I sat down with various folks on the Eloqua Customer Success team to hear their experiences on what it took to build out a highly successful lead scoring system. Jocelyn Brown ( @jocebrown ), Chad Horenfeldt ( @chadhorenfeldt ), and Adrian Chang ( @adrianchang ) are the folks who help clients with implementing lead scoring at organizations of various sizes and within a variety of industries, so they have the experience to know what it takes to achieve success. Tags: lead nurturing Lead scoring sales handoff sales and marketing alignment B2B Marketing MORE >>

hope you enjoy some of this week’s highlights as much as I did Laura Ramos (B2B Marketing Posts) published her long awaited, and very well thought out Lead Management Market Overview. If you are thinking about an investment in marketing automation or lead management, this guide is well worth reading. link] Brian Carroll (B2B Lead Generation blog) , as part of his series on lead generation, talks about developing and intensifying your ideal customer profile – mostly based around pains you can solve for them, and their motivations, rather than demographics or firmographics. MORE >>

This has lead to an unprecedented variety of options for marketers to choose from, and the range of options can be dizzying. Ten questions to ask your team, your services partner, or your software vendor, in order to highlight key questions, process issues, and areas of concern: 1) How will we define a qualified lead for sales? Having sales buy in to your definition is crucial, but reaching agreement between marketing and sales on the definition of a qualified lead is not as easy as it seems. How are leads routed to sales? How quickly do leads need to get to sales? MORE >>

Whether it is segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, lead routing, or marketing analysis, if you don’t have clean and consistent data, your efforts will be built on the shakiest of foundations. In many marketing databases, key fields may be only 30% or less complete, which leads to challenges in using those fields for marketing efforts. Again, this is an area to ask tough questions in if you are looking at making an investment in lead management software as it makes a significant difference to your success. Data is key to all your marketing efforts. MORE >>

These are the main search terms that would ideally lead prospective buyers to your web properties. One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. Each insight allows you to guide investments in a way that maximizes their effectiveness in driving your revenue performance. Are you Being Discovered? An increased investment in content creation may be warranted. MORE >>