B2B Marketing Predictions For 2011
Whenever I start to see Thanksgiving turkeys flying out of the grocery store and Black Friday ads start to appear, I know it’s that time of year to prognosticate. So here is my list of B2B Marketing Insider predictions for 2011.
2010 was the year social media moved from cutting edge to mainstream (right?). And what a wild ride it has been. While some have predicted the consolidation of Twitter and Facebook or the demise of Foursquare, I am sticking to the practical topics most B2B Marketers I know are talking about:
Enjoy A Demand Funnel Cocktail
I was recently asked by the good folks over at Focus to participate in an exciting project and the first edition of the “Book of Funnels“. The challenge was this: put all your thoughts on the marketing and sales funnel into one page and use a picture to tell your story.
I have to admit that this project was a lot of fun. At the time, I was leading a large online demand generation program and had some thoughts about the state of the marketing and sales funnel. And I agree with Craig Rosenberg at Focus, that “every organization should make the effort to depict its revenue funnel on one page. It serves as the basis for your sales and marketing strategy.”
Be A Hero: Choose Appointment Setting for Your Next Campaign
With all of the discussion on marketing and sales alignment, I thought it made sense to bring in a sales perspective and guidance to the site. The following guest post is another important topic for sales and comes from my colleague, Rob Krekstein.
Telemarketing services are continuing to grow in popularity, due to the low cost and high ROI; however, the difficulty lies in which telemarketing tactic to utilize. In my 20 years of sales and telemarketing experience I have implemented all different types of telemarketing tactics and found that appointment setting provides high value for multiple reasons.
5 Sales Closing Techniques
With all of the discussion on marketing and sales, I thought it made sense to bring in a sales perspective and guidance to the site. The following excerpt is certainly important to sales and comes from my colleague, Rob Krekstein. This post also appeared recently in B2C Marketing Insider.
I have been a student of selling and sales management for more than twenty years, and I have used a grand total of five “closes” during that time. You must always remember that at some point in every sales discussion, you must “ASK” for the business. Here are brief descriptions of these five closes:
The New Marketing Accountability
The most popular posts on B2B Marketing Insider over the last few weeks have a common theme: accountability and The Role of B2B Marketing . You can review both How To Align Marketing With Sales and Marketing Leads: Quality Vs. Quantity for more detail on the emerging need for marketing to drive real sales and to quantify efforts.
Late last week, I responded to a post by my new friend Adam Needles, VP Marketing of Left Brain Marketing. In “Revising Our Demand Generation Definition as B2B Marketers” Adam does an excellent job of thoroughly putting a call to action out to all marketers that demand generation needs to be end-to-end. He also asks us to be accountable to results. I told him that I almost stood up and clapped. I was so excited, I thought I should recount my response here.
How To Align Marketing With Sales
This is arguably the single most important topic for marketing: how to align with sales. If you are asking if we need to align with sales, go find a new profession. If you think marketing is much more important than sales, update your resume. If you think marketing objectives are about something other than sales, then it’s time to start networking.
Five years into my early sales career, I realized that I was a mildly successful sales person mainly because I focused on relationships, not selling. And…Marketing needed lots of help. So I followed my frustration into a marketing career and have never looked back. In this post I will provide some of the latest thinking along with my own thoughts on how to better align marketing with sales.
Marketing Leads: Quality Vs. Quantity
Last night I had the pleasure of dining with one of our media partners. We discussed the great lead quality vs. lead quantity debate. And the conversation went way later than the restaurant manager and our wonderful server wanted it to.
While we all want to be considered purveyors of nothing but the highest quality stuff, sometimes higher volume is the way to go. And when quality is required, you need to be able to deliver leads that convert.
7 Tips For Successful Lead Follow-up
A Guest Post By: Robert Krekstein
Telemarketing services are continuing to grow in popularity given the low cost and high return, and for most companies Tele resources are fully utilized in an outbound calling capacity. The companies that are able to create a sustainable responder generation program will see higher conversions and sales.
However, it is difficult for companies to gain inbound responders in large volumes, and too many companies do not have an optimal responder program in place to drive whatever responders they receive to an eventual sale. In my 20 years of marketing, sales and Telemarketing experience I have created many “Tele Web” programs, and here are the top reasons they succeed.
Lead Generation Programs That Work
On July 13th, 2010 I presented on a webinar sponsored by Focus entitled “True Lead Generation Stories” moderated by Craig Rosenberg and co-presented by an esteemed colleague Chris Waldo who runs Demand Generation for Ingersoll Rand.
During my presentation titled Lead Generation Programs That Work I walked through the 5 Steps to Achieve Lead Generation ROI. I defined the top tactics for driving leads in today’s environment and listed those that aren’t working as well as they used to. I concluded with a discussion of the tactics to consider in future demand generation efforts.
11 Reasons Why Outbound Telemarketing Programs Fail
My colleague Robert Krekstein is the Telemarketing Program Director for SAP North America. Rob and I support and have adopted what we call the “Tele-Web” concept of driving the most efficient leads for sales through pull-based inbound programs. The leads with the highest conversion rate and the lowest costs typically come from inbound activities like search and are then followed up and qualified by our telemarketing professionals.
