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It’s the marketing mix that leads to better demand generation — not a focus on one particular approach. To fill your sales pipeline, it’s best to use a combination of new and traditional marketing techniques. Don’t ignore social media, but at the same time, be sure to build in some direct mail and telemarketing. The key is to pull it all together into an integrated go-to-market strategy.

Instead of thinking about marketing tactics, start with your objectives. What do you want to accomplish? This can include revenue goals, new account wins and existing client penetration. Once you’ve figured out what you want to reach, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to get there.

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Marketing campaigns don’t add up to a strategy. Sometimes it may look that way, but that’s just a bit of luck at work. It’s far more effective to go the other way — start with a strategy and use that to drive your campaigns.

IT solution provider marketers tend to focus on the campaign, a perspective resulting largely from demand generation considerations. The best way to bring in leads, however, is to use a coordinated approach that maximizes the value and potency of your marketing efforts. One-off campaigns just don’t have the same effect.

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Generating high-quality leads is the top challenge for B2B marketers … by a mile. The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 69 percent of respondents see this as a significant challenge. The next one — marketing to a lengthening sales cycle – came in at a distant 39 percent. Even generating a high volume of leads only attracted the attention of 35 percent of the survey’s respondents. Competing for leads across multiple media environments ranked last at 27 percent.

What does this mean for you?

Quality matters. Period. The top priority for solution providers needs to be lead quality — there’s no substitute for delivering a qualified, interested prospect on which you have plenty of intelligence to your sales team.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

Well, it’s not as simple as that, as I’m sure you know. But, the link between Twitter and lead generation is certainly worth a closer look.

The latest research from eMarketer reports that developing a rich Twitter following – in conjunction with a “regularly updated stream of content on a blog” – helps trigger engagement, leads to search engine optimization advantages and ultimately brings more opportunities in the door.

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Are you getting the most out of your marketing budget? The only way to know for sure is to take a close look at how your marketing and sales teams are performing. Dig into the data in your CRM system, and you’ll find a wealth of information. Even if you’re satisfied with the fruits of your labor, you may learn that you’re actually leaving ROI on the table. Here are five ways to find out if your organization has more ROI just waiting to happen:

1. Low closure rate
If you are swamped in highly qualified leads but aren’t putting many of them in the “win” column, you’re probably not getting the return you should be on your marketing efforts. This is a red flag and should be followed with a hard look at why so many leads aren’t turning into sales. This can require some tough conversations, but the outcome will be worth it for all involved. Your sales team will enjoy better numbers, and company revenue as a whole will increase.

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If the sales cycle were kept to less than 90 days, everything would be so much simpler. Sales professionals would be able to manage their pipelines to their quarterly revenue objectives and make the decisions necessary to maximize the company’s results and their own. But, those days are long gone. This has led to a myopic perspective, in which leads that aren’t expected to close quickly are cast aside.

The result is an unfortunate dynamic, in which sales professionals are left scrambling for “hot leads” constantly. If they were to allocate some of their time for investment in lead cultivation, they would soon have a robust ongoing pipeline, allowing them to nurture every account and maximize the value of every opportunity.

The opportunity that many sales professionals miss — even purposefully skip — is substantial. Imagine how many leads are cast aside in favor of the needle-in-a-haystack that is ready to make a purchase almost immediately. These are next quarter’s hot leads — or they’ll get hot the quarter after that. In disregarding these leads now, the sales professional could be giving the opportunity to a competitor when the prospect is ready to buy.

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“Are you free on Tuesday at 9 AM?”

This question tips the odds of getting an appointment with an IT buyer in your favor. Yes, it’s a bit specific, and there are other times that work as well. Thursdays at 2 PM are pretty good, too.

At enter:marketing, we schedule a lot of appointments for our clients. Through the demand generation and lead cultivation programs we run, we’ve learned a considerable amount about how IT buyers prefer to be engaged, the best survey questions for triggering interest and even when they want to talk.

What we’re about to show you isn’t the result of some survey: it’s live data. Real. These insights are based on the actions of IT buyers.

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I hear the following from clients a lot:

• I want leads
• I need appointments
• I have to have an event
• My company has to be on LinkedIn (or Facebook or a blog or anything else)

Unfortunately, these are tactics in search of an objective. When these requests are delivered in full, those who requested it tend not to be happy with the effect it has on there bottom line. Why? They didn’t really want what the asked for. The need they don’t state – but which is most important – is almost universally, “I want sales growth.”

Start the demand generation and cultivation process with sales and marketing planning. First, determine your sales and marketing objectives at as granular a level as possible then, build and execute a plan that maximizes the value of your marketing investment for short-term opportunities and long-term growth. This may include events, social media and other tactics, but these activities aren’t the goals. Rather, success is measured by high-quality opportunities and top-line growth.

Ask for what you want is the first step to getting what you want. Demand “a marketing and business development plan that has immediate and long term sales strategy at its core and that can be 100 percent transparently tracked and managed so we can build our business in the direction we desire” from your marketing partner, department or from yourself. That’s a much better request than “I want a lead.”