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“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished,” said Ben Franklin. And in a business world that seems to change more rapidly than ever, his words are still relevant.

What can you change today in your business that will help you with demand generation and ROI? Here are six ideas that can pay off. All you have to do is put them into action.

1.      Clean Up Your Database

Sadly, there’s nothing glamorous or exciting about keeping your database clean. It’s a tedious job. Like cleaning your closet, it’s often a task that falls to the bottom of the priority list until there is absolutely nothing better to do.

But think about how you feel after cleaning your closet and ridding it of the clothes you no longer wear. Every day of the week, you save time because it’s easier to find what you need and get dressed. In the same way, when your database is not contaminated with bad data, you’ll increase efficiency.

The funeral for outbound marketing took place several years ago. Friends and relatives celebrated its life and moved on, letting inbound marketing fill the void. But now, what was old is new again. Outbound marketing is coming back to life. This begs the big question, “Why?”

• Lead Scoring Doesn’t Qualify Leads

Don’t get me wrong, I like lead scoring. It’s highly effective in increasing the efficiency of generating qualified leads. There is, however, a caveat. It does not do the whole job.

What does lead scoring do? You score leads based on their engagement level with your content as well as on the strength of demographic criteria that qualifies them. When you do so, you’re able to spot the hottest prospects, narrowing down the list, so you know who to call. In this way, it increases productivity.

Effective digital marketing and automation make outbound marketing more efficient. They do not eliminate the need for it. That’s because you need a two-way conversation to answer all the qualifying questions.

Some of your leads, for example, could be opening your emails, reading blog posts and downloading white papers. But how do you know if they can afford the product, service or solution you’re offering? You may have captured your leads’ titles, but every organization is different, so how do you know if they have the authority to buy? You can’t even start to guess who else is involved in the buying decision.

We’re still in the opening weeks of a new year, wondering how it will unfold. Soothsayers abound, and it is time I added my thoughts to the melting pot of predictions. Based on what I see in the world of sales and marketing, here are four trends you can hang your hat on.

1. The Shift from Field to Inside Sales

The inside sales train has left the station, and there’s no stopping it now. Companies are shifting the makeup of their sales forces as they discover that face-to-face meetings with salespeople are not as important to B2B sales processes as they used to be.

Several factors are fueling this trend. Buyers no longer need as much education from salespeople. They’re happy to do their research online at their own pace. On the Internet, they can find white papers, e-books, blog posts and more produced by the companies that want to sell to them. Equally important (or more so), they can sift through product reviews, visit niche forums to tap into expert advice, and join relevant conversations on social media platforms.

“Humans are wired to connect with each other. And we connect with one another by feeling, not thinking. …Emotion is now increasingly recognized as the key to moving hearts and minds,” Helio Fred Garcia, author of The Power of Communication

B2B buyers are a rational bunch. After all, they’re making decisions about business. That’s not emotional. That’s not personal. It’s simply a matter of tallying up the business benefits, weighing them against the price, making some tradeoffs and coming up with a sound business decision.

So says traditional thinking.

There is, however, a problem—it’s not true. And there’s research from The Corporate Executive Board Company (CEB) to prove this. They conducted an extensive study, including responses from 3,000 B2B buyers. It showed that personal considerations, including emotions, trump business considerations in decision making.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort,” Paul. J. Meyer, founder of the Success Motivation Institute

The Most Effective Content Marketing Tactic

When you think of content marketing, do online tactics come to mind—e-books, white papers, emails and more? If so, it’s not surprising. That’s where a lot of the marketing action is today.

Given our focus on all things web-related, it may come as a surprise to discover that the number one content marketing tactic is good old-fashioned in-person events. That’s according to research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and their partners. When they asked B2B marketers what their most effective content marketing tactics were, in-person events topped the list. Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said event marketing was the most effective form of content marketing.

While in-person events are impactful, they are also a significant investment. So, how do you ensure a positive return on investment?

In his newly debuting book, “The Human Brand,” Chris Malone and Susan Fiske talk about how human beings developed the split-second ability to judge people on their intentions and capabilities. It was a matter of survival for our ancestors. Today they write, we still judge people based on “these same two categories of social perception, which are known as warmth and competence.”

When someone exhibits both qualities, trust develops. If warmth is lacking, suspicions and envy take over. If competence is not evident, we feel sympathetic. In the worst case, when someone is neither warm nor capable, there’s little chance for a budding relationship.

The research presented in this book goes beyond the human-to-human relationship to the human-to-brand relationship. We judge brands by their warmth and competence too. Those perceived to have both attributes are more likely to develop deep, enduring relationships with their customers.

Now that’s something to aspire to.

No one said that tech marketing was easy. After all, you’re trying to reach IT leaders — some of the busiest people on the earth. Not only that, other companies are hot on their trails too. Naturally, they’re seeking cover, doing everything they can to avoid vendors and stay focused on their never-ending to-do’s.  

Given the challenges of reaching your target audience, you need to have your marketing and sales ducks in a row. Where are marketers going wrong?

Outsourcing marketing tasks is a trend that’s here to stay. There are many reasons for this, including:

• Change in Marketing Functions
  
  

Because of the influence of technology and the web, marketing functions are changing more rapidly than ever before. It’s hard for an internal team to keep up with the shifting environment as well as their business and the markets it serves.

• Today’s Integrated Marketing Requires Diverse Skill Sets
  
  

You need high-level leaders to craft your marketing strategy and guide its implementation. Also, executing digital marketing requires an array of specialists. These include web designers and developers, content and copywriters, graphic designers and videographers. In addition, you may need gurus of social media marketing, marketing automation, conversion optimization, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, digital display advertising, email marketing and more.

And digital is only part of the marketing equation. For B2B marketing, you have to add the human touch. For this, you’ll need trade show and conference organizers and inside sales people or telemarketers. 

in-house talent may not offer all the skills and expertise they need.

This problem, however, doesn’t mean marketers should reshape strategies to reflect their internal capabilities. The opposite is true. They should design marketing strategies that promise to produce the highest growth, then determine how to implement them with company associates and external resources.

“Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder,” Mason Cooley, an American writer.

It’s September. We’re almost into the fourth quarter (Q4) and John, the Vice President of Sales, is in a mild panic. It’s not surprising. After all, time’s running out to meet his quota and sales are soft.

How did he get into this position?

When he arrived at work at the beginning of January, he was full of optimism for the New Year and ready to tackle the sales challenges. Ahead of him stretched twelve long months to make it all happen. Plenty of time to fill the pipeline, nurture leads and convert them into sales. Or so he thought.

It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?

But things didn’t work out that way.

Each month sales fell just a little short. And John thought he could tweak a few things to catch up. It didn’t work. Now, he’s about 5% down year to date. Making up those lost sales in the last quarter will require some heroics.

Does this sound familiar?

Too often glass-half-full leaders fail to take strong actions to get sales back on track until they’re up against the wall. Time, their friend at the beginning of the year, zips along and turns into their enemy. And, as Cooley noted so wisely, procrastination makes hard things become harder.

When you’re managing business-to-business telemarketing representatives, you can record their conversations and use them as learning opportunities. If one agent is particularly productive, you can listen to recordings of her phone calls to determine what sets her apart from the others. Also, if another is having difficulty meeting their goals, you can re-live their conversations and learn where they go off track.

Before doing anything, however, become aware oflocal and federal laws related to recording calls and ensure that you abide by them.

What to Listen For

When you’re listening to recordings to find out why some representatives are successful and others struggle, pay attention to these areas.