Most B2B organizations already know that mobile technology can have a significant impact on sales enablement. According to a recent Aberdeen Research study, however, mobility now plays a critical role in separating best-in-class field sales teams from their competitors.

The Aberdeen study – Sales Mobility: How Best-in-Class Remote Sellers Are Replacing "See" With "Do" – found that 40% of the best-in-class (BIC) companies surveyed said their sales reps regularly use mobile devices during client meetings. As a result, these reps are able to support their client-engagement activities with real-time access to the web and to corporate data.

A recent survey of chief marketing officers (CMOs) offers a mixed bag of predictions for the U.S. economy in general – and for the B2B market in particular.

First, the bad news: According to the Duke University Fuqua School of Business CMO Survey of 528 marketing executives, just 29% said they were optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy. That's down more than 34% percentage points from the previous survey in February, 2012.

The number of respondents who said they were pessimistic about the economy grew from 8.5% in February to 36% in the current survey, taken during July and August 2012.

Brainshark, a provider of online and mobile video presentations, recently announced a partnership with enterprise software vendor Blackboard Inc. The deal will integrate the Brainshark content creation tools with Blackboard Learn for Sales, the company's cloud-based learning management solution.

The Brainshark integration will allow Blackboard Learn for Sales users to add voiceovers, along with video clips, survey and test questions, and document attachments to PowerPoint decks and other attachments. Blackboard Learn for Sales users can use the integrated offering to create interactive online and mobile video presentations for corporate e-learning courses.

Marketing automation vendor Act-On Software, yesterday announced a new partner program titled Act-On Partner Exchange (APEX). The APEX program is designed to bring together Act-On customers and partners. The new offering provides is a new resource for its customers from diverse vertical marketing that can help enhance their online marketing, while offering its partners access to innovative companies.

"We've already seen an exponential increase in customers working with APEX partners," said Shawn Naggiar, Chief Revenue Officer, Act-On Software. "APEX has been designed to be a simple and effective program that encourages partners to easily join the Act-On ecosystem, and for customers to find products and services to optimize their marketing investment."

According to a recent Corporate Education Board (CEB) report, marketers still struggle to use data effectively when making business decisions. In fact, most marketers heavily rely on gut instinct, intuition and past experiences, which causes disconnects between what the data tells marketers and what they assume to be true based on their own intuition and experiences.

The result, according to the report, is a tendency towards “bad decision making and wasted resources.”

It's no secret that marketing automation is a high-growth industry. Yet it's also clear that many B2B marketers struggle to achieve the ROI they expected to get from their marketing automation investments: According to an often-cited 2011 Focus Research study, half of all companies say they haven't realized the full value of their marketing automation investments.

What separates the successful marketing automation users from the pack? According to many experts, it often boils down to a matter of timing – or, rather, of cadence.

"Cadence is commonly confused with frequency" in marketing campaigns, said Jessica Meher, Head of Enterprise Marketing at HubSpot. "Frequency is simply how many times emails are sent, whereas cadence is the 'pattern' of email – it includes the number of emails sent, the spacing between emails, the content sent, and the audience receiving the email."