Tweet A couple of weeks ago, I presented an American Marketing Association webcast , “ The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content” (a replay of the webcast is posted below). These questions hit on key challenges in lead nurturing today. hope the answers will help you solve specific challenges in defining qualified leads, nurturing them, and aligning your sales and marketing teams. How to define a lead. Q: What if salespeople have differing opinions about what a lead is? Map out the process. MORE >>

Tweet A couple of weeks ago, I presented the webinar, “ Optimizing the Lead: A data-driven optimization process that goes beyond lead capture.” ” Lead optimization is the core of revenue optimization – making as much money as possible from your time, energy and resources. Learn more about the importance of data: “ B2B Marketing: Building a quality list.” ” If someone signs up for a free trial of your product, does that automatically make them a lead? Can lead nurturing work without sales management buying in? MORE >>

Fifteen years ago I worked for a B2B marketing agency that had an outbound call center focused on lead generation.  We were quite successful in developing these programs for our clients and the leads were graded based on the answer to the BANT questions.  We are smack in the middle of marketing 2.0, a more “modern” way of marketing that makes BANT no longer effective for several reasons. If this is the case, one has to wonder why many organizations (especially sales people) still want to include BANT as part of their early stage lead qualification criteria?  MORE >>

More and more B2B marketers are turning to lead scoring as a way of optimizing lead management. Many of us will remember when we used to process raw Excel lists, handing over hundreds of names with job titles and companies to our sales department, only to find that leads weren’t being followed up on. It wasn’t possible to know which leads were the most interested in your company, and wasn’t easy to see which matched your target buyer. Recent advances in marketing automation and sales CRM software have made it easier to streamline the whole process. MORE >>

This is apparently not enough to make marketers and sales professionals embrace change and develop a formal lead generation strategy, considering that 75% of marketers still don’t have a formal lead generation process or guidelines according to  MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report. If you’ve been feeling the pain of producing lead quality and quantity but don’t know what to do about it, keep reading. universal lead definition (ULD) clarifies what a lead is to everyone in your organization. This tells me they either. MORE >>