Posts Tagged ‘B2B Sales’
B2B Lead Management – 6 Best Practices
Companies that succeed in marketing not only generate a large quantity of sales leads but they also do a good job of qualifying and nurturing these leads to make sure they become customers. This article discusses six specific B2B lead management best practices.
Where to Find B2B Sales Leads – Part 3
I hope you have found my two previous posts on where to find sales leads to be helpful. This week, I will share some ideas on how to fill your sales funnel with leads from events and content marketing. This is a sample of the possibilities but it should give you a good start.
Events
Online Events – Having spoken at and/or conducted many web seminars, I am a fan of this medium and have used it to generate tens of thousands
Who Can Use More B2B Sales Leads?
I’ve had several posts recently about where and how to find fresh sales leads. Leads are the lifeblood of many B2B organizations and if you ask the VP of sales what he or she most covets, it is often a variation on the theme, “lots of qualified leads.” Generating leads is difficult enough when you know what you are doing – if you don’t it can be painful and frustrating.
To help make this process easier, we’ve just released a new eBook
Where to Find B2B Leads – Part 2
In a recent post, I talked about six direct marketing sources of B2B sales leads. You can view that post here. Let’s now turn our attention to nine more lead sources from two important categories – online media and pull marketing.
Pull Marketing
Social Media – The big three B2B leadgen social media tools are LinkedIn, Twitter and blogging. All three can be a good low-cost source of leads. If you are going to engage with these media – and I strongly
How to Shorten the B2B Sales Cycle
If there is one thing that aggravates the modern B2B company, it is the constantly lengthening sales cycle. Everyone, from CEO to sales VP to sales rep, suffers from this problem and wants to know what to do about it. The future of your company (and its stock price) may depend on getting revenue in the door faster.
What exactly do I mean by the term “sales cycle”? The classic definition is “the total time elapsed from the buyer’s first contact
Five Questions Every B2B Marketer Needs to Ask – by Christopher Ryan
B2B Marketing is a tricky business with a lot of moving parts. To do it right, you need the answers to the appropriate questions. Here are five to get you started:
Is what you offer a commodity or a differentiated product or service? This is a critical question because it will determine how you must market to be successful. A differentiated product or service has advantages, but it must usually contend with a much smaller market niche. By contrast, a commodity
Do You Need a Service Level Agreement Between Marketing and Sales? – by Christopher Ryan
I have written a lot about the gap between marketing and sales in B2B companies and you can download my whitepaper about this subject here. One of the trickiest aspects of the relationship is establishing the marketing and sales metrics. Once you do this, you then need to agree on who is responsible for which part of the process. In most scenarios, the marketing VP is responsible for every step through qualified leads, and the sales VP is responsible for
Just How Many Leads Do You Need? – by Christopher Ryan
You think this would be a simple question. However, for a lot of B2B executives, the answer is tough to pinpoint When I ask a new Fusion Marketing Partners client or prospect “How many leads do you need?”, I often get one of three types of answers:
“I don’t know.” or “I have no idea.”
“A lot more than I am getting now.”
“X number of new leads a month, but I don’t know why.”
Often, I get different answers from different people in
A Dose of Reality in B2B Marketing – by Christopher Ryan
Napoleon once remarked, “A general should consider himself successful if half of what he plans comes to pass.” This is not to say that you shouldn’t carefully plan. But the fact is that things don’t always turn out the way you plan (just ask Napoleon about a place called Waterloo). For example, the list is staler than you thought. The webinar topic is not as interesting. The offer is not as compelling. Your vendor misses the mailing or email date.
B2B Marketing and Baseball – by Christopher Ryan
I’ve seen a number of blog posts and articles lately that use sports metaphors. I think this is true because sports is a common reference point for Americans. People who have no idea who their U.S. senator is or which ocean is on the west coast can name the Super Bowl MVP and they also know who won the World Series. So I got to thinking (always dangerous) about the many ways that B2B marketing is like baseball and some
