Each morning our piece of the world comes through the door

Here are some of the key documents, blogs and websites that I have used recently that have really helped me get an insight into the issues and potential challenges surrounding lead nurturing and progression:

I found that googling Laura Ramos at Forrester unearthed a number of insightful pieces including a paper titled– How mature is B2B Lead Management in which they had benchmarked 252 B2B companies and established that only 9% were at best practice. For most of us, we were creating leads that we were passing onto the sales teams (usually too early), and the sales teams were tending to cherry-pick those that they felt they could close quickly. All the rest was leaking out of the buying funnel. There is also a Forrester Marketing Blog that Laura and a number of her colleagues contribute to.

Another name that keeps on popping up is Brian Carroll, CEO of Intouch. His ebook Start with a Lead offers some practical pointers that help remind us that nuturing a client from initial interest through to sale takes a sustained effort, not just a series of disconnected tactics. Brian maintains a regular B2B Lead Generation blog.

Another great resource to dive into is Jon Miller’s Modern B2B Marketing blog. Of special note here is the Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs where you will find the opportunity to learn from and engage with good, bad and ugly truth-seekers in this arena.

That's where I started on this journey - along with a few a few vendor websites such as Marketing Advocate and Vtrenz and a handful of newsletters from the likes of MarketingSherpa and MarketingProfs.

There's so much information out there that's just a click away - and most of it is free. On its own this won't solve your lead management challenges of course, but at least you'll sense that there's some others who are thinking along similar lines as yourself.

What free sources do you use for inspiration on the topic of B2B lead nurturing? Please post a comment and let me know.

And Finally - and for not obvious reason whatsoever, each post will be headlined by a an extract from a song. The only prize is your own smug satisfaction. Post #1 was pretty obvious – Start! By the Jam. Today’s is much more obscure, but also from the Jam - News of the World.

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Start!

My challenge is one that faces most marketing departments, I believe. How do we ensure that the business gets a better return from our marketing investments. Specifically I'm focussing myself on improving our marketing peformance in 3 areas
· Establishing a framework for nurturing prospects that are not yet ready to engage with our sales force, yet have a real business issue that that needs exploring
· Ensuring that the lead management processes deliver - so that opportunities are handed off to the sales force at the appropriate point, and that the opportunities are highly valued and followed through to successful closure
· Exploit the use of Web2.0 and other pull-based digital techniques to enhance prospect/client dialogues - not to get caught up in the hype, but to deliver real value
I'll explore the themes in future postings - we all have a day job so I don't expect a new post every day. But if this is an area that interests you I look forward to hearing from you and learning from you.
In my next posts I'll share with you some useful articles that I've found around this topic on the web. Stay tuned...

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