Have you heard these six B2B myths? Here’s the truth behind them
The world of B2B marketing is a murky twilight zone where myths, preconceptions and false impressions abound. You should definitely not believe everything you hear, as the wilderness of rumour will swallow an unwary traveller. Here are six myths from the B2B realm and the illuminating truths behind them.
1. Big Data will solve all your problems
Actually, big or small, data in itself will do nothing for you. It’s Knowledge, refined from your data, that will help you to win over customers and form long-lasting business relationships. How do you turn bits and bytes into valuable customer understanding?
Take a look at our article Forget Big Data – say hello to Big Knowledge!(https://idbbn.com/blog/big-data-big-knowledge) to get new insights.
2. You should toss aside useless data
Even if data is not useful to you in itself, you should still store everything you can. Computing power has gone up and the cost of storage down, and there are numerous ways you can turn customer data into knowledge. Our article Essential customer knowledge to gather along the buyer journey (https://idbbn.com/blog/essential-customer-knowledge) gives you some excellent pointers on the different types of knowledge you can build from your mass of data.
3. Integrating marketing automation is hard
With leading marketing automation systems like Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Salesforce Pardot, integration is really not an issue. The systems can tap into the latest versions of more than 300 applications to help you build valuable customer knowledge. The real challenge is knowing what to integrate. Our article What data sources to integrate to gain from big knowledge (https://idbbn.com/blog/what-data-sources-to-integrate) sets you on the right path.
4. Machine learning is magic that only tech giants use
Machine learning is actually simple to understand and available to all marketers with a large amount of data. It finds patterns in customer data and can, for example, predict buyer behaviour. Read our article From Knowledge analytics to insights – help from machine learning (https://idbbn.com/blog/from-knowledge-analytics-to-insights) to pick up ideas for producing more precise knowledge. You will also learn how one of our clients used machine learning to find 602 new leads and predict 722 customer businesses at risk of churn.
5. Salespeople spend their days selling
They should, but actually most of their time is wasted on something else. According to Salesforce’s third annual State of Sales report, salespeople spend 66% of their time prioritizing leads, manually entering customer information and researching prospects. This is a problem that marketing can fix by providing sales with the right knowledge. Our article Customer knowledge feeds sales success (https://idbbn.com/blog/customer-knowledge-feeds-sales-success) helps you to connect the dots between marketing efforts and sales success.
6. Winning new accounts equals winning market share
In B2B, you should never copy the benchmarks of short-sighted consumer marketing. Competition is not simply about gaining market share, but also about remaining the favourite of your existing customers. Measuring the success of your knowledge-based marketing plays a key role in this. What questions do you need to ask to find out if you are succeeding? Check out our article Boosting marketing knowledge with benchmarks (https://idbbn.com/blog/boosting-marketing-knowledge-with-benchmarks) to learn the best measures.
