The Future of B2B Sales: A Digital-First Approach

Gartner defines the ‘future of sales’ as the permanent transformation of organizations’ sales strategies, processes and allocation of resources, moving from a seller-centric to a buyer-centric orientation and shifting from analog sales processes to hyper-automated, digital-first engagement with customers. 

via Gartner

How Savvy B2B Buyers Raised the Bar for Vendors

“In the future of buying, the buying process transforms from seller-led to buyer-led. The future B2B buyer will expect buying experiences to be increasingly open, connected, intuitive, and immediate:” B2B channel marketing leaders must anticipate and plan for buyers’ evolving expectations.

via Sirius Decisions

Major B2B Buyer’s Journey Ends in the C-Suite

“88 percent of CEOs at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues say they are more involved in major investment decisions than they were before — 63 percent of whom qualify their involvement as “far more” than in previous years.”

via Chief Executive

Agile IT Procurement Strategies for Digital Transformation

Just 45% of IT and Line of Business (LOB) executives believe their procurement organizations understand new transformational technologies and their related delivery models. Only 46% of IT/LOB leaders believe that procurement understands their business needs.

via IDC

Buyer Enablement: Digital Transformation Evolution

“The IT Infrastructure market has changed. The buying process within the typical large enterprise has evolved — it’s more complex, due to the numerous decision-makers involved in the process.”

via Digital Polymath

How Business Technology Purchasing Evolved in 2019

At Cisco’s Partner Summit in 2019, CEO Chuck Robbins said something that while apparent, does showcase the reality that the nature of the IT buyer is changing. “Never has technology been more important to customers and never have they cared less about the details of that technology.” – Chuck Robbins

via IT Connection

Digital Transformation Raises the Bar on Procurement

Digital transformation can enable typical procurement organizations to reduce their process costs by 30 percent, bringing them to cost levels slightly below those of world-class procurement organizations. World-class procurement organizations can reduce process costs by 22 percent.

via The Hackett Group

No More Dummies: B2B Buyers Make the Case for Better Talent

“The digital marketer that won’t invest the time and effort to become capable of contributing to content strategy and development is going to be of limited value. Savvy buyers expect meaningful and substantive content, and they can’t get that from marketers that outsource their jobs to agencies who have little client industry subject matter expertise.”

Source: Forrester Blogs

Why IT Testing Workloads will Migrate to Public Cloud Services

The services market is aflutter with the coming impact of migrating work from legacy IT environments to cloud environments. Twenty-five to 30 percent of capacity in legacy environments today is utilized for testing, making it ideal as the first workload in services to migrate to cloud.

Source: Everest Group

Why Open Cloud Infrastructure Options are Highly Valued

As more companies choose to shift some of their IT platforms to cloud computing infrastructure, they seek information and guidance that will help them to evaluate the vendor leaders in the market. In particular, CIOs and enterprise Line of Business leaders want open architectures for their Hybrid IT scenarios.

Source: Digital Lifescapes