How we wish we could just delay the hair wash day. But that is not possible. Or is it? Washing hair every day or every alternate day not only is a tedious task but also damages your hair. While overwashing the

Urvashi Rautela has been filing up her Instagram handle with such stunning make-up looks that we sometimes feel envious. When it comes to make-up, Urvashi definitely knows what she is doing. Her high regards for all things beauty need no introduction.

Some trends are worth the hype and organic hair products is one such trend. Switching to natural and organic products seems like a gamble that we are not too crazy about. Don't you think that it is high time that you

Shaving the face ladies is no longer a taboo that is frowned upon. We know it sounds scary but by now enough women have done it for us to leave the stigma behind and get your hands in and shave the

'It is not a guys thing'-You no longer can give the excuse. The beauty world has become more accommodating today and it is for the better. Men pampering themselves is no longer a hush-hush matter. When it comes to pedicure, it

Kim Kardashian is looked upon as a quintessential beauty and fashion icon. The world has seen and admired the evolution of Kim Kardashian. Seeing her extravagant hair and make-up looks, we have applauded and been jealous. Kim Kardashian latest post on

This week on Instagram came with major throwbacks(yet again!). In the times of quarantine, Instagram has a big role to play in keeping us sane. From people posting their quarantine activities to celebrities posting their throwback pictures, it feels good to

the volatility in spot may continue and 75.30-75.50 will act as a strong support and we may see a bounce towards 76.50 level, says Rahul Gupta, Head of Research- Currency, Emkay Global Financial Services.

The company is also launching the Mi Box (A device that can convert a regular TV to a smart TV) and new true wireless earbuds alongside the Mi 10.

Both phones are pretty evenly matched in terms of performance.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18 Former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha said the railways can’t be treated like any other department. "My own feeling is that the Finance Minister will have to grant a lot of autonomy to the Ministry of Railways, he said.

Most people focus on returns and chase products that offer the best returns at any point.

The Aurangabad-based company aims to mop up nearly Rs 1,162 crore (at higher end of price band) by diluting 17.5 percent stake through the issue that will close on October 7. It already raised Rs 348.52 crore through anchor investors' portion on Tuesday, the day before issue opening.

Credit Suisse' Neelkanth Mishra expects repo rate to fall to a decade low in the coming quarters. He says that beginning December the market may see a robust and widespread pick-up which may boost indices.

If there is no direct government intervention to uplift demand then the auto industry is staring at its worst year ever.

Ashok Leyland has released the sales report for zero sales in April due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The nationwide lockdown was supposed to be lifted by May 4 but seeing the current scenario, the government has further extended it to May 17.

Hyundai India recently announced that it will be restarting its operations in India from the 6th of May 2020. The company has slowly started to reopen dealerships across India in a phase-wise manner, as per the government's lockdown relaxation guidelines in many parts of the country.

The actor will be remembered for effortlessly portraying varied roles.

That was the sombre assessment of about a dozen top producers, distributors and actors from Bollywood, the movie industry in Mumbai, during a video conference this week, one of the participants said.

While IPL viewers are watching different content this year, the sporting property over the years has contributed significantly to television viewership.

Shows like Shri Krishna and Uttar Ramayan are seeing strong traction on Doordarshan.

The court also suggested that the government should publicise the decision so that migrant workers learn about it.

"This doesn#39;t mean that Mumbai will be handed over to the Army. Police personnel are tired after working round-the- clock, some have fallen sick and a few of them have succumbed to the virus. They need rest," Thackeray said.

Authorities in the city ordered all shops, except those selling milk and medicines, to close on midnight Wednesday until May 15, implementing a stricter lockdown than the national one in place since March 25, in an effort to curb a rise in infections.

He said the state government has given a grant of about Rs 275 crore to the cow shelters which will provide relief to their operators who are suffering due to coronavirus pandemic crisis.

The mobile phone services have been restored across the Kashmir valley, they said, adding the decision was taken in view of the improving situation.

They, however, said the curbs were relaxed in some areas of the valley where the situation remained peaceful.

The protesters placed two bodies of the dead in front of the factory main gate as part of the agitation while some youths barged into the plant even as state Director General of Police D G Sawang was inspecting the vapour leak spot and talking to the management on the measures taken to restore normalcy.

INS Jalashwa, participating in Indian Navy#39;s "Operation Samudra Setu" to bring home Indians stuck in foreign countries due to COVID-19 pandemic, has departed from Male port for Kochi with 698 Indian nationals on board on Friday night. It is expected to reach here on Sunday.

Brent crude was up by 12 cents, or 0.4%, to $29.84 a barrel 0044 GMT, after falling earlier in the Asian session and dropping 4% on Wednesday.

Argentina will keep pushing for talks with creditors even as a deadline for its $65 billion debt restructuring proposal passed on Friday with little sign it had the support needed from international bondholders to unlock a comprehensive deal.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he was "very torn" about whether to end the so-called Phase 1 U.S.-China trade deal, just hours after top trade officials from both countries pledged to press ahead with implementing it despite coronavirus economic wreckage.

Germany will have to work on another supplementary budget to help the state's social security system cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief budget lawmaker said on Saturday.

As many parts of the world's biggest economy begin to reopen after weeks of stay-at-home orders that slowed the spread of the coronavirus but gutted jobs, Americans should not expect a quick return to growth, U.S. Federal Reserve officials said on Friday.

How B2B Buyer Behavior Has Changed in Light of COVID-19, and What Marketers and Sellers Can Do Now
82 percent of B2B buyers said they were concerned or strongly concerned about the possibility of a pandemic-sparked recession, while 30 percent have reported spending more on videoconferencing software — two of several findings of interest to digital marketers in a recently-released survey examining B2B buyer shifts. eMarketer

How Bad Data Hurts B2B Companies [Infographic]
Just 33 percent of marketers say they can rely on their customer relationship management (CRM) software, and 88 percent said that bad data has a direct impact on their company's bottom line — two of the findings in a new infographic look at the effect of poor data on B2B firms. MarketingProfs

The Evolving Discussion Around COVID-19 and How Brands Have Responded [Infographic]
Brands have used Twitter the most often to mention the global health crisis, according to recently-released survey data examining how brands are using social media in crisis management planning. Social Media Today

Social Media Users Value Brands Responsive To COVID-19 Crisis
83% of social media users expect brands to address the health crisis in their ads, with 31 percent saying they appreciate brands offering products suited for remote work, 28 percent promoting social distancing, and 24 percent mentioning brand philanthropic efforts, according to newly-released survey data of interest to marketers. MediaPost

Why It Takes So Long to Apply Data-Driven Insights to Campaigns
Just 5 percent of marketers say they can immediately go from data gathering to actionable intelligence, while 31 do so later than they would like, and some 3 percent take so long that the output is irrelevant, according to new survey data. MarketingProfs

Instagram Live Streams Can Now Be Viewed on the Web
Facebook-owned Instagram has made it possible for its users to view its previously app-only Instagram Live video streams from its website, bringing marketers a new cross-promotion opportunity with the feature, the firm recently announed. Social Media Today

Twitter notifies users that it’s now sharing more data with advertisers
Twitter has notified its users that a previously available user privacy ad interaction sharing option has been shuttered for all, in a move that will bring more audience data to advertisers, the firm recently announced. The Verge

What Customers Need to Hear from You During the COVID Crisis
The types of brand stories companies should be telling their customers include those that put solutions before sales, according to a new examination by Harvard Business School of interest to B2B marketers. Harvard Business School

Facebook Has Launched a New Tournaments Option for People to Create Their Own Gaming Events
With online gaming forecast to produce $196 billion by 2022, a recent move by social giant Facebook allowing its users to create their own private or public gaming events could bring brands new opportunities for reaching its sizable gaming audience. Social Media Today

Content Plays Various Roles in Brands’ Customer Engagement Strategies
61 percent of marketing leaders said that interactive branded content communicates brand promise and value, according to recently-released survey data from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, with 51 percent saying that it delivers thought-leadership, and 45 percent saying that interactive content helps communicate with customers, partners and prospects. MarketingCharts

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at digital transformation and organizational change by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Grinning Tim Cook Announces New iPhone Will No Longer Be Compatible With AirPods — The Onion

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — Leadership and Engagement In a Time of Crisis [Podcast] — Traject
• Amie Krone — Navigating the new world of working at home — Chaska Herald
• Dell, SAP — Building A Perfect B2B Influencer Program During Imperfect Times — Forbes
• Lee Odden — Marketing During a Pandemic – Resources for Small Businesses in the Coronavirus Crisis [Roundup] — Simple Machines

Do you have your own top B2B content marketing or digital advertising stories from the past week? Please let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for taking the time to join us, and we hope that you'll return again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don't miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.

The post Digital Marketing News: Shifting B2B Buyer Behaviors, Brands Evolve Crisis Response, Bad Data’s Effect on B2B Firms, & Twitter Shares New Data With Advertisers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

One great thing about being a young Gen X’er: There was no social media during my junior high and high school years. 

Young millennials weren’t so lucky. They chronicled their adolescence in excruciating detail on Myspace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, every half-formed thought and laundry-detergent-eating stunt preserved forever.

So it’s no surprise that the youngest social media users leapt on Snapchat when it launched. Snapchat Stories provided the feeling of togetherness that social media’s good at, without the potential to embarrass your future self.

Other platforms were quick to buy into the idea of ephemeral content — content that expires and is deleted after a set period of time, usually 24 hours. Instagram’s creatively-named offering, Instagram Stories, boasts 500 million daily users. That’s more daily users for a single feature on Instagram than there are for the entirety of Twitter. 

But don’t count Twitter out just yet — they’re testing their own ephemeral content, called, unfortunately, “Fleets.” Even the level-headed folks at LinkedIn* are testing LinkedIn Stories with a handful of users.

For B2B content marketers, ephemeral content seems like the opposite of everything we try to do. DISPOSABLE content? No SEO value, no repurposing potential… what’s the point?

Should B2B marketers go ephemeral? It depends. Here’s what you need to know.

Ephemeral Content for B2B Marketers

Before we get into specifics, you should first consider ephemeral content the same way you would any content. I’d recommend asking the following four questions.

Four Questions B2B Marketers Should Ask about Ephemeral Content

These questions aren’t unique to ephemeral content, of course. They’re questions worth asking for any new marketing channel or tactic. They are:

• Is my audience on this channel?
• Is my audience consuming content on this channel?
• Can we produce high-quality content for this channel?
• Does this channel offer a logical next step for our audience?

For most B2b marketers, the answers to all these questions is “yes.” If your audience includes millennials or young Gen Xers, they’re likely on Instagram Stories at least. They’re used to the format and will likely be open to ephemeral content on LinkedIn and Twitter as it rolls out.

Can your brand produce high-quality ephemeral content? That’s one of the chief selling points of Stories — they’re easy and cheap to produce. There are robust tools for creating them built into the platforms that host them. And audiences expect a more informal, less-produced content experience.

As far as next steps go, Instagram Stories are actually more marketer-friendly than Instagram posts. Users can swipe up in a story to go directly to another piece of content, a lead gen form, or any other hyperlink. There’s no “Please visit the link in our bio” for Stories — it’s an immediate pass-through.

Now, if your offering skews more to the Boomer demographic, or you’re courting people too hip — or technology-averse — to be on social media, you might hold off. But it’s safe to say the majority of B2B marketers can get some juice out of ephemeral content.

How to Make the Most of Ephemeral Content for B2B

You don’t get the opportunity to build a content library with ephemeral content. By its nature, it should serve a different purpose than blog posts or eBooks. Think about building an audience and engaging them on a regular basis, rather than creating a library people wander in and out of.

Focus on Your People, Not Your Product

There are plenty of outlets for you to serve up product information and sales brochures. Ephemeral content is better suited for highlighting the people who work for your company. Focus on what makes them unique, what makes them relatable, and what makes them excellent at serving your customers. 

Mailchimp is great at this type of story. Their “Day in the Life” series highlights and celebrates individual employees.

[bctt tweet="“Ephemeral content is better suited for highlighting the people who work for your company. Focus on what makes them unique, what makes them relatable, and what makes them excellent at serving your customers.” @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

Be Passionate about Purpose

For a growing majority of consumers, what a brand sells is less important than what the brand stands for. We’re looking to buy from businesses that share our values, and B2B buyers are no exception. Ephemeral content is a good way to get the message out about your brand’s larger purpose in the world, to highlight your vision for the future and your progress towards those goals. 

Lush is great at blending their purpose with their more product-centered ephemeral content. It only takes a few Instagram Stories to see exactly where they stand and what they value. 

Show Your Personality

If your organization is still looking for permission to loosen up a little, ephemeral content is your permission slip. It’s a format with lower audience expectations, one that’s focused on short-form, entertaining content, and one that won’t linger to haunt you until the end of time. 

So it’s well worth experimenting with your brand’s voice and personality. You may find that B2B buyers are just as starved for entertainment as the rest of us.

Cisco is absolutely killing it with their Stories right now. The playful, energetic tone isn’t what you would expect from a staid titan of industry, but it’s delightful to watch.

[bctt tweet="“If your organization is still looking for permission to loosen up a little, ephemeral content is your permission slip.” @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

Serialize Your Content

Ephemeral content is all about building an audience that will make your feed appointment viewing. Serialized content can help establish that habit. There are a few easy ways to serialize:

• Establish regular features, like Mantra Monday, Thoughtful Thursday, or Whiskey Wednesday (okay, maybe not the last one)
• Chop up a long-form video into segments and air them sequentially
• Focus on a different department every week to explore your organization

For longer-form serialized content, it’s worth creating an IGTV Series. Series come with tools to help you create and promote new episodes to bring in subscribers. Check out General Electric’s Taking the World to Work series for inspiration.

Let’s Get Ephemeral!

Ephemeral content is one of the primary ways people are using social media — which means it’s relevant for any B2B business with an audience on social platforms. Adding ephemeral content to your content marketing strategy will exercise a different set of muscles than your regular content creation, but it’s a form that rewards continued experimentation.

Need help with ephemeral or evergreen content? Our content marketing team is ready.

* Note: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.

The post Should B2B Marketers Embrace Ephemeral Content? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Why should B2B marketers give a DAM?

When that DAM is digital asset management, you’re looking at a system that will improve all forms of online marketing, whether it's B2B influencers, social, search, content, video or always-on marketing.

It's also one of the top investments an organization can make for successfully leveraging a digital environment that will only expand with more data in the coming years.

It’s no wonder the global DAM market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and is expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2025, according to report data from IMARC.

Just What Are Digital Assets?

As we explored in our introduction to DAM technology, “Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing,” digital assets are simply any computer files, stored anywhere — whether on your phone, tablet, desktop, network, or in the cloud.

DAM software runs either on a local computer network or in the cloud, and is built to pull in and make it easy to organize an unlimited number of files — all those digital assets that organizations create and use daily.

The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of DAM will be, especially when accumulated over time.

The pandemic has also brought to light weaknesses for some organizations, as remote workers place additional strains on systems not necessarily designed for unified online access to digital asset libraries.

Let’s look at how adding a DAM system to your mix can help improve six major forms of digital marketing.

[bctt tweet="“The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of digital asset management (DAM) will be, especially over time.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

1 — Use DAM to Augment Your Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing campaigns, especially in the B2B realm, can involve many people and projects, often with a variety of images, document files, videos, and other digital assets.

Tracking multiple versions of files — with varieties specifically created for each social media platform involved in a campaign — can get complicated, and many firms either use a cobbled together make-shift approach that may be known only to one or a few people in the organization, or end up bouncing around from one software solution to another.

A good DAM database, however, can be used company-wide and is expandable enough to accommodate any change in file types, for as long as the DAM is supported by its developers.

The best DAM solutions also offer transparent and robust import and especially export routines, so that organizations aren’t locked-in to one DAM environment with their digital assets held hostage, unable to easily migrate to other solutions if needed.

Influencer marketing benefits from DAM through increased efficiency and time savings, which ultimately make influencers happy and better able to share co-created content.

2 — Expand Your Content Marketing With DAM

The type of savvy content management offered by DAM systems could save marketing teams 13 days annually per staff member, according to report data from Canto.

The same research found that 41 percent of marketers said that digital filing inefficiencies had caused delayed project releases, and 54 percent noted that they experienced frustration with inefficient filing systems.

By its very nature content marketing involves vast quantities of content in all its various digital forms, and a powerful DAM system enhances content marketing by making it easy to find all the digital assets a business has ever created, both for current campaigns and when gathering past performance and return on investment (ROI) data.

Brands such as Under Armour use DAM systems to manage over 12 terabytes of content including more than half a millions digital assets for some 7,000 products that change seasonally, a task that while possible without using a DAM, really shows off the benefits of a solid organizational and archival solution.

3 — Make a Move to DAM to Improve Your Video Marketing

As with static digital assets, a good DAM system easily ingests and organizes video content, putting it at the fingertips of each person in an organization who needs it, from video editor to social media manager to corporate executives.

Digital video has remained a leading performer for marketers, with 92 percent saying it's an important part of their marketing strategy (HubSpot), and with the arrival of the global health crisis initial reports have shown that more video than ever is being viewed, including 5.5 percent higher video view rates on Twitter.

One of the many benefits a top-notch DAM solution offers is the ability to find otherwise hidden static content in your organization's archives that can work well in creating video marketing, oftentimes also avoiding time-consuming efforts to re-do work that has already been completed but can't easily be found.

4 — DAM Shines in Always-On Marketing Environments

Always-on marketing replaces on-again off-again campaigns with a fluid ongoing effort, continually cultivating and carefully building efforts that allow businesses to seamlessly adapt their marketing efforts, rather than playing catch-up, stopping a campaign, and waiting to build a new one.

For B2B marketers, the shift to always-on is swiftly advancing, and in always-on marketing DAM shines brightly, as it removes many of the bottlenecks slowing down traditional marketing by offering easy and swift access to a firm’s digital asset archive.

We recently launched a new ongoing series for B2B brands looking to explore the many benefits of always-on influence, as our CEO Lee Odden took a close at in "Always On Influence: Definition and Why B2B Brands Need it to Succeed."

Marketing technology also thrives when DAM is involved, and MarTech Advisor recently took a look at 10 of the major players in the DAM market.

[bctt tweet="“Always On Influencer Marketing is a strategic approach to creating communities of trusted experts that is relationship and content focused.” @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

5 — Search Marketers Find Success with DAM

Search marketers also benefit from a powerful DAM system, being able to systematically find search campaign assets, analytics data contained in spreadsheets or other formats, in ways that help make more data-informed search marketing efforts a snap.

In a way the so-called findability of search marketing goes hand-in-hand with a smart DAM solution, as both are centered around finding things — whether in the form of search engine query answers or finding a file you know you have but haven't been able to successfully locate until the arrival of a DAM system.

6 — B2B Marketers Get Social with DAM

Social media marketers too can gain advantages by using a DAM workflow, easily accessing digital assets destined for a variety of social platforms, whether they involve static or video content, advertising copy in text documents, or social analytics data in any number of file formats.

Social media marketing is also enhanced by DAM through time savings, but also by the extra insight it can bring helping to open up an organization's digital asset library. Re-purposing content on social platforms can take on an entirely new and all-encompassing level when every digital asset can easily come in to play and be combined in relevant new ways, thanks to a powerful DAM system.

Invest in Your Firm’s Long-Term Success Using DAM

Whether you specialize in B2B influencer marketing, social, search, content, video or always-on efforts — or a combination of these primary digital marketing practices — finding and implementing the right digital asset management system is an investment in the long-term success of your organization.

Finally, to help you learn more about DAM solutions for marketers, including a list of many of the top providers, have a look at our article exploring the subject.

The post Why B2B Marketers Should Give a DAM: Top Tips on Digital Asset Management appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

What do we mean when we talk about a transformation in marketing?

Let me put it this way. The switch from horses to cars was a transformation. It was a fundamental rethinking of the way that humans move. We went from, “Find an animal that can go further and faster than you can and ride on it,” to “Burn fuel and use the energy to turn a motor that transfers the power to wheels.”

Every improvement since then — from V8 engines to power steering — has just been an iteration on the theme. A little faster, a little more efficient, a little safer, but iteration, not transformation.

Marketers are fantastic at iteration. It’s part of the job! We’re great at A/B testing, optimization, and continuous improvement. But at the heart of it, a lot of us are still working with a souped-up version of the same old tactics we’ve always used. Yes, we’ve gone digital. Yes, we’ve automated X and Y and we’re on Z and W channels. But we’re not inventing the engine; we’re just breeding faster horses.

That’s why I get excited when I see something genuinely novel in our profession. And Lisa Sharapata and her colleagues at 6sense have the goods. 

We had the privilege of interviewing Lisa during B2BMX, and she discussed some big ideas that we’re still wrapping our heads around. The death of the MQL. The “dark funnel.” It’s nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of the theory and practice of marketing, one that brings together sales and marketing and refocuses both around revenue.

[bctt tweet="“When we say, ‘we're gonna give you this amount of pipeline, we're gonna generate this amount of revenue,’ and we can actually see it coming and help deliver it in a predictable way, they are never going to want to go back to a #MQL again.” -Lisa Sharapata, @6senseinc" username="toprank"]

You can watch our full interview with Lisa below, or listen to the podcast version (and don’t forget to subscribe). Scroll down past the embeds for a few highlights from the conversation.

Break Free B2B Interview with Lisa Sharapata

Timeline and Highlights

1:00 Account engagement platforms and the dark funnel

4:30 The role of the BDR for inbound marketing

6:00 Sales and marketing: Together at last

7:15 Content strategy & SEO in dynamic marketing

10:15 Engagement is the new oil, but are we ready to drill?

15:30 The end of MQLs

Lisa: We'll create a segment based on our ICP, our ideal customer profile and keywords, depending on how we want to set it up, what they're searching for, what stage they're in. 

We have multiple different campaigns running all the time and it's dynamic, so we're seeing what these groups are searching. And they're in consideration right now, so we're gonna run this type of content and this type of display to them. 

And then lo and behold, they're starting to engage. More and more people are engaging, more of them have come to our website, they're now familiar with us, so we're gonna change up the content. And it's all dynamic and running based on how we've set the segments up to run and what content we've set up to target those accounts. 

So it moves dynamically, as they shift what they're doing, we can do all that from our platform. And then on the flip side this all feeds into Salesforce and you see this, basically this map and timeline of everything that's happening. We have a persona map that fills out this grid and you can see in your targets who's doing what, green, yellow, red, who's engaged who's not, who do you need to engage, who clicked on what, when, what keyword did they search for, what brought them to your website, what pages did they go to. 

You can look at all this information, but then it's also aggregating that and turning it into data that you can use to say, "Here's the next best action, here's someone in that account that is probably a key decision-maker, that you should buy their contact information". So it's like this whole 360 of what you do with that account.

Susan: That's awesome. Okay so the technology is obviously extremely strong, but it can't be done without humans.

Lisa: very true, very true. Like you can see my I love BDR t-shirt, we actually declared this week BDR appreciation week. I kind of started from the marketing background because that's my background, but a salesperson comes in, they have a dashboard in the morning telling them here's the accounts that are hot, here's the ones that are engaging, here's the ones that you should go after today and here's now what you should do and it breaks it down into next best actions.

And typically that would be a BDR or SDR role, that needs to figure out "Okay, I'm gonna make a video for them and send them as email, what should I talk to them about? Okay they were searching these keywords, so they must be interested and have this problem, here's how I can offer value." 

Instead of just the shot in the dark like guessing, hoping that they're saying the right thing, or just spraying as many emails out there, phone calls as they can make in a day. We're getting really strategic and helping them and it takes all the legwork out too, like they don't have to spend thirds of their day doing research, it cuts that way down so that they have it all their fingertips and then they can just start taking action when they come in in the morning.

Susan: so then do the BDR's love marketing? 

Lisa: So, I have never in my career, been in an organization where sales and marketing work hand in hand, I mean it's truly a night and day difference, because first of all we agree on "Here's the best accounts", because you can see what they're doing in the dark funnel, you know they are in my ideal customer profile but they're also in market. They're in market, before they even come inbound, we know they're in market. So sales loves marketing and marketing loves sales, because we are working together toward the same goal now.

Susan: Okay can we get back to the MQL's? Because you have declared 2020 as the year of no MQL's, so to sales execs, senior execs that sometimes can mean no accountability. 

Lisa: Yeah, so I mean here's the thing: If you talk to most sales execs and you ask them "How valuable do you think the MQL's really are?" and "How often do they turn into an SQL?" and “When marketing says they're gonna give you this many MQL's, how meaningful is that truly to you?" Most of the time they're like "Yeah, marketing is gonna throw these scans from their event over the fence and tell us to work on them." 

And they don't really put a lot of value in them. But when we say we're gonna give you this amount of pipeline, we're gonna generate this amount of revenue, and we can start to show that predictability, in saying this is what of your accounts are in market right now, that is worth this amount of pipeline to you and we can actually see it coming and help deliver it in a predictable way.. I'll tell you what, they are never going to want to go back to a MQL again. 

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Enterprise-Level ABM with Oracle’s Kelvin Gee
• Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus
• Break Free B2B Series: Jon Miller on How ABM Can Help Marketers Keep Their ‘Ship’ Together
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Lisa Sharapata of 6sense on the End of the MQL appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

A white former police officer and his son were arrested in Georgia on Thursday and charged with murder in the death of an unarmed black man, an incident that has sparked furor in the community and among civil rights activists across the United States. Gloria Tso reports.

Tara Reade, the woman who alleges Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993, said in a video interview on Thursday that he should withdraw from the White House race. Gloria Tso reports.

The sting of the Asian giant hornet can kill and that's not just an expression of speech. Since their discovery in 2019 in the US, traps have been set to see if Asian giant "murder hornets" have settled in the state. Libby Hogan has more.

An in-depth study of Leonardo da Vinci's earliest-known drawing has proved definitively that the great Renaissance artist was in fact comfortable working with either hand. Dan Fastenberg reports.

A European coalition is forming around an approach to using smartphone technology to trace coronavirus infections which, it's hoped, will enable borders to reopen. Joe Davies reports.

Reuters Breakingviews examines how Washington’s new paradigm on China is affecting Silicon Valley, from overseas investments to intellectual property protection to trade.

Three Indian soldiers were killed in a gunbattle with militants in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir on Monday, a day after a similar incident in which five were killed.

One of Bangladesh's largest drugmakers, Beximco Pharmaceuticals, will start production this month of the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, which has shown promise in fighting the new coronavirus, a senior company executive said on Tuesday.

Pakistan's finance ministry will share part of the risk banks face in lending to struggling small businesses, in a bid to protect jobs in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the central bank said on Wednesday.

Indian troops killed four militants in gun battles in Kashmir on Wednesday, including the commander of the biggest separatist group fighting New Delhi, a police official said, triggering clashes across the disputed region that left dozens injured.

Pakistan will begin lifting its coronavirus lockdown on Saturday, Prime Minister Imran Khan said, hours after the country announced its highest daily increase in new cases.

The Bangladesh navy has rescued around 280 Rohingya Muslims from the Bay of Bengal, towing their stranded boat to an island where they will be quarantined as a precaution against the coronavirus, coast guard and naval officials said on Friday.