Here’s what we will cover:

Building the Foundation:

• Ideal customer profiles
• Value Propositions
• Buyer Personas
• Trigger Events
• Universal Lead Definition
• Think Like a Publisher
• Your website and landing pages
• Inbound marketing and social networks

Making it Work

• Problem to Solution Story-Telling
• Catch Factors
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead Scoring
• Handoff to sales
• Pull backs

Making it stick

• Regular meetings with sales
• Metrics and measures
• Where to get more information

We have an exciting series of blog posts/emails starting next Monday.  It a free training course on demand generation.  But you need to sign up below.

The biggest problem I see in B2B sellers is a lack of understanding on demand generation and how to implement a program.  To help these top executives identify what is needed in their businesses, they need clear and simple ideas.

We’ll walk you through a best practices demand generation program for your business — in the proper order — in just 30 days.

Opt in to the 30 Day Training here.

Every weekday we’ll explain one step of demand generation in each blog article or video.  This content will walk you step by step through the process.

We’re going to use a clear and concise series of steps in 3 Phases:

1. Build the foundation
2. Make it work
3. Ensure it sticks

It’s going to take about a month to complete.  But if you follow along and do what we recommend in the order we recommend, your business will grow and prosper.

Opt in to the 30 Day Training here.

Coming tomorrow: The details on what’s coming.

And during this series I welcome your ideas and comments, as well thoughts and ideas from the many other demand generation experts out there, including Ardath Albee, Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay, and Jim Burns.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing. Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.

Find New Customers hosted a great webinar yesterday featuring Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and co-author of Get Content, Get Customers.

It was a great session and we had huge turnout.

Content Marketing is the new imperative for business.  Why is content marketing important?  Look at these facts:

• 9 out of 10 buyers say they find the seller.
• 95% of buyers also say they look for content (white papers, eBooks, videos, webinars, etc.) during the buying process.

What do buyers respond to?  Mainly content mapped to their buying journey.

Industry, role, stage of buying process, product type — all are but of few of the ways you can map your content.  And as Joe told the audience, good is not good enough.  Your content has to be great.

“To attract and retain customers:

Deliver valuable, relevant, and compelling content to your prospective buyers on a consistent basis. “

This means if buyers get a blog article every Tuesday at 10:00am ET, don’t disappoint them.  Keep to your calendar.  (Fearless Competitor publishes every weekday at 9am ET USA.  We keep to that calendar.)

It’s also essential that businesses start embracing a publishing mindset.  Be on the hunt for great content all the time.  Create a calendar for publishing and keep to it.  And develop buyer personas.  The better you know prospective buyers, the better you can create content that engages them.

If you would like to get access to the recorded Flash version of this webinar, being produced by the content marketing experts at Avitage, please send a request via email to jogden at findnewcustomers.net.  You can also download the free white paper, Attracting and Retaining Customers with Content.

And we’d love to hear your thoughts on content marketing as well.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing.

Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.

If you’ve visited the home page of Find New Customers, you know the crisis of content facing marketers today. They need remarkable content — but 97% of the content out there is far less than remarkable.

Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions recently teamed up with the content experts at Avitage to present Catch Factors. It was an excellent presentation and shared invaluable information on how marketers can create remarkable content.

Catch Factors are the key elements in crafting marketing content that engages buyers. She made the point that these are subconscious reactions that happen almost instantly. These factors command attention, increase mind share and accelerate buying behaviors.

Ardath shared five factors:

1. Urgency
2. Impact
3. Effort
4. Reputation
5. Intent

Let’s look at each of these. This is but a brief summary of what Ardath shared. Please go to her original presentation (highlighted below) to listen to her entire presentation.

Urgency — What’s top of mind for them? It may be about their competitors or deadlines.

Impact — What’s in it for them? What do they get from you?

Effort — Is it simple? Is it what we expected?

Reputation — What do they think of you? Made up of lots of things. (Google yourself.)

Intent — What they think you want from them. Be consistent. Line up their expectations with delivery.

If you would like to learn more about Catch Factors, please visit the Avitage Content Marketing website and Ardath Albee at MarketingInteractions.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing. Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! (Apologies to the movie “Network”) but I’m fed up with these long and convoluted signup forms on websites.

There’s a better way.  A kinder and gentler way.  It’s called progressive profiling and I explain it in this video.  If you want to grow your marketing database, learn about Progressive Profiling.

Just click on the words, Progressive Profiling, below.

We also have the full video at Find New Customers

Progressive Profiling from Jeff Ogden on Vimeo.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing. Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.

In addition, Jeff’s hosting a great free webinar on content marketing with Joe Pullizi (Junta42 and co-author of Get Content, Get Customers on March 11th at noon ET.  Register athttps://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/536492297.

My current passion is story-telling, and it would have served me well in a recent experience.

I was hired to head sales and marketing for a UK based Search Marketing firm. I had to lead the staff in the UK as well as build a US operation where none existed.

It seemed clear what needed to be done. Crank up marketing and lead generation. Seed a few accounts to get a user base. But none of that happened. Laptop, phone — and they expected results.

The writing on the wall was clear. Change the path or face failure.

I did it wrong. The right way would be to tell them the story of a company that tried to expand to the US, ran into problems, adapted and succeeded. This was so they could learn what needed to be done on their own. But instead, I simply told them what they needed to do. It was not well received. I was let go.

Learning to tell stories is a powerful approach is business and in life. Check out books by Annette Simmons like The Story Factor and Doug Litman for more.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers using the form below.

(Stay tuned for Part Two on Monday.)

This time I’d like to relate a story that took place back in the early 90′s at a large French business intelligence software firm that’s now part of IBM — and how success got me fired.

My current passion is story-telling, so sit back and I’ll tell you a story.

I won a sales job with this firm and was given a list of 25 accounts or so. Working very hard, I got a bunch of prospects and won them all.  At the next sales kickoff meeting, I was shocked when they announced my name as Top Rookie.

One of the names on my list was a GE division.  I noticed that we were not doing a very good job on GE.  Very tactical and vendor centric approach by this lady named Judy C.  I decided to take a chance and ask if I could handle GE.  They didn’t exactly say yes, but they didn’t say no either.  If I was to get this opportunity, I’d have to use a lot of political license.

My idea was to use a very customer-centric approach.  GE would be my employer, not the software company I worked for.  Also, I needed reps all over the world empowered to sell GE. Though I had all of these ideas, my compensation plan still said “Regional Sales Manager.”  But I got business cards that said “Global Account Manager for GE.”  But there was no global accounts program, so I was making it up as I went along.

(In fact, the VP of the East and the VP of the US met with Mark M., head of purchasing and a notorious bad-ass.  When these men shared their business cards, Mark threw both back at them, stammering “GE is a GLOBAL company.  You can’t help us!”)

Another of my brainstorms was that in order for others to sell GE, I had to make it easier to sell than any of their other accounts.  So Rory in Australia and Barbara in Italy needed help selling GE in order to focus on them.

The first thing I did was go to Amazon.com and buy books on GE.  I read and read till I really understood the company.  Then I started looking at our products through the eyes of GE.

Case in point, we sold business intelligence while GE was buying Digital Cockpits.  This had to change.

My big break came when GE Capital decided to buy a digital cockpit.  They gave us a mock-up of what the cockpit should look like.  My presales person, John C. found a programmer down in Atlanta who in a matter of days, mocked up their vision.

Everyone wanted this deal.  Oracle. SAS, SPSS, Cognos, etc.  But I had the mock-up and, more importantly, the deep knowledge of GE.  We won.

I didn’t stop there.  I called the GE product leader, Egidio L., and shared my belief that it was up to him and me to make this work.  A lot of programming was needed and they took six of our programmers and six GE programmers from India.  So Egidio and I set a weekly conference call every Thursday at 2:00pm.  We got right to the chase and fixed problems immediately.

I was blessed to have a superb project leader, Chirag Shah (he now works for Microstrategy.) Chirag was sharp and dependable.

The project was a huge success — GE had planned to roll it out to 14 — instead they deployed it globally to 144.  Even more interesting, my fame across GE grew substantially.

Next big project was a Six Sigma Quality Management System at GE Appliance in Louisville, KY - coordinated by GE Fanuc.  We had no such product in our price book.  But we had a new analytics product that seemed to do a lot of what they want.

I contacted the product development team and they agreed.  But how could we make the product fit their needs?  I finally decided I’d need GE to sell the idea and contacted GE Fanuc.  I explained that I needed their help.  We flew to San Jose and met the product team. GE presented to us.  The deal was done and in a few months, the client was delighted.  My fame grew even more.

(On Monday, how a great job turned sour due to politics)

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers using the form below.