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Modern B2B buyers overwhelmingly prefer to experience a product first-hand rather than endure sales pitches. In fact, a Forrester survey found 3 out of 4 B2B buyers would rather self-educate…

Recently, I sat down with Aberdeen Group’s CMO-in-Residence, Trip Kucera to discuss the value of third party research in content marketing. As Trip talks to B2B marketers every day about their content marketing strategies and challenges, his insights are particularly relevant on what the best practices are for the Best-in-Class.  Here are just a few of the key points we gleaned, but for even more insights, you can check out Trip’s latest post about third party research on CMO Essentials.

We’ve all endured painful sales calls, but as marketers, the last thing we want is for our own sellers to be the ones behind such bad calls. Losing forty minutes to someone who promised they only needed five is bad enough, but when you slowly realize that someone on your own sales team might be doing the exact same thing… that’s when the real horror sets in. Might such cursed closers be undermining your own marketing and demand generation efforts from the depths of your funnel? To help you keep your sellers in your prospects’ and customers’ good graces, we’ve identified the seven sellers you meet in sales call hell, and how to avoid having them on your team.

Whether remembering life at school triggers fond memories or even hard-learned lessons, as professionals, it’s difficult for us to argue with the results. From teachers actively pushing us to bring out our best, to report cards aptly reporting on our progress, school was a rare time when so much attention and effort was spent on our own personal growth. Today, as marketers, data rekindles that old scholastic spirit of growth by both equipping us for success in identifying valuable opportunities, and by driving improvement trough measurable benchmarks. With that spirit in mind, we created this Data-Driven Targeting Report Card in order to help you grade your strengths and identify your opportunities for improvement in your target marketing efforts.

As marketers, give us a lead and we’ll be set for a minute, teach us how to get leads, and we’ll be set for our careers…

There’s a lot of back and forth about data. Some perspectives position it as the solution to a wide range of problems, while others find the level of information to be creepy or suspicious. To keep data on the up and up from a marketing standpoint, here six things a data-driven marketer should never do…

There’s a lot of personal investment that goes into creating content. We don’t just pull levers and print out content like a cold assembly line; we all have to invest our time, creativity and talent into our marketing assets in order make them relevant, relatable, and effective.

How interesting would the Jedi be without the “Dark Side” of the Force? Would Batman be as endearing without the Joker?

Every four years, a strange thing happens in the summer… In offices around the world, people are ducking out or disappearing at certain hours of the day to back rooms or nearby bars where even from a distance, cheers, chants and sounds of excitement randomly erupt.

No time, no budget, no resources… no problem. In marketing, we’re regularly under pressure with the odds against us and time winding down.