When it comes to 1:1 human interactions, perception is reality. Intention means little; the way in which you deliver a message — be it solemn condolences or boisterous congratulations — is what the other person experiences. But in the competitive world of B2B marketing, the reverse is true; what you have to say matters more to buyers than how you say it.

ClearSlide for Gmail is a Chrome app that puts the core functionality of ClearSlide’s service within Gmail. The solution aims to help salespeople engage with customers and prospects directly from their inbox — intending to improve salesperson productivity, help sales leaders forecast more accurately and makes sales content and campaigns more effective.

Folloze is a buyer engagement platform designed to amplify marketing’s impact on revenue and enable sales to communicate with the right prospects.

Appboy, a marketing automation platform for mobile apps, announced new multivariate testing capabilities designed to help marketers test variations of headlines, copy and content on multiple messaging channels, including email, in-app messaging and push notifications.

The company is positioning the tool as a way for marketers to identify and automate the messaging mix that will have the highest impact on metrics such as conversion rate, click-through rate and revenue generated, according to Bill Magnuson, co-founder and CTO of Appboy.

Sales enablement provider Skura Corp. enhanced its Skura SFX technology platform to provide greater levels of insight, visibility and auditability throughout the entire sales process.

This next generation technology, which the company calls adaptive sales enablement, is designed to align customer interests and behavior with the content, messaging, and activities of sales and marketing teams.

When done correctly, content marketing, social media and SEO are a triple threat for lead generation. Being interesting helps get you better search rankings, larger audiences, and ultimately, more impressive results, as demonstrated in this infographic from Adept Marketing.

Limelight Networks announced the next generation of its Limelight Orchestrate Digital Presence Platform that is designed to support consistent, high-performance digital experiences across channels, devices, and geographies. The Orchestrate V2.5 platform addresses the challenges presented by increased and unpredictable content consumption and the need to support an ever-expanding variety of mobile devices, according to company officials.

In recent testing, validated by third parties, Limelight demonstrated up to an 8x web site performance improvement, translating into an 88% reduction in web site visitor wait time, explained Kirby Wadsworth, CMO, in an interview with Demand Gen Report.

It is clear that marketers can no longer treat all prospects alike, as sending out the same email to everyone no matter who they are or where they are in the buying cycle is not likely to yield stellar results. While the ultimate goal is to make a sale, it is becoming more important to develop a rapport with buyers and understand what drives their purchasing decisions. That was the message of several speakers at the recent Digital Marketing University event in Philadelphia held by Silverpop.

“You have to own the whole relationship with the customer,” said Ellen Valentine, Product Evangelist for Silverpop. “It seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but as we have more channels and more ways to communicate with the customer, the buyer expects a more personalized experience.”

Blogs, infographics  and press releases are all integral to a top-notch content marketing plan and can do wonders for your SEO and web traffic. This infographic from WebNet Hosting outlines some best practices.

For many marketers, lead nurturing still consists of drip email campaigns that spit out the same series of messages to everyone no matter who they are or where they are in the buying cycle.

Progressive B2B marketers are moving toward lead nurturing campaigns that offer tailored content based on the buyer’s stage in the purchasing process, industry, role in the organization and product of interest, among other factors. Some industry experts are dubbing this best-in-class strategy “Lead Nurturing Version 2.0.”