Marketing Consolidation

Marketbright Kicks-Off Summer Webinar Series

2010-07-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

Marketbright is kicking-off our Summer Webinar series on July 8th with our Nurture Marketing 101 webinar. The series will be focused on B2B marketing best practices. Marketbright will be bringing in industry experts and sharing the experiences of some of the top global B2B organizations. The lineup for the Summer Webinar includes:

Nurture Marketing 101 - July 8 at 11am PT
The Score on Lead Scoring - July 22 at 11am PT
Email Deliverability 101 - August 5 at 11am PT
Marketing Analytics 101 - August 16 at 11am PT

Check out the events and sign up at http://www.marketbright.com/events/

Lead Nurture Webinar this Thursday, Marketbright closes round of funding

2010-05-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

Marketbright is hosting a webinar on May 27th at 11am (PT) covering the best practices of B2B lead nurturing. This webinar will help marketers begin to build a baseline lead nurture program that fits their business.

You will learn:
- Key tips to creating multi-touch campaign
- How to educate a prospect by incorporating every interaction
- How to automate best sales practices with nurturing
- Tips to effectively utilize segmentation

Join us on May 27th for this complimentary webinar:
http://www.marketbright.com/go/leadnurture101webinar

Marketbright also anounced today completion of another round of funding with public software company CDC Software. WooHoo!!! Reach about it here.

CDC Software Agrees to Invest and Form Strategic Relationship in Marketbright

2010-04-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

"We are excited to partner with CDC Software since we believe that our products not only offer great synergies, but we can also leverage CDC Software's extensive global technology and support infrastructure, especially their high performance offshore operations, that offer compelling economies of scale," said Dom Lindars, CEO of Marketbright. "We expect that CDC Software's investment in us will provide us with the opportunity to strengthen our growth, while this partnership can offer our customers complementary solutions to further add value to their businesses."

Check out the press releases:

Business Week: Click Here
Marketwatch: Click Here
RTT News: Click Here
IT Times (German): Click Here

Marketbright: Enterprise Marketing Built from the Ground Up

2010-03-29T22:53:00.000-07:00

Marketbright has hit a major milestone this month, as we have been in business for five thriving years. Marketbright’s foundation as an enterprise level Marketing Automation platform was laid by Co-Founders Dom Lindars and Erik Bower, both of whom brought their vast experience in designing and executing enterprise marketing campaigns and generating millions of leads through thousands of marketing campaigns for some of today’s largest technology companies. This expertise led to the creation of Marketbright in March of 2005, when Erik and Dom built an enterprise marketing automation platform from the ground up.

Read the rest of the blog entry at Marketbright: http://blog.marketbright.com/2010/03/29/enterprise-marketing-built-from-the-ground-up/

Marketbright Launches Google AdWords Jump Start Program

2010-03-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

Google now enjoys a 70% share of the online search marketplace. PPC campaigns also enjoy the highest ROI of any campaign channel according to a new study by IntelliSurvey, Inc. and Radar Research. If you are not running a Google PPC campaign, you could be at a serious disadvantage to your competitors. If PPC campaigns are done right, the leads that come across can be extremely targeted and of very high quality

Marketbright can help you get your campaign up and running in less than 30 days from scratch. We design your campaigns and landing pages in a way that maximizes conversion rates and targets highly qualified prospects.

The process is fast and painless for you and gets a steady flow of highly targeted leads flowing to your sales team. You also enjoy the advantage of the Marketbright platform, which enables automated lead scoring, lead nurturing and allows you to run and track other demand generation programs such as email marketing.

Find out more about Marketbright's Googe PPC Services

A VentanaProfile in Success: Taking the Lead

2010-03-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

Download the full report now

Project:
TELUS Business Solutions’ marketing team had difficulty
determining the quality of business-to-business leads it
provided to the sales force. To improve demand
management, Marketing set out to establish a closed-loop
system to track leads from their sources to results. Using
marketing automation software from Marketbright, the
team now is able to identify the strongest immediate
prospects and develop other potential buyers over the
longer term, giving the sales force more and better
opportunities to close business.

Outcomes:
People: Marketing now ranks leads automatically and
nurtures prospects through more targeted Web-oriented
campaigns that it can create faster than before. Sales gets
a stream of highly qualified leads and is able to act on
many more leads than previously.
Process: Qualified leads are routed automatically to the
most appropriate sales rep. Marketing tracks the complete
sales pipeline to determine the efficacy of its marketing
spend and uses conversion rates to develop forecasts and
targets.
Information: Marketing applies lead scoring, lead
nurturing and lead routing to produce high-quality leads
from information it receives from other systems.
Technology: Marketers build their own Web pages using
templates, freeing more technical team members for other
tasks. Marketbright’s delivery of software as a service
(SaaS) facilitated rapid deployment and makes Marketing
independent of IT.

Business Benefits:
Marketing for TELUS Business Solutions turns its data into
a business asset that it uses to develop more effective,
ongoing marketing campaigns. Sales receives leads that
are much more likely to produce success. Relations
between the marketing and sales functions are more
collaborative and productive than ever before.

About Ventana Research
Ventana Research is the leading Performance Management research and advisory services firm. By providing expert insight and detailed guidance, Ventana Research helps clients operate their companies more efficiently and effectively. We deliver these business improvements through a top-down approach that connects people, processes, information and technology. What makes Ventana Research different from other analyst firms is our focus on Performance Management for finance, operations and IT. This focus, plus research as a foundation and reach into a community of more than 2 million corporate executives through extensive media partnerships, allows Ventana Research to deliver a high-value, low-risk method for achieving optimal business performance. To learn how Ventana Research Performance Management workshops, assessments and advisory services can impact your bottom line, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.

Marketbright Now Available on Google Apps Marketplace

2010-03-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

Marketbright today announced it has added its leading on-demand marketing automation and email marketing platform to the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. Marketbright is an on-demand marketing automation solution which enables self-service campaign execution, automated lead nurturing and scoring, and closed loop marketing analytics. Marketbright provides a cost-effective alternative for mid-market to enterprise companies that want an easy-to-use on-demand marketing solution while still supporting complex business functionality.

"Offering the Marketbright agile marketing automation solution on the Google Apps Marketplace was a logical step, since Marketbright was conceived and created as an on-demand application meant to work with a company's collaboration and communication tools," said Dom Lindars, CEO of Marketbright. "Now Google apps users can easily integrate a solution that delivers rapid growth in sales and marketing leads and significantly increases lead-to-opportunity rates."

"We are pleased Google Apps customers can now easily access Marketbright to increase their marketing process efficiency and enhance their internal, customer and prospect communications for business growth," said Chris Kelly, Google Apps ISV Marketing Manager. "Requiring no technical resources to implement, set up and execute email campaigns, Marketbright exemplifies the type of simpler user experience provided by cloud applications."

Marketbright's solutions help marketers stay connected to valued customers and prospects, collaborate with sales teams, and track leads all the way through to closed business. Delivering this ability as an on-demand application in the cloud helps companies dramatically improve their marketing programs and strategies with very limited up-front risk and investment.

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than 2 million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/a/marketplace.

Marketbright delivers the leading software-as-a-service, marketing automation solution, enabling more than 20,000 users at companies such as Serena Software, Genesys, Telus, and Varonis to generate leads, nurture leads and convert prospects to customers. Marketbright goes beyond the traditional marketing tools with a full suite of integrated applications including campaign management, email marketing, event registration management, landing page creation, lead scoring, and lead nurturing. The company is privately held and headquartered in San Bruno, Calif., and can be reached at http://www.marketbright.com/

Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

Marketbright Overhauls Email Marketing Module

2010-02-24T10:22:00.000-08:00

Check out this video of Marketbright's new powerful email marketing module.

Click here for the DEMO VIDEO

The Lead Nurturing 5 & 10: Executive Briefing by DemandGen Report

2010-02-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest fumbles among BtoB organizations is the failure to develop formal programs to nurture their leads from the initial inquiry phase through to the point when they are ready to buy. Without the tools and processes in place, companies are unable to build and track their ongoing dialog with both new and old prospects. In a survey conducted by DemandGen Report in 2008, less than 10% of companies had formal lead nurturing strategies and processes in place.

Marketbright has sponsored,a 3-page, executive briefing with DemandGen Report, in which we will highlight 5 of the top reasons why BtoB organizations can’t afford to throw away long-term leads. In addition, we will provide 10 quickideas which can help companies get started down the path to nurturing their prospects from contact to close.

Sign up for the free white paper now: http://www.marketbright.com/go/demandgenexecutivebrief

Joint Webinar: Marketbright & Virtual Causeway

2010-02-08T21:47:00.000-08:00

Marketbright is hosting another AGILE Webinar Series event with Virtual Causeway on March 3, 2010. The topic will be Agile Conversations - Real-time Marketing.

We'll discuss the mentality, the tools, and the technology to scale, engage, and close more leads than you can handle by simply using relevant content with Nurture Marketing.

SIGN UP NOW for the free webinar.

Marketbright Offers Migration Services

2010-02-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

Marketbright Offers Migration Services from other marketing automation platforms such as Marketo, Eloqua, Manticore and Silverpop. Optimize your marketing efforts with the Marketbright advantage.

Migrating to Marketbright is simple. The hard part is over; you already have clearly defined goals for your organization and the content to launch your campaigns. All that is left is to equip you with the tools to more efficiently execute and manage your campaigns. Marketbright will guide you through our 3 phases of campaign migration.

Find out more at: http://www.marketbright.com/services/migration-services.html

Migration phased approach:

Phase 1 – Initial Assessment - This assessment examines your overall marketing goals and project scope for the migration. This includes tasks such as outlining immediate and long term goals, creating timelines and a migration plan, and defining user roles.

Phase 2 – Campaign Migration – The second phase executes the migration plan already developed in phase 1. We begin the migration implementation by recreating campaigns into Marketbright and uploading existing landing page, email templates, and lists. Lead scoring and lead nurturing programs are set up based on the qualifications previously determined.

Phase 3 – Refine and Automate – The third phase of the process is targeted at refining and automating your campaigns for maximum results. Once the second phase is complete, optimizing your lead scoring, lead nurturing programs, and CRM integration will provide you with an accurate view of your marketing reports enabling you to repeat successful campaigns and improve your ROI.

For more info contact Sales@marketbright.com

Marketbright Launches Marketplace

2010-02-02T14:35:00.000-08:00

The Marketbright Marketplace has launched, bringing you a easy to search list of partners ranging from those with prebuilt integrations to agencies, professional services, and system integrators with experience and expertise with Marketbright and Marketing Automation.

Learn more: http://www.marketbright.com/partners/

B2B Marketing & Enterprise 2.0

2010-01-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

Tatyana Kanzaveli from CustomerThink blogged today, raising the question is there a real business need and business support in separating Social CRM from Enterprise 2.0 from Social Media?

A great topic to consider: read more

Can B2B marketing automation systems like Marketbright be key factors in making this a reality for all businesses alike?

Marketbright Customer Success Video: Varonis Software

2010-01-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

2010 Marketing Automation Trends

2010-01-06T15:54:00.000-08:00

As we look out to 2010 we see several common issues at B2B marketing companies, and we also see some important trends:

Proving the Value of Marketing to C-Level Executives
Proving ROI is not a new problem for marketing; justifying marketing budget has always been an issue. However, more and more companies are requiring hard metrics from their marketing groups to justify budget spend.

Lack of Resources or In House Expertise
Marketing people are busy; they don’t have time to generate a 15 week nurture program. They barely have time to do a monthly newsletter and keep the blog up to date. A lot of marketing people have limited experience with running email marketing programs or are not up on all the latest tactics to ensure high conversion rates. It is really hard to stay on top of all the different tactics and methods available, and the game is always changing. Marketing automation by itself is not going to fix the problem.

Alignment of Sales and Marketing
The problem of Sales and Marketing alignment is as old as the times. Marketing generates leads, Sales says there were not enough of them, or they were not of good enough quality. Sales is very rarely involved in the planning process, and yet they know better than anybody what messages are selling. So the marketing team generates a bunch of collateral and campaigns that is not tuned for what Sales is doing. Then once Sales gets the leads, Marketing lacks the ability to see what happened to them, and which messages/offers resulted in closed deals.

Changing Landscape – New Tactics and Social Media
The advent of social media and new marketing tactics such as pay-per-click, SEO, and email marketing has marketing people reeling. There is so much information, so many blogs, so many top-10-tips whitepapers, and so many webinars that it is hard to determine the methods that are going to matter, prioritize activities, and focus on what you can actually have an impact on.

Do More With Less
Sales are down, deal size is down, and marketing budgets are down. Marketing people have to do more and more with less and less. In this environment, the technology they use has to be brain dead simple-to-use and also has to automate time-consuming tasks.

Marketbright Campaign Manager Demo

2010-01-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

Marketbright promotes Agile Marketing Webinar Series and Nurture Marketing for Dummies Guide

2010-01-05T16:48:00.000-08:00

5 Ways to Increase Organizational Agility While Enhancing Creativity: http://www.marketbright.com/go/agilemarketing-conceptshare.

Attend this webinar and learn how Marketbright and Conceptshare have partnered to allow rapid planning and collaboration and to help you implement the Agile Method.

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing more ideas and announcing new product features designed to enable the Agile Marketing Method. You can register and attend the Agile Marketing Webinar Series - http://www.marketbright.com/agile-marketing/

Marketbright is also publishing the official guide to nurture marketing with our upcoming book release Nurture Marketing for Dummies. The book will detail the best practice steps for B2B marketers to implement marketing automation. Sign up now for your free copy of the Nurture Marketing for Dummies Guide:

Marketbright Launches Agile Marketing Webinar Series

2009-12-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

Marketbright, a leading on-demand marketing automation platform, today announced the Agile Marketing Webinar Series, which will detail the top issues and game changing trends facing B2B marketing organizations. The series also will outline how companies can take an Agile approach, now commonly used as a best-practice in software development, to improve the nimbleness of their marketing organizations and efforts.

The revolutionary series will be launching in January, 2010.

Sign up for the webinar series today

See the Press Release: MARKETBRIGHT LAUNCHES AGILE MARKETING WEBINAR SERIES

Marketbright Achieves Record Growth During Difficult Economic Environment

2009-12-02T16:15:00.000-08:00

I'm proud to announce our recent success at Marketbright as we have achieved record growth over the past year.

" Marketbright, a leading on-demand marketing automation platform, today announced it has achieved over 320% customer growth in the last 12 months, making it the fastest growing enterprise marketing automation solution on the market today."

Read the press release

Marketbright at Dreamforce with DreamSimplicity

2009-11-30T13:08:00.000-08:00

At Marketbright we had a great Dreamforce 2009 conference. Check out this video - including a brief interview with me at the conference with the team from DreamSimplicity:

DreamSimplicity at Dreamforce 2009 from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.

Marketbright Excited to Sponsor Boston Marketing Sherpa Event

2009-09-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

Marketbright, a leading enterprise marketing automation platform, is excited to sponsor the upcoming MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit in Boston.

"The Boston area is the next great frontier beyond Silicon Valley, and Marketbright is excited to meet and learn from some of the top B2B marketers", says Erik Bower, Co-Founder of Marketbright.

Marketbright is looking forward to expand the reputation as being an enterprise marketing automation B2B leader, catering to the needs of global organizations and marketing departments.

Marketbright Donates Services to DAMMAD

2009-09-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

Marketbright has donated it's marketing automation platform to DAMMAD (Dad's and Mad Mom's Against Drug Dealers), a non-profit organization. Marketbright hopes it's powerful platform will help DAMMAD raise bettere drug awareness throughout the country.

Dammad is a grassroots anti-drug organization committed to helping in the fight against the drug problem in our communities, our workplaces and our schools.

New Marketbright GUI Delivers Advanced New Features with Added Ease of Use

2009-08-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

Marketbright, a leading Marketing Automation SaaS provider, has just released a new GUI which now is in BETA. The new GUI will increase the user experience by delivering an easier to navigate platform. Marketbright has taken user experiences and feedback from top enterprise marketing customers in combination with indusrty leading analysts. The new GUI release will be complimented by new enterprise level reporting capabilities (over 200 canned reports), email deliverability features and advanced web-editing capabilities.

Lead Management Tips

2009-08-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

Check out ReachForce's recent post detailing lead management best practices featuring Marketbright.

Tips To Improve Your Lead Management Strategy

"Truly" sophisticated marketing automation

2009-07-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

You hear a lot in the marketing automation industry around sophisticated marketing. I guess the question is "what really is sophisticated marketing"? Marketbright's new campaign flow designer is a perfect example of sophistication. As marketing and sales guru Mike Pilcher says: "making the complicated simple". Yet even by simplifying the infrastructure for building campaigns with an easy drag and drop tool, you still have to put some thought power into marketing strategy and nurture flow layouts. Sophisticated marketing requires a comprehensive marketing solution that was designed by marketers for marketers. Some vendors claim to be sophisticated, yet at the same time they make claims such as “get up and running in less than one day”. This may only seem obvious to the truly sophisticated marketers, but getting up and running in one day is not sophistication. Let’s get that straight. I would consider sophistication the following:

a. Global approach to ensure message consistency, branding and empower local teams to run programs for specific vertical, geographic and target markets.
b. Consistent data ensuring a 360 degree view of the prospect and drive accurately targeted messages.
c.Common processes from a template-based system driving common processes across all marketing groups, increasing marketing velocity and consistency.
d. Accurate measurement of all marketing metrics providing insight into the prospect lifecycle providing the platform for better decision-making, optimal targeting and improved response rates.
e. Ease of use and powerfully rich functionality from drawing lists to creating and managing campaigns.
f. Simple CRM integration for example, Salesforce.com.

In order to deliver a truly sophisticated solution it requires careful assessment and guidance on best practices. Training and implementation are keys to success, and in order to truly reach sophistication... one day roll-outs are going to end up in disaster.

Reaching Top Executives with Marketing Automation

2009-07-10T17:08:00.000-07:00

Most enterprise selling reps are familiar with "Selling to Vito". The concept of reaching top executives and decision makers by delivering tailored information that matches a companies business objectives. This is not a new concept, and it has been proven successful over and over again by sales reps. Yet it requires spending many hours of research and development in messaging. Instead, wouldn't you rather that your sales reps focus on qualified opportunities with decision makers?

With marketing automation eveything changes. Bringing the budget holders into the conversation and developing an ongoing relationship with them is no longer the role of Sales, it is the role of Marketing through effective nurturing. Marketers are faced with the challenge of capturing the attention of the busiest executives and keeping their interest until they are ready to buy so that Sales can move faster through the selling process.

Marketbright is hosting a best practice webinar to discuss the topic of nurturing to C-Level executives. In this session we will raise discussion on the following:

- How to get the attention of a C-Level executive and keep it.
- How to automate the nurturing process to reduce time and resources.
- How to align Sales and Marketing to quicken the selling process to convert contacts to customers.

Join us on Thursday, July 16th 2009 9:00am (PT). Sign up here

Social Media helping the sales process in online conversation. Great article by Mike Pilcher on CustomerThink.

2009-06-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

What exactly is social selling? There are a variety of worthy descriptions and explanations, but I think this one describes it best: Social selling is the promotion of your products and services using social tools to converse and collaborate with people.

Read the rest of the article at CustomerThink

Contact Marketing

2009-06-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

Special Blog Guest, Mike Pilcher. Author of ProSultative Selling, and VP WW of Sales at Marketbright.

Contact Marketing is the phase in which a person continues the nurturing of a prospect. The Contact Marketing person guides the prospect toward the most probable contact point that would move them to engage in an interactive dialogue. This phase is characterized by a high volume of contacts, usually requiring multiple contacts to move the conversation forward. Using qualification criteria to target a prospect, the Contact Marketing team’s role is to make outbound contact to a prospect who has no expectation of agreed next steps. When the prospect agrees to active next steps with the prospect expected to expend resources, the interaction moves from Passive Contact to Active Contact.

Metrics must drive the process rules defining the frequency and content of these contacts, constantly monitoring the optimal blend of low-cost Passive Contacts, e.g. press and mail, with higher-cost touches such as advertising and Contact Marketing. Use tools to refine accurately the messaging presented to these prospects and thereby enhance the results of this activity. Tools designed to initiate contact include LinkedIn, InsideView, Jigsaw, etc. Ensure the message is pertinent and specific to the target prospect.

I once asked a customer, the CIO at Barings, to monitor the number of in-bound calls he received a day. After monitoring his voice mail for a month, the CIO found he was receiving an average of 18 unsolicited vendor calls each day. This did not include emails, direct mail, or other messaging. With this level of incoming static, the best way to break through the noise and gain sufficient interest is to make the message pertinent to the individual buyer.

Intelligent Contact Marketing is targeted at the right prospect at the right time with the right message and further nurtures the relationship. As with the consultative nature of the sales process, it is important to demonstrate an understanding of the prospect even in the Passive Contact phase. As there is no Active Contact interaction during this phase, Contact Marketing offers an initial perception of listening to the prospect by demonstrating an understanding of information about the prospect’s business, the prospect’s individual needs and the functionality of the product. Nurturing involves feeding a prospect with information to increase their awareness of a product and enhance this knowledge to the point where it meets a prospect requirement. Once the prospect understands this match and is ready to engage, they are ready to move to the Active Contact phase.

The Contact Marketing team must be available to make initial contact, take in-bound telephone contact, and follow-up on contacts made through other methods until the prospect becomes a qualified lead, agrees to next steps and passes to Internal or External Sales.

For clarity, and to ensure clean metrics are gathered, delineate between Contact Marketing’s Passive Contact and Internal/External Sales’ Active Contact. When the Contact Marketing team tries to interact and close business, the metrics will no longer be clean data. Clean data is at the core of the success or failure of ProSultative sales. The increased volume of interactions is only supportable with automation and constant refinement of the interaction. It is essential to connect the interactions and form patterns, understanding where proactive sales can replace consultative sales and where automation can replace manual intervention.

ROI of Nurture Marketing

2009-06-03T22:24:00.000-07:00

Every marketer struggles to make the most of their lead generation and marketing budget. Several factors go into how your return on investment will be determined: potential prospects are often lost or have gone stale during the sales process, man power was wasted on campaign execution and inaccurate reporting can lower your ROI.

Nurture Marketing is a proven process to help maximize your investment in lead generation. Nurturing the leads you already have will establish an ongoing relationship with your prospects and increase the chance of converting them to customers.

Join Mike Pilcher, the author of ProSultative Selling and the VP of Sales at Marketbright as he breaks down ways to maximize ROI through Nurture Marketing.

IN THIS WEBINAR YOU WILL LEARN:

• How to improve your ROI by 25% - 35% through Nurture Marketing
• How Nurture Marketing helps align Sales and Marketing
• How to automate the nurture marketing process to reduce man power
• How to trace your leads from the first point of contact for accurate reporting

Sign up here for free: ROI for Nurture Marketing

Come visit me at the Cloudforce Tour in Chicago and Minneapolis

2009-04-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

Marketbright will be sponsoring the upcoming salesforce.com Cloudforce events in Chicago on May 4th and Minneapolis on May 6th. Stop by Marketbright's booth to get a demo of our solution.

Marketbright is the leading On-Demand marketing solution, providing a platform to easily move all of your demand generation activities onto one solution. With Marketbright, you get a highly automated system that will help your company increase sales. Learn why over 50,000 users and companies like VMware, SAP, Seagate and AVID Technology utilize Marketbright.

Recent Marketbright and salesforce.com news:

Marketbright Expands Capabilities for Salesforce CRM

Cheers,

Jon

jon.ross@marketbright.com

Marketbright Partners with Cloudweaver

2009-04-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

Marketbright partnered with CLOUDWEAVER to Serve Oracle On-Demand CRM Customers. This is great step to focusing on fulfilling the on-demand CRM marketplace. Marketbright has the ability to integrate with multiple CRM systems out-of-the-box; including salesforce.com, Oracle On-Demand, MS Dynamics, NetSuite and SalesLogix.

Marketbright Enterprise gives marketers a powerful system at their fingertips. Marketers need a system to measure results consistently, and at the same time quickly roll out campains efficiently. The system allows marketers and sales to measure top marketing campaign influences on top sales opportunities. It also allows marketers to score and nurture those leads not yet ready to be converted to top opportunities. Marketbright's integration with on-demand CRM systems allows marketers to execute and analyze real-time results.

CLOUDWEAVER is looking forward to connecting valuable prospects to a mission-critical marketing automation system like Marketbright.

Contact Jerry Leto at CLOUDWEAVER for more information on the partnership (phone 408-556-9706, email jerry.leto@cloudweaver.net).

Boston Cloudforce Tour a Success for Marketbright

2009-03-26T21:42:00.000-07:00

Marketbright was one of twelve premium sponsors of the salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour event today. Marketbright is the marketing automation leader in the cloud, allowing companies to easily leverage their website as a camapaign.

I had a chance to speak to many people in the Boston area about their experiences on salesforce.com, and their needs around marketing and sales. The one thing I concluded from today was that Marketbright's ability to deliver easy inegration of marketing campaigns directly to companies website solves a huge pain point for many marketers. The ability to rapidly update content with NO IT expertise is essential in marketing. A difficult to use web content management systems makes IT a gatekeeper for changes and updates. With their already limited resources, web sites often become a low priority, content gets out of data and the customer experience deteriorates. Marketbright's on-demand Website Content Manager provides self-service content management, so the actual content owners can collaborate on and publish content from any desktop or web browser, and gain the independence from IT necessary to keep web sites up to date. Marketbright delivers easy to use website management tools. Create and manage your website integrated with every marketing touch point.

Marketbright CEO recently wrote an article detailing best practices around utilizing your website as a campaign in CRM BUYER.

As a leading AppExchange vendor, Marketbright streamlines lead generation efforts for marketing departments with a full suite of integrated applications including campaign management, email marketing, event management, landing page creation, lead scoring, lead nurturing and membership management.

Lead Nurturing 101 = Discover Demand

2009-03-11T00:08:00.000-07:00

Working in the Marketing Automation technology landscape at Marketbright I have steadily grown to understand the basic philosophy that is hidden behind so many complex and confusing words. Discover Demand is a crossroads between marketing and sales that for so long has been broken. Providing the sales team with only legitimate, highly qualified leads has long been the Achilles heel of marketing campaigns and a constant source of conflict between Sales and Marketing. With Demand Discovery; only fully qualified leads are passed to your sales team.

Lead Nurturing = Discover Demand

You nurture your leads by trying to discover the quickest and most effective way to drive leads to sales. Marketing Automation tools like Marketbright, gives B2B marketers the solution they need to deliver sophisticated Demand Discovery. Giving marketers the ability to:

* Deliver highly qualified leads faster with real-time lead scoring based on profile and behavioral data

* Pass leads directly to leading CRM systems

* Nurture leads through automated multi-touch campaigns

Download a free guide to evaluate Marketing Automation solutions

Dom Lindars is an innovative leader in B2B marketing

2009-03-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

Dom Lindars, CEO of Marketbright, has revolutionized the B2B buyer/seller experience. With innovative and thought leading development, he stands in a class of his own. His simple and straight forward approach has helped marketers grasp complex marketing strategies that not so long ago were primarily only encompassed in B2C marketing campaigns.

He recently wrote an article for E-Commerce Times that discusses some of these revolutionary B2B marketing tactics, including the importance of incorporating your website as a campaign run by marketing.

"Your Web site is a campaign -- treat it like one, and you'll get the results you need to jump ahead of the competition."

Read his recent article

Marketbright and Google Partner for Joint Webinar

2009-03-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

Marketbright and Google have teamed up for a joint webinar " Google Adwords 101: Jump Start Your B2B Pay-per-click (PPC) Campaigns". This will be a best practice webinar focused around B2B PPC Lead Generation. Attendees will learn:

* Tips and tricks on optimizing your Adwords campaigns right from the source: Google
* Tips and tricks on landing page optimization and lead nurture strategies to maximize your PPC campaigns
* How to increase your campaign performance by 300-400%

CLICK HERE to register.

B2B Selling relies on providing an information conversation

2009-03-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

Marketing Automation has solved a really complicated problem.

The problem of delivering the right content to the right prospect at the right time across the right medium.

Delivering this information to the prospect should ideally take them along a sophisticated conversation trail. Marketing Automation provides an information conversation by automatically setting up lead nurturing to be delivered to a prospect based on what will give them the greatest propensity to become a customer.

Each piece of marketing content needs to be easily pushed out across marketing channels from a single campaign source. This gives marketing managers the ability to set-up multi-channel testing to optimize the prospect conversation experience. Increasing conversion rates and rapidly deploying and delivering information automatically from a single campaign source gives marketing managers complete transparency into what used to be a really complicated problem.

David Raab praises Marketbright

2009-02-26T09:53:00.000-08:00

David Raab, renowned industry analyst and author of “The Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems,” had this to say of our momentum news: “Marketbright offers a unique combination of sophisticated demand generation features with tools to support sales teams and channel partners throughout the purchase cycle. Its continued growth is a testament to the value companies gain from continuous cooperation between marketing and sales teams.”

READ MORE

Link to Raab Guide- http://www.raabguide.com/

Making Quality Leads is a Top Priority in 2009

2009-02-24T15:26:00.000-08:00

Garnering high quality leads is of the utmost importance in 2009. A current LinkedIn poll proved this to me, and was actually somewhat of a surprise. In the past you have heard me talk a lot about marketing consolidation and optimization. This is important, but it's not as important as delivering the highest quality leads to sales. The LinkedIn poll compared some compelling B2B lead generation priorities for 2009; including the importance of generating more leads, measuring results, working with less budget and reaching decisions makers. I can assure you all of these are important, but I can also assure you lead quality should be your number ONE priority.

You may be thinking how am I going to make higher quality leads? Should I spend more on lists? Should I bid on more expensive keywords? Should I hire more outside sales reps?

All of these things will help, but won't be the answer. You still need to nurture your leads from quality lists and you still need to qualify PPC leads. Hiring more outside reps is great, but only if you can keep their pipeline fresh with quality leads.

The answer is Lead Scoring.

As a matter of fact, I am not the only one who thinks this. CSO Insights' 2008 Lead Life Cycle Optimization study found that technology is playing a larger role: 51 percent of marketing organizations are using lead management systems and 60 percent are using some form of lead scoring before passing leads to sales.

With lead scoring you will transform the relationship between sales and marketing to work seamlessly together by opening up the passive touch marketing activities that are driving forces into qualifying leads for sales to follow-up on in a more active matter. The key features that will excite B2B marketers includes:

* Highly customizable rules to generate more accurate lead scores.

* Intelligent monitoring of customer activity, including web pages visited, time spent on the site, and visits from multiple people from the same company.

* Validation of data entered onto lead forms helps weed out inauthentic leads by scoring them lower.

If you are interested in learning more about lead scoring and marketing automation, please download this informative brochure giving you a checklist of things to consider when evaluating vendors.

Marketing Automation Checklist

ProSultative Selling LinkedIn Group

2009-02-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

I am co-managing a new LinkedIn group detailing Mike Pilcher's new book ProSulative Selling. This is an excellent opportunity for B2B Sales and Marketing professionals to collaborate around new trends, best practices and business strategy.

Here is a glimpse into some recent discussions:

Solving vs Explaining

To what degree can explaining your product or service undermine a high-level consultative selling approach? Does the 'How' take the bloom off the 'What'? And what positioning rules of thumb can be applied to avoid this problem?

Answer from Mike Pilcher:
I think you can achieve both. Consultative selling requires the application of those aspects of your product that solve a customer's problem and defocusing those features that are not solving the problem. Understanding to whom they are important, articulating the technical aspects in business terms is the consultative nature. You are typically selling at multiple levels in any sales process, the greater the complexity and typically the higher the value, the more requirement to break elements of your product down and identify who in the customer values which features.

As far as how to position against them. Use technical white papers that fully describe the architecture, features and technical benefits of your solution. Aggregate these into Product Marketing pieces which focus on problems people understand and articulate them in ways the customer understands. The final element is the sales team collating these in the most focused and highest value, targeted fashion. Great question.

Answer # 2 from Mike Pilcher (I love how thought leaders never stop thinking!)

Been thinking on this some more, it was a great question. A move away from consultative selling and demand creation results in a move to demand identification. Sales' role in this process is to take a qualified lead and move it rapidly through the sales process. Marketing's is to create enough information, and distribute that information over a wide net. Marketing is trying to leave a trail of breadcrumbs that based upon the medium for acquiring information of the prospect they are sufficiently interested to pick up that piece of information. What makes this more than scatter and pray is marketing carefully crafting messaging and offers that draw the prospect toward a point where they are an informed and qualified prospect.

Join the LinkedIn Group ProSultative Selling

Pilcher has over 20 years of business and enterprise sales experience. Before joining Marketbright, he served as vice president of worldwide sales at HyperRoll, general manager of worldwide financial services at TradeBeam, and executive vice president of worldwide sales at Velosant, which was acquired by Harbor Payments.

Prior to Velosant, Pilcher served as vice president of sales at Epiphany, acquired by Infor, and senior vice president of worldwide sales at Tenfold Technology, acquired by Versata. Prior to Tenfold, he was the divisional manager for U.K. financial services at Sybase, and before that ran the Oracle U.K. insurance team.

Remembering the great voice of Martin Luther King Jr.

2009-01-19T14:31:00.000-08:00

In an era where unprecedented change has taken place on local, national and global levels I think it is important to take a moment to appreciate those who made this road possible to be traveled upon.

Martin Luther King Jr. is an American Hero who we should all look upon his actions to inspire us with his great wisdom. Here are some selected quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. that will last with us forever:

"Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better."

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."

"At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love."

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

"I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good."

"I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."

Marketing Consolidation is focusing on what works

2009-01-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

If you follow my blog then this is not a news flash. Focusing on what works is more important as ever. You must optimize the best way to take your contacts to customers, and map this into a practical plan.

This process needs to be defined as a work flow that allows marketing and sales to work together as one unified team. Better communication, insightful reporting, and rapid delivery of highly qualified leads is a direct result of setting up a process to consolidate your marketing and sales efforts.

I like to think of interactions with prospects in two distinct ways: passive touches and active touches. It is marketing's job to nurture qualified leads to sales through a series of sophisticated passive touches. It is then the salespeople's job to become actively involved, continuing the conversation marketing has set-forth.

Sales and Marketing in 2009 - Hugging the New Austerity

2009-01-06T10:36:00.000-08:00

As we kick-start the new year, it is evident that politically 2009 is the year of change, and commercially this is the case too. This is the year of pocket change. Trying to find a way to sell more with less, stretching less of last year’s marketing dollars to meet more of this year’s sales. Welcome in the New Austerity. We can try to run from this, or we can choose to embrace it. I suggest as we have no option, rush up and give the New Austerity a big hug. You don’t need to do lunch on a diet of curried squirrels cheeks, deep fried in ginger aspic and tricolore organic wild mushroom risotto washed down with California’s finest. There’s nothing wrong with hamburgers, or simply McDonald’s for that matter. Dunkin Donuts makes perfectly good coffee, begone no-fat, half-caffe, semi-tepid, sugar-free, vanilla substitutes, no foam, soy lattes. Begone I say.

The Siberian Winter has arrived and is here to say. At least for the next couple of Quarters anyway. So let’s make the most of it. We cannot enjoy unfettered budgets if we don’t at first accept and enjoy fettered, ham-strung, tiny budgets. Think TinyURL but for budgets. We must hunker down and find new ways to sell to people. We must get creative and find ways to sell more with less.

Here are some ideas for working within today’s new market.

1. Requirement. Spend less yet make more leads. This always sounds great, especially on a slide set for Senior Management. It is an interesting dilemma, embrace it in which case we may as well run the halls stating we were wasting money historically, or we can reject the idea which will quickly result in someone else sitting at our desk with the aforementioned PowerPoint.

a) Option A. Sit in the basement of your building with an alchemist’s wand and a large cauldron of boiling, mystical goo. Stay here until you have converted lead to gold, water into wine, and Contacts into Sales Qualified Leads.

b) Option B. The challenge with many businesses today is they seek a silver bullet, one thing that will solve everything. In this case, focus in on the lead generation activity you delivered in the past that directly produced the greatest return. It would be great if you had a system like Marketbright and could press a button to find this data. More companies do not have Marketbright than do (hurry up and fix that, it saves time later on), anyway chances are you can’t press the Marketbright Easy button. Sit down with sales, track it back, trust your instinct. Spend on those programs that generated the majority of business last year. (Seems obvious? Do any of your budgets show trimming of activities you know should in your heart should be stopped altogether?)

2. Requirement. More better (thank you GW we will miss you in 2009), qualified leads passed to sales people. The problem with this is we usually allow Marketing to define what they see as qualified. Then we allow Sales to decide whether it was qualified or not dependant on whether the lead closed, sales’ mood, whether the Sun was in Uranus, or if Punxsutawney Phil sees his own reflection (or something like that. I am British after all. At least I can spell Punxsu……..once is enough).

a) Option A. Let only Sales define what is and what is not a Qualified Lead after the close. That way we can declare victory and the sales team can go to the local bar, drink beer, eat meat and start fires.

b) Option B. Sales and Marketing sit down together and jointly decide what the end of the funnel should look like. Work their way back toward and initial contact both acknowledging and accepting some prospects will qualify out, some will be lost and there will not be a 1:1 close ratio. (Seems obvious? Please forward to me the document that Sales and Marketing both signed up to detailing the lead pipeline metrics and the expected conversion rates. I will issue a prize for the best one. N.B. both means Sales AND Marketing, not just sales declaring Independence and calling it done.)

3. Requirement. Accelerate the pipeline. (Blame Marketing for Lead Quality if any sales cycle goes beyond 31 days). Every sales cycles takes too long, in fact every business cycle takes too darn long. How long did it take you to interview your last hire? Then how long did it take you to get the offer letter out? Too darn long. We simply to have to move faster.

a) Option A. Prove the New Improved Sales Cycle has a 48 hour pipeline close time (as in, you have 48 hours and then it’s your badge). This can easily be achieved by taking the time from when the sales person starts working on the final order form, adding two weeks, then adding a week for safety, then adding a Quarter just in case. Start counting from there. You will not be far off and Senior Management will be amazed at the truncated pipeline. (You can also try putting buckets of oil over the door to the sales office. I have found this doesn’t do much to grease the pipeline but it sure is funny.)

b) Option B. Work with sales to identify those accounts that have the greatest propensity to move through the pipeline. Get ProSultative. (For those whose Christmas was a void due to the artful book ProSultative Selling being sold out on Amazon, this is when you are proactive with the delivery of information during a consultative sales process). Find out what is the minimum amount of information you need to give to a prospect to make them a customer and give it to them proactively. (Seems obvious? When did you last sit down with your counterpart in Sales or Marketing and really understand what was the least you had to do to covert a prospect to a customer?)

There is no point in anyone pretending 2009 is not the year of the New Austerity, therefore we may as well make the best of it. This does not mean buying all your work clothes at the local good will (though I have seen some start-ups where apparently this is a requirement), it does mean accepting the situation and applying your best judgment as to how to become more agile, more creative, and above all not to ignore the data that is sitting in our businesses. Find out what worked, do more of it. Accept what didn’t. Don’t do so much of that.

Levaraging Social Media Tools for Marketing

2008-12-31T11:41:00.000-08:00

Leveraging Social Media Tools for Marketing is a trend that has continued to blow-up in 2008. I think in business-to-business selling we will see this is not just a tool for leisure anymore- but instead a tool to build communities around enterprise level business deals. Having a Facebook like collaboration tool to build relationships with prospects and exchange vital information during evaluation periods is now convenient with tools like a prospect portal. What makes this even more intriguing is that tools like the prospect portal will seamlessly integrate with your CRM System and Marketing Automation tools.

Here is an article discussing the recent trends:

Turn Your Online Social Network Profile into a Marketing Weapon

Tough times: Turn to Marketing Automation- Optimize Marketing Spend & Maximize Conversions Rates

2008-12-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

Marketbright is the leading On-Demand marketing solution, providing a platform to easily manage all of your demand generation activities in one solution. With Marketbright, you get a highly automated system that will help your company increase sales. In these times where the business landscape is volatile, it’s significant how quickly and effectively campaign resources are allocated and deployed.

Marketbright allows you to maximize conversion rates and optimize marketing budget spend with:

• Self services campaign execution
o Empower Marketing to implement and manage campaigns
o Deploy campaigns faster with user friendly toolset
o Gather instant feedback on campaign performance

• Real-time lead scoring and nurturing
o Deliver highly qualified leads faster with real-time lead scoring on profile and behavioral data
o Pass leads directly to leading CRM systems
o Nurture less qualified leads through additional marketing contact

• Campaign to cash optimization
o Eliminate lost or stale leads with closed loop process from campaign initiation to sale
o Measure campaign effectiveness by tying specific lead source to revenue
o Optimize marketing spend around successful campaigns

Now more than ever, Marketing must find new and innovative ways to leverage changing market and product conditions. Marketbright has the solution to consolidate your efforts on to one easy-to-manage platform, and for you to measure the results with sophisticated marketing analytics. We hope to prove the value add of our solution for your company going into 2009.

I would be more than happy to walk you through step by step how easy yet powerful the Marketbright solution is. I think it is more evident than ever that the companies that will continue to be successful are the companies that stay focused with a solid plan to deliver to a targeted marketplace.

Looking forward to hearing back from you very soon. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

View Marketbright Introduction Video

Please email me at jon.ross@marketbright.com or directly at (650) 249-6385.

Encouragement for marketing in bad economy

2008-12-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

My Dad, who owns a graphic design firm (Ross Luthin Creative) and is heavily involved in marketing sent a letter with the following quotes I thought relevant to my blog so I thought I would share them.

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets. Steve Jobs

If you're attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn't, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income. Jay Abraham

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing. John D. Rockefeller

Graphic design will save the world right after Rock 'n Roll does. David Carson

Let us all remind our colleagues and clients that great design and wise marketing will be the light that leads the winners through this murky economy!

Marketing Initiatives for 2009

2008-11-25T20:48:00.000-08:00

When entering the new year, many marketers are looking at where to shift their budgets to optimize ad spend and best drive Contacts to Customers. When you are thinking about your plan of attack for 2009 I urge you stay focused on what works.

Marketing is a science, an understanding. Once you understand the framework, you spend wisely, track everything and bring innovation to your marketing efforts. If you do this you will survive through any market change. Again, I will repeat myself stay focused on what works!

When doing this it's essential to stay involved with social media, as this is a perfect community for you to lean on peers for best practices and road maps to what is working for other companies. Build relationships not only with the companies that are ready to buy now, but also the companies that may not be ready to buy in the near future. If you do this, I promise you that when the current marketing meltdown is over you will have more business then you can imagine.

Now is the time to capitalize on what works, and relationships will always be the underlying common factor to successful businesses.

8 Tips to Improve Your Company’s Lead Generation

2008-11-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

Improving the process of lead generation and the overall quality of leads generated is a constant goal of both B2B and B2C marketers. According to BtoB magazine – Interactive Marketing Guide 2008, marketing professionals report spending growth for lead generation, or referrals, will increase 30.9% over last year, beating out all other categories of spending except rich media/video. Lead generation involves getting access to information on qualified consumers interested in your particular product or service and in the end, isn’t about generating more leads; it’s about generating actionable leads that drive sales. Optimizing the lead generation process and activities translates to improvement in lead quality, ultimately shortening the sales cycle. Using the 8 tips described below will give you actionable ways to improve your lead generation - resulting in more and better leads, more deals, more revenue.

REGISTER FOR UPCOMING WEBINAR (December 4, 2008 @ 11:00am PT)

Discussing:

1. Define and clarify what constitutes a “qualified” lead within your enterprise. This puts marketing and sales on the same page with regard to both the sales process and the each group’s goals. As new technology increases the amount of leads generated online, the quality of the leads has seriously deteriorated, creating a need for effective lead ranking, or scoring. The discussion between marketing and sales to set parameters and decide on what constitutes a qualified lead provides the basis for an effective lead scoring system and allows marketing to be able to focus on producing more targeted leads. It is really the process, not the number, which provides the value of lead scoring. Once “qualified lead characteristics” are established, sales and marketing can work together to manage and nurture leads. It also allows marketing to get the “A-identified” leads into the hands of the right sales people at the right time to increase conversions through rapid response.

2. Have an integrated, multi-step, multi-touch marketing plan.
B2B marketing and selling is all about carefully building relationships with potential customers. Clearly communicating value and solving buyer’s frustrations and needs constitutes effective B2B marketing campaigns in today’s marketplace. Astute marketers know that to reach new prospects, no single marketing channel or strategy can be left untouched. Yet keeping track of the multiple email blasts, traditional media coverage, content to bloggers, social networking sites, tradeshows and SEO marketing, etc., becomes a complex management task. And funneling and filtering the leads generated by these activities requires multiple people and departments within the enterprise. Consider being judicious in the number of email reach outs you send to prospects – make sure different departments are not sending out emails to the same prospects without a concerted marketing effort. Aim for quality, not quantity. Otherwise, your opt-out rates will increase. Don’t measure marketing success by the number of leads produced. Measure how your ideas spread online or how many prospects are actively engaged with your brand. Create, manage and coordinate your messages across all channels for a consistent customer experience. It all gets back to the old Marketing 101 mantra - right target, right message, right timing, right channel.

3. Enhance your landing pages and call to action on each page.
When your future lead clicks on a search or paid ad online, the resulting landing page should be exactly what the prospect was looking for and provide them a compelling offering (webinar, whitepaper, demo, etc.). The value of the offer increases with an accurate, concise description of what the prospect will receive. A relevant landing page delivering content that solves the visitor's problem induces the reader to, not only consider the offer, but to pursue it. And a strong call to action that clearly shows how they can “act now” provides the incentive for lead capture, in turn allowing your company to continue the dialogue and nurture the lead.

4. Refine your surveys and registration forms.
Develop and implement productive online surveys that capture relevant prospect data and furnish quality leads. Review each of your lead generation forms, create and use more than one. Aim for capturing limited information on the initial contact and keep it short and sweet You can ask for more info as the dialogue progresses. And provide value when capturing data. Data capture is not an event, but a process leading to conversion to a customer through nurture marketing. There needs to be an exchange between you and the prospect to understand who they are and how you can meet their needs.
Additionally, the Interactive Advertiser’s Bureau (IAB)’s “Lead Generation Data Transfer Best Practices” Oct. 2007 report suggests that all personally identifiable information (PII) be received and transferred in encrypted and secure formats. However you get your information, it’s preferable to get permission to use it. If you don’t get permission in the first action, then try to get it on the next interaction. It helps to give recipients a clear indication of what you’ll be communicating, ensure prospects that data will not be abused and deliver on your promises.

5. Test, Test, Test
Search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC) advertising to generate leads are labor-intensive activities with ever-increasing demands for personalization and message optimization. Evaluating the best use of these activities for your enterprise requires much experimentation. Even simple sequential A/B testing when used often and repeatedly can yield valuable results. Yet testing needs to be a consistent habit leading to cumulative tests over time – a one-shot test will tell you very little. Reliable test results give marketers a concrete means of demonstrating marketing effectiveness to upper management and increases your company’s knowledge base. Not testing leaves marketing in the dark – make sure you test extensively to get the lead results your company desires.

6. List segmentation is critical.
Using segmented lists for your online campaigns is crucial for your target (or niche) marketing promotions – which in turn can increase lead generation capture, conversion and retention rates. Personalization of campaigns to suite the needs of specific market segments is becoming even more important as competitive pressures mount in all industries.
List segmentation comes in infinite forms – by demographic factors, by offer, by day of week sent, by time of day sent, or by subject line - to name a few. An approach can be simple or sophisticated. One example – Varying the campaign offering by sending executive level information to executive titles vs. technical information targeted for technical level titles. This concept of message matching is based on the theory that contacts only pay attention to relevant information that matches their needs. Segmentation driven campaign personalization and customization allows marketers to delivermore focused campaigns, which help to build more targeted lists and boost response rates. By segmenting your lists, testing and retesting, you can improve the quality of your lead generation results.

7. Broaden your on-line lead generation measurements with accurate and reliable campaign analytics/metrics.
Having some form of campaign/email marketing analytic reporting or metrics is essential to understanding how and where your marketing dollars are generating sales for your enterprise. In this environment of constantly shrinking marketing budgets, improving campaign ROI is the bottom line. To gather precise information about campaign effectiveness, marketers need to tap into the full spectrum of metrics available in email marketing. Once armed with a broad range of rigorous on-line lead generation measurements, any company can optimize their campaign spend and gain a competitive advantage.

8. Automate, Automate, Automate
As primary marketing tasks have shifted from using traditional marketing techniques (direct mail, print, TV, radio and trade show advertising) to using on-line marketing strategies, the process of marketing has rapidly become technology-centric. Lead generation capture, processing, filtering, selling and delivery tactics are inherently labor intensive activities and shifting much of the prior manual workload to automation systems saves both time and resources. Additionally, automating a part or all of the lead generation process reduces complexity and makes work-flow more efficient as contacts, leads, prospective clients, and sales professionals interact. The possible interactions and subsequent actions that are created have a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to customer acquisition. This ever-increasing number of scenarios generates critical opportunities to mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value. Application of marketing automation systems can help to appropriately manage these scenarios and reduce risk.
Marketers can also stay competitive with other firms already using sophisticated, multi-step, multi-campaign lead generation programs through use of automation. And better collaborate with their sales team to groom and close prospects. The biggest premium to be gained from marketing automation comes from the ease of gathering and analyzing performance metrics for marketing campaigns. This analysis can be used quickly to enhance subsequent campaigns, provide the best possible message to each customer at the lowest cost per communication, while fulfilling the promise of the closed loop marketing vision.

Sign up for an educational webinar on December 4th at 11:00am (PT)

(Content property of Marketbright, Inc.)

Dreamforce 08' Wrap Up

2008-11-05T20:52:00.000-08:00

Dreamforce 08' was truly memorable.

Not only was it enouraging to talk to hundreds of people about their companies plans to move forward in these rough times, but it was also a great time to collaborate and share ideas. My company Marketbright went into to Dreamforce with a clear vision to continue recent momentum and differentiate as the market leader in the automated marketing field. I am confident we achieved this, and even surpassed our goals and expectations.

It was also encouraging to talk to companies about their innovative technologies and forward thinking plans. Salesforce.com focused on the future of cloud computing, and they led way by hosting a first class conference.

By the way the Foo Fighters and the election made it all the more exciting!

How To Overcome A Recession: Have A Plan

2008-10-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

In times where budgets are being cut and job security is scarce, companies are looking for ways to optimize their spend in all facets of business. As I talk to a variety of marketing executives on a daily basis, the one thing that is common in thought is the importance to strengthen relationships with customers and partners and continue to build new relationships.

In order to do this it is immensely important for marketing and sales to deliver the right messaging to the right person, and do this at the right time across the right medium. B2B selling relies on providing an information conversation that is appropriate to the prospect. In doing this you must have processes and standards in place with as much automation as possible to make these functions more efficient and seamless. The last thing you want to do is downshift your marketing efforts in a bad economy. I realize that the first budget being cut in many organizations will be the marketing budget. That confirms the importance of being efficient as possible with strategic planning.

The International Journal for Research In Marketing recently reported on Marketing in tough times. The study finds that firms entering a recession with a pre-established strategic emphasis on marketing; an entrepreneurial culture; and a sufficient reserve of under-utilized workers, cash, and spare production capacity are best positioned to approach recessions as opportunities to strengthen their competitive advantage.

"Those firms with a strategic emphasis on marketing have already put in place the programs that help them derive value from their marketing activities"

The companies that have the best strategic planning in place will likely start winning the business that traditionally they lost to competition that may be cutting marketing activities, have poor planning or simply no longer exist.

Marketing in the Meltdown Webinar

2008-10-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

Marketbright will present this timely and highly specific web clinic on utilizing Web2.0 marketing technology that will help companies reduce expenditures on Marketing programs while increasing the flow of leads.
Attendees will learn:
- How to maximimze your Google AdWords program - How to create inexpensive, yet far reaching online events - Email is cheaper than stamps - Optimize campaigns to reduce advertising waste - Tips to get your webinars and white papers promoted at nearly no cost: October 24th, 2008 10:00am (PT)

Marketbright

2008-10-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

As many may know by now via email, Linkedin, or just word of mouth I now work at Marketbright. I am excited about Marketbright and the direction the company is heading. I am going to be shifting my blog to focus on B2B marketing, as this is the topic that I live day in and day out at Marketbright. Upcoming posts will include my thoughts on topics such as Lead Management, Best Practices for optimizing B2B marketing campaigns, Marketing 2.0, Post Click Marketing and many more relevant topics.

Thanks,

Jon Ross

"Malware" made it into the dictionary!

2008-07-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

I find it fascinating that is took this long, nevertheless "Malware" made it into Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition 2008.

Malware: software designed to interfere with a computer’s normal functioning.

Billions of dollars later, malware is finally getting some recognition. My questions is how did it take so long? This current wave of malware attacks has continued to reach all time highs year after year, yet it has been somewhat ignored by Corporate America even with the catastrophic growth levels.

Dave DeWalt, President and CEO of McAfee was recently quoted: "The current trends, only six months into it, is that we are seeing doubling from 2007 to 2008 in the amount of malware we receive".

Don't be fooled though, this problem goes much deeper than just recent times. We all remember nearly a decade ago the famous love letter worm that phished millions of people for up to 10 billion dollars. I guess that wasn't enough to draw Miriam Webster's attention. Other words were though.

Try the also recently added phrase "Mental health day": a day that an employee takes off from work to relieve stress or renew vitality. I do agree we all need a mental health day every once in a while, but are you kidding me?

1 in 8 internet users have been attacked by malware, and the sad thing is that some of the biggest internet giants are serving ads on these malicious pages infecting the users. They choose to ignore the issue, and it just so happens that online ad revenues are hitting historic levels as well. What a coincidence!

Atleast the unlucky and scary word malware finally made it to the dictionary, a tiny step to making the internet a safer and a more open marketplace.

Until next time, I wish you luck towards a safe journey through cyberspace.

-Jonathan Ross