Especially if your marketing and sales organization is new to content and buyer centric marketing, don't be tempted to build the perfect system that, for example, captures 8 granular buying stages, 5 buyer personas, across, 5 market segments. With software as a service, you can even see what features your trial users are actually using and are most interested in, and incorporate this information into your marketing and sales response (at the individual user level, leveraging marketing automation - you can even build feature usage into your lead scoring model to indicate sales readiness). MORE >>

Today's prospects filter out most attempts by companies to interrupt them with vendor and product focused marketing messages and sales pitches. While this situation can create a crisis in many marketing and sales organizations, it also offers a great opportunity. mention "ongoing" because I believe the days of linear, one-dimensional, time-limited "campaigns" on the marketing side and transactional selling on the sales side are for the most part over. Your B2B markets are changing rapidly. It is now harder than ever for B2B vendors to get the attention of our audiences. MORE >>

Take a look the chart below to see the popularity of various social media metrics for measuring activity, followership, engagement, leads, and sales results (click chart to enlarge | n = 210). Here is another interesting result from the B2B social media survey. was surprised to learn that a plurality of B2B marketers (45%) say they don't have ANY metrics in place for measuring social media effectiveness. Something tells me that B2B marketers will get away with this only for a short time until investment in social media comes under increased scrutiny. MORE >>

There are literally thousands of marketing books available today. handful of them stand out as most influential on the art and science of marketing. But which books should be in the top-10 list of "must read" marketing books? To get an answer, I conducted a quick survey among the 17,000+ members of the B2B marketing community on LinkedIn. After collecting and analyzing hundreds of your survey responses, here is the "ultimate" top-10 list: The Top-10 List of Marketing Books Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey A. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne) Inside the Tornado (Geoffrey A. MORE >>

Especially the top-3 challenges have grown significantly from 2009 to 2010: 1) Generating high-quality leads (from 69% in 2009 to 78% today) - Today's B2B marketers are tackling this issue with processes and technologies such as marketing automation and lead scoring in an attempt to only deliver qualified, truly sales ready leads. 3) Marketing to a lengthening sales cycle (39% to 41%) - Also a function of the economic environment. According to MarketingSherpa , the top challenges for B2B marketers are becoming, well, more challenging. MORE >>