The Year Of The Real-Time Enterprise

There have been a fair number of B2B marketing and sales trends that I have been tracking throughout 2010. We could all suggest that mobile, apps, and b2b social media are high level trends that will continue into for 2011. They are no-brainers, right?

Over the next few Friday’s, I’ll reframe some of those trends and introduce a few new ones that will impact B2B marketing and sales in 2011. This week enjoy the first two.

Your Blog (and Your Website) Are Now Your Cold Call

By now we all realize no one likes being interrupted by unsolicited phone calls. I personally can feel my blood pressure rise when politely saying “I’m not interested,” is ignored and the rep just keeps asking me questions like they didn’t hear a word I said. HINT: Trying to keep me on the phone when I am telling you I am not interested does not in anyway endear me to your company. It actually significantly damages your reputation with me.

Though from a sales point of view, (while the percentages are significantly less than a few years ago), if you make enough dials, you will make connections that eventually turn into sales. The challenge is that since the percentage of contacts per dials is decreasing, the model of simply adding sales people to make more calls is no longer an efficient (or profitable) way to scale and grow an organization today.

So what’s the alternative in today’s battle for attention?

Create the dialogue (become a media company) and use it to your advantage to get found, to educate, and to attract prospects. B2B buyers now own the discovery process and educate themselves using multiple channels. Having a corporate blog and website (that are both search optimized) is no longer an option.

In 2011, it is a requirement. Work it into your marketing and communications strategy or face the hard truth of losing market share to your competitors that do.

Cold Calling Becomes Real-Time Calling

With your blog and website handling your cold calling (attracting prospects), it’s now time to embrace technology and deploy your marketing and sales force in a real-time way. Through a combination of web analytics, marketing automation, real-time identification, sales pipeline analytics, and social media monitoring, the tools are now available to become a real-time enterprise.

Through understanding a buyer’s Digital Body Language, (i.e. the behavioral interactions with the content of your website, blog, e-newsletter, etc.) and their activities in the social web, it’s possible to provide your sales force with actionable, real-time information that can accurately identify not only who to call, but also what to call them about.

Cold calling becomes real-time calling. You are there at the buyer’s time of need, in real-time, able to deliver the right message, at the right moment.

What do you think? Will these two trends become reality in 2011? If not, tell us why?

Next week’s trend

• Experimentation Is The New Best Practice

Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons By francescopozzi

Author: Jeremy Victor | Website | Twitter

Jeremy's the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com. B2Bbloggers.com is a B2B Marketing online magazine discussing the evolution of B2B marketing. Topics include content marketing, B2B social media, demand generation, marketing automation, and more. Sign up. Get all the articles via email.