By Michael Damphousse, CEO/CMO of Green Leads, LLC

Recently we conducted a poll on LinkedIn where we asked: Inbound Marketing & Outbound Marketing -

What is your mix for lead gen?

By Jeff Ogden, Author, How to Find New Customers

The first rule every marketer must embrace when they look at lead nurturing programs is this:

Companies don’t buy. People do.

Since we’re speaking to people rather than companies, one must engage on an emotional level. You need to build trust and confidence in your company and the very best way to connect in this manner is through the use of stories.

Few companies have been as close to the pipeline building strategies of leading BtoB organizations over the past decade as By Appointment Only (BAO). The company has provided demand generation services for more hundreds of high tech clients and has secured more than 150,000 executive level meetings since its start in 1997.

By Guy Powell, Author, “Marketing Calculator: Measuring and Managing Return on Marketing Investment”

Is half your marketing wasted and you just don’t know which half? Are you a follower of John Wanamaker and don’t know whether your marketing is working or not? In any organization, marketing is one of the most difficult functions. There’s always too much to do and too little time.  And if you’re like most organizations after the campaign is done, you can’t answer the simple question, “How much revenue did it bring in?”

Here are six steps to help fix this problem: 

By Lisa Cramer, President, LeadLife Solutions

The statistics are overwhelming. The volume of leads or inquiries that come to your company’s Web site or trade show booth that don’t buy—usually because they’re just not yet ready to— is staggering. However, even if they’re not yet “ready buyers,” it doesn’t mean that your sales team shouldn’t be nurturing them. In fact, 80% of the un-worked leads (those not picked up by your sales force for a variety of reasons) will buy from someone over the next 24 months. So how does marketing make sure it’s your company that they buy from once they’re ready?

Fresh off a book tour promoting “Digital Body Language,” Eloqua CTO Steve Woods has been immersed in conversations around the latest trends in BtoB marketing, from social media to sales and marketing alignment, and the role of each in the demand generation space. Woods says many marketers have realized marketing should be seen as facilitating a buying process, not outbound selling, and future conversations will be centered on how to understand the buying process and use that intelligence to optimize marketing messaging. DemandGen Report recently had the chance to catch up with Woods to hear his insight on the future of social media, the best way to stay in front of prospects with an increasing buying cycle, and industry feedback about the book.

By Jim Lenskold, President, Lenskold Group

This is the second article in the four-part series on Maximizing Lead Generation Marketing ROI. The other articles in this series include:

Part 1: Lead Quality Counts
Part 3: Measuring Effectiveness
Part 4: Dashboard Metrics

You run your marketing, generate those high quality leads we discussed in Part 1 of this article series, hand these leads off to the sales team, and wait. Hey guys, anything happening over there with our leads? Dead silence. The execs are asking about the ROI on your marketing efforts but you seem to have lost sight of the financial returns which may or may not be present in the black hole where you pass your leads into. The financial success of lead generation marketing is very much dependent on how those leads are managed after the marketing handoff to sales.

The intersection of sales and marketing keeps drawing closer as lead management solution providers continue to roll out new applications which provide sales executives with insights and new paths to interact with prospects.  Both Marketo and Eloqua bowed new tools last week which stretch beyond the marketing automation space into CRM-based, sales intelligence offerings.

By Eric Hoffert, CEO, ShareMethods

As any salesperson knows, having the most up to date and accurate marketing materials is a must.  Surprisingly, email, while ineffective, is still one of the most common methods for document sharing, yet even when companies want to move away from it, the options are IT intensive and lack flexibility. But, times have changed and as business ecosystems have become more and more distributed, and salespeople are traveling less, having a way to securely work together and collaborate around important documents has gone from being a nice-to-have to a necessity.

By Mike Gospe, Principal & Co-Founder, KickStart Alliance

One of the most common types of marketing programs is the "awareness & thought leadership" program.  This specific program has the objective of focusing the company on the business and solutions topics target audiences cares about.  Instead of immediately diving down to the feature-rich technical jargon, this program positions the vendor as a business partner, and thus allows for a consultative approach in dialoguing with customers and prospects.