What does this company value? Tweet The precursor of change is always pain. For most of us over the past four years, our marketplace has inflicted varying levels of it as we have slogged through the most challenging economic climate since the Great Depression. This is apparently not enough to make marketers and sales professionals embrace change and develop a formal lead generation strategy, considering that 75% of marketers still don’t have a formal lead generation process or guidelines according to  MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report. This tells me they either. MORE >>

That changed when the computer company realized 4,000 conversations about the brand were happening online every single day and the company was not present. Here are the free tools Margetic advised using immediately to hear the social media conversations impacting your business: Google Alerts : Whenever your company or your industry is mentioned online, Google will notify you. Twitter search : Type in your company name, keywords or industry to find out what people are saying in real time. 'Tweet Five years ago, Dell had little presence on social media. MORE >>

That’s the word from three experts in B2B PR and marketing: Wendy Marx, president of Marx Communications , a B2B public relations firm; she blogs about B2B communications for Fast Company. Laura Sturaitis, Executive Vice President of Media Services and Product Strategy, Business Wire , a press release distribution company. Is it easy for reporters to find the information they need, such as biographies, downloadable photos or essential company information? are you going to be able to easily find the company address or how the CEO’s name is spelled?”. Is it logical? MORE >>

We help companies find their passion and purpose.”. This site has the solution your company is looking for.”. 'Tweet This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana – Boston, Mass. for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013. After a short (and rather scenic) water taxi ride from the airport, I’ve settled into one of the Value Proposition Development Course sessions being led by Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, as he taught marketers how to craft and express value propositions. What is a value proposition? MORE >>

But, if I’m a VP of Sales, I’ll be really peeved if you lose to ‘no decision,’ because you probably wasted my time as well as a lot of resources around the company in terms of getting help from manufacturing, customer support and finance — all to get to the point where nothing happened.”. But, we were recently talking with a Sales VP from a database company, and I asked him to tell me about their CRM System. Dickie insists that when companies take the WORN approach, they are throwing away a goldmine. That’s more than one in every four deals! No deal = broken sales cycle. MORE >>