Archive for the ‘Thought Leadership’ Category

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Sales & Marketing Best Practices: Taking Your Website to the Next Level

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we will be sharing Sales & Marketing best practices via the Loopfuse Exchange.  Today’s topic is:  Taking Your Website to the Next Level, and here is an excerpt from the article:

Overview

Your website is one of your most important marketing assets. It attracts, educates and informs customers, business partners, investors and other potential stakeholders in your business. It communicates your brand to the public and should help start the sales process and possibly enable sales via e-commerce capabilities.

Whether you’re creating your first website or whether you’re looking for ways to increase the effectiveness of your current site, we will provide you with tips to help you meet your goals. The article will cover issues like:

  • Branding Do’s and Don’ts – what does your website say about your business? What “vibe” does it give off?
  • Tips for creating a website that meets your business goals and doesn’t cost a fortune including:

1.  Information Architecture
2.  Website Design
3.  Content Management Systems
4.  Forms
5.  Finding Help

  • Analytics – How do you know whether my website is achieving its business goals?
  • And more…

Download a copy of Taking Your Website to the Next Level

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5 Best Practices for B2B Corporate Blogging

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Just posted: Head on over to B2BBloggers to read my post on Best Practices for Corporate Blogging.  The article focuses on some of the tips and tricks we employ here at LoopFuse to drive traffic and interest to our marketing automation blog.

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Look Before You Leap (Market Sustainability)

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Yes, there is a successful formula for transforming your approach to the marketplace by arming your marketing, social, and pr teams with a sales mindset that can give you unfair competitive advantage. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should be targeting all marketplaces.

Before you make that commitment you need to make sure the marketplace in question is financially viable. One of the first questions you need to answer is how big the proposed market for your offering is. Keep in mind this isn’t a mathematical proof you are trying to solve. You just need to develop a rough estimate that justifies the costs and time associated with targeting a new space.

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Size Doesn’t Always Matter (Market Size)

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

Just because a market is big does not mean it’s desirable.  When evaluating entering a new market it’s important to try and assess the space’s future prospects.  Clearly, there is a lot of masked complexity here.  What you really want to be looking for, however, is the obvious problems.

Technology innovation is often a predictive indicator.  From typewriters to answering machines, or floppy disks to CD’s there are countless markets that have faded away due to technology.  You need to ask yourself if the market is going the way of the dinosaur.

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Getting to Know You… Digitally (Online Research)

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

When you are fairly unfamiliar with your new target segment one mandatory step is to begin an online research program.  In our ubiquitously digital world there is an enormous amount of content that is easily available that can give you a head start.   The objective here is to arm yourself with a thorough understanding of the current terms and trends and a high level outlook on the market.

If you are totally new to the space and don’t even know where to start you should try setting up a social monitoring program.  Plug in the names of potential customers and competitors in the space, which you should have identified in the sizing exercise,  and start to analyze the terminology, sites, and authors that are being used.

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A Lead: An Expression of Interest

Monday, October 4th, 2010

One of the largest and most frequent problems that plague the sales and marketing relationship is the quality and quantity of leads.  Tomes have been dedicated to the subject and some very smart consultants make a lot of coin advising on it.   Yet, the results are still very hit or miss.  The problem is that people have been trying to solve the wrong problem.

The real issue isn’t what defines a “qualified” lead, but rather what defines a lead itself.  Nearly everyone defines a lead as a person.  It’s someone you’ve just met who you hope will mature into a customer.  A lead can linger on in your database for months if not years.  If this is how you define a lead, let me stop you right there to say you’ve got it wrong!

A lead isn’t a person.  A lead is an expression of interest at a specific point in time.  Think about what that means.  We are all complex people and engage with brands every day.  Our motivations for engaging at any point of time can shift and vary.  It’s these motivations that drive what and why we buy.  Remember, people buy things to solve problems.  The same is true in our personal as in our professional lives.  It’s key, therefore, for brands to hone in on what’s motivating the engagement and seize on the immediate, relevant pain.

Defining a lead in this manner addresses the sales and marketing relationship in two ways.  First, it gets marketing thinking like sales.  Injecting this notion of an “expression of interest” gets marketing focusing on the things important to the customer, and why they will buy as opposed to a raw count of bodies.  Second, it brings standardization and repetition to the qualification process.  Never confuse the inside sales team with highly paid, external sales professionals.  Reducing their scope and funneling the outcomes will drive consistency and performance.

Step one in getting your lead generation process moving in the right direction; therefore, must begin with the right definition of a lead.

Takeaways:
– A lead is NOT a person
– A lead IS an expression of interest in time

http://www.tractionsm.com

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Posted in Lead Generation, Lead Management, Thought Leadership | No Comments »

7 Must-Follow Marketing Automation Blogs

Monday, September 13th, 2010

For the benefit of our readers, we have assembled a list of our most-read blogs that provide marketing automation best practice advice, tips, tricks, and industry news. We normally follow these blogs actively and believe them to be the most important and up-to-date group of expert bloggers covering  the field of marketing automation:

  • LeadSloth : Covers all aspects of marketing automation (including best practice advice, tips, tricks, webinars, and news) with the most up-to-the-minute and non-biased reporting in the space. Follow LeadSloth on Twitter for the most up-to-date events announced in the marketing automation space: @leadsloth
  • Customer Experience Matrix : Managed by David Raab, this blog’s focus is mostly centered around industry news within marketing automation and complementary spaces like web analytics, email marketing, and SEO. David has covered the industry for a long time and is possibly the most knowledgeable (and objective) blogger in the field.
  • Marketing Consiglierie : Allinio’s corporate blog is filled with marketing events/conference news, and general best practice help and advice for those starting out. Allinio is a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations maximize their marketing automation investments.
  • Marketing Interactions : Ardath Albee does a great job of providing nuggets of wisdom in every blog post. Aside from marketing automation topics, this blog covers social marketing, sales process, email marketing and content-writing.
  • Digital Body Language : Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua, is a visionary in the space of demand generation and marketing automation. Ths blog updates very frequently with great advice for all levels of marketing automation users.
  • The Funnelholic : Covering online marketing, b2b marketing, b2b sales, lead nurturing and general marketing automation trends and events. Insightful and regularly updated.
  • DemandGen Report : You may have to wade through the vendor-sponsored content, which is often hard to distinguish from the regular editorials, but this site provides well-written and informative articles, covering industry news from all the vendors in the space.
Marketing Consigli

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Posted in Marketing, Marketing Automation, Thought Leadership | 2 Comments »

Webinar: “Search and Rescue” for your lead database: How to find lost leads and turn them into opportunities

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Live Webinar: Wednesday August 4th, 2010, 11am PDT/ 2pm EDT

Where did all our webinar leads go? Did any of the 250 whitepaper downloads turn into sales opportunities? Did we get our money’s worth when we paid $40 per lead in a lead gen program? This 45-minute webinar will teach you how to save those leads and turn them into revenue for your company.

You will learn how to:

•    Create workflows so no lead is left behind
•    Improve your data quality by segmentation and nurturing
•    Nurture your leads with relevant information
•    Convert qualified prospects into paying customers

Join us and get useful tips on how to help save your drowning leads and bring them to the surface so you can start generating revenue NOW! Jep Castelein of LeadSloth, a long-time marketer and thought leader in the area of lead management and marketing automation, will demonstrate the simplicity by which you can automatically start to better nurture and qualify your leads today.

RECORDING AVAILABLE: if you can’t make it, you can still register so you’ll receive the recording afterwards

Click here to register for the webinar.

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Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, LoopFuse, Thought Leadership, Webinars | No Comments »

Q&A with Laura Ramos – Part 3: Implementation & Keys to Success

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Following up on the interview with Laura Ramos, I am releasing the third and final part of my interview:

7.  Dwyer:  Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Ramos:  Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems in the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure and the “what’s needed” to make marketing automation work.
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Posted in CRM Integration, Customer Acquisition, Lead Management, Lead Scoring, Marketing, Marketing Automation, OneView, Sales, Thought Leadership | No Comments »

Loopfuse Welcomes Marcus Tewksbury!

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I would like to welcome Marcus Tewksbury to the Loopfuse team.  Last week, we formally announced that Marcus joined our advisory board but Marcus has been good friend of the Loopfuse team for about a year.  By way of introduction, he is an expert on how companies can turbocharge their inbound marketing efforts, select and implement successful social media marketing strategies, and drive customer engagement.  In addition, Marcus is known throughout the industry for his work in engagement marketing, where he focuses on helping marketers manage the disruption of digital saturation and the effect of word of mouth.  While Marcus has worked companies such as Wal-Mart, JP Morgan, Hallmark, Walgreens and Coach, he is currently the director of customer intelligence at Alterian, a publicly traded, integrated marketing platform company.  Without question, Marcus brings a wealth of knowledge, expertise and engagement strategies across sales and marketing automation, demand generation technologies, and social media.  We are very excited to have him join LoopFuse’s advisory board and contribute to our next stage of growth and success.

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