This post involves one of my pet peeves in marketing: the tendency of marketers to spend money and time to generate inquiries and then fail to follow-up (FTFU) on these inquiries.  This failure can be fatal to the success of your sales lead management program. So what are the lessons of this example and how do they apply to B2B marketers who are selling more expensive products and services?  While a phone call is preferable, sometimes a quick personalized email is a good first step, even if that email is generated via auto-response. MORE >>

by Dayna Rothman IDC recently released their 2012 CMO Advisory Service Best Practices Series: Realizing the Vision of the 21st Century Lead Management. The study surveys marketing professionals and demand generation executives at Avaya, CA Technologies, CSC, Datacore, Dell, Fairchild Semiconductor, HP, Juniper Networks,MathWorks, NetApp, PerkinElmer, Rackspace, Red Hat, Taleo, and VMware, to help provide best practices to help marketing professionals examine and refine their lead management practices. This makes marketing and sales more relevant. MORE >>

That’s how Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLabs , kicked off the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 today – and appropriately so. B2B marketing lives or dies based on your value proposition. Almost self-explanatory, but worth repeating – like any piece of marketing, you’ll want to test various value proposition examples. Steps to Defining Your Value Proposition from MarketingSherpa is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing. Nevertheless, it’s often neglected. Frame the Question. Review the Data. MORE >>

As a result, B2B marketers sometimes overlook the professional social media site’s ability to support lead generation and qualification. Part of the reason many B2B marketers overlook LinkedIn’s potential is that they don’t realize the breadth of information available. To help you use this information about when LinkedIn users engage to maximize your lead generation and qualification activities, examine eight common types of content listed below. How have you used LinkedIn content to support your firm’s lead generation and qualification efforts? MORE >>

Lack of clarity and erroneous assumptions about demand generation, lead management and marketing automation are effectively addressed in two recent Software Advice whiteboard videos by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO, Annuitas Group , and Executive Director, Marketing Automation Institute. In part one , Carlos differentiates between demand generation strategies and lead management processes. When these qualified leads start to leak out of the sales funnel, it’s usually because an effective lead management process is missing. MORE >>