B2B Marketing Digital Conference in London

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Robin Collyer
Thanks to Joel and James for a thought-provoking event on Wednesday - Pull Marketing, Social CRM and Influencer Marketing - Twitter Tag #b2b21c

Stephen Mills from O2 advised that you only have 4 seconds to capture interest so RELEVANCY is key if you want to drive campaign results.

Given the volume of communications that we are all trying to manage, you can see why Marketing Management Technology is so popular right now.

Will Schnabel explored the shift of power from vendor to buyer in the sales process - the hunted become the hunters and use multiple channels to inform themselves (Tom Chapman advised that 1 in 5 tweets mentions a brand, product or service). With 70% of leads not being "ready now", event trigger marketing and lead automation are no longer optional tools for the B2B marketer.

Katie and Pamela from Volume informed us that 69% B2B decision makers use social networks and 90% participate in video - thanks for sharing the Oracle case study on Enterprise Performance Management TV.

David Beard re-enforced the message that Sage don't just do finance software! They are doing a great job "keeping the conversation going" around their CRM solutions and interacting with any interest they observe.

"Too much noise" was the message from James Hanson. Every prospect you are speaking to is likely to have at least 5 influencers. Empathy is key - understand what drives the influencers and adapt your marketing plans accordingly. Thanks to Drew Nicholson for sharing the influencer experience at Cisco Webex.

Great energy from Prof Merlin Stone. Are we approaching a tipping point similar to the explosion of telephone marketing 20 years ago? Web 2 has given the customer parity with the supplier this time. Hyper-competition makes planning very difficult - best to be guided by how you would like your customers to talk about you.

A stimulating debate, led by Scot Mckee from Birddog and Steve Kemish from Cyance, forced us to consider whether traditional forms of B2B marketing were dead and that we all need to migrate to digital. Despite protestations from Joel, the panel - and audience - migrated to the middle ground and the much maligned word "Integration".

Guess I'll have to be careful about how much I reference the ability to integrate all your marketing efforts in Aprimo Marketing Studio!

Lead Management

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Donna Holland
How are you handling your leads currently?  Is your lead managment process working well for you?  Are your leads winning the battle or are you winning the leads?

Marketing professionals reach out to us asking to hear more about our Lead Automation Management functionality, saying they are swamped and overwhelmed with leads and are trying to find a best practice to address them. 

We have prospects - who are now our customers - that have come to us with just that one business concern.  They didn't need anything huge......they simply needed to solve their problem....What to do with all those leads?  They might have leads from events, leads from their websites, leads from lists, and more.  I've heard questions like:  How do I determine which ones to handle first?  How do I keep from having duplicates?  How do I know if I'm passing out duplicates to my sales team?  How do I best organize them so they are manageable?  How do I track them?  How do I score them?

Aprimo has marketing management software to make you the unquestionable winner in the Lead Management arena.  Let us know if you are overwhelmed in your current processes of trying to manage your leads and lead scoring.  We would love to help. 

Is it just the economy?

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Kelly Turner

In my past marketing life, before learning to speak "Yoda" and definitely before I could do an office scavenger hunt that I would win if "stuffed star trak characters" showed up on the list...(there are at least 10 offices I know of that I can beeline to here!) I fought uphill battles.

In that past life, I debated, practically daily, with the finance higher ups about the value of marketing. My department was responsible for lead development and lead distribution, but  a lot of our success rested on the question, "Is it just the economy driving these leads?" It seemed to me that anything we did poorly, we took on chin (yes, I hear violins playing!) but that anything done well was attributed to the economy. What we needed to do was rip up the Excel speadsheets used for tracking and adopt a marketing communication software that would provide lead automation. Then, that monthly debate or button pushing would be backed up. Technology is a science...so who can argue with science? Are you fighting those same uphill battles? If so, quit tracking and start automating!

I say..."CFO Joe" bring on your questions, I've got Aprimo software on my side...and a whole host of "techie trekkies" to back me!

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