'My guest today is Michael Brenner, Vice President of Marketing and Content Strategy at SAP and Managing Editor for the SAP Business Innovation site. At SAP, Michael’s challenge is to transform social business and content marketing to reduce cost-per-acquisition of new customers. Michael is also the author of B2BMarketingInsider.com , where he discusses content marketing, demand generation, mobile strategy, and sales alignment to name a few. It’s the aim of marketing to assist salespeople and the aim of sales is to enable buyers to buy. Sales is Still Important. MORE >>

Jim is Managing Partner at CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking how companies are leveraging people, process, and technology to optimize the way they market to, sell to, and service customers. Jim has over 29 years of sales and marketing management experience. In this interview, Jim highlights the problems between sales and marketing departments and necessary changes to improve communication and increase close rates. This makes a more successful marketing campaign. If a company has a marketing 2.0 'My guest today is Jim Dickie. MORE >>

'I''m pleased to have as my guest today Jamie Turner, CEO and Founder of The 60 Second Marketer, an organization that provides tools, tips and tutorials on the newest techniques in marketing. He is a regular guest on CNN and HLN on the subject of marketing and social media and is an internationally-recognized keynote speaker for corporations, events and trade shows around the globe. Jamie was recently profiled in Advertising and Promotion , the world''s best-selling college-level marketing textbook. In his experience sales and marketing typically leads the economy. MORE >>

Let’s now turn our attention to the characteristics the right marketing metrics should have and then use those characteristics to clearly identify the marketing KPIs needed to correctly measure lead value in B2B lead generation. While cost-per-lead measurement has been the only game in town for longer than we care to remember, we are seeing radical and positive shifts in how marketing is evaluating qualified leads. Marketing KPIs are moving from top-of-the-funnel expense metrics to deeper-in-the-funnel actionable indicators like pipeline deals. Cost-Per-Lead. MORE >>

I had the great the opportunity to interview Lori Wizdo , B2B marketing analyst at Forrester Research. Lori is a senior analyst with extensive marketing, sales, and operation experience in the information systems and software industries. In our discussion, Lori shared key insights into the B2B buyer's journey as well as marketing and sales alignment. Although calling this an urban legend might be too strong, in the marketing zeitgeist, this said a lot. In many companies, particularly larger companies, there's a total disconnect between marketing and sales. MORE >>