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Webinar: February 4, 2010, 12:30 to 1:15 PM EST

Prospecting for today isn’t good enough. Focus too much on the near term, and you’ll find yourself in a constant scramble for leads. Break the cycle now, and cultivate leads for the future. You’ll develop a pipeline for the future and gain a platform for strong, consistent growth. Don’t chase leads… cultivate them.

Join enter:marketing for this webinar to learn how you can cultivate your leads!

Click here to reserve your spot >>

There is no shortage of IT marketing agencies on the market that would be thrilled to have you as a client. You get calls regularly, have listened to countless pitches and reviewed what feels like a never-ending stack of presentations on demand generation. So, how do you choose? If you have a partner in place, how do you evaluate its effectiveness?

The most important aspect of your relationship, of course, is the result generated. You are looking for a return on your marketing investment, and sluggish demand generation is probably an indicator that you need to take a closer look at your IT marketing agency. And, strong results may be effective now, but you need to think toward the future — is your agency equipped to help you grow and mature?

To help you answer these questions, you’ll find below five characteristics of an
optimal IT marketing partner. Take a look to get a sense of what you are receiving
from your current relationship.

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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.”

Prospecting for today isn’t good enough. Don’t get me wrong: if your near-term pipeline is empty, you need to fill it quickly. But, if this is your constant focus, it will become your constant problem. You’ll wind up spending all your time chasing leads, overpaying for them and suffering lower close rates. Why? You’ll be working against the clock constantly.

Breaking this cycle is the key to consistent growth … and keeping your sanity. You want leads for today, and you want a pipeline of opportunities that will mature at different points in the future – for example, three months, six months or a year from now.

Change the way you approach marketing, and this steady stream of leads becomes pretty easy to attain.

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