How much guesswork is involved in your B2B market segmentation strategy? Are you building products for an imaginary buyer? In the B2B tech sector, this happens more often than you would think.
According to Ron Carucci, executive leadership coach and co-founder of Navalent, many executives experience “altitude sickness” upon arrival into their roles for the first time. As a result, 50-60 percent of executives fail within the first 18 months of being promoted or hired.
Surprise! — employees aren’t productive in their first day on the job. Guest Maia Josebachvili, VP of Marketing and Strategy at Greenhouse, has gone beyond that conventional wisdom and helped to create the Employee Lifetime Value Framework. This Framework helps companies understand how employee effectiveness changes over time. In this episode, we’ll help you understand the Framework.
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How can sellers use cold email to engage rather than irritate?
Somewhere between intent and interpretation, a lot can get lost in translation.
Facts and statistics make for a boring presentation. If you want to earn thunderous applause with your next conference talk, make sure your speech actually says something. Spellbind with a story.
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In this episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviews renowned speaker Troy Hazard on giving a conference talk. Hazard is a seasoned keynote speaker, entrepreneur, author, TV presenter, and business consultant with more than 25 years of experience.
Hazard points out that an emotional arc means more to the audience than a random list of data points. “People relate to stories. That’s why we like the movies. We like to see the hero win and the villain get crushed, and all that sort of stuff. It’s the same on stage,” he said. “They’re going to immerse themselves in the journey, and there’s a far better learning opportunity when you do it that way.” Give your audience a reason to care about your data by putting it in context and explaining why it matters.
Campbell pointed out that some individuals are natural storytellers, others are not. What if a non-storyteller finds themselves giving a presentation? Can they learn to build a compelling narrative?
Short answer: yes. Anyone can turn experience into a story. What happened? What did you learn from it? How did you change afterward? How did that affect outcomes? Hazard encouraged potential speakers to answer the question: “What was the action you took after you experienced the events in this story?” That’s what audiences want to know and learn from.
Another key tip: don’t spend 5 of your 60 minutes walking through your bio. Instead, take the opportunity to grab your audience’s attention as quickly as possible. “I learned a lesson from a fellow speaker years ago that the best way to start that presentation is to walk out and start it. I’ll walk out onto the stage and say, ‘Let me take you back to 1996. I’m getting off a plane from Tokyo, and I get a call from the office, and the first thing is that they tell me is we just lost $375,000.'” In other words, get right to the point and start the story off right away.
To give a speech worth listening to, you gotta tell a good story. Turn your presentation into a hero’s journey of lessons learned from experience.
Want to spruce up your presentation skills? Listen to the full episode for more speaking tips and see our collection of business communication best practices.
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How should marketers balance the need to be visible with the need to be relevant and useful?
The best marketers love data and the creative process in equal measure.
On this episode of B2B Revealed, “Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization” author Adele Sweetwood is our guest.
Sweetwood is the senior vice president of global marketing & shared services at SAS.
Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell and Sweetwood explore why an analytical mindset is necessary for a properly targeted marketing success strategy.
“The days of marketing as simply an artistic endeavor are gone. That’s not to say that creative skills are not in demand, it’s just that [creative skill] alone [is] insufficient.”
“We’re killing our customers with messages.”
“Once you start the engine moving, you don’t want the pieces missing.”
“The sales relationship needs constant care and feeding.”- Sweetwood on communication between marketing and sales.
“Investment in technology and … [capturing] data and analytics in your company is better than an ad you might buy or an event you might go to.” – Sweetwood on marketing for small businesses.
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This year our podcast went through a major change. The B2B Market Research Podcast became B2B Revealed. Our focus broadened to a myriad of issues that impact our clients in the B2B technology sector. The result? More interviews, more thought leaders, more insight, and an even better B2B Podcast.
It was a good year for B2B content. As we reflect on 2017, we bring you a countdown of our most read articles of the year.
