Operating in a space dominated by large, well-known brands poses a challenge for companies in any sector. In the SaaS software market – and in CRM in particular – the challenge can seem monumental. Clare Dorrian is the CMO of SugarCRM, where she and her team are leading their challenger brand up against heavyweights like Hubspot and Salesforce. The…

The biggest change in the purchasing process for business technology over the past decade is the role of business users. IT no longer makes all of the decisions about technology. Instead, it’s the business users who use the tech on a daily basis who do much of the work. The area of low-code development, which allows business users to create workflo…

Audience marketing is essentially the practice of building an audience of prospective buyers for your product or service that you inform and educate until such time as they’re ready to buy. Sounds pretty intuitive, right? It is. But it’s often a tremendous challenge to pull off successfully. Most marketers work in an environment where it’s difficul…

More than 15 years after it happened, you can still find videos online of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer chanting “Developers! Developers!” more than a dozen times at a Windows conference in 2006. You can’t blame Ballmer for his excitement. Put the right combination of tools, technology, and ideas in the hands of a developer and you’ve got the foundatio…

How many times, B2B marketers, have you sat on a pipeline call reviewing open opportunities and heard someone comment on how long an opp has been open and what can be done to move it along? Quite a few times, no doubt. Outreach from the sales rep, an open opportunity nurture sequence, and even executive outreach are all possible solutions. But woul…

Because we live in a world surrounded by technology, we often equate innovation with devices and software. But innovation is about taking a different approach to just about anything. If you can make something faster, more efficient, and more productive, you’re innovating. During times of economic uncertainty, innovation and experimentation are ofte…

Resource constraints are hitting B2B marketers hard. The teams are often smaller than they were two years ago. The tools are fewer. But the goals are often headed in the other direction. Many marketers are tired of hearing “Do more with less.” And a better approach to economic uncertainty might be rethinking what your company is doing to see if it …

The modern marketing and sales organization often integrates several platforms to deliver a comprehensive view of prospects and customers. But when it comes to recruiting talent, the systems are often years behind what’s available to marketing and sales. Recruiters, for example, often can’t target potential employees the way their colleagues in mar…

Businesses in the technology sector understand the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) better than most. But the full scope of AI’s potential lies beyond tech, in industries that have been slower to adopt tools that can rapidly analyze data and help manage risk. The construction industry, for example, touches almost everything we do. But it’s …

ChatGPT and other generative AI tools that create content are capturing a lot of attention. But content is only one application of generative AI. It can generate just about anything in terms of data. Getting AI and machine learning projects off the ground remains a significant hurdle for many businesses. One of the biggest obstacles companies face …

There are some things about the art and science of media buying that haven’t changed much in recent years. But other elements of media buying are in a constant state of flux. Social media is one example. Would you have predicted even one year ago that brands would be skittish of Twitter but taking a serious look at Reddit? Jason Gladu is the presid…

Location, location, location. That’s the age-old advice given to real estate investors. And like the age-old advice given to many areas of life and business, today it’s often tweaked just a bit. Location, location, location – and data. Today’s real estate investors and developers have access to millions of data points to help them gauge the potenti…

The pressure is on finance teams to better control spending and account for every dollar spent. And that probably doesn’t sound like a great time to be pitching new software to finance roles. But if tracking and managing an organization’s spending is the primary focus of your product, this might be your time to shine. In this episode of the B2B Nat…

An increasing number of B2B revenue organizations are aligned around their product and customer lifecycle. Marketing generates awareness, sales closes deals with customers, and customer success is tasked with increasing renewals and lowering attrition. But just because the teams are organized in such a manner doesn’t mean the motions are carried ou…

Branding might be the most undervalued aspect of B2B marketing. Just take a look at any list of the dominant brands in the world, and you might see a B2B brand or two, but branding remains synonymous with the B2C world. But the lack of investment in branding is putting many B2B brands at a disadvantage. Demand generation is the dominant marketing p…

Twenty years ago, software vendors that wanted to sell into an enterprise organization would target the tech team and its leadership. They could develop and distribute whitepapers and product guides, and attend the conferences where technology leaders went to talk shop. Today, everyone is a software buyer. And that requires a radical shift in the w…

One of the challenges B2B marketers face today is the perception that their brand is boring. As a new generation of B2B buyers takes control of the market, many of the tried and true – but potentially stale – tactics that worked in the past might not produce the same results. That’s why today you see more video content in B2B marketing, more brand …

A surprising number of the daily activities that take place on revenue teams remain manual. Sellers still create reminders to follow up with prospects or customers. Data is manually entered into CRM applications and other tools, increasing the likelihood of human error in the process. It’s a little hard to believe when you think about it. The combi…

Some people encounter a problem at work with no obvious solution and find a workaround. Others see roadblocks as part of their job or the task at hand and learn to deal with them. And for other people, the desire to solve a problem impacting their daily work fires up their imagination. Chad Waite came across a problem while working in partner marke…

Every business needs to think about cybersecurity. As a result, there’s a huge market for the growing number of vendors selling the tools and platforms that help keep businesses, their users, and their data safe. And that means noise. For B2B marketers in the cybersecurity space, cutting through the noise and reaching information security professio…

An increasing number of technology vendors are making artificial intelligence (AI) central to their products and their messaging. For B2B marketers that like to talk about ROI and value, AI presents a conundrum: How do you balance the use of AI with business outcomes? AI is a foundational technology that is incredibly complex to explain, especially…

B2B marketers that want to put their brand where the conversations are taking place need to understand how to use social media. That might sound obvious given the dominance of social media today across B2B and B2C audiences, but all social media platforms are not created alike. LinkedIn is the first platform that comes to mind when most people thin…

The great promise of digital advertising was the ability to measure performance and optimize programs. And unlike traditional forms of media, marketers using digital ads would have detailed visibility into attribution. Digital advertising has helped brands big and small reach their target audience using a number of platforms and networks. Self-serv…

Account-based marketing is such an integral part of the strategy for so many B2B marketing teams that it is hard to understand how marketing worked before ABM burst onto the scene. The early promises of ABM included increased efficiency and better alignment between marketing and sales. When marketing knows exactly which accounts it needs to target,…

Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on your organization’s products to acquire and retain customers. With the demand for digital products and experiences at an all-time high, it’s not surprising to see product-led growth gaining popularity. Digital products and the experiences they deliver are significant differentiators for m…

There has been a lot of attention on the healthcare industry over the past two and a half years, and it hasn’t all come from consumers and the news media. Healthcare is more complicated than it was 20 or 30 years ago. There are more specialists involved in care, more facilities, and more data. That’s one reason why healthcare is a popular area for …

People don’t remove their B2C hats when they’re researching products in their business life. That’s why B2B marketers are often reminded that some of the tactics and platforms that have the “B2C” label deserve a look in B2B marketing. It’s all marketing to people, after all. But B2B purchases are still made by a committee of people, each with their…

Content marketing is more than distributing thought leadership and offering eBook downloads to attract leads. Your organization’s content can continue to serve your revenue organization (and your customers) as they interact with your sales and customer success teams. But your content can’t serve anyone if your team doesn’t know where to find it or …

Content marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing tactics in B2B, but has the content evolved to keep up with the audiences? Experiences and interactivity are more commonly found in B2C marketing efforts where the audience is large and the resources are often more plentiful than in the B2B space. It’s simply difficult to justify …

Online quizzes and product builders seemed to find a home on the Internet the week after it was invented. And while you might joke about the answer you received when you took that quiz about the type of superhero you would be or the pet dinosaur you should own, you’re generating real data when you answer those questions. Data generated on a company…

How well do you understand the content you have and the gaps that exist in your content strategy? Creating content at scale requires a level of visibility that many editorial organizations struggle to achieve and which many B2B marketing organizations can’t even imagine. Jeff Coyle is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse, which b…

Scaling B2B content creation remains a significant challenge for many companies. The demand for content assets, including papers, videos, and articles for marketing, the website, sales outreach, and more never seems to end. With the right mix of in-house resources, reliable partners and freelancers, and clever strategies, B2B vendors can scale thei…

Many organizations are putting Revenue Operations roles in place and growing the role into an entire team. But confusion around the RevOps role, the functions it performs, and where it goes as the revenue team matures continue to be an issue at many organizations. Revenue Operations is not the same as a Salesforce Admin, but in-depth knowledge of y…

Software developers are the builders in their organizations, and like a lot of builders, they feel strongly about their tools. You can’t market to software developers the way you market to senior business leaders. Developers are more hands-on. They like to try before they buy. And marketing to software developers often means taking a bottom-up appr…

How are we going to develop the next generation of female revenue leaders? It’s a complicated question because the lack of women in revenue leadership roles today makes it hard to develop leaders for tomorrow. Women are sorely underrepresented in leadership roles. And that’s as true of revenue teams as it is elsewhere in many organizations. Women i…

How to Make the Transition from Lead Gen to Demand Gen Moving your marketing from a lead generation strategy built on MQLs to a demand generation strategy built on revenue and pipeline is often discussed in B2B marketing circles. But if you’re making the transition, it needs to go deeper than the label. Among the challenges you’ll face in the proce…

Whether you call it organic marketing or inbound marketing, strategies that bring prospects to your brand in search of a solution to their problem stand in contrast to outbound strategies that are usually more costly. As B2B marketers pivot from lead generation to demand generation, organic and inbound tactics are gaining traction once again. Creat…

Maura Rivera is the CMO of Qualified, a conversational marketing vendor that infuses Salesforce data into chat to give the sales team a better idea of who is visiting their website. In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Maura about marketing in a space with a dominant brand, B2B marketing tactics she’s re-examined over the past two years, and w…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Michael Sciano, Sr. Customer Marketing Manager at Airship, about how customer marketing is evolving from formulaic PDF case studies to a customer advocacy strategy that creates fans and eventually a community around your product.

On this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Patrick Quinn of BigCommerce about how to design and launch an influencer marketing campaign for your brand. For decades, businesses hired famous people like actors and athletes to work as the face of their brand and influence their target markets. It was largely a one-way relationship because that’s how th…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Dana Freker Doody about growing online communities, measuring their effectiveness, and what her journey from journalism to B2B marketing taught her along the way. Dana Freker Doody is the VP, Marketing and Communications, at Juno, an online platform that helps turn an audience into a community.…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Valerie Smyk, chief revenue officer of Kangaroo Rewards, about how businesses of all sizes and industries can use loyalty and rewards to grow their business. We’ll be discussing how loyalty programs can help your business improve brand affinity, increase average deal size, incentivize customer referrals, an…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Tucker Stoffers of Divvy about how his team markets its fintech solutions and how B2B marketing for people in finance roles differs from tech roles. Episode Guide 2:40: The challenges and opportunities of marketing in the B2B space. 3:51: “People just don’t bank the way they did 10 or 20 years ago.” 5:36: W…

The “Great Resignation” has everyone talking about career goals, skills development, and job opportunities. With so many people moving around within industries or moving from one career path to another, there’s a lot of demand for skills training, which, like everything else these days, is increasingly taking place online. Brian Finnerty is the VP …

In this episode of B2B Nation, Nathan Burke, CMO of cybersecurity vendor Axonius, shares with us the five ways he thinks B2B lead generation has changed in the past decade, what his company is doing to keep pace with the changes, his marketing challenges, and more. Learn more about TechnologyAdvice: solutions.technologyadvice.com/solutions-overview…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we explore the experiences of women in the technology industry with Jamie Porter, senior director of marketing at MNJ Technologies. We’ll discuss Jamie’s experience in the tech sector and how she works to help other women achieve success as well. Among the topics we cover are coaching and mentorship as well as the rol…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Eric Dates, Director of Growth Marketing at Ncontracts, about how marketers can influence the dark funnel and dark social conversations, coming to grips with not being able to see and measure everything we do, the impact of LinkedIn on the B2B marketing community, and more. Episode Guide 1:26: Messagi…

James Stanton is the Vice President of Marketing at Empyrean, an HR tech vendor. For James, moving beyond the MQL means looking at prospects through the lens of “opportunities,” which sounds a lot more aligned with how B2B works but does present some challenges of its own. In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to James about MQLs, his compan…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to David Melendrez, an account manager at AMD, who manages the relationship between AMD and one of its biggest and most strategic partners: Dell. David’s job at AMD is to make sure the Dell team has all of the knowledge and tools it needs to grow market share and nurture the relationship between the companies.…

In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re talking to Wayne Bulsiewicz of Simplus, an Infosys company that helps its customers get more out of their Salesforce deployments. Wayne and the Simplus team are growing their content strategy by creating marketing Centers of Excellence around the specific industries that Simplus targets. Episode Guide 2:03: How …