Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 4, 2020

As regular as Halloween and football, this time of year Green Leads usually hears the following questions from both new and existing clients. "Why should we do appointment setting or lead generation during the holiday months? Plus it's Q4, who has time for introductory appointments anyway?". Here are some points to ponder and they are relevant to all marketing pipeline generation programs.

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Smashmouth Marketing

JANUARY 25, 2017

The sales and marketing industry is flooded with events, conferences, web events, you name it. You could make it your full time job just trying to attend every one of them. Last year I was invited to attend the TOPO Summit in San Francisco – the inaugural event from TOPO. I’ve known the founders, Scott Albro and Craig Rosenberg, as clients, industry partners and friends for years.

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Smashmouth Marketing

FEBRUARY 29, 2016

Trish Bertuzzi and I have known each other for quite some time now. We've been on stage together. We've been with clients together. Green Leads' b2b appointment setting team has even been a client of the Bridge Group. My opinion of Trish as a sales development expert is beyond what I could deliver in this article. Just last week I attended her launch party for her new book, The Sales Development Playbook (amazon link) and she fielded a few questions that pointed directly to the underlying theme

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Smashmouth Marketing

JUNE 12, 2013

'Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe (BANT) qualification is scrambled and outdated. Having budget was important in the days of "Our contract is up for renewal next year, we need budget". But with so many new products and technologies flooding us, from evangelical to emerging to faster and better, Budget not only doesn''t exist, many times those with Authority don''t even know they have a Need or that they need it now.

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Smashmouth Marketing

MARCH 31, 2011

Green Leads is pleased to announce that we will be a Gold Sponsor at the SiriusDecisions 2011 Summit--B2B Sales and Marketing: Forging a New Alliance. The event is scheduled May 4-6 at the Fairmont Scottsdale Resort. This event is considered the premiere B2B Sales and Marketing event of the year and if you are into Sales, Marketing, Demand Gen, and any discipline that surrounds it, this is the event to attend.

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Smashmouth Marketing

MARCH 28, 2011

I can’t be at the Sales & Marketing Leadership Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 11, but I encourage you to check it out. The event features keynotes from John Grosshans of SAP Americas and Justin Shriber of Oracle (the latter will be reprising his presentation from the recent Sales 2.0 Conference, which sparked a debate a pretty good debate about the future of predictive analytics and CRM.).

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Smashmouth Marketing

MARCH 10, 2011

There are a lot of great sources for telemarketing and teleprospecting calling tips out there, and just several weeks ago we brought you some great outbound calling tips from the best BDR's our management team has ever worked with. That being said, there are some bad tips out there that need to be put to rest. They just don't work any longer and they're not helping anybody succeed at generating quality b2b leads.

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Smashmouth Marketing

MARCH 1, 2011

You'd think that in today's economy, a steady paycheck would be enough motivation to get the best out of people, right? Not always the case, nor should it be. Part of any manager's role is to make the people around them better. Whether it's mentoring someone to take over your role when you ascend the corporate ladder, or taking a rep with just enough potential under your wing, ultimately, the job of a manager is to improve his or her team.

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Smashmouth Marketing

OCTOBER 11, 2010

This past week at the Inbound Marketing Summit, all the sessions were broadcast live by The Pulse Network. Below is the clip of our session with Chris Brogan on Lead Generation. For the time constrained fans.you can find my contributions at time spots: 4:50, 19:48 and 26:30 ;).

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Smashmouth Marketing

OCTOBER 6, 2010

Today I'm attending New Marketing Lab's Inbound Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro (killer spot for a conference, btw). Highlight of the day is always Chris Brogan's down to earth, almost "stand up" quality talks. He is always insightful, practical, and spot on with his delivery. I thought it would be useful to create a Twitter List of the #IMS10 Speakers.

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Smashmouth Marketing

OCTOBER 3, 2010

As many of you would expect, Green Leads consumes prospect lists at a rate that far exceeds most outbound marketing efforts. With over 30 clients running their appointment setting programs through us, having volumes of accurate contact names is essential to our business. As a result, we've got licenses with Jigsaw , OneSource and NetProspex , and we use LinkedIn and other contact discovery services.

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Smashmouth Marketing

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

pictured left to right: front row: Lisa, Linda, Cheryl, Amie, Stacey (holding Louie), Kathy, Josh, John T. second row: Kerry, Sarah, Gill, Mira, Bill, Gareth, Anna Marie, Mike S., Mike D. (me), Lenny, Levi. third row: Sam, Dawnia, Coleman, John V., Chris. missing: Tim, Ursula, Olivier, Vanessa, Ian and Joe. Some of the folks you see above have been appointment setting for over 10 years.

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Smashmouth Marketing

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010

I was fortunate enough to be asked by Gerhard Gschwandtner , of Selling Power to speak this week at his Sales Leadership Conference in Philadelphia. The highlight of my day was listening to Seth Godin, blogger and author on topics b2b sales and marketing folks devour. One part of Seth's talk was on building a tribe. Not sure I've got the quote verbatim, but basically he was saying "marketers that build tribes of loyal prospects and customers will win.

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Smashmouth Marketing

AUGUST 8, 2010

Sometimes I think George Lucas just didn’t “get it” when he made the Star Wars prequels. You know, the “other” Star Wars movies? He had made the greatest trilogy in the world in Star Wars , The Empire Strikes Back , and Return of the Jedi. For years, with fans clamoring for more movies, Lucas said that either he wasn’t ready to make them or the technology in cinematography just wasn’t ready.

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Smashmouth Marketing

AUGUST 3, 2010

Lead Generation is an "industry" in New England, going back to the early days of the Route 128 Technology Highway. At one point some entrepreneurial soul spun off from one of the big companies, such as Digital or Wang, and there you have it -- an industry was born. Now there are over 1500 third-party lead gen employees in the area, not to mention all the companies that have based their outbound efforts in the area.

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Smashmouth Marketing

JULY 27, 2010

Last month was the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston ( my comments here ). I connected with friends and colleagues with similar desires to increase sales and marketing production with no holds barred. I had the opportunity in Boston to present on the topic of Increasing Productivity Without Increasing Headcount and then participating on a panel discussion on the topic.

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Smashmouth Marketing

JANUARY 7, 2010

Yesterday I was using ConnectAndSell as a training tool and had one of our BDRs (Business Development Reps) live and working a list and three others listening in and critiquing. (This, btw, is one of the many benefits of ConnectAndSell. You can train with 5-10 pitches in an hour versus 1 or 2. You can see the Smashmouth ConnectAndSell product review here.

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Smashmouth Marketing

JANUARY 3, 2010

Just a quick note to everyone who might be spending the next few weeks planning for the new year. Don't take your eye off the ball. January, along with June and October, are the biggest Demand Gen months for Green Leads, and it may be for you as well. Three years of production data shows that on a per-rep basis, January produced 35% more appointment setting and qualified lead generation than the worst month, August.

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Smashmouth Marketing

JUNE 24, 2009

We all know that accelerating a prospect through the educational/discovery phase onward to a selling cycle and then a buying event takes time. Especially today when the buyer defines the sales cycle, not the seller. The typical decision maker is bombarded with marketing contacts each day, yet they are still finding information on their own, they are educating themselves on industry sites, blogs, twitter and your website and emails.

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Smashmouth Marketing

AUGUST 10, 2009

In the Smashmouth Review of Genius.com Part 1 , we focused on Genius Pro. Since then, we've had the opportunity to work with and evaluate Genius Enterprise. The one liner summary: marketing automation and sales enablement with a 2.0 twist. The product is so rich in features that this article alone will not do it justice. It’s always tempting to try to make apples to apples comparisons with other marketing automation vendors, but Genius is different.

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Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 21, 2009

When we started Green Leads we set out to build the perfect Virtual Call Center. We accomplished it, and other than not seeing people face-to-face, the way we work is identical to a traditional call center. We can see people's dials, what CRM records they modify, listen in for training, etc. Of the many benefits, here are but a few: Working from home Distributed resources for disaster recovery (this happened with last year's ice storm) Flexible hours, allowing for a better work/life balance Redu

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Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 10, 2009

We hear this all the time, even from our own reps when they are having a slow week: "December is terrible for lead gen. End of year and the holidays.". True, people have other things on their minds. Some might be closing out the year, but many are willing to help those elves with their heads down making appointments. So I give you these thoughts to consider, and recommend you keep dialing with cheer: Prospects are thinking about next year.

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Leads Lead Marketing Qualified Leads Lead Gen 100

Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 2, 2009

This past week a prospect commented that she wanted to explore a third-party lead gen program because their sales reps were spending too much time prospecting and not selling. She said that if they had enough leads they would be SELLING and CLOSING -- not having to do lead gen. How many sales reps are caught in the prospecting grind and not closing?

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Lead Gen Leads Lead Marketing Qualified Leads 100

Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 29, 2009

I recently was asked to participate in Ambal Balakrishnan's ( @ambal ) ebook, to be published at year'd end and then available from her blog, Connect the Docs. She asked a bunch of B2B marketing experts for their predictions for 2010. Being one of those tweeps who always barks by mid-January that "if I see one more predictions blog article, I'll puke," I chuckled as I sat down to write.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 22, 2009

In the collection of appointment setting techniques I've seen before, I've never seen the one that I fell victim to this week. Interestingly, if Green Leads did this for our clients we would soon be one a B2B Appointment Setting Vendor that had a tainted reputation. The scam : I got an unsolicited calendar invite in my inbox with a bridge number, date and time.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 1, 2008

<-- This recent entry on one of me and my daughter Rebecca's hall of fame sites, the live art project PostSecret , reminded me of a post I've been wanting to write. How do I stay on top of what needs to be done for the company, the house, my family, for? A few years ago I started using the GTD system that became popular as a result of the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 3, 2008

How cool is the latest iPhone TV ad for UrbanSpoon. Free app where you simply shake your iPhone like shaking dice, and it rattles and tumbles like a slot machine and spits out a restaurant. It can use your GPS location and you can refine it by cuisine, neighborhood or price. And then there's Shazam. Hear a song on the radio or on TV, quick, hold up your iPhone and it will identify the song for you.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 10, 2008

I'm on the the flight back from SFO after attending Sales 2.0 conference. It was great to put faces to names of folks I've been colleagues with by phone and email. Even better was to find out that my company is well on it's way to Sales 2.0. As defined by Selling Power , Sales 2.0 is “Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 14, 2008

I happen to enjoy poker tournaments and am a math geek poker player, which is a different breed. Part of winning in poker is understanding the equity of your hand. I'll bypass all the math and explain it in layman's terms. Basically it is the value of your hand as it relates to the investment you have made in it. I believe this applies to demand gen as well.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

Call me a geek, but I'm a gamer. Competitive scrabble being one of them. I've played some live tournaments, not many, but I've got more than 2000 registered tournaments on the Internet Scrabble Club and a tournament rating of 1112 (at the moment). Tonight was a great night with a triple spanning bingo JUBILEE for 123 points. For those of you not familiar, a bingo is when you use all 7 letters and get a 50 point bonus.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

I LOVE reading Lifehacker , Treehugger , Engadget and Wired RSS feeds, but over the years they have migrated from blogs with fantastic posts 8-12 times per day, to massive media sites that publish 30+ posts per day, at least a third of which are drivel. I am currently on a business trip and have not been able to read my feeds for a couple days. It's all baked up.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 26, 2008

Cartoon Credit: Gary Larson.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 28, 2008

Other than general vicinity and locale to your running out of gas, how much marketing does a gas station really need to do. I can see some of the top company branding (Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Sunoco, and Citgo), does anyone really care who they buy gas from? In many cases the only competition that exists is the station across the street. The direction you're traveling on the road may play more to your decision than the brand.

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Smashmouth Marketing

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Having already experimented with outsourcing some database work to India, we thought we should give a try to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. From the FAQ page: "Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient.

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Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 5, 2008

I was with Craig Rosenberg in SFO a couple weeks ago and were having a hot discussion on the economy, marketing, and Thai food. Craig is the author of the blog The Funnelholic and is an expert on b2b lead generation so I decided it would be great to do an impromptu rapid-fire interview with him on his thoughts regarding b2b lead gen and publish it here: Mike: How should marketers adjust to the downturn?

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Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 10, 2008

World Aids Day. Thinking of my Uncle Eddie today. Always laughing, always having fun.passed away on June 3, 1998. He was 51.

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Smashmouth Marketing

DECEMBER 12, 2008

Walking around a networking event the other night I noticed everyone's nametag was just a name (no company). Once around the room I realized this was a great application of the new iPhone LinkedIn app (iTunes App Store: LinkedIn). It is a networking secret weapon. Here's how I used it: Research : As I was mingling, I'd plug in the person's name in the LinkedIn search and find out a little about them.

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