We talk a lot about the importance of measuring the effectiveness of all the content that Marketing creates. It’s necessary to have insights into how those pieces are performing to ensure that resources and time aren’t being wasted. Not only is it important to measure whether Sales is actually using the content, it’s also crucial […]

On some deep level, marketers have a belief that all of the content they create serves a greater purpose that ultimately drives revenue for the organization. They may not say it out loud and indeed know that it’s not necessarily true, but there is a secret hope that everything they touch will move the needle. […]

Marketing has long been faced with the challenge of measuring their effectiveness. Especially with content. How do you consistently prove value to your organization and your leaders? Are your campaigns even working? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are most effective? How, and with what, do you measure these KPIs? As a content marketer, I understand […]

When organizations think of sales and marketing alignment, they often focus on demand generation. As content continues to grow as a critical component in successful selling, organizations must now take steps to align around content as well. Because buyers are savvier and more educated, they expect salespeople to present them with content that is relevant […]

Learn what metrics you should be tracking to measure your content's effectiveness.

Most successful companies are using sales analytics to report and predict sales performance. Organizations use the information provided by the sales funnel and pipeline to increase win rates and shorten the sales cycle. But even with data-rich analytics to track sales activities, companies are still lacking the insights they need to improve sales processes and […]

I was recently reading an insightful excerpt on LinkedIn from Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD, about the importance of marketing buyer personas. Using buyer personas to segment a group of prospects based on demographic information, geographic location, company characteristics, behavioral data, etc. is a proven method of increasing prospect engagement. The ability to personalize marketing […]

Synergy. Collaboration. Interlock. Alignment. These buzzwords are everywhere in the B2B industry these days, and for good reason. Organizations that have mastered alignment, especially between sales and marketing, experience benefits like higher win rates, better customer retention, and increased revenue growth, to name a few. Aligning marketing goals to the organization’s sales strategy has never […]

Today’s buyers want your sales reps to understand their business and articulate how your product can fulfill their business needs. Sellers are capable of driving these intelligent conversations, but it’s up to Sales and Marketing leaders to supply them with messaging and content to stay one-step ahead of buyers. This seems like a logical process, […]

As a B2B marketer, you understand how important content is to accelerating sales cycles and winning deals. But you also know that there might be a disconnect between marketers’ content creation and sales reps’ content usage, and think that there must be a better way to deliver that content to sales. SiriusDecisions estimates that between […]

Welcome to the second in a series of blog posts that will explore the questions that surround artificial intelligence and machine learning within the space of sales enablement. We all know there’s an overabundance of hype around these topics. When I joined Seismic to tackle intelligent technologies in 2016, it was important that we didn’t […]

I’m going to kick off my “Metrics that Matter” by shedding some light on conversion rates. Conversion Rates: Rarely Understood, Often Misused Despite being one of the most cited metrics by sales and marketing organizations, conversion rates are rarely understood, and are often misused. When calculated correctly and reviewed in the proper context, your company’s […]

Last week, a few of us at Seismic had the opportunity to sit down with the Global CEO of MullenLowe Group, Alex Leikikh. MullenLowe, an integrated marketing communications network that works with brands like Acura, Google, JetBlue, and Royal Caribbean, is known for creating memorable ad and marketing campaigns like Monster’s “When I Grow Up” […]

  “Predictive” is everywhere in marketing these days. Predictive analytics help marketers use past performances to direct new programs and predict the results; predictive lead generation allows marketers to leverage external lead data to find prospects that have the highest conversion potential; and predictive content is regarded as the new frontier of marketing efficiency and […]

ABM can help win sales with a hyper-personalized marketing strategy.

Alright listen up. It’s time to get real. We’re getting down to business here. This is a no-nonsense blog. We’re talking marketing enablement and strictly marketing enablement. If you start talking about anything else you’re outta here! Let’s keep it clean and marketing enablement-focused. No horsing around, no roughhousing, and absolutely no monkey business whatsoever. […]

It

Account-based marketing is a major up-and-comer in the world of B2B marketing. Today’s technology finally allows B2B marketers to quantify the success of their campaigns, causing some marketing leaders to conclude that a standalone Inbound Marketing strategy doesn’t produce the results necessary for optimal pipeline contribution.

For too long, the lives of marketers have been dictated by unreliable data, dubious correlations, and hearsay. The content Marketing creates has traditionally been created without keen insights into how past pieces have performed. Marketers need proper content analytics to create the best content possible. Sure, there are statistics like page visits, bounce rates, email […]

In many organizations, sales and marketing teams seem to be at odds with each other, both applying an “us-versus-them” mentality. Sales can’t seem to understand why it takes marketing so long to update collateral that sales needs at an instant, and marketing gets annoyed when sales uses irrelevant content with the wrong prospects. More importantly, […]

Channel Enablement Definition A channel enablement definition is: utilizing resources to ensure that channel sellers have all the tools they need to be successful—and that the organization can track the success of their efforts— to increase operational efficiency and improve alignment. What is channel enablement exactly? Channel enablement has emerged as a leading concern for […]

91% of B2B organizations are currently using a content marketing strategy.

Content has been a major topic of discussion in 2016. Buyers are expecting high quality, helpful content at every stage of the decision-making process, and salespeople are starting to understand the importance of sharing the right content with buyers at the right time. In effect, enterprise organizations are recognizing that content is either empowering or […]

Content marketing is becoming a larger concern for manufacturing organizations. This post delves into a recent report that reveals interesting trends.

Wherever you are to kick off 2019 there are some trends you need to be aware of to be fully prepared.

The manufacturing industry is enormous and amorphous. It’s difficult to find a one-size fits all definition to encapsulate the industry. Manufacturing can consist of creating some of the largest machines in the world, or some of the tiniest. However, most manufacturing organizations will run into similar problems, and how those problems are solved can often […]

  “Behind every great content strategy is a great data management strategy.” Debra Walton did not say exactly this during my interview with her, but it’s clear from our conversation that, as Chief Content Officer at multinational mass media and information firm Thomson Reuters, it’s an ethos to which she ascribes on a daily basis. […]

There’s an uncomfortable truth that we need to talk about as marketers. But before we “go there,” we need to talk a bit about all of the time, effort, and spend that goes into a critical business function: the collateral that sales uses in order to sell. We recently collaborated with Demand Metric on research […]

Clevertouch, Revelian, and TIBCO measure and improve enablement performance.

In sales, it is relatively easy to measure progress and success. Typically, each person has a dollar-value quota, and success equals hitting or surpassing that quota. You can even break sales goals down even more by number of meetings set, number of calls made, or number of demos given in a certain amount of time. […]

Marketing analytics are imperative for gauging marketing performance and success. Sales content analytics allow marketing to measure its contribution to a company’s success in a way that sales and other parts of the organization can understand. But most metrics that marketing teams are tracking don’t go far enough down the funnel, and marketers don’t have […]

I attended VentureBeat’s GrowthBeat Summit in Boston yesterday, an event for marketing leadership across various industries to share best practices and learn about new trends in technology adoption. In one of the roundtable discussions, an intriguing question was posed to the breakout group of 15 or so heads of marketing: What is the definition of […]

Webster’s Dictionary defines sales enablement as… wait a minute, this opening doesn’t work for two reasons: Any writer worth their salt knows this is a cliché opening to any piece of writing Sales enablement isn’t defined in the dictionary At Seismic, we have a pretty good idea of what the phrase means to us, but […]

Skills, content, and context to win today

Understand how and when your content is used.

Many companies have finally come around to understanding that content is what makes the sales engine run. But once this realization is made, a vast majority of companies jump to the conclusion that simply creating more sales content is the solution. The issue here is that as more content is created, companies’ content repositories become […]

Unlocking these insights is game-changing for marketing.

I recently came across a Forbes article that discussed the misperception of marketing in Silicon Valley. The article explains that in many tech companies, any part of the company that isn’t tech-driven (marketing, HR, even operations and business development) is considered secondary. The author suggests that marketing isn’t taken seriously at these companies because the […]

Marketing’s job as a lead generation engine has changed. It’s no longer good enough to provide sales with just any leads; providing ultra-qualified leads that are sales-ready is now the imperative. Models based on past behavior and engagement help marketers more effectively qualify leads, but even these traditional engagement-driven models have become unreliable in a […]

Product marketers are often akin to chefs in the kitchen. They’re going from preparing the vegetables, to checking on the boiling water, to searing the meat, to finishing the side dishes, to finally plating the food. Then they start all over again. This is all to say that product marketers are responsible for a lot […]

Content is all the rage in B2B sales and marketing today. It’s been ingrained into our brains that “content is king,” content is “the lifeblood of an organization,” and even recently became “the H2O of marketing.” If content’s importance is so well-known, why are CMOs still struggling to create and support an optimal content strategy? […]

At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce announced the Wave Analytics cloud to considerable fanfare and hype. So how did they do? There are a handful of good things and question marks surrounding Wave.

What happens when you organize a roundtable with representatives from Bank of America, Chubb, Zurich, Wells Fargo, NASDAQ and Intel? Bright people get on the same page to discuss industry-wide challenges and board-level topics.

It’s about time to address the biggest elephant in the room at enterprise organizations: sales enablement. Despite sales enablement being a top priority for executives, sales enablement programs are still struggling to meet strategic organizational goals due to a lack of formalized processes and technologies surrounding the initiative. There’s no doubt that organizations need sales […]

Despite sales enablement being a top priority for executives in the new year, sales enablement programs are still struggling to meet strategic organizational goals due to a lack of formalized processes and technologies surrounding the initiative. There’s no doubt that organizations need sales enablement, but the way it is being addressed, implemented and bolstered by […]

The GDPR is designed to strengthen protections around personal data.

What are the qualifications and features you should be looking at?

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Everything you need to create (or reboot) your content marketing strategy.

Sales needs content to do their jobs. Long gone are the days of door-to-door selling. That might have been a good way to hawk some vacuums or encyclopedia sets, but it’s not too effective for global salesforces nowadays. Instead of hitting the streets of Mayberry, sellers now have to provide their buyers with effective content […]

These engagement analytics also provide an important feedback loop for Marketing.

Metrics that matter to CROs

Marketing has officially entered its Renaissance Era. Long gone are the days of talking at customers without feedback and tracking metrics that don’t move the needle. Thanks to a recent boom in marketing technology, marketing success can be quantified to show its contribution to revenue goals, helping sales and marketing align more than ever before. […]

Fellow Americans (or wherever you’re from, we like everyone), we gather here today to take stock of the state of content analytics and ROI. Now, I won’t lie to you. What kind of important figurehead would lie to the populace at large? That would be downright evil and a miscarriage of the faith you’ve placed […]

As part of the Seismic team who attended the SiriusDecisions Summit in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to attend many  case study sessions that ultimately helped to enhance our marketing practices at Seismic. Looking back on the event now, one session that stood out in my mind was presented by Eric […]

According to Forrester, we are in the age of the customer.  “Customers are the new market-makers, reshaping industries and changing how businesses compete and win. Success depends on how well and how fast you respond.”  In the recent Top 20 B2B Marketing Charts of 2016 deck released by MarketingCharts, it’s apparent that B2B marketers share […]

The complexity of a sales technology investment today is lightyears away from what it was just a decade ago. Buyers are more educated and informed, the sales software and applications space is saturated and flourishing, and sales organizations have a full plate when it comes to choosing the right tools to enable their teams to […]

Sales enablement has now reached a point in its development that some organizations are starting to build departments strictly geared towards sales enablement, as well as hire people with titles related to sales enablement.  However, many organizations are still in the beginning phases of sales enablement, and there’s one question that is hugely influential on […]

Optimize the content experience with actionable insights.