Growth Driver Growth Driver

What makes or breaks a B2B growth strategy? The pivotal roles of understanding your ideal customer, aligning your product to their needs, and crafting positioning and messaging that not only attracts but wins and retains those very customers. This trifecta can significantly reduce missed revenue, minimize wasted go-to-market spend, and alleviate professional suffering. 
But these elements cannot merely exist in theory, confined to a PowerPoint presentation or trapped in the mind of a single visionary. They demand to be operationalized, brought to life in the day-to-day of any B2B organization. We sat down with April Dunford, a widely recognized expert in B2B positioning and messaging, to discuss the details of how to actually do this. 
Throughout our conversation, April emphasized the importance of not just developing strong positioning and messaging, but of integrating these elements into every facet of your operation. This means moving beyond the conceptual phase and ensuring that your strategic positioning and messaging are reflected in how your product is marketed, sold, and supported. With experts like April Dunford, there's no doubt that the path to more effective positioning and messaging—and, by extension, more successful B2B marketing—is becoming clearer for us all.
April Dunford is the world's foremost authority on product positioning. As a consultant, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. Boasting an impressive 25-year career as a VP Marketing at various rapidly developing technology firms, she has collaborated with hundreds of growing technology companies such as Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others. April is also the acclaimed author of the best-selling book, "Obviously Awesome," which delves into the art of positioning and the future sales classic, "Sales Pitch," which unveils the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market. 

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Conflict can have a positive impact on your organization when it’s handled with the right approach and language. When leaders leverage purposeful actions early on and establish a strong foundation of trust, they’re able to leverage difficult situations as growth opportunities for their organizations. 
It starts by prioritizing deliberate leadership, and equipping yourself with the right tools to ensure intention matches the impact of our actions and sets our teams up for success. From self-awareness to actively engaging in constructive conflict, there are critical steps leaders must consciously take to move from lazy leadership to deliberate leadership–which is what today’s conversation is all about. 
Join us as we sit down with Julie Holunga, an expert in deliberate leadership who has helped over eight thousand professionals and teams stop practicing Lazy Leadership by developing trust, communicating more effectively, and actively engaging in constructive conflict. 
Julie Holunga develops professionals to amplify their influence and impact. She works with teams and leaders to instill her Trusted Voice Paradigm to increase effective communications, make conflict constructive, and develop leaders who lead with integrity. Through these programs, leaders get out of their own way, develop trusting relationships with key stakeholders, and positively impact the organization's bottom line. Her expertise lies within professional services: law, accounting, and investment firms, with a specialization in the careers of female leaders. Check out her TEDx talk on the power of leadership language!

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In the race towards modernizing go-to-market strategies, B2B firms often lose sight of what truly propels growth–the customer. If you've nodded in agreement to buyers’ behavior shifts, the tangle of tech consolidation to drive efficiency, and the explosion of new GTM motions; it’s time to pause. Amidst all this talk and transformation, our customers seem to have been forgotten. 
Customer obsession is more than a mantra; it's a strategy that infuses customers into the lifeblood of leadership and operations. We’re bringing the concept of 'customer obsession' into the limelight, directly from the start reality sourced from Forrester Research. 
Join us as we sit down with John Arnold, Principal Analyst at Forrester, as we strip down this buzzword to its core and construct an actionable blueprint tailored for the ever changing landscape that is B2B growth.
John Arnold is a Principal Analyst at Forrester, helping B2B organizations grow revenue with marketing strategies for a digital-first world. He is an expert in frontline marketing strategies and the co-creator of Forrester's lifecycle revenue marketing approach. John has been a published marketing author since 2007 and began his career building marketing education programs at Constant Contact (IPO in 2007) and the Mobile Marketing Association. John was also on the advisory board at Wildfire (acquired by Google in 2012). John's marketing leadership roles include product marketing and sales enablement at Return Path (acquired by Validity), account-based marketing (ABM) strategy and consulting at Demandbase, and vice president of marketing at FullContact.

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The way today's B2B buyers are actually buying has changed dramatically in the last few years, leaving many B2B companies with out of date and out of sync go-to-market strategies. The good news is we finally have the research and data-back behavior insights to update GTM strategies with the modern B2B buyer. 
We know the modern buying journey is done almost entirely online, but did you know most buyers are already 70% through their decision-making process by the time they talk with any vendor reps? And when buyers do initiate contact—which they do 83% of the time—they're likely reaching out to the vendor that has already won in their minds.
We’re going to anchor today’s episode in some of the best research about B2B buying available today, and we’re going to do it with a true expert–Kerry Cunningham. 
Kerry Cunningham is a research director, analyst, and thought leader with over 25 years of experience in all aspects of B2B. He’s authored numerous B2B frameworks including the latest versions of the Revenue Waterfall model. Most recently at 6sense, Kerry leads research and insights, including the just-released B2B Buyer Experience Report.  
Check out the report from Kerry: https://6sense.com/blog/new-buyer-experience-report-3-insights-and-a-warning/
Other articles mentioned in this episode:
https://intelligentdemand.com/resources/sirius-decisions-new-demand-unit-waterfall/
https://www.forrester.com/b2b-marketing/b2b-revenue-waterfall-guide/

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Before the pivot into efficient growth, and even before AI, the field of B2B sales has been seriously transformed in the last few years. B2B buying behavior has shifted, away from meeting with sellers and toward anonymity. There has been an unprecedented rise of different GTM motions; account-based, product-led growth, customer-led growth, partner ecosystems… And to top it all off, we’re experiencing an absolute explosion in technology, data, and now generative AI. 
Despite all of this upheaval and innovation in B2B, sales and marketing teams still have to deliver growth, and efficiently. The era of siloed heroics is coming to a close, and smart leaders are leveraging alignment to keep up with the demands of efficient growth. 
Join guest Dan Gottlieb for a deep-dive conversation with co-host John Common about the vital trends reshaping B2B and how sales and marketing leaders can foster a culture of resilience amid constant change. 
Dan Gottlieb is a Senior Director Analyst at Garter for Sales Leaders. He covers a range of topics, from generative AI for B2B sales to RevOps data automations, to conversation and revenue intelligence. He describes the current state of the market in a single word: mayhem. Prior to Gartner, Dan was a Senior Analyst leading research in the sales practice at TOPO. 

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Stories of ascent and success don't get more compelling than those penned in the high-stakes environment of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). We’re taking an honest look at the path to becoming a B2B CMO, followed by a deep discussion about what it takes to be successful as you enter the role and make the right impact.
This episode is tailor made for 3 types of folks:
1. You want to become a CMO
2. You’re currently a CMO and feeling some version of imposter syndrome
3. You’re a head of sales or a CEO who’s ready to uplevel alignment at your company
If you fit into any of those categories, grab a cup of coffee and a pencil–consider this episode your map to navigating the path of leadership, strategy, and success as a marketing leader in a B2B context.
We’re diving into the gravity-of becoming a CMO with Aaron Ballew, PhD engineer turned marketer and CMO at Split.io. Aaron has been the CMO at Split.Io for just over 2 years. He came to Split from Ping Identity where he was VP of Demand. Before that, he held senior roles in demand gen, portfolio marketing, segment strategy. Interestingly, Aaron started out in engineering–with a PhD. He has the shortest LinkedIn about section we’ve ever seen: Real data with a human touch.

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