B2B Lead Blog

Watch our latest B2B Lead Roundtable webinar for a powerful case study on how to execute content marketing strategy in the real world and discover how it can build powerful alignment between sales and marketing.

View webinar replay:

How ECI Telecom Developed a Content-Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results from B2B Lead Roundtable on Vimeo.

View and download slides only here

I met Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Marketing Programs for ECI Telecom, when she served on my panel at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit in January. She had the floor for just 10 minutes to present her company’s content-marketing strategy. But what she had to say, even in that short time, was so rich with actionable takeaways that she definitely deserved more time to share her story.

That’s why I invited her to present at this month’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinar. Michelle candidly revealed what it takes to drive results through content marketing in the real world. She explained why it’s critical to:

• Deeply understand your potential customers, what they want and when they want it, and gain alignment around that from your entire organization.
• Identify each piece of content you have and how it fits into each turn of the buying cycle. She explains why it took four interns 10 months, as well as the input of the entire sales and marketing organization,  to complete that process at ECI.
• Provide information responding to business issues your prospects are facing and why it’s smart to leverage third-party resources they respect to do so.
• Repurpose content if you have limited resources and how to go about it.

Well, I could go on and on, but I recommend that you review the webinar video above, even if you’re not directly involved in content marketing. Here’s why: the process of executing a content marketing program is transforming ECI’s entire marketing and sales organization, making them more aligned and responsive to customers’ needs and each other.

In, literally, the last minute of the webinar, Michelle explained what she considers one of the greatest benefits of her content marketing strategy: sales alignment. Every week, she meets with sales teams worldwide to discuss what marketing is doing.

“It’s critical they understand our activity,” said Michelle, “The emails that were opened, what was sent…showing them the value marketing can provide and aligning our whole process with sales activities.

“This is one of the hardest alignment programs I’ve done, but one of the most beneficial…You can see from the beginning where you generated that lead, how you nurtured that lead, when you passed it to sales, how they accepted it. And now we’re seeing real opportunities that have come as a result of those marketing-sourced leads.”

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Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay

Chances are if it hasn’t happened already, some marketing type is going to ask you to develop a whitepaper, a blog, an article – something that will reveal your professional perspective. And if you’re like most folks you’re not going to be jumping for joy.  In fact, you’ll likely ponder questions like these:

“Why are they asking me? I’m a lousy writer.”

“What have I got to share that anyone else is going to care about anyway?”

“How do I get it down on paper? Writing is really hard work!”

Take heart, everyone thinks that – even professional writers. Ernest Hemingway said it best:

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

But your voice needs to be heard. You can blame that on content marketing.

Essentially, content marketing focuses on sharing information prospects and customers care about
without trying to sell anything.  The premise is that if you give people ideas and insights they can use, without asking anything in return, you’ll be top of mind when they are ready to buy.

As Brian Carroll has said again and again, it’s all about building relationships, and that’s why
content marketing is transforming how we engage our marketplace. One of the foremost challenges for any marketer is identifying what audiences want to know at each stage of the buying cycle and then giving them that. And that’s where you can help fill the gap. You have a perspective no one else possesses and sharing it will add value to your prospects, your customers, your peers and your profession.

To further clarify why it’s important you share your perspective, substitute the words “add value” with “bless.” Your ideas put into words can bless multitudes by helping them make better decisions, drive more opportunities, achieve more success and avoid disasters.

My next posts will reveal tips to make sharing your ideas easier and take the charge out of the writing process. They will look at what you must clarify before you even begin, how to get creative juices flowing, ways to break through writer’s block, why the first draft is never the final and more.

Image by:   ChepeNicoli

Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Webcasts/Webinars

In the free B2B Lead Roundtable webinar replay below, Paul Teshima, Senior Vice President of Customer Strategy and success for Eloqua, explains what revenue performance management is, and how the fastest-growing companies are using it to optimize return on marketing investment and achieve unprecedented competitive differentiation. Hope Frank, Chief Marketing Officer of Webtrends, and her marketing team detail how their company is executing RPM and their outcomes so far.

Watch the webinar replay here:

The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management from B2B Lead Roundtable.

View and download slides on slideshare

Lead Generation, ROI Measurement, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay

Have you had some great marketing successes this year? Then you’ll want to let my colleagues at MarketingSherpa know. They’re compiling their ninth annual MarketingSherpa 2011 Wisdom Report. It shares the best thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and takeaways from marketers in 2010. 

In fact, even if you’ve had disappointments, and are willing to share, they’d like to hear from you as well. After all, failure is often the best teacher.

Tell us, what are some of the best lessons you learned this year?   

Great marketers are always working so diligently to put everything and everyone else in the spotlight. That effort deserves attention. That’s why I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to attain some very positive publicity. 

Share your wisdom here, but you’ve got to do it soon because the deadline’s December 21.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Cold Calling, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Trigger Events, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

Join me for a complimentary live webinar with MarketingSherpa’s Todd Lebo and Jen Doyle on “How to Generate Leads Using Search and Social Media” 

Here’s a chart of how Marketers are currently using Social Media. 

We’re hearing the words “inbound marketing” more and more these days. The idea is simple – your sales team’s pipeline magically fills as prospects seek your company out. Of course, it’s easier said than done. To help generate revenue using search engines and social media sites you’ll learn the following: 

• How to effectively deploy a search and social media campaign 
• Top 5 practices for integrating search and social for lead generation 
• How to optimize for search innovations 
• And much more… 

View the slides “How to Generate Leads Using Search and Social Media”

Lead Generation, Social Media, Webcasts/Webinars

For those of us in marketing and sales, our jobs are even tougher thanks to the busy lives of the decision makers we’re trying to reach. Overwhelmed, impossible deadlines, crazy busy – these are just some of the words today’s decision makers are using to describe their lives at work – and probably outside of work as well.

The biggest hurdle we need to overcome is cutting through the clutter to show the decision makers information that is relevant and that will help them make their lives easier.

That’s why I’ve invited Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and her excellent new book SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers (May 2010) to help us address these issues.

During this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How being super-busy impacts your prospect’s thinking and their expectations of you.
• What factors your prospects use to determine if they’ll continue the conversation or send you to the dreaded “D-Zone” where you’re deleted, delayed or dismissed.
• The four new SNAP Rules for selling as applied to your prospect’s First Decision.
• How to leverage the “mind meld” to increase your success rate significantly.

Watch recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)
Get the slides (no registration required)

Cold Calling, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Webcasts/Webinars

In a recent post I talked about the most important B2B marketing metrics to CEO’s or what I believe CEO’s should be measuring. All too often Marketing is measuring one thing while the CEO’s are asking a question those measurements don’t answer. 

The biggest challenge for marketers is the quality vs. quantity tug-of-war. I think most realize quality leads are what sales wants (and the ones that will close) but the quantity of leads always seems to be top of mind with CEO’s which force marketers switch focus and bring in lots of leads instead of quality leads. What happens next? The CEO doesn’t see revenue (lots of leads don’t equal good leads) and then gets frustrated that marketing isn’t providing any ROI.

So, how do you build a lead generation program that generates quality leads, creates revenue, and meets your CEO’s goals? To answer this question I’ve invited Aaron Ross, CEO of PebbleStorm and the author of “PREDICTABLE REVENUE: Lessons Learned From Growing Salesforce.com’s $1 Billion Sales Machine.”

During the webinar you’ll learn: 

• How to build a lead generation machine that will predictably generate leads month-after-month
• How to ensure sales follows up on every lead
• The two things CEOs care MOST about that you must understand
• A simple 6-step call agenda to help salespeople convert new leads into qualified opportunities

Get the slides (no registration required)

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, ROI Measurement, Webcasts/Webinars

The purpose of B2B marketing and lead generation is to help the sales team sell; however marketers can often get so wrapped up in driving campaign activity they seem to forget it’s about driving sales conversion and helping the sales team achieve better results.

Join me and Jeff Thull, author of Mastering the Complex Sale, Second Edition and President/CEO of Prime Resource Group, for a complimentary webinar where you’ll learn how to help sales:

• Establish relevancy, credibility and trust
• Receive executive sponsorship and privileged access to the organization
• Build and prove the financial case for your solution
• Ensure the solution is prominently on the executive’s dashboard
• Win more predictable and profitable sales

Watch recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)

Related post:
Going beyond the sales lead

Books, Current Affairs, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Webcasts/Webinars

As I’ve written before, when dealing with the complex sale, most people aren’t coming to your website to buy; they’re coming to your site for information. And people are hesitant about giving up too much info on forms before you’ve earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? How much information are you asking for before you’ve earned their trust?

I’ve invited Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MECLABS Group (parent company of MarketingExperiments, InTouch and MarketingSherpa), to show us how to optimize our web forms to increase conversion of that traffic. 

During this complimentary webinar, Dr. McGlaughlin will be performing live optimizations and providing specific advice on improving your online lead generation efforts. You can check out this short video of Dr. McGlaughlin speaking on optimizing email responses.

Watch Online Lead Generation Webinar: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads

View recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Sales Leads, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars

Cold calling. Feel a shiver move up your spine?

Too bad. It’s a shame that you, like many others, choose to dismiss cold calling as a lead generation tool (there’s that shiver again). I’m not saying that its reputation hasn’t been earned.  I just think everybody is going about it all wrong.

I love this analogy from Mike Schultz, Publisher of RainToday.com:

Fail at something enough, and it’s easy to dismiss the whole tactic. (No matter how many times I try, I just can’t hit a Jonathan Papelbon fastball. Swinging a bat at a baseball must not work!)

Cold calling works…you’ve probably just never been shown the right way to do it.

If you’re interested in exploring how you can improve your teleprospecting, or if you just aren’t convinced it can work for you, check out B2B Lead Gen Roundtable’s next complimentary webinar featuring Josiane Feignon. She’s author of Smart Selling on the Phone and Online as well as the founder and CEO of TeleSmart Communications.  Josiane provides consulting and coaching for Fortune 1000 companies, and she knows what it takes to find the power buyers.

Join us for this live webinar on “How to Improve Lead Generation with Prospecting 2.0.” Josiane is going to show you her latest ideas on prospecting 2.0 including email and voice mail trends and how to outline a winning qualification criteria and more. As a bonus, Josiane will be giving away copies of Smart Selling on the Phone Online to three attendees. I hope you can join us!

View recorded webinar now and download the slides here

You may just warm up to the idea of cold calling when you understand how to use it properly.

Read more…

Cold Calling, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Webcasts/Webinars