If ever there is an overused analogy when it comes to marketing, it’s got to be the dating analogy: you don’t ask someone to marry you the first time you meet them, you need to work at the relationship, you need to figure out where and why you are compatible, you need to be aware [...]

Sales and Marketing Functions must work in harmony to create and retain lead marketing balance.  When they don’t and work in silos, many departments are impacted; sales, marketing, corporate communications, finance and business operations.  Compare lead marketing to an ecosystem.  An ecosystem is defined as an interactive system established between a group of living creatures [...]

Long ago* at Bulldog, when we were a company that focused primarily on planning and execution of Webinars, we’d refer jokingly to the process of audience creation as “getting butts in seats.” This was virtual butts in virtual seats, but the point was the same. Reaching the right people and generating enough interest to get [...]

There’s a good post over on The Social Organization blog titled Social Media Is Not Community. How could I not love a post with a title like that? Rachel Happe writes:
I’m finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably [...]

Lead scoring is a hot topic these days, and there are some awfully sharp minds trying to figure it out. Vtrenz has a white paper on the subject that has good information. We’ve got our own work on multidimensional lead scoring. The Pedowitz Group even tried to boil lead scoring down into “7 Easy Steps” [...]

The American Marketing Association will host Mark Clemente, senior VP of strategy and development for the CMO Council, for a July 9 live Webinar covering key findings from the CMO Council’s Business Gain from How You Retain report.
The report was produced in April by Global Fluency (which runs the CMO Council) with CSC, IBM and D&B. It addresses [...]

There have been a number of articles and blog posts in past few months on B2B marketing in a recession. What I wanted to do in this post is discuss specific initiatives marketers can undertake, I’ll likely follow-up with a series that includes the following:

Using lead scoring to identify high potential opportunities for sales to [...]

First off, I am not a professional blogger, I am a sales guy, which means I have no real discernible skill. However, for the good of sales and marketing alignment everywhere, I feel compelled to let marketers behind the velvet sales rope to be briefed on one of the closest held secrets of the sales [...]

Marketing to the IT buyer is the topic of a Webinar we’ll participate in on June 18 (you can register here) with BtoB Online. We’ve defined this elusive target as the people in an organization who “determine IT needs, identify features, specify products and recomment or authorize technology purchases at work.” They range from the [...]

BtoB Online’s special issue Lead Generation Guide 2008 is a really nice overview of our space. (Warning: “Space” is one of those cliche business terms I began using a few years ago to mock business-speak, and somehow it’s become part of my regular business lexicon. I can’t seem to shake it. Be careful what you mock!)
Striking [...]