MarketStar Blog

While selling has never been an easy job, the growth of digital has made sales a herculean task. Power has moved from the seller to the buyer. With the explosion of information online and the number of channels for peer interaction and crowdsourced research growing, buyers are better informed than ever before. In their sales conversations, buyers expect sellers to have an intimate understanding of their industry and their business needs, and demonstrate strong knowledge of the solutions that they have to offer. 

Sellers, on the other hand, haven’t been able to embrace this change fully. Much of their sales conversations continue to be on the product or technology that they are promoting. At the seller’s end, sales and marketing are often at loggerheads over what they need to communicate to the buyer. This has resulted in as much as 80% of the content created by marketing going unused by sales.1 It comes as no surprise, then, as revealed in a 2018 study2, that just over half (53%) of all sales organizations hit their target numbers, and this figure has been on a decline over the past five years. 

Sales enablement has evolved as a solution to this problem. It provides sales organizations with the tools that they need to enable their sales teams to perform more productively. But sales enablement isn’t just a productivity tool for sellers. It is an organization-wide shift in perspective that brings the buyer into focus.  

Organizations that have embraced sales enablement are more buyer-centric. They put the needs of their buyers at the center of everything they do. Here’s how. 

If there’s one aspect that defines the sales conversation in recent years, it is the rising level of buyer expectations. It’s not only what the vendors sell, but how they sell that marks the key difference between wins and losses. Buyers expect sales reps to have an intimate knowledge of their industry, understand their pain points, and guide them through the evaluation process with relevant and timely information. This is where sharing high value content at the right time plays a critical role. 

It’s a cliche to say “content is king” without putting it into proper context. However, it remains true that without content to engage your potential customers, you’re drifting down the marketing creek without a paddle. Your account-based marketing (ABM) content efforts are what propel people to consider your product or service from interest through to conversion. 

The digital generation practically lives online, so it’s natural it be educated online as well, well partially at least. Obviously, online learning is seeing great success and has fascinated both educators and students enrolled in higher education with its potential to engage students in context-based content and enabling them to personalize their learning process.

As buyer behavior and preferences evolve, it’s up to businesses to keep pace with them or risk losing relevance. With buyers seeking information online before engaging a vendor, high-value content — lots of it in various forms and formats — is the key to success. Recognizing this shift, we built Nytro, an all-new sales enablement platform designed from the ground up, to tackle the rigors of this modern sales enablement paradigm. Here’s a peek at how it does so: 

This blog was originally published on 10/10/2016 and updated on 12/18/2019. 

Product marketing is crucial if you want your target audience to notice, consider and actually purchase your product, you must indulge in it. A product marketing plan is even more crucial to ensure that your buyers keep coming back for more and provide you with a regular sales pipeline. Be better prepared to take on marketing contingencies in case something drastically goes wrong with your product marketing plan.  

In this post, we provide you with some easy steps to create an effective product marketing plan: 

You have a world class product, you have announced its release to the world using paid publications, you’re on all the social networking sites and yet it doesn’t seem to drive sales. You could be making any of the following classic product marketing mistakes, which as basic as they might seem sometimes can be missed by the most seasoned marketers and the biggest of brands.  

Here are some pitfalls that you must avoid while marketing your product along with some tips to help you in your endeavors: 

It was the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who famously said, “Change is the only constant in life”. This holds true in marketing, too; it’s a landscape in which new technologies and innovative practices are always being implemented in an effort to reach the right audiences more effectively and efficiently. 

It was the spring of 1994. Web usage had skyrocketed by a baffling 2,300%. This inspired a 30-year-old enterprising man to quit his job, set up shop in a garage and take advantage of the opportunity. He booked the domain relentless.com, but naysayers said it sounded sinister. So, he changed the name, used the domain to sell books online at first, then diversified the product portfolio and eventually became the world’s largest online retailer. That domain still exists today and redirects to the Amazon website.