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How's your stress level today? Want to drop it quickly? Here's a "Saving Grace" you can activate right now to buy a little peace and quiet. Give it a try. Almost every email system has some sort of auto responder feature that most people use when they'll be gone on vacation. Why not use it to stop incoming rounds for half a day? Usually these are "out of the office" messages, but simply being "unavailable" is also useful when email could be a distraction. Close the program or turn off the sound for incoming messages. Do the same thing for instant messaging. It is smart to tell your immediate group what you're doing and why ("Report due at 1:00"), or else you may have a parade coming to your office door - which pretty well defeats the purpose. Here's the saving grace: If people know you'll be available again, they won't keep sending you emails or instant messages hoping to get a reply. And your attention won't be diverted by email dropping into your In Box.

Multi-channel Marketing! Simple put, communicate with your prospect in multiple ways - direct (phone, email, direct mail, events, networking); indirect (website, blog, PR, SEO/SEM) and partners (resellers, referrals, endorsers). There are two levels of multi-channel marketing in B2B lead generation, one is across the main major channels, direct, indirect and partner and the other is within each channel with utilizing multiple communication methods and, in the case of partners, lead sources. As an example, let's take the direct channel. If your lead generation program is only teleprospecting/telemarketing and the networking you do, you are failing to reach a large percentage of your audience. Studies continually show that people respond to B2B marketing differently. Some answer their phone regularly, but will never respond to emails. Others never pick up the phone, have effective screeners, but will read and respond to much of their email. This higher up in an organization you go, you'll find that executives like to network with their peers at events. Therefore, when you are working hard to deliver your finely tuned, very specific marketing message to the right target at the right time with a great unique value proposition and a fantastic call to action, all communicated in a relative manner to their industry and their role within the company - - DON'T WASTE IT BY NOT COMMUNICATING THROUGH MULTIPLE CHANNELS AND COMMUNICATION METHODS. As for indirect and partner channels, ensure that your message flows consistently throughout and is clear for all audiences. If this task seems just a bit too much to handle or manage with your current resources, there are many fine business marketing services and marketing consulting firms out there to help you along.

Database Booster Over 60% of sales leaders say that they do not believe that they know the correct decision makers and influencers in most of their target companies. We have found that if you have a prospect database of 2,000 contacts that is 2 years old; you have over 35% bad data. Did you think it would be that high? Here are some supporting statistics: * Up to 18% of all telephone numbers change every year.¹ * Up to 20% of all postal addresses change every year.¹ * Up to 21% of all CEO's change every year.¹ * 25-33% of email addresses in your in-house file will become outdated every year.² * In addition, up to 66% of people change companies or job functions every year!³ SOURCES: 1. D&B 2. Lyris Technologies: "Guru's Guide to Email Marketing Success" 3. Sales & Marketing Institute If you are interested in more, visit their website. Apollo's central hub for up-to-date B2B marketing, lead generation and nurturing information and best practices: http://blog.apollosmg.com Apollo Sales & Marketing Group http://www.apollosmg.com

Be Consistent! Get started and don't stop. Let's assume for a minute that you have only been half as successful as you might have been working on your Secrets to Auto-Pilot Marketing. This still puts you miles down the road ahead of your competition. They, most probably, haven't even left the station, yet. (That's Secretariat winning the Belmont by 31 lengths in 2:24 in 1973) (His record still stands today) Keep pumping. Zig Ziglar gives the analogy of a water pump for a well when he talks about business development. He relates how all the hard work is done pumping the handle to get the water flow started. Once the water is flowing, all you have to do is maintain an even pace of pumping and you get all the water you want. But, as soon as you let up, the water stops flowing and you have to go back to pumping much harder to restore the water flow. This analogy will hold true for your B2B lead generation and lead nurturing too. In getting B2B sales leads, timing is everything. Be there with the right solution at the right time and you have a new customer. The buying cycles of your prospects cannot always be predicted or manufactured by visionary, consultative selling. How do you ensure that your message is in the right place at the right time? Be in a lot of places a lot of the time. If you let up and lose your consistency, your message will fall cold and your audience will cease to remember your company and your solution when their buying cycle starts. So, plan out a marketing calendar. Assign resources (internal, external - outsourced marketing, marketing consulting, marketing services) to accomplish each of the tasks involved. Find the right technology (CRM, SEO/SEM, marketing automation, email marketing, reporting, analytics, blogs, website) to execute and measure you success. That's it - 8 Secrets to Auto-Pilot Marketing. Best of Success!!!

Ask for action!!! Want to get 10x more out of your marketing campaigns? Your eMarketing and email marketing? Your B2B lead generation? So many of the direct mail that goes out these days has a ton of information, maybe even a super marketing message that seems as though it should be a lead generation dynamo, but the call to action is merely the main phone number and their web address. No offer, no compelling reason to do something about it today, rather than tomorrow, next week or never. Please understand that this is not necessarily an easy undertaking. For professional services firms especially, most of your competitors can claim almost everything you can claim as a differentiator. The work that you put into creating a unique offer for your prospects can be a huge advantage in starting the conversation and winning the sale. If you take the time to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect thinking of what they would see as valuable and what they would want to take action on, something that they may not be able to get from just anywhere, you are on the right track. Then, if you can stretch even further and think of something so unique that any prospect has to sit up and take notice, you have a compelling offer - a no-brainer offer. Best of lead generation success in your marketing messaging.

What is something that companies can do to leverage their lead generation investment? Get more out of your prospecting by profiling your target market. In other words, use your B2B lead generation programs to gather intelligence about your prospects as you interact with them through teleprospecting or email or webinars or social media marketing. This strategy enables you to start ranking them to find out how good a prospect they are and updating that ranking over time to understand how good a prospect they are in future quarters and years. Then, target them based on that information to educate them over time. So, what are the qualification questions you ask every prospect to determine how strong of a prospect they are for your solution? Find those out as many time as you can each prospect interaction. Then, even add some industry trend-type questions, maybe formulate some multiple choice answers to all of these questions and use the responses to create a research report that can be published and used as a marketing asset for your future B2B marketing campaigns. Talk about effective campaign development. Here's an example (http://bit.ly/gVqS9l) of what it could look like. Set yourself apart as a thought leader in your industry. If you are interested in more, visit their website. Apollo's central hub for up-to-date B2B marketing, lead generation and nurturing information and best practices: http://blog.apollosmg.com Apollo Sales & Marketing Group http://www.apollosmg.com