Top Sales Library - a resource of all things sales

Dan McDade

2015 Word of the Year: Nurturing

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I don’t know of a single company that can afford to throw away two out of every three potential leads. Unfortunately, if we were to take a closer look, that’s exactly what’s happening. For this reason, when I met with my SVP of Marketing and PR/Publicist for our annual planning meeting at the start of… Read More

Are You Minding the Revenue GAP?

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Most of the so-called experts in lead generation today are riding the inbound bandwagon. It’s hard to read a marketing article or blog without a blaring headline claiming inbound is king and outbound is dead. I get it. Inbound leads are in some cases great. You use SEO, blogs, marketing automation—every tool in the kit—and… Read More

Back to the Future: Account Based Marketing

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“Demand generation [via marketing automation] is a highly efficient model for certain kinds of businesses.” Honestly, I never thought I would hear those words—much less hear them during a webinar featuring Jon Miller, founder of Marketo and the new account based marketing automation company, Engagio. Miller compares marketing automation to fishing with a net and… Read More

Big Truth: It’s the economics, stupid!

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“It’s the economy, stupid” was a slight variation of the phrase “The economy, stupid”, coined by James Carville during his stint as a campaign strategist for Bill Clinton during Mr. Clinton’s successful run for president in 1992. While Mr. Clinton’s opponent, President Bush, enjoyed a 90% approval rating days after the ground invasion of Iraq,… Read More

CEOs Don’t Care About Leads – There are Five Reasons They Should (Part 2)

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CEOs don’t care about leads. They care about revenue. Consequently, the relationship between marketing and sales is often nothing short of mayhem. A couple of weeks ago we published part one of our five-part series entitled: “Five Reasons CEOs should Care about Leads (and databases, content, social media, cost per lead and marketing ROI) and… Read More

CEOs Don’t Care About Leads – There are Five Reasons They Should (Part 3)

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CEOs don’t care about leads. They care about revenue. Consequently, the relationship between marketing and sales is often nothing short of mayhem. Two weeks ago we published part one of our five-part series entitled: “Five Reasons CEOs should Care about Leads (and databases, content, social media, cost per lead and marketing ROI) and How to… Read More

CEOs Don’t Care About Leads – There Are Five Reasons They Should (Part 4)

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CEOs don’t care about leads. They care about revenue. Consequently, the relationship between marketing and sales is often nothing short of mayhem. A few weeks ago we began our five-part series entitled: “Five Reasons CEOs Should Care About Leads (and databases, content, social media, cost per lead and marketing ROI) and How To Fix What… Read More

CEOs Don’t Care About Leads – There Are Five Reasons They Should (Part 5 – Final)

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CEOs don’t care about leads. They care about revenue. Consequently, the relationship between marketing and sales is often nothing short of mayhem. This is the final in our series, “Five Reasons CEOs Should Care About Leads (and databases, content, social media, cost per lead and marketing ROI) and How To Fix What Is Broken.” So… Read More

How Relational Segmentation Techniques Help Achieve Higher Sales at Lower Cost

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Sophisticated relational segmentation techniques balance the principle of statistics with realities of today’s marketing budgets, and can predict the likely success of B2B marketing programs. This informative white paper can save significant dollars, time and resources by providing you valuable information that helps you: Avoid the missed potential that traditional database clean-ups miss. Understand why… Read More

Increase Lead Rates 3X – The Difference is Nurturing

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Nurturing is essential for successful lead generation—both inbound and outbound. Paradoxically it’s among the most underutilized tools in the marketing arsenal. With the potential to increase lead rates from 5% to 15%, it’s a wonder only 35% of B2B companies (Marketing Sherpa) have nurturing programs in place. An analysis of 25,000 PointClear dispositions* from the… Read More

Is Your Funnel Full of Fool’s Gold?

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The sales reps at most B2B organizations have two choices: 1) Spend their time culling through leads that experience has shown are overwhelmingly raw, unfiltered, and unqualified. 2) Or, dismiss them outright. In this take-it-or-leave-it scenario, nobody wins. Sales is not as productive as they need to be to meet quota, marketing is wasting its… Read More

ITSMA Professional Services and Solutions 2013 Brand Tracking Study

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According to ITSMA’s research, while there are professional services and solution providers with unaided awareness in the market (IBM – 52% of respondents, Accenture – 25%, HP – 22%) there were literally scores of other vendors mentioned when 466 business and IT executives were interviewed about services providers in September – November, 2013. A key… Read More

Point C: From Chaos to Kickass: 3 Steps to Sales and Marketing Optimization

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How well are your B2B organization’s sales and marketing behaviors, practices and processes reliably and sustainably producing required outcomes? Are you mired in chaos, spending lots of time getting little done? Are you like most companies, achieving just average results and not knowing why? Or are you among the few that are kickin’ it?No matter… Read More

PowerViews with Chris Tratar: Execs Need to Support ‘Sales-First’ Culture

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Everyone in sales recognizes that there is an unfortunate gap between marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM). When 80 percent of marketing-qualified leads fail to convert into sales-qualified leads, it’s time for the industry to reconfigure its thinking. This is a topic I discussed at length with my latest guest, Chris Tratar, vice president… Read More

Prospect Development: The Answer to Your Lead Generation Woes

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The inbound marketing versus outbound marketing controversy rages on. The mantra from Inbound Marketing fanatics is “cold calling is dead.” I could not agree more. How many salespeople do you know who actually enjoy and excel at calling unqualified prospects? And do you really want your highly paid salespeople spending half their day prospecting companies… Read More

Pulchritudinous Leads

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An industry friend of mine referred to his wife (on Facebook) as “pulchritudinous”. I figured he was going to be looking forward to a number of nights on the couch or in the spare bedroom. He was not, and I was surprised. More on that toward the end of this article. “The leads are weak!”… Read More

Reaping the Value of Long-Term Leads

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In 1885, William Lever of Lever Bros. said, “Half of the marketing money you spend is wasted—trouble is you don’t know which half.” Unfortunately, there is a good chance that substantially more than half of your marketing investments are being squandered. Many leads are not followed up by sales, for legitimate and non-intuitive reasons. The… Read More

Sales Thinks The Leads Are Weak – Well Are They? 12 Power Opinions (Pt 1)

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The leads are weak? You’re weak! If you have never seen the movie/play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” do yourself a favor and watch it. Alec Baldwin rips into the late Jack Lemmon for commenting, “the leads are weak,” with a classic Baldwin-esque tongue-lashing: “The leads are weak? The leads are weak! You’re weak!” The movie should… Read More

She Said What? Marketing Success … but No Leads?

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“Lead generation is the biggest weakness in their otherwise successful marketing efforts.” I had to laugh when I read this sentence in an article about B2B lead generation marketing trends. The author started the paragraph the quote above came from by stating that, “Year in and year out, in trade article after trade article, B2B… Read More