B2B Lead Generation Articles

• Question #8: Social Marketing Conferences
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Wendy wondered: Are there any conferences for social marketing - especially making videos - you would suggest? What do you guys suggest? I've been to a couple of great conferences this year. The Web 2.0 show is always a valuable...
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• Question #5: Determining Which Social Media Channels Your Customers are Using
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Robin and a few others asked: How you can tell which social media channels your target customers are using today?" Usually, I ask. We do customer surveys. We have user group meetings. We talk to sales and account managers about...
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• Podcast #24 - Interview with Robert Cialdini, expert on persuasion
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Dr. Robert Cialdini will change the way you communicate forever. His research, books and talks (he'll be keynoting at the Eloqua International User Conference next month), have been read and attended by hundreds of thousands. He consults for Fortune 100...
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• Q&A from the B2B Magazine Social Media Webinar with David Meerman Scott
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  David Meerman Scott and I went over time on our B2B Magazine Webinar on social media and agreed that we'd handle Q&A on this blog (and perhaps over on David's as well). I consolidated some of the 50+ questions we...
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• Trendsurfing on That Marketing Show
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Spoke with Rodger Roeser of That Marketing Show recently about Web 2.0 marketing tactics, measurement and Digital Body Language. The show's online now. Check it out here.
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• What is lead nurturing?
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Salesforce.com’s big Dreamforce conference is over. The keynotes have been distilled down to talking points for the media. The hangovers from the after parties have been dealt with. The Black Crowes have flown away, the hangovers from the after parties...
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• What's your big idea?
  The Innovative Marketer | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  I was having dinner with a super smart marketer a few weeks ago, and I asked him what his big idea was for 2010. And this bright guy articulated a strategy of media dominance, of placing his brand everywhere that...
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• Twitter and Politics: Friends or Foes?
  The Customer Collective | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  If you can believe it, we are rapidly approaching the 1 ½ year “anniversary� of the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States. This event was historic and monumental on many dif...
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• You Can't Save Your Way Into More Sales
  The Customer Collective | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  In response to the tough economic challenges of 2009, most sales organizations ruthlessly slashed all unnecessary expenses from their budgets. Annual sales meetings were cancelled, training was de...
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• Improving telesales performance: why call monitoring isn’t as effective as ...
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Today's post is for managers, but you telesales reps will want to read this, too, because it affects a lot of you directly. It's about a practice common in the inside sales business that is widespread, and not as effective as a lot of managers think it is. It's called call monitoring. Monitoring is the practice in which inside sales managers, from their own desks, listen to taped or real-time inside sales calls from their reps. In this practice, managers take notes on the call and then later review the call with the rep at some future time. So what's wrong with that? Since the rep cannot immediately achieve success by correcting call issues immediately, effective learning-by-doing doesn't occur. Discussing the call even one hour later isn't very good, because the rep has gone onto other...
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• Can women really succeed as sales execs? Time for a little honest dialogue.
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Some of the most talented female inside sales directors and managers I've met have gone on to starting their own companies or becoming independent consultants, rather than remaining in high tech sales for a corporate entity. With very few exceptions, none of these women have held the title of VP of Sales, in which they ran both inside and field sales. This is not the case for many of the men who've moved up the ranks from individual telesales contributors to becoming sales executives. Fact is, in my 20-odd years in the business, I just haven't seen talented women move up the sales exec ladder the way men have. Today's post is a starting point to open up some dialogue within our industry about why so few of our female telesales managers and directors move into executive sales management ...
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• Price Negotiation and sticker shock: why sometimes even the experts fail
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  I don't care how smart or seasoned a sales exec --- or sales trainer --- is, sometimes he or she will fail to bring in a big deal. Today, it's true confession time. I'm going to tell you about a deal I lost this year, then tell you a question I could have asked that might have saved it for me. I don't want you to lose the deal like I did, so listen up! First, a little background. My sales training company has had another great year this year. We're unique, totally customized, and my customers will tell you I'm the hardest working classroom trainer in the biz. We don't have trouble convincing prospects that we're the best. But even when they know we're the best, we still have to negotiate the price. Sometimes they can't afford it. And lots of times, if that's the case, they won't tell y...
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• Inheriting a Sales team: Now what do I do?
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  Today's post comes from Bangkok, where I'm doing some sales consulting for Frank, who's just inherited a sales team that in the past has been effective, but now the numbers are dropping and the company is concerned. Frank was brought in to run Operations, and has a sales team where two reps are over-quota performers and the rest are functioning below par. There are other important issues Frank needs to address, some of which are in the area of team communication. The team has never been formally trained, and there is no current training budget. The top performing rep refuses to share the reasons for his success with other members of the team. The result of these two issues is that there are no best practices to be shared because they have not been codified. This post is potentially imp...
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• 5 Personality Traits of a Superior Inside Sales Person
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  The most popular blog article I've ever written is 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson. In that post, I primarily covered activities and behaviors that most successful inside sales people have, relating to prospect/customer interaction, and interaction with the people with whom they work.  What I didn't address were the personality traits of a superior salesperson. When I'm asked what personality characteristics make a good telesales person, I'm always a little leery of spilling the beans. There are companies that make a lot of money "testing" job hunters to see if they have what it takes to be a salesperson, and I think any kind of personality testing is balderdash, because of the thousands of people who've gone through my telesales training courses, loads of them broke...
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• Don’t miss low-hanging fruit… Prioritize calling the best leads that mone...
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Mar 09, 2010 | Permalink
  At this time of year, salespeople are typically focused on two things: closing prospects that are already in the pipeline, and managing new leads that are coming in through trade shows, downloads, you-name-it. But you've already got a better lead source than those new leads, and they're sitting in your CRM sales database. Let me explain, because if you ignore what's in your CRM, you're missing some hidden but active sales opportunities, and working hard, not smart. Two weeks ago, I made a printout of every month of activity on last year's calendar, including all calls to my telesales training prospects. Loads of those calls I made last year never resulted in conversations. In just about every one of those cases, I finally left a voicemail as a last resort. Like most voicemails, they did...
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