The Grateful Dead were light years ahead of the concept of lead nurturing. In one of their early albums, they inserted the following message: “DEAD FREAKS UNITE. Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.” The street address of the band’s office [...]
http://zoominfoblogger.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/making-sure-your-data-doesn%e2%80%99t-curdle/
Data, like unrefrigerated milk, goes bad fast. In fact, by conservative estimates 25% of the database will sour within a year. Add poor import practices and other minor mistakes and bad things quickly snowball. It isn’t until senior management realizes it is making strategic decisions on the back of sub-par data that heads begin to [...]
Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.
NOTE: Robert Hamilton and I collaborated on this article.
It seems every week we talk to just another IT services shop trying to kick-start their marketing and sales process. We sit down with the founder and ask the same question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”
When we ask that question, [...]
In my 20 year career, I’ve used nearly every form of B2B lead generation available.
To properly evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns, it is important to know your real cost of a lead.
Forrester Research recently revealed that about 50% of b-to-b marketers don’t use e-mail metrics to measure their campaign results(1). Do you know [...]
Linking marketing and sales to buying activity requires reinvention of the sales process as well as process improvement. The traditional model of marketing handing leads off to sales is being replaced by the idea that both organizations jointly own prospect relationships and coordinate activities to nurture and migrate the prospect forward in the decision cycle. [...]
When you can accurately predict marketing’s contribution to the quarter, it means less career risk and a greater opportunity to grow the business. Understanding how marketing contributes to each quarter also means that:
You have a marketing operations model (not just a collection of tasks)
You understand the key inputs and outputs from each marketing tasks
You use [...]
Jerry Walters, one of the best guys I’ve ever worked for, repeatedly told me to “get a sale, you need four things: timing, relationship, money and a relationship. If you have the relationship, everything else is easy.”
In an earlier post, we conducted interviews and almost everyone interviewed said new business was generated via “trusted relationships.”
In that [...]
Every so often, I’ll publish a list of great content found on the web. Most of these links relate to sales excellence and process which is one of my soft spots. Here’s a quick listing of good content that I have stumbled across in the past few days. I’ll try to be as brief as [...]
Over the past few months, we’ve spoken to dozens of managing partners in professional services firms about ways they find new business. Every person interviewed said that a vast majority of new business was generated via their “networks and trusted relationships.”
Trust is a shared belief that you can depend on one another to achieve [...]
