B2B Lead Blog

On the way home from the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit, I caught up with one of our clinic coaches, Craig Mullenbach.  A Program Manager for MECLABS, Craig used his decade-plus years of experience in lead-generation and content strategy to help attendees at the event. But he often felt like his hands were tied.

He voiced his frustration to me: “Nearly everyone I talked to said that they knew all of the best practices but can’t execute them because they don’t have executive support – and the budgets that come with it.”

I feel his pain. Unfortunately, as much as I wish I could write a blog titled “The Three Easy Steps to Convince Your CEO to Say ‘Yes,’” it’s just not that simple.  After all, no organization has the same politics and culture.

Attaining executive buy-in and the support that comes with it too often requires intense financial, organizational and behavioral analysis. But I do have some at-a-glance, high-level advice that will point you in the direction to get to that “yes.”

#1. Identify executive priorities – I realize not every marketer can hold court with the CEO, but, at minimum, you need to understand and speak the CEO’s language. They could care less about clicks or responses. They want:

• More leads
• More revenue
• Shorter time to revenue
• Improved marketing-to-sales expense

Show how your ideas can definitively improve the CEO’s top and bottom lines. Identify what’s in it for them, and keenly focus on that.

#2. Analyze your sales organization - Find out how much time the sales team spends on prospecting. A survey for one of our clients revealed that the sales force spent more than 40% of their time trying to generate leads instead of working on closing deals.

How much would 40% of your company’s sales payroll add up to? That would probably more than pay for a generation campaign. Read more about how sales productivity can be turned into a bigger marketing budget:

• How to get funding to improve your lead gen
• Four Steps to Convince CEOs that Lead Generation Should be a Marketing, Not a Sales, Function

#3. Show what others have done - Find case studies that illustrate the success of other companies like yours. They should outline the steps that were taken and financial results. Excellent sources of case studies include:

• MarketingExperiment’s Research Directory
• MarketingSherpa Blog
• MarketingExperiments Blog
• MarketingSherpa’s Newsletters and Handbooks.

#4. Huddle with your sales team – During a huddle, a team looks at their last play – what worked and what didn’t – then uses that information to decide their next move. Do the same with your sales team so you know what you’re doing right and what you can do better, and how your efforts are directly leading to closed deals (or not). In the process, you’ll enhance communication and ultimately, build a broader base of support.

Learn more about the value of huddling in this blog: Closed Loop Feedback: The Missing Lead Generation Huddle, then watch this video where Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs for ECI Telecom, explains how huddles transformed her marketing organization.

#5. Develop a pilot – In this blog, Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot, Dave Green, MECLABS Director of Best Practices, advises to clarify your objective, then build a pilot around low-hanging fruit to achieve it.

Your goal is to get the economic space you need to experiment, test, course-correct, test again, and repeat the best-performing process. For a practical, step-by-step outline on designing a pilot, read this blog: Landing Page Optimization: How to start optimization testing and get executive support.  I think its precepts could apply to virtually any marketing project.

What have you done that convinced the C-suite to give you the support to move forward? What are your success stories and lessons learned? Do you have any additional recommendations? Tell me about them in the comments below.  I’d love to hear what you have to say about this very challenging topic.

Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

I received some news today that leaves me both humbled and honored. OpenView Labs named its top 25 sales influencers for 2012, and I am among them. This is especially meaningful for two reasons.

First, I have tremendous respect for the people who have joined me on this list; I’m in great company. Learn more about them here: Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2012.

Second, OpenView Labs takes a scientific approach to selecting its top influencers. OpenView Labs leverages the Klout True Reach metric to calculate social media influence. They also examined blog activity, and other more traditional content. You can read more about their selection process toward the end of this post here: Marketing Channel Research: How to Design a Prioritization Scheme.

Current Affairs, Inside Sales, Leadership, Sales, Thought Leadership

I can’t stress this enough: when it comes to marketing, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re going to find ourselves left behind faster than ever.

Some people say I’m an expert in B2B lead generation because I wrote a book on it, but you know what? I am astonished by what I didn’t know then compared to what I know today. This past year has been especially illuminating thanks to the brilliance of smart marketers who are expanding and perfecting the lead-generation concepts I wrote about years ago.

This year’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinars are testament to that.

In February, Paul Teshima, SVP of Product Management at Eloqua, set the tone for the webinar year. He defined the tenets of the new world of marketing in Revenue Performance Management. “We’ve seen a problem now where, even though marketing is doing a great job of generating leads, sales still cannot handle the volume and they slip away,” explains Paul. “Some of the leading companies today are really focusing on this idea of managing and bringing marketing sales together, in a more effective way, now that they’ve solved some of the tactical problems.”

Paul explains how here: The Future of Marketing: The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management

In March, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at ECI Telecom, detailed how she executed an ultra-successful content strategy campaign and how that transformed their entire marketing strategy.

“We had to put ourselves in line with our buyers’ journey so we knew how to engage them at the right level,” she points out. “We had to provide value to our prospects, who have never heard of us before, and position ourselves as a company that understands their marketplace and their business issues – a partner as well as an expert.” Learn more here: How ECI Developed an Entire Content Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results

In April, John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, outlined how he streamlined, integrated and automated lead generation for a marketing program for 20 different heavy construction segments for dealers in 125 countries.

“We took online marketing activities, leveraged their analytics and optimized – measure, take action and repeat. It’s a continuous loop that makes the database and the lead-generation process better and better.”

Watch the webinar to find out how John’s efforts are providing customers and prospects the precise information they need to make a smart purchasing decision, and dealers a much more detailed, useful picture of who they’re selling to. And much of this is happening in real time. Learn more here: How CRM Revolutionized Marketing and Lead Generation at Volvo North America

In May, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, and I expounded on the powerful combination of excellent data and the human touch to make the best use of sales time and resources.

According to MarketingSherpa, 80% of marketing leads are lost or discarded because even though someone may have provided basic contact information, they may not be ready to talk to a salesperson. Teleprospecting bridges the gap.

Make sure you’re setting a strong foundation for your campaigns with an accurate list. Brandon revealed the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment that tested how higher cost/high quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The results were astounding – the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was $581 per lead. Learn more here: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads and How One Company Slashed Their Cost Per Lead by More than Half

In June, Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, shared why inbound marketing – a strategy where the prospects find you as opposed to you finding them – is critical, and how integrating social media and SEO drives it.

“Companies with integrated social media and SEO achieve 60% better conversion rates…Search rankings are driven by relevance, relevance enhances an organization’s credibility, and this credibility helps to drive conversion rates,” says Sergio. “It’s an essential ingredient to a B2B marketing program.”

To prove it, Sergio shared five steps that helped an email marketer pull in 70% more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Learn more here: How to Integrate Social Media and SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

In July, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, revealed how companies are leaking significant revenue in their sales and marketing funnels – knowledge gained through analyzing two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. He outlined astonishing facts like 43% of companies don’t even respond to inbound leads! But for those that know how to respond, the opportunities to make the sale grow exponentially – 78% of sales goes to companies that respond first, not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

It’s no wonder that Dave points out that venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments. “They’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies,” he says. For more data that will show you how to speed leads into your sales pipeline, go here: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Find out how:

• Clarifying value proposition helped one company decrease cost-per-acquisition by 66% and multiplied monthly profit four times over
• Re-engaging clients helped one company attain grow its business by 64%
• To quickly and easily choose the best lists
• To time lead-generation activities to attain the highest possible return on investment of resources
• Closed-loop feedback makes sales professionals worship their marketing department

Find out much more here: Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues Part 1 and Part 2

It all came full circle in October, when Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, discussed what more than 1,745 marketing organizations had to say about their lead generation efforts in 2011.

“It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to achieve success, and challenges are growing in pertinence year after year,” she explains. “Perceived effectiveness of tactics is declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to achieve the same results from the same marketing activities.”

She points out, however, that may be due to the fact that marketers still aren’t optimizing their funnels:

• 68% haven’t identified their sales or marketing funnels.
• 61% send leads directly to sales.
• 79% haven’t established lead scoring.
• 65% haven’t nurtured leads.

Learn how to make 2012 a better year here: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures, Challenges into Revenues.

We are in the process of planning our 2012 webinar year. What would you like to know more about? What information would help you generate more leads? How can we help you stay on top of lead-generation innovations? Leave a comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership

I always look forward to the announcement of the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award winners; they’re a great source of inspiration. In fact, just couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the B2B Best in Show Winner’s unexpected email approach grew its subscriber base by millions.

But honestly, I think B2B marketers might be more disillusioned with the power of email, if the feedback from 1,745 marketing organizations in the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report is any indication.  Email marketing remains one of the top three lead-generation tactics, just below websites and SEO.  Yet they claim its effectiveness dropped from 40 to 26 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Maybe this year’s Email Marketing Awards can point to one of the reasons why this is happening. If you look at the list of winners, you will note no one won the top award for innovation.

I asked Adam Sutton about it. He’s a senior reporter for MarketingSherpa. He edits and writes for their email and inbound marketing newsletters, has easily interviewed hundreds of marketers about their email marketing initiatives, and he’s one of the event judges.

“We don’t give out an award unless a company deserves it and an entry really ‘wows’ us,” he confesses.

But he also concedes that impressing the judges is getting tougher every year. “Email is a mature tactic as far as digital marketing goes; the low-hanging fruit is gone and you have to be more creative to reach the fruit that’s higher on the tree,” explains Adam. “But there’s still plenty there – especially when it comes to reaching people through newer technologies like smart phones and tablets. Of course, you want to make sure it’s worth targeting that segment of the marketplace, and you want to make sure you can measure the results. But I think there’s opportunity that companies aren’t taking advantage of.”

But what if your audiences aren’t avid users of iPads or smart phones?  

“I think it’s a running joke here at MarketingSherpa: I’m sold on triggered emails, like confirmation emails and thank you emails,” says Adam. “Triggered emails are marketing for you all of the time. When you’re on vacation, when you’re sleeping, when you’re working on another project, they’re still out there driving business without you having to add any resources.

“I would look for every opportunity to create a triggered-email campaign. Frankly, I’m surprised that I’m not seeing more of these.”

While it may be more challenging to innovate within the larger email industry, Adam thinks the B2B space is wide open if you’re willing to learn from your B2C counterparts.

“Analyze how B2C marketers nurture leads with triggered email, follow-up email, or cross-selling opportunities. Think about how to use those ideas to reach your audience,” he advises. “I’ve learned in my years of writing newsletters that there are very few case studies that aren’t universally applicable. If you think your email efforts are stale, we have hundreds of case studies to give you some fresh ideas.”

Adam points out a number of case study resources:

• Download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report.  
• Subscribe to MarketingSherpa’s free inbound and email-marketing newsletters.
• Have a fresh email campaign that you think is worthy of a case study? Email him at adam.sutton@meclabs.com.

“Tell us what you’re doing, and think about entering the Awards next year,” advises Adam. “Whatever you do, I encourage you to set aside time to contemplate your email program. If it’s not something you’re impressed with, if you consider it more of an expense and a hassle than a performance-driver, strategize a fresh approach and consider getting professional support.”

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

At the B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content at MECLABS, asked me and a few other attendees to reveal our most important “aha” moments in 2011. Our responses are compiled in the video below; hearing what my colleagues had to say produced even more “aha” moments for me, and I’m sure they will for you, too.

In fact, this will be well worth investing nine minutes to watch if you want a serious dose of inspiration and insight. You can also review the timestamps for a quick summary.

:31 – Jason Striker, Digital Marketing Director of ICM Document Solutions, insists that even if an organization says they don’t have the money to make a purchase, they’ll still manage to find a way to buy something if they really want it. “It’s not the economy that’s stopping you from getting sales, it’s your message.”

1:01 – Jay Baer, President of Convince and Convert and Author of The Now Revolution, believes that the path to an organization’s social media success can never be paved by a single expert, “It’s about distributing social media responsibilities across the whole enterprise.”

1:23 – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS, says marketers are finally realizing that optimization is not about “seizing opportunity” it’s about recovering the millions of dollars lost through leaking sales and marketing funnels. “Marketers need to think like plumbers and find the leaks and plug them.”

2:40 – Karen Hayward, CMO and EVP of CenterBeam, believes it’s time for marketers to be accountable for results and has been working diligently with her team throughout 2011 to demonstrate that. “2011 was about … owning our accountability.”

3:19 – Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, says 2011 was a watershed for her. “Everything I thought was true wasn’t.” She went on to explain that written processes are meaningless without real relationships with your sales team. “I learned what alignment really was, and how to align the sales and marketing organization to really create a cohesive group.”

3:57 – Milap Shah, CEO of Nexsales, warns marketers that when it comes to data that drives the lead-generation campaigns, you get what you pay for. “Working with a so-called ’inexpensive’  list could cost firms 2 ½ to 3 times more; it pays to pay more and stay targeted.”

4:37 – I explain how marketing is about building relationships, and how marketing must play a leadership role in transforming companies from the inside so they can transform outside relationships.

5:37 – Kristin Zhivago, President, Zhivago Management Partners and author of Roadmap to Revenue, reveals that over the past few months, buyers are changing the way they purchase. “In the intense scrutiny of the B2B environment, they’re talking to peers first…they don’t want to read websites.” Zhivago explains why: sellers aren’t even close to aligning their websites to how buyers want to buy.

6:37 – Ge Moua, Senior Demand Generation Manager, Unify, says her “aha” moment came when she defined her job as being the liaison between sales and marketing. “For a long time sales and marketing were very siloed … today we’re working together to achieve the same goal.”

7:30 – Tracey DeMay, Marketing Manager, CenterBeam, advises making sure you’re always talking “with” not “at” your customers and meeting them where they’re at. “By the time they reach out to us, they’ve made a decision or they narrowed it down. They’re much farther along in the buying process than before.”

8:12 – Tony Doty, Senior Manager, Research & Strategy, MECLABS, was surprised by how marketing teams in big companies are facing the very same challenges as those in small ones, whether that’s terrible data, poorly tracked metrics, or lack of measurement. “There are huge companies that are just as green as the startups,” he confesses.

What were your biggest “aha” moments this year? I’d love to hear about them, share them in the comments below.

Lead Generation, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Thought Leadership, Uncategorized

How many emails have you sent prospects and customers this week? How many opened them? How many acted on them?

If you’re like most marketers, the answer too often is, “Not enough.”

It’s a hard fact: people are being inundated with so many sales pitches via email that it’s harder than ever to get prospects to not delete your email, no less take action. It’s no wonder that when marketers are obsessively focused on what’s in it for their prospects to open an email, remarkable things happen – like several million new subscribers.

That’s precisely what Citrix attained through a campaign to grow their subscriber base. Typically, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they do things like coming up with a gimmick, giveaway or contest to convince people to sign up. Instead, Citrix decided to leverage their lists to attain new subscribers. They emailed content their existing subscribers valued so much that they eagerly shared it with their colleagues and Citrix made it easy for them to do so. The subscribers’ colleagues appreciated the emails so much that they decided to subscribe too.

The result: an overall email list increase of several million contacts (35%), “which has greatly increased our media spend efficiency. We are generating demand without having to directly pay for the usual media channels like banner ads, Adwords, etc.” explains Baxter Denney, Manager, Database Marketing at CitrixOnline.

It also resulted in receiving the 2012 Email Marketing Awards’ B2B Best in Show. To read the details of how the Citrix email campaign conclusively proved the value of sharing vs. selling download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report. It features more than 100 pages of the industry’s smartest, most-effective innovations, as well as campaign descriptions, sample emails, extensive results metrics and judges’ analyses.

And if you want to learn even more about the most innovative and effective ways marketers are using email to drive more opportunity and revenue, consider attending the next Email Marketing Summit, Feb. 7 – 10, at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To review an agenda go here: 2012 Email Marketing Summit. Receive an extra $500 off registration by entering promotion code 192-ST-1004.

Email Marketing, Social Media

If you’re struggling with managing social media programs in the B2B marketplace, Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe  (pictured at below) has some news for you: Most of your peers are too.

Why is she so certain? As a research manager for MECLABS Conversion Group, Zuzia spent two full days at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit in San Francisco providing one-on-one coaching to some of the nation’s leading B2B marketers. (Read more about who attended here.)  
Here’s what she has to say about her experience.

After my time in San Francisco, I am further convinced
social media is one of the most
challenging channels for B2B marketers to manage. It’s so unpredictable, yet there’s so much pressure surrounding it – everyone feels like they need to be on every social media channel or else. And there’s so many people claiming to be social media experts,  but don’t just blindly follow their advice. You see, I don’t believe anyone can be a true social media guru because there are constantly new ideas, platforms and  methodologies.

In fact, you could make a full-time job out of monitoring the hundreds of social media blogs and attain hundreds of different opinions on what you should be doing with your social media program. It’s no wonder marketers feel overwhelmed. 

So what’s a B2B marketer to do?

•  Know your audience. Where are they gathering online to learn about your product or services? Do they have favorite publications or platforms they turn to for industry information? For instance, an engineer may have a Facebook profile, but is he really on there to learn about the newest technology?

Fact is, you can never know your audience well enough. This was driven home to me when I had the privilege of spending more than an hour in a coaching session with the head of marketing for a European bank. He revealed to me the details of what should have been a highly successful social media campaign targeting a Scandinavian country. His bank invited fans of a super-popular European sport to submit a video depicting their passion for it to the bank’s Facebook page. Winners received prizes like a week’s stay at a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi, meeting a star athlete, cash awards and free gear. They blasted online and national TV advertising everywhere throughout the country. They even had 150,000 page views. But alas, only a handful of people people submitted a video.

He was flummoxed. “What could I have done to make it a success?” he asked me.

There really was nothing he could have done, except understand that his audience was more private than other cultures. Apparently, no matter how passionate they are about a sport, his audience clearly wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of displaying that passion to their entire nation.

• Know what your competitors are doing. Analyze and monitor their social media. Learn from their mistakes and successes. Watch what’s being said, and where, about your company, product or service.
   
• Begin with a blog. Why be on social media if you don’t have anything to say? A blog is the means to provide meaningful information your audience will care about and a vehicle to distribute it to other social media platforms. You don’t need to write all of your own content. You can repurpose relevant content you’ve already created – this could be whitepapers, articles, and news releases. Use one of your public relations professionals or a freelance journalist to interview experts within your organization and write a blog post on their behalf. Use guest bloggers or provide content from a third-party source that’s respected in your field.  
   
• Consistency is critical. Make social media the responsibility of one or two people in the organization to maintain a uniform voice and image across your platforms. However, be sure to encourage as many people as possible within your organization to engage, post comments, promote your posts and spread your message.
   
• Because social media is so unpredictable, test and test some more. Is your audience paying attention and what are they paying attention to? Social media was created so people could engage and interact online, so it’s easy to ask and respond to questions, post polls, and conduct surveys. Don’t miss out on this unprecedented opportunity to identify what your audiences wants to see, read and receive.  

Again, developing, managing and monitoring social media is the bane of too many B2B marketers’ professional lives. It doesn’t have to be.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the newest advice from a social media guru.  Be strategic and selective.

What challenges have you faced launching B2B social media campaigns? How did you handle them? We’d love to know. And, if you want to learn more about how to make social media drive real opportunity for your organization, I strongly recommend you subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Blog which reports the latest from real-world marketers on what works – and what doesn’t – in social media, email marketing, content strategy and more.

Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Weblogs

I am especially looking forward to the next B2B Lead Roundtable webinar. You should be, too, if you’re eager to find out how your peers are responding to today’s marketplace, and how this represents an unprecedented opportunity to drive the highest performance from your marketing efforts.

Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, will reveal key takeaways from this just-released publication, which is based on a survey of marketers from 1,745 B2B organizations.

We weren’t surprised by their responses. However, to call 2011 a tough year is an understatement, to say the least. Respondents admitted that their marketing tactics simply aren’t working like they used to, and reported  as much as a 50% decline in effectiveness for even their most tried-and-true marketing strategies since last year.

However, Jen will reveal how these challenges merely point to abundant opportunity to improve overall marketing strategy. She’ll show you precisely where that opportunity lies by guiding you through a five-step funnel optimization process that will ensure you produce better marketing results next year. I will be joining her, as will Kaci Bower, MarketingSherpa research analyst. Together, the three of us are going to provide takeaways you can begin using now to overcome today’s marketing challenges and set the foundation for higher marketing ROI in 2012.

If you’re eager to transform this year’s pressures into powerful results, watch the webinar replay below.

View Slides on Slideshare

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy, Webcasts/Webinars

Your success hinges on what you accomplish in the time you have, and that is never more true than these last few months of the year as we all race to meet projections, quotas and sales goals.

At our next B2B Lead Roundtable webinar, I will once again be joined by an outstanding in-the-trenches marketer, Pamela Markey, MECLABS Director of Marketing & Brand Strategy. Every day, Pamela is driving opportunity to MECLABS and is all too familiar with the challenges marketers are facing, especially at year’s end.

Together, we’ll continue the conversation we began in our last webinar as we reveal what has helped ourselves, our clients and businesses that have submitted their experiences to MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments, the primary research organizations of MECLABS.

(Missed the first webinar? Watch it here: b2bleadblog.com/part1)

In just 45 minutes, you’re going to learn how to effectively seize the next three months to drive the very best outcomes and begin 2012 from a place of power. Find out:

• How to avoid wasting time on the wrong prospects by directing energies to the ones who will be most likely to buy.
• Identify the best timing and methodology for contacting prospects – how long to persevere and when to call it a day.
• Generate timely feedback from sales on every lead you give them – and why that’s absolutely critical to success.

If you’re eager for a solid finish to 2011, I strongly recommend you attend!

Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales

The graph at right, published in MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Benchmark Report, provides a snapshot of what marketers care about most. And it’s very telling, especially now. As we approach the fourth quarter, I am acutely aware of why marketers believe generating better leads is a higher priority than generating more leads.

In an economy that’s more precarious than ever, there’s simply no room to waste time, budget or resources.  And there is little that is more wasteful, and frustrating, than chasing down leads that will never be customers. It’s no wonder generating a high volume of leads has dropped in priority as sales cycles have become longer – lots of poorly qualified leads can bring a sales cycle to a screeching halt.

Conversely, I have learned how to accelerate your sales cycle to warp drive: fill it with well-qualified leads.

That’s why, during our next two B2B Lead Roundtable webinars, I’ll examine the smartest strategies you can execute right now to attract the highest-qualified leads to your sales funnel and speed them directly to your bottom line – just in time to meet your end-of-year goals. Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues – Part II will be held Tuesday, September 20, at noon EDT, 11 a.m. CDT, and 9 a.m. PDT.

If you’re concerned about how you’re going to meet your sales goals and revenue projections, I strongly encourage you to attend.

Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Webcasts/Webinars