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…
Top A.I. Powered Tools Not Named ChatGPT
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…
Creatives are more than a remix
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…
Content Marketing During a Downturn: Here’s What the Conventional Wisdom Gets Wrong
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…
Reimagining B2B Coaching
by JUSTIN MICHAEL for Justin's Newsletter A way of being before thinking and doing Sales coaching and training are broken. It's broken because it's focused at the surface level of doing. And that's Einstein’s definition of insanity. Surface level tactics repeated may hone in a new habit but in time, the gains fade and the results ebb. It's a proverb! Why? Because it actually works like this: below doing, is thinking, and beneath thinking is being. It's a cosmic layer cake of cause and effect. It's been called dharma. From acorns, oaks. An apple seed cannot become an apricot tree.…
“The Lean Startup” is Bullshit
by The B2B Growth Newsletter Hi all — After talking with approximately 2.4 billion B2B founders, I’ve realized one of the main root causes of everyone’s pain and frustration. “Experimentation.” We’ve been told since the dawn of the Lean Startup that we need to generate hypotheses, experiment, measure, learn, and pivot. But the Lean Startup’s experimentation orthodoxy is wrong and counterproductive for founders and GTM teams. Why? It assumes you can generate testable hypotheses and learn real things. Generally, you can’t. Every time you try to do this in a startup setting, you realize your hypothesis was dumb and wrong, but can never…
AI Applications Across 12 Different Industries
by Flori Needle for HubSpot Some businesses have used AI for years; others were prompted by the recent AI gold rush to jump on the train. AI’s applications are far and wide as every business can leverage it differently to meet their goals. In this post, we’ll review AI application examples across 12 industries. AI Applications Examples AI has transformed the business landscape as time-saving tools complete tasks and help make data-backed decisions. Virtually all industries can benefit from AI, from medical providers to students pursuing an education. Below we’ll go over how AI applies to the three main business…
Building an innovation culture
by MARK DANCER for Mark Dancer on Innovating B2B Resilient, responsive, and regenerative As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to fade, the supply chain will emerge from its crisis stronger than before. Supply chain professionals are working to make it more resilient and able to withstand future shocks, but more change is underway. Geopolitical tensions are rising, motivating countries to develop strategic industries to achieve security objectives. Developing redundant and reliable sources for critical raw materials and agricultural commodities is a top priority, creating forces that may partially undue today’s ubiquitous global supply chain in favor of more regional or local…
What does an awesome pricing page look like?
by ELENA VERNA for Elena's Growth Scoop Pricing pages are crucial in converting visitors/free users to paid customers. Important attributes of every pricing page: Showcases monetization model Easily understood Instills trust Assists consideration Has clear navigation The goal of the pricing page is to provide all the needed information to a potential customer to make a decision and then make it easy for them to take the next step. Pricing page performance Best-in-class in-app pricing pages with self-serve options convert ~15-20% of pricing visitors to the checkout page. Checkout pages usually convert 50% to paid customers. Best-in-class pricing page design…
How Ramp builds product
by LENNY RACHITSKY for Lenny's Newsletter I was talking to a prominent VC the other day about what startups he’s watching, and he told me that he’s seeing one company quickly becoming a gravity for the best talent: Ramp. If you’re not familiar with Ramp, they provide corporate cards and a spend management platform, helping startups save money and control spending. They were last valued at over $8 billion, are backed by Founders Fund, Redpoint, Stripe, and others, and in the past year grew 4x, to over $10 billion in annualized spending. I believe they are also the fastest-growing SaaS company…