Gerhard Gschwandtner showed an updated version of the funnel in the form of a fan, demonstrating how each and every aspect of B2B sales and marketing can now be fully automated with a cloud-based Sales 2.0 From the beginning, Sales 2.0 has promised massive productivity and efficiency gains for Sales and Marketing.  Starting with the Sales 2.0 technology funnel which I first published in “ Sales 2.0 It is remarkable how rich the Sales 2.0 technology arsenal has become in 4 years.  solution. Who won the showdown?  Neither.  Who had the best product. Salesforce, easily.  Oracle, hands down. MORE >>

B2B marketers are still getting their arms around measuring the impact of Social Media. Check out this short on-demand demo showing how a B2B Marketer tracks lead generation from social media. Everyone’s doing it, but few are able to attach hard metrics. Here’s 3 important reasons marketers need to figure out how to track Social Media lead generation : Social Media is not free. Far from it, Social Media takes up lots of time of at least one (if not many) team members and involves the extremely important art and science of content creation. Tweet This! Digg this! MORE >>

Tags: Email Marketing best practices b2b marketing email marketing list segmentation segmentation MORE >>

As reported earlier in the BtoB Genius Marketing Skills study showed less that 50% of B2B marketers were actively engaged in corporate blogging — a number less than we might have expected. I saw this chart when perusing eMarketer. eMarketer’s post of 8/17 validates the earlier assertion and indicates that the BtoB -Genius results might have actually overstated blogging activity. eMarketer research shows that only 34% of companies are currently blogging. While that number is expected to grow to 43% in 2012 it’s still below the 49% shown in our earlier research. MORE >>

In the typical B2B market, it takes a while before a lead is ready to buy. While  CRM systems are not built for marketers , Marketing Automation systems are and you can use the same contacts. But it’s not just a one-time import of your contacts. The two systems should stay in sync at all times, so that updates from the CRM system flow into the Marketing Automation system and vice versa. In this post I’d like to delve a little deeper and look at the seven critical points for integrating CRM with Marketing Automation successfully. Field Mapping. Bidirectional Synchronization. MORE >>