As the person here at ReachForce ultimately responsible for having a regularly updated blog, I know how very difficult it can be to continually come up with new blog post ideas.  Lucky for me Kipp Bodnar has created a great list of 20 Ideas For B2B Blog Content To Drive Traffic and Boost SEO on the Social Media B2B blog. Here are some of my favorites:

• Profile your customers
• List the top ten twitter users in your industry
• List the top five blogs in your industry
• Start a contest and ask for submissions
• Use Trendrr to create graphs of industry information
• Compile the top ten blog posts on a specific industry topic

I can’t wait to start using some of these ideas myself.  Some things we do on The B2B Lead:

• Guest posts from partners and customers
• Quote great articles and blog posts and then expand on those ideas (hence this post)
• Write a cliff notes version of hit industry books
• Feature other companies who offer complimentary services or products to your own

Don’t forget to read the full list of 20 ideas!

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Are Your Leads Lying to You?, I want to dive a little further into David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie.  There are some truly interesting statistics in this article, but the meat of the article is his call to focus on the creation of opportunities as a key indicator/metric rather than the creation of leads.  Sitting at the cross-roads between Marketing and Sales I can echo his commentary that is a key indicator but I feel that it’s also a bit hasty to claim that it is the only meaningful metric.

Taber argues that by focusing on ‘sales-cycle starts’ (i.e. creation of opportunities) you get a true view of the over all process and communication between Sales and Marketing.   His position is that by using opportunity creation as the key metric you will encourage better alignment between Marketing and Sales.  While I think that he is on the right path, I feel like using only creation of opportunity as a metric fails to take into account the activity on all sides of the table that goes into feeding the creation of opportunities.

If one side fails to fulfill their end of the bargain, then you’ll end up with a lopsided equation and little to no opportunity creation.  For example, if Marketing is not held to the standard of feeding ‘X’ amount of leads and then drumming up activity via an email campaign, webinar, etc. then there is nothing for Sales to use to stir up the opportunities.  On the other side of the coin, if Marketing regularly adds leads, keeps the activity going and continues to feed the fires but Sales isn’t following up then opportunities won’t be created either.   Both pieces of the puzzle are necessary to create opportunities and by looking away from the metrics that measure each of these activities, spotting upcoming problems (or finding the root to existing ones) is difficult at best.

Taber argues that an opportunity centric focus will create the collaboration necessary to convert leads to opportunities, while I agree that if all the pieces are in place it can happen I guess I’m just a bit of a cynic (or a big metrics nerd).  I feel like it’s important to see the whole picture to ensure the process works all the way around.  Keeping everyone accountable to key metrics (lead input, campaign activity, meeting setting and execution) that are relevant to their role in the cycle will allow better visibility across the process and will ensure that if something breaks you can easily identify where the problem was and fix it.

Sitting down with my coffee this morning I stumbled across David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie,.  In it, Taber makes the case for really focusing on the right metrics in measuring performance, interesting stuff, but I got stuck on a particular statement he makes: “In many B2B and B2C businesses, the unqualified leads that are in the nurturing cycle may be numbered in the millions. Industry statistics show that up to 40 percent of leads may make their first purchase after having been in the “remarketing database” for 18 months or longer.”   As someone who works with our database and manages the cleansing of our customers database (via our Relevance & Repair Process), I was really struck by this.

On a day to day basis I look at lots of data (ok that’s an understatement, in the past two months I’ve looked at tons of contacts/prospects), most people who engage in our data appending and cleansing services do so to clean up old data – to find the diamond in the ruff. They are looking for that 40%, but what if they’ve had the right name and the wrong email for the last eighteen months?? And assuming they have been emailing this person for that time and they’ve had the wrong email, wow – that’s someone that they have lost some serious time with.

So how do you avoid falling into the abyss of not knowing if you’re marketing but no one’s listening?  Know who you’ve got good information for and who you need to get the right information for.  One more pitch for data cleanliness here but the idea is very simple, how will you ever reach that 40% if you don’t have their contact information right?

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Matthew Quinlan (@mattquinlan) at LoopFuse for this post.

What is LoopFuse?

Sophistication Made Simple

LoopFuse was founded on the principle that marketing automation should be powerful yet simple. In fact, it was the founders’ experience of implementing a marketing automation system at JBoss that led directly to the creation of LoopFuse OneView. Some marketing automation vendors achieve power and flexibility, but at the expense of usability. Others have a fantastic user interface, but a shallow feature-set. LoopFuse OneView strikes the delicate balance between sophistication and simplicity by hiding complexity with integrated contextual help, intuitive defaults, and wizard-driven configuration.

In addition to making LoopFuse OneView easy to implement and easy to use, we also make it easy to buy. Our complete pricing list is publicly available from our website so that our prospects know exactly how much LoopFuse will cost before engaging our sales team. (Refreshing, isn’t it?) Even better, there are absolutely no hidden fees. No setup fees. No support fees. No per-user fees. No API fees. You can even pay by credit card. Try LoopFuse OneView with zero risk by signing up for a fully functional free trial on our website. Your account is immediately provisioned without ever speaking to a LoopFuse salesperson.

Lead Management

Target, track, capture, score, segment, nurture, route, convert, close, and analyze your leads in a single tool that tightly integrates with your CRM. Start with anonymous web activity collection that provides the basis for web analytics such as most popular pages, best referrers, search terms, and most active companies (via IP address). Collect registration data and convert anonymous visitors into identified prospects. Continuously evaluate the quality of each prospect according to his/her profile and behavior and route qualified prospects to the CRM. Nurture unqualified prospects by providing a constant drip of highly relevant and timely information (via email) to engage the prospect until they are ready to buy. Arm the salesperson with all of the relevant information necessary to close the deal. Finally, analyze the effectiveness of each lead source to determine the best use of your marketing dollars.

Sales Enablement

LoopFuse will automatically create new leads/contacts/tasks in the CRM based on the LeadFlow you define. Existing leads/contacts in the CRM are continuously updated with information such as lead score updates, new registration form data, email campaign activity, and latest web activity. Within 1-2 clicks the salesperson has access to every piece of data ever collected about a prospect, including the prospect’s company & location (even if prospect left it blank), and all of the activity (anonymous included) associated with the prospect’s company. The prospect data is further enriched with one-click access to the prospect’s LinkedIn profile as well as data about the company from Hoovers, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, and Google. By adding a prospect to their watchlist, a salesperson can be immediately notified when the prospect visits the website. Calling a prospect while they are browsing your site ensures that you have their full attention.

Performance & Scalability

While much of our early success was concentrated within open-source companies, LoopFuse continues to add customers from traditional software companies, SAAS providers, media companies, etc. One of the advantages of having so many open-source customers early on was that it required us to build a highly scalable infrastructure to manage the millions of transactions (page views, emails, registrations, etc.) per day that result from our customers offering free software. This continues to be a strategic advantage for LoopFuse as we can easily scale to accommodate customers of any size.

Why LoopFuse?

• Basic setup in less than 1 hour via configuration wizard
• Unlimited database size at no extra charge!
• Free trial to prove the value before you purchase
• Because it works

Thanks to Laura Folio and Adam Blitzer for their blog post on Pardot earlier this week. We want to continue to discuss what Pardot is offering by taking a look at one of their great whitepapers.

Marketing Automation is an integral part to any marketing organization, but there are a lot of choices out there. With so many top vendors to choose from, how do you make the best decision for you and your organization? Pardot has written a great whitepaper to help you through the process, Web Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide.

Their whitepaper is set up in a very easy to read with a number of charts that help walk through the decision-making process.

I also found their list of ten questions to ask when evaluating a marketing automation tool particularly useful:

1. What marketing solutions do you currently employ (email marketing, paid search, etc.)?
2. Does your sales team use a CRM system?
3. How does marketing pass leads into the CRM system (if applicable)?
4. Which areas of your marketing and sales process could be more efficient?
5. Who in your organization will use the marketing automation system?
6. What is the projected timeline for deciding on a solution?
7. What are some of the short-term goals to be achieved with marketing automation?
8. What are some of the long-term goals to be achieved with marketing automation?
9. What type of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) do your employees typically use?
10. Do you have web programmers in-house, or do you use an outside agency?

One of the most important things to remember when selecting a Marketing Automation tool is that it needs to work for you and your team, which means you want something that works with the flow of your data, your CRM and your processes. Pardot has set up some easy to follow check-lists of things that will help you make the best choice between the systems you are evaluating. They aren’t exactly tear-sheets but could easily be utilized as such to help you along the way.

Their whitepaper is extremely informative and a must-read for anyone in the market for a Marketing Automation system.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Laura Folio (@LauraFolio) and Adam Blitzer (@AdamBlitzer) at Pardot for this post.

What is Pardot?

Pardot is the maker of Prospect Insight, a “No Hassle” marketing automation suite designed to streamline online marketing campaigns and jump-start ROI for small-and-medium sized businesses. Pardot brings together all the elements of creating an online lead generation program and packages them in a simple, user-friendly marketing automation suite that gives you in-depth insight to your visitors and prospects.

What can Pardot do for you? The Prospect Insight suite was designed to simplify online marketing and make it easy to generate great content that will produce real results for a non-technical user. What does that mean? It means all the tools in Prospect Insight are designed with marketers in mind and consist of pre-formatted templates, easy drag-and-drop builders and step-by-step wizards to guide you through the process. Create custom landing pages in a few clicks. Build a branded email newsletter and personalize it from each individual sales representative with the Pardot template library and a simple, visual editor. Host images and files securely with Pardot, eliminating the need to bug your IT department about uploading your latest logo.

Then, use these shiny new campaign elements to generate prospects and create drip programs to nurture leads. Score and grade your new inbound leads with customizable criteria. Set up rules to automatically segment prospects for follow-up, assign them to your sales representatives and more. Sync this new-found information with your CRM system, creating a seamless flow of data that encourages adoption across your entire organization. Before you know it, the sales team is singing your praise (you’re making their job a lot easier, after all) and you’re able to show meaningful ROI data reflecting the marketing department’s contribution to the bottom line.

That’s right, marketing automation is about results. Its about making the marketing department, sometimes regarded as all “fluffy stuff,” ROI superheroes. Tracking prospects and visitors allows companies to bring in more leads – and more importantly, better leads – while reporting on marketing campaigns like never before. Pardot customers have been able to increase sales team efficiency and generate loads more leads.

Now you know why you need marketing automation, but what makes Pardot different? In addition to building an easy-to-use tool, Pardot designed the “No Hassle Marketing Automation” Promise to define what sets Prospect Insight apart from other choices:

• Pardot is a month-to-month service with no contracts. The simple, low-cost plans include implementation and services, making it easy for smaller companies to get on board without a large upfront investment.
• Pardot includes unlimited users for one monthly fee – that’s right no need to purchase individual seats at an additional charge. Come one, come all!
• Pardot offers personalized services and support. We pride ourselves on client service with our interactive success community and our stellar team of services folks and client advocates. We love to meet clients and invite them to the office to take a spin on the Segway, play a game of ping pong or, of course, chat about all things marketing automation.

To learn more about Pardot and marketing automation, in general, we invite you to visit www.pardot.com and view a quick demo to see Prospect Insight in action. You can also catch up with us on our blog at marketingautomation.net.

Remember in school when you took a quiz to see what kind of learner you are?  In case you didn’t, there are three types of learners:

• Visual (seeing) learners
• Auditory (listening) learners
• Kinesthetic (touch/experience) learners

Does your marketing mix appeal to all three types?  We are trying to add more to our mix to appeal to a greater audience.  We have a new way for visual learns to understand what we do.  We created a map that shows a live feed of contacts we are discovering right now.  It is pretty cool if you haven’t checked it out yet.  Thanks to Jason for creating it.  Is there a cool or new visual way you could explain your business?

When trying to reach visual learners, consider:

• new graphics
• charts
• videos

For those who are auditory learners, you might try experimenting with:

• podcasts
• video or recorded case studies
• webinars

For kinesthetic learners, look into:

• interactive demos
• in-person events
• free trials

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been highlighting some of the most well known Marketing Automation players out there.  This week we’re profiling MarketBright.  Thanks again to Caitlin and Mike Pilcher for the previous blog post.

So now that you’ve read about and studied up on each, what’s next?  Just getting the right technology in place isn’t going to solve all of your headaches.

MarketBright’s whitepaper, Tips To Improve Your Lead Management Strategy, has some great ideas on creating and building out your lead generation strategy.

Here’s a few things that caught my eye…

When getting started here’s a few things to think about:

• Who has ownership of each stage of the process?
• Is there a defined lead management flow that exists today?
• What essential performance indicators or ROI measures are associated at key points throughout the process?

Just like taking a road trip, best practice says you should have a map before you take off.

Lead Generation/Acquisition – the following elements are absolutely necessary to provide QUALITY leads:

• Have you agreed with your sales team on what a qualified lead looks like?  Any of these sound familiar?
• Clearly define and know your target market.  An effective lead generation process always begins and ends with knowing the audience.
• Use effective lead generation tools.
• Optimize landing pages and forms.  Be clear on the action you want your audience to take and focus the content on just that action.
• Use accurate and reliable campaign metrics for tracking, reporting and testing.  This keeps everyone involved in the process honest .

Remember – the secret with any lead management system is to maximize the efficiency but not lose the impact of a personal customer experience. I think this is a great point!  As we continue to use automation to be more effective and efficient we have to remember that people buy from people.

Thanks again to MarketBright for contributing this week.  Now go download this whitepaper to ensure you are set up for success.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Caitlin Marco at MarketBright for this post.

What is Marketbright?

For starters, Marketbright is simply a centric platform for marketing automation. However, a ton of information is packed into that one, little sentence. So what does it really mean? Marketbright has rethought the way marketing automation should work for you; making you, the marketer, more in control of the development, execution, and result of your campaign. Marketbright’s marketing automation platform acts as a central hub for multi-touch marketing campaigns. By automating best practices of Sales and Marketing, you can execute any campaign from direct mail and telemarketing, to events and online advertising. Even the management of your website can be taken out of the hands of the webmaster and put into the hands of Marketing. Our philosophy is that marketing automation leverages the technology and best practices of multiple departments in order to produce faster, more efficient campaign deployment and reporting, right out of the box.

But, wait, how do you do all that?
One thing we firmly believe is that marketing should be done by, well, marketers. Being marketers ourselves, we have a good idea of the kind of tools our clients need to get the job done. If the job has to rely on the use of the IT department to update the events on their website, or the sales team to do nurture marketing instead of closing deals, then resources are being wasted and productivity is falling. Bottom line is that their ROI isn’t what it could be.

Now that you have an idea of what we mean by a “central platform,” here are a few items that help make marketing more productive and less dependent on outside resources:

Campaign Management: Marketbright’s campaign management tools allow any nontechnical person to easily create quarterly campaign plans that are automatically tied to powerful reporting and tracking tools. The result is streamlined budgeting capabilities and seamless campaign management.

Lead Nurturing:  approach is unique in the marketplace because it has automated the difficult task of managing multi-touch campaigns and the resulting, often complex flows. The platform provides an easy way to deploy and manage multi-touch campaigns across all marketing channels.

Resource Center: is the easy to use solution to keeping relevant content and marketing collateral updated on your website. Your company’s most recent case studies, white papers, and product brochures will be readily available to potential prospects without any edits to your website

Event Center: is a great addition to Marketbright’s Event Management solution. Without the help of your IT department, the Event Center automatically publishes all of your upcoming on and offline events directly to your website.
As mentioned before, Marketbright incorporates aspects from multiple departments in its platform to create one central hub. It also helps align Sales and Marketing to act as one organization. With the use of lead nurturing and lead management, Sales and Marketing are able to work together to get the most out of your lead generation.

Lead Scoring: One of Marketbright’s key strengths is scoring leads so only the best leads go directly to sales. Marketbright’s platform automatically sorts and prioritizes leads based on customizable rules. Marketbright’s lead scoring system features:

• Highly customizable rules to generate more accurate lead scores.
• Intelligent monitoring of customer activity, including web pages visited, time spent on the site, and visits from multiple people from the same company.
• Validation of data entered onto lead forms helps weed out inauthentic leads by scoring them lower.

Just as the collaboration between Sales and Marketing effects the quality of the contacts in the pipeline, a consolidation of data between Marketing and Sales gives a full view of the path a contact took to becoming a customer.  Marketbright’s marketing analytics provides insight into the sale funnel and instant feedback as to what’s performing well and what’s not, allowing for on the spot campaign optimization.

Marketing Analytics: Marketbright analytics enables closed loop marketing that equates to traceable return on investment. Marketbright’s pre-integrated platform is designed from the ground up to provide a 360 degree view of all customer interactions:

• Visibility and metrics from campaign to cash
• Data consistency across all customer interactions
• Access to reporting for campaigns at-a-glance.
• Visibility into what’s working, and what’s not
• Automated profiles of promising prospects for targeted follow up

By understanding where marketing resources and budget are being lost, Marketbright fills in the gaps to improve your productivity. A centralized marketing automation platform brings in all the different resources used by Marketing and combines it into one solution. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketbright, please visit us at www.marketbright.com

MarketingSherpa just came out with a very interesting how-to on using LinkedIn for lead generation.  While most of us have a profile, many marketers are unsure on how to use this new channel as a lead source.  MarketingSherpa interviewed Jason Rushin, Director, Marketing at Quantivo on his process and found 6 lessons that all B2B marketers can learn from.

Here are some of highlights from the article:

Lesson #1. Target groups by activity level, not just size

For each group, Rushin spent 15 or 20 minutes reading through recent posts to assess group members’ interest areas, and how much activity each post generated. In the end, he identified 17 groups that matched his needs.

Lesson #2. Join groups under an individual name, not a company identity

Social media is a two-way channel, which makes it especially important to assign a point-person to oversee your social media initiatives, establish themselves as a community member, and respond to feedback.

Lesson #3. Place collateral in the context of a conversation

Every time the team had a new piece of collateral to promote — such as a webinar or a white paper — Rushin looked for opportunities to share that information with the team’s LinkedIn groups.

- For example, when promoting a white paper, he would write a message to the group announcing the new title, sharing a link, and asking group members to provide feedback on the white paper itself.

Lesson #4. Response rate is highly variable

By participating in several groups, Rushin quickly saw that response to his lead-generation offers (in the form of landing page registrations) was highly variable. Each group has its own characteristics and dynamics, which make some white paper or webinar offers highly successful and others relative duds.

Testing content offerings among different groups is essential. Beyond that, Rushin also saw two factors that affected response rate:

- Placement in the weekly or daily update newsletters

- White paper or webinar topic

Lesson #5. Create social media-specific landing pages

Rather than taking LinkedIn members to a standard landing page, Rushin created landing pages that specifically addressed the LinkedIn audience.

The tactic did not require a complete landing page redesign. Instead, the team modified the landing page text to create continuity for visitors arriving from LinkedIn, using phrases such as: “Thank you for your interest in this discussion”

Lesson #6. Quality can be an issue with leads from LinkedIn

To discourage job-seekers, the team changed its registration form to require prospects to use an email address from a company domain — forbidding the use of free email accounts such as Yahoo! or Gmail. The technique backfired, though, when LinkedIn members began complaining to Rushin (and sometimes to their Twitter followers) that the company was preventing unemployed people or independent consultants from viewing their thought-leadership content.

Rather than risk alienating LinkedIn members, you may have to rely on inside sales follow-up or further nurturing to eliminate non-qualified leads from your marketing funnel.

Ultimately lead generation on LinkedIn is the same as any other lead gen channel.  Be targeted, stay relevant to your audience, measure everything you can and always go for quality over quantity of leads.

The entire article is open to non-MarketingSherpa members until August 5th, be sure to check it out.