Daily Archives: December 8, 2010

Marketing Automation - Beginning of the end?

Posted by Jeff Ogden on

Carlos Hidalgo wrote a rather controversial post for Marketing Profs entitled

“Marketing Automation: The Beginning of the End?”

Carlos’s point is valid. MA software companies issue press releases on the remarkable number of new customers they have signed up, but

  • Silverpop told me their belief was less than 10% of MA software customers (regardless of vendor or ‘ease of use’ claims) get full use of capabilities.
  • 78% of BtoB marketers say generating high quality leads is their #1 problem.
  • The Propelling Brands Blog stated, “Less than 25% of organizations that have implemented a [marketing automation platform] fully currently utilize its potential.”
  • As many as 7 to 9 leads out of every 10 given to sales is being ignored and wasted (Probably because Sales sees it as unqualified.)

Is it hype? Wasn’t marketing automation supposed to fix these problems once and for all?

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but here’s what I hope to see next year.

  1. Businesses will stop trying increase revenue by raising quotas and realize they need a better way.
  2. They’ll begin to understand that fixing this problem takes real effort and time.
  3. Instead of just buying software, they’ll focus on learning. (Check out the very popular blog article “4 BtoB Marketing Action Items for 2011“
  4. Businesses will finally realize they need a strong foundation - such as buyer personas, universal lead definitions, strong value propositions, etc. and they will turn to companies like Find New Customers to help.

What do you think? What do you believe the future holds? We love your comments and sharing.

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

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Jeff Ogden (@fearlesscomp) is President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers. Find New Customers helps companies dramatically improve revenue results by transforming the ways they attract and earn the trust of prospective customers. Contact Find New Customers by calling (516) 495-9350 or sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com.

Find New Customers helps companies (with between 150 and 5,000 employees who sell complex products to businesses) to implement world-class lead generation programs. As companies struggle to create quality sales opportunities, they turn to lead generation companies like Find New Customers.

“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.

Focus Experts Roundtable on BtoB Lead Generation

Posted by Jeff Ogden on

Focus Experts Roundtable (listen here)

On November 17th, 2010, The Fearless Competitor and President of Find New Customers hosted a roundtable discussion with three top business to business lead generation experts:

  1. Mac McIntosh of Sales Lead Experts
  2. Mac McConnell of BlueBird Strategies
  3. Paul Mosenson of NuSpark Marketing

You can now listen to this conference by clicking the link above. (To the left of “Listen Here.”)

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 a lead generation company in New York.

Find New Customers helps businesses (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) develop and implement marketing lead generationprograms to improve the way they find and acquire high quality sales leadsusing best practices in business to business lead generation. 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.

Name the HubspotTV “Marketing Take-Away” (via )

Posted by Jeff Ogden on

Congrats to the five young ladies who won $15 Starbucks gift cards! They are on their way. it’s over, sorry.

Win a $15 Starbucks gift card by naming the Watch this HubspotTV episode from November 19, 2010 and identify the 2 word Marketing Take-away for the episode. The hosts of the show, Mike Volpe and Karen Ruben, ask me for the Marketing Takeaway. I answer with two words. Watch the video below and look for the question and 2 word answer. Once you have it, Re-Tweet it please.

The Decline of Advertising and the Rise of Content Marketing

Posted by Jeff Ogden on

The folks over at Junta42 and Forrester had an interesting discussion that has interesting ramifications about your lead generation programs. Here is Forrester’s take-away:

“The most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline.  Yep.  With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.”

Forrester Interactive Market Spend

The key point illustrated is that the fastest areas of growth is social media. But talking about what you had for lunch does not attract interest. This is why content marketing is red-hot today for b2b lead generation programs. There is no point in spending one dime on social media unless you have remarkable content to share. (Remarkable content is exactly that - people remark to each other about it.)

Search marketing is also growing. But watch are people searching for. Again, we come back to content. So what should you do? Look at Junta42 and Kristen Halvorson of Brain Traffic for answers:

Spend on the Right Content Initiatives

Okay, so what should you do with this?  First off, stop thinking about content marketing or content strategy as the end deliverable. The content process is not just the video series, the e-newsletter or the custom magazine. It’s the entire content strategy process, including (shout out to Kristina Halvorson from Brain Traffic on guidance here):

  • The Content Audit. Before you usher in more content noise, it’s worth it to figure out what you have said. Anyone about to spend significant investment in content creation should develop a content benchmark first.
  • The Content Plan. Who’s the audience?; What are their informational needs?; What are the success metrics of the content plan?; Who owns the plan?; What are the best content tactics?; How will we execute those tactics?;
  • Content Maintenance. Once we create the content, how do we keep it fresh, updated, and continually monitor our customers’ informational needs so that we succeed with the content plan?
  • Content Marketing. How are we distributing our valuable, relevant content so that we deliver on our success metrics?

The lesson for BtoB marketers is clear.

If you’re not making a major investment in Content Marketing in 2011, you will be left on the proverbial dust heap of history.

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.