FEATURED ARTICLES

  • Plan Like There Are No Rules

    If you already began planning for your business’ success 2025, including a marketing plan with supporting budget, congratulations, you are ahead of schedule. But now it’s Q4 so let’s get on with it.

  • Beware of FOMO & Vanity Metrics

    Nothing destroys a well-planned and adequately resourced B2B marketing strategy like a big emotional dose of FOMO and the uncontrollable urge to chase vanity metrics. 

TRAILBLAZER INTERVIEWS

  • Lifecore Biomedical: When Culture Drives Business

    Darren Hieber, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Lifecore Biomedical speaks about the pharmaceutical landscape for challenging drugs, building a marketing and sales engine, synching marketing & sales with oprations, and Lifecore's values.

  • The X-Matrix, Coming To A Business Near You

    Dan Sullivan & Nero Haralalka from TBM Consulting Group speak about the Hoshin process, X-Matrix planning and execution tool, and how to transition from "what" you want to accomplish with your business to "how" you will do it.

  • Content Marketing Development Best Practices With Trisha Gladd

    Trisha Gladd, Director of Content Production at Life Science Connect, explains how to develop a content strategy that consistently produces engaging marketing content in the complex B2B life sciences space.

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS

  • When creating your customer persona there are two main camps that organizations fall into. Those that have customers and those do not have customers or at least very few. If you fall into the group with customers that is great, but it still does not mean you are finished, in fact it could be the recipe for disaster. 

  • Business-to-business sales professionals are no strangers to innovation. The last decade has seen a shift to Zoom meetings, the rise of hyperscale data vendors, and modern RevOps. The days of smiling and dialing and wining and dining aren’t over, per se, but things are markedly different. Enter the next disruptor: artificial intelligence and ChatGPT in particular.

  • Today it seems that every business is engaged in some sort of content marketing initiative, which means that in addition to pitching products or services via traditional marketing methods, companies also are producing content to help inform, educate and even entertain their audiences. But because there’s some confusion about what content marketing actually is, many businesses aren’t as effective as they could be in their content marketing efforts. 

TRAILBLAZER SHORTS

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  • Customer-Centered Content Marketing - Part 2

    It is important to understand that potential buyers are on a journey to solve problems, not necessarily buy something. If you want to be considered as a solution provider, you must be a helpful participant in their problem-solving journey, the entire journey.

  • Customer-Centered Content Marketing Part 1

    Here is the problem that many of us have. We define the B2B buyer’s journey in three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. And we define awareness as when a buyer becomes aware of us and our solutions. We then develop content strategies focused on our own products and services which is what buyers seek in the late stages of their journey. We miss the opportunity to build trust with buyers when it is most critical. What we need is a content-marketing strategy that is aligned with the real buyer's journey.

  • The Real Buyer's Journey

    The single force that has disrupted the way B2B solution providers market and sell is also the most critical to business success, buyers. As buyers discovered and embraced on-demand, digital content to help them solve problems, not make purchasing decisions, they pushed long-held B2B marketing traditions aside, rendering them obsolete.

FYB METHOD

  • Life Science Connect, the parent company of Follow Your Buyer, has had a front row seat for the past several decades for the evolutionary transformation of the buyer's journey. Here is what we learned!

  • The single force that has disrupted the way B2B solution providers market and sell is also the most critical to business success, buyers. As buyers discovered and embraced on-demand, digital content to help them solve problems, not make purchasing decisions, they pushed long-held B2B marketing traditions aside, rendering them obsolete.

  • Here is the problem that many of us have. We define the B2B buyer’s journey in three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. And we define awareness as when a buyer becomes aware of us and our solutions. We then develop content strategies focused on our own products and services which is what buyers seek in the late stages of their journey. We miss the opportunity to build trust with buyers when it is most critical. What we need is a content-marketing strategy that is aligned with the real buyer's journey.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

  • Content is the entire back row of the chess board, the royal rank of king, queen, bishop, knight and rook. These are the most important and, except for the king, powerful pieces on the chess board that can change the outcome of the game with several strategic moves.

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS & REVIEWS

9-16-24 Stop Starvation Marketing

 

At the top of my list of books-to-read this Fall as you plan for business success in 2025 is “Stop Starvation Marketing” by Christine Slocumb. This is a must-read if you are a B2B solution provider in life sciences, technology, or any space characterized by long sales cycles, high-investment solutions, and complex business relationships. It will change how you think about and do marketing, and the results you achieve by following Chris’ advice will be astounding 

 

Is Your Business Dying Because Your Marketing Is On A Starvation Diet?