The Funnelholic

I thought I would start 2009 with some help from some Friends (of the Funnel). For the next 5-6 posts, I will put up interviews I did with some thought leaders in the industry. After the first 5-6, I’ll write some original posts again before we pick up some more interviews again. I was going to basically fill the first couple months of the year with interviews, but the two weeks off in December gave me too many ideas on blog topics.

For the interviews, I attempted to give everyone the same questions:

1. What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?

2. What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

3. What are 3 metrics that b2b marketers should care about and why

4. What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

5. What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

6. What three Web 2.0 applications, cutting-edge technologies, or lead generation sources do marketers HAVE to consider to be successful?

7. What do you hope for in b2b sales and marketing for the new year?

Next post will start the interview series and see where that takes us. Otherwise, welcome to the new year — time to produce.

The Funnelholic will be going on hiatus until January.  Before I go, I just wanted to look back on the Funnelholic in 2008.  Overall,  building the Funnelholic.com blog has been a rewarding experience.   By having to write 2 posts a week, I have done more research than ever in all aspects of the b2b sales and marketing funnel.  I have also learned a ton about social media and traffic building, met new friends and contacts, and actually had people say “Wow, you’re the Funnelholic!”.  I don’t plan for this blog to be a huge Web property, instead a place for me to have some fun talking the business I enjoy.  It’s also a colossal time-sink.

2008 Milestones:

• Redesigned the site: There is probably another rev coming, but the most important thing was to get up and running as quickly as possible.  Bottom line, it is working for me and I haven’t heard too many complaints.
• Two posts a week: I basically decided this was all or nothing.  I didn’t want the Funnelholic to be one of those blogs with 3 to 5 posts on there a year.  Two posts a week is incredibly difficult, but I believe has been integral to the Funnelholic’s success
• “Friends of the Funnel” Linkedin Group: My goal for the year was 500 members, and I hit that number last week. The group is now one of the bigger ones in the demand gen space.  For a guy who came out of nowhere, this has been awesome.
• Twitter: 227 followers and adding 1 or 2 a day. I am not Guy Kawasaki, but I am happy with the progress.  I got a lot of traffic from Twitter and Linkedin.
• Facebook: Total flop, doesn’t work for me. Neither does Plurk.  Thumbs down.
• “The Wikipedia Scandal” series of posts: This post was one of my first big traffic lifts.  For a while, I was getting 15 visitors a day, no comments, and no links.  I wrote this post and I blew up for a week.  The traffic poured in and I finally got some comments.  This post will go down in Funnelholic history as a big traffic boost.
• My mood swings: The blog is meant to be fun, sarcastic, and witty.  When the depths of the recession began to be felt, my writing got dark.  After some personal requests to go back to putting the FUN back in the Funnelholic, I came back to life.  One post that I got a lot of great feedback on was the Making It Work in 2009: 6 Quotes from Martin Scorcese Put Things in Perspective. This article got kudos and traffic, and writing it was fun and cathartic.

So, I am off for a couple weeks, and then we will come back with a vengeance in 2009.  I plan to kick off the year with some thought leadership interviews.  As the year progresses, I hope to use more data we are gathering here at Tippit around buying behavior.

Signing off for 2008.  Happy New Year.

I wrote an article on my view of the SEO world titled “You Can’t Fade the 20 Wisemen.” The premise behind my article is the contention that there is a small cabal of real SEOs that actually “do” SEO, and there are a bunch of others who are just out there thinking they are doing it, but really aren’t. My key theme is that whatever the common SEO or marketing person is doing for SEO is probably old news.  The real SEOs, or “wisemen,” have moved on. They don’t even call it SEO anymore — it’s the Competitive Internet to you. Thank you. Now they are kicking the rest of our asses in the social media world as well.

So, I wanted to write about this, but I needed the right analogy.  Here were the three ideas I tossed out: Continue Reading »

We have been doing a lot of research around what type of information buyers prefer when in the considered purchasing process.  While I can’t share with you the actual stats because the data belongs to our customers, I can talk about some of the findings.  One that is really interesting is the increasing preference of buyers to trust peer or user recommendations or reviews.  Throughout our surveys over the year, buyers (particularly technology buyers) time and time again rank  peer and user data as their most trusted source.

Here is what I think is going on: Continue Reading »