Step 1 – Define Your Prospects Better
The first challenge you face when marketing more complex solutions is to define exactly who is the prospect. If your solution doesn’t fall neatly within the responsibility of a specific job title then you need to investigate who has responsibility…
Read More
Creating Key Account Thought Leadership
According to Jeff Ernst of Forrester Research, addressing “the B2B buying process isn’t about selling a product or service – it’s about demonstrating your ability to solve a customer’s problems1.” Let’s face it, we are all in the business of…
Read More
How to Reach Decision Makers
Marketing is often given mixed messages about what’s expected. Demand generation – creating a flow of leads – is not the same as the goal of reaching decision-makers, but it is often spoken synonymously. When you’re tasked with reaching…
Read More
Ensure campaign success with prospect surveys
Prospect surveys may be easier to do than you think, and leveraging the results in a timely fashion can have a major impact on campaign success. In a recent blog post – “Proof That It Never Hurts To Ask”1,…
Read More
5 Keys to Align Marketing and Sales Prospecting
SimplyDIRECT recently surveyed marketing professionals within large software firms, and we learned a lot about the assumptions, desires and anxieties of this group. No question, this is a smart bunch. We often come back from meetings with clients not only…
Read More
BANT vs. Sales Triggers to Qualify Key Accounts
Traditionally, marketing has been tasked with producing BANT quality leads for key accounts. The individual identified is confirmed to have Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe. Good Lord! What sales team wouldn’t spec their wished-for leads that way? Why not add…
Read More
5 Keys to Web Surveys That Work
Web surveys offer marketers a multi-tool that can help their budgets go far, very far. You think you know them – the SurveyMonkey style surveys that often pose as a legitimate survey but are as transparent as televangelist asking for…
Read More
5 Tips for Prospecting to Key Accounts
Do you remember the line from Rudyard Kipling’s epic poem, “If”? “… if you can keep your head when all around you people are losing theirs and blaming you for it?” In one of our recent surveys we asked, “What…
Read More
How to Engage Senior IT Decision Makers in Key Accounts
We’ve heard this a million times when doing marketing campaigns: appeal to human instincts. Don’t think of your prospects as monolithic automatons. So even when trying to reach that super senior executive in that big, impenetrable key account, keep…
Read More