Marketing Automation

Is traditional direct marketing dead?

Craig Huey, in this week's show, tackles a tough subject when he answers the question, Is Traditional Direct Marketing Dead?  Of course, he says it isn't, and with good reason, but the naysayers are out there.  Huey says direct marketing is stronger than ever and is more accountable than most programs.  Hear what he has to say and learn why direct is more direct and profitable than ever in this interview with SLMA Radio host Jim Obermayer.Craig Huey: The Authority on accountable advertising Craig Huey, the President of Creative Direct Marketing Group, is recognized as one of the world's leading experts in direct response marketing. He is the winner of 78 major marketing awards for break-through campaigns for multimillion-dollar sales.Craig works with small companies and major corporations. His campaigns have targeted municipal areas to international markets. Working with over 1,000 companies, Craig has helped successful companies become more successful, and troubled companies to recover.Articles by and about Craig Huey have appeared in Inc., DM News, Direct Marketing, Target Marketing, Christianity Today, and Adweek.He is also the creator of the V.I.V.A.™ (Valuable Information, Value-Added) direct marketing system.Craig is an author, his newest book is 16 Secrets to Raising Capital from Accredited Investors Under the JOBS Act , as well as publisher of the industry newsletter Direct Marketing Update.He is also the President of InfoMat, a postal and email mailing list brokerage and management company.Creative Direct Marketing Group BioCreative Direct Marketing Group, INC. (CDMG) is a full-service, direct response advertising and digital marketing agency with one goal in mind: increasing your response and profits through "accountable advertising.  For more than 30 years, we've helped turn entrepreneurial start-ups into large companies…and large companies into multibillion-dollar businesses.  Through 7 recessions, 2 inflationary periods, as well as times of economic prosperity, CDMG has consistently achieved breakthrough response rates for our clients.

Why VOCUS is a serious challenger to Eloqua.

You Mon Tsang joins Jim Obermayer to discuss why Vocus is a serious challenge to Eloqua’s positon in the marketing automation space.  When Obermayer approached Vocus about the interview, their response is that they take exception to our title as Vocus representatives feel that they, and not Eloqua, is the leader in the marketing automation space. We’ll find out the scoop when we interview Mr. Tsang. After all, their site says that they have more than 16,000 annual subscription customers across a wide variety of industries that use Vocus software.  About: You Mon Tsang  CEO, Vocus Marketing Suite business line Before assuming his current role leading Vocus’ Marketing Suite business line, Mr. Tsang held positions as CMO and senior vice president of product at Vocus. Prior to Vocus, he was CEO of Engine140, a company Vocus acquired and subsequently integrated into its product portfolio. A serial entrepreneur, Tsang also founded and was CEO of Biz360, a market intelligence company that helped Fortune 500 companies compile and analyze media content. He founded Boxxet, a consumer content aggregation engine with 4 million unique visitors a month, as well as Milktruck LLC, an Internet pioneer in offline browsing and “push” software. Mr. Tsang holds a Bachelor of Arts in urban studies from Yale University and an MBA from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley About Vocus:Vocus provides leading cloud-based public relations and marketing software that enables companies to acquire and retain customers. The company offers products and services to help clients attract and engage prospects, nurture and convert customers, and measure and improve marketing effectiveness. More than 16,000 annual subscription customers across a wide variety of industries use Vocus software. The company is headquartered in Beltsville, MD with offices in North America, Europe and Asia.  

Is Marketing Automation Right for Every Company?

Howard Sewell has opinions, driven by expertise And experience, that few have.  Jim Obermayer, SLMA Radio host will interview Howard and discuss the criteria for a company considering implementing a marketing automation system. It isn’t for everyone but everyone should know why or why not it makes sense for them. You’ll learn:What are the key criteria that make a company an ideal candidate for marketing automation?How should a company prepare to make sure they get the most from marketing automation?Where do companies fall short with marketing automation?  What are the pitfalls to avoid?Realistically, what are the necessary resources a company needs to be successful with marketing automation?What’s the best way to choose a marketing automation solution? What should companies look for?Jim Obermayer will address these questions with Howard Sewell, President of Spear Marketing GroupHoward has more than 20 years’ experience in high-tech sales and marketing.  He started his marketing career at software giant Oracle Corporation, before leaving to start his own direct marketing agency, CDI, growing the firm to be one of the nation’s top B2B agencies.  Howard authors Spear’s blog (www.spearmarketing.com/blog), where he writes on demand generation, lead nurturing, and marketing technology.  For the last 3 years running, Howard has been named one of the “50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management” by the SLMA.Company BioSpear Marketing Group (www.spearmarketing.com) is a full-service demand generation agency that helps B2B high-technology companies generate, nurture, and convert leads to revenue.  Spear’s unique, holistic approach to demand generation blends strategic expertise, creative flair, and a deep understanding of marketing technology to achieve measurable results across every stage of the lead lifecycle. The firm serves high-tech clients nationwide from its offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle, WA.  Connect with him on Twitter: @hjsewell and LinkedIn: /hjsewell

How to stop wasting marketing dollars on non-revenue tactics

Michelle Jacobs and Matt Hertig of Alight Analytics discuss how multi-channel marketing analytics can help companies be more efficient with every marketing dollar. Marketing management today has pressure to spend money on things that work and leave the rest for their competitors. Michelle and Matt share how they use ChannelMix Big Data Warehouse to increase sales online and offline for their customers.About Michelle Jacobs, Co-Founder, Alight AnalyticsMichelle Jacobs is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Alight Analytics, and continues to lead and develop their marketing analytics and measurement practice. Her passion for delivering insightful, actionable marketing analytics is a key pillar of the company's success. She is responsible for helping clients like Helzberg Diamonds, AMC Theatres and Hill's Pet Nutrition maximize their digital marketing efforts through intelligent use of multi-channel analytics. Before Alight Analytics, Michelle directed Web analytics, marketing and advertising strategies for companies such as H&R Block, American Century Investments, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Toyota.About Matt Hertig, Co-Founder, Alight AnalyticsMatt Hertig is the Co-Founder of Alight Analytics, an independent marketing analytics firm based in Kansas City, Missouri. Under his leadership, Alight has developed an industry-leading marketing analytics platform, ChannelMix, which has established Alight Analytics at the cutting edge of multi-channel marketing analytics.  Prior to founding Alight Analytics, Matt built an extensive background in CRM, database marketing, web strategy and business intelligence by serving as an executive leading multi-million dollar database marketing systems and multi-channel web strategies at companies such as AMC Theatres, American Century Investments and Payless ShoeSource.About Alight AnalyticsAlight Analytics delivers global marketers powerful, actionable marketing analytics. As a pioneer in the space, Alight has been offering its holistic analytics platform and services since 2007. With a talented team of dedicated experts, a proven process, and the industry’s best platform, Alight reveals omni-channel insights to enable marketers to optimize all their marketing channels. These insights significantly increase marketing ROI across their entire marketing portfolio – both online and offline. As the only marketing analytics firm to provide a full-service solution, Alight integrates its clients’ own marketing data in its cloud-based ChannelMix Big Data warehouse, builds custom dashboards, delivers regular, proactive insights and creates powerful attribution and predictive models to ensure future success.Alight Analytics was named the 2014 Best Business Analytics Solution Provider by Innovation Enterprise, a 2014 25 Under 25® award winner by Thinking Bigger Business and Alight’s Co-Founder, Michelle Jacobs, was named one of Ingram’s 2014 40 Under Forty honorees. Alight Analytics is a Google Analytics Certified Partner, a Google Analytics Authorized Premium Reseller, a MarketLive Integrated Partner, an Amazon Web Services APN Consulting Partner, a Tableau Software Technology Partner and part of the SAP HANA Startup Program.

CMO Salaries and Integrated Marketing Summit Review

Host Jim Obermayer discusses with Paul Roberts of OC Talk Radio, about the compensation programs for CMOs. Plus as a bonus, Obermayer brings interviews from the Integrated Market Summit Conference (January 30-31st in San Diego). He interviews Shawn Ellridge, Shawn Flaherty of ITX Corporation, Mac McIntosh from Acquire B2B, Jennifer Allen from Victor Marketing, and Julie Newmark from Outward Media Inc. Obermayer said that this summit was unusual in its choice of topics. There was a keynote by the venerated Don E. Schultz interesting presentations by Shelly Kramer of V3 Integrated Marketing, Michelle Killebrew of IBM Social Business. Aaron Bolshaw of Act-On Software, Audie Chamberlain of Realtor.com., Nicholas Muldoon from Twitter, Eric Holtzclaw of Laddering Work’s, Matt Hertig and Michelle Jacobs of Alight Analytics, Tim Ash of SiteTuners (Your baby is Ugly) Roy Pun from Adobe, Amanda Kahlow of 6Sense Insights, Pam Didner of Intel. If you missed IMS, it will appear in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Raleigh-Durham and Austin kin the coming months.

LIVE INTERVIEWS from RevTalks in San Francisco

James Obermayer is at RevTalks: The Revenue Marketing Summit and will be interviewing a variety of speakers that will include a number of the following folks:James Obermayer is at RevTalks: The Revenue Marketing Summit and will be interviewing a variety of speakers that will include a number of the following folks:  Tune into hear interviews with:Valerie Fawzi, CloudshareJim Lenskold, Author of Marketing ROIAmnon Mishor, LeadSpaceMark Organ, InfluitiveJeff Pedowitz, The Pedowitz GroupMaria Pergolino, ApttusDebbie Qaqish, the Pedowitz GroupWill Spendlove, InsideViewSteve Wood, Obliterase

Maria Pergolino, Vice President of Marketing, Apttus
Maria Pergolino leads marketing at Apttus and works every day to make herself, and those she works with, better marketers. Prior to this, Maria was Senior Director of Marketing at Marketo. Maria has worked in marketing for over ten years, specifically in online marketing for the past six years, including CRM, social media, search marketing, and lead generation and nurturing. She is a Salesforce.com Certified Administrator and user group leader, and a speaker at numerous marketing events.
Maria holds a Marketing Degree and MBA from the School of Business at Rutgers University.
REVTalk: Promoting Revenue Marketing with Fun and Emotion!
Valerie Fawzi, Chief Marketing Officer, CloudShare
Valerie is Chief Marketing Officer for CloudShare, a provider of virtual lab infrastructure for the development community. Before joining CloudShare, Valerie served as VP of worldwide marketing for EVault, a Seagate company that delivers cloud storage application services. Prior to EVault, she held marketing leadership roles at start-ups Corticon & DecisionPoint Software, which she positioned for ultimate acquisition by Teradata. Valerie also led the global product marketing function for Autodesk's AutoCAD design software and related products.
Valerie holds a bachelor's degree from University of California at Berkeley, and an MBA in International Marketing from San Francisco State University.
REVTalk: A Winning Formula for Sales and Marketing Alignment –and Why Marketing Must Own It
 
Debbie Qaqish, Chief Strategy Officer, The Pedowitz Group
Debbie Qaqish is Chief Strategy Officer and a principal partner at The Pedowitz Group and is responsible for developing and managing client relationships. She is a nationally recognized speaker, thought leader and innovator in the demand generation field, with more than 30 years of sales and marketing experience applying strategy, technology and process to help B2B companies drive revenue growth.
Debbie is a pioneer in marketing automation, first as a beneficiary, and now as an advocate and expert. She is a frequent speaker and writer on topics related to driving revenue through demand generation techniques, marketing automation technologies and the integration of sales and marketing. Debbie was named one of the Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management for the last two years, as well as one of Top 20 Women to Watch. Her first book, "Rise of the Revenue Marketer", was published in October 2013.
REVTalk: The Rubber Band Theory of Leadership
Mark Organ, Chief Executive Officer, Influitive
Mark Organ is the founder and CEO of Influitive, helping companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more.
Mark first revolutionized B2B marketing as the founding CEO of Eloqua (ELOQ), the world leader in marketing automation software, which was recently acquired for $871M. In between, he was a go-to-market consultant for SaaS companies in North America and Asia. Mark has also helped over a dozen software companies successfully go to market in asymmetrical or disruptive ways as a consultant and entrepreneur.
REVTalk: Alignment with Advocacy
 

How is Google+ Different Than LinkedIn for Business Users?

Or: Why LinkedIn Users are Slow to Embrace Google+
We covered the reasons people are so comfortable on LinkedIn and why they find exploring Google+ uncomfortable, or unnerving, due to the fact it is organized differently with Circles, profiles and all of the other tools that are largely under utilized. We also discussed how when you dive into G+ it can be overwhelming due to all of the notifications that find you everywhere unless you go into settings and tone it way back.
REMEMBER: Google+ profiles are about PEOPLE. If your profile is set up under your company name, you may want to change that RIGHT AWAY. Some "profiles" are being flagged when they are a company, rather than a person. PAGES in Google+ are for COMPANIES - similar to LinkedIn and Facebook - Profile - person, Page - company, brand or organization.
Mari Anne Vanella of the Vanella Group brought some very real examples of why she prefers LinkedIn and is hesitant to dive into Google Plus. She's had a successful, well formed group, Telesales 2.0, on LinkedIn for years. She is in the B2B arena exclusively.Greg Cooper covered additional scenarios of what may hold people back from dipping a toe into Google+; and Ronnie Bincer - The Hangout Helper as well as Mark Vang offered Mari Anne and the rest of you some great suggestions for getting started in Google+. It's not about bringing everyone over from LinkedIn, it's about finding some new connections through similar interests and areas of expertise.
We all acknowledged how powerful content is when posted to G+, YouTube through Hangouts on Air and using your authorship tags Google provides to build your reputation as an expert in your field and increase your rank in search engine results.
A wonderful post that goes with this is Mark Vang's article on Circle Management.

Is the traditional sales compensation program for B2B dead?

SLMA Radio Host Jim Obermayer will ask Daniel Perry of Sales Benchmark Index the tough questions. Is the traditional sales compensation program of salary plus commission obsolete?Are commissions dead as a motivator?How much should the base salary be as a percentage of the whole package?Is it time to change commissioned sales reps to just a salary?Are draws again commission still used?Are companies paying for sales lead follow-up? About Daniel PerryDan Perry is an industry thought leader with more than 25 years of experience in B2B field sales, sales management, and sales operations. Dan has delivered domestic and international results for companies such as: Hewlett PackardYahoo!Epicor Terremark WorldwideDow JonesKronosIntuitCDS Global Ceridian Monster.com Prior to joining Sales Benchmark Index, Dan held executive sales leadership positions 'making the number' at Aramark, Corporate Express, Lavi Industries and 3 Day Blinds. In these roles, he held global responsibility for sales strategy, market segmentation, demand creation, sales process, channel design, organizational structure, sales force capacity planning, and served as a member of the executive management committees.Dan is an is adjunct professor at Pepperdine University for their MBA program specializing in Sales Management. He earned a BA in Economics from Illinois Wesleyan University.Sales Benchmark Index Sales Benchmark Index provides sales consulting services to leading organizations across the private and public sectors. These companies are seeking to increase their rate of revenue growth. Unlike traditional sales improvement approaches, such as software implementations or skills training, SBI offers superior value because it relies on the benchmarking method to deliver results. This method of sales consulting allows for results to be delivered quickly with little organizational disruption and it is accomplished through the use of best-in-class diagnostic tools and solutions that are supported with verifiable truth. Each project is executed by the most experienced team of advisors in the industry.

Part 1 Is this the best you can do? What’s expected from a marketing manager today?

This hour of the Sales Lead Management Association’s Radio program is devoted to the question, “Is this the best you can do? What’s expected from a marketing manager today? SLMA radio host Jim Obermayer asks, Eric Lundbohm, “Are marketing managers responsible for lead generation? Must they match sales quotas with sufficient sales inquiries? Are marketing managers in charge of generating only qualified leads? Is lead management the responsibility of the marketing manager? What happens if lead follow-up is poor on the part of salespeople, is marketing management culpable for this also? Whose responsibility is it to generate wealth in the company, marketing management or sales management? Maybe both together?It will be an interesting hour. Both Obermayer and Lundbohm are outspoken, opinionated and have strongly held, sometimes opposing views. About Eric LundbohmEric Lundbohm is a B2B marketing professional with over 25 years’ experience in the trenches bringing products to market and growing their revenues. He brings a range of experience garnered from Fortune 500 down to start-up situations across technology, healthcare, information and automotive industries. Eric's main focus is on go-to-market strategies, creating messaging that works and lead generation that can be tracked. He enjoys helping companies hone their marketing strategy and execution to begin or accelerate growth.His experience includes 9 years growing a network security firm from $4 million to $60 million, a dot-com startup and a dozen years in marketing roles in Fortune 500 firms. He holds a Bachelors in MIS from the University of Rhode Island and a MBA in Marketing from The Ohio State University.Eric blogs regularly on marketing, business and management on his blog at http://ericlundbohm.com/ and you can follow him on Twitter @lundbohm.

7 Things Digital Agencies Need to Do to Remain Relevant

SLMA Radio host Jim Obermayer interviews Rob Eleveld of Optify about the software for digital agencies.
Rob Eleveld is the CEO of Optify. Rob brings more than 15 years of B2B technology experience to Optify.
Most recently Rob was an executive consultant on go-to-market strategy and execution. Rob was previously CEO of SaaS online scheduling provider Shiftboard and was also co-founder/CEO of Vykor, Inc. Earlier in his career, he was in enterprise sales at Onyx Software in the CRM space. Rob was a submarine officer in the US Navy for 5 years. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and has both an MBA and MSE from Stanford University.
About Optify
Optify delivers a digital marketing software suite that is the industry standard for digital marketing agencies.  It’s complete cloud-based digital marketing platform empowers agencies to easily create and manage multiple lead generation programs, nurture the hottest prospects, prioritize the highest performing programs and streamline reporting of client results – all from one login. Optify is headquartered near Pioneer Square in the heart of Seattle, Washington. To learn more about Optify, please visit the Optify website or the digital marketing blog.