content Marketing World 2016, and more!
Joe Pulizzi, the CEO of Content Marketing Institute, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the essence and value of content marketing, how to measure content marketing efficacy, tips for getting started with content marketing, Content Marketing World 2016, and more!
Trish Bertuzzi, the CEO of The Bridge Group, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the challenges sales development representatives face today, the importance of sales and marketing alignment, and the value of understanding the message that is being received by your prospects.
Amar Doshi, the vice president of product at 6Sense, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed the highlights of the B2B ESP conference, broke down and defined the differences between predicting and analyzing, and looked at where predictive analytics is headed and how it will evolve.
Loretta Jones is the VP of Marketing at Insightly. In this episode, we discuss what predictive analytics means, how predictive data has different applications for different job roles, what types of data can initiate sales/marketing action , and how predictive analytics may evolve in coming years.
Hank Weghorst is the Chief Technology Officer at Avention. In today's episode, we discuss account-based marketing adoption, what it means to be a data driven marketer, and sales/marketing alignment.
Katharine Mobley is the CMO at WeCareCARD and a digital Storyteller for the Huffington Post. She shares her thoughts on the difference between B2B and B2C social selling, the benefits of social selling for ABM, and her panel on women in technology at FlipMyFunnel.
You can read some of her posts below: http://blog.creationagency.com/22-the-disruption-of-women-in-technology/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-mobley/a-business-case-for-fixin_b_9760766.html
Aaron Dun is the SVP of marketing at SnapApp. In this episode we discuss how content has evolved, the most effective content strategy to drive leads, how and why the MarTech stack is so crowded, SiriusDecisions, and more!
Julia Stead is the Director of Demand Generation at Invoca. In this episode, live from the 2016 SiriusDecisions Summit, we discuss why B2B marketers have historically fallen behind B2C marketers and how intelligent growth can help fuel and sustain revenue-driven marketers today.
How does the idea of intelligent growth frame your demand generation and marketing strategy? In this episode, I asked 8 different leaders in demand generation and marketing their thoughts. Guests are below:
Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB Vanessa Porter, Director of Marketing at SnapApp Julia Stead, Director of Demand Generation at Invoca James Thomas, CMO at Allocadia Aaron Dun, SVP of Marketing at SnapApp Christine Ladd, Account Executive, Strategic Accounts at SalesLoft Seth Lieberman, CEO at SnapApp
Adam von Reyn is the VP of Growth Marketing and Joe Chernov is the VP of Marketing at InsightSquared. In today's episode, we discuss how companies should allocate account-based vs. inbound marketing to their overall strategy, how content marketing for ABM has evolved, the FlipMyFunnel Festival, and more!
Katie Rogers is the Vice President Customer Success at SalesLoft. In today’s episode we discuss whether there’s a stage in the customer journey that’s most important to customer success, the biggest challenge that exists today, and of course, since this episode is sponsored by FlipMyFunnel, customer success’ relationship to ABM.
Meagan Eisenberg is the Chief Marketing Officer at MongoDB. In this episode she shares her thoughts on revenue marketing, how demand generation will change in the coming years, how intelligent growth frames her marketing, SiriusDecisions, and more!
Sangram Vajre is the CMO and Co-Founder of Terminus. In this episode we discuss the growth and transformation of ABM, how the marketing technology stack has impacted account-based marketing, why marketers have been lazy with their KPIs, the FlipMyFunnel Festival, and more!
Find out more about the FMF Festival: http://flipmyfunnel.com/flipmyfunnel-festival-austin/
Lincoln Murphy is a customer success strategist, growth architect, and President of Winning by Design. In this episode we discuss how the way companies look at customer success has changed, the importance of properly framing customer success with desired outcomes, how companies should think about making their customers more powerful, the relationship between ABM and customer success, FlipMyFunnel Festival, and more!
Hana Abaza is the VP of Marketing at Uberflip. In this episode she shares her thoughts on whether every company should have a podcast, how to measure the success of a podcast, the best time to publish, and so much more!
More on Flip The Switch: http://uberflip.com/podcast
Craig Rosenberg is the Chief Analyst at TOPO. In the episode, we discussed the importance of research for something as new as ABM, how the structure of marketing KPIs impacts ABM adoption, some of the biggest mistakes companies make with ABM, and what he's most looking forward to at the FlipMyFunnel Festival.
Find out more about TOPO: http://topohq.com/ More on the FlipMyFunnel Festival: http://flipmyfunnel.com/flipmyfunnel-festival-austin/
Jim Williams is the VP of Marketing at Influitive. In the episode, we discussed the history and growth of advocate marketing, how to measure success with an advocate marketing program, how MarTech’s growth impacts software purchases, and why ABM is the next stage in B2B marketing evolution.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/growing-brand-affinity-with-influencer-marketing/ More on Influitive: http://influitive.com
Chris Bucholtz is the Director of Content Marketing at CallidusCloud, sales performance management software. In this episode he shares his thoughts on the importance of marketing attribution, how sales and marketing can best utilize data from content, and how that data can be applied to creative development.
Kendra Morton is the Director of Demand Generation Marketing at Teradata Marketing Applications. In this episode, we dive deeper into demand generation, how we as marketers can better implement campaigns and measure our results. Demand Generation is a common challenge every marketing department has to face. The fact that 3% of marketers would rate their demand generation as effective is pretty crazy but not surprising.
Rob Chen is the CMO at CEB. CEB is a best practice insight and technology company and they recently held a Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas. I met up with Rob there to discuss how working for a company that’s constantly researching best practices for marketing can test and utilize those insights.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/behind-the-scenes-insights-from-the-2015-ceb-sales-and-marketing-summit/
Jessica Cross is the Director of Audience Marketing for EverString (www.everstring.com), a company hoping to help marketers better predict their customers and prospects. As marketers, making sure you're speaking the same language as and using the same currency as your sales team is critical to your overall success. Today's episode is all about that. Predictive marketing helps determine which accounts to target and creates a dialogue between marketing and sales. But first, I had to ask, what does the director of audience mean??
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/making-the-most-of-predictive-marketing/
Jeffrey Cole is the Director of The Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg. In this episode he shares his thoughts on some of the biggest changes in communication technology in the past decade, how they have impacted marketers, whether consumers are reacting to or setting the digital precedent, and more!
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/big-data-myth/
Stephen Saber is the CEO of The Pulse Network, a cloud-based platform focused on content marketing and event solutions. In this episode he shares his thoughts on the role of customized content, multi-channel engagement, common mistakes with content strategies, and more!
Andrew Yang is the Founder & CEO of Venture for America. In this episode we discuss the current state of entrepreneurship in the US, why more folks don't carve their own path, and how brands and marketers can learn from Venture for America.
More on Generation Startup: http://www.creativebreed.com/generationstartup/ Venture for America: http://ventureforamerica.org/
Chris Klinefelter is the Marketing Manager at TechnologyAdvice. In this April Fools Day episode we discuss severed marketing, why sales and marketing teams shouldn't align, and what that means for our industry going forward.
Follow Chris: http://twitter.com/cklinefelter Follow the Marketing Laboratory: http://twitter.com/mktglaboratory
Joseph Jaffe is the CEO of Evol8tion, a company connecting leading brands with early stage tech startups to solve business challenges. In this BONUS Episode he shares his thoughts on why businesses should focus on retention more than acquisition, how that impacts the customer journey, and why “zero paid media” should be the new marketing model.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/why-retention-is-the-new-acquisition/
Sangram Vajre is the Co-Founder and CMO at Terminus and the Founder of the FlipMyFunnel movement. He shares his thoughts on the ascendence of ABM, it's biggest challenges, and what to expect at the FlipMyFunnel Roadshow.
More info on the upcoming FMF Virtual Summit: http://bit.ly/1RMW7q1
Kyra Reed is a nationally recognized digital marketing consultant and Co-Founder of the MTO Agency. In this episode we discuss how companies target and engage with audiences differently on social, which social media channels your brand should be on, and so much more!
David Ostrov is the CEO of Noteblox and a veteran in the marketing software space. In this episode, we take a look at how the growth of enterprise marketing software, what that change means for marketers, and how to improve landing page optimization.
Wendy Clark is the CEO of DDB North America, a highly ranked, worldwide advertising agency with clients such as State Farm, McDonalds, Johnson and Johnson, and Hertz. She joined the B2B Nation as part of our partnership with the 4A’s Transformation Conference. In this episode we talk several of the ongoing transformations in the marketplace today, including the transformation of advertising and marketing, creative and media, customer interaction, and so much more.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/the-art-and-science-of-storytelling/
Carrie Murphy is the Marketing Content Manager at Revinate, Hotel Operations, Marketing & Revenue Software. In this episode she shares her thoughts on what marketers can learn from the hotel customer feedback model, personalization, one-to-one marketing, and more!
Jillian Wohlfarth is the Director of Content at SendGrid, a cloud-based customer communication platform. In this episode she shares her thoughts on their motto, getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time, with the right frequency.
Robbie Kellman Baxter is creator of the popular business concept "membership economy", strategy consultant, and a best-selling author. In this episode she shares her thoughts on rethinking the marketing funnel, superusers, and how the membership economy impacts B2B marketers today.
Find out more on The Membership Economy: http://peninsulastrategies.com/the-membership-economy/wp/
Jon Miller is the Founder and CEO of Engagio, an all-in-one platform for account-based marketing. In this episode, he shares his thoughts on the growth of ABM, some of its biggest challenges, his key takeaways from FlipMyFunnel, and more!
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/transcending-the-hype-of-account-based-marketing/ More on Engagio: http://engagio.com Also check out the upcoming FMF Virtual Summit: http://bit.ly/1RMW7q1
Adam New-Waterson is the CMo at Lean Data, a lead management solution looking to simplify B2B sales. In this episode of B2B Nation, he shares his thoughts on how LeanData has changed the way thier sales and marketing teams operate, how often they meet, their metrics, and so much more!
Check out the upcoming FMF Virtual Summit: http://bit.ly/1RMW7q1
Adrienne Weissman is the Chief Marketing Officer at G2 Crowd. She shares her thoughts on what exposed selling means to her, why you should have a strong review strategy, FlipMyFunnel, and more!
Check out the upcoming FMF Virtual Summit: http://bit.ly/1RMW7q1
Matt Heinz is the President of Heinz Marketing, a B2B marketing and sales acceleration firm that delivers measurable revenue results. He shares his thoughts on pipeline strategy, marketing execution, marketing, and FlipMyFunnel.
Check out Heinz Marketing: http://heinzmarketing.com
Megan Heuer is the Vice President and Group Director at SiriusDecisions, a leading global B2B research and advisory firm. She shares her thoughts on customer marketing, its relationship to ABM, the future of ABM, FlipMyFunnel, and more!
More about SiriusDecisions: https://www.siriusdecisions.com
Dave Rigotti is the Head of Marketing at Bizible, marketing analytics and attribution software that enables companies to measure and optimize for revenue. He shares his thoughts on marketers' current ability to measure their success, pipeline marketing, the importance of analytics, FlipMyFunnel, and more!
More on Bizible here: http://www.bizible.com
Suzanne Darmery is the Executive Creative Director and David Schey is the Director of Analytics at Acxiom Impact. They share their thoughts on one-to-one personalized messaging, the growth of multichannel analytics, the best way to test and learn from big data, MarketingSherpa Summit, and more!
Find out more about Acxiom Impact: http://www.acxiomimpact.com
Special thanks to Topher Mohr and Alex Elena for the music.
Tom McCarty is the SVP of Sales Support and Business Development at Pipedrive, sales CRM and pipeline management software. He shares his thoughts on the current importance of sales motivation, how process fits into your sales strategy, compensation techniques, challenges with sales pipelines, and more!
Free 2 Month Trial: http://pipedrive.com/b2bnation
Special thanks to Topher Mohr and Alex Elena for the music.
Fawn Young is the Senior Marketing Strategist at WhatCounts, an email service provider that helps marketers send what counts. She shares her thoughts on email personalization, list hygiene, the importance of real-time data, MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, and more!
Michał Leszczyński is the Content Marketing Manager and Magdalena Ciszewska is the Enterprise Marketing Manager at GetResponse. They share their thoughts on the Thompson Holiday Travel Agency, relationship marketing, data implementation, MarketingSherpaSummit 2016, and more!
More info on GetResponse: http://www.getresponse.com MarketingSherpa Summit: https://www.meclabs.com/training/marketing-summit/marketingsherpa-summit-2016
Special thanks to Topher Mohr and Alex Elena for the music.
Shannon Duffy is the VP of Marketing at Pardot. She shares her thoughts on content themes, landing page optimization, lead scoring, MarketingSherpa Summit, and of course marketing.
Find out more about Pardot: http://www.pardot.com
Special thanks to Topher Mohr and Alex Elena for the music.
Stacey Miller is the Senior Manager of Journalist Community Engagement at Cision. She shares her thoughts on the impact of communities on brand engagement, media intelligence, the future of PR, and more!
Paul Rossi is the President of The Economist Group, the leading source analysis on international business and world affairs. He shares his thoughts on the current state of the magazine, the growth of content platforms, and collaboration.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/creating-value-for-content-brands/ Find out more about the Economist Group: http://www.economistgroup.com
Lars Bastholm is the Global Chief Creative Officer at THE ZOO, Google’s creative think tank for brands and agencies. He shares his thoughts on the importance of partnership and collaboration, the growth of virtual reality, how technology has impacted advertising and marketing, and what it's like to be on the 4A's Partner Awards jury.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/expert-interview-what-the-internet-and-dog-years-have-in-common/ Find out more about the Partner Awards: partnerawards.aaaa.org/
Raj Badarinath is the VP of Marketing and Growth Services at Avangate. He shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of commerce automation as well as revenue leakage and how to turn that into revenue uplift.
Find out more about Avangate: http://www.avangate.com
Kristina Halvorson is the CEO of Brain Traffic. She shares her thoughts on her biggest takeaways from Content Marketing World, what brands should think about before developing content, and whether B2B and B2C companies should look at their content differently.
Find out more about Brain Traffic: http://braintraffic.com
Rand Fishkin is the Wizard of Moz, Marketing Analytics Software for Search, Links, Social, and Brand. He shares his thoughts on the relationship between content and SEO, how Google algorithms are changing, and the future of content and SEO.
Find out more about Moz: http://moz.com
Jeremy Epstein is the VP of Marketing at Sprinklr, a social experience management platform. He shares his thoughts on leveraging social data for business transformation, real time personalization, the customer passion score, and more!
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/expert-interview-series-problem-enterprise-point-solutions/ Find out more about Sprinklr: http://sprinklr.com
This podcast was recorded on site at the CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada and dives into the Challenger Customer as well as the themes and trends from the conference. Guests include: Patrick Spenner, the Director of Strategic Initiatives for CEB's Marketing practice, Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at CEB, Nick Toman, Sales Practice Leader at CEB, and Jill Konrath, a frequent speaker, author, and influencer.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/behind-the-scenes-insights-from-the-2015-ceb-sales-and-marketing-summit/ Find out more about the Challenger Customer: https://www.cebglobal.com/top-insights/challenger-customer.html
Maureen Flaherty is an email Marketing and Campaign Specialist at Pardot, B2B Marketing Automation software. She shares her thoughts on personas, the importance placed on lead scoring, content strategy, and more!
Find out more about Pardot: http://pardot.com
Malinda Wilkinson is the CMO at Salesfusion, a leading marketing automation platform for mid-sized B2B businesses. She sat down to share her thoughts on everything from the customer journey, lead scoring, and the importance of alignment between sales and marketing.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/expert-interview-3-tips-nurturing-b2b-buyers/ Find out more about Salesfusion: http://salesfusion.com
Matthew Sweezey is author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, keynote speaker, and a marketing futurist. He shares his thoughts on personas, the future of marketing automation, and his upcoming book.
Check out Marketing Automation for Dummies: http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Automation-Dummies-Mathew-Sweezey/dp/1118772229
Daniel Kushner is the Founder of Oktopost, social media management for B2B marketing. He sits down to share his thoughts on everything from social media ROI, employee advocacy, and the best time of day to post.
Find out more about Oktopost: http://oktopost.com
Cassie Lancellotti-Young is EVP, Customer Success at Sailthru, omnichannel personalization and marketing automation software. She sits down to share her thoughts on everything from predictive marketing, omnichannel personalization, and why the "customer journey" is the wrong way to look at marketing.
Find out more at http://sailthru.com
Kaiser Mulla-Feroze is the CMO at Totango, software that coaches Customer Success teams one step at a time. He sat down to share his thoughts on everything from similarities with CRM, understanding operational models, and the future of CSM.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/sales/why-customer-success-is-a-company-philosophy-not-just-a-job/ Find out more about Totango: http://totango.com
Robert Rose is the Chief Strategy Officer for the Content Marketing Institute. He shares his thoughts on some of the biggest takeaways from CMW this year, the future of live video, John Cleese, and more!
Find out more about the CMI: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com ...and Robert: http://robertrose.me
Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs. She shares her thoughts on the difference between advertising and marketing campaigns, the resurgence of print, personas, and more!
Find out more about MarketingProfs: http://marketingprofs.com ...and Ann: http://www.annhandley.com
Joe Pulizzi is the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, a group looking to advance the practice of content marketing, through online education, print, and in-person events. He sits down to share his thoughts on everything from the three-legged stool, the importance of on-going series, as well as campaign-based advertising/marketing.
Read more: http://technologyadvice.com/blog/marketing/expert-interview-series-targeting-customers-sales-savings-sunshine/
Emma Snider is the Section Editor for the HubSpot Sales Blog. She shares her thoughts on the importance of data, attribution, the growing strength of customers and more!
Find out more about the Hubspot Sales Blog: http://blog.hubspot.com/sales
Lucy Hitz is the Content Marketing Producer at Simply Measured, a leading social media analytics provide in-depth measurement and reporting. She shares her thoughts on how B2B marketers can learn from B2C, the most powerful social platforms for marketing, and making marketing attribution more clear.
Find out more about Simply Measured: http://simplymeasured.com
Sujan Patel is the Co-Founder of Content Marketer and Narrow.io. He shares his thoughts on growth hacking, some trends in content marketing, and the importance of building your personal brand.
Find out more about ContentMarketer.io: https://contentmarketer.io ...and Sujan: http://sujanpatel.com
Janis Rose is the Co-Founder of Mailigen, a SaaS company looking to help users create responsive email campaigns, get feedback using online surveys, save time setting up autoresponders.. He shares his thoughts on data in email marketing including the most useful data to pull from campaigns, whether or not too much data can be bad, and how much of your email marketing should be driven by data.
Find out more about Mailigen: https://mailigen.com
Natalie Issa is the Marketing Director at Woopra, software that helps track customers' web and mobile activity, forms, and emails, all in one place with customer analytics. She shares her thoughts on whether or not data deserves to be a buzzword, the best kind of data for marketers, and the importance of real-time data.
Find out more about Woopra: https://woopra.com
Michael Brenner is the Head of Strategy at NewsCred, a leading content marketing platform. He shares his thoughts on why creating engagement content is still so difficult, the importance of research and storytelling, and how visuals fit into the engagement equation.
Find out more about NewsCred: https://newscred.com
Jon Ferrara is the CEO of Nimble, a solution offering small businesses features of high-end CRM systems combined with the power of social media. He shares his thoughts on 2015, how social fits into CRM, and the importance of relationships.
Find out more about Nimble: https://nimble.com
Sean Zinsmeister is the Director of Product Marketing at Infer. He shares his thoughts on personalization at scale, how AI assists employees and improves the customer experience, how B2B marketers can make the most of segmentation, and more!
Find out more about Infer: http://infer.com
Brandon Sellers is the Head of Sales at KarmaCRM, web based small business CRM software. He shares his thoughts on cold emailing best practices, common faux pas, tips and tricks for pre-targeting, and more!
Find out more about KarmaCRM: http://karmacrm.com