Newsletter | December 9, 2020

12.09.20 -- B2B Content Marketing's Complicated Relationship With Leads

 
     
 
     
 
  In This Issue:  
 
     
 

FROM THE EDITOR

 

You’ve heard this stat before if you’re a regular Follow Your Buyer reader. It’s from the book Selling To The C-Suite: "At any given time, only 4 percent of your market is actively buying, 40 percent are ready to start looking at options, and 56 percent aren't ready or don't have a current need."

 

Translation: Only 4% of your leads are any good, right? That's a tough pill for marketing and sales to swallow, especially when you are "doing" content marketing in order to generate good leads.

 

In this week's featured article, we discuss thinking beyond the confines of "new" leads. Content marketing can tell us so much about our buyers. We just have to be willing to listen, and to follow them.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

-Abby

 

Abby Sorensen

Chief Editor | Follow Your Buyer

asorensen@followyourbuyer.com
 

 
     
Thinking Beyond Net-New Leads: Part 1
 
 

Infatuation with net-new leads means lost opportunities. That's why B2B marketers need to push back when the sales team undervalues lead intelligence on prospects they “are already working.”
 
 
 
 
     
Thinking Beyond Net-New Leads: Part 2
 
 

Don’t lose sight of opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and retain existing customers just because your marketing strategy places too much emphasis on net-new leads.
 
 
 
 
     
Leads Aren’t Buyers: Tracking Companywide Engagement In B2B Marketing
 
 

Your sales teams can’t sell to a "lead." The B2B purchasing process involves groups of buyers, not individual leads. So let's stop obsessing over individual leads and start looking at the entire buyer’s journey.
 
 
 
 
     
     
 
B2B Marketing Around The Web
 
The B2B Digital Inflection Point: How Sales Have Changed During COVID-19
 

McKinsey says, "We believe we are at a digital inflection point, where B2B sales operations going forward will look fundamentally different from what they were before the pandemic." That might sound like a statement of the painfully obvious, but this article is still worth a read.
 
 
A 12 Step B2B Brand Strategy Guide For 2020
 

This is a long report from Renegade, but what's refreshing about it is the word "pandemic" doesn't appear anywhere in it (because it was published in early March). To save you some reading, we recommend you take a look at #1 and #9. Those sections, respectively, instruct B2B marketers to "Clear Away The Clutter" and to use B2B content to "Sell Through Service."

 
 
 
     
 
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