Marketing & Sales

The Power Of Peers: 3 Key Marketing Insights From The 2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey

The Power of Peers: 3 key marketing insights from the 2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey

Peer reviews have reached a historic level of importance in the buying process, according to Demand Gen Report’s seventh annual B2B Buyer’s Survey. The independent publication polled 283 C-level executives, vice presidents and directors who were involved in a B2B purchasing decision in the past year. They found that as decision makers become more risk averse and purchases become more complex, trusted insights from real users are a critical component of the buyer’s journey. This shift continues to create opportunities for vendors who align with today’s buyers. Here are some of the key data points from the survey and what…

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What Bill Macaitis Learned About Customer Voice At Slack, Zendesk & Salesforce

What Bill Macaitis Learned About Customer Voice at Slack, Zendesk & Salesforce

Bill Macaitis has led marketing at some of B2B technology’s most iconic and fastest growing companies, including Slack, Zendesk and Salesforce. He also recently became an advisor at TrustRadius. We sat down with Bill to discuss the new customer voice imperative and why he joined the TrustRadius team. How have you seen the role of customers and the customer voice evolve in the tech space? If you look back through history, the successful companies are always ones that have embraced a customer-centric approach. That being said, within the last 10 years we’ve seen this seminal moment where the voice of…

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TIBCO CMO Shares His Secret For Launching A Marketing Rocket Ship

TIBCO CMO Shares His Secret for Launching a Marketing Rocket Ship

Thomas Been, CMO of TIBCO, was recently named Marketing Executive of the Year by PR World Awards. We recently spoke to Thomas about the role customers play in his award-winning strategy.   Tell us about TIBCO and your role at the company. TIBCO provides businesses with connected intelligence. On one end, we allow businesses to connect their systems and get data they can use in their applications and processes. Then we enable them to use that data to augment their intelligence by putting insights into the hands of the right people, like business users or data scientists, and into the…

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How To Get Your First 10 Reviews (and Why It Matters)

How to Get Your First 10 Reviews (and Why It Matters)

The TrustRadius Research team interacts regularly with software vendors, and we usually get a lot of questions about reviews — specifically, why reviews matter, and how vendors can go about getting them. Here are some common questions, and our answers. I’m a software vendor. Why should I care about reviews? Really just one reason — because your buyers care. Research shows that: B2B buyers are doing more research, and doing it independently. Reviews are becoming more influential as a third-party resource. In particular, buyers are looking for authenticated, in-depth, and balanced reviews. Buyers don’t trust vendors — they’d rather hear directly from end-users. An added…

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Let Your Customers Do The Talking: Session From Digital Sales Engine

Let Your Customers Do The Talking: Session from Digital Sales Engine

If you want to accelerate pipeline and improve win rate, the solution is hiding in plain site. Your customers are an incredibly powerful — and often underutilized — tool in the B2B sales process. At last week’s Digital Sales Engine online summit, TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat discussed strategies and solutions for leveraging your customer’s voice to engage today’s informed buyer.

Check out the recording and full transcript below.

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The B2B Buyer’s Search For Trustworthy Advice

The B2B Buyer’s Search for Trustworthy Advice

We read a lot about the buyer’s journey. And while it is often credited with putting customers squarely in control of buying decisions, reality is not quite that simple. The fact is, much of the change in buying processes is a direct response to dwindling trust factors in vendors’ sales and marketing. Today’s sales efforts tend to be more about selling, and less about helping prospective customers buy. As a result, buyers have become increasingly skeptical of what they see as the self-serving agenda of the approved sales pitch and more savvy about finding resources for the advice and recommendations…

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How Search And Social Empower The B2B Tech Buyer

How Search and Social Empower the B2B Tech Buyer

A survey of 1,400 B2B buyers by the Corporate Executive Board indicated that an on average they complete 60 percent of a purchase process before engaging a vendor. Previously, a lot of research was done through talking to peers, posting on listservs and accessing vendor materials. Search and social are now fundamentally changing how buyers research products.

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Transparency Coming To B2B Technology Marketing

Transparency Coming to B2B Technology Marketing

The last decade has seen B2B technology marketers adapt to many shifts in distribution model and buyer behavior. Like consumers, business buyers are increasingly doing research online before talking to a vendor. In response, B2B marketers have significantly expanded their content marketing efforts by “providing valuable information or entertainment that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.” This strategy has been quite effective, but remains a far cry from content available to consumers. Consumers are empowered to do comprehensive research prior to a decision through peer reviews and forums.

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