Brain-dead marketers are everywhere

Sorry, kids but I need to vent a little. Looking for instant results in B2b lead generation? It ain’t there.

I’m shocked at the number of companies who expect instant results. Run a few email blasts and watch the leads pour in?

It ain’t happening. B2B marketing is hard and takes time.  It’s not about campaigns anymore. It’s not about throwing so-called sales leads to salespeople. It’s not about software and tools.

It’s about deep understanding of buyers and their process. It’s about thinking “outside in” instead of “inside out.” - from customers back to us rather than us out to customers. It is about differentiating your company and creating remarkable content. (So people start remarking to each other.)

It’s sad how badly American businesses are run today.

Check out our new lead nurturing cheat sheet in this video clip.

One other thought. I turned the B2BSalesLounge.com over to the company three weeks ago. It was rocking - great posts for the next three weeks lined up to post. Super images in each one too. What happened over the last three weeks?

Nothing. They did not touch the blog. The last post ran Friday. For the first time in months, there is no post running tomorrow - it aways ran Monday to Friday in the past. Way to go, guys. I’ve lost all respect for them.

By the way. the publishing is paying off. Find New Customers is in the top 5 in Google for almost all our keywords.

What do you think?

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 150 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 generationexperts at Find New Customers. Use the form below to send me a personal note or Leave a Reply to post a permanent comment on this article.

Just got back from the Aprimo Marketing Summit. Great event. Great speakers. Great hotel room too (with a great ocean view). Jeff Hayzlett was a hoot, and   the fly that kept landing on Seth Godin’s head as he talked via satellite was hilarious!

By now, we have our weekly leads report from Marketo.

Why can’t other firms provide a quality weekly report via email like Marketo does? We use this report to sent Marketo a bill each month, which they promptly pay.

Very proud of our new cheat sheet entitled

“7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing“

Frankly, everyone doing lead nurturing should download it. It’s really easy. Point, click, click, done. We don’t even use a signup form.

I’m shocked how many companies don’t “get b2b lead generation.” Sales lead generation is critical to deliver business sales leads. Look at this list of challenges for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs):

When almost 8 out of 10 CMOs say generating high quality leads is a problem - and it has increased since 2010, it is a BIG problem. And SiriusDecisions said that companies who are best practices get 5X better results than those who are not. CSO Insights says quota achievement is at an alltime low and quotas are going up. A huge problem and companies who do it well get 500% better results - duh! I really feel sorry for B2B salespeople - hung out to dry by their leaders.

It’s clear this needs to be a top corporate focus. But most CEOs simply don’t understand it. It seems most of them think the way to improve revenue is by flogging the salespeople. I sent an email to the head of sales of a technology firm sharing the 500% number. His reaction: Please remove me.

IMHO, those business leaders are brain-dead. They will never achieve the fiscal results they want, because they are oblivious to the need of fixing root causes.

Enjoy what’s left of your weekend.

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. Follow Jeff on Twitter or download the free white paper on lead generation.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours(with 150 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.

Right now, I’m at the Aprimo Marketing Summit in Florida, where I am hosting the B2B track. On Monday, I moderate a round-table discussion on B2B marketing with executives from Symantec, ESRI and Autodesk.

Check out our new “Cheat Sheet” on B2B lead nurturing too. It’s terrific! No registration either.

Looks like we have a new professional writing project too. Another large marketing automation company wants a great white paper, like How to Find New Customers, which we wrote for Marketo.

Some observations - Marketo, Eloqua, Kinaxis (winner of our “B2B Marketing Idea of the Year Winner) and Hubspot all do a superb job of content marketing.

If you are not one of those four, you are probably NOT doing a good job of content marketing. I hear very little from other companies, including a large competitor of Eloqua and Marketo where Find New Customers is a Gold partner. (This may be changing as they wish to retain our services.)

“The Flywheel Effect” - my good friend, Jim Burns of Avitage talks about this. His point is that most businesses lack the patience for content marketing. He says “It takes more than a quarter or two to see real results.” Do you have the stomach to work hard, spend money and see nothing for over three months?

Content marketing works like a flywheel. The flywheel you can push very, very hard, but it starts to turn very slowly. But if you push long enough, it speeds up and gets its own momentum. Most CEOs give up far too soon. (I’ve been dismissed as a marketing head in as little as 30 days - clueless business leaders.)

Enjoy what’s left of your weekend.

Welcome new subscribers! We’re glad you are here.

Sunday posts are of a slightly personal nature - unlike weekday posts. Enjoy!

That rinky-dink little Florida CRM software company still refuses to return the domain www.findnewcustomers dot net to its rightful owner. (I sold those for a fire sale price when I joined the firm, but when they dumped me without warning after just 1 month, I asked for my property back. They refused, unless I paid them back in full. My own fault for trusting rather than an iron clad agreement, but now I feel…..)

Screw you.

We now own four domains:

1. www.findnewcustomers.com - the main business name
2. www.fearlesscompetitor.com - the blog
3. www.findnewcustomers.org - points to the company domain
4. www.findnewcustomers.mobi - reserved for future mobile use

Heading to the Aprimo Marketing Summit in Florida end of next week. I’m the host of the B2B marketing track there. Very exciting. Hosting panel discussions, coordinating affairs, etc. Should be a lot of fun and get Find New Customers some great exposure.

Did you miss Friday’s Laugh and Learn? We do that show every Friday. It runs on our blog, on our Facebook fan page and on our business home page. Please post a comment on it - love to hear from you.

Wrote a blog for a company in the Boston area called the B2B Sales Lounge. I certainly made more than my share of mistakes. But the lack of content became a critical problem. No good customer-focused content, what do I write about? Learned a painful lesson. A content marketing guru working for a company not into content marketing? Oil and water.

Check out our new “Cheat Sheet” entitled “7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing.” My graphics guy in the UK did a terrific job on it.

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 150 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.

Each Sunday we write something more personal. Stay away from business.

Starting tomorrow, we’re back to B2B lead generation and marketing. More on how to create your own lead generation programs to drive better sales leads.

Our 17 year-old son got accepted to his first college, the University of Connecticut. More are coming. But Dad’s a proud graduate of the University of Notre Dame. (Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame.) He applied there too. I’m hopeful.

Our youngest is 11 and I had a tradition of taking each boy to a football game at Notre Dame when they turn ten. I already did it with the older boys. One more to go.

Starting Find New Customers sucked up a lot of cash, so we were unable to do it when he was ten.

Why did it suck up cash? It took time to build great content — like the white papers

• How to Find New Customers (b2b lead generation)
• Definitive Guide to Making Quota (b2b sales) and
• Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email Marketing. (email marketing)

All are available free at http://www.findnewcustomers.com/getcustomers. Depending on where your interests lie, lead generation, sales or email marketing, we have a white paper for you.

You need great content like that before you start looking for clients. They give you great credibility. When you are a startup, you do everything yourself. A lack of staff and marketing funds is our single biggest problem. But we’re very, very well known ( a top marketing expert just call us “the ‘Wolfgang Puck of B2B marketing”) and this blog has over 39,000 readers, I was featured in the book Get Back to Work Faster and was a special guest on HubspotTV recently, so it could be a lot worse.

Things are looking up, both for Find New Customers and for the Irish, (they just got the best defensive line recruits in a decade) so I hope to take my youngest to Notre Dame this Fall. And I really hope to take my entire family on a nice vacation this year too. To do that, we just need a few more happy clients like Aprimo and OneSource.

Certainly, with the financial struggles of so many firms, business is out there. As MarketingSherpa found, 8 out of 10 companies say the lack of quality sales leads is their biggest problem.

Looking forward to going to Florida at the end of February. Our client, Aprimo, invited me to host the B2B track at the Aprimo Marketing Summit. That’s quite an honor. Looking forward to it. They have great keynote speakers, including:

1. Seth Godin (America’s greatest marketer)
2. Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer for Marketingprofs and co-founder of ClickZ)and
3. Jeff Hayzlett (Celebrity CMO and former CMO of Kodak)I look forward to meeting them.

Did you know that we also write the B2B Sales Lounge on behalf of our client, OneSource? Every post you see there was created by yours truly. It publishes five days a week. And this blog publishes six days a week too. Would love to have you subscribe to either one.

Got a great Linkedin endorsement on Friday. I’m now up to 39 of them, which blows my mind.

“If marketing to marketers is like cooking for chefs, Jeff Ogden is the Wolfgang Puck of marketing. His insights, instincts and ingenuity about getting customers engaged and keeping them involved are well-known in the industry. And, he’s a heck of a nice guy to boot. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Jeff now or in the future.”

Hope you have a great weekend and I really appreciate your support. Every fan, follower or friend is celebrated.

Jeff

Do you have a personal mentor - someone you can reach out to anytime day or night and get his or her unconditional support? (Sundays are for more personal posts.)

I do, and I cannot overstate how much I appreciate her. I am one lucky guy. She is responsive, supportive and encouraging.

Thank you, Jill. From the bottom of my heart.

Loved this touching Thanksgiving story and wanted to share it.

A very young 18 year old kid arrives at Notre Dame. He’s Indian and from Nairobi, Kenya. He knows no one.

Feeling awkward and lonely, Notre Dame breaks for the Thanksgiving Holiday. He’s only been in the USA for a few months.

A roommate invites him to visit his family for the holiday. Together, they travel to a small and picturesque little town on the banks of the Ohio River, Madison, Indiana.

32 years later, this man still remembers that weekend, and says “That’s the weekend I became an American and a Domer.”

Can you imagine what it must have felt like for him? Lonely and in a strange culture.

Our 17 year old son is looking at college and distances. But Nairobi to Chicago (the closest major city to Notre Dame, Indiana) is over 8,000 miles.

The fact that this man saved this wonderful memory for over three decades on the wonderful way how he was treated on his first USA experience is one of the best Thanksgiving stories ever.

(p.s. I was that roommate.)

In this difficult economy, many of us feel like failures.  But watch this video to see the story of other people who failed.    There are some real shockers here.

In line with the Fearless Competitor, if you’ve not failed, you’ve not lived.  When you fall down, get up.  Fall again.  Get up.  Fall again.  Get up.

Stick in there.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

A heartwarming story…I love it and hope you do too.

Weis Uses Play Called by 10 - Year - Old Boy

By:	Tom Coyne
Date:	September 25, 2005
From:	Associated Press

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — Charlie Weis doesn’t usually let anyone else call plays on offense. He made an exception for 10-year-old Montana Mazurkiewicz.

The Notre Dame coach met last week with Montana, who had been told by doctors weeks earlier that there was nothing more they could do to stop the spread of his inoperable brain tumor.

”He was a big Notre Dame fan in general, but football especially,” said his mother, Cathy Mazurkiewicz.

Weis showed up at the Mazurkiewicz home in Mishawaka, just east of South Bend, and talked with Montana about his tumor and about Weis’ 10-year-old daughter, Hannah, who has global development delay, a rare disorder similar to autism.

He told Montana about some pranks he played on Joe Montana — whom Montana was named after — while they were roommates at Notre Dame.

”I gave him a chance to hammer me on the Michigan State loss, which he did very well. He reminded me of my son,” said Weis, whose son, Charlie Jr., is 12 years old.

Weis said the meeting was touching.

”He told me about his love for Notre Dame football and how he just wanted to make it through this game this week,” Weis said. ”He just wanted to be able to live through this game because he knew he wasn’t going to live very much longer.”

As Weis talked to the boy, Cathy Mazurkiewicz rubbed her son’s shoulder trying to ease his pain. Weis said he could tell the boy was trying not to show he was in pain.

His mother told Montana, who had just become paralyzed from the waist down a day earlier because of the tumor, to toss her a football Weis had given him. Montana tried to throw the football, put could barely lift it. So Weis climbed into the reclining chair with him and helped him complete the pass to his mother.

Before leaving, Weis signed the football.

”He wrote, ‘Live for today for tomorrow is always another day,”’ Mazurkiewicz said.

”He told him: ‘You can’t worry about tomorrow. Just live today for everything it has and everything you can appreciate,” she said. ”He said: ‘If you’re (in pain) today you might not necessarily be in pain tomorrow, or it might be worse. But there’s always another day.”

Weis asked Montana if there was something he could do for him. He agreed to let Montana call the first play against Washington on Saturday. He called ”pass right.”

Montana never got to see the play. He died Friday at his home.

Weis heard about the death and called Mazurkiewicz on Friday night to assure her he would still call Montana’s play.

”He said, ‘This game is for Montana, and the play still stands,”’ she said.

Weis said he told the team about the visit. He said it wasn’t a ”Win one for the Gipper” speech, because he doesn’t believe in using individuals as inspiration. He just wanted the team to know people like Montana are out there.

”That they represent a lot of people that they don’t even realize they’re representing,” Weis said.

When the Irish started on their own 1-yard-line following a fumble recovery, Mazurkiewicz wasn’t sure Notre Dame would be able to throw a pass. Weis was concerned about that, too. So was quarterback Brady Quinn.

”He said what are we going to do?” Weis said. ”I said we have no choice. We’re throwing it to the right.”

Weis called a play where most of the Irish went left, Quinn ran right and looked for tight end Anthony Fasano on the right.

Mazurkiewicz watched with her family.

”I just closed my eyes. I thought, ‘There’s no way he’s going to be able to make that pass. Not from where they’re at. He’s going to get sacked and Washington’s going to get two points,”’ she said.

Fasano caught the pass and leapt over a defender for a 13-yard gain.

”It’s almost like Montana was willing him to beat that defender and take it to the house,” Weis said.

Mazurkiewicz was happy.

”It was an amazing play. Montana would have been very pleased. I was very pleased,” she said. ”I was just so overwhelmed. I couldn’t watch much more.”

Weis called her again after the game, a 36-17 victory by the 13th-ranked Fighting Irish, and said he had a game ball signed by the team that he wanted to bring to the family on Sunday.

”He’s a very neat man. Very compassionate,” she said. ”I just thanked him for using that play, no matter the circumstances.”