This Week’s Top Stories
May 28th, 2010 - Posted by Tim Freestone
ROI Is Your Reward for Listening to the Market: Too often, we think we know the answer. We know our clients pain points. We know the solutions they need. We know how much they should budget for it. Unfortunately, what we purport to know is rarely what actually happens. Prospects may delay a purchase, alter implementation timelines or even go down an entirely different path. When this happens, IT sales professionals and implementation teams are often surprised, feeling that the change of plan came out of nowhere. If you pay attention, however, you’ll pick up cues along the way that can keep these surprises from arising.
Do You Really Want More Leads?: Generating high-quality leads is the top challenge for B2B marketers … by a mile. The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 69 percent of respondents see this as a significant challenge. The next one — marketing to a lengthening sales cycle – came in at a distant 39 percent. Even generating a high volume of leads only attracted the attention of 35 percent of the survey’s respondents. Competing for leads across multiple media environments ranked last at 27 percent.
Four Ways to Sell Skittish Execs on Corporate Blogging: Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to expect readers to engage on some sort of level if you’re doing it right. With that said, some blogs can be the Wild Wild West, which is what gives blogging a bad reputation in the board room and with executives that are stuck in the 80s. So, despite impassioned pleas to get a corporate blog off the ground, sometimes those pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears.
How to Sell Emerging Technology: Right now, the buzz around cloud computing is endless. But, it’s just the latest trend. In the past, it’s been B2B marketplaces, best-of-breed solutions for targeted business challenges and even the internet as a whole. The hidden cost of innovation is that IT solution provider’s need to explain the value and viability of these emerging technologies to skeptical decision-makers who are heavily invested in the status quo. Eventually, you know, today’s innovation will become tomorrow’s legacy platform, but that doesn’t make getting over the hump any easier.
A New Way to Sell Virtualization: Virtualization is among the hottest technologies in the IT market right now. Even though datacenter penetration is still low, your competitors are pushing it just as hard as you are. There’s no guarantee that you’ll be the first person a CIO or other IT decision maker has spoke with about virtualization, so you need to make sure your message is a bit different — you need to make it pop. The easiest way to do this is to make it about the competition.
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And, you may have missed …
Is E-mail Marketing Getting Too Defensive?: Most companies could be much more aggressive with their e-mail marketing initiatives. A new report from MarketingSherpa shows that customer retention is by far the top priority, with objectives around new opportunities not gaining nearly as much attention. Listen to this message from the market, and you’ll hear the whisper: “It’s time to make your move.”
