B2B Connection

B2B marketing leaders and content marketing experts weigh in on challenges & changes in content marketing at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit. They said content marketers should take action to improve their efforts and maximize content ROI, and shared tips for making Marketing messages more strategic, more relevant, more profitable, and more accessible. The State of Content Marketing in 2016 Content Marketing Programs Have Been Adopted But Are Still Immature Content marketing has grown in popularity as an inbound tactic for B2B marketers. The strategy involves using content to attract, engage, retain, and grow a brand audience by providing helpful information about topics that interest the brand’s universe of ideal customers. At the recent Marketing Nation Summit, Marketo’s user conference, there were several presentations by marketing leaders championing particular approaches to content marketing, as well as by software vendors like ScribbleLive, Uberflip, and Kapost, and consultants who assist with content creation and program design. During the Summit, TrustRadius Research interviewed experts and practitioners to get a pulse on the state of content marketing in 2016. These conversations revealed that although marketers are starting to use content more, effective content marketing remains a challenge. Defining the relationship of Marketing to Sales, determining the strategic value of content, and creating impactful […]

The FlipMyFunnel festival makes its way to TrustRadius home base Austin, Texas next month for a day of ABM-themed sessions, including high-level thought leadership and practical case studies to help attendees “challenge the status quo of B2B marketing and sales.” What is #FlipMyFunnel? #FlipMyFunnel is a movement started by Sangram Vajre, the co-founder and CMO of Terminus, which is an ABM tool that serves ads via mobile, social, display, video and direct mail and provides account-level revenue attribution. The movement, which has gained support from vendors and practitioners across multiple software categories, proposes to reverse the traditional marketing funnel that passes a large volume of leads through various stages of education before a narrow slice of them purchases the product. The flipped funnel concept says you should instead identify the right set of target customers, find more like them, engage them with personalized content, and turn them into loyal fans that stick around, spend more, and advocate for you to a broader base of prospects. The implication is a greater focus on finding the right customers and making them happy. What’s new in ABM? As TrustRadius has observed before, Account-based Marketing is not necessarily a new concept. We talked to a couple of speakers […]

  Regarding the state of Sales in 2016, Scott Albro offers this provocative piece of advice: “Companies that figure out how to adopt sales technology and mitigate risk grow a hell of a lot faster than those that don’t.” Albro’s claim—part observation, part promotion—is based on research done by TOPO, a sales process and technology consulting firm where Albro is the CEO. To some extent, this advice is self-serving, since TOPO’s business model involves advising companies about growth strategies that involve technology. However, based on TrustRadius’s independent study of sales tech buyers and users, as well as surveys done by other sales tech experts like Nancy Nardin, many companies are planning to adopt new sales technology this year, whether for the first time or to replace/fill in older ecosystems. If you’re heading into product evaluations this year, there are a few things you can learn from early adopters. While I was at TOPO’s recent Sales Summit, I talked to practitioners at leading tech companies to find out: Which pieces of the Sales tech stack they’re focused on How sales tech relates to organizational growth initiatives Lessons learned around managing user adoption Goals for future use of sales technology Organizing for Growth: Sales […]

Along with account-based marketing and selling, specialization is one of the biggest trends in SaaS sales right now. Many sales leaders at high-growth B2B tech companies are following the advice offered in the bestselling book Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler, also supported by research findings (touted by vendors like InsideSales.com): specialist models “achieve a 7-point improvement in close ratios over a generalist model.” Specialization means to break out responsibilities and disperse expertise, so that people focus on a particular piece of a larger operation. Much of the TOPO Sales Summit conference, which happened last week in San Francisco, was focused on how to specialize Sales organizations effectively—in terms of people, processes, and technology. Sales development is not the only area that can be specialized, but it seems to be the focus of conversation in the space right now. There were presentations from TOPO analysts and consultants on the topic, as well as from high-growth sales leaders who have been successful with specialized SDR teams. At the conference, I interviewed sales development leaders about their experiences building and honing SDR teams. Across companies, these are some of the key steps to implementing an SDR team: Map SDRs onto the sales process/greater sales […]

TrustRadius Research aims to help buyers navigate the sales technology landscape with a new report, featuring expert and user advice on how to build your sales stack in 2016. The report is timely, because of changes underway in the market right now. Vendors are rapidly releasing new and overlapping product functionality, renaming software categories, and attaching themselves to trends and buzzwords in the Sales/Marketing space. At the same time, many businesses are looking to scale their Sales operations by creating specialized high-velocity teams, while automating and optimizing key pieces of the sales process. These initiatives can be supported by technology, so many Sales leaders are looking to invest in new software for their sales teams this year. Scott Brinker, Editor of Chiefmartec.com, commented, “Sales technology has lagged a bit behind MarTech in terms of development and adoption but it is quickly catching up, and 2016 may very well be the Year of the Sales Stack.” The visual below combines different ways to look at sales tech products-by user role, function/stage of the sales process, and vendor offerings–which are not usually presented together. This comprehensive view, excerpted from the TrustRadius Research study, allows buyers to get a better sense of which products do what for who, and which vendors offer solutions […]

Account-based marketing is a huge trend in the B2B software world right now, but sales leaders and experts on sales methodology are starting to ask—how does it fit into the overall scalable revenue machine? The account strategies underpinning ABM are drawn from fairly traditional Sales tactics (which are being adopted by Marketers), and, after all, ABM cannot produce its celebrated benefits without the help of Sales. So what is the role of Sales in ABM, and how can companies organize around a unified account-based strategy? At their recent Sales Summit conference, TOPO proposed a framework to establish how the relationship between Sales, Marketing, and customers should work with an account-based strategy. TOPO calls their framework Account-based Everything—in summary: target high-value accounts; be data and intelligence-driven; organize around account strategy; make interactions valuable for the buyer; and use the appropriate number of touches. To find out what these account-based strategies look like in practice, I interviewed practitioners Ted Purcell (Marketo), Doug Landis (Box), Lars Nilsson (Cloudera), Jeff Imm (When I Work), and Chris Albro (Zendesk). Here are the big takeaways: The right approach depends on your product and the business model. An account-based strategy looks different for companies that are targeting a […]

Note: this article was first published 4/1/16 on ChiefMartech.com. TrustRadius Research attended MarTech last month to interview a number of vendors exhibiting there about their perspective on “hot” categories within the marketing tech landscape. Account-based marketing (ABM) was one of the biggest topics at the MarTech conference. Nearly every exhibitor featured a reference to ABM, and many of the presenters touched on the trend as well. Across software categories like predictive analytics, sales & marketing intelligence, and ad serving & retargeting, ABM is impacting vendor positioning, marketing campaigns, and even product roadmaps. The TrustRadius research team checked in with some of the leading vendors to get a pulse on how ABM is shaping their product and business. Here are the major ABM trends that emerged: Vendors that provide contact and account data (sometimes called prospecting tools, data vendors, or sales intelligence solutions) are positioning themselves as the foundation for alignment between marketing & sales teams. Predictive analytics vendors, which use machine learning to determine a company’s “ideal customer profile,” are surfacing best-fit accounts in addition to contacts. Some are also offering their own prospecting and data verification features. In addition to creating personalized content that is relevant to specific target accounts, companies practicing […]

Note: this article was first published 4/8/16 on CustomerThink. Last week (March 21-22), Totango hosted their annual Customer Success Summit, which brought together leaders who manage Customer Success teams and tech vendors whose software products are used to facilitate customer success strategies. Totango provides customer success management software, which includes user monitoring, alerts about customer health, analytics, nurture campaigns, and BPM tools. Their product is part of a growing practice where B2B companies are focused on making sure their customers are deriving continuous value from their product, to ensure retention, growth and advocacy. Several other vendors, like Gainsight, Bluenose Analytics, Amity, Preact, Natero, and Churnspotter, also provide software designed to enable Customer Success teams. TrustRadius interviewed leaders in Customer Success about the trends and changes they’ve observed in the space, their goals for their own Customer Success teams, and learnings about best practices from their own experience and from conversations at the Summit. Mark Roberge of HubSpot, David Apple of Typeform, Matt Oxley of Opal Labs, Dan Adika of WalkMe, and Loretta Jones and Megan Roth of Insightly all had different, valuable lessons to share about customer success. Across these conversations, several topics emerged as important considerations as you build and evaluate your own Customer Success strategy: Customer Success impacts revenue, […]

Content plays a role throughout the buyer’s journey. Content marketing, which is the strategy of creating and distributing useful and relevant content to attract the right audience, is often seen as classic top-of-the-funnel, awareness stage content. Mid-funnel content might be focused on nurturing and demand generation, whereas content for sales enablement, which is the practice of equipping salespeople with the information, assets, technology and best practices needed to sell more effectively, is often seen as bottom-of-the-funnel, conversion stage content. TrustRadius talked to several vendors exhibiting at MarTech who focus on one or more stages of content use. In general, these vendors discussed the importance of thinking about your content strategy across all stages, whether you’re using one tool or a set of tools to support and track your activities. Meet the Vendors The vendors we interviewed span a few different categories: Kapost, a content marketing platform. Content marketing platforms support content creation, publication, distribution, measurement and optimization. Vidyard, an online video platform. OVPs allow users to host and measure the impact of video content. Acrolinx, a tool that helps companies with large writing staffs produce writing with consistent quality and tone, and Persado, a tool that uses machine learning to write targeted, effective content for […]

  This year’s MarTech Conference was abuzz with talk about how to enable agile marketing. The short answer? With data. Marketing thought leaders and exhibiting vendors debated what it means to be a data-driven marketer–what type of data helps your marketing strategy, what too much data looks like, and how marketers can use technology to more effectively manage and operationalize data insights. The Marketer’s Data Dilemma One group of vendors, in particular, evangelized the importance of real-time data, comprehensive cross-channel dashboards, ROI attribution, and actionable insights made accessible to Marketing without intervention from the data scientists. BrightFunnel, Bizible, Beckon, Datorama, Allocadia, Origami Logic, Impact Radius, and Full Circle Insights fit into a subset of Marketing Analytics software that’s specifically concerned with putting BI-style data insights into the hands of marketers, so that the Marketing department can more quickly and intelligently (re)allocate resources to achieve their own goals as well as the bottom-line goals of the business at large. Note that some of these products focus on B2C, while others focus on B2B; some are designed to handle enterprise loads, while others stress usability and fast time-to-value for SMBs. There is not yet consensus around what this subset of Marketing Analytics should be called. Tools have been described as […]

The role of video in marketing was a theme among vendors at this year’s MarTech Conference. We talked to three video platform vendors (Brightcove, Vidyard and HapYak) about the evolution of video marketing—from a brand awareness effort with questionable ROI, to a highly sophisticated, targeted content method that can drive measurable results. Meet the Vendors Brightcove is an online video platform with two main lines of business: media companies looking to monetize video through advertising and other methods, and organizations looking to leverage and measure video content as part of their digital marketing strategies. The company was founded in 2004 and has 5,500 customers. Vidyard is a video marketing and analytics platform for businesses, allowing for hosting, distribution, management and measurement/analytics of video content. The company was founded in 2011, has 700 customers, and recently raised $35 million in a series C funding round. HapYak is an interactive video platform that allows users to add interactivity – such as chapters, clickable buttons, text annotations, quizzing, branching, etc. – to existing videos. The product works with any online video platform. The company was founded in 2012 and has several hundred customers. Video Marketing Trends 1. Video is now being used across the funnel Unsurprisingly, all […]

3/30/2016 Sales Leaders from High Growth Companies Come Together to Discuss Organization, Process, Pipeline Development, and Technology at the TOPO Sales Summit. On April 7-8 Sales Leaders will gather at Pier 27 in San Francisco for the first TOPO Sales Summit. TOPO is a research and consulting firm that helps Sales and Marketing teams develop a high-growth revenue stack consisting of processes, plays, people, technology and metrics. The conference is organized around four topics: Sales leadership, Inside sales, Sales development, and Sales technology. It promises to give attendees insight into how the most effective sales leaders have been able to drive scalable revenue growth. The Summit is indeed timely. TOPO’s research indicates that in 2016 successful Sales leadership is no longer tactical, but rather, strategic; companies who want to drive sustainable growth must design and run their Sales teams accordingly. Check out TOPO’s 8-point Sales Framework for driving revenue growth on their blog here. In summary, according to TOPO, Sales leaders should: determine their ideal customer profile and buyer personas; develop a sales strategy and framework; align their organization to the ideal customer; design a standardized sales process; use buyer-centric messaging; invest in sales enablement; design and build their sales technology stack; and track and optimize […]

Scott Brinker – author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog and program chair of the upcoming MarTech conference (March 21-22 in San Francisco) – produces a marketing technology landscape infographic each year, which plots the logos of most marketing technology vendors by category and function. Brinker’s goal is to illustrate the continuing transformation of Marketing into a technology-based discipline. The supergraphic depicts explosive growth in terms of the number of Martech vendors (and categories): The 2014 version recognized 947 vendors; the 2015 version included 1,876; and Brinker says the 2016 version – not published yet – will include an even larger sample of the roughly 4,000 marketing technology companies that he now estimates exist worldwide. Yet one of Brinker’s most interesting predictions for 2016 is that the number of active vendors will actually finally plateau. The space is crowded, consolidation is happening, and the VC appetite for unproven technology startups is cooling; however, adoption of marketing technology – particularly among leading vendors – will continue to grow as Martech becomes more mainstream. This is certainly evidenced by the growing number of marketers using sites like TrustRadius to evaluate Martech products. It’s also sure to be a topic at the MarTech conference – where TrustRadius is a media partner. Here’s the visual […]

Be sure to check out our new Buyer Blog for the latest B2B blog articles & discussions! We talked to Kevin Marasco, CMO, about how HireVue’s video engagement platform helps recruiters and coaches. Marasco explained that a combination of video interviews and predictive analytics powers performance scoring, based on personality and language attributes. According to Marasco, this allows managers to make data-driven decisions about hiring and coaching.  Introduction to HireVue Give us a brief overview of HireVue. HireVue’s the team acceleration company. We use digital video and predictive analytics to build and coach the world’s best teams. Our purpose is to give people a voice. We believe people represent unique stories, experiences and potential that doesn’t always come through on your typical resume or profile. So we offer individuals the ability to share their stories through digital video, where they can show the attributes that really matter – things like attitude, ambition and potential. This levels the playing field for candidates so that they can find and do more meaningful work. Busy candidates and team leaders can stay focused on their customers and day jobs, and respond at their own convenience, on demand. We are also leveraging predictive analytics. We are analyzing […]

  As we head into 2016, we took a look at trends in the social media management landscape. Here’s the year in review: several vendors gained visibility on TrustRadius over the last year, while others fell in the ranks—and these changes in buyer research activity seem to be a function of continuing social M&A. Check out our stack rank chart, based on changes in website traffic over the last year, below.  Spredfast, Oracle, Sprinklr, and NetBase are Fastest-Growing SMMS Vendors on TrustRadius A Closer Look at Growth, Research Frequency & Company Status Sprinklr, NetBase, Spredfast, and Oracle SRM gained the most traction over the last year, rising up in the rankings for most researched SMMS tools on TrustRadius. Interestingly, over the last few years climbers Sprinklr, Spredfast, and Oracle have all added to their social offerings through M&A, which continues to be a big trend in the social space. Sprinklr, the clear leader in terms of research frequency on TrustRadius, has been particularly active over the last two years. Sprinklr’s recent acquisitions include the Dachis Group, TBG Digital, Branderati, Pluck, Get Satisfaction, Scup, newBrandAnalytics, and Booshaka. Hootsuite, which held steady in second place between 2014-2015, has also been acquisitive—in 2014, Hootsuite […]

SMMS users have spoken! According to user feedback on TrustRadius—ratings and research frequency—here are the top ten social media management suites for 2016: Sprinklr, Hootsuite Enterprise, Sprout Social, NetBase, Spredfast, Adobe Social, AgoraPulse, Oracle SRM, Viralheat, and Shoutlet. (Engagor, which is just shy of Top Rated, and Expion, which is used by agencies, were close runners-up.) But, it can be tricky and time consuming to dig into the nuances that distinguish these products. So, we put together an overview to help you quickly and easily compare leading SMMS tools. Use this chart to narrow down your choices, based on the qualities and features that are most important for your use case. Here’s what you’ll find in this chart: Top-Rated SMMS products for small businesses, mid-sized companies, and enterprises.  Ultimate feature comparison across 38 social media management features, including listening/monitoring, publishing, engagement, marketing, channel coverage/integration, reporting/analytics, and account management. Features marked in green are standouts—they score at or above average among the leading products. Comparison of user ratings for product attributes like usability, support, training, and implementation. Attributes marked in green are exceptional—they score at or above average among SMMS leaders. Alternatives to leading products, based on top buyer comparisons. Top industries using each product (based on reviewer distribution). Compare the Top Ten Social Media Management Suites Best SMMS […]

We talked to Andrew Archer, VP of Marketing at Yesware, about the developing Sales Enablement software space. Yesware combines email tracking, sales intelligence, analytics, and productivity features (such as email templates and click-to-call) into a tool that’s designed to service salespeople as well as managers/ops. A pioneer in the sales email tracking space, Yesware is expanding its core by building out more in-depth analytics and prescriptive recommendations, which Archer said will increase the actionability of Yesware’s data and help improve sales performance. He also gave us a view on upcoming product releases—including how Yesware’s development roadmap fits into larger trends in Sales software and best practices. In addition, Archer responded to reviewer feedback around Yesware pros and cons, explaining Yesware’s approach to common pain points compared to its closest competitors.   Introduction to Yesware Give us an introduction to Yesware—where do you see yourselves in the space, and what is your mission? Our space is evolving rapidly, and it’s been called a couple of different names: Sales Enablement, Sales Acceleration, and Sales Productivity. All of these terms fall under a larger umbrella term—Sales Automation Software. We see Sales Automation as a macro category that contains CPQ software, sales content management tools, sales performance management platforms, […]

The almost moribund category of job scheduling and workload automation has been invigorated by the emergence of a number of open-source, DevOps-oriented tools that have quickly become hot commodities. This is an increasingly visible and quickly developing category. What follows is an overview of the space and an early summary of the key products, based on initial reviews. Summary of Findings Tools like Chef, Puppet Ansible and SaltStack allow IT administrators to automate the configuration of cloud services, in addition to internal data centers. These upstart tools have also completely moved away from any kind of batch processing, to be event-based configuration allowing, for example, new cloud resources to be provisioned and configured automatically during peak demand. These DevOps tools are not all the same. As early reviews make clear, Ansible is much lighter weight, and easier to use than other tools. Chef is more powerful, but also requires developer-level resources. Puppet is the most established product, but has a steep learning curve. Large enterprise vendors like VMware and HP have taken notice, and some have made significant investments. Ansible is in the process of being acquired by Red Hat, but look for further acquisitions in this very hot space. Our review […]

In this article, we provide a comprehensive exploration of leading project management software products, including advice on how to compare products based on key metrics like research frequency and user ratings. To help you evaluate project management software based on your particular use case, we’ve collected data on company sizes and industries of the end-users reviewing the products, as well as ratings of specific project management features such as Gantt charts and support for Agile methodology. Here’s what you’ll find in this article – A Comparison of the top ten most highly rated project management software A look into well-known vs. highly rated project management software products Top rated project management software by company size A head-to-head feature comparison of the top rated products A note on project management with collaboration features Top Ten Most Highly Rated Products As you start your search for a new project management software, keep in mind that not all Top Rated products are suitable for everyone. For example, some products focus on tasks, while others focus on coordinating long-term timelines; some are designed to support agile methodology while others are designed to support waterfall methodology; some work well for small and mid-size companies, while […]

We talked to Replicon co-founder & co-CEO Raj Narayanaswamy about his perspective on time. Narayanaswamy explained how Replicon tracks time as an enterprise asset, which he sees as unique compared to other HCM vendors, who offer time as a module or add-on within a suite.  Replicon integrates with payroll, HRIS, ERP, and project management systems to unify company records and streamline the end-user (employee) experience of tracking time. Narayanaswamy also updated us on compliance-as-a-service, or how Replicon delivers location-specific legal expertise.  He sees this as increasingly important, since states like California are passing new compliance laws that change how time worked earns paid sick leave. Introduction to Replicon To start, give us some background about Replicon. What do you do, and what is your overall vision? At Replicon, we consider time to be an enterprise asset. “I don’t have enough time” is the most common complaint. A company with 1,000 employees has over two million hours a year at its disposal, and we provide companies with an understanding about where those hours are going. Replicon provides a time asset management platform on which companies can track time for their employees. We do that in three different ways: we help companies […]