B2B Lead Generation Blog

BtoB 2010 Lead Generation Guide just published

BtoB Magazine just published their 2010 Lead Generation Guide. The guide contains information about trends, expert columns, market statistics and vendor lists.

Here's a few of the articles that I found relevant in the guide:

• Social media tips for demand generation
• Maximizing online content to fuel conversations, conversions
• Creating e-mails that generate leads
• Finding new ways to maximize your list
• Telemarketing can still ring up sales
• 7 tips on using e-mail to drive webinar attendance
• Reach customers throughout sales cycle and beyond
• Data and Charts

I recommend you check it out.

8 Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation 2.0

The single biggest issue for B2B marketers is effective lead generation. I wrote an eight part series on building an effective lead generation program a while back. To help readers who missed the series, I pulled all the posts together in order.

In this series, you'll read the following posts:

1: The Right Mindset: Conversations, not campaigns
2: Sales and Marketing - One Team
3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile 
4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition
5: Treat your marketing database as a valued asset
6: A Multi-modal lead generation portfolio approach
7: Effective lead management
8: Lead nurturing for lead development

You may also find this ebook that connects with the series relevant.

Ebook: Start With a Lead: Eight CRITICAL Success Factors for Lead Generation

View more presentations from Brian Carroll.

Can you think of other critical success factors I’m missing?

Webinar: Beyond Lead Generation - Helping Sales Drive Revenue with Jeff Thull

The purpose of B2B marketing and lead generation is to help the sales team sell; however marketers can often get so wrapped up in driving campaign activity they seem to forget it's about driving sales conversion and helping the sales team achieve better results.

Join me and Jeff Thull, author of Mastering the Complex Sale, Second Edition and President/CEO of Prime Resource Group, for a complimentary webinar where you'll learn how to help sales:

• Establish relevancy, credibility and trust
• Receive executive sponsorship and privileged access to the organization
• Build and prove the financial case for your solution
• Ensure the solution is prominently on the executive's dashboard
• Win more predictable and profitable sales

Watch recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)

Related post:
Going beyond the sales lead

Most important B2B Marketing Metrics For CEOs

Today CEOs expect marketers to provide metrics and to be accountable to meeting their numbers just like sales people. They do have a bunch of activity metrics and some squishy metrics like brand recognition.

At the same time, most CEOs agree that they aren’t getting enough activity at the top of the sales funnel. Thus their marketers are constantly reminded that more leads are needed...now! When the revenue doesn't immediately materialize, CEOs will lament, why can't I see ROI from marketing?

This is what CEOs should be asking?

1. What effect are our marketing investments having on sales productivity?
2. What can marketing do to lower the combined expense to revenue ratio of sales and marketing?

As marketers, I believe the key is to look at why are we measuring our marketing in the first place?

I'd love to get your input on what you believe are the most important B2B marketing metrics for CEOs?

How to Get the Twitter Username You've Always Wanted (even if it's taken)

Don't forget to secure your Twitter name! I signed up for twitter a year an half ago but that wasn’t soon enough to get my hands on my company's Twitter name of choice of @intouch.

So if you were late to the party (like me) I'm happy to say there still might be hope. I found this blog post How to Snap Up that Twitter Username You’ve Always Wanted posted by @zee

I followed Zee's process and I'm pleased to say it worked for us! Maybe it will work for you too. 

Here's what we did

1. Emailed username@twitter.com with the following information:
   

   • The username you want
   • Your existing username, if you have one
   • Whether you want to change your username, or start a new account with the username you’re requesting

2. I received confirmation the email had been received a few minutes later, then another email asking me to reply with the above information (if I hadn’t already provided it).
3. Literally, 3 weeks later, I had my account switched from @intouch5 (BTW intouch1-4 were already taken!) to @intouch.

Why did it work?

The person who took my company's name was inactive. Twitter has a policy that if a profile has been "inactive" for a period of time they release the name. In my case @intouch was never updated by the previous user so we were lucky. I hope this helps and I wish you success!

Improve your Lead Generation: Takeaways from MarketingSherpa's B2B Marketing Summit

I was a speaker at MarketingSherpa's B2B Summit in San Francisco and Boston. I had a great time learning and connecting with fellow attendees. For me, the most valuable part of attending was hearing what other marketers are doing to drive results in their companies. 

If you didn't get a chance to attend here's a summary by the Sherpa team on 8 things you can focus on to improve your lead generation results. 

You can also read the Twitter conversations at #sherpaB2B09

Read: 8 Takeaways from the B2B Marketing Summit 

Read: Sherpa B2B Summit Kickoff: 5 Ways to Increase Lead Gen Performance

B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group on LinkedIn

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called 5 steps for using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and step number five was ‘create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.’

Well, last Thursday I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. I wanted to create a group to discuss and share ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting and more.
 
I’m jazzed at how fast the group is growing and even more excited about the discussions that are already taking place.

My first question to the group was if lead distribution should be fair or optimized? What do you do? Do you invest your hard won leads on your top performers or do you try to help your weaker sales people? In this economy should we take a Darwinian view of lead generation and focus on helping the strong sales people get stronger?

What’s your take on lead distribution? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable group and let me know your thoughts.

Looking for a little marketing wisdom?

Well, I’ve got, oh about a hundred suggestions for you all courtesy of MarketingSherpa’s latest Wisdom Report.

Sherpa’s free report is filled with mini-stories from our colleagues in the marketing world who have learned through trial and error. The topics of this year’s report touched on just about every aspect of marketing out there – from tradtional tactics to Web 2.0 and mobile marketing.

According to the editors at Sherpa, there were three main trends represented in this year’s edition:
1.    Email  - It’s clear from this book that email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s far from it. Sherpa editors noticed that marketers are looking for ways to tweak their email correspondence. Marketers are personalizing messages more than ever, segmenting their lists to create the most focused targets possible, and are testing to the hilt. You could learn a lot from the stories included in the email section.

2. Build Social Networks - Marketers are starting to see the value of building relationships using LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. There are some interesting “Case Studies” that will hit home for marketers investigating ways to integrate social media marketing into their 2009 plan.

 3. Search Engine Optimization - It seems that more and more marketers are focusing on making their websites search-engine friendly.  Marketers give advice on everything from making PPC more affordable to concentrating on niche keywords. One marketer shares how 2008 was the turning point that made him realize that after 25 years in the business he had to get with the program.

Download a copy here today

Share your marketing 'wisdom' with Sherpa readers worldwide

I wanted to be sure to let you know that MarketingSherpa is gathering content for its seventh annual “wisdom report.” It’s a great opportunity for you to share your top 2008 story – and get back lessons learned from colleagues worldwide. “Marketing Wisdom from the Field Report” will be published in January and distributed free to all MarketingSherpa readers.

Here are a few suggestions for ‘wisdom’ stories:

-Test campaign that worked better (or worse) than anticipated.
-What you learned about a specific tactic
-How you coped with a recessionary economy and the impact it had on your 2008 marketing plan and budget.

Deadline for quotes for the ‘wisdom report’ is December 31. 

Here’s the link: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/91070/wisdom-report-survey

5th Annual MarketingSherpa Demand Generation Summit 2008

You're invited to join me at MarketingSherpa's Demand Generation Summit at your choice of Boston (Oct 5-7) or San Francisco (Oct 26-28.) I'll be speaking on "Playbook for Effective Lead Management."

This year's the summit will have 19 new case studies, which will show how to increase lead volume, optimize webinar attendance and effectiveness as well as show you the effectiveness of multi-touch campaigns, closed loop measurement and more. I hope you can make it!

Register here for the event before September 5th and save $300.