Demanding Views

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.