B2B Marketing in 2018: It’s Time to Go Back to the Basics

I love reading over everyone’s predictions for the New Year. Especially as it relates to marketing.But most of the predictions seem to be around marketing tactics – where you should allocate your budgets to reach more customers, how to create more website traffic, etc. And while these trends are interesting, they seem to assume that the marketing basics — like understanding your ideal customer target, having a clear value proposition and an integrated communications strategy — are already being covered at 100%. Which is not the case, as hilariously pointed out by Mark Ritson in his recent blog post.Case in point – Miller Heiman reports that only 53% of salespeople make quota, which means 47% of your salesforce is not hitting their number. And the # 1 reason, according to SiriusDecisions is the sales reps “inability to articulate value to the customer”. And value proposition development isn’t just a sales problem, it’s a marketing problem.