Sales lead generation

SUMMARY: Many companies rent lists and reach prospects who have never heard of them, even if it's not a best practice. The marketers in this article, however, earned great results by shifting gears to focus campaigns only on prospects who had prior contact with the company.

See how two emails and six phone calls generate an average 4-to-1 ROI for this healthcare IT company's lead generation. We include the team's contact schedule and show how the emails prime prospects for conversion. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Recently we had the opportunity to speak with five experts in mobile and social media marketing. Last week’s B2B newsletter featured two of those experts. This week we have insights and advice from the other three industry thought leaders.

This article features seven tactics, ranging from why LinkedIn remains the top B2B social media platform, to utilizing QR codes in your mobile campaigns. These tactics include both broad-stroke practices and detailed ideas you can implement into your own efforts. 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 process of optimizing the Marketing and Sales funnel can be a tiresome task. However, breaking the funnel into small stages, marketers can reveal opportunities for improvement. Each organization will approach the project uniquely, but it may be helpful to understand which funnel process will be the most demanding.

In this week’s chart, find out which Marketing-Sales funnel processes were found to be most challenging by more than 1,700 B2B marketers. 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