Archive June 9, 2023

We need better swag!

By in Sales Tag , , , , , ,

by LIZ CHRISTO for Dear Stage 2 A rant on SWAG: Stuff We All Get. AKA alternatives to the branded water bottle DEAR STAGE 2: I’ve been tasked with ordering new swag for our company and I want to mix it up beyond the usual t-shirts and pens. What’s the best piece of swag/collateral you have ever given or received? Any creative ideas? ~We need better swag DEAR WE NEED BETTER SWAG: I totally agree — we do need better swag! Too often the branded swag I receive just doesn’t connect and I end up donating or tossing it. What a…

Read More

Why this, why now, why me

By in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Information Technology, Sales Tag ,

by MARTY KASSALEN for Marty Kassalen's Substack The urgent need for B2B sales reps and leaders to adopt generative AI The Problem I don’t suspect anyone reading this lives under a rock. B2B sales is evolving and getting harder. Thanks for breaking the news, Marty. But just how bad is it getting, really? Bravado reported that 22% of sales reps hit their Q4 quota. Breaking that down: Essentially 1/5 reps were successful A minority of VPs / Directors were successful What this means: growth targets missed, higher CAC, anxious CEO, anxious BoD, frustrated reps, higher attrition, wasted recruiting & onboarding spend. Bottom…

Read More

You’re Not Alone—The “Do More With Less” Trend Has Hit Content Marketers Hard

By in Content Marketing, Marketing Tag , , , , , ,

by Jimmy Daly for superpath Between the macro economy and generative A.I., content marketers have been thrown for a real loop over the past year or so. Things changed and fast. Here’s our monthly job board revenue for the last two years. It’s a small sample size, but I believe it represents some larger trends in SaaS. Revenue—and, by proxy, the number of open roles—peaked in January 2022. Then it fell off a cliff. A historically good job market turned into a historically bad one within just a few months. ‍ Profitwell founder Patrick Campbell recently shared an analysis of the SaaS market over…

Read More

How to Use XLookup in Excel

By in Operations Tag , , , ,

by Lauren Farrell for HubSpot Working with large data sets is always tricky. Excel is one of the most powerful tools you can use to manipulate, format, and analyze large sets of information. Several well-known functions exist to help you look up specific matches within a dataset, like VLookup. But functions like VLookup had certain limitations, so Microsoft recently introduced the XLookup function to Excel. It provides a more robust method for finding specific values in a data set. Knowing how to use it effectively can drastically cut down the time you spend trying to analyze data in Excel. What…

Read More

How to Build a LinkedIn Strategy

By in Lead Generation, Marketing Tag , , ,

by RACHEL KARTEN for Link In Bio I’ll admit it: I’ve never thought of LinkedIn as a priority platform. Likely because most of the brands I’ve worked with are consumer-facing and I’ve generally found a lot of the posts on there fairly cringe. But that’s changing. Between the reach I’ve gotten lately on personal posts promoting this newsletter and the potential demise of a not-to-be-named platform, I’m starting to see the LinkedIn light. For today’s interview, I reached out to someone who has a lot of LinkedIn knowledge and has been a believer for awhile now. Chris Kim is the Director of…

Read More

AN 8-POINT WEBSITE CHECKLIST FOR EFFECTIVE B2B CONTENT MARKETING

By in Content Marketing, Marketing Tag , , ,

by Matt Bell for The Framework Your company’s website is one of its most important assets when it comes to effective content marketing. You own it. You control the content. You can direct visitors to the parts that are most relevant for them. And yet, many B2B companies still treat their website as little more than a digital catalog. Some practically reproduce the catalog format, with an index-like homepage and subpages dedicated to product lines and spec sheets. Is that what your audience wants to find? All of them, all the time? Those are rhetorical questions, of course. As I’ve…

Read More

Long sales cycles, the #1 enemy of SEO attribution

By in Sales Tag , , , ,

by Kevin Indig for kevin-indig.com Attribution models are the most common way to quantify the returns on marketing investments, but not every company can use them successfully. Long sales cycles (+90 days) are the biggest enemy of attribution models, often to the detriment of channels like SEO that play an important role in early touches. Companies with long sales cycles often either sell B2B enterprise software (SaaS), high-priced products (e-commerce) or long-term commitments (consumer). The function of Marketing is to drive customers (if they can complete the buyer journey without talking to a person) or leads who connect with a…

Read More

Top A.I. Powered Tools Not Named ChatGPT

By in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Information Technology Tag , , ,

by MICHAEL SPENCER for A.I. Supremacy Hey Everyone, If I had more time, I’d like to dive into A.I. and Generative A.I. tools. I’m sure you might as well, while I think it’s early days for A.I. tools in 2023, it might be useful to take a short survey of some of the ones that are trending. In 2023 we are entering new terrain: Prompt-engineering based solutions No and low code solutions A proliferation of tools to automate and speed up repetitive tasks A plethora of writing-tools and chatbots Productivity platforms (Notion, Mem, etc…) Increasingly better thought leadership around A.I. and trends. To see…

Read More

Creatives are more than a remix

By in Marketing Tag , , , , , ,

by ALEJANDRA CÉSPEDES AND SEBASTIAN CUERVO for 42 Slash Advertising uses graphic representations to connect brands with buyers. The more your brand resonates, the easier you can capture value and turn it into revenue. In the B2B SaaS world (and digital marketing in general), these visual models are often called "creatives." While the name is not wrong- they result from creative processes- "creatives" often are distant from genuine creative work. Why is that the case? How does it affect marketing? Creatives aren't creative... but they should. In marketing, creatives usually refer to adding an image to a previously prebuilt copy. This text…

Read More

Content Marketing During a Downturn: Here’s What the Conventional Wisdom Gets Wrong

By in Content Marketing, Marketing, Uncategorized Tag , , ,

By Sharla Moody for Contently Recession. Downturn. Economic uncertainty. When these words start to appear, conventional wisdom tells businesses to cut their marketing budgets. It turns out that advice is dead wrong. As multiple researchers have found over decades of studies, stopping your marketing efforts during tough times is a mistake. Data shows that proactive marketing “pays off” during recessions—for brands across industries, including the likes of Toyota, Amazon, Coca-Cola, etc. As two marketing professors put it in a 2020 Harvard Business Review article: “Firms that maintain their marketing spend while reallocating it to suit the context … fare better than firms that cut their marketing…

Read More