Recent Posts by Contributor

Lead Scoring is becoming an industry standard for ensuring marketing and sales agree on what qualifies as a lead. Taking agreed upon profile and engagement criteria for qualified leads, you can input this information into lead scoring, which helps you understand a buyer’s decision-making status within the context of how engaged that buyer is with your marketing efforts. Typically, a lead’s profile is scored A through D while a leads engagement is scored 1 through 4. Put...

One of life’s unspoken disappointments is this: Rarely do we know the extent of the difference we make in one another’s lives. We stumble across an article, catch the tail end of a conversation, receive a kind word from someone special, notice a tweet in passing … and something about it sticks. Maybe it inspires, or perhaps it irritates. But it calcifies, until we do something about it. And that’s one of the ways change happens. For me, Augie Ray, the executive director of...

These are the questions we asked ourselves as we imagined and developed “What is Revenue Performance Management?”, the latest video from Eloqua and JESS3. To be honest, we never came up with a clear answer. I suppose it tastes great and is less filling. When we published The Future of Revenue, the precursor to today’s video, our objective was clear: help create a new category (Revenue Performance Management) by putting our vision in historic context. Worry less about the...

At last week’s South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin Texas, I participated in a panel discussion on The State of Social Marketing.  The session was moderated by The Next Web editor Brad McCarty, and included Becky Brown of Intel and Tyler Willis of Unified. The session promised to consist of 10-minute rapid-fire discussions of the three most important changes happening in social marketing. To keep the discussion fresh, we had one prep call in which McCarty told the...

When Jill Abramson was growing up on Manhattan's upper West Side, her family maintained two subscriptions to The New York Times. One was for reading; the other for her mother’s crossword puzzle idiosyncrasies. The prominent role the Times played in her home makes the story of Abramson’s rise to become the paper’s first female executive editor all the more fabled. I knew embarrassingly little about Abramson when she took the stage for a casual conversation with Evan Smith, CEO...

It always comes down to skills. When marketers talk about what’s holding them back – skills. When the demand generation engine is stuck in neutral – skills. When the CMO is unimpressed – skills. B2B marketing is changing. And lots of modern marketing departments lack the fundamental skills they need to keep and drive real demand. And many of these skills may not be top of mind. Here are the 5 must-have skills that B2B marketing departments need to build a demand generation machin...

Below is the deck I presented at the Online Marketing Summit a couple weeks back. It’s called “From Content to Customer” and it focuses on the nexus of B2B content marketing and demand generation. Huge thanks to partner JESS3 for the creative genius. The substance was co-developed in concert with my colleague, Elle Woulfe, who moves the levers in our demand engine, and it’s in this duality – from “pre-funnel” creative content to “in funnel” functional content – that this...

You know the feeling: Just when you think you have something (almost) all figured out, someone goes and blows up your self-image. As the person responsible for Eloqua’s content marketing efforts, that’s how I felt when reading Altimeter Group’s latest research: Content: The New Marketing Equation. Turns out, however, illumination can be a very good feeling. You see, today’s report, published by Rebecca Lieb, is filled with practical tips and heady observations for those just...

If you send every “lead” to sales, regardless of quality, they will have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince. Not everyone who fills out a form, attends a webinar or clicks through on one of your emails should be passed to sales.  Marketers have to evaluate buyer fit (Do they map to your ideal customer profile?) and buyer behavior (Have they shown interest in what you sell?). What constitutes buyer fit and intent differs for every company. Lead scoring makes evaluation...