Date: January 12, 2012 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST

Overview:

Sales and Marketing are responsible for managing a predictable, reliable demand generation pipeline that produces higher value opportunities and maximizes revenue. The traditional approach to the pipeline- Awareness, Interest, Demand, Action or the more modified version of this pipeline – Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Purchase – is outdated.

The customer is no longer a passive recipient or a sidelined spectator. In today’s environment, customers are actively engaged in the buying process. Today we leverage a mix of vehicles from search engines to customer generated blogs and reviews, from online communities to social networks, and from broadcast to personalization designed to create engagement and enhance experience. Yet our language related to the customer buying pipeline hasn’t kept up.

Agenda:

Join us for this web-based discussion,We’ll discuss and learn:

• A customer-centric alternative for creating an opportunity pipeline
• Six key measurable stages for developing, implementing and measuring Marketing’s contribution to the opportunity pipeline
• How to use this customer-centric approach to align marketing and sales and enable the two organization to collaboratively accelerate revenue

About the Speaker:

Laura Patterson’s career spans over 30 years working for companies such as State Farm and Motorola. In 1999 she co-founded VisionEdge Marketing, a company that enables organizations to leverage data and analytics to facilitate marketing accountability and operations, measure and improve marketing performance, develop dashboards, and enhance marketing and sales alignment in order to accelerate revenue and create a competitive advantage.

Author of three books, including Metrics in Action, Laura has served on several boards such as the ANA and BMA and has lectured at various universities including Tuck’s Business School and Stanford University. She serves on the Advisory Board for the CMO Council and the World Brand Congress. Laura earned her B.A from Truman State University and her Master’s at the University of South Florida.

Register Now

On November  10th, Steve Bernstein, Founder and Principal Consultant, Waypoint Group presented an informative webinar on “3 Steps to Acquiring New Sales-Ready Leads Faster than Ever Before” Webinar helped the audience in understanding the innovative process that has proven to drive new opportunities for the sales team –producing conversion rates in excess of 30%. We also discovered:

• Preparing by predicting your results in expected revenue.
• Where to find these opportunities: The new ‘targeting’ method
• How to engage them
• How to get started and how fast you will see results

Watch It Here

On October 20th, Craig Rosenberg, Vice President, Focus Expert Network presented an informative webinar on “6 Components for the Successful B-to-B Demand Generation Engine” Webinar helped in learning on  how we can have an immediate and positive impact on your pipeline. We also discovered:

• The 6 critical steps every demand generation machine must have to maximize your pipeline
• Practical “get started” tips that you can implement from day-one
• Best practices from real successfully deployed demand generation programs across the industry

Watch It Here:

How times have changed. It’s clear that many B2B organizations now understand the need for marketing automation technologies, and the need for optimized processes and skills to leverage them, as blogs and tweets on these topics abound at an increasing rate. Ultimately, the proof of whether these purchases “worked” is often difficult to measure, time-consuming and subject to significant debate.

Unfortunately, we still see organizations purchase a marketing automation platform (MAP) in an attempt to automate processes that don’t exist; in instances where this has occurred, the technology has struggled to demonstrate results. As a result, any journey into MAP ROI must compare organizations where a MAP is implemented without strong surrounding processes, those that wisely combine technology with process, and those with no MAP.

We’ve been using our Demand Creation Waterfall as a framework to compare the benchmark conversion rate data we’ve collected for each of these three scenarios (see the graphic). While this post uses sample numbers (our clients have access to more granular benchmarking data), the results are both stark and startling, and they include the following.

Clearly, organizations that address demand creation processes and skills, at even just a basic level, are best positioned to leverage marketing automation technology. Imagine the results your can achieve if you reach strong or best-in-class status.