What’s the not-so-secret but often neglected success factor in B2B direct marketing? Simply this: your in-house prospect list (house file) can be your most important asset in a successful direct marketing operation. And this is equally true whether you are communicating with prospects at their email addresses, physical addresses or telephone numbers. A house file can vastly decrease your cost of lead and new …
Category Archive
for: ‘Lead Generation’
Bridging the Gap Between B2B Marketing and Sales by Christopher Ryan
If you are a marketing manager at a company that uses direct sales representatives, these people can be either your best friends or worst nightmare. Chances are they are somewhere in between, but the point is they can make your life easier, or they can be a constant source of irritation. In fact, careers can …
The “Ideal” Prospect – by John Leavy
“I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.” – Willie Mays
Wouldn’t it be good to know who the “ideal” prospect or prospects are before sending out email blasts, newsletters, Twitters, facebook fan page invites or webinar invitations? Assuming what most of us naturally assumes and that is, of course everyone wants to …
Build a Great B2B Marketing Team by Christopher Ryan
In my new book, How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing and Sales Machine (available at http://bit.ly/4zTeAs), I devoted four chapters to the subject of how to find, motivate and manage marketing and sales personnel. I gave this subjet valuable book space because it is not just the budget, programs, and technology that generate the results, …
Stop What is Hurting You in B2B Marketing and Sales (by Christopher Ryan)
Take a sober assessment of your B2B marketing campaigns, strategies, lead generation programs, expenses, etc., and immediately stop: lead generation programs that are not followed up by the sales team, campaigns that do not reinforce your core message, expenses that do not contribute to the overall objective, unnecessary reporting and analysis, working with people who are unreliable and/or unproductive, and anything that you are doing as a manager that is impeding your staff’s ability to get their jobs done quickly and efficiently.
Timing is Everything in B2B Marketing (from Chris Ryan)
I just read an interestng post at the Smashmouth Marketing Blog about the importance of timing when it comes to reaching business prospects at their desks. According to an MIT/InsideSales.com study, you are 2-3 times more likely to catch someone in the eastern time zone between 4 and 5 pm as you are between 11 am and …
B2B Lead Issues
In research reported in Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation blog (http://blog.startwithalead.com), the biggest pain point (34%) is converting leads to pipeline revenue.