Lead Management with End-to-End Digital Marketing – by Christopher Ryan

B2B Marketing is hot hot hot.

In fact it seems to be overheating with a plethora of terms that are used to describe similar, well …, related marketing techniques.

  • Lead nurturing
  • Drip campaigns
  • Lead qualification,
  • Lead scoring
  • Sales development,
  • Contact management
  • (B2B) Marketing automation
  • etc

High time for somebody to bring order into this chaos and explain how the above fit together.

And they do all fit together, namely they are all aspects of lead management.

Thankfully, the next article in our DigitalMarketingOne series for the CMO is on lead management and comes to us by Christopher Ryan.

Chris is president of Fusion Marketing Partners. He is well known in B2B marketing with twenty-five years of marketing, technology, and senior management experience.

Wow, with 25 years looking at this it must be fun to reflect how much B2B marketing will have changed in the digital age. Digital’s knack for interactivity is just Purrrrfect for B2B. And doing digital marketing for B2B without interactivity would seem a crime today.

For additional resources on B2B marketing from Chris visit fusionmarketingpartners.com or contact the author at cryan – at – fusionmarketingpartners.com.

4 Comments on “Lead Management with End-to-End Digital Marketing – by Christopher Ryan

  1. Interesting that you should focus on the plethora of terms used by B2B, some quite inappropriately in imho. The one that irks me the most is how B2B lead management has hijacked the term Marketing Automation to mean exactly what they do. Let’s be clear, CRM is not Order Automation, ERP is not Process Automation.

    Marketing Automation is really just a tool, a component of a larger suite. Put all the functionality and feature sets you want together, integrate them, use scripts to tie them all together and voila, you have a suite. Not a Marketing Automation suite or an Order Automation, rather an industry specific suite.
    True automation is
    the ability to mash-up features and functionality, and to build models and scenarios that govern how these features and functions automatically launch according to specific triggers or events. In the context of marketing, these are events that are relevant to contacts, prospects and customers. In other applications the subject could be an order or a resource…

    That’s it for my marketing automation rant today. Kudos to you for focusing on the TERMS problem!

  2. Hi Jacques, You totally express something there that I felt for the past year but never verbalized even for me.

    It is really strange how “marketing automation” seems synonymous with B2B in certain circles and implies a set of very specific capabilities. Not surprising then that the vendors in that B2B space have been beating each other over the heads from their marketing messages.. So much marketing has managed to bend gravity.

    Rant much appreciated!
    Akin

  3. Marketing Automation is an interesting space. B2B marketing totally pushes B2C aside when it comes to Marketing Automation mind share. I think the B2C space is all about social marketing integration which, to my mind, is synonymous with marketing automation. With the emergence of low cost pay-as-you-play SaaS marketing (i.e. process) automation providers, I think the ability to mash-up custom marketing functionality and features from best-in-class solutions on a just-in-time basis will be a competitive requirement in the future.

  4. Hi again Jacques, you have a cool vision of what B2C marketing automation in 201X should be. You zoom straight into social media and company’s desire to tap into behavior data. Certainly visionary but the devil is in the detail, i.e. what kind of behavior data can be measured vs. is out of reach.

    I’d say B2C marketing automation at the very big picture is about:
    * Campaign management
    * targeted marketing incl predictive analytics
    * centralized decisioning for inbound + outbound marketing

    In contrast with B2B the focus is quite different, namely on nurturing, scoring, rules based drop campaigns etc.

    Really calls for better terms

    best wishes
    Akin

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