The Funnelholic

This is soo random, but I am reading one of our employees blogs and she has the great post about dealing with admins. She had a bad day with the admins as you can tell….but anyway. I liked it.
I personally enjoyed this one:

Don’t get pissed at me because that communications degree from that 2 year you attended didnt get you that PR dream job in LA you wanted. Do me a favor and fake a smile and press *227 and transfer me, okay?

Anyway, good read click here for Erikakali

It brings up a good point: The ADMIN and her (rarely, but some

One of the main reasons for this Venture Capitalist/Silicon Valley gold rush towards marketing automation ultimately stems from B2B’s inability to create a fully automated, reliable closed loop process. Neither Salesforce.com nor Sugar CRM are very good at it though they can be gerry-rigged to get close. Again, the recent success on the internet with B2C pay-for-performance advertising is leading the charge and as usual B2C is ahead of the B2B game. The B2C companies do a great job of following lead to sale because they have to and they can. Vonage pays publishers and ad networks $30-100 per sale you bring in. From the reg page to the close, their system keeps a closed loop tab on your lead.

B2B lead generation are typically more complex sales that don’t lend themselves as easily to clean closed loop process. And furthermore, if the marketing department is doing their job, future customers are coming to their site via webinars, email campaigns, etc…that is, they are getting touched more than just once. These multiple touches make things tricky.

So does the reliance on the Sales Team to correct track and update leads in your CRM.

So does the subjectivity of the Sales Team against even the “tightest” lead definition.

This is our life.

Some beginning steps:
1. A unified lead definition is vital and a great first step.

2. The next step is to get your automation to best support your process. More on this in future posts.

3. The anecdotal Closed Loop Meeting between Sales and Marketing. See Elusive Closed Process Part II.

So, this guy, Brian Carroll, has a great B2B Sales and Marketing Blog that I hope to bite from quite a bit. As you know in the blogosphere, biting is actually honoring and I will always link back to his articles. He covers alot of things that I live by in my day-to-day life in B2B marketing. This is not one of his newer articles, but it is one that is near and dear to my heart — creating a unified lead definition. I cannot agree with this article more. He details some of the steps along the way to creating this definition, but I would say at a high level is:

1. Sales and Marketing need to come to agreement on the definition. Frankly, part of the key to this agreement will affect the type of quantity sales may receive. In other words, if you put too many restrictions on the lead definition (has to be C-level, has to have budget responsibility, etc), this will affect the number that Marketing can/should agree to.

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Amendment #1; the first two blog posts are the hardest. Anyway, I want to continue to answer the question “Why the Funnelholic”. There is a major movement going on in Lead Generation/Marketing Optimization. Venture Capitalists are giving money to new startups coming up in this genre. I am not sure exactly what spurred this as I have been in this business for awhile now. There are many theories such as Google adwords which has given life to a new world of remote controlled lead generation and some fairly solid reporting tools to go with it. Adwords has made the position of lead generation hip once again.

Overall, many of us we have been around the world of lead generation are starting to get excited with some of the new tools at our disposal. Trade shows, print media, and to a large extent cold calling are still part of the repertorie but are fast showing the least ROI. Don’t get me wrong, you have to do it. Continue Reading »