Modern B2B Marketing

This blog is where we share Marketo's latest thinking about B2B marketing, from best practices in demand generation and lead nurturing to accountability and marketing & sales alignment.




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Modern B2B Marketing

April 29, 2009

Creating solid opt-in lists can be a difficult task for marketers. Avoid these bad lead generation methods to ensure deliverability and avoid reputation issues.

Read Full Post: Don’t let Bad Leads Happen to You

March 03, 2009

Achieving the full benefit of lead management requires much more than just lead nurturing and lead scoring. Those are necessary but not sufficient components of a complete solution; by themselves they don't automate many of the marketing processes, especially the key interfaces to and from marketing and sales, that are necessary to really unlock growth. So, here are my top five lead management best practices beyond lead nurturing and lead scoring.

Read Full Post: 5 Reasons Why Lead Management is more than Lead Nurturing and Scoring

March 01, 2009

Here are some great resources to help you define what you are looking for in a demand generation system.

Read Full Post: More Resources to Define Lead Management Requirements

February 26, 2009

If you’re grappling with how to make the right choice, or just looking to make a business case for marketing automation at your company, here’s a new resource from the smart analysts at IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice: a new workbook titled “Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation.”

Read Full Post: IDC Workbook: Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation

January 27, 2009

I frequently get asked to share how we achieve these marketing results, so I recently presented a fact-filled webinar titled Secret Sauce for Demand Generation: How Marketo Nurtures, Scores and Accelerates Leads through the Revenue Cycle. In order to share these lessons with as broad an audience as possible, we’ve made the webinar available anytime on-demand, without registration.

Read Full Post: Marketo's Secret Sauce for Demand Generation

September 07, 2008

How do you know if your demand generation is good enough or when it's time to take your lead management processes to the next level? Here are 14 important questions that indicate whether or not you can benefit for more sophisticated marketing automation.

Read Full Post: Demand Generation Quiz: How Good Are You?

March 25, 2008

Marketo is the first complete software in this space that lets marketers act responsively -- to build and deploy campaigns in minutes, not days or weeks.

Read Full Post: Re-inventing Marketing Automation

March 20, 2008

Marketers need sophisticated lead management capabilities to close the gap between marketing and sales, but marketing software has traditionally been too costly, too hard to implement and far too complex for all but a few marketers. Here are the seven key elements of a modern B2B marketing software solution.

Read Full Post: Lead Management Will Never Be The Same Again

January 25, 2008

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Brian Carroll, author of the B2B Lead Generation Blog and the popular book "Lead Generation for the Complex Sale", about the importance of a personalized touch in lead nurturing, the best ways to encourage a latent prospect to start an active buying cycle, and the ROI of thought leadership.

Read Full Post: Lead Nurturing With Brian Carroll

January 14, 2008

On the lead management side, one big reason to automate your marketing campaigns is to become more efficient. Why do it if the automation tool is hard to install, has a long learning curve, and is cumbersome to manage? Your marketing automation tool should work the way you do.

Read Full Post: Stupid Marketing that's not so Dumb

December 10, 2007

Using dating as a metaphor, this white paper gives best practice tips for B2B marketing, including building thought leadership, lead generation, lead nurturing, determining sales-readiness and evaluating the process.

Read Full Post: Lead Nurturing - Dating for B2B Companies?

November 03, 2007

A 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity. Marketo Lead Management can help you increase lead quality and thereby increase sales productivity.

Read Full Post: Improving Lead Quality Can Improve Sales Productivity

October 31, 2007

We're putting together a few webinars with customers and friends to show off our upcoming email marketing, lead nurturing, and lead scoring capabilities. If you are interested, learn more and sign up!

Read Full Post: Join Marketo's Lead Management Software Beta Program?

October 25, 2007

Q&A session with Tricia Reilly, an expert on lead management best practices.

Read Full Post: Lead Management Tips and Ideas

September 20, 2007

Lead scoring can help improve win rates and revenue per deal. Here's how one company designed their lead scoring system.

Read Full Post: Drive Revenue With Lead Scoring

September 19, 2007

Tips for improving your lead management, based on salesforce.com's own internal lead management processes.

Read Full Post: Best Practices in Lead Management

April 04, 2007

Many B2B companies have a chasm between the pay-per-click campaigns that generate clicks and the campaigns that help turn those clicks into customers. When the goal of search marketing is to drive high-quality leads to sales, no B2B pay-per-click campaign...

Read Full Post: Four Steps to Better Business Leads From Search

March 02, 2007

Countless companies end up with poor sales-marketing alignment because they suffer from Bad Lead-itis. This crippling disease can destroy marketing's credibility, waste demand generation dollars, and damage your company's brand reputation. It is important to learn to recognize these four...

Read Full Post: Do You Recognize the 4 Warning Signs of Bad Lead-itis?

January 10, 2007

FedEx Kinko's announced a new service called Direct Mail Services, delivered in partnership with AAS. It provides an end-to-end service that allows marketers to design and execute simple direct mail campaigns completely online. You begin by designing a direct mail...

Read Full Post: Direct Mail Services from FedEx Kinko's

December 18, 2006

As part of the lead management process, make sure to measure the "depth" of your relationship with a target company. By depth, I mean both the number of contact names you have at the company as well as the quality...

Read Full Post: 8. Measure relationship depth

December 13, 2006

So you’ve managed to get a potential customer to register on your landing page. Congratulations! What do you do now? If you are like many companies, the prospect’s information goes into an SFA system like Salesforce.com and sales gets alerted...

Read Full Post: 7. Lead nurturing 101

December 09, 2006

Forrester recently published research titled "How Mature Is B2B Lead Management?" in which they claim that B2B marketers who shift their focus from “demand generation” to “lead management” are twice as productive. As Kristin Zhivago points out, one reason for...

Read Full Post: 6. Manage leads – don’t generate demand