• Buyer Acknowledged Urgency
• Buyer Unrecognized Urgency 
• Provider Forced Urgency (Legitimate) – This is more about customer retention than acquisition, but sometimes vendors force urgency on customers by changes they make in their business, such as ending the life of a product or making changes to a SaaS offer.  
• Provider Forced Urgency (Artificial) – This is the worst form of urgency.   It occurs when providers create urgency through artificial deadlines.   

Here are a few actionable tips to help B2B marketing leaders improve their demand generation strategies for existing clients.

1) Refine your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. There is no question ABM is redefining B2B marketing. While some B2B marketers are using ABM to better target new business, most are still getting their heads around this B2B marketing trend. Marketers looking for more revenue should ensure they enhance their target account lists with offers for relevant products and services to existing clients.

2) Be smarter with analytics. While many marketing leaders have data and the analytics at their disposal, most aren’t leveraging them effectively. Marketing leaders need to get a better handle on their customer data, targeting key accounts and using better analysis to identify opportunities for growth. For example, marketing leaders need to look for opportunities to cross-sell more products to existing clients or look for upsell opportunities. By mining purchase patterns and content consumption history, marketers can unearth new insights that they can leverage for more business.

3) Better align sales, marketing and technology. Alignment between sales and marketing in B2B organizations can be an elusive goal. One of the biggest challenges for sales and marketing usually centers on lead quality. But, this is where technology can help, if used properly. Thanks to improved demand generation through ABM and multichannel marketing, marketing and sales can better define leads from the beginning – and improve lead quality and sales conversation. Applied to existing clients properly, this can be a path to more revenue thorugh better collaboration between sales professionals and marketers.

1. Mirroring: Mirroring involves the repetition of three to five keywords from your counterpart’s previous statement, in the form of a question. 

2. Emotional Labeling: Labeling is, in a sense, mirroring on steroids. Rather than merely repeating words, labeling involves proactively labeling your counterpart’s emotions – especially fears. It entails careful and proactive listening skills.

3. Getting to “No”: Getting the other side to say “no” makes them feel safe and secure. When you empower the other side to say “no,” they feel more comfortable that they aren’t being pushed into a commitment and more willing to entertain your ideas. 

4. Triggering “That’s right.”: Voss contends that the single biggest breakthrough moment of a negotiation is getting the other side to say “that’s right.” To achieve this breakthrough, negotiators must actively listen to the other side and effectively summarize how they feel and what they hope to achieve.

5. Asking Calibrated Questions: The best negotiators will transform negotiations into cooperative joint problem-solving sessions. Rather than focusing on negotiation, they’ll focus on discovery – on truly understanding a counterpart’s wants and desired outcomes. To do this, Voss recommends the use of calibrated questions. These are open-ended questions that generally start with “what” or “how.”

1. Stick to Email For as Many Interactions as Possible
2. Collect and Reuse Content That Works
3. Don’t Leave Meeting Scheduling to Chance

Technographics is about understanding a company's tech stack. And that goes beyond the outward-facing tech tools used to manage websites and marketing automation. That so-called digital exhaust is relatively easy to pick up, but it doesn't shed light on all the core technologies used to run the business – the systems of record that form the backbone for virtually all-important operations.
In addition to providing information on a company’s tech stack, technographics also help identify other important insights such as when a particular technology might have been purchased, how long it’s been in use, and where it is being used.
Your competitive sweet spot is where firmographics and demographics intersect with technographics , helping you identify your best-selling opportunities—whether you're offering a compatible or competitive solution. To your customers and prospects, this means you’re no longer pushing hit-or-miss messages at them. Rather, you're able to build proactive, results-oriented messages and solutions from the grassroots up in response to your understanding of their real needs.

B2B sales leaders say they could win more deals if their marketing teams delivered better messaging and more qualified leads. See what else the research has to say.

New research indicates where to focus digital investments so that they will reap rewards in online and face-to-face channels.

In 2015, BrightFunnel released a host of statistics that show marketing must work harder than ever and that its efforts span the entire buyer’s journey, from lead to sale.

It takes 52% more marketing touches to close a deal.
The total number of touches are evenly split between pre-sales (53%) and the sales cycle (47%).
The average path to sale for “high growth” tech companies is 512 days from lead to revenue.

Chart of the day: Most marketers are empowered to collaborate with sales Research has found that marketing and sales are aligning more than ever, sharing i. Marketing topic(s):Managing digital marketing. Advice by Robert Jones.

Almost 50% of the sales and marketing leaders who participated in a recent Forrester survey rate themselves as weak (or very weak) in presenting themselves as one team to senior leadership. Unsurprisingly, our B2B marketing team frequently advises clients about how complementary marketing and sales activities blur role definitions but clarify codependence. Nonetheless, we’re seeing progress because the majority of organizations report that sales and marketing are well aligned on segmentation and specific account targets. They also similarly define prospect and lead qualification criteria as well as targets for revenue goals.

The core cause of the B2B sales prospecting epidemic is an inability to create opportunities when buyers aren’t looking to buy. The reality is 90+% of potential buyers in your market aren’t actively looking.

A second reality exacerbates this situation. Professional purchasing agents have given way to teams of buyers. The 6 to 8 people on these teams typically represent multiple functional groups. Often they have never conducted a similar procurement process before.

A third reality complicates this situation. The digital trend to ubiquitous online information has produced self-educating buyers.

B2B is high stakes team buying. It’s a very different buying dynamic. If your marketing team isn’t clear and honest about these differences, and have a compelling strategy to address them, you’re probably in even deeper trouble than you think.

This is not a sales rep problem, per se. It is a business and sales leadership problem. B2B sellers must create value for customers through the way you sell. This starts with the way you create opportunities with prospective buyers who aren’t actively looking to buy what you are selling.

Technique 1: “Operation Land Grab”

There are companies in your industry (consulting services, technology products, industry analysts) that have the land (leads not in your pipeline) that your sales team wants to attract; all you need to do is capture the land. Using a high volume of insights, you will develop a scheduled system to guest blog on websites that will drive their leads into your sales pipeline.

Technique 2: Event Lead Exchanges. 3 Best Practices For Event Exchanges

Build promotional packages for panelist and promotional partners.
Clearly outline social post schedules, email templates and so on.
Outline your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that you want to attract for the event. 
Technique 3: Re-Purpose & Recycle Your Top Content

HubSpot has some incredible analytics from its own blog: “92% of their leads come from blog posts over 30 days old. 30 blog posts (0.5% of their blog database) represents 46% of all their leads!”

Despite the reach of email, asking in person is the significantly more effective approach; you need to ask six people in person to equal the power of a 200-recipient email blast. Still, most people tend to think the email ask will be more effective.

In research Mahdi Roghanizad of Western University and I conducted, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we have found that people tend to overestimate the power of their persuasiveness via text-based communication, and underestimate the power of their persuasiveness via face-to-face communication.

We found that people were much more likely to agree to complete a survey when they were asked in-person as opposed to over email. These findings are consistent with previous research showing that people are more likely to comply with requests in person than over email.

• Avoid hiring sales stars. 
• Don’t slash prices. 
• Ditch the extra incentives. 
• Provide top-notch customer support. 

More than 75% of companies using sales enablement tools have seen an increase in sales over the past year. Of those companies seeing growth, roughly 40% reported an increase greater than 25%.

The study, titled: 2017 State Of Sales Enablement Report, surveyed more than 550 marketing and sales professionals to learn more about how businesses are using sales enablement to drive sales performance. Performance growth can also be attributed to the growing investment in the practice. The study shows sales enablement budgets increased at 47% of companies in 2016, and more than 30% cited gains greater than 11% year over year. In addition, companies with a sales enablement strategy are more than twice as likely to experience a less complex sales process. However, a majority (65%) stated they are experiencing a more complex sales process.

Make ROI the focus of all discussions

1) Calculators. 

2) Case studies. 

3) PDFs of best practices. 


Consider the investments you’ll need to make (and sometimes go the extra mile)

4) Additional training. 

5) Customer success (post-sales) pipeline. 

6) Gifts. 


Realize that each enterprise is actually many clients

7) Figure out who makes the decision. 

8) Understand the purchasing evaluation process. 

9) Establish a personal relationship with champions and buyers. 

1. Find an entry point that you can build trust with and use as an ally to understand the composition, leadership, and dynamics of the team.
2. While you need to message to different roles, make sure they unify around an enterprise objective–don’t let efforts to appeal to personas create conflict and confusion within the team.
3. Create content for sharing within the team.    Be conscious that not everyone will be part of your conversations, so make sure that you provide “leave behinds” that would be clear to others on the buying team who did not hear the discussion.
4. Acknowledge the challenges to the team members you work with.   Ask them what you can do to help build consensus.

And a big thing not to do:  Don’t lock out IT.

Anecdotes gain that stature because managers often lack timely, reliable information. Smart companies turn this traditional approach on its head. Instead of relying on scattershot annual surveys and hearsay, they systematically focus on key decision makers in the client organization. They view the process of collecting direct and more frequent feedback from these stakeholders as the first step in supporting sales representatives, account managers, operations teams and service agents in solving customers’ problems and earning more of their business.

How is this different from relying on anecdote and myth? The answer lies in scale and approach. Methodically capturing, cataloging, and analyzing individual conversations on a large scale allows companies to turn anecdote into statistically robust, reliable data.

• Gather useful feedback
• Use feedback to engage in direct dialogues
• Identify patterns that reveal opportunities for company-wide changes

Sales - The role of the person who is ultimately responsible for deciding which marketing technologies to purchase varies widely from company to company, according to recent research from DataXu.