[Posted by Laura Ramos]

In my last post, I steered B2B marketers away from building social
destinations focused on their products and services by suggesting they
participate in open, social networks before jumping on the community
bandwagon. I do think there is a place for B2B communities, but these
sites need to focus truly on the community first, not trying to sell a
firm’s wares.  Case in point: ComplianceOnline.

I wrote up how you can can use ComplianceOnline's model to build an online community serving the needs of your firm in a recent report.  I found that B2B marketers can learn how to build a successful B2B community by
following three key lessons: Gather the best content, encourage the
community to vet and contribute to it, and give members equal
opportunity to engage with potential buyers who visit.

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

During the past week I’ve had the privilege of presenting to two
different organizations that I think B2B marketers would benefit from
exploring further: 

June 3, 2009 I spoke at the MOCCA quarterly meeting, held at Adobe’s facilities in downtown San Jose. The Marketing Operations Cross-Company Alliance (MOCCA) is a community for sharing practical experience between Marketing Operations professionals in technology companies.

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

If you have never been confronted by a sales person over lead quality, you can stop reading this blog post now:

The primary source of tension between marketing and sales is
this: Marketing wants to know what sales does with all the leads they
generate. In response to the question, sales says, “What leads? Those
leads were awful; send us better leads.” Sound familiar?

The basic problem is that marketing and sales don’t agree on what
constitutes a lead. The deeper issue is that many marketers are still
learning what it takes to develop truly qualified demand and pass the
right information to sales in a way that helps sales to progress an
opportunity quickly and consistently.