For example, a customer in the early stages of the buying cycle might want to read articles and white papers, while someone who is closer to making a purchasing decision is more likely to request sales literature or product demos. Marketing automation is becoming a vital tool in today’s B2B space, as more marketers need to gain a better understanding of their customers’ buying cycles and increase their ROI from every campaign. Here are five things you shouldn’t expect marketing automation software to do: Model how your buyers buy. Define buyer personas. MORE >>

Are there multiple product lines that need to be scored separately? Are there overlays for strategic accounts, specific product lines, or geographies we need to take into account when routing leads? The market for marketing automation software is doing very well these days. This has lead to an unprecedented variety of options for marketers to choose from, and the range of options can be dizzying. While many of the discussions can focus on software and feature/function comparisons, this is only one element of success. What mistakes can be avoided? How are leads routed to sales? MORE >>

Second, a comparison of your relative strength between long tail search phrases with and without your brand name (ie, “Sourcefire intrusion detection products” vs. “intrusion detection system comparison”) provides an understanding of whether the buyers discovering you tend to be more at an education stage (understanding the category) or have moved more into the discovery stage and are looking to better understand your specific products. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. MORE >>

Last week we made the pricing for Eloqua’s software product packages public on our website for the first time: The starting prices range from $1450 to $10,000 per month, depending on the level selected. A lot of what I write on this blog has to do with the changes that have happened as a result of buyers’ increasing access to information. Often, these changes are looked at from a general perspective. Today, I want to look a very specific example of how this overall market transition affected us at Eloqua. Just hearing this likely makes everyone who has ever been a field sales rep cringe. MORE >>

You don’t build products, write code, design architectures, or fix bugs. 2) Selling without Transactions: Once you convince someone that your product is worthy, the “transaction” part of the sale has always been real work; taking credit cards, establishing AR departments, dealing with credit scores. So why on earth should you want to be aware major trends that are happening in the software development space? Because these current trends are big, transformative, and are changing the nature of how software is built, delivered, and sold. Software, in many ways, works like Lego. MORE >>