Category Archives: Lead Management

lead gen forms

The Case for Allowing Personal Emails on Lead Gen Forms

Should you allow prospects to enter a personal email address when they fill out lead gen forms?  B2B marketers seem divided on the question.  In a recent LinkedIn poll, almost half of the respondents (46%) indicated they’d rather force prospects to enter business emails on forms, even if it resulted… Read More

non-responsive leads

How Quickly Should I Suspend or Delete Non-Responsive Leads?

A client asks: How long should a lead be chronically non-responsive before they’re marked as “marketing suspended”?  What best practices should we put in place? There are multiple, legitimate reasons to suspend or even delete non-responsive leads from your mailing lists or CRM database: *  Non-responsive leads can weigh down… Read More

nurture programs

When Should I Stop Nurturing a Lead?

A client asks: “I know the answer is probably “it depends” but curious if you think there’s a best practice for how many follow-up nurture emails to send TOFU content syndication leads before you stop due to non-engagement?” My response: We typically design nurture programs for inbound leads like content… Read More

18 Common Features of a Best-in-Class Lead Nurture Program

It wasn’t that long ago, when marketing automation first burst on the scene, that the height of lead nurture sophistication was the simple, automated sending of multiple, sequential emails. Today, advances in marketing technology make such “automation” seem laughably basic. Modern, best-in-class lead nurture programs focus less on automation, and… Read More

leads don't convert

4 Solutions to Consider When Marketing Leads Don’t Convert

If your organization is generating plenty of leads but those initial inquiries aren’t converting to sales qualified leads, meetings, or pipeline, a myriad of things could be at fault: 1) sales follow-up may be sub-standard in either cadence, frequency, or message 2) lead nurturing may not be doing enough to… Read More

Report: B2B Buyers Engaging Earlier with Sales

For the last decade or more, it’s been an accepted principle – almost a key tenet – of B2B demand generation that business buyers don’t want to talk to a sales rep until the last possible moment.  It’s why, for example, we marketers have assumed control for more and more… Read More

8 Questions to Ask Before Investing in Marketing Attribution

[Thanks to Anne Angele, Spear’s esteemed Director of Marketing Technology, for this month’s guest post.] Marketing attribution is a hot topic these days in B2B circles.  Yet, for all the interest, precious few B2B companies achieve the holy grail of knowing exactly how – and where – their marketing investment… Read More