B2B Nation

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 advantage held by many challenger brands is tha...

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 workflows and automations for business processes, is a p...

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 difficult to play the long game of audience building bec...

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 foundation for a number of applications and platforms we us...

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 wouldn’t it be better to avoid the problem to begin wi...

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 often cast aside in favor of short-term returns. Testi...

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 still makes sense. That’s true in both your messag...

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 marketing can target potential customers. Add all of...

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 an unlikely place to find tools like predictive an...

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 is access to the datasets they need to properly bu...

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 president of Avani Media , a demand gen agency that spec...

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 potential of a property. That level of insight is especia...

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 Nation podcast, we’re talking to Idan Gol from Mesh P...

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 out correctly. In this episode of the B2B Nation pod...

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 philosophy in the B2B space, and your demand gen ef...

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 way software vendors market their tools, support th...

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 building, and more top-of-the-funnel content that...

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 combination of automation and business process tools wa...

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 marketing that lacked an obvious and easy-to-use soluti...

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 professionals is a daily struggle. You can’t scare people i...

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 to business buyers without a deep technical backg...

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 think about B2B social media, but video content on Tik...

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-service tools and reporting allow even part-time marke...

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, there’s less wasted effort. And when sales and ma...

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 many organizations. Today’s consumers expect seamle...