The Thomas Blog

Don’t Play Hide and Seek With Buyers: The B2B Buying Cycle, Part 2

How do you search for information when you already have a general idea of what you need? Often, you go right to a niche source rather than conducting a web search. For example, if you’re looking for a book, you head to Amazon. Need yesterday’s basketball scores? Right to ESPN.com. Many industrial buyers get started the same way.

Impacting Prospects Before the Sales Funnel: The B2B Buying Cycle, Part 1

Last week, we took a bird’s-eye view of the entire B2B buying cycle, and how you can impact each stage of it. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to zoom in on each step of the way to a sale, and take a closer look at the strategies that can work best for you in reaching buyers.

Impact Your Prospects at Every Stage of the Buying Cycle

Content marketing is a great tool for reaching your prospects at every stage of the buying cycle — it’s a benefit we’ve revisited time and again.

This week, let’s take a closer look at that B2B industrial buying cycle — and the marketing tools that are best suited to making an impression at each step of the way.

2 Things to Help You Better Measure Your Digital Marketing’s ROI

Digital marketing tactics—including social media, online display ads, e-mail marketing, and your company website—have many things in common. The most obvious is that their effectiveness is trackable and measurable.

However, many marketing professionals get lost measuring "clicks," "likes" and "visits." Unfortunately, while these are valid metrics of interaction, they do not always equate to return on investment (ROI).

2 Tools That Can Help You Retain Customers

Many articles on this blog focus on building business, targeting new customers and reaching new markets. But customer retention is just as critical to your business's success. The best way to help maintain your current customers is to offer good customer service.

How to Make the Best First Impression in B2B Industrial Sales

We all know that first impressions matter — B2B sales are no exception.

Having sales personnel that are well groomed, well-spoken and well prepared for meetings with buyers is one way to help ensure a good first impression. Another way requires understanding where many first impressions take place, and what buyers will be expecting when they meet you.

What is Your Sales Strategy Missing?

You've set your objectives, determined the steps required to get there, and analyzed your market to figure out the best sales channels to use (face-to-face, telesales, direct mail, etc.). There is still one critical element to your sales strategy that you may have overlooked.

Marketing ROI: A Tip, a Trick and a Challenge

It is more important than ever today for marketing professionals to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for their marketing efforts. But the ability to determine a clear ROI for marketing continues to elude many companies. While there is no single solution to getting more out of your marketing, there are some marketing methods that are both more effective and easier to measure the effectiveness of. What follows is one tip, one trick, and one challenge that all marketers should be aware of that should help boost their marketing ROI.

Your Secret Weapon to Influencing Decision Makers throughout the Buying Process

The industrial buying process can be long and complex, often with numerous decision makers involved. Constraints with time and resources increase complications in the buying process. This is further aggravated by efforts to reduce risk. Two recent Industrial Purchasing Barometer (IPB) surveys, conducted by Thomas Industrial Network, dive deeper into the minds of industrial buyers and decision makers and provide insight into what suppliers can do to better understand the buying cycle and help close more sales.