Six years ago, Twitter was just a newfangled tool for intrepid marketers who wanted to expand their online reach. Today, Twitter boasts 140 million active users; a single tweet from a celebrity or company can become headline news in an instant. The trouble for in-house marketers is, while a celebrity like Lady Gaga can acquire 20 million Twitter followers in a single weekend, most B2B companies struggle to accruing their first 1,000 over the course of a year.

Ask most B2B sales and marketing professionals and business owners and they’ll tell you that B2B lead generation is much harder today than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Why? It’s not because prospects have stopped buying. It’s because the way that they buy has changed. And many B2B sales and marketing professionals who still use the same tactics that worked well 5 or 10 years ago are struggling because the tactics no longer work.

Many of us have heard of ghost towns from Wild West movies. A ghost town is a town or city that, due to economic reasons or some kind of catastrophe, is abandoned by its residents. There are numerous ghost towns throughout North America; you may have even visited one at some point. But, today, I'm going to talk about a ghost town that hits a little closer to home - your company's social media profile.

Undergoing a website redesign is an incredible adventure for any organization; if done right, however, the rewards are well worth the investment.

When you think of bad habits, what springs to mind? Smoking? Nail-biting? Overeating? These are just a few of the nasty habits that millions of individuals attempt to break every year, often spending a lot of money in the process. Businesses also suffer from their own vices which (left unchecked) can stifle the organization’s lead generation efforts and result in loss of opportunity.

Pay per click advertising (PPC) has taken root in businesses large and small. This should come as no surprise to anyone who follows business news. Google’s recent quarterly revenues grew to $9 billion. Many business owners and managers are familiar with Google’s AdWords pay per click (PPC) search advertising service. But how many are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and techniques? Not nearly as many. Yet SEO offers a tremendous opportunity.

I was recently running  a lead nurturing workshop with a client and we were  discussing the fact that buyers today progress through a significant portion of their buying cycle without  engaging a sales person. Both CSO Insights and Sirius Decision recently found many buyers put off contacting a vendor until the latter part of the purchasing process. With information available on the internet, and social media sites brimming with tips and advice, buyers no longer rely on sales people, or vendors, to keep them updated on trends, technologies and solutions available on the market.
 
So, I was asked, did I see a time when there would be no need for sales people. It's a good question, and as a life-long sales person myself, one that I found a little shocking.
 
Back in the day, there were (and I suppose there still are) two general types of sales people - hunters and farmers. The hunter was given a territory and a quota and it was up to him to hit the phone, pound the doors and bring in new customers no matter what it took. The farmers had a more pastoral existence, nurturing and developing accounts and performing the gentlemanly art of upselling and crossselling.
 
Clearly, cold calling is rapidly falling from favor and there's plenty of evidence suggesting that it's becoming less effective. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs concluded that their number one annoyance is unsolicited cold calls. Nothing irritates a CIO more.  Does that mean that the fire-breathing, back-slapping, hand-shaking sales person is a thing of the past? Well, perhaps yes.
 
Most buyers report that they receive little value from their first contact with a sales person - and few find being sold to a pleasurable experience. The first meeting with a vendor or sales person is now delayed as long as possible - in fact, in her book 'eMarketing for the Complex Sale', Ardath Ablee states that  four-fifths of buyers found the seller after doing research online. And when they do engage with a vendor, buyers expect to meet a subject matter expert - someone who can answer specific questions and explain the product or solution in great detail. They are not looking for a slick presentation or two-page glossy.
 
Where does that leave our sales guy? The person who is the expert, the educator and the orchestrator of the sales process will still be a valuable and necessary part of the buying process. But the traditional tag-em and bag-em, swift-footed salesperson will increasingly find themselves pulled from the field and relegated to the sidelines.

Modern marketing require a dizzying array of marketing skills. From strategy to execution, many skills are required by companies with a business-to-business (B2B) target market. Most small size companies have no one dedicated full time to marketing. Mid-size companies may have only 1-5 full-time resources in marketing. Even if you have a few people on your internal marketing team, it’s not likely that all the required skills will be represented on your team. That’s why partnering with a B2B marketing agency makes sense.  

What is Website Grader?                                                                                        

Here are ten can’t miss tips for landing page optimization. There are several types of landing pages, but for the purposes of this article, I’ll be addressing landing pages that are used to offer downloadable content, such as white papers. Landing pages are one of the basic building blocks of internet marketing. They are used to convert anonymous visitors to your website into leads. They are also used with email campaigns. The emails have a link in the body of the email and when the recipient clicks on the link, they go to the landing page.