My brilliant colleague Vanessa DiMauro (a leader in social networking marketing, decision making, and leadership) and I are currently writing an article on Sales and Social Networking. While we are both filled with ideas, I decided to go to the source and have you (my readers) help out. I suspect this is a big topic, [...]

Marketing automation has amazing potential as a way to close more sales, make the selling process more efficient, and help buyers get the content they need. The field is working hard at discovering all aspects of the buying process and how to influence it.

Just to see what the hype is all about in Marketing Automation, I decided to trial a solution…

Here are some numbers I’ve recently read: through marketing automation we are closing between 2-8% of leads (as per Jeff Lenskold), 70% of leads buy something (as per Steve Gershik) but not necessarily during the time we are scoring and nurturing them, and 90% of leads ’fall out the bottom‘.
Here is what these fascinating numbers tell me: 1. we are [...]

I’ve been reading articles on marketing automation/sales enablement that discuss leads ‘falling out the bottom’ of the funnel. What, exactly, does this mean, and how is this different from what has happened in sales for the past, oh – I don’t know – the past forever? And what’s the difference between leads  not closing after 4 [...]

We don’t get objections because buyers don’t like us or our solutions. Or because they don’t trust us. They object – push back – because they are protecting themselves from the fallout that would happen if something new entered their environment before they are ready.
When we notice a problem we’ve got a solution for, and go barreling forth [...]