The better you understand your customers, the easier it is to sell to them. For small businesses with limited time and resources, knowing exactly what their buyers need helps them tailor pitches and close deals faster.
Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.
B2B marketing is changing. Buying cycles are longer. People want more from brands. And old campaign models aren’t cutting it. Most marketers feel pressure to show results fast, even though only about 5% of their audience is actually ready to buy. No surprise 96% expect results in two weeks. But few get real outcomes that matter.
The first CRMs were digital address books at best. They have evolved to become the central nervous system of modern business strategy, thus paving the way for a different way of thinking about and doing business.
For most organizations, Voice of the Customer (VOC) means surveys and complaints. Both sources are routinely challenged by skeptics because the data represents only a small percentage of the customer experience.
This may seem academic, but it applies directly to something you probably care about: the growth of AI. Seen through the STIB framework, most of the AI applications we see today are substitutions: an AI copywriter replaces a human copywriter in an unchanged workflow. The omnipresent co-pilots are another, even less disruptive type of substitution: they help humans perform the same tasks more efficiently, again without changing the workflow.
AI-powered interactions are becoming more human-like, and businesses are embracing emotionally intelligent AI to enhance customer experience, powering what is projected to become a $13.8 billion market by 2032. But as AI takes on a bigger role in support, marketing, and even finance, companies must ask: Does simulating empathy build trust, or does it risk making AI interactions feel artificial?
For those in the supply chain industry, the term “customer” takes on a broader meaning. Instead of a single entity, the supply chain consists of multiple touchpoints, each with its own unique consumer.
In addition to data based on the 15,384 vendors now listed (up 9% from 2024), the report analyzes results from a survey of martech and marketing operations leaders. Again, there’s lots of fascinating information, but I was of course drawn to the sections related to Customer Data Platforms.
In 2025, prospects are inundated … literally drowning in digital communication. The average executive receives hundreds of business-related emails daily, most remaining unopened and quickly buried under the constant stream. Let’s face it, your perfect email is probably buried beneath a hundred others, destined for deletion or worse, perpetual oblivion.
If you’re a B2B marketer, you’re probably caught in a frustrating cycle: You know brand marketing matters. You’ve even made it a top priority. But when budget time rolls around, demand gen initiatives tend to get priority. Why? Because those are the initiatives you can easily measure. This creates a vicious cycle where short-term metrics drive long-term strategy. But how do you break the cycle? And how do you fill in that brand measurement gap?
Most B2B marketers are stuck proving short-term wins. Not because it drives the best results, but because it’s the only story the numbers can tell. Could this be why long-term growth, brand equity, and strategic influence keep slipping through the cracks?
As a B2B marketer, it's hard to avoid the ever present debate about brand vs. demand. There are countless opinions and ideas for how to find the elusive balance between the short-term and long-term time horizons in marketing.
So it came as no surprise that this dichotomy showed up everywhere in the survey data.
Writing a post? Or hoping for a miracle? 94% of all creators are not satisfied with the performance of their content. Se here it is, chapter 4 of the Algorithm Insights Report
That’s right—according to recent research, organizations that break down the traditional barriers between sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams don’t just marginally improve; they dramatically outperform the competition. Yet despite this clear advantage, only 23% of companies report having truly collaborative GTM motions.
How can you preserve simplicity and work at a reasonable pace in an increasingly complex and rushed environment? That’s the question I’m answering today.
Sales teams have not found generative AI to be a major differentiator when it comes to making work easier, according to a study from agentic sales messaging platform company Breakthrough. The primary reason: AI fails to capture the human element.
You know that feeling—you finally got a reply from your crush (or your potential client), everything seemed to be going great, and then… poof! You’ve been ghosted. No calls. No texts. No follow-ups. Just like that, you’re left haunting your inbox, wondering what went wrong.
Sales leaders and enablement teams can use this information to evaluate whether their current approach aligns with buyer expectations and where to adjust strategy to improve results.
Elon Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire with power over the federal agencies that regulate his businesses. Since Donald Trump took office, more than three dozen employees, allies, and investors of Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey have taken roles at federal agencies, helping direct billions in contracts to their companies.
Sales is an emotional rollercoaster. As someone who's been running my own business for over a decade, I've learned that understanding the emotional dynamics of a sales conversation is often what separates closing a deal from watching it slip away.
Author of "Playing to Win," Roger Martin reveals why 95% of companies fail to build a strategy that actually drives results and how to craft one that wins.
Over two weeks, I put Claude 3.7 and ChatGPT 4o through their paces on analyzing real marketing data and creating strategic and tactical artifacts. My goal was to determine if LLMs (Large Language Models) could actually steal my job or just make it easier.
