Editor's Pick
Most B2B Buying Decisions Actually Happen in the ‘Dark Funnel’
Today's B2B buyers don't identify themselves to suppliers until they're well down the road to making a decision. Marketing professionals must take on more of a sales capacity in the sense that they are now charged with building credibility, demonstrating value and helping stakeholders justify decisions internally, long before initial contact.
How to Break the Linear Sales Cycle and Accelerate Deal Velocity
When go-to-market (GTM) teams operate in silos, they treat deal closing like a linear relay race, resulting in disconnected practices that stall momentum and buyer trust. To improve win rates, leaders must operate as one team, building a unified view of the customer, strengthening handoffs and enabling cross-functional creativity.
4 Strategic Shifts to Break the B2B Marketing Resource Cycle
Marketing should deliver bottom-line results, and when marketers and decision-makers speak the same language, they can better know the goal and whether the current marketing mix is reaching it.
We’re Ruining LinkedIn. Here’s How to Fix It.
If we want LinkedIn content to matter, we must be willing write with a voice that is recognizably human and an argument that is recognizably ours.
Join the SMM Connect Community
Be part of a community of over 40,000 sales and marketing professionals. Get immediate access to hundreds of live and recorded training sessions, ebooks and resources.
New Focus Report: Why Donald Trump Doesn’t Lead Effectively
Many Americans voted for the billionaire president because they felt he had savvy business skills that would translate well to leading the country. In truth, he breaks many long-held, widely accepted tenets of effective leadership.
How AI-Driven Personalization Is Reshaping B2B Sales Conversions
Agentic AI tools are now capable of orchestrating and delivering hyper-personalized journeys across the entire sales funnel – if teams can deploy and apply them effectively. Here’s how.
Stop Optimizing Channels. Start Managing a Marketing Portfolio.
As AI continues to reshape engagement environments, marketing leaders can no longer rely on static campaign structures or isolated performance metrics. Success will belong to organizations that treat platforms as investments, journeys as outcomes, and channels as flexible capabilities deployed in service of those outcomes.
Why AI Makes the Strategic Salesperson More Indispensable Than Ever
Sales in the AI era will remove order takers and identify a high-value class of reps who possess deep business empathy and intellectual curiosity - the ones who aren't just making the most cold outreaches, but who are adept at providing the confidence buyers need to move forward.
Agentic AI Isn’t Ready for Marketing. Your Operating Model Still Needs to Be.
Treating AI assistants as agents inflates expectations and causes pilot programs to fail to deliver meaningful performance gains at scale. The challenge for CMOs is not simply deciding whether to adopt agentic AI. It is determining how to adopt it without damaging marketing’s credibility and performance in the process.
