"THE GROWTH BLOG" - A RESOURCE FOR B2B LEADERS, MARKETERS, SALES & SERVICE PROFESSIONALS

Tweets, Tik Toks, Slacks, IMs, WhatsApps, Insta feeds.

If you are like the vast majority of business people your next twenty four hours will be a blizzard of micro content. Your personal and professional lives will blur into one. The demands for your attention will be unrelenting, thirty seconds here, five seconds there. An assault on your senses. Your challenge? To simply make sense of and order the information coming at you in a way that allows you to make thoughtful, coherent decisions. 

As B2B Marketers and sellers, the temptation is to join the frenzy, amp up the volume of content we fire at our hapless target audiences, Buyer personas and (worst of all) our actual identified leads.

"Surely if we do enough of it some of it will stick, right?"

However there is a multitude of research that suggests this might just be the exact opposite of the right approach.

Authentic relationships and buyer trust are at an all time low. The Pandemic forced us apart, we resorted to digital tactics to stay connected to each other, to our loved ones, to our colleagues - and of course to our leads and prospects. And in the process we have burnt them. Now it's time to reconnect. 

Digital fatigue has never been higher. Sales email open rates have never been lower. Google has never seen so many searches not result in a click through. It's time to rebalance the books in favour of re establishing a genuine human centric connection, to treat your leads prospects and customers as humans not data points.

The Pandemic for the most part is over, but there is no going back to "normal." Many elements of our lives have changed for ever. Some for the better, some for the worse. For example, how we form and maintain relationships with individuals and our communities of staff, partners and customers has fallen victim of The Pandemic. Digital communications and communities do not adequately replace thousands of years of human behaviour. It maybe efficient but it is not effective.  It degrades our experiences, erodes trust, corrodes authenticity. According to HubSpot, sales email open rates are collapsing, down 40% and 65% of Google searches result in no click. Social channels are clogged with unwatchable, meaningless detritus. It should be entirely unsurprising that digital fatigue is everywhere. 

But people crave community in both good times and bad.

More than ever, sellers must maintain deep and meaningful communications with their customers across the full lifecycle. Digital fatigue and fractured communities are making this harder and harder than ever.

Growing revenue velocity - your firm's speed of growth - is the aspiration for most Founder/CEOs and Chief Revenue Officers that we meet. In this article we discuss the 7 key metrics available to these executives to optimise their revenue velocity and some best practices for building an effective revenue engine. 

Buying B2B solutions is a long hard slog. Gartner says the median B2B buying group consists of between 6 and 10 people. Each of these people need four to five pieces of information to help them. Usually, around 83% of the time they have gone and sourced this information themselves.

Then starts the painful process of achieving consensus and a concrete action plan. 

Brent Adamson, a Gartner distinguished VP, puts it this way.

"The hardest part about B2B solutions isn't selling them but buying them. Today's buying journey has effectively reached a tipping point where it's become unnavigable without a significant amount of help" 

The B2B sales person plays a significant role in providing that help. Here's how.

The 'phone is undoubtably a critical business tool; it isn't going anywhere. So it makes little sense to have your 'phone system sitting out on a limb and not integrated with your other business systems. The shift to the cloud provides small and medium businesses with an affordable, simple way to fully integrate their suite of customer facing applications.