DemandGen Report Honors 10 BtoB Organizations in the 2011 Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards
DemandGen Report’s thir
d annual Sales and Marketing Alignment Awards profiles 10 companies that have successfully adopted technology to drive an influx of top-funnel lead generation, maximize campaign development and response, and cut internal costs.
Bulldog Solutions client CompassLearning was recognized for its efforts to "combat lead fatigue," which resulted in an increase in qualified leads by 50% and 4x conversion from marketing-qualified to sales-accepted leads.
Lead Generation: How Your Peers Optimize the Lead
A complex buying process is, well, complex. And as H.L. Mencken said, “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.” But first, we turned to your marketing peers for tips you can use. Here are some of our favorite insights.
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Top BtoB Agencies Grow as Economy Bounces Back
Bulldog Solutions has made BtoB's Top Agencies list for 2011.
As the economy began to improve and marketers increased ad spending last year, b2b ad agencies saw their businesses once again expand after two years of client cutbacks.
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Chief Marketer: When Processing Leads, Remember Not All Customers Are Created Equal
When a company employs a marketing automation system to score its incoming leads, it begins assigning points to prospects based on their activity. But, not all the activities of all your prospects should be given equal weight.
Bulldog Solutions' VP Technology Chris Parisi talked about lead scoring best practices in Chief Marketer's latest edition.
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Data Tops List Of Tactics & Technologies Marketers Can't Afford To Live Without
After many marketers underestimated the importance of data management in the early phases of rolling out marketing automation, data and reporting are expected to top the list of priorities in 2011. As demand generation practices continue to evolve and mature, industry analysts suggest people, processes and data will become top priorities.
“Even the best technologies available will fail to provide the needed insight if the data isn’t in order to support it,” points out Chris Parisi, VP of Technology at Bulldog Solutions. “There’s just no escaping the importance of clean, normalized, reliable data to drive success in online marketing. Data management is a necessity, and it shakes out in many ways. It’s critical not only for all of the revenue-driving activities marketers want and need to do, such as lead scoring, segmentation, lead nurturing — but also to reporting and business intelligence tools.”
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Tech Trends in 2011: 3 Tactics to Optimize Your Automation Program
Bulldog VP Technology Chris Parisi provides insight on the challenges and hot-button topics surrounding marketing automation adoption and optimization for 2011.
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One Tech Marketer’s Approach to Lead Nurturing: Interview with Pete Marino of D-Link Networks
Q. What suggestions can you offer other B2B marketers looking to build a nurturing program?
- Start simple and build out. It’s better to build off what you’re learning versus going in blind with something large.
- Consider working with an agency like Bulldog Solutions to put scoring in place.
- So much of nurturing is seeing how prospects react to your content and programs – that’s where you need to experiment.
- Meet regularly with sales. Have an open dialogue and tweak what you’re doing based on their feedback. That means scoring, what you consider a sales ready lead, and how you define the ideal customer profile will change over time.
- Don’t get mad when sales pushes back a lead. You need to understand why it got pushed back; usually there’s a good reason.
Building an Efficient Reference Program
As a marketing automation provider, we're always looking for new and interesting ways to solve our operational problems with our own tool.
DemandGenReport: Analysts Say 2010 Marketing Automation Adoption Curve Is Behind Expectations
When marketing automation vendors saw a significant spike in adoption during the fourth quarter of 2009, many industry insiders predicted 2010 would be the “tipping point” where marketing automation took off and became a must-have for all BtoB marketers. Now, with three quarters of 2010 in the books, the category has shown substantial growth, but not the kind of explosive adoption some had predicted.
Although 2010 did see significant growth in the category, adoption still fell short of industry expectations. That said, analysts are again pointing to the coming year to see even more growth, particular among a broader range of business verticals.
“2011 will see continued adoption of marketing automation, and by that I refer not only to new users of marketing automation, but improved optimization of marketing automation platforms already in place,” said Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing at Bulldog Solutions. “The adoption of increasing functionality — and overwhelming validation of the investment — is as important to longevity in the space as new users.”
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