B2B Lead Generation Articles

• Question #5: Determining Which Social Media Channels Your Customers are Using
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Robin and a few others asked: How you can tell which social media channels your target customers are using today?" Usually, I ask. We do customer surveys. We have user group meetings. We talk to sales and account managers about...
  more »
  

• Podcast #24 - Interview with Robert Cialdini, expert on persuasion
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Dr. Robert Cialdini will change the way you communicate forever. His research, books and talks (he'll be keynoting at the Eloqua International User Conference next month), have been read and attended by hundreds of thousands. He consults for Fortune 100...
  more »
  

• Q&A from the B2B Magazine Social Media Webinar with David Meerman Scott
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  David Meerman Scott and I went over time on our B2B Magazine Webinar on social media and agreed that we'd handle Q&A on this blog (and perhaps over on David's as well). I consolidated some of the 50+ questions we...
  more »
  

• An open letter to PR agencies ...
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Hello, my friends in PR. Some of you have seen that I'm looking for a new agency, and a few of you have submitted responses to the RFI we sent out. I even met with some of you these past...
  more »
  

• Not a blogfader, I
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Well, it's been a while since I've made an appearance in this space. Been a busy time. As you can see from the right-hand nav, I've changed jobs, moving to TOA Technologies, an on-demand mobile workforce management company. If none...
  more »
  

• Liveblogging at the Eloqua Experience Conference
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  In a room filled with 600 marketers from companies large and small. Last night at the welcome reception, I met one-person marketing departments and reps from some of the largest multi-national corporations in the world for both service and products...
  more »
  

• A primer on Social Media ROI
  The Innovative Marketer | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.
  more »
  

• Increase sales by using your enthusiasm to get prospects motivated to want to...
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  One of my mantras when I teach my sales training courses is that you've got to quickly determine how your solution is either going to make your prospects money, or stop them from losing money. Then tell them. That's all about ROI. But pumping up the enthusiasm is really important as well, and I witnessed this concept first hand recently when someone sold me a whole bunch of stuff I never intended to buy when I walked in the door. I was happy with my purchase too, and follow-on sales resulted. We can all learn a lot from this story, so here's what happened: There's a company called Rosenblum Cellars that makes Zinfandel wines, and they're located way at the northern tip of Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco. I'm not a big zin drinker, but Alameda's a great town, and I was curious...
  more »
  

• How to shine when giving an in-house product presentation
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Particularly if you're selling a technically sophisticated solution, you may, as an inside salesperson, be called on to make a product/solution presentation to your own in-house sales or engineering team, as proof that you know your product. Such a presentation can be fraught with pitfalls, as more than occasionally you'll be expected to provide a product feature dump, particularly if your engineers are the intended audience. While we touch on presentation skills as part of our telesales training courses, it's worth reading this blog post if this presentation task is coming up for you. The worst mistake you can make is trying to make sense out of a 400 page technical manual, then trying to craft the data into a presentation. This happened to me one time, and I made a really great prese...
  more »
  

• 3 Tips to increase Channel Sales… try thinking out of the box
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  This past week I met with a prospect that had a fairly common sales dilemma. His telesales team sells both directly and through a reseller channel. They are compensated on both types of sales.  Channel sales had been subpar, and in our discussions about our inside sales training courses, he wanted some ideas on improving the way his inside sales team works with the Channel. Being an "out of the box" thinker is always helpful in sales, and you have to be that way with the Channel, too. By doing so, you can get a jump on your competitors, and they may never figure out how you did it. I probably got the "out of the box" concept from my grandfather. He came out of Russia after the revolution, through Siberia, to Harbin, China, onward to Mexico, and then up to the U.S. Some of the creative w...
  more »
  

• 5 steps to fast-tracking your career move to upper management
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  I read a very good article today on career development strategies, written by Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, a management consultant who writes periodically in the Bangkok Post. While his article is geared to people already managing, I'd like to take a more basic approach, and suggest that if you're a Business Development or Telesales rep right now, I think it's a very good idea to look at your career in its current state, and design a plan for your next career step. A good number of inside sales reps fail to do this, primarily, i think, because many of us landed in this profession by accident. Inside sales was just something we'd do to bridge the gap to our next real job. And now, 5 years later, we're making real good money, have exciting conversations with prospects, and know an awful lo...
  more »
  

• What other solutions are you considering? A can’t miss question that will s...
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  One of my most popular blog posts is the one dealing with getting "shopped" by purchasing folks that ask you to bid on a project that you've already lost. Now that the economy is nicely rebounding, my inside sales training customers are telling me that unsolicited RFPs (requests for proposals) and RFQs (requests for quotes) are starting to come in over the transom, from telephone and email from prospects to whom they've never spoken.  Answering these blindly without talking to someone first is always a mistake, because in all probability, some competitor of yours has already gotten there, the decision has been made against you, and the person that contacted you did so to do some price comparison for the purpose of grinding your competitor's price down a bit. So you've really got to hav...
  more »
  

• Taking over an industry, one Sales 2.0 step at a time
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  This past week I delivered an inside sales training course to a client that makes devices used to diagnose electrical problems. This company makes terrific equipment, has begun to take market share away from its biggest competitor (who owns 90% of the market), and has hired me to train their inside sales team to take over and own the market in one year. In a coaching session that occurred last week, we cooked up some bright ideas that the competition probably won't be using. I'm going to tell you what they are, but I'm not going to divulge the client or the industry to protect our program. I've been teaching the techniques we're using for years now, but there are a few new twists because of some tools we're using today that fall into the Sales 2.0 realm. So read on, and use them to take...
  more »
  

• How to Prepare for a Sales Job Interview – Not exactly like a date, but close!
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Today's post wasn't written by me. It was written by an individual that has just landed herself an outstanding six-figure inside sales job. I know her, because she took one of my inside sales training courses.' target='_self'>inside sales training courses. More than one company was bidding for her, so she was able to choose from among several. How was she able to accomplish this? She gave outstanding employment interviews, and I know, because I got feedback from more than one company. She "wowed" everyone, so I asked her what the heck she did to gain all this traction. She told me, and I asked her to put it in writing for the blog. She wants to remain anonymous, but we'll call her Allison for the record. What she says below should be adopted by everyone looking for an inside sales or qu...
  more »
  

• Salesforce 101: a cautionary tale on successfully implementing a CRM
  Inside Sales Tips Blog | Jul 30, 2010 | Permalink
  Salesforce.com is a CRM database tool that's become the standard for many companies' inside sales teams, and I've seen it used many times when I coach team members during my inside sales training courses. It's powerful, but like most robust tools, it needs to be tweaked for the characteristics of the team using it, based on use cases. Generally, I encourage my clients to either have a dedicated Saleforce.com expert on staff, or utilize a consultant to assist in making the best use of the CRM. One of my blog correspondents is going nuts over how her company has implemented Salesforce, and she's made a very cogent, if impassioned, statement about how it's not working as well as it should at her company.  What triggered her correspondence to me was the ongoing discussion on the blog based ...
  more »
  

Lead Generation Topics