Welcome to What We're Reading, a weekly rundown of news stories, marketing columns, and specific B2B industry news that caught our eye.

Alibaba enters the U.S. B2B arena

International retailer Alibaba has opened its platform to U.S. vendors, targeting B2B businesses that want to expand into the global virtual market. According to HomeWorld Business, the platform now competes with Amazon for that big, B2B slice of the e-commerce pie.

For lead gen, email marketing is still the reigning champ

With all the fancy new marketing tech threatening to dethrone traditional methods, it’s easy to forget about email outreach. Think Marketing explains why email marketing should stay top of mind for those who want top-notch leads.

Go beyond ROI with these marketing reports

As much as we’d like to skirt around it, a big part of marketing is proving the value of your work. According to the Pardot blog, these three reports focus on different metrics to demonstrate how value goes beyond ROI.

Ask prospects these open-ended questions

Let’s take a break from our usual programming to share a few sales tips from Hubspot. Familiarity with these sales questions can help marketers, too: for instance, when you’re writing a chatbot to encourage and qualify leads from your company website.