Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

"Guerilla" Salesforce.com

I gave a little bit of background on the Salesforce.com user group community in this post a few months ago, and I wanted to bring it up again and send out a special request to the SFDC community at large out there...

I'm looking for recommendations and examples of great tools and reports and dashboards that you Salesforce.com power users and junkies have downloaded off of the AppExchange and use for free. I'm not interested in tools that have a "free trial" or tools that have pay-as-you-go features -- I am only interested in honest to goodness free tools. So, anything from the community that has been posted to the AppExchange, anything from Salesforce Labs, any reports or dashboards you have found on the AppExchange...let me know in a post down below.

The next San Francisco Salesforce.com User Group meeting is on Thursday, September 18th and the theme is "Guerilla" Salesforce.com -- since much of the Salesforce.com user community is from companies with sales or marketing departments of less then 10 people, it is always interesting to see how much these small groups can accomplish with limited resources and limited budgets. Hence my interest in what users have been able to accomplish with the free tools available to them. I'd love to hear some stories. Let me have them!

We'll also be talking about Dreamforce and sorting the the tracks and sessions, with alumni sharing thoughts on sessions that are being brought back and exploring all the new stuff coming up in November. If you are in the Bay Area and are interested in attending the meeting on the 18th, register for the San Francisco user group here.

Improving Campaign Relevance to Increase Response Rates

Demandbase CEO Chris Golec has written an article for www.destinationcrm.com called 5 Key Elements of Microtargeting...here's an excerpt:

"B2B marketers are increasingly adopting microtargeting to get superior results. AG Salesworks, a rapidly growing marketing services firm needed to boost the effectiveness of its client's sales and marketing programs. AG Saleworks knew that the greatest leverage would come from improving the relevancy and accuracy of the contact data it used in their campaigns. The company set out to improve the quality of the contacts in its marketing lists, and to segment the contacts based on their interests, behavior, response rates and demographic information."

Check it out here.

Demandbase Stream is Here

Let me first apologize for having been silent for a few weeks, but as you have (hopefully) heard, Demandbase officially launched today, announcing not only Demandbase Central™ (our platform for cleansing and scoring business contact information from leading data providers) and Demandbase Direct™ (the solution through which B2B marketers and salespeople can purcahse them) but also a brand new free desktop widget called Demandbase Stream™.

Demandbase Stream is the first browserless Web application (built with Adobe® AIR™) that enables sales and marketing people to find out which businesses are visiting their Web site, what their interests are, and who to contact. By downloading the free Demandbase Stream tool and connecting it to a Web site and to Demandbase Direct, anyone can turn passive Web visits into actionable sales leads. From a ticker that runs across the desktop users can view business traffic information, company details, and recommended contacts in minutes. Users can also set preferences to filter traffic from outside a sales territory or from Internet Service Providers (ISP’s).

Catch a glimpse and download Stream at demandbasestream.com. Did I mention it's free?