'by Sylvia Jensen | Tweet this In March EConsultancy held their annual Digital Cream Event in London.  It was a great pleasure for me to be a part of the marketing automation roundtable where I had the chance to hear 30 B2B marketers discuss how they are using, or thinking about using, marketing automation. was very impressed with the participants on the roundtable and the level of discussion. However, I sensed a level of doubt regarding the benefits of marketing automation and I’ve been pondering the reasons why for a couple of months now. MORE >>

'I recently read a post written by Brian Carroll of MECLABS. An excerpt caught my attention as this is a problem I see often. He was discussing a finding in Marketing Sherpa's 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report that found only 15% of marketers reported they have dedicated resources to produce content for each stage of the buying process. Brian's colleague, Daniel Burnstein, shared that he had heard a related story from one of their partners: They, too, wanted to send emails that were relevant and didn’t know. where to begin. Typically, as a matter of rote, they blasted out an. MORE >>

'10 Things Your CEO Needs to Know Now about B2B Demand Generation. love salespeople. Are you one? feel for your suffering and want to help you. But to help you, you have to help me set proper expectations with your company’s leaders. That’s the theme of this post. Why do I feel for struggling salespeople? First and foremost, I carried a bag for over two decades, so I know how your feel. carried a quota. was you. Recent experience bears it out too. What can I do? My prospects are hiding under rocks! ” He begged me for advice, which I gave for free. There ain’t no magic. MORE >>

'At their annual Amplify conference last week, Silverpop unveiled the culmination of a two year project that conveniently matches the Customer Data Platform (CDP) concept I’ve been describing for the past month. While the timing is just coincidental, Silverpop’s Universal Behaviors provide more evidence that a new breed of system is emerging. Silverpop’s new features load customer behaviors from all sources into a central database, match identities to create a unified customer view, and make the resulting information available for real-time, automated interactions across all channels. MORE >>

'By Mars Dorian, {grow} Contributing Columnist. Since my early childhood, there has been a guy in my life that I can’t stand. One day, he beat me up so bad I was crying before the whole Kindergarten. It happened again. And again. When I left Kindergarten, I thought I was never going to see my enemy again. But Lady Luck wanted to play another game with me. Call it twisted destiny, but we ended up in the same high school. Worse, we even ended up in the same class. The war continued. Whenever we met, there was poison in the air, and world views clashed like gigantic Transformers. Maybe, maybe not. MORE >>