Artful Dodgers

Open secret: B2B prospects are dodging salespeople.

It now takes 18 or more dials to connect with a B2B prospect over the phone, according to TOPO. Call-back rates are below 1%. And only 24% of sales' emails are ever opened.

The reason: reps put their own agenda above that of prospects, so prospects turn to peers for advice.

It's why 1 million B2B reps will lose their jobs to self-service e-com by 2020.

Two professors, Laurence Minsky and Keith Quesenberry, urge B2B reps to try "social selling."

"With social selling, salespeople use social media platforms to research, prospect, and network by sharing educational content and answering questions," they say in Harvard Business Review.

"As a result, they’re able to build relationships until prospects are ready to buy.

Social selling makes sense, because three of four B2B buyers rely on it to reach buying decisions.

A survey by Hubspot shows 72% of B2B reps who use social media outperform their peers, and more than half have closed deals as a direct result of social selling.

Reps can be sell effectively with social media by spending no more than 10% of their time with it, the professors say; but they need to be trained.

Marketers can provide that training, but often they don't want to.

The solution? Wrest social media from marketers and hand it to sales.

By providing a self-guided portal where reps can find marketers' content and share it with prospects on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, B2B companies can win over artful dodgers, the professors say.

"After all, social media is too important to be left to marketing."

Your Blog is Like Your 401(k)

Trust is built with consistency.

— Lincoln Chafee

Trend-watching corporate blogs like The Allstate Blog, GE Reports and CMO.com can lure you into mistaking your own blog for a newspaper.

But it's more like one of those ancient People magazines in mom's bathroom. Sure, the articles may be dated, but they're still worth your time.

More accurately, a corporate blog is like a 401(k). Each post is like a dollar invested. And regular posting is like the familiar investment strategy called dollar-cost averaging.

When you dollar-cost average, you stash a fixed dollar amount in your 401(k) every month. That money buys you shares at the then-current prices. When share prices decline, the money buys more of them; when prices increase, it buys fewer. But things average out—and you never need worry about "buying low and selling high." You end up with a ton of equity.

Key to dollar-cost averaging is consistency—your pledge to invest on a regular basis. You should make that same pledge to blogging. Publish consistently. Don't worry about "timing the market." In time, things will average out. And you'll earn a ton of trust.

The Marketing of Tomorrow

What's ahead for marketing tomorrow?

Writing for Forbes.com, Kimberly Whitler, a professor at the University of Virginia, asked CMOs for their predictions. 

She discovered:

• "B2B influencer marketing" will become all the rage. CMOs will turn to popular business authors, speakers, podcasters, and executives with large followings and pay them to hawk their products.

• CMOs will also begin to rely more on employees to spread brand messages through social, knowing they can speak more effectively than ads. And, because buyers hang out on many social platforms, CMOs will begin to think "multichannel first."

• B2B CMOs will embrace "account-based marketing," but not without a struggle, because it's hard to influence every decision-maker on every buying committee. To that end, CMOs will begin to use a "recommendation engine" like the one used by Netflix.

• Design will become the key brand differentiator, because big data is now just a "commodity." And educational content will become king. Unfortunately, CMOs will produce too much of it for buyers to absorb.

• CMOs will quit focusing on new martech (although thousands of new martech products will flood the marketplace). CMOs will focus instead on cybersecurity. They're spending up to 25% of their budgets on social, and have made their companies targets for cybercriminals.

• 30% of CMOs will be fired next year, because they lack the ability to drive results. Polish that resume!

Good Things

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

                                                           

— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

The Jesuits taught me, if you use a lot of words to express a thought, you're not thinking very hard.

Or you're covering your ass.

As Polonius said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."

As Dorothy Parker said, "Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

Digital Natives: Getting Restless?

Evidence to the contrary, Millennials and Gen Zers want to communicate face-to-face, according to new survey findings from Randstat.

At least 4 of 10 do.

The company asked 4,066 of these digital natives to identify the most effective way to communicate.

Face-to-face took the top spot (39%).

Face-to-face was trailed by e-mail (16%), phone (11%), instant messaging (10%), text messaging (7%), social media (7%), videoconference (6%), and online portals (4%).

Lamentably, 6 of 10 Millennials and Gen Zers prefer tech to communicate.

"It comes as no surprise that technology is one of the biggest driving factors enabling collaboration today," the report states.

"However, while social and collaborative tools are intrinsically part of the picture, the study drives home the critical need for in-person communication and cooperation as a fundamental aspect for our youngest generations."