I've long been a fan of his blog Build a Sales Machine and I learn something new every time we interact. After that experience, I decided I needed to learn how to build and manage a killer sales organization. Where better to learn that than doing sales at salesforce.com? The next interview in the B2B Marketing thought leader interview series is with Aaron Ross, formerly with salesforce.com and founder of PebbleStorm:CEOFlow . 1.

With all the micro-blogging, I’ve often wondered whether the number of bloggers who actually create original, substantial content is decreasing. Don’t get me wrong, you can create meaningful thought in 140 characters, but it’s a lot easier to write 140 characters (no matter how well crafted) than it is to consistently create original content for [...] ...Tags: Tags: B2B Social Media b2b blogging B2B Blogs B2B Sellin

Often the relationship between sales and marketing seems one way, since typically it's marketing's job to pass leads to sales. But the relationship is truly two ways, since marketing relies on sales for critical information in order to make decisions about pricing, messaging, and product roadmaps. Receiving this information from sales means that marketing does not have to find it by contacting prospects or doing additional primary and secondary research, saving the company valuable time and additional cost. Below are five ways that sales can significantly help marketing:

Check out his entire post or (better still) join him and leading Sales 2.0 Social Media practitioners as they share their latest Social Media sales effectiveness secrets (alliteration anyone?) at the upcoming Sales 2.0 Four: Do they know the difference between virtual sales effectiveness I was checking out Facebook and caught Gerhard Gschwandtner’s great post on Twitter effectiveness. I loved it so much I’m reposting it here.

Years ago a successful sales representative knew how to optimize their time by ‘reading’ their prospects.   But then things changed, as buyers started to research their purchases online, preventing the sales rep from deciphering the buyer’s intention from their physical actions.   0160; So sales professionals reacted, spending their time pouring over online data, trying to understand what made a good buyer.    0160; A quick phone call would be made to colder opportunities, while a day would be spent golfing with a good bet.   0160; The key

It came from Christine Durkin of MockVideo when she commented on a LinkedIn discussion asking “Is there a silver bullet answer to shortening the technology B2B sales cycle?” Her comment was “One of the main reasons a B2B sale is lost is that the prospect isn’t truly aware of the cost of doing nothing.” Providing a calculator or quantitative numbers on what In an earlier post, I talked about what motivates business buyers to buy. I

I’m probably biased, but I believe the primary objective of business-to-business marketing is driving sales of the company’s products and services. Of course branding and awareness are also roles that can be played effectively by B2B marketing, but from my point of view these are only supporting roles—secondary to the primary objective of helping drive sales. In many, if not most, of the companies Other B2B companies try to skip the leads-to-salespeople-to-sales process, instead encouraging prospective customers to initiate purchases themselves from print or online catalogs and/or via order forms, e-commerce sites, phone calls or purchase orders.

Back in the fall I attended Selling Power 's Sales 2.0 It was so informative and interactive for sales execs and marketing execs that Green Leads decided we wanted to sponsor the conference (March 4,5 in San Francisco). Selling Power's publisher and Sales 2.0 You could conference. This time with a twist.

Integration between Marketing Automation systems and CRM systems allows a very powerful and valuable flow of data, and business alignment, between marketing and sales. It forms the technology and data basis for a new relationship between your marketing team and your sales team. First, and most critical, is a look at what actually needs to be integrated between marketing and sales. I think of it as a three-layer system, This is a very powerful concept, and worth digging into in some depth as there are a lot of questions worth asking as you evaluate potential solutions. This is

These are all great discussions to have, but there are eight critical questions that need to be contemplated and discussed in order to build a lead scoring algorithm that will truly work in a business environment: 1) What are Your Outputs?: are you using lead scoring to determine who to hand off to sales? 10 points for any of the key terms, up to a maximum of 20. 5) Are your Scores Loosely Mapped to the Ranks that Determine Follow-Up?: If you are going to teach sales to follow up with leads that are defined as "A leads", you need to build in the flexibility to slightly adjust the bar