NetProspex, a B2B data services provider, and B2B teleprospecting and marketing services firm AG Salesworks, recently announced a partnership and joint solution. Leveraging NetProspex’s verified contact data services, AG Pipeline Connect will focus on delivering full service marketing and sales campaigns to garner fully qualified sales leads.

As data from marketing programs and sales efforts often exist in disparate locations, B2B companies can lose visibility into subtle changes in their target market. With 25% of the workforce changing each year, a business contact database is continually degrading in quality.

Change is a fact of life for the modern enterprise. That includes change driven by the adoption of new technologies, such as marketing automation and CRM solutions, designed to revitalize sales and marketing organizations.

That's the promise of transformative technology. Yet the reality is often very different: According to some studies, more than one third of all major IT initiatives fail, and many others don't deliver their expected results.

Ryan Abreo, Vice President of Couch & Associates, is a seasoned veteran at helping enterprises navigate – and overcome – the challenges that derail transformative technology projects. As a preview of our upcoming webinar – The Sales & Marketing Transformation Triad: 3 Keys To Tying New Technology Rollouts To Business Results – Abreo sat down with DGR to answer some questions about this important topic.

Optify, a provider of inbound marketing software B2B marketers, recently announced the expansion of its inbound marketing solution, adding closed-loop email marketing to its suite. Email marketing is the first in a series of "middle-of-the-funnel" lead nurturing features part of the Optify platform. The integrated enhancements are focused on enabling users to view, track and analyze online marketing and email campaign results in a centralized location.

The platform is designed to provide a closed-loop expansion of the sales pipeline for maximized measurement and email campaign follow up. For example, using Optify marketing can provide sales with a list of the contacts that showed the most research activity on a company's web site after receiving the email, rather than just those who filled out a form.

DemandGen Report will host an educational conference for senior executives increasingly in need of better analytical precision and more accountability in their marketing efforts. The half-day event titled "Achieving Measurable Marketing Results Across the Enterprise” will be presented Tues. June 26 at MacArthur Park Restaurant in Palo Alto, Calif.

New Eloqua CMO Heidi Melin will speak during the event, as well as David Raab, VP of Optimization and Analytics for Left Brain DGA, and Andrew Gaffney, Editor of DemandGen Report.

Back in January, four marketing thought leaders assembled as part of The Great Marketing Conversation. The panel included:

• Ardath Albee – CEO, Marketing Interactions and Author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale (@ardath421)

• Mike Volpe – Chief Marketing Officer, HubSpot (@mvolpe)

• Robert Rose – Author and Strategist-In-Residence, Content Marketing Institute (@Robert_Rose)

• Marcus Sheridan – Speaker and blogger, The Sales Lion

(@TheSalesLion)

Business has never been better for marketing automation vendors. For B2B marketers, however, what they expect from marketing automation doesn't always match what they get.

 A recent SiriusDecisions study found that 85% of organizations using a marketing automation platform don't think they are using its fullest potential. According to experts familiar with this issue, the underlying problem doesn't always involve the technology. Instead, advocate a greater focus on the people and processes that set the stage for how technology gets implemented.

"A marketing automation platform will automate whatever you want," said Jonathan Block, VP and Practice Director, SiriusDecisions. "It doesn't care whether your processes and skills are optimized or not."