But usually, it also requires a renewed focus on creating content that focuses on the buyer’s issues, rather than your own products. Today I read a blog post about 7 trends that speed up the adoption of marketing automation. It mentions the importance of valuable content, the increasingly longer sales cycles and the “consumerized&# B2B sales processes. These are all important trends, and many people will wonder: how do I get started? The Software is Great, But… Marketing Automation software is often positioned as the be-all and end-all. Process First. That was hard. MORE >>

If you sell multiple products, cross-selling may work for you. If someone is interested in product A, don’t send info on product B, unless products A and B are similar or at least complementary. In some cases you can send product collateral, but educational materials are usually most effective, because they address an issue that the recipient may have. If you want to make a start with Lead Nurturing, what are the right questions to ask? And what are the decisions that you need to make? How do you to segment your audience? When do you send leads to sales? MORE >>

Products & Pricing. Last week I presented a session at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University in Atlanta. In addition to Marketing Automation, there were two big topics: Social Media and CRM. will write about Social Media some other time, and focus on CRM in this post. Many attendees were confused by CRM vendors claiming to offer full marketing functionality. If that’s true, why would you still need Marketing Automation? So let’s dig in and find how Marketing Automation and CRM are different. Strong Features of CRM. For CRM, I focused on Salesforce.com. Forecasting. MORE >>

This week someone asked me about lead nurturing for people who signed up for a 30-day product trial (for a SaaS/Cloud software product). Tip 2: Make Product Adoption Your #1 Goal. The one and only goal of the emails you’re sending out should be to get people hooked on your product. Instead, focus on tips and resources to make sure the trial users get the most out of your product. It’s hard to know beforehand which messages are most effective in increasing product adoption. They signed up. What now? Tip 1: Start Sending Email Now. Tip 6: Experiment. MORE >>

But since then too little progress was made: the product was good, but their marketing was lagging behind. More and more I’ve come to believe that great marketing initiatives go bad if marketing and sales don’t have a productive relationship. Enterprise-Ready Product. More on a product-level, Oracle is getting their hands on a very feature-rich product. The Market2Lead product has been developed using the Java programming language. Oracle has just acquired Market2Lead , one of the early Marketing Automation vendors. Great Technology Fit. MORE >>