Look at what is not working, scale up what is – that is what the agile, smart startup looks to do.

Investments in your startup are followed closely by marketing in terms of the vital areas that require your focus, writes Steven Shattuck for Techpoint.

Consider what channels produce customers. Avoid wasting many

All startups dream of having the billions of Uber, the wildly successful business model of Airbnb, or the popularity of Snapchat. But the overwhelming majority of tech startups must persevere to make sure their product or service makes it to market, whether solo or by taking a partner corporation along.

We all know that working in a group can help us move our goals forward, but sometimes not without pain. Keeping everyone on a team on the same track can be a perilous challenge.

No one knows all there is to know about everything. Some people are experts in certain fields or about specific topics, and they may know more than virtually everyone else. In some instances, they may know special details that are unknown to everyone else.

In 2013, Forrester Research conducted a survey on website habits and found that 96 percent of all visitors to a website moved on without taking whatever action the marketer wanted them to take. If you are a B2B marketer, that bounce rate can cause you more than a few moments of anxiety, particularly if you rely on inbound traffic for sales or leads. You may have looked at the statistics and wished that you had a second chance to engage the customer — and that is exactly what you can get with remarketing.

Social media marketing has become an integral part of B2B marketing strategy. And all us B2B marketers have had our fair share of struggles to get it off the ground.

Pitching a new idea to an untapped market is no small task, especially for startup companies with little or no brand power. These “disruptive innovations” have the power to change the landscape of the existing market, but to do that, you have to create the demand necessary to bring your product into the public eye.

When IBM pioneered a method of qualifying sales leads based on Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline — commonly known as BANT qualification — the world was a very different place. These were the days before the Internet and before potential customers could conduct extensive research on their own. Any customer wanting information on your goods or services had to work through your sales department. Either your sales staff made rounds and called on likely candidates or your telemarketing department did a bit of pre-screening before handing leads off to sales. Occasionally, a potential client would call in response to a print ad or flyer. In short, virtually all sales leads were generated by outbound sales methods that involved your company pushing its message to possible buyers.

Outbound marketing still has its place, but the digital age has shifted the "balance of power." Today, the emphasis is on inbound marketing, which is essentially getting the customer to contact you. Sales funnels are no longer straight, logical progressions that can be managed in a linear manner, so you might have little information regarding just where a buyer is in his journey when he calls you for the first time.

This makes BANT qualification process unwieldy when used as it was originally designed.