This cold, hard reality: that hot leads will only ever be a subset of the total universe of potential prospects – means that feeding sales a constant stream of qualified leads requires a demand generation strategy that focuses on 1) reaching potential customers at every stage of the selling cycle, and then 2) employing systematic lead nurturing to move those prospects towards sales-readiness. In an ideal world, all B2B sales leads would be pre-qualified and ready to buy. In theory, anyway. Because our agency works primarily with high-tech companies, we see this kind of pressure often. MORE >>

She has a lot to say about how B2B companies need to adapt better to the reality of how their customers buy products and services. Most B2B companies will readily acknowledge how much the Web has transformed the way they market their product or service, most visibly in the form of vehicles like search, content marketing, social media, and lead management. Fewer companies, however, can claim to have adapted their sales process as readily. HS) What’s different about the B2B selling process compared to say, 5 or 10 years ago? Vendors leveraged that knowledge gap. Fast forward to today. MORE >>

d) often overlooked as an effective way to reach customers and prospects. Customer Marketing. Pop Quiz! Direct Mail is: a) more expensive than email. b) quaintly old-fashioned. c) regaining popularity in B2B circles. Answer: (e) all of the above. Yet many B2B marketers continue to be allergic to the idea of using direct mail, simply because it seems such a throwback in our mobile-social-online era. Old fashioned, yes, but used smartly and effectively, direct mail can play a vital role in a well-rounded, integrated marketing plan. Lead Nurturing. Target Account Programs. Most do. MORE >>

The clients we work with are concerned with more basic, day-to-day issues: enhancing sales productivity, converting more inquiries to sales-ready leads (or trial users to paying customers), better leveraging their marketing database, and increasing demand generation ROI. Earlier this week, Marketo , the marketing automation company, held its second ever user conference in San Francisco. It’s all heady stuff. Based on first-hand impressions, however, it’s not how the vast majority of clients are employing (or even thinking of) marketing automation. Think you have enough content? Email? MORE >>

Optify’s customers are primarily small- to mid-size companies.). The data contained in the report were extracted by analyzing more than 62 million Website visits, 215 million page views, and 350,000 leads from more than 600 Optify customers. You see a lot of so-called “benchmark reports” in B2B marketing circles, and most of them are, well: complete rubbish. The reason many of these reports are worthless, in my view, is that they’re based on non-randomized surveys, and thus the results are influenced heavily by who chooses to respond. MORE >>