SalesNewz.com

Ken Ross recently wrote on the Expert CEO blog about the future of
Software as a Service in today’s economy. Although he discusses software in particular, I think his arguments
apply to any company that needs to grow without using significant
amount of capital.

Historically, SaaS companies needed a significant amount of
funding to get to cash flow breakeven. This was because it takes time for the recurring
revenues to build up enough to cover the fixed and semi-fixed costs of
development, marketing and sales. For example, Ken points out that both salesforce.com
and Netsuite took over $100M in venture capital before going public.

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How do you know if your demand generation is good enough or when it’s time to take your lead management processes to the next level? Here are 14 important questions that indicate whether or not you can benefit for more sophisticated marketing automation.

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As part of our ongoing series about sales and marketing alignment, Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast and I recently chatted about why B2B marketers should care about lead scoring and how they can get started qualifying and prioritizing leads.

Download the full MP3: Sales is from Mars, Marketing is From Venus – Vol II – Lead Scoring.

Podcast Summary:

Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). Lead scoring matters because fewer than 25% of web inquiries are sales ready. Since sales reps don’t want to waste their time on leads that are not in an active buying cycle, passing these early stage inquiries to sales tends to hurt the relationship between sales and marketing. (more…)