OnBase: Smashing Sales and Marketing Misalignments

If you’re (still!) looking for new ways to disrupt your B2B Sales initiatives, these useful tips and ideas from Ben Simms, Vice President of Commercial Client Services at MarketSource will come handy. About Ben: As the leader of delivery for commercial client services at MarketSource, Ben is responsible for deploying and executing a wide range of B2B sales and marketing solutions for Fortune 500 and enterprise clients across several verticals and industries. Ben’s client engagement programs manage inside sales, account development, brand advocacy, and channel sales teams for some of the most iconic brands in the B2B space. He has an insatiable thirst for learning how different industries can most efficiently grow revenue and share knowledge management principles to instigate strategic thinking. The #1 motivating factor throughoutBen’s profession has been growing careers. Prior to MarketSource he spent 15 years as a leader in admissions, marketing, and operations for higher education institutions to launch careers for graduates and now enjoys growing careers at MarketSource on behalf of his clients. Combining his experience in education and passion for rock music Ben has a “side hustle” as the owner of School of Rock – Johns Creek, inspiring people to rock on stage and in life, which was voted “best music lessons in North Atlanta” by Appen Media. Ben has lived in 13 states calling Georgia home since 2013. He holds a BBA from Western Michigan University and an MBA from the University of Colorado. Ben lives in Johns Creek with his wife, Christina, and two rock star sons. You can follow him on Twitter  or connect with him on LinkedIn. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “I’m a fan of high amount of sales prospecting touchpoints.” “If you have a high volume of attempts within a timeframe, you get more results.” “Sales and marketing alignment is an age-old question that I don’t think will ever be solved!.” “Sales and Marketing conflict can actually help challenge the status quo.” “The one thing Marketing is responsible for (always) is generating leads.” “Its never only about impressions and touches and triggers.” “Sales should have SLAs – how quickly will they respond to a lead, how quickly will they follow up.” “I believe Marketing should focus on Demand Generation and Inbound leads.” “Its more common to have BDRs and SDRs report to Sales and this also gives more results.” “Data is improving dramatically and in a quick way. I’m excited about technographic data which analyses digital signals to see who is using or recently purchased different technologies. ” About the podcast Sunny Side Up is a series of 15-minute podcasts. Leaders and innovators share what they’ve learned in the B2B tech sector on topics related to marketing, product management, sales, and leadership.

We had the pleasure of speaking with martech influencer Matt Heinz (President and Founder of B2B marketing and sales acceleration firm Heinz Marketing) in this episode on B2B marketing trends. Have a quick listen! About Heinz Marketing: Established in 2008, Heinz Marketing is a B2B sales and marketing firm located in Redmond, WA, serving businesses throughout North America and overseas.  Heinz Marketing focuses on driving results through strategic demand generation, disciplined sales funnel strategies, fully-integrated campaigns and collaboration between marketing and sales organizations. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “The more sales and marketing work together, the more likely the company is to achieve its goals.” “Account-based Marketing done well requires tight integration between sales and marketing and the buying committee at your target accounts.” “Addressing the buying committee as one team is the biggest challenge to overcome today.” “No one can do enterprise sales and marketing without a pretty complex data that tells you who your targets are, and why to target one company over the other.” “There is often a lot of variables that go into choice of data.” “Alot of content is ask and not give.” “The fallacy I hear is that people are not consuming content, that is simply not true. We have more content coming to us in various formats today.” “Your content strategy should go from interruptive to creative.” “In 2019 we will see smaller and narrower, more focused content created, maybe even to audiences of just one!” “Direct mail has made an enormous comeback, when people get Direct Mail, they think its novel because they don’t get too many mails anymore!.” About the podcast Sunny Side Up is a series of 15-minute podcasts. Leaders and innovators share what they’ve learned in the B2B tech sector on topics related to marketing, product management, sales, and leadership.

What does 2019 hold for B2B sales and salestech?  We recently spoke with Christy Kirkland from SalesLoft to discuss upcoming trends in B2B sales.  About Christy, in her own words: “I started my career in SaaS almost by mistake, or rather grand design. I began at Lead Forensics, which was an incredible learning experience & eventually graduated into a more challenging role at Marketo. After much deliberation, I chose to leave and venture off to SalesLoft – an Atlanta-based & quickly growing, but immensely successful start-up.” Top ten takeaways from the episode: “The biggest push I’m seeing today is rising popularity of Sales Engagement platforms, the whole world right now is paying attention to Sales Engagement” “An important part of Sales Engagement is having a multi-channel platform”  “80% of top performing organizations use at least 3 channels” “If you just use phone or email, you will be missing the mark” “Sales tech and Sales engagement is an evolving market, sales people are slower in adopting tools and technologies” “Its all about being politely persistent today” “It is hard to build a predictable pipeline with substandard data” “Marketing teams have picked up on ABM, ABM is meant to drive alignment between Marketing and Sales” “More and more people are taking an account-based approach to Sales too. Everyone has a different take on what ABM means to them” “It all comes down to personalization, everyone likes to feel special” About the podcast Sunny Side Up is a series of 15-minute podcasts. Leaders and innovators share what they’ve learned in the B2B tech sector on topics related to marketing, product management, sales, and leadership.

Why is Account-based marketing gaining so much importance in B2B Marketing?  Sangram Vajre responds while sharing his predictions for ABM in 2019.

Pamela Muldoon , Chief Content Strategist at The Pedowitz Group returns to our podcast series titled Sunny Side Up to discuss the future of gated content and what leading brands do to gain leads with this strategy. Key Takeaways from the episode: A lot of folks in B2B sales are finding it very tough to break through the noise to connect with their target accounts. Having your own podcast gives your team the unique ability and often times the ability for sales too to break in to new accounts starting with the aim of interviewing your ideal clients on your podcast. The big reason we see audio content  gaining attention is because of the nature of the way that we live and do work these days.  The timing for podcasting is really really good as we touched upon. But the thing I would encourage folks to think about is this idea of content based networking where you collaborate with your ideal clients and potential referral partners to create content.

 The face of content marketing and content consumption has seen a shift, with audiences showing a rapid increase in preference for video and audio content. We spoke with Logan Lyles of Sweet Fish Media in this episode to discuss the various ways in which B2B marketers can use podcasts to enhance their content marketing efforts. Have a quick listen! Key Takeaways from the episode: A lot of folks in B2B sales are finding it very tough to break through the noise to connect with their target accounts. Having your own podcast gives your team the unique ability and often times the ability for sales too to break in to new accounts starting with the aim of interviewing your ideal clients on your podcast. The big reason we see audio content  gaining attention is because of the nature of the way that we live and do work these days.  The timing for podcasting is really really good as we touched upon. But the thing I would encourage folks to think about is this idea of content based networking where you collaborate with your ideal clients and potential referral partners to create content.

Data drives all of marketing today. But how can marketers and companies use it optimally to plan their B2B marketing efforts? Paroma Sen, the Innovation and Industry Marketing Lead at SAP India  shares her views in this podcast episode. Key Takeaways from the episode: Demand is like energy, you cannot create it from zero from nothingness you can only convert it from one form to the other, like you can convert potential energy into kinetic energy if you remember you know  high school physics. Demand today exists in the world in the form of customer pain points and when we take that, harness it, articulate it and contextualize it, then we can work those pain points into demand. But marketing is ultimately any form of marketing going back to basics, it’s about putting your message where the customer eyeballs are and data helps us fine tune that approach, data tells us where to go where to make best use of our budget to put our message where. Having intent data, being able to tell what the context and the behavior of a person is…with respect to a certain product or service that you’re trying to put out there. Which is great. I mean that’s the gold mine right. That’s what we all want, we all love. But the other side of that now is GDPR, where the lines are being drawn, where we are seeing consent and privacy being a priority.

A Quick Discussion on Digital Marketing Practices and trends for B2B Tech Marketers.   In this podcast episode, we discuss changing B2B Digital Marketing Practices and trends that affect B2B Tech Marketers with Eric Sharp, Founder and CEO of Protofuse Inc and Host of the 1 to 10 Podcast series. Key Takeaways from the episode: If you try to set up multiple channels at the same time and you’re trying to do everything well and you have a resource issue and you don’t have people that are helping you push content to that channel and engaging people when they engage with you it’s just you’re going to get burned out really quickly. I think using video in your digital marketing is a bit of a foregone conclusion right. Everyone knows that they have to it. I think from a B2B space. I think the leaders that B2B companies especially within this space. Again they understand that video is important in their overall digital marketing. But I think the gap that I’m seeing at least is, is it doing well. Your website should be running Google Analytics especially if you’re going to be subscribing to some sort of content marketing plan. You need some sort of other tool to measure the effectiveness of that too.

A Chat with Anastasia Pavlova on B2B Content Marketing and its Changing Dynamics .   Anastasia Pavlova, (Former) Vice President of Marketing at Webgility talks about the current and evolving trends in B2B Content Marketing.  Key Takeaways from the episode: When it comes to content marketing there’s a lot of noise out there. Everyone is now a content marketer, everyone has a blog, everyone is trying to communicate their message and it’s harder and harder to stand out. So you really need the right tools and you need the right skills to be able to break through the noise We are now seeing a really big transition from inbound marketing or traditional demand generation where content really plays a big role  transition to account-based marketing Having shorter videos, shorter webinars is a trend we see happening right now

B2B Content Marketing is evolving at a rapid pace. Here’s what Pamela Muldoon, the lead content strategist at The Pedowitz Group feels about these dynamics.