Quotes are an excellent source of inspiration. They make us think, consider, and draw conclusions, especially when they’re from those people we generally turn to for advice.
We have created a list of quotes that perfectly reflect the essence of B2B marketing, some of which put emphasis on digital marketing or future marketing trends, while others focus on sales and marketing alignment and customer-centricity. Get inspired by these B2B Marketing thought leaders!
- “While the concept of “team” can be somewhat cliché, revenue marketing/demand generation truly is a team sport. It requires collaboration among product marketing, content creation, brand and sales. When everyone works together to analyze the data behind a campaign and optimize the elements that work, and shift from the components that do not perform well, the leads and revenue will follow.”– Cheryl Rodness, Global Vice President of Revenue Marketing at Unisys in “ABM, IBM and Demand Generation at Unisys
- “Whether B2B or B2C, I believe passionately that good marketing essentials are the same. We all are emotional beings looking for relevance, context and connection.”– Beth Comstock
- “Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they’d like to go.”– Seth Godin
- “Marketing is moving so fast now that a critical question for every company is how to drive innovation in new ways to reach the customer. It cannot be a single-person job, but has to include everybody and be part of the DNA of the marketing organization.”– Ana Villegas, Senior Director of Marketing at Dell-EMC in Continuous Marketing Innovation at Dell EMC
- “Having engaging content is key, the last thing you want to do is invest the effort to have people visit your site only to find there is no engaging content. Ensure that the website content resonates with your target audience of CMOs and marketers.”– Almitra Karnik, Head of Marketing at CleverTap in “Implementing Inbound at CleverTap”
- “Content Marketing is no longer a numbers game. It’s a game of relevance.” – Jason Miller, Sr. Content Marketing Manager, LinkedIn
- “While a lot of marketing activity aims to fill the top of the funnel, in the enterprise space it is critical for marketing to work closely with sales to also drive accounts through the funnel and on to fruition. This includes sales enablement and working closely with sales leadership to increase deal velocity and help close business. One key element is measuring how marketing activity assists and influences the various stages of the pipeline so they can accurately decide where to invest resources.”– Celia Fleischaker, Chief Marketing Officer at PROS in Driving Digital Transformation and a Better Customer Experience at Pros
- “At its core, design thinking is problem-solving – understanding what the needs of a person are, and how to solve for those needs. It needs to fit within the ultimate goal of solving problems for real people – the form ultimately needs to fulfill function.”– Lynn Teo, Vice President of Digital Marketing at CA Technologies in Design Thinking Marketing, Unlocking the Power of People
- “Good marketers see consumers as complete human beings with all the dimensions real people have.”– Jonah Sachs
- “Growing numbers of IT decision-makers (and influencers) are from the millennial generation. Millennials consume content differently: they want to see videos, e-books, bite size information. Key component of a good content strategy is to ensure the content is easy to consume by target audiences – not just titles anymore but generations as well.”– Jen Holtvluwer, Head of North America Marketing and Inside Sales at Cherwell Software in Smarketing against Goliath art Cherwell
- “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”– Tony Robbins
- “Aligning sales & marketing is facilitated by proper objectives and incentives. Scaling growth is about setting the right KPIs, measuring them and reviewing progress regularly.”– Claudia Hoeffner, Vice President of Global Marketing at Feedvisor inSales and Marketing Alignment at Feedvisor
- “There’s a lot of personalization involved in reaching out to senior leaders. This can involve everything from an orchestrated digital campaign with our sales development team and account directors, to in-person experiences these senior leaders are looking for.”– Rebecca Stone, vice president of marketing at LiveRamp inC-Level Engagement at Liveramp
- “The loyalty story trumps everything – because the value of loyal customers is worth more than converting one or two more new prospects. When you are talking to the C-Suite, Customer Experience (CX) is often a ‘top 3’ initiative in many companies, and that’s because they recognize the value of loyalty, and personalization is often the most related or applicable method of improving CX. So when buyers are at this level, it is usually not about an ROI calculator but, rather, about satisfying an initiative driven from the board-level.”– Andy Zimmerman, Chief Marketing Officer at Evergage inMachine Learning and Personalization at Evergage
- “AI is becoming a key aspect of all businesses and especially marketing. Being able to understand your users, to predict what they are likely to do when they are likely to do it, and what content they are likely to engage with next. AI is the only way to do this efficiently and at scale.”– Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President at Oracle Marketing Cloud inThe Future is Now at Oracle Marketing Cloud
- “We don’t want to get deals rushed because if we don’t get the right champion or sponsor if we don’t clear the security review, or if procurement is looking askew, it could jeopardize the sales process.”– Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach in Pioneering a Market Category at Outreach in Pioneering a Market Category at Outreach – the Importance of Economics
- “By using data to divide the ideal targets and tailor it to a few pillars, it’s much more scalable because we’ve got groupings now, it matches the data to what the marketing team’s doing. Then you need to build an engagement strategy where there is an automated marketing reaction to every action a buyer makes.”– Dawn Colossi, CMO at FocusVision in Deeply Understanding Customers at Focus Vision in Deeply Understanding Customers at Focus Vision
- “Tell a story. And more importantly, relate that story back to your ideal prospect’s problems or desires. Even if the story focuses on the founding, evolution, or growth of your company, make sure people understand that all of those great things happened because of the value you provide your audience, customers, and clients.”– Brian Clark, Founder and CEO, Copyblogger Media
- “This whole marketing world probably started around 150 generations ago when people were sitting around campfires and painting drawings on cave walls in order to tell stories and share experiences. That’s all marketing is, story-telling, about how you overcame something, a challenge, a situation or a problem solved.”– Peter Ross, Vice President of Marketing at Actifio
- “The market has changed and we are no longer as reliant on the big face to face sale. We need to reach customers in a much more digital kind of way – creating digital journey assets and engaging with customers digitally. We are constantly experimenting with technology to better learn what marketing campaigns or messages are the most effective.”– Rosie Pongracz, CMO for Data Science and Machine Learning for IBM Hybrid Cloud
Decision makers these days distrust marketing claims that aren’t backed up by thought leadership. In fact, they will remove companies from consideration if they don’t see a strong thought leadership presence.
It’s time to make thought leadership a priority so that you can begin to position yourself and your brand as a trusted advisor for potential customers and earn their trust and advocacy.
