In the spirit of Twitter’s Follow Friday I’d like to finally publish the remaining Demand Generation blogs that I enjoy reading. Earlier I published the Top 10 Demand Generation vendor blogs and the Top 10 Marketing Automation Blogs. Of course, there were many great blogs that I forgot to include, so here are the remaining ones! B2B Marketing Zone. This is more of a meta-blog, aggregating a large number of B2B blogs, including this blog. I’ve discovered several new and interesting blogs on the B2B Marketing Zone, so highly recommended. DemandGen Report. Net-Results blog. MORE >>

Talk to someone about Marketing Automation and one of the first topics that comes up is Lead Scoring. Lead Scoring is the process of assigning a numeric score to leads to indicate lead quality. That seems to be something magical: rather than having to manually sift through hundreds of leads, a sales rep can simply look at the lead score to pick the promising ones. However, it’s quite a challenge to summarize the complex behavior of a buyer into a single number, so let’s zoom in on the mechanics of lead scoring. Why Do You Need Lead Scoring? How Do You Create This Score? MORE >>

At Savvy B2B Marketing, we thrive on different perspectives and new ideas, which is why we are thrilled to welcome today's guest blogger, Casey HIbbard, also known as the queen of case studies. In her blog - Stories that Sell - Casey shares success-story marketing best practices. More fantastic guests are planned for the weeks ahead, so stay tuned. Customer case studies are high-value, in-demand marketing and sales collateral. Marketing teams are tasked with producing powerful stories, yet it’s not always easy. The same questions come up again and again. How do we get measurable results? MORE >>

This is what real ROI looks like. Except if you're in Canada. Then it would be red, blue and purple. Canada money rocks. Do NOT skip over this article -- It might just save your reputation, your credibility and your career! ROI (Return on Investment) seems to be THE social media marketing topic right now -- How do we make money on this darn stuff? There are hundreds of articles on SM and ROI. So why am I writing yet another one? Because almost all of them have it WRONG. Let me illustrate our problem through the headlines of three articles posted in the past two days. Forget ROI. Greenbacks. MORE >>

I was thinking about all the lead qualification criteria I’ve seen used in B2B lead generation programs and started listing them by category. Here’s what I came up with so far: Firmographics (Industry, company size, location). Demographics (Contact’s title, job function). Contactability (Phone number, email address). Action taken (Attended webinar, downloaded whitepaper, requested pricing, spent time on certain Web pages). Need for your product or service. Fit (Your products or services meet or exceed their technical, performance, reliability requirements). MORE >>