B2B Lead Blog

That’s the word from our own Brian Carroll, who made that proclamation in an interview at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit this week.

Paradoxically, this is why it’s critical to be strategic. He explains there’s a lot of ways to acquire leads, but there’s no determining which ones work best without testing. But what compounds the situation is that marketers don’t have the time or resources to test every potential tactic.

This is why Carroll advises looking at marketing like a portfolio manager looks at a mutual fund. They analyze the financial marketplace. They make choices that balance high risk/high reward with the tried and true to achieve the highest return from their investment portfolio.

To get a complete view of what’s performing in the sales marketplace, Carroll turns to data from MarketingSherpa’s Benchmark Reports. He analyzes what’s working – and what’s not – for other marketers and makes informed decision about which tactics would best complete his marketing portfolio. 

Beyond that, it’s all about building relationships with people. “That’s what we really need to do instead of expecting to drive conversion from a single event or email,” he explains and throws in another analogy, “You don’t ask someone to get married on the first date…the relationship you’re looking to start with customers is built over time with trust.”

He expands on how to make that happen: 

“You need to identify the right people in the right companies. Initiate a memorable dialog that answers ‘yes’ to the questions ‘Is this relevant to me and my needs or my coworker’s or colleagues?’ And then  nurture that dialog with a potential customer on an ongoing basis…If you’re doing these three things effectively, you’re doing lead generation well.”

Take five minutes to watch Brian’s interview here:

This video has been produced in cooperation with GetResponse Email Marketing. See more at: http://www.getresponse.com/promo/emailtv

Related resources

Top Takeaways for Small Business from Email Summit 2012

Email Summit: Mobile marketing panel on the complex sale

Email Summit: Testing, timing and format elements in follow-up email

Email Summit 2012: Meeting email marketing challenges

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy

In his most recent post, Dave Green pointed out how marketers invest most of their budget on trade shows even though it ranks fourth in effectiveness. He went on to explain how to get a better return on your trade-show investment through lead scoring.

Now I’m going to share nine tactics that will drive those lead scores – and your ROI – even higher:

Do thorough research. Find out which attendees fit your Universal Lead Definition. If you have access to the registration list, analyze it. Look up registrants on LinkedIn. Develop a list of targets you want to seek out during the event. Research the sponsors, too. They should all be on the event website. There may be ways to join forces with them to reach your audience.

Leverage social media before, during and after the event. Connect with attendees and build your profile before the event through your blog and updates on Twitter and LinkedIn. Tweet relevant content during the event. Invite customer feedback afterward. There’s so much more than can be addressed in this post, so I advise looking online for more great ideas.

Creatively partner with event organizers. If you’re holding an educational or social event, brainstorm with them to see how they can help you attract more and better attendees. This could be everything from sending pre-event emails to including information in registration packages. Negotiate support before signing contracts to minimize costs and maximize opportunity.

Get involved with the event. Don’t just be a statue at a booth. Try to attend a few sessions, switch off with your team members to sit with attendees at lunch and engage on a personal level. It will help you build relationships and you will be able to strike up more relevant conversations if you just sat through the same keynote. Best of all, the conference will be more fun and you’ll learn a lot more.

Provide value, not trinkets. People attend events to gain knowledge and share it with their teams. Time is always tight as they try to take care of work back at the office while absorbing as much information as they can. That’s why you must always think about what’s in it for them to engage with your brand. Provide what they really can use: resources to drive their business to the next level – whether that’s a strategic piece of content, a tool or an opportunity to network with their peers.

Focus only on those who have expressed genuine interest. Trade shows often reward people if they visit as many booths as possible. At too many events, I’ve witnessed sales professionals requiring attendees to sit through a 10-minute presentation to “prove” they’ve visited the booth, when the attendees clearly don’t care about their product.

Are they interested? Take note. At minimum, jot your name and notes about their issues on their business card, and assign one person to collect and enter information into your database for follow up. Include the solution they’re interested in, the issue they’re trying to resolve, other contacts they’ve had with your organization, and any qualitative intel that will help the person following up – such as “launching a new website in Q2” or “unhappy with solution X.”

Promptly and professionally follow up. Before the event even begins, be ready to follow up. Prepare a brief, customizable email template to send out immediately afterward. It can come directly from the sales professional who spoke with the prospect, or it could reference the conversation and any key information you were able to capture. If the prospect doesn’t respond, follow up with a thoughtfully scripted phone call where you position yourself as a resource they can turn to when they are ready to talk. Don’t stalk and don’t be pushy, but do be responsive and close the loop. And be absolutely sure that only one person is doing the follow up. (This is why it’s critical to work from a single database.)

Track and measure the results. After the follow-up emails have been sent and calls have been made, note how many are still in your marketing and sales funnels, and how many deals closed. Monitor this throughout the year to determine whether the trade show is worth investing in the next time.

Do you have additional ideas on how to make the most of your tradeshow investments? I’d love to hear about them. Share them in the comments below.

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, ROI Measurement, Sales Leads, Social Media

In the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, 1,745 marketing organizations revealed that trade shows took up the biggest chunk of their marketing budget – over 21%. Yet, they only ranked fourth in marketing effectiveness, under websites, SEOs, and emails.

I suspect that part of the ROI problem may be due to improper prioritization. Smart marketers apply some type of lead scoring to leads generated from website, SEO, and email initiatives. They need to do the same with trade shows. I recommend ranking trade show leads using the point-system outlined below – the higher the ranking, the hotter the lead.

1. Trade-show registration lists. While useful to build your marketing database for lead nurturing, a trade-show registration list is the least-qualified lead source because some aren’t remotely interested in your solution. In fact, they may not have attended the trade show at all. If the trade show closely aligns with one of your solution offerings, then the quality of these kinds of leads will be better. The more broad based the trade-show appeal, the less aligned it will be with your product/service categories and target market, so the conversion rate will be lower.

2. Those who attend a widely publicized trade-show social event sponsored by your organization. Obviously, such events give you time to engage prospects and customers in a more relaxed atmosphere. At times, however, these social events are so large that many of those in attendance never speak to anyone from your team. If that’s the case, the overall conversion rate of attendees is unlikely to be very high. Still, there’s an indication of awareness and interest in your company.

3. Booth visitors. Make sure their reasons for stopping by aren’t for merely collecting a tchotchke or fulfilling a requirement to win a prize.

4. Those who attend a special public event. Often, marketers will create an event within their booth in which someone presents to a small group. There’s typically one-way communication, not a conversation. Depending on the nature of the presentation, this indicates a relatively early stage in the buying cycle. The buyer enjoys a level of anonymity while gathering information to determine whether the solution warrants a conversation. These attendees generally have a deeper level of engagement than someone who stops by your booth to window shop.

5. Those who attend a learning event. These events can be executive roundtables or seminars held during the trade show. You can specifically target the audience and their attendance indicates significant interest.

6. Those who interact with a team member. This group is obviously more qualified than a booth visitor. The challenge is capturing this information. One way is with radio-frequency identification which tracks visitors’ movement. It can tell who stopped by, where they specifically stopped and for how long.

7. Those who attend a one-on-one meeting. Trade shows can be great places to meet individually with key decision makers in target accounts.

This type of trade-show lead scoring can supplement your larger lead-scoring model that includes information like the title, industry and organization size, or the number of responses from the prospect’s company over time.

Most importantly, it can help you determine, as you sort through the massive amounts of leads that trade shows generate, who is most worthy of your attention.

Image: AAPEX Shows

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Sales Leads

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

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

In my post earlier this week, I outlined the challenge presented by SiriusDecisions’ Demand Waterfall taxonomy, specifically with the phrase “Marketing-Qualified Leads” (MQLs). Another problematic phrase is “sales-accepted leads.”

Often, funnels leak the most during the handoff between sales and marketing. Invariably, marketing blames sales and sales blames marketing. A lack of clarity around the term “sales-accepted lead” is the real culprit.

Marketing doesn’t need sales to “accept” the leads. Marketing needs sales to confirm whether the lead met the Universal Lead Definition that was agreed to between sales and marketing. This is a yes/no answer. Sales people should be able to tell on the first sales call, whether by phone or in person, if the lead met the criteria they set with marketing. If the lead didn’t meet the criteria, then marketing needs to know why. There are usually just a handful of reasons.

Such feedback need not wait until the lead is converted to an opportunity weeks or maybe months later. Instead, marketing can take immediate actions to improve lead-qualification practices. And sales leadership can identify sales people who do not understand the agreed-upon criteria, which can lead to an improvement in the Universal Lead Definition.

That’s why I like the phrase “sales-validated leads.” That’s what sales should be doing: validating whether the lead is really a lead, per the definition agreed to by sales and marketing. For most marketing organizations, this small change in funnel focus can make a huge difference in plugging funnel leaks.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your comments. At MECLABS, we don’t want to “own” the funnel taxonomy. We want to create a new, universal language that is useful for everyone and share our knowledge freely. That objective is best accomplished through a community effort via social media. So please, share this post with other funnel mavens and share your opinion. Together, we can create a new, more useful set of funnel definitions.

Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership

I just got back from this year’s round of MarketingSherpa B2B Summits in Boston and San Francisco, where I provided one-on-one coaching to attendees, marketers from Fortune 500 organizations, leading private companies, and emerging businesses. (You can read more about who attended here.)

Frankly, I don’t know who walks away more enlightened – the marketers I was coaching or me. Every year, I receive a personal introduction to the struggles they’re facing every day. And even though the latest MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report essentially reported that it’s tougher than ever to be a marketer, you really can’t grasp how challenging it is until you’re working one-on-one with someone who is essentially a lone ranger for marketing within a large, complex organization.

Here’s what I learned during my coaching sessions this year: to advance in this economy, the C-suite absolutely must recognize the value of marketers and marketing. As part of that, they must give them the time and resources to set the foundation for best-in-class lead generation efforts. Especially considering that, year after year, attaining the highest quantity and quality of leads consistently remains marketers’ highest priority – just check out the graph at right.

Unfortunately, after too many coaching sessions with marketers who had neither the time nor resources to set strategy, I suspect too many CEOs think that most of what they learned in the marketing 101 course they took decades ago still applies today. The reality is (forgive me for preaching to the choir) is that marketing has been transformed in the past ten, even five, years! In fact, as with most everything these days, change is the only constant and you better keep up, or else. You can thank the cut-throat economy for that.

Revenues are scarce. So smart organizations are scrutinizing how they’re spending every penny of their resources. They want to make sure their highest-compensated sales professionals are spending their time closing the biggest deals they can, not qualifying leads or prospecting. They know that’s marketing must lead the way in ensuring this happens, so they allow their marketing organizations the time and resources to set the foundation to do so effectively and efficiently.

Their CEOs establish the directive for marketing to develop:

• A Universal Lead Definition (ULD) that prioritizes and defines the degree of a lead’s sales readiness, and requires the input and buy-in of both the sales and marketing teams. Learn more about creating ULDs here: Lead Generation Checklist: Universal Lead Definition.

• An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that uses the unique attributes of prime customers to prescreen potential opportunities. ICPs identify decision makers and key influencers, and ultimately serve as the basis for defining a sales-ready lead. Learn more about developing an ICP here: Lead Generation Checklist: Ideal Customer Profile.

• Accurate, manageable data that details the contact information of prospects who fit the ULD and ICP. Learn how data can make or break your marketing efforts here: Do You Expect Your Inside Sales Team to Practice Alchemy? And here’s a webinar replay that examines the power of data: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads.

• A defined marketing and sales funnel that spells out specifically when a lead should be passed along to sales, or sent back to marketing for further nurturing until they are ready to move forward in the buying process. Read more about that here: Four Reasons why Funnels are a Marketer’s Best Friend. Or watch our most recent B2B Lead Roundtable webinar: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures into Revenue.

• A clear, concise value proposition. Read more here: Why a Value Proposition Makes Marketing Good.

Unfortunately, very few marketers I spoke with in Boston or San Francisco had the executive support to set this foundation for  marketing success. So it became challenging to provide advice that would lead to sustainable, long-term optimization. Nonetheless, we had plenty of “ah-ha” movements. But those quick wins were often centered on strategy designed to circumvent or overcome a flawed foundation. This felt like the equivalent of telling someone what color to paint the walls on a building with a crumbling infrastructure. After all, you can have the perfect messaging, but if that message is going to a list that’s filled with inaccurate data and contacts, or doesn’t include those who are most likely to buy, you’re wasting time, energy and money.

So what did I tell those marketers?

For the most part, I advised them to do what they could with what they have.

• Even without executive support, marketing can document the state of their current lead management process; and they should do so immediately. Without precisely knowing what’s happening with leads right now , marketers can’t identify the greatest bottlenecks or areas for improvement. But they can’t make any assumptions. This mean they need to meet with their sales and marketing leaders, along with their practitioners. Only then will marketers have a clear understand of the current state of affairs. By the way, getting all of the stakeholders together to agree on the issues and prioritize solutions is the perfect start to a funnel optimization process.

• Even without executive support, marketing usually owns the data. They can make sure it’s up to date and free of duplications. They can quarantine new data before it’s entered into the system to ensure its accuracy and make sure they’re valid leads. They can analyze and clean their lists to ensure that messages are targeted to those who are most likely to buy.

• Even without executive support, they can analyze their existing customers to create an ICP.

• Even without executive support, they can build a content library. They don’t need to be great writers; they just have to understand their value proposition and personas, and then repurpose existing content or identify third-party content that fit both. That’s not as overwhelming as starting from scratch.

• Even without executive support, marketing can demonstrate their value to sales through only sending them qualified leads. If marketing delivers a great “product,” sales will want more.

When sales begins noticing that they’re closing more deals faster, they’re going to be eager to collaborate, revenues will grow, and leadership will fully realize the value and power of marketing. After all, businesses that thrive in the new economy will be the ones that give marketing the time and resources to set the strategies upon which successful campaigns are built.

Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

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

The temptation to buy data at pennies per contact – especially when you have limited resources – can be overwhelming.

But whatever you do, you must resist.

In the short video below, taken at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit in Boston, Brian Carroll explains why.

Did you find this valuable? If so, remember, this is merely one of 60,000 minutes of revenue-driving information that is unveiled at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit. There’s obviously a lot more where this came from and, even better, there’s still time to discover it all. Just register for the San Francisco summit, October 24 and 25.

Human Touch, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Uncategorized

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