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Does your marketing organization have a thoughtful blueprint upon which to build pre-sales nurturing programs? A strategic plan will help you and your team understand the goals and objectives of upstream lead qualification and serve as a step-by-step framework for moving from initial buyer engagement to vetting the specific buyer as a lead that is ready to engage with a sales team member. It also helps diagnose opportunities and gaps that exist in many demand generation programs, by narrowing the objectives for lead qualification at each stage in the nurturing process.
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Once a year the demand generation ‘glitterati’ – i.e., the major thought leaders, the vendors and the packs of in-the-trenches B2B marketing and sales practitioners … a lot of them – all descend upon Scottsdale, Arizona, to talk B2B demand generation for two-and-a-half days.
The catalyst? The annual SiriusDecisions Summit, put on by an analyst firm that has emerged as a leader when it comes to covering strategic and technological innovation in the B2B marketing and sales arena.
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This white paper explores five reasons you should integrate marketing automation. It explains how unqualified leads cost your company money, the fact that your unqualified leads will actually buy, and that most marketers only follow up 20% of their leads. Download now to learn more about the common issues markers face today, and the solutions that will help increase your marketing effectiveness.
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One of the things I find exciting about modern B2B marketing is that not a day goes by without rapid change and new thinking. It’s a great time to be a B2B marketer, but it’s also a quite challenging time. For example, over the past year, marketing automation vendors have shifted much of their messaging from a focus on automating marketing and powering demand generation to that of managing ‘revenue performance.’ Seems like a good thing–revenue is good; however, for some B2B marketers this is probably a bit confusing, and so the obvious question is whether we’re still talking about the same technology and capabilities. The answer is yes and no.
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This past week I spoke at and attended the annual Online Marketing Summit event (Twitter: #oms11, @OMSummit), which was held February 7-11 in San Diego, along with a number of others from the Left Brain team. (Full disclosure: Left Brain also was a sponsor of the event.)
Continuing a trend I saw at Dreamforce in December, I got a strong glimpse of a real maturation that is starting to occur in online marketing, and particularly in B2B demand generation. And I saw the next wave of marketers – beyond the early adopters – in attendance and starting to absorb new techniques and practices. All good signs that B2B marketers are increasingly understanding and responding to the modern challenges of engaging with the an empowered B2B buyer in a Web 2.0 world.
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Developing a unified Demand Generation approach requires a collaborative process that facilitates discussion and ultimately drives alignment on key issues. The results of this collaboration are critical in order to support Marketers in implementing successful demand generation programs. This white paper examines the shifting marketing atmosphere and Left Brain’s model for demand generation success.
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I‘m excited to announce that Barbra Gago — formerly with Genius.com and Cloud9 Analytics — is joining Left Brain as a key member of our demand generation strategy team. Barbra brings great expertise around inbound marketing, content marketing, Website information architecture design, social media and how to leverage all of these elements for integrated, buyer-centric, buyer-driven demand generation. So welcome Barbra … and read on for her first blog post on leveraging social media in B2B demand generation. ~ABN
Social media – alone – cannot drive the type of scale B2B demand generation results that most enterprises need. But when social media is combined with other buyer-targeted content and programs – especially as part of an inbound engagement model – it can serve as a critical multiplier of your efforts. Moreover, it can enable you to engage with your buyer at phases of his/her decision-making process that other mediums cannot reach.
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Marketing automation has numerous components, including strategy, program messaging, technical execution, integration with other systems, layout and design, and reporting. Depending on your particular background and skill set, some of these requirements may be more or less challenging, but none of it is easy. Here are 5 myths about marketing automation, and tips on how to better think about integration.
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David Raab outlined in a recent blog post his current research around the state of the B2B marketing automation marketplace. Raab estimates total spending on B2B marketing automation platforms in 2010 reached approximately $200 million in revenue in 2010. He further notes “… that the industry nearly doubled last year, so the current run rate is much higher.” I had a couple of reactions to this number.
First, it made me think of another number. $129 billion. That’s the amount research firm Outsell estimated in a BtoB Magazine article in March last year would be spent in 2010 on all B2B marketing and advertising in the US. Closely behind that number is the $26 billion Outsell further estimated (in the same report) would be spent on B2B company websites in 2010. It subsequently strikes me that the $200 million spent on systems that are designed to orchestrate and run intelligent B2B demand generation programs still pales in comparison to what seems to be spent on brute-force execution.
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This ultra-quick read covers some recent data around current lead management processes, why most of the leads you pass to Sales are unqualified, and why marketing automation can help you deliver more, better qualified leads to Sales, consistently.
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