By, Kathleen Schaub

How many of us as sales professionals have hit a home run in developing a champion at a top prospect, only to find out that our champion was unable to convince their management internally to go with our solution?  We were able convince our champion of the wonders of our solution, but we failed to truly enable our customer to “sell” into their own organization.

Just as marketing and sales operations teams need to improve “sales enablement”; as sales professionals we need to improve our “customer enablement”. Customer Enablement is defined as:

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By John Kennedy 

Vice President, Corporate Marketing, IBM

What’s the biggest obstacle marketers face today when it comes to connecting with customers?

It’s building a productive partnership with their CIO, according to 60% of the marketers IBM recently talked with for a survey. The survey underscores what’s becoming clear to those in the marketing and technology departments. To stay relevant in our uber-digital, hyper-empowered consumer age, CMOs and CIOs need to become every bit as connected.

From tweets to pinboards, Tumblr updates and Facebook likes, every digital move a person makes leaves digital clues to understanding brand-love or early warning signs of customer defection and churn.

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BtoB

Social media, initially a curiosity, is an increasingly important avenue for marketing interaction between marketers’ brands and their customers and prospects, according to a new study from BtoB. The study also contains a number of surprises about which platforms are favored by marketers and social’s impact on legacy channels.

“Social Media Marketing: A Surge in Adoption” found that this year, 32% of marketers are “very” or “fully” engaged in marketing through social channels, compared with 21% surveyed by BtoB in 2011. For 2013, the study projects that 53% will be intensely engaged in social media marketing, with 97% of all marketers involved with social media to some degree.

Content Marketing Inst.

Appealing to multiple audiences is one of the biggest challenges in creating content for corporate websites.

A typical business site typically draws visits from:

• Customers
• Shoppers
• Suppliers
• Investors
• Employees
• Job seekers
• Media

Firms that recognize the importance of these various groups attempt to appeal to all of them, usually by building content sections with high-level navigation labels, such as For Investors, Careers,or Media Center. Using this type of audience segmentation far exceeds doing nothing, but it still falls short.

Warc 

NEW YORK: Less than 10% of US companies think they are genuinely “customer-centric” in their strategy and activities, new analysis has shown. The Temkin Group, a consultancy, polled 255 representatives of firms with revenues topping $500m, and found that just 7% of the panel believed the customer experience they provided was superior to all of their rivals. A further 28% placed performance levels “considerably above” the industry average, while 30% “slightly” improved on the norm, and 23% fell into line with typical standards for their sector.

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By, Michael Gerard 

I was reading an article in MIT’s technology review this past weekend about social intelligence, and I came across an interesting comment by Stanford professor Clifford Nass, an expert on human-computer interaction.  You may be thinking, “what could this possibly do with sales?”  Well, Nass was commenting on why Microsoft’s 1997 intelligent assistant for Microsoft Office, Clippy, failed so miserably.  As Nass suggests, “Clippy’s problem was it said ‘I’ll do everything’ and then procreeded to disappoint [its customers].”  Sound familiar?. . . I hear this from a lot of CIOs about their interaction with their vendors’ sales teams.

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Forrester

According to a research report by Junta42 and MarketingProfs, the number one content marketing challenge is producing engaging content. It’s an age-old marketing truism that the key to engaging customers is relevance, which comes from a deeper understanding of customer behavior and sentiment. However, as our customers are becoming more social, and as the business and personal worlds continue to converge, the tools and tactics we employ to get to know and engage our target customers are changing dramatically. And not too surprisingly, the demands of this new breed of socially savvy-buyer are not only forcing the evolution of the marketing practice, but the marketing practitioners as well. Thus, a new breed of marketer is emerging: the content engineer.

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eMarketer 

More business-to-business companies are using social media as part of their marketing mix. Some have found that sites for professional networking, like LinkedIn, are an effective way to generate leads, while more casual social media mainstays, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are helping B2B firms reach customers in new ways.

“Leveraging social media for branding and awareness-building can help humanize B2B companies, establish them as thought leaders, and offer new touchpoints for connecting with customers and prospects,” said Kimberly Maul, eMarketer writer/analyst and author of the new report, “B2B Social Media: A Growing Focus for Marketers.”

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Cisco Systems is deploying an integrated social strategy to interact with customers and prospects that is resulting in improved customer service, more engaged customers and loyal brand advocates.

“We look at four pillars within our integrated social strategy: listening, planning, engaging and measuring,” said Petra Neiger, senior manager of social media marketing at Cisco.

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