The Funnelholic

I never do book reviews, but it is interesting how many times I get asked: “What should I be reading about b2b marketing?”    That is why I am writing today about Adam Needles’ book: Balancing the Demand Equation - it is worth passing along to everyone.

Asterisks:

1.  Adam Needles is a friend but we have no commercial relationships with each other.

2.  Would I write a frivolous blog post supporting  friend’s work? No, not really. I really enjoyed it and decided to write about it, but am definetly a little uncomfortable because I don’t really shill. (some people may disagree, but I don’t)

Truthfully, there aren’t very many books out there for b2b marketing or b2b demand generation. I always and will continue to recommend Ardath Albee (I am an unabashed reader of all-things Albee), Jill Konrath (easy to read and fun) and Digital Body Language (not easy to read but a pre-cursor to the Adam’s book in many ways).  Basically,  I have been taking BART into work which means I get to read, and I really dug into Adam’s book.  I am writing because I like it AND I think it’s important.  Why?  It’s a study in the creating a demand generation platform. No, not just technology, but a organizational process that delivers an  always-on, highly efficient, highly effective b2b demand generation platform.

He uses a lot of data points, something that a lot of us in the blogosphere DON’T do (me included).  That helps keep me interested.  If what I am reading is just another one of us shouting about the buyer changing than I am not interested, but providing unique data points I like and this book does a good job of providing that.  There are some real-world examples - another piece lacking in a lot of the b2b marketing blogosphere’s writing (me included) is examples.  There are examples in here written from the view point of the practitioner.  I enjoyed that, and frankly, wish Adam provided more.

The quote at the top of the post is from the book and I loved it.  So there you have it, add another one to your list.

From Monday, July 11, through Friday, July 15, Focus.com is presenting Focus B2B Marketing Week, rolling out a bunch of webinars and roundtable panels that will bring together the top experts in their fields to discuss the state of B2B marketing today.

Couple things to note:

• Wednesday at 10 am PT is a webinar with Ardath Albee and me. Everything else is a roundtable.
• You can catch all the action by clicking here.
• Ask questions before, during and after the event in the event interfaces.

For speaker details and to attend, click the event links below.

Monday July 11

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: How to Set Up an Effective Marketing Organization

Tuesday July 12

11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing Tactics That Work (And the Ones That Don’t)

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Modern B2B Marketing Strategies

Wednesday July 13

10 am PT/1 pm ET: The Four Types of Prospect Attention and How They Affect Demand Generation

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: B2B Lead Generation: How To Use the Phone to Drive High Quality Leads

Thursday July 14

9 am PT/12 pm ET: The Key to Sales and Marketing Alignment

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Expert Best Practices in Content Marketing

Friday July 15

11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing 3.0: What’s Next for B2B Marketers?

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Tips on Generating Leads for Yourself

Sign up to attend now — it should be awesome.

Today, The Funnelholic wraps up its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Sue Hay, author of the blog 21^st Century Lead Generation and founder of BeWhys Marketing, a full-service lead generation consultancy with managed services. The BeWhys team has helped midsize to enterprise organizations increase revenue by creating and implementing targeted lead nurturing campaigns using marketing automation. BeWhys incorporates lead process management best practices, lead scoring, persona building, content creation and mapping to achieve results.

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Last week, I went to Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University.  As I have blogged before, I don’t write about conferences unless I can write about something interesting. This event was awesome — the content was great (not your typical BS), 180 people were in the audience, and the questions were engaging. I was having writer’s block going into the event, and I left with three posts (coming soon). Props to Silverpop.

OK, so during Malcolm Friedberg’s presentation, someone in the audience asked for advice on how to handles sales. (The actual question is not important, but it had something to do with convincing sales to let marketing nurture instead of passing the leads to them directly.) Anyway, I was sitting there thinking that, here we have Malcolm on stage talking about marketing automation processes, etc., and one of the questions that comes up is the age-old issue of the sales-marketing divide. Boom. Funnelholic blog post.

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