I’ll admit that I’m a fan of industry studies. Among my favorites are the surveys conducted by publishers to document how engineers learn about new products and where they go to buy them. In an era of growing ecommerce, Amazon and other dramatic shifts in how companies market to engineers and other technical buyers, keeping in front of these trends is rather critical.

So, with gratitude to several engineer-focused publishers who share our interest in digital marketing trends, here are some highlights from a variety of studies we’ve seen recently.

1. Perhaps at the top of the list is the explosive impact Amazon is having in the b-to-b market. We’ve talked about it coming for several years. Now Amazon has gone from no where two years ago to a whopping 38% of electronic engineers reporting they buy products on Amazon for work-related purchases. It’s even more pronounced among younger engineers, as you’d expect: 55% of younger engineers report using Amazon.
   
   What it Means: If you don’t have an Amazon Prime store on Amazon, get one. Before the end of the day.
   
   

One of the common questions our agency is asked is what marketing automation software platform clients should choose. We think they’re all good tools, and certainly add a strong dose of measurability and analytics to the marketing programs being implemented. And we love those analytics.

Today, as we’ve now become one of HubSpot’s newest Platinum Level Value Added Resellers, we thought we’d share a few opinions we have on how Pardot and HubSpot compare. Certainly, we’re a bit biased toward HubSpot, as we’re proud to have achieved Platinum status as one of just 100 VARs out of HubSpot’s 3000+ VAR community. However, we tend to do more HubSpot work more so because the bulk of our clients have chosen that tool, not because we’ve insisted they make that choice.

Everyone hates to do it, and in truth there are few people who are good at it.  And even though an earlier blog post from us talked about the increasing difficulty in selling over the phone, particularly to younger professionals, we do encourage sales organizations to make outreach a part of their strategies for acquiring new accounts.

In fact, one of our clients with a particularly well-oiled sales machine has generated millions of dollars in new account revenue from their targeted cold calling campaigns.

So, with that in mind, I was sent these latest statistics on cold calling and telephone selling recently by sales veteran Tim May, who runs sales at our client N2Net. (Author’s admission:  Tim gives full credit to pulling these from one of his LinkedIn contacts, Emma Marriott, Business Development Manager at Pingala Media!)

Can You Sell to Millennial Engineers on the Phone? 

Recently we’ve had some discussion here at the agency about the use of tele-sales, and whether that time has passed. Is it possible to reach people and sell on the phone anymore?  Is – gasp – cold calling still something to task salespeople to do?

We still believe that cold calling and phone selling has its place. In fact, we know of several clients that use call centers as their primary selling channel.

However, we also believe that cold calling and telesales is the single most costly method of selling.  It reminds me of an old McGraw Hill Publishing ad in which a grumpy prospect looked directly into the camera and asked, “I don’t know your company. I don’t know your products.  I don’t know your reputation.  Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?” 

The point of the ad, of course, is to remind marketers that you can certainly sell to someone who knows nothing about you, but it’s always going to be quite a bit easier to push that boulder up the hill if you walk in the door with some brand awareness and even preference already established.

Still, some companies are making it even harder for marketers to use the phone.  JPMorgan Chase and Coca-Cola recently eliminated voice mail for many employees as part of cost-cutting moves; others are considering similar initiatives. Vonage released a study showing annual declines in the number of voice mails left on their systems, and the number who even listened to their messages fell by 14%. In another story about voice mail, NPR interviewed a 26-year-old who said that “voice mail might evolve into something kind of special and exciting – like a telegram once was.” Oh my god!

Tech Accelerators Will Win the Marketing Battleground 

I was stunned to read this:  Gartner Group reported recently that the technology budget for the Chief Marketing Officer in 2017 will be bigger than the CIO’s tech budget!

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, with the explosion in marketing tools coming to the market.  See the graphic put together by Chiefmartech.com, and you’ll see what I mean.  It’s a dizzying array of tech tools to measure and improve marketing.  No wonder marketing feels so overwhelming these days!

50% of Your Content Should be Video

That was a surprising comment, made by one of the speakers at HubSpot’s recent Inbound 2016 event on digital marketing. It’s one of the better conferences on all things online, all things marketing, particularly for a b-to-b marketer trying to make sense of all the ways marketing is changing. And changing rapidly.

So while we’ve all realized video’s importance, that was a bit of a wake-up call when I heard that. If I look at 2017 budgets, for instance, and I pull apart the section on content, is 50% of my activities next year for a client devoted to video?

Great Ideas for Blogs

Often, coming up with the idea for a blog is half the battle. Once we know what we want to write about, the rest has a way of following suit relatively quickly. Your most popular blogs – indeed, your most popular content of any type – will always meet the ultimate content standard: “it must help me do my job better.” If your blog meets that standard of value, and it does so in a way that reinforces company marketing themes, you’ll have a winning blog strategy.

Why is CRM So Hard?

Sales Enablement is all the rage these days. The concept of getting more traction in sales and more alignment between sales and marketing is certainly not new. However, the spotlight on finally eliminating the barriers between sales and marketing is getting more attention than I’ve ever seen in 35 years of b-to-b marketing.

If you’re in the market for a marketing firm, you’ve probably read a dozen articles about how to select an agency. After a while, they all sound the same: “we’re experts in digital marketing, we know b-to-b, we specialize in your industry…”

Sounds like a broken record (if we still listened to records). I went for a run the other day, and it just started popping in my head: here are criteria you’ll never hear when hiring a marketing firm. It ties to the old marketing story about uncovering what people really want, by considering what people want when they’re shopping for a drill: people want to buy a hole, not the drill. Same thing for marketing firms: as a potential client, it’s nice to see the shelf full of awards or hear the presentations about the “creative process.” But, you really want to know how these guys are going to make you a star, and help you hit your revenue numbers.

Google Fred Update and What It Means to You

Between the first and second week of March 2017, web marketers were scrambling to discover the meaning and far-reaching effects of the Google Fred Update. Understanding Google updates usually requires a bit of science—guessing and checking, if you will—because Google tends to refuse to comment on its updates. Let’s face it, its algorithm is what makes Google who they are and no one is going to give away the secret sauce.

With a team that specializes in business-to-business digital marketing, we were watching traffic closely and keeping our ear to the Web, so we could see how our clients would be affected by the update.