Why have I spent the last months writing about Breakthrough marketing?  Isn't there enough written about content marketing and marketing automation?  Can we really transform Enterprise go to market and sales?  Are we just talking about features and benefits?  Well my answers are yes but, yes for sure and no we are not!

Figure 1: The Three Stages of Breakthrough Marketing

Today's buyer is information overloaded, bandwidth constrained and fiercely independent.  A recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board reported that 57% of the new B2B sales cycle is DONE before the buyer's first formal contact to the selected vendor.  Understanding that simple fact requires a radical rethink of go to market strategies and tactics across sales and marketing.  Those who react, can see dramatic increases in Marketing ROI and significant compression of sales pipelines.  This can drop real dollars into the bottom line. 

There are three stages to moving to Breakthrough marketing, depicted in Figure 1.

In my experience, 90% of organizations are mucked and mired in the first stage, slugging out a content marketing battle based on features and benefits.   This is shown in Figure 2.  Viewpoint is diverged from the customer, Value is the usual and Velocity is low.

Figure 2: Stagnant, Content and Benefit Centric Marketing

In order to get to the next level of impact, we must get our Viewpoint and Value aligned with our buyer's view of the world.  We must create a Viewpoint that converges on the biggest business changes impacting our customer and the most disruptive response that out solution delivers in response to those changes.  (Read more about Viewpoint here) Once we do that, we can then go on to articulating unique Value that is differentiated, meaningful and aligned with our Viewpoint.    This state of Viewpoint and Value alignment get us to stage 2, driving significant impact in our in market communications, creating ROI and reducing sales cycles.  (Read about Value and tilting the playing field with Viewpoint here) This is seen graphically in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Converged Viewpoint and Unique Value Creates Impact

However, if we can then drive to higher levels of Engagement and Experience as discussed here, we can move our marketing execution from low to high Velocity, we create Breakthrough as shown in Figure 4.  (Read more about Engagement, Experience and Velocity here.) Breakthrough Marketing can be seen when we have high levels of unique and compelling value communicated in high velocity, engaging and experiential ways.

Figure 4: Increasing Velocity with Engagement and Experience Creates Breakthrough

(Where are you on the Breakthrough Marketing Evolution?  Want to learn more?  I'll be discussing The Breakthrough Marketing framework and Game-plan in detail on my free SIIA April 18th webinar, and driving Velocity with attendees at my May 8th Workshop at All About The Cloud in San Francisco.  Hope to see you there!)

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