The B2B sales and marketing landscape can be a murky place.

Visitors may flock to your website but create few qualified leads. A flurry of sales activity doesn’t necessarily lead to sustainable gains. You can flaunt your services at all the right trade shows and still go home with little to show for it. And every five minutes some new “must do” marketing platform or technology pops up on the scene.

It’s never been easier to sink time and money into marketing your business. What’s harder is creating a focused and disciplined strategy that’s tied to genuine and measurable ROI.

At Innovaxis, we specialize in helping B2B businesses develop and implement effective sales and marketing strategies specifically tailored for B2B success. Our strategies don’t just drive leads – they drive sustainable B2B success. But we don’t do it alone.

 
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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, and provides SMBs
what no other company can: alignment between sales and marketing and the first step to 10X sales growth.

 
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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.

 
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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).

 
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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. Otherwise, it’s tennis, baseball, hockey, piano, and basking in the continued afterglow of the Cubs World Series victory.

 
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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, B2B mystery shopping is something to consider. This form of competitive intelligence takes its name from a consumer marketing term as “shopping” doesn’t quite capture the path to purchase or buying decision. It’s more of an investigation that must be conducted on a strictly ethical basis, but we’ll run with it as “B2B mystery shopping” for now…

 
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In order to turn blogging into a lead generating machine for our business-to-business (B2B) clients, a lot goes into every single blog post and web page that we create.

For the vast majority of our clients, weekly blogging can turn into gains of over $100,000 in new business per year.

Recipe for Success

Here’s the recipe for a successful B2B marketing and lead generation effort:

 
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As you think about strategic marketing planning and budgeting for 2017, I have 3 questions for you:

1. Are you happy with the results of your marketing efforts this year and how they translated into lead generation and sales success?
2. Are you confident in your ability to execute your marketing plan for 2017 with your current internal and external resources?
3. Are you on top of content marketing, and ranking as high as you want for your highest priority keywords?

If not, we should talk.

 
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Once again, it’s budget season. Try to contain your excitement…

While establishing budgets is a critical step, we believe that a more powerful way to look at it is “strategic planning season” – especially for companies that want to grow by 10-20% or more.

Budgeting vs. Strategic Planning

Strategic planning season is where budgets are driven by your goals for 2017. Sales and marketing goals often include:

• Revenues: overall, per country, per service, per channel partner, and per account
• New Client Acquisition: average selling price per engagement, number of new engagements, close rate
• Client Retention: retention percentage, growth of each account
• Lead Generation: combination of inbound (web, content marketing and SEO), and outbound marketing efforts (campaigns, events, PR, etc.)

The most effective strategic marketing plan gives you clarity on how to achieve these goals, how much those efforts will cost (internal time and external costs) and the expected ROI.

If you focus on budgeting first, the temptation is to think about doing the same thing next year as this year with some incremental increases. This likely will lead to incremental results and not serious growth.

 
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