Whose Customer Am I?

I read the following question on Quora recently: You buy a pen from a store. Then, are you a customer of that store or pen manufacturing company? Normally, my answers on Quora are rather short. After seeing this answer by Quora's founder @adamdangelo, I no longer worry about whether my replies are too terse. https://t.co/V6UqD1qinA … Read more

Perils Of Blind Retargeting

Since the time I published Retargeted Ads or Retarded Ads, I’ve come across many more retargeted ads exhibiting retarded behavior. Take for example the ones from Cleartrip. Well after I’d booked my tickets on its portal, I kept seeing its retargeted ads. I hinted to the OTA that it could try setting frequency caps on … Read more

3 Ways To Get Approvals For Case Studies From Reluctant Customers

In Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies, we saw when to use case studies and when not to. Let’s now assume that a technology vendor has reached a certain stage in the sales cycle when it is appropriate to use case studies. Building an inventory of ready-to-use case studies can be a challenge when … Read more

Just Because Customers Can Find Their Own Solutions Doesn’t Mean They Will

There’s lot of data in the public domain. Buyer 2.0 is Internet-savvy. So they will help themselves to all that information and find solutions to their pain areas by themselves. Ergo salespersons should stop trying to sell solutions to potential customers. This is the sum of essence of one prevailing school of thought in B2B … Read more

Banks Will Know Chipotle Is Going Bankrupt Before Chipotle’s CEO

Following Chipotle’s e-coli scare late last year, the burrito chain’s stock has been on a free fall. From a peak of ~$750 in October 2015, the stock price plummeted to ~$400 at the height of the crisis last month. At the time, it was rumored that the company might be forced to file for bankruptcy. … Read more

Scoping Can Make Or Break A Deal

Whenever they’re asked to sweeten a deal, most vendors respond with a discount. They don’t have to. In Five Ways To Sweeten A Deal – Apart From Discount, we gave several alternative tactics for sweetening a deal without dropping the price. We illustrated some of them with our interactions with the following vendors: Acme Accounting: … Read more

Panic Not If Your WordPress Images Fail To Enlarge

Content marketers rarely find the space to squeeze in full size versions of images in the body of their content. Therefore, it’s customary for them to include a smaller size of the image within their (online) whitepapers, blog posts and other marketing collateral and leave it to readers to click the images to view them … Read more

How Banks Can Boost Branch Sales

In his blog post titled The Power of Location-Based Offers in Financial Services, Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, highlights how banks can leverage the proliferation of smartphones to make location based offers (LBOs) for cross-selling of banking and other third-party products at their branches. Let’s say a bank implements LBOs and an existing … Read more

Sales Will Hasten Its Demise By Sitting On The BANT High Horse

In this post “ALL B2B SALES LEADS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL”, author Garrett Hollander references a BtoB Magazine study according to which only 23% of sales professionals say marketers deliver sales-ready leads. When I read this, it struck me that “sales-readiness” is fast becoming an outdated concept. In today’s world of Buyer 2.0, the prospect … Read more