Key Findings Whiteboard |
Session |
Volume |
Quality |
Mktg/Sales SLA |
Nurturing |
Velocity |
| Increase campaign response rates to drive more inquiries | Optimize lead qualification to focus on ‘high quality’ leads | Develop ‘service level agreements’ between sales and marketing | Intensify leads in the marketing funnel with lead nurturing | Accelerate leads currently in sales pipeline | |
| Brian Carroll | Old leads – who do you re-engage first…recency…number of contacts…role/title Content gives you a valid reason to contact businesspeople in your database |
Find the rights amount of “Friction” | Develop the “One Team” mindset
If you’re not re-engaging your “dead leads”, your competitors probably are. 20% of dead leads lost to competition |
Reuse available content
Purchases over $25k can afford phone contact for re-engagement Most of the time…takes longer for leads to become ‘sales ready’ than we think How to create relevant re-engagement messaging: Customize based on lead source, role, anticipated needs, priorities/challenges |
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From “Campaigns to Conversations”
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| Flint McGlaughlin | |||||
Conversion Killers: 1. Lack of clarity…answer these questions in 5 seconds…
2. Undisciplined eye-path
3. Insufficient value promise
4. Excessive friction 5 key elements of landing page eyepath: Size, color, motion, shape, position Don’t just try incremental landing page changes, test radically different alternatives Monday Morning Action Items: Take a critical eye to your pages & processes Do your pages ask your visitors to ‘submit’? What’s the natural eyepath (maybe ask someone else to tell you) Does it have two goals: quantity or quality -- can't do both with the same landing page Do you have white text on black background When those pages deal with additional information…do they ask…or promise? Re-engage those with email addresses to return for more detailed info… |
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| Erin Daly-Building a Database that Results in Sales Leads: Acquisition Methods and Incentives Compared | You get what you pay for with free campaigns (pay to play gets you more leads)
Expanding your contacts within existing customer corporations – especially crucial right now Get contacts that don’t know to date you anyway…3rd party endorsements Use guaranteed incentives, like gift cards, instead of a contest entry to boost survey response rate |
Identifying new contacts at companies you already know: list rents, list appends, tele…
5x response on white paper offer to rented contacts based on company name (known companies) Choose the right analyst: Doesn’t help to get a deal if no one knows/trusts the source of the report Target webinar invites to prospects who’ve already downloaded whitepaper on the subject |
Make an impression on non-buying contacts before the rise up inside the organization…they’ll remember and bring you with them Increasing levels of risk (or commitment) -White paper…2 seconds/10 minutes -Webcast…2 secs/30+ minutes -Seminar…time, time, time & direct sales contacts -Sales meeting if you’re notinterested…the opposite of priceless 3 date rule…don’t ‘come up for coffee on the first date’ |
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Expanding your contacts within existing corporations – especially crucial right now Monday Morning Action Items: Draw up a list of your key companies by the number of contacts you have there… Come up with 2-3 ideas for 2-stage campaign (the white paper to webinar example) Consider a survey where everyone is a “winner” (no sweeps) |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Video: Viral Marketing How-To Report: Viral Marketing Tool Kit |
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| Tom Hayden (SF) & Jay Henderson (Boston)- Implementing a Multi-Channel, Multi-Wave Marketing Strategy Driven by Analytics | Relevance takes a lot of data ID marketing campaigns based on stage of the customer lifecycle |
Make sure everyone is speaking the same language – share customer lifecycle map with entire organization | There’s probably one stage of the process that’s really the most important 50% higher conversion rate for multi-wave, multi-channel supported titles |
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Test # of follow-up touches for non-responders. Too many can cause opt-out rates to jump Monday Morning Action Items: Analysis of the customer lifecycle…map it out and make sure Sales & Mktg understand and agree on it Evaluate your current state of data integration (know, don’t know, want to know, how to know it, etc.) |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Video: Everyday Analytics Report: Everyday Analytics Companion |
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| Akin Arikan & Maureen Thormann (SF)- Migrating to B22.0 Marketing: Pitfalls, Lessons Learned andSuccess Strategies | Using lead ‘essence’ (a version of lead scoring) to raise the percentage that engage with Sales | Making sense of it all – the need for some kind of lens (or lenses) is becoming paramount. Exploit the behavior of people coming to the site (ie, exploit Google’s investment in relevance) |
Lead scores (essence ratings) become a tool for dynamic web content delivery Analytics at the individual level are required to implement lead scoring |
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Monday Morning Action Items: Uncommon indicators of interest – start a list. Then you can get to figuring out your own approach to essence or engagement. |
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| Richard Fouts- Research Exclusive: How Marketers are Integrating Social Media into the Communications Mix |
First step - get your website(s) relevant; 2: drive traffic using social; 3: Measure, tweak, tune | Quantify your value proposition in marketing comms to generate better quality leads Marketing is now a series of conversations – you can’t control them, you just have to be involved with them. Go narrow/go deep for best results & lead quality |
SM lets marketers walk in the salesperson’s shoes: having one on one conversations with prospects | ||
SM informs everything we do; examine market, make plans, execute, communicate & evaluate A ‘world without secrets’ – ever more important theme SM is good & bad for marketers. More channels, more noise. If you thought you were herding cats before…well, they’ve all had kittens. Hub and spoke model: Make website the hub of all social media campaigns, use SM channels to drive people back to that hub Don’t have a Twitter or a Facebook strategy, have a campaign goal/task and then find ways social media can advance that goal Monday Morning Action Items: MAP IT – start (or enhance) a social media map for your sector Look at your market segmentation plan (are you just segmenting with demos)…how can social help define and attract segments? |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Report: Technology Buyers’ Media Consumption Habits |
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| Kim Albee- Using Social Media to Create Lead-Rich Online Communities | Double edge sword of social media – it’s easy to start, but don’t overlook that maintenance can be a SM killer.
“Blogging is a beast you have to feed” Microsites for aggregating content (and crawler-friendly SEO)
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Let the community tell you if you’re adding value. If you’re getting stars in LinkedIn answers, you’re on the right track. If not, make sure your message is helping your prospects, not just helping you.
LinkedIn groups create a great email list: Genoo’s enewsletters to LinkedIn Group members avg. 19%-44% CTR. |
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| Need for super focus – the low hanging fruit has been picked…
You can’t control social media, you can only hope to contain it (with apologies to John Madden) Avoid paralysis: Taking the first step into social media is the way to test/learn/improve Monday Morning Action Items: What is your LinkedIn exposure? Participation in groups Answerers of questions…posers? Who’s on your expert team? Who can address questions on topics that relate directly to your brand proposal? Pick up an online copy of David Meerman Scott – New Rules for Marketing & PR |
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| Social Media Panel-Focus on Lead Generation | Build exposure on Twitter by targeting “elephants” – users with thousands of followers among your core audience Buyers have created a bubble around themselves to block marketing messages – Social media provides a new way to reach people Support traditional campaigns with social media: Upcoming webinar = Blog about it, tweet about it, put as an upcoming event on Facebook/LinkedIn Opt-ins, followers, fans and RSS subscribers are your SM marketing assets |
Identify a universal pain of your prospects as source of non-promotional social marketing messages | Social media is about relationships and reputations built over time. There are no shortcuts | ||
| Include a short URL for tweeting an email message. Make it easy for your list to share with their networks.
Social media content/activity feeds on itself: A blog mention becomes a tweet, gets re-tweeted, and so on. In social media, ‘fluke’ isn’t a bad word Create a social media strategy ROAD map: Research, Objectives, Actions, Devices Social promotion builds links back to your blog/website = ongoing SEO benefit Social Media is a real-time conversation. You have to respond to queries/comments the same day. Monday Morning Action Items: See if you have a Twitter/LinkedIn etc. guru in-house already. Someone who’s already interacting with those groups and can help you start your own efforts. Setup your Google reader account to aggregate relevant feeds on your company/products |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Video: How to Build Brands with Social Media Report: 9 Steps to Social Media Success |
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Aaron Dun-How to Build a Program when Every Dollar Counts -- Twice |
Reusable assets – another key theme –
How to experiment: Don’t sign up for a 5 webinar deal. Sign up for 1 to prove concept with option of 4 more if it goes well. |
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What you’re not doing…and this relates to TIME, not just raw budget dollars – Fail faster – one of the keys ideas of the internet age, but I don’t see it in action very often. Monday Morning Action Items: Create a list of the things you spend your time on, with time attached. Analyze it for ROI. If you’re just looking at things from the view of ‘sure, I can fit that in’ you’re missing the other activities that could be replacing it. |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Video: Email Automation – Welcomes & Welcome Series Handbook Chapter: Email Automation |
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| Dave Wieneke- Re-engage Inactive Customers, Grow Lead Flow, Win with Sales | Don’t forget the non-buyers | A measurable goal for the social media program – top of funnel engagement like list growth | company relationships should last longer than the employment of the people involved. | Don’t forget the non-buyers Measure how much time prospects spend the reading specific types of content. Invest in the content that people really want to read. |
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Monday Morning Action Items: Wake the dead. Use discounts to spot interest. Change behavior with offers. Invest in writing people read. Pick a segment and keep ringing the bell. |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Video: Email Automation – Triggered Messaging |
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| Jeff Taxdahl- Managing a PPC Campaign Without a Dedicated Marketing or IT Staff and No Outside Agency Help | No one knows your business as well as you do. if you’re going to use a vendor, they should be doing something you can’t OR should benefit from your direction
Engaged people don’t need a form – what does that mean? PPC isn’t about technology – it’s about marketing |
Engaged people don’t need a form – what does that mean? | |||
Dialed up PPC spend in 2008 to anticipate competitors dialing back…this year sales are up 35% Monday Morning Action Items: Analyze how your PPC agency is doing. Are they answering your questions succinctly and accurately? Test a personal email address as an alternative to a reg form. |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Report: The Buying Process for Large and Complex Purchases |
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Session |
Volume |
Quality |
Mktg/Sales SLA |
Nurturing |
Velocity |
| Increase campaign response rates to drive more inquiries | Optimize lead qualification to focus on ‘high quality’ leads | Develop ‘service level agreements’ between sales and marketing | Intensify leads in the marketing funnel with lead nurturing | Accelerate leads currently in sales pipeline | |
| Jaren Green- Taking Lead Generation to the Next Level: Focus on Process | Improved response to an online form could lead to a decreased response in the qualification step Great SEO isn’t about ‘tricks’…Google will dance away…it’s about content that’s so compelling the crawlers can’t get enough |
Prospects self-qualify Some friction is a good thing… separates the wheat from the chaff |
Work ‘lead quality’ into every conversation to improve your relationship with sales. One bad lead passed to sales can blow marketing's credibility away |
Every page a landing page | |
It’s not about offering products & features…it’s about offering answers Focus on the cumulative effect of your marketing activities – every dollar you spend should take your results to a new, higher baseline, not a short-term peak that eventually comes back down. Campaigns should always funnel into the website, so you can get prospects into the next steps. Marketers are now process engineers ID the gatekeepers in your own marketing process Optimize your entire online lead-gen process: If you just focus on one step, something else along the path is going to fall short Monday Morning Action Items: Inventory your response and treatment of: Indexers…Searchers …Visitors…Requestors…Qualifier…Seller Profile your gatekeepers |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Report: Building the Bionic B2B Landing Page |
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| Christine Chariton & Mac Macintosh-Overhauling Your Lead Gen Program to Deliver More High Quality Leads to Sales Faster |
Use threats (ex: down economy) to business as advantages, content hooks | Content ‘kits’ targeted by role or prospect profile |
Use metrics to get mgmt. Buy-in for lead-gen projects: Chariton’s team showed that sales opportunities from marketing-generated leads were 2X more likely to convert than sales opps without marketing attached to it. All-hands meeting to kick-off lead gen overhaul. Management made the case that it’s important to the entire company. Marketing explained objective to get more and better quality leads to the salesforce Speed delivery of leads to sales: Document all the steps in the process and timing. Cross-department team to ID roadblocks and brainstorm solutions. Work with sales to identify qualifying questions Report for sales management: show recent leads handed to sales… activity pulled from CRM – it’s not “policing” if it becomes a sales management tool |
Scoring methodology – use points not qualitative statements like ‘warm’ |
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Repurpose content – enewsletter articles become blog posts, standalone PDFs. Bundle related content together, pull sections from larger documents as standalone pieces Monday Morning Action Items: Test using optional qualifying items – in their test, 25% filled them out… Get the team together to talk through your current lead handoff process…start identifying ways in which to evolve |
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| Emily Salus-Driving Sales and Marketing Efficiencies with Lead Scoring | Data cleansing for lead scoring: Verify that a sales-ready lead is from a valid company and has a real email address before sending to the sales team. |
Agree on your definitions Would your old/successful leads have passed your system? How would they have scored? Review and tweak your lead scores regularly: Salus’ team has quarterly review meetings |
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Time is the overlooked element of lead scoring – how fast are people going through the process? | |
Hypotheses – don’t test to look for outcomes, test a hypothesis Monday Morning Action Items: ID your lead scoring team. Work backwards from closed deals and unqualified leads – what patterns emerge? Plan your brainstorming session with Sales. |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Videos & Report: Automated Email – Welcomes, Triggers & Transactionals |
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| Michael Rapp with Ahmed Taleb (SF) & Amy Bills (Boston)-Buyer Personas: Critical Drivers in Effective Lead Nurturing Strategies |
Use personas to define different/relevant follow-up tracks for each campaign or offer. Share personas with creative department so they can write for the intended audience |
Personas make a targeted marketing approach easier to execute and more effective
Keep your definitions for scoring to 5 criteria…avoid unnecessary complexity…Existing Customer, Industry, Active (previous drip marketing or new to system), Role (level) and Department Persona development process is driven by sales: Who are they looking for – title, decision-making roles, etc. Role can be more important than title. Combine lead scoring with personas – attach numbers to persona attributes to filter your leads Personas replace lead “alphabet soup”: CFO, VP, CTO, etc. Don’t overlook personas’ media preferences: What do they read? What kinds of events do they prefer? What social media channels are they using/not using Key elements of sales/marketing SLA: What defines each stage of the marketing/sales pipeline? Agree on definitions for raw lead, marketing qualified lead, sales accepted lead, etc. Have it written down and signed. |
Make sure everyone is speaking the same language – share customer lifecycle map with entire organization | There’s probably one stage of the process that’s really the most important
50% higher conversion rate for multi-wave, multi-channel supported titles |
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Monday Morning Action Items: Whether you have personas developed or not, take a look at the ways in which you define them using pain points, motivators, media channels… |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Report: Marketing to Engineers (example of how differently one group consumes media from another) |
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| Julie Wisdom & Julie Lamphiear- Attract, Convert and Retain Customers Through Relevant, Engaging Content |
Focus – one solution/concept per month Auditing content -- You have to actually read it! Every piece of content should have a desired action – get them to click, comment, etc. people consume content and consider subject matter first - then think about the brand/co. behind the content Let prospects self-segment for content preferences by presenting multiple offers Make content microsite interactive: Let prospects comment, rate, vote on it, etc. provide interactive exp. w/users - use active (surveys) and passive (activity) profiling Each content piece needs a next step: Another article to download, an event to attend, an offer, etc. |
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Offering varied media to satisfy all tastes New content at least once per month Get tips on what they want based on passive (behavior) or explicit (pref. centers, surveys, focus groups) preferences |
Timing/relevance of content is the way to pull people through the marketing funnel |
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| Interviews, not assignments, for SMEs
Avoid overload Monday Morning Action Items: Content list – how can it be repurposed for different formats. Who are your SMEs who might not be right for blogging, creating content on their own, but could be interviewed? |
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| Bob Johnson & Troy Monney (SF) & Justin Steinman (Boston)- The Marketer as Publisher: Mapping Content to the Buying Cycle and Prospects’ Needs |
Educational content almost equivalent to transactional content (brochures, etc.) in sales process.
Most content still not relevant to buyers. Don’t use social media in isolation – every tweet, blog post, LinkedIn comment should include a link back to your website or some other content B2B buyers say lack of relevant content adds 2 weeks to decision cycle time sharp, crisp content can differentiate you from competition when you don’t have huge brand recognition Key shortlist creation content: Vendor comparisons more important than case studies because fewer third-party labs are doing them now. Generic content is “pull” content: You have to have it out there where people are searching (blogs, Google, social media) Personalized/specific content is "push" content: You offer it to specific prospects in the later stages of the buying cycle (shortlist creation/final decision) |
lead stages: Consult sales team to learn what content/tools they need for one-on-one selling in the sales process |
Increasing self-importance of all buying team members. More people at the table, all want to be heard Social Content more important than vendor/educational content in decision-making process Case studies used heavily early…less later in sales process Product info used throughout by decision maker White papers Discussion boards/forums important late stage Discussion boards/forums most important social media channel in final decision phase – buyers trust their peers |
B2B buyers say a lack of relevant content adds 2 weeks to decision cycle time | |
Monday Morning Action Items: Match channels/formats with buying stages… How can you expand on your content so that it moves from generic to specific to personalized? |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Report: Marketing to Decision Makers & Influencers |
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| Stu Richards- Exclusive Research: The State of the B2B Newsletter | Short, easy to skim, easy to read Biggest driver – your brand. Layout/design not as important as who the newsletter is from and what it contains Do you have a relevance gap? You can ask them via survey or focus group. |
Industry specific content | Email newsletters aren’t just relevant, they’re ‘very important’ – 97% of b2b decision markers agree | ||
Practical content wins the day – how-tos and case studies General rule for newsletter “from” lines – don’t send newsletters from an individual person’s address. Use your brand – something like news@brand.com Test delivery day/time of delivery to see if recipients show a preference |
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| Galen De Young & Kenric Van Wyk- The Importance of Site Architecture in SEO: Viewing your Site as a Web of Landing Pages |
One keyword – one optimized page – don’t try to optimize for more than 2 primary keywords Use categories to determine where to put keywords on your site: People, Geography, Type of Problem, Services, Company, Experience Get local search visibility in markets where you don’t have a physical presence: Optimize landing pages that relate to specific geography and try to get first result below the Google maps local listings |
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Don’t optimize based on how YOU think/search, optimize for the way your customers think/search. Many homes for your keywords – company experience page, staff bios, news/blog page, industry specialty pages, etc. When content stops growing, your SEO results can plateau. Need to continually add and refresh Analyze all the ways people are searching for your product/service: By their problem? By their location? Etc. Website navigation must accommodate all the different SEO landing pages you’ve created Review team blog posts to determine if they can be optimized more for specific search terms Optimize your site content first before you try to expand inbound links Optimize for long-tail keywords if you can’t beat a well-established, well optimized competitor you can’t unseat on the primary keyword landing pages Monday Morning Action Items: Use your paid words that are converting as inspiration for new SEO efforts. Take a look at your site – how well do site pages/sections map to keyword groups? Also – are there unutilized opportunities for keyword rich, credible landing pages? Are your pages trying to do too much – more than 1 or 2 keywords? |
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| Marc Joseph- B2B Ecommerce: Low-cost, High-Impact Tactics to Increase Traffic & Sales |
Write articles for the keywords for which you’re struggling to get high rankings Still can’t get ranked? Target those keywords for your limited PPC spend Google checkout button adds visibility |
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Multiple products/departments – make each its own landing page Monday Morning Action Items: Find competitive keywords that might get a lift from an article ID the keywords for PPC spending Find all the available partners who can help you sell |
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Recommended from the Best of Research USB: Report: Offline Marketing Tactics for B2B |
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| Sean Donahue - Viral Hall of Fame Inductees Announced | B2B marketers rate Viral Online Marketing the most effective social media/Web 2.0 tactic Go “big elephant hunting” on social networks – ID influential users to help spread your message |
Don’t go for sensationalism without relevance |
Plan a stage 2 campaign that follows-up on the exposure from a successful viral effort If you get people talking about you on social media, dive in and answer them |
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| Q&A and Closing Comments | |||||
Most companies have a reservoir of “dead” leads that are really just suffering from advanced hypothermia. What are you doing to warm them up? You’ve already done so much work…where does your content lend itself to repurposing or refreshing? We’re in love with ‘data-driven’ but is your process driven by the right data? The technologies at our disposal allow us to quickly conduct experiments and test hypotheses. How are you taking advantage of ‘fail faster’? (and get your CFO’s respect) |
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