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While testing content is nothing new—in fact, most marketers and agencies perform some sort of testing on creative content before publication—the formalization of such processes has become a priority at many b2b companies.

We've learned that simplicity is the key—easily scanned, brief content, appropriate imagery and a value-based call to action.” For example, after simplifying a registration form for a particular call to action, SAP.com saw a 96% increase in the number of registrations.

“We have to look at what is the downside to SAP in removing a field, such as taking away "industry.' We have industry-specific sales teams, so for each field we take away to get an increased conversion, there is a downside—now we have to do more work on the back end [to learn this information].”

Painful Con­se­quences of the Sta­tus Quo for B2B Marketers Accord­ing to a recent report by For­rester, here are some of the typ­i­cal con­se­quences of tra­di­tional B2B mar­ket­ing, approaches that haven’t responded to the new realities: Only 12% of tech mar­keters say they have a “very strong” rela­tion­ship with their sales coun­ter­parts when it comes to achiev­ing align­ment on sales pipelines, processes for man­ag­ing leads, etc. Half are unable to reach solid agree­ment on basic things like busi­ness targets. No vis­i­bil­ity into what’s going on with the buyer (or buyer com­mit­tee) once the lead moves into the sales pipeline. Chaotic engage­ment with the cus­tomer, siloed com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, incon­sis­tent mes­sages, lost opportunities. Too many tools, too lit­tle inte­gra­tion, too much over­lap, wasted spend.

If you look at the data from the survey, you will see that marketers believe their website is the leading source of leads and that 80% of marketers believe they are NOT maximizing their efforts there.As I like to say:  “you got them into the store (aka website), now what?”  The next step for marketers who are doing the right things with inbound marketing, lead nurturing, and such as optimize conversion when they get them to the website.

I am shocked that in this day and age: 27% have 8 or more fields.

Ardath: In your opinion, what is the biggest reason that B2B websites fail to generate demand?Craig: There are two reasons.The first is the propensity for creating brochureware.   Many websites are still boring, corporate, sterile, etc.  In today’s world, content needs to be arresting and provide buyers with something they actually want to read.  As well, design and usability is very important to the user experience.The second is conversion, plain and simple.  You have to decide what you want your website visitors to do on a particular page, etc.  If it is to register for something, then optimize the experience for the registration.   Most websites are not the great at that.

1 – Attract many, then focus on filtering If your prospects do research online, will they find your company, or your competitor? Mark Roberge, VP Sales from HubSpot argued that you should keep the top of your sales funnel as broad as possible.

#2 – Give all sales people a social media address Scott Holden, Senior Director at Salesforce.com argued that not just companies need to be discoverable, but also individual sales representatives. Social pages are often the first ones to come up in search results.

Scott Holden summarized this as moving from self-promotion to social referrals: “trust me, he is a great lover” and not “I am a great lover”.  I expressed a similar sentiment in my blog earlier this week on Genuine Customer Engagement.

Marketers must produce marketing automation campaigns that are even more personalized, pertinent and timely.

Rather than measuring page views and click rates, marketers are starting to focus on numbers that relate directly to revenue