The #1 Lead Generation and Sales Prospecting Blog

When it comes to e-mail marketing, everyone wants to know how much is too much. Should my company send out quarterly e-newsletters, bi-monthly e-blasts, weekly informational e-mails, a steady stream of text e-mails, a certain number of lead nurturing e-mails? How can I make an impact on leads and prospects without inundating them with e-mails and information they don’t want or need? What are the magic numbers?

Ever eavesdropped on a group of sales professionals standing around, bemoaning the fact that they haven’t hit their sales targets and blaming it on a lack of quality sales leads?  Ever had the sneaking suspicion, however valid their complaints, that there were things that they could have done to get more leads that they just didn’t do?

Most B2B sales reps can agree that there is one thing a heck of a lot scarier than ghosts, goblins, and assorted monsters: moving into the holiday season without the new accounts you’d hoped to win long before October 31.

Remember the story of the frog that got caught in a vat of milk and had to kick and squirm and fight until it churned the milk into butter and was able to hop out? Given the current lull in the US economy, your company may need to do the same thing when it comes to sales and marketing in order to achieve significant fourth quarter earnings and hop into 2013 unscathed.

Have you seen that Bill Cosby comedy routine about parents who repeat themselves? If you’re a parent, you know that you can lose minutes—maybe even entire years—of your life saying the same things over and over again in order to try and get the responses you want from your children. “Come here,” Bill Cosby says, mimicking a frustrated parent. “Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. HERE!”

It’s easy to begin a social media marketing campaign. You just sign up and create free accounts with the social media networks that are likely to have the biggest impact on your business, which, for most companies, will be Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and boom—you’re off!

Most sales and marketing professionals consider press releases outbound marketing tools. They equate them with advertising, direct mail, and other forms of outbound marketing.

Developing a marketing campaign is kind of like making pizza. You can incorporate all the bells and whistles, or, the best toppings, but if you don’t have the right recipe for making dough, the end result is bound to be disappointing.

Outbound marketing includes everything from telemarketing and cold calling to event hosting and advertising. Traditionally, when you engage in outbound marketing, what you’re doing is throwing out messages to a general audience and hoping that they somehow reach the right people and resonate with them.

Whatever you want to call it—industry speak, corporate lingo, or company jargon—it can make a marketing message fall flat faster than a whole-wheat pancake dropped from the top of the Chrysler Building.