There is more to successful marketing then just running buyer targeted campaigns as there also needs to be effective lead management mechanisms in place to ensure that potential buyers receive the attention they deserve.
Ryan Moss
Senior Sales Representative
Last week I attended Silverpop‘s B2B Marketing University which was held at the Westin Hotel in Washington D.C. This free educational event was designed to help B2B marketers stay up to date with the current technology and best practices. There were several different presentors who discussed topics ranging from how to build out B2B marketing infrastructure to allow for automation to buyer-centric demand generation.
All and all I found the event to be very beneficial and learned quite a bit about B2B Marketing and the value of lead automation. Some of my biggest takeaways were:
- Great content is the key to a successful marketing campaign and your content should help you structure your marketing automation strategy
- 52% of marketers say that lead generation is their biggest challenge
- 70% of consumers are not ready to buy when first contacted my salesmen
- Setting goals and monitoring quantitative data is vital for marketers. To help create their goals marketers should work backwards from the sales revenue goal
- With the amount of information that is easily accessible on the Internet, the buyer is in charge now making effective marketing even more important
Tags: B2B Marketing, Lead Management, online lead generation, Silverpop
Hi, Ryan. Thanks for this great write-up from last week’s event.
I think another other key takeway — which builds on your last point and which is a challenge both for sales and marketing — is the increasing preference B2B buyers have for conducting research on their own … w/o talking to a sales rep. More than ever, the research points to a widening gap and the sales person being pushed later and later in the buying cycle. This is the other reason marketing is more important than ever. For many companies, our only chance to shape buyer perceptions is to be smarter marketers ‘upstream.’ This way by the time they get to calling a sales person, we’ve already built a relationship and have gotten on the shortlist. Without this upstream awareness and engagement, our sales team members are left hanging out in the wind.
Thanks again for joining us in DC. Look forward to staying in touch.
Thanks for the additional comments Adam, you make some great points. The event was great and I look forward to future SilverPop events.
- Ryan