Dreamforce 2019 kicked off in full force this week, bringing thousands of “Trailblazers” to the heart of San Francisco for four days of learning and networking. The common theme coming out of the morning keynote — as well as other presentations throughout day one — was all about digital transformation and putting the customer at the center of everything you do.
Acknowledging that B2B buyers are placing a higher emphasis on comments from colleagues and peers, user reviews and third-party/analyst reports, marketers are taking steps to make sure that these go-to sources are more proactively making recommendations about their products and services.
ON24 Target is designed to help marketers create, personalize and deliver content experiences to engage select accounts, audiences and personas at scale. Powered by the ON24 Platform and its engagement analytics, ON24 Target gives marketers insights into their audience behavior and content performance.
InsideSales.com announced it has rebranded to XANT. The company stated that it will continue to build upon its sales engagement solutions to ensure new and prospective customers make informed, data-driven decisions.
As operation teams’ responsibility in fueling the revenue engine continues to gain momentum within B2B organizations, individuals working in Marketing and Sales Ops will be tasked to grow their skillset beyond the tech focus. These newly developed skillsets will position teams to identify specifically how their company is driving revenue, as well as determine what needs to change to drive success.
B2B CMOs are shifting focus to expanded revenue responsibilities, which means they are increasingly being asked to own their numbers with heightened involvement in the customer experience and communication across the organization with strong teams. This requires today’s CMO to transform into a leader that focuses on brand storytelling, strong talent retention and team building, revenue- and customer-focused, as well as maximizing the efficiency of their tech stack.
NewsCred has extended capabilities of its enterprise content marketing platform (CMP) with new analytics across digital content optimization, team efficiency, content production and pipeline attribution. The new features are designed to give marketers unparalleled insights to optimize the customer journey, maximize team output and quantify the impact of content on sales and revenue.
As B2B companies continue to develop their personalization strategies to ensure content is relevant and contextual, they are also beginning to understand that opportunities with confident buyers lead to closed business. Therefore, leading companies such as Phononic and ExtraHop Networks are using personalization strategies as a confidence builder versus a relevance builder to ease buying decisions for their customers.
Oracle has released updates to CX Unity, the company’s enterprise-class customer data management platform, as well as new additions and updates to its data-driven CX Cloud, which is pre-integrated with the CX Unity platform.
Innovation and disruption in the technology sector are soaring, but customer experience continues to falter. Research from B2B International shows that only 14% of large B2B companies are truly customer-centric. However, progressive companies that have seen great success over the past couple of years are focusing on disrupting the customer experience to ensure buyers control the decision-making process, have as little friction as possible and build genuine relationships with their new partners.