Sales lead generation

SUMMARY: Ever have trouble determining whether a sales team was using the marketing collateral and other sales enablement materials you’ve created for them?

Read how a mutual funds company reinvented the way they delivered sales support and business development content to its team of independent financial advisors. They scrapped their outdated practice of mailing CD-ROMs of important documents in exchange for a desktop application that provided an interactive channel for important documents, sales support materials, and ongoing training. Savings topped 80%, and they can see which types of content are most popular with advisors. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: For the second consecutive year, we’ve gotten an exclusive look at new data that highlights how B2B marketers use telemarketing in their lead generation strategies.

This article underlines five insights from this year’s survey that show how marketers are adapting their strategies for the recession -- and which factors are critical to the success of telemarketing programs. read the complete article

SUMMARY: Not all contests and awards programs are created equal.

Dawn Brister, Manager, Integrated Marketing Communications, Cisco, says choosing the right contest or awards program can generate leads and boost brand awareness. Get Brister’s tips on fighting list fatigue while increasing the quantity and quality of contest entries.

Brister will be presenting the Case Study, “Boosting Demand Generation by Revamping Your Awards Program: How Cisco Increased Entries by 59%,” next month at MarketingSherpa’s B-to-B Demand Generation... read the complete interview

SUMMARY: The foremost change in B2B marketing during the past decade or so has been the emergence of a company's website as the primary point of contact with prospects and customers.

The website has also become an extremely efficient platform for integrating and automating the lead generation process. As a result, the role of a company's website has been elevated from simply a spoke in the marketing mix wheel to the hub of the marketing strategy. The following chart represents a snapshot of how well B2B websites are being managed. read the complete article

By Anne Holland, Founder

Thanks for all of your questions before and after our teleseminar, 'B-to-B Marketing: Top 10 Quick Fixes', last week. More than 100 Sherpa readers wrote in, and I and our senior reporter Sean Donahue are preparing answers to post with our compliments on Sherpa by next week.

In the meantime, I wanted to address one particular query which came up a few times: "Where specifically did Sherpa get that B-to-B marketing data?"

Here's... read the complete blog post