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The Evolution of B2B Selling: Focus on Helping Customers Buy
Many B2B companies are experiencing longer sales cycles, declining win rates, and increasingly unreliable forecasts—not because their sales teams are ineffective, but because their customers are struggling to buy.
| Executive Takeaways |
| B2B buyers face overwhelming complexity, not a lack of information. |
| Long sales cycles and no-decisions often reflect buyer indecision, not sales failure. |
| Winning sellers focus on boosting buyer confidence, not pitching products. |
| Helping customers buy is now the key to competitive differentiation. |
Need Higher Revenue Growth and Profitability? Start with your Company’s Image
Thu, Sep 13, 2018 — There are tens of millions of small businesses and corporations in the United States today. A deluge of brands, all with their own marketing campaigns, makes it more overwhelming than ever for potential customers to choose the right products or services for their needs. No matter how many advertisements or social media posts your target customers see, their willingness to select your company depends on how well they conceptualize, understand, and trust your brand, its offerings, and employees. It probably seems obvious that your organization’s image and perception is critical. Too often, however, companies fail to understand the distinct impact that weak brand perception can have on their bottom line. As a result, they may under-invest in developing and managing their brand, even as the consumer decision journey has changed so profoundly.
The US Hispanic Consumer Cultural Evolution: You CAN Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
Tue, Sep 4, 2018 — Hispanics, or Latinos (which kindly includes my native country, Brazil, where we speak Portuguese), have been a strong influence in the US economy for decades. As an integral part of the workforce seeking the “American Dream”, more and more Latinos tried, as time went by, to “fit-in” to the American culture to succeed and achieve that Dream. Latino parents would only speak English with their kids, so they would fit-in in school. When American neighbors came to visit, they made sure to serve peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the kids and hot dogs for the adults (“keep the tamales in the fridge, Mi Amor!”). You get the picture. The process of trying to “fit-in” to an alien culture is called acculturation. It does not have much, if anything, to do with which generation you belong to, but it is a phenomenon statistically proven to be correlated with two major variables: How easily you flip-flop from your native language to the country language. In this case, how effortlessly a Latino goes back and forth between Spanish (or Portuguese) and English, and; How similar the purchase basket is of a Latino family or individual to an American one.
Growth Engine Roadmap, Metrics, and Financial Benefits
Fri, Jul 27, 2018 — If you have been following this series of articles on sustainable business growth, you know that we have arrived at our fifth and final topic. If you missed the previous articles in the series, you can read Article 1 (The Difference Between a Growth Plan and a Growth Engine), Article 2 (Best Practices in Processes) and Article 3 (People and Organizational Best Practices), and Article 4 (Platforms: Playbooks and Tools).
Leveraging Market Change to Drive Growth: Four Steps to Becoming an Agile Organization
Tue, Jul 24, 2018 — In a 2017 letter to his shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos cautioned, “Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. And that’s why it is always Day 1 (at Amazon). The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them, and you have a tailwind.” Your business environment is rapidly changing and more uncertain than ever. If you follow the lead of companies like Amazon that are committed to achieving high levels of organizational agility, you can leverage market changes to create a competitive advantage – and fuel growth. Put simply, a company’s organizational agility is its ability to renew itself, adapt quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, and turbulent environment.
An Executive’s Guide to Using Video to Win Business and Influence Deals
Tue, Jul 17, 2018 — First in a 3-part series on Growing Revenue in the Digital Age. Video works. It’s a powerful way to tell stories, position products and engage viewers. Most importantly, video can directly help companies grow revenue, increase pipeline and build awareness. It appeals to both the rational and emotional ways we make decisions. It’s also a preferred way to consume content. Face it, no one wants to read long whitepapers any more. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, recently said “Video is a mega trend, in a decade, video will look like as big a shift in the way we share and communicate as mobile has been.”
Disrupting Your Marketplace: Are You Ready for What the Future Delivers?
Tue, Jul 10, 2018 — In 1907 – at a time when we as a nation weren’t that far removed from receiving mail via “Pony Express”– a visionary young fellow named James “Jim” Casey borrowed the princely sum of $100 and founded a small company called American Messenger Service in his hometown of Seattle, WA. More than a few years – and millions of package movements later – Casey’s company grew into the hugely successful United Parcel Service – forever changing the way packages were delivered with frequency, and setting a new standard by which Ben Franklin’s venerable U.S. Postal Service would struggle to meet.
The Role of People and Organizational Structure in Digital Growth for Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs)
Thu, Jun 21, 2018 — This is the third in a series of articles focused on helping executives in small- and mid-sized businesses utilize digital technologies effectively to assist in accelerating revenues and profits. If you missed the first two articles, you can find the first one here and the second one here. The previous articles included an introduction to four major ways digital technologies can help your business, described a spectrum of technologies and a possible implementation roadmap, and associated digital proficiency with enhanced business performance. The second article also took a deep look at how business process needs and priorities should help guide your digital paths. In that article, I also introduced the “USA” model for digital transformation.
How Platform Capabilities Sustain Business Growth
Tue, Jun 19, 2018 — If you have been following this series of articles on sustainable business growth, you know that we have arrived at our fourth topic: Platforms. If you missed the previous articles in the series, you can read Article 1 (The Difference Between a Growth Plan and a Growth Engine), Article 2 (Best Practices in Processes) and Article 3 (People and Organizational Best Practices).
Why Growing a Business is Harder Than Ever
Mon, Jun 18, 2018 — One of my daughters recently read Of Mice and Men in English class. Since I also read it in high school, it was fun to chat about the story as she progressed through the book. I wondered how Steinbeck came up with the title. It turns out he used a quote from a poem written by Robert Burns in 1785. The contemporary translation is, “the best-laid plans of mice and men.” The two main characters, Lennie and George, have a plan for a new life. Unfortunately, their reality ends up being far from what they hoped.