B2B marketing lives or dies based on your value proposition. To truly stand out, you need to frame this question on three different levels: the prospect level, where you address the needs of the buyer; the product level, where you differentiate what you’re selling; and the process level, where you make clear the value of going through the process, be it a click or a purchase. Almost self-explanatory, but worth repeating – like any piece of marketing, you’ll want to test various value proposition examples. Nevertheless, it’s often neglected. Frame the Question. Share email. MORE >>

B2B Lead Generation | Buying stuff is easy – fixing problems is hard. And every Friday we do a fun B2B marketing show called Laugh and Learn – teaching a key marketing lesson using wit and humor. SaaS marketing products like Marketo , Hubspot , Eloqua and the like are very, very easy to buy. Unfortunately, there’s no “Wonder Herb&# in B2B lead generation and marketing either. Want to hear what it’s really like to buy marketing automation? So sales will get fewer, better leads.). We hope you enjoy it. MORE >>

Are you a client of Eloqua ? You bought a great marketing automation platform from a great company. But we equate this marketing automation platform as a Ferrari – and since you’re in a race with your competitors, you need a fast car like a Ferrari. Take a look at what marketing automation expert,  David Raab found: “Our studies have shown that careful planning makes all the difference in the speed and success of marketing automation deployments.  Our Marketing Automation Acceleration Package for Eloqua is exactly what the doctor ordered. MORE >>

recently called on a client and he described his vision of lead generation as “frosting and cherries.” His view is that the current state of lead generation is dead.  Salespeople in the “Internet world” have relied on leads from marketing which are neither good nor productive.  In his opinion, salespeople need to do a 180 and get back to the basics of generating their own leads.  Any leads from marketing would just be a bonus (and hence the frosting and cherries analogy). The Demise of Lead Generation. Steps to Improved Lead Generation. MORE >>

I wrote last week about the difficulty of linking marketing leads to sales results. One reason the topic was on my mind is I’m also thinking a lot these days about lead scoring. The practical use of lead scoring is to decide which leads to pass from marketing automation to sales, or, even more pragmatically, to predict which leads will be accepted by sales.* But the ultimate goal is to identify the leads most likely to generate revenue. For all the reasons I discussed last week, that lead-to-revenue connection is hard to make. MORE >>