A recent Bridge Group study on Sales Development found that the average new BDR hire at tech companies had only 1.5 years of experience. The industry seems to have converged around an ideal profile for BDRs. They are typically young, located in major metropolitan areas, and motivated to grow their career into a field sales role. But just because most…
Category: Product Marketing
Landing Pages Should Offer Downloads to the Cloud (Not Just Your Hard Drive)
Cloud Storage services such as Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are growing quickly in popularity as more and more users prefer to have their content accessible on multiple devices rather than tethered to their hard drive. As the usage of these services grow cloud storage providers have an opportunity to leverage their identity models and security credentials on…
There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be in Marketing
There’s never been a better time for marketing professionals to be able to engage directly with customers. B2B buyers are collecting up to 60% of the information they need to make a purchasing decision before they are even willing to talk to a sales rep. Instead they are conducting research online. The implication of this shift in buying behavior is…
Marketing Automation Software Should Offer Personalized Recommendations like Amazon.com
Some of the most powerful features of marketing automation software are in the category of lead nurturing. To give a simple example – once you download a white paper (or register for an online event) marketing automation software can be configured to recommend another piece of related content. By encouraging the user to take the next step you can nurture…
The Broken Windows Theory of Marketing
A few years ago I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book the Tipping Point. One of the most fascination chapters in the book focused on the Broken Windows Theory of criminal psychology. The theory espouses that the probability that a crime will occur in a given area is proportional to the number of broken windows on its blocks. If a broken window…
Ten Outputs of Your Visual Content Factory
In my last post I made the case for why your company should consider building a visual content factory to support your content marketing strategy. To stand out from the noise these days, you need not only an attention-grabbing headline, but also an eye-catching visual. Readers can infer a lot about the content behind a link from the associated photo. …
Take a Shark Tank approach to Prioritizing Marketing Investments
For those outside of the US who may not be familiar with Shark Tank – it is an American reality TV show in which aspiring entrepreneurs pitch potential investors to fund their startup companies. The investors, called the sharks, starring on the show include tycoons such as Kevin O’Leary, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Mark Cuban. Each entrepreneur has a…
The Fantasy Content League
One of the top priorities marketing leaders face in 2013 is producing a consistent stream of high value content. Today’s B2B technology buyers are conducting 60% of their research online before they are even willing to speak to a sales representative. As a result having killer content that engages users during this online research process is essential. But generating strong…
Building Technical Equity in Your Platform
There is a lot of talk about technical debt these days. (There is a lot of talk about debt in general as we are still attempting to recover from the macroeconomic recession of 2008.) The question I would ask though is – If it is possible to build technical debt then it should it not also be possible to build…
The Marketing Hackathon
If engineers and programmers can have hackathons, why can’t marketing professionals? Today’s social media tools make it very easy for even the least technical individuals to experiment with new technologies. Instead of programming in HTML5 or Ruby on Rails, marketers can use WordPress and TypePad to quickly mockup new concepts. Self-service tools on the Internet enable anyone to quickly design,…
