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Blog #5 of #5 in our Peter Ostrow Guest Blog Series

Here, There, and Everywhere: 21^st Century Selling Comes of Age

Answer this question:  is your sales team inside or outside?  If you hesitate before mentally responding, you’re in good company.  

Over the years, my Sales Effectiveness research has seen a steady blurring of these traditional job roles, as work/life balance employment trends, ever-cooler handheld devices, and lightning-fast connectivity have dramatically changed the landscape of B2B selling.  Traditionally, enterprises employed low-cost or entry-level staff to smile-and-dial their way toward qualifying leads for the field, and showered their high-flying outside reps with all the goodies that accrued to coffee-drinking closers.  The line between the personas was clear, although proactive sales leaders were wise enough to build a dues-paying, promotional path between them for the strongest inside sellers to graduate to the field. 

Blog #4 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

Which Half of YOUR Marketing Budget is Working?

It's time to retire the classic mantra of ROI-hungry CMOs: “I know that half of my marketing dollars are effective, just not which half." 

Today's savvy B2B marketers have plenty of tools at their disposal to overcome this traditional lack of visibility, which legitimately plagued their communications and business development efforts for generations. While the next Super Bowl will undoubtedly set new records for mass media advertising costs, few CMO budgets are spent nowadays on anything but laser-focused, personalized marketing content that approaches one-to-one messaging as closely as possible.  

Blog #3 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

What Do You Mean, “Margin Matters”?

A long time ago, in companies far, far away, B2B marketers marketed and their sellers sold.

The former were responsible for guarding the integrity of the corporate logo and generating tons of leads; the sales team was left to their own devices, and expense accounts, if they sold enough stuff. Obviously, times have changed. Contemporary marketers have, for a decade or more, been held accountable less for how many bodies, clicks, and downloads they generate, and more around ROMI - return on marketing investment. Considering the well-publicized analyst predictions that by 2017 the CMO's budget will out-pace that of the CIO, ROI had better be part of the equation for marketing leaders hoping to keep their jobs secure.

Blog #2 of 5 in our Peter Ostrow guest blog series

Traditionally, the B2B customer acquisition process is perceived as a two-dimensional, linear workflow: the mad scientists in product development cook up a brand-new iteration of the solution in their dark laboratory; product marketing launches a revolutionary messaging campaign in the newest, coolest medium; field marketing runs ads, events, and promotions to develop a pile of net-new leads; and then the sales team…closes the deals the same-old, same-old way they always have. Just like that - as if the proper order of things dictates that all content-based creativity and flexibility ceases to exist, once the white-hot leads are passed to sales, whose reps merely have to collect another signature in order to generate the revenue stream. If, however, enterprise sales reps are only expected to perform repetitious, uncreative, end-of-cycle tasks, why do we pay them so much?

The inherent problem with this model is obvious to all of us who have carried a bag, and a quota, but less so to the persona of the "celebrity CMO" who too often rides their white horse into town to fix things, but doesn't spend enough time interacting with real prospects or customers to truly understand whether their content is resonating where it counts. In reality, B2B sales leads are becoming an anachronism.

As hard as it might be for some of us old-timers to believe, 2015 represents the exact 30-year mark referenced in Back to the Future Part II.  Makes you feel old, doesn’t it?  

The concept of time, beyond Hollywood's interpretations of traveling through it, is a core currency among modern B2B marketers and sellers: product developers are under constant pressure to reduce speed-to-market. Marketers are tasked with refreshing – and controlling – the brand more frequently than ever before, and delivering more quality leads, and faster than a DeLorean. Sales leaders are pulled in a million directions, and never have enough space on their calendar to ride along with their reps in order to provide proper coaching. Reps themselves are now required to act like micro-marketers, adding the stress of delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person, to their already-metered selling time. And even clients are required to become smarter buyers, distilling terabytes of user-generated and Googled data into just-in-time, lean purchasing behaviors that minimize face time with traditional B2B sales reps who cherish that 1:1 encounter more than anything else.