I agree with Jonathan Block. Organizations do not suffer from lack of content- they just don’t realize that they can use, and reuse, the same content in different ways and across many marketing channels.

Jonathan gives a great example – those whitepapers that we marketers must write and at times it seems that no one really wants to read, are chock full of useful information. In fact, a whitepaper can be used in bits and pieces for months, as material for tweets, emails and blog posts. The average whitepaper is so rich in content that each paragraph can spawn lots of shorter-style content.

It’s not that whitepapers, or longer, detailed, richer-type content, are unnecessary. These do have their place, certainly in later phases of the buying cycle when prospects are ready to dig deeper into your product or service.

But in the initial phases of the buying cycle, most prospects will be very interested in receiving short, concise messages about your product and will not be terribly into reading ten pages of technical information. Remember – they are just skimming at this stage, looking for an overview. Giving them what they want is easy, if you remember that you already have it – you just need to re-wrap the content and present it a little differently, tailoring it to the specific channel you’re using (email, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn) and to the specific prospect.

Sure, if you have more than a handful of customers or prospects, this is easier said than done – it won’t be easy to manage the distribution of content across many channels to many prospect if you want to stay personal with each of them. This is where marketing automation and sales enablement tools become useful, enabling you to automate your lead nurturing efforts to the point where you can take each prospect from initial engagement to a decision, giving them personal attention and helpful information along the way.

Were you surprised to find out that the majority of consumers check their email before they do anything else online? I wasn’t, becuase I do it too! I think it’s basic human curiosity – email is still more personal than social media channels. Messages we receive via email are meant for us, and often require us to take action. So it’s natural that we would be gravitated towards checking our email first. Kind of like in the past we used to wait for the mailman…

Will you agree with me that if consumers’ first online activity in the morning is to check their email, the same is probably true for B2B buyers? They get into the office, they sit down, start their computer… it makes sense that the first thing they would check is their email.

Which means that when you send these prospects an email, the last thing you want is for that email to be something generic, a message that means nothing to them and will be sent to the trash, or – worse – cause them to unsubscribe. You want your email messages to be targeted, interesting, filled with content that will grab the buyers’ attention.

You also want your emails to be short and concise. I can’t imagine wanting to read a very long message first thing in the morning. You don’t want people to glance at your email and decide it’s too long and they’ll get back to it later, becuase in the vast majority of cases, they won’t.

Way in the past, we used to treat email marketing as one of the easiest forms of marketing. It’s easy, right? You simply blast hundreds, maybe thousands of email addresses with your message and forget about it. But today we know better than to do that. We know that generic email blasts are not just ineffective – they could backfire and cause people to unsubscribe.

Personalized emails that contain the right message for the right recipient at the right time in the buying cycle are essential. Your prospects check their email first thing in the morning. What will they find in their inbox? Will it make them visit your site, hit the delete button, or unsubscribe?

Instead of pouring money into “dialing for dollars,” more and more B2B companies are shifting their teleprospecting investments to qualifying and nurturing prospects that have already shown some interest in their solution.

By focusing on prospects that have had some prior contact, inside sales or call centers typically have much higher success rates in creating opportunities for the sales team because they are spending time on “warm calling” rather than cold calling.

Dan McDade, President of PointClear, a prospect development company that has worked with B2B brands such as Microsoft and D&B, recommends his clients focus on multi-touch, multi-media campaigns to accelerate their pipelines. “Historically, database marketers expected to increase results by up to 8x when following up a direct mail or email campaign with a telephone call,” McDade said. “However, stopping at a single touch leaves anywhere from half to substantially more business on the table for your competitors to grab.”

To maximize pipeline performance, it takes at least nine individual touches, including a minimum of two email messages, according to PointClear’s research. “Our data also shows that the initial contact cycle, the first time you touch the market with those nine individual touches, will yield only 40%-50% of the total opportunities,” McDade added. “The other opportunities existing within the market can only be identified by continuing to touch the same prospects, with the same multi-media, multi-touch strategy on a regular basis.”

Sales intelligence tools not only allow sales reps to do “pinpoint prospecting,” they also help to identify “trigger events,” which can drive short-term sales opportunities. Real-time lead alerts can increase connect rates by up to 10X. Reps armed with website visit history, campaign and detailed prospect information have more confidence and more information to effectively engage with interested prospects. The result is a much higher success rate then traditional, often futile, cold calling.

The economic downturn has created increasingly lengthy sales cycles in the B2B space, making it important for companies to track more website visitors and their interactions on a site over a longer period of time.

Ideally, you want to start gathering data on a visitor to your site from as early a stage as possible, even at the stage where they are still anonymous visitors to the site and haven’t yet identified themselves.

Later, when an anonymous visitor does identify themselves, you want to be able to tie their information back to their activities on your site while they were still anonymous, in order to get a complete picture about this prospect, which would enable your sales rep to better understand their needs and to better communicate with them.

Following the widespread adoption of social media by B2B organizations, your website probably gets a large number of anonymous visitors. Capturing the history of each visitor before they have registered on your site is essential for helping your marketing team to nurture prospects and your sales team to effectively communicate with them.

Realizing the importance of tracking visitors from the very early stages, we have recently expanded out anonymous visitor tracking and have added unlimited anonymous web tracking functionality to our marketing automation and sales acceleration offerings – eTrigue Professional, eTrigue Unlimited and eTrigue SalesPro. The idea is to help companies refine and better target important inbound prospects before they self-identify.

eTrigue gathers and maintains anonymous information of an unlimited number of visitors from their first visit, to their first ‘hand-raiser” action on the website, such as registering for premium content via a form or clicking on a link in an e-mail. This enables you to nurture new relationships more effectively by having greater insight into each prospect’s exact needs and their level of interest before sales make contact.

Better communication with prospects means more sales – after all, from a prospect’s point of view, the worse thing you can do is to give them a generic pitch.

I have read Michael Gerard’s recent blog post on IDC’s 2010 Sales Barometer Study with great interest.

I can’t say that I was surprised – I think most of us have seen it coming for a while now. More leads are needed to close a deal now than ever before, buying cycles are getting longer, and sales reps are not as prepared for customer interactions as they should be.

These are familiar pain points, and it’s up to each organization to decide how to solve these issues. Certainly, sales and marketing alignment is a key to solving them. Sales reps should be able to leverage internal resources such as marketing assets to better communicate with customers; sales and marketing should be in agreement on what constitutes a sales-ready lead.

Marketing Automation and Sales Acceleration tools should be used by organizations to achieve better alignment of Marketing and Sales, to foster an atmosphere of a joint effort, and to empower sales reps by giving them better access to company assets and by giving them access to as much data as possible about a lead before they contact that lead. The better informed and well prepared a sales rep is, the better the prospect would react to her (remember customers’ complaint that they are tired of generic sales pitches?)

If we agree that increased Sales productivity drives revenue growth, and I feel certain that we all agree on that, then as our economy slowly recovers from the recession, organizations’ first priority is to improve the productivity of their sales organizations. One of the simplest ways to do that is marketing automation, and easier yet if your budget is tight – start with an affordable, stand alone sales enablement tool such as eTrigue SalesPro.

These tools improve sales efficiency and productivity by giving sales reps crucial real-time sales intelligence, eliminating the need for wasting time and energy on cold calls and on cold leads, enabling sales reps to know which prospect is ready to buy and making sure every sales rep/lead interaction is relevant and timely.

I recently experienced firsthand what a big turnoff it is when a vendor pounces on you even though you’re still at the very first stages of research and are in no way ready to commit.

I saw a promotional video that I loved, and immediately thought about a friend who has been looking to add a video to their Web site. So I found out who made the video and contacted them, figuring I would then give their contact info to my friend.

What I envisioned as a short phone call turned into several phone calls and emails. They have set up an account for me so that I could watch more videos, several people at the company became involved in the chain of emails, and then a sales rep was copied on one of the emails and of course immediately wanted to set up a meeting.

During this flurry of activity, which wasted almost an hour of my busy day (what can I say, I need to learn to say “no”) I basically felt as if they were getting it completely wrong. I was obviously not ready to make any purchase – I was merely inquiring on behalf of someone who doesn’t even know they exist yet. It was nice of them to set me up with an account (getting my details, of course and thus entering me into their database) – but the pouncing that followed, and especially the call with the sales rep, was a waste of time for both she and I.

Frankly, I felt so uncomfortable, I don’t think I would recommend them to my friend.

It got me thinking about the delicate balance between neglecting a lead and basically handing them off to the competition, and pouncing on them so hard when they are not ready that – again – you end up losing them.

Both are NOT good scenarios, and both can be avoided with a proper lead management system. That video company would have done much better identifying me as a cold lead, placing me into their database (as they did) and nurturing me for a while, making the sales call only when realizing from my reactions that I am ready to buy.

It’s all about relationships, they keep telling us, and I have to agree: more and more, marketing is becoming a very different activity than it used to be just a decade ago. In fact, it’s not an activity anymore – marketing has now become a process, a slow process of building connections and trust over time.

Social media is certainly a big part of this shift. Social media has taught buyers and prospects that they can expect more from companies – generic sales pitches or a limited info on the company’s Web site will no longer cut it. Your prospects now expect to have a two-way relationship with you, to interact, to get as much information as they can about you and about your competitors before they make their decision.

The recession, which is turning into a long-winded economic slump, has further contributed to this shift in how marketing works by making buyers choosier, more reluctant than ever to spend. It is now more legitimate than it ever was for buyers to take their time before making a decision, and as marketers, we have to accommodate that.

Here at eTrigue, in the Marketing Automation business, we are strangely benefiting from this shift in how marketing is done. When marketing is a conversation rather than a blast, when you need to engage your prospects and produce content and information over many months to keep them interested, how do you monitor these relationships? How do you decide what content to send to each client, and which client is ready to buy?

Marketing Automation tools are extremely helpful when it comes to managing leads in this relationship-based market. Automating your marketing efforts enables you to develop long-term relationships and to keep the conversation interesting and relevant. Automated marketing also promotes marketing and sales alignment and especially agreement on what is a sales-ready lead and on corporate messaging.

In a relationship-based market, lead management is a long-term process. Automating it makes sure nothing falls between the cracks. After all, the last thing you want to do is to serve potential customers to your competitors on a silver platter just because you are unable to efficiently manage your leads.

“Just like a good relationship between a man and a woman; when there is open communication and an honest desire to reach a common goal then your probability of success is much greater,” said Anthony DeAngelis, one of the participants in a recent LinkedIn discussion, and I couldn’t agree more.

I love the comparison between a personal relationship and sales/marketing relationship. In fact, I think B2B relationships – sales/marketing and also the relationship between businesses and prospects – are not that different than personal relationships, and the comparison is beneficial because it helps to explain, and to understand, why these relationships are so complex.

Aligning Marketing and Sales to agree on the same goal and to define that goal, then work together to achieve it, is a lot like aligning mutual expectations in a personal relationship.

Patiently nurturing leads in a long buying cycle, getting to know them better and tailoring your communication to their needs is very similar to nurturing a long-term personal relationship.

The idea is simple: in the B2B space, we’re not dealing with a single, quick sale of goods. We’re typically dealing with complex, expensive transactions that take time. It takes time for the buyer to decide to buy, and as a result the business needs to be very patient while the buyer takes their time, while remaining top of mind for the buyer. Not an easy task!

This also reflects on the Marketing/Sales relationship, because the complexity of these sales requires a lot of cooperation between Marketing and Sales and a highly knowledgeable Sales rep when the time finally comes to make the sales pitch.

The complexity of these relationships in the B2B space means that automation is very important – without automation, efficiently managing these long buying cycles is nearly impossible. The beauty of Marketing Automation systems is that they enable not just lead nurturing over long periods of time, but also a much better relationship and understanding between Sales and Marketing.

Marketing automation and sales intelligence tools can help accelerate the flow of qualified leads into the pipeline, but the fundamental shift for many companies is improving the long-term visibility of pending deals.

“It’s imperative that sales and marketing teams take a longer term view in conjunction with a ‘what can we close today?’ view,” says Louis Foong of The Alea Group. “Most companies realize that it is taking longer to close deals, yet they haven’t implemented programs that start early to assure a stable flow of mature leads.”

One of the first steps to achieving longer-term visibility is measuring the average conversion rates for prospects through different stages of the sales funnel. That means measuring from initial inquiries to qualified leads and then from opportunities to closed deals.

However, only 64% of companies have defined those pipeline stages to ensure marketing and sales agree on common definitions, according to the Executive Benchmark Assessment (EBA) from Frost & Sullivan and Bulldog Solutions.

While measuring the flow from inquiry to close is an important step, the hard work of improving the conversion rates at each stage is heavily dependent on a company’s lead nurturing programs.

According to the CSO Insights’ report, only 26% of firms had a formal lead nurturing program in place. Lead nurturing programs allow the sales team to close out the quarter by focusing on the truly hot leads that are likely to buy, while marketing continues to warm up those longer-term opportunities that need education.

“In today’s busy world, a prospect may be a perfect fit for your solution,” notes CSO Insights’ report, “but they may not have the time available to take a look at your offerings right now.”

Ultimately, lead nurturing programs help increase the volume of sales-ready leads in the pipeline, but this process requires patience, persistence and precision. The development of a prospect from initial engagement to a closed deal can vary widely depending on price point and the complexity of the solution.

Once a lead nurturing history is established, companies can build metrics for the average lifecycle of leads from initial inquiry to close. This intelligence will provide insights to support the longer-term visibility companies need into their pipeline.

A better understanding of buyer needs and an automated stream of relevant messaging to targeted buyers should accelerate the sales process. And this in turn would reduce the amount of deals stuck in the pipeline and improve the effectiveness of your sales organization.

Case studies have consistently shown that unclogging deals and reducing funnel leaks makes companies less reliant on sales teams having to “save the quarter” with expensive, inefficient eleventh-hour deals.

According to CSO Insights’ new report, “2010 Sales Performance Optimization–Going Forward Analysis,” the following are the top four initiatives needed to increase sales effectiveness:

1. Revising/enhancing lead generation programs.

2. More closely aligning sales and marketing.

3. Enhancing sales team communications.

4. Analyzing customers’ buying processes.

The report noted that lead management plays a critical role in developing likely buyers. “We have documented numerous examples where using Lead Generation Management systems have increased the quality and quantity of leads; yet only 16% of the firms we surveyed have these systems in place. This is something nearly all companies would benefit from and is not just for use by marketing.”

Since sales reps are still responsible for generating “nearly half of the leads they pursue,” the CSO Insights’ report suggested that giving sales reps access to lead management automation systems “can help them more effectively generate their own prospecting campaigns.”

Many B2B companies are supplementing marketing automation systems with sales acceleration tools. These tools enable reps to focus on deals in the pipeline with personalized attention via trackable emails and real-time actions. They not only allow sales reps to track ongoing activity and history, but they also provide real-time alerts and triggers to allow sales reps to focus on the prospects that are active and ready to buy.