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What is the future of buying and selling? How do marketing and sales approach digital native decision-makers? That is the topic of this episode of the Modern Marketing Engine with my guest, Dave Boyce.
Dave is the Chief Strategy Officer, XANT, where he divides his time between corporate development, corporate strategy, and operational strategy. He is also a board member of Forrester Research Inc. since 2017.
This episode was inspired by two articles that Dave published on LinkedIn:
Join us in this conversation to learn why marketers must understand the modern buyer.
What is the future of buying & selling? How should B2B #sales and #marketing approach digital decision-makers? @XANT_AI's @davidjboyce1 reveals it all on the @MMEnginePodcast with host @BernieBorges. #ContentMarketing @MarketMuseCo Click To TweetThe Journey of the Modern Buyer
Both marketers and sellers must be aware of the changes to their buyer personas in the past year.
Today, our buyers are sitting in their living room, the people who are signing purchase orders are at home, almost nobody is at an office. That means that almost everyone involved in the decision process is using digital channels to research potential suppliers.
Dave says the modern buyer is a digital native. That means that:
- They will do independent research online about our products and our competitors
- They don’t like to fill out forms so they will rely on ungated content
- They trust their network and will ask other people for recommendations and experiences
After the steps described above, the buyer is now 60% to 70% of their way towards understanding their options.
“The remaining amount of her journey,” Dave says, “she’s going to have to do collaboratively with the sales team. But her silent partner during that 70% of her journey was our marketing team. Not that they were talking to her, but they were publishing and orchestrating and curating a learning journey that was either easy to use and therefore she really leaned into it or is less easy to use and therefore she learned from our competitor.”
Marketing needs to focus on providing a great experience during the modern buyer’s journey, even if it means ungating content.
Dave says that instead of collecting information through forms, marketers can use technology like intent signals. This technology tracks searches from domains to know when people from certain companies are searching for specific terms related to your solutions. Then it can flag your CRM so you can do outreach to existing contacts from those companies.
The Modern buyers of 2019 are different from the Modern #buyers of today! Wow! I highly recommend listening to this episode of the @MMEnginePodcast with @BernieBorges & guest @davidjboyce1 of @XANT_AI. #SEO @MarketMuseCo Click To TweetThe Modern Seller
In the US, 56% of the B2B sales force were field sellers. But with now remote selling being the norm, those sellers are either out of a job or doing something different.
And the truth is that buyers like the new normal and don’t want to go back to the old field sales model.
“The buyer doesn’t want protracted exchanges with the salesperson,” Dave says. “They don’t want to retreat again from acquiring information digitally. They don’t want us to force them into the conference room to have a stakeholder meeting with a whiteboard. They actually like the way it’s working right now and it’s better for everybody. If we’re honest with ourselves as salespeople, we’re more efficient. If we’re not spending our time navigating airports and trains and cabs and Ubers and instead we’re on the job of selling most of our time. So it’s not going back. We have to figure out how to lean into the future and do it faster than our competition.”
Sales leaders must now focus on modernizing their sales teams with the five modern seller attributes:
- Fast (answering to their messages quickly)
- Always-online (engage the buyer when they want to engage)
- Customer-centric (being empathetic, sympathetic, and helpful)
- Content-rich (adding value with information that is helpful to the buyer)
- Technology-enabled (it’s not just Zoom and LinkedIn but the entire marketing and tech stack, including CRM and sales prospecting tools)
“It’s all about being where the buyer is and being a resource to the buyer,” Dave says.
Don’t miss this episode to hear some great insights from Dave about the role of the modern seller.
Remote selling has become the norm & modern buyers prefer it this way. @davidjboyce1 of @XANT_AI discuss the reality of b2b buying & #selling now and beyond on the @MMEnginePodcast w/ @BernieBorges. #ContentStrategy @MarketMuseCo Click To Tweet
10 thoughts on “15 LinkedIn Profile Optimization Tips to Get Found This 2023”
My LinkedIn account was ranking on the first page for best mommys blog keyword quite a few years back and I didn’t have any idea. While working, I stumbled upon the Analytic section of LinkedIn and saw that most of the visitors are coming from search engine later on I realized that in my profile I’ve used “Mommy’s blog” word a lot of time and that is the reason why it was ranking well on SERP. This is how I came to know about SEO and I was also amazed by the fact that how easy it was to rank for competitive keywords back then. Anyways loved your article and please share more tips on SEO.
Thanks for sharing. The number of times you mention a word or phrase is still a factor for sure.
We love hearing tips as well as questions our reader, so keep them coming!
Should I change keywords overtime based on what’s popular on the internet?
There is a lot of value in this article, especially for those looking to improve their visibility on LinkedIn. My favorite of the fifteen tips shared in this article is number nine. I’ve observed that people with custom profile links, seem to get more attention than those who haven’t customized their LinkedIn profile URL. Interesting article, thank you for taking the time to put it together.
Customizing LinkedIn URLs create more visibility for sure! Thank you, Bret.
I agree with the recommendations, they are a very important part of our strategy on LinkedIn, it can give confidence to potential customers (or leaders when someone is looking for a job).
People shouldn’t underestimate keywords on their LinkedIn profile! This helped potential buyers to find me on LinkedIn more easily when they searched for certain products and/or services. Thanks Viveka!
Thank you for another great blog post. For the alt text and/or naming images, do you mean two to three different keyword phrases as a maximum, like this?
B2B cybersecurity content marketing writer , technical writing cybersecurity content , cybersecurity technical writer , David Geer
Or can you add more keyword phrases than this?
Hey David – I honestly don’t know the efficacy of adding more keywords than that. I would stick with what you have above.
All the information is very helpful which can help us to increase our Profile ranking on LinkedIn. Another big interesting article, this blog is very useful for the Optimization of my LinkedIn profile.
I also get much knowledge from this blog.
thank you keep sharing.