How To Avoid the Biggest Pitfall of Progressive Profiling

Questionaire from Focus GroupAccording to Google, progressive profiling is “a method of asking questions incrementally, gathering more information about a prospect over time.”

With progressive profiling, instead of putting a 15 field form in front of your next potential prospect, use progressive profiling and only ask for the first couple pieces of information. Then, as they come back over time, continue to gather a little bit more.

And then it all falls apart. [Read more…]

B2B Marketers Are Begging For Bad Data

In B2B marketing, bad data represents a huge lost opportunity. According to SiriusDecisions, companies with the best quality data drive 70% more revenue through marketing programs than those with simply average data quality.

Despite the cost of bad data, the practice of the average marketer guarantees bad data, and it may be getting worse each year. With a growing body of research showing current marketing practices are consistently delivering bad data, it is time for change. [Read more…]

Looking Beyond Sales and Marketing Alignment

In many B2B marketing organizations, marketing is expected to deliver leads and sales is expected to close. In a world of perfect sales and marketing alignment, marketing and sales have a common definition of qualified leads, the number of leads needed, when leads should be delivered and how the handoff from marketing to sales will function.

But is this really perfect sales and marketing alignment? A clear definition of roles and responsibilites with no overlap?

Adam Needles (@abneedles) makes some great points that call this into question [Read more…]

Buying B2B Email Marketing Lists: Challenges and Recommendations

Email email emailBuying email marketing lists. It makes many think of the spam emails selling a database of millions of top executives.

The challenge with buying email marketing lists is you cannot easily judge quality until after you buy and few marketers understand the email list market.

This makes selling email marketing lists in particular fertile ground for scammers and many marketers have been burned by bad email lists. Telling the difference between good and bad providers can sometimes be difficult, as Welcome to the Murky World of Email List Sales outlined now more than three years ago. [Read more…]