Sean Parnell
How to Unlock the Power of Your B2B Website with Structured Data
The first objective of any marketing effort is to get your message where it needs to go. In digital marketing, your first audience is often a search engine: the powerful, frequently misunderstood gatekeepers of the internet.
Search engines are designed to deliver the best possible results based on what you’re searching for. To do so, automatically, they have to decipher and reconcile thousands of formats, languages and vocabularies associated with website coding.
The addition of “structured data” – highly organized blocks of code added to web pages to provide search engines with additional page details – can streamline this process by “speaking” to search engines directly, in a vocabulary they can easily interpret.
... Continue Reading >>Chicago Innovation Awards 2018: Call for Nominations
For the 17th consecutive year, the Chicago Innovation Awards will celebrate the most innovative new products and services introduced in the Chicago. Nominees and winners cut across all industries, from large corporations to start-ups, for-profit and non-profit, public and private sector, high tech and low tech. The key is innovation.
I encourage all who have developed a new product or service within the last 3 years to self-nominate for this year’s awards. Nominations are free, and can be submitted via an online form at www.chicagoinnovation.com. The deadline is July 31, 2018.
This year’s winners will be celebrated with 1,500 business and civic leaders at the Chicago Innovation Awards on October 29,
... Continue Reading >>The Stock Market Is Booming, So Why Isn’t Your Business?
The stock market is at all-time highs. The economy is in the seventh year of expansion since the Great Recession. Big business has never been more
profitable, even before proposed cuts to lower the corporate tax rate.
So why aren’t small and mid-sized businesses growing at the same rate? Why is it so difficult to generate new business? How can SMBs compete against
big business?
If the answers were clear, SMBs would be growing along with the rest of the economy. Instead, they suffer from many hidden barriers to growth. One
of the most common, and most damaging, is a misalignment between sales and marketing.
Buyerlytics Plus is the product of 30 years of combined sales and marketing best practice experience between Innovaxis and Infinity,
... Continue Reading >>Buyerlytics® Plus Creates a New Opportunity for Businesses to Achieve 10X Growth
Innovaxis & Infinity Partner to Help Businesses Achieve B2B Sales & Marketing Alignment for Midwest Companies with Digital Sales Models
Chicago & Cedar Rapids – October 30, 2017 – Infinity, Inc., a Cedar Rapids-based sales and service agency, today announces the launch of Buyerlytics Plus: a new way for business-to-business (B2B) technology and service companies to achieve 10X sales growth by aligning sales and marketing.
Buyerlytics Plus provides integrated sales and marketing through Infinity’s strategic partnership with Innovaxis, a Chicago-based marketing consultancy
and managed services firm.
The Case for Sales & Marketing Alignment Best Practices
While markets have rebounded since the Great Recession, many organizations between $25 and $100 million in annual revenues are still experiencing a
lack of growth.
Sales & Marketing Alignment: Strategy vs. Tactics
If there is anyone who hasn’t weighed in by now on the concept of sales and marketing alignment, it’s hard to imagine who it could be.
Getting everyone on the same page, in the same boat, on the same planet, holding hands and having a beer together, is, apparently, a goal upon which we all agree and a topic that generates no end of strategies for how to reach it.
Can there possibly be anything left to say? If not, then why isn’t your sales and marketing aligned?
Misalignment
The idea of sales and marketing professionals locked in endless disagreement over how to grow a business seems a little dated at this point.
... Continue Reading >>New Product Development: Do You Feel Lucky?
It happened again. We’ve observed another software vendor that released a new product that has generated almost no sales
in the first year and which faces an increasingly grim outlook.
How
does a vendor with an otherwise successful track
record in their bread-and-butter market fail so miserably?
The answer is a lack of insight into both
channel and end-user requirements—insight that could be
obtained through primary market research.
We’ve seen this scenario play out time and time again, with millions wasted and many people fired. Two
instances come to mind where products were launched with no evidence of market or channel demand,
How to Drive ROI with ECM Marketing Strategy
“Marketing doesn’t work” – statement from a document imaging reseller to us in 2012.
He was 100% correct: marketing without a strategy, with poor execution and being disconnected with sales most certainly does not work – and this is the most common form of marketing that we’ve encountered.
So, what does work?
The Marketing ROI Formula
Based on our 16 years working in the ECM industry with over 50 companies, plus our 20 years of business-to-business (B2B) marketing experience, here’s what we’ve found to be a successful marketing formula:
- Marketing Strategy: creation of a comprehensive marketing plan that answers how marketing will achieve your lead generation,
Adobe Business Catalyst: Far Better than WordPress for B2B Small Business
Update: Adobe has announced the end of life for Adobe Business Catalyst as of March 25, 2021. Contact us to learn the best options to migrate your website.
As an Adobe Business Catalyst partner for over five years, I’m often asked why this web content management software (WCMS) is so effective for business-to-business (B2B) marketing for small and mid-sized (SMB) businesses. Having worked with WordPress for numerous years, as well as Joomla, Drupal, Modx, Umbraco, Miva, Adobe Muse, American Eagle, Ruby on Rails, Tridion, HubSpot, and good ol’ straight HTML, here’s why Adobe Business Catalyst continues to make so much sense for our clients and for us (this is an Adobe Business Catalyst website).
... Continue Reading >>Interview with Our Founder Sean Parnell
Our founder, Sean Parnell, was recently approached by a casting company seeking entrepreneurs in Chicago to take part in a commercial for a major credit card company. They asked some good questions, so we thought we’d share his answers. Enjoy…
Q: Tell us a little about yourself. What do you like to do for fun? Passions? Hobbies?
A: By night, many know me as Chicago’s historic bar expert by night: I wrote Historic Bars of Chicago and Created the Chicago Bar Project. By day, I run a marketing consulting agency that I founded 10 years ago. My wife is from Colombia, so we travel there often with our 7-year-old son.
... Continue Reading >>B2B Mystery Shopping Questions & Qualifications
Unless you have a monopoly, you face competition. So, what do your competitors charge for their products and services so you can compare their value proposition to yours?
Competitive Pricing
In business-to-business marketing, you probably won’t find your competitors’ price list on their websites. Even if they sell software or cloud solutions and do advertise their pricing, it’s often only a baseline: pricing for basic products or services without any customization or significant volume – and so they do not advertise their true pricing following bundling and negotiation.
If you’d like to find out how your competitors really price out their products and services, as well as insights about their selling process,
... Continue Reading >>