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As companies head out into the brave new post-recession world, the top two goals for marketers are organic revenue growth (37 percent) and margin growth (41 percent), according to Aberdeen's Q4 2010 Business Review. To help achieve these objectives, marketing budgets grew by an average of 4 percent for 2011, chief marketing officers reported. The crucial question, then, is this: How do CMOs invest that marketing budget wisely to maximize gains?...

Whether driven by lack of product differentiation, insufficient revenue growth, competitive pressures, or simply the need to improve the prospect/customer experience, companies are seeking to better understand their customers in order to more effectively acquire, retain and profitably monetize their business. ...

Configure/Price/Quote (CPQ) tools provide companies technology-enabled processes by which selling organizations manage their opportunity-to-order (or lead-to-win) methodology with automated tools that impact the speed and accuracy of developing quotes, proposals, contracts and products. ...

In the Aberdeen benchmark report "Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling" (February, 2010), the research among 528 end-user sales organizations revealed that the most frequently used delivery models for sales intelligence were limited to remarkably traditional, if not predictable, applications: email, search engines, CRM/SFA tools and spreadsheets.

For years, the promise of the truly mobile salesperson has enticed reps and sales operations professionals alike, yet a true pay-off has often been elusive as interface and bandwidth limitations conspired to lower industry expectations of success. ...

As companies continue their search for the elusive "360-degree view" of their prospective clients, harvesting all the scattered information from social networks (free) and other content providers (paid) about these prospects can potentially be beneficial for the purposes of deploying more finely targeted sales and marketing campaigns. ...

With the advent of technologies enabling buyers with increasing insight into the sellers' products and competitors, the traditional strategies of bringing qualified prospects to a closed deal require a new set of contemporary skills among sales staff. ...

Aberdeen research conducted for "B2B TeleServices: The 2009 Buyer's Guide" (November, 2009) has shown the end-user value of deploying external, customer-facing teams to source, nurture and convert the most highly qualified leads on behalf of an internal, B2B-focused field sales organization. ...

Enterprise sales organizations are under increasing pressure, often both from internal and external stakeholders, to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue in order to better predict, and improve, the long-term health of their company. ...

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. ...

Companies seeking to steer highly qualified leads to their "closers" are faced today with a combination of competitive threats, information overload and hesitant buyer behavior requiring new strategies and tools to succeed. The never-ending economic pressure for sales organizations to increase productivity, while "doing more with less," often results in organizational emphasis on segregating responsibilities between inside and outside sales teams, and yet empowering both teams with crucial sales intelligence...

Marketing Asset Management (MAM) is an emerging category of Digital Asset Management (DAM) technology that has been developed exclusively for the marketing function. With a host of digital asset technology available, many generic DAM products lack workflow capabilities, dynamic collateral development, and the user security required for productive marketing asset management.

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress in terms of bringing their sales cycle under control. Recent Aberdeen research published for "Inside Sales Enablement: Let Them Drink Coffee!" (Dec. 2009) reveals that not only did under-performing companies see a year-over-year increase in their sales cycle of 12 percent, but even the Best-in-Class, or top 20 percent of performers among over 500 companies surveyed, experienced a slight (1 percent) lengthening of their own bid-to-win time frame.

Whether driven by lack of product differentiation, customer demand for better service, or simply the need to improve the prospect/customer experience, companies are seeking to better understand their customers in order to more effectively acquire and retain business. ...

From early origins of cold-calling into purchased contact lists, to contemporary methodologies incorporating Web 2.0 enablers, companies seeking to steer highly qualified leads to their "closers" are faced today with a combination of competitive threats, information overload and hesitant buyer behavior requiring new strategies and tools to succeed. The never-ending economic pressure for sales organizations to increase productivity while "doing more with less" often results in organizational emphasis on segregating responsibilities between inside and outside sales teams...

In research conducted among over 200 companies in 2008 for a reported titled "B2B TeleServices and Appointment-Setting: Less Risk, Less Reward?," Aberdeen Group found that end-user sales organizations relying primarily on external appointment-setting vendors for lead generation realized dramatically lower business results if the vendor deliverable was limited to simple appointments, rather than meetings accompanied by business intelligence...

With a variety of options available for training their revenue-seeking professionals, today's sales leaders need to carefully select the methodology that will most directly impact their bottom line. ...

With a third of all lead generation budget dollars allocated to outsourced business-to-business teleservices providers, how do Best-in-Class organizations most effectively compensate their external vendors? Aberdeen survey respondents from more than 200 organizations provide rich detail regarding their preferences for how they prefer to model the fiscal relationship they build with their outsourced provider partner.

While demand generation professionals consistently turn to a wide variety of direct marketing software and e-mail marketing tools in search of sales leads, current research by Aberdeen points to a significant spend associated with a more human element: outsourced B2B (business-to-business) teleservices, provided by a large array of vendors offering different models of phone-based support by outside agencies.

Empowering sales forces with tools to work remotely has evolved dramatically since the first wave of smartphones hit the streets. Sales reps have grown adept at basic applications such as e-mail and Web browsing, but often still wait for an end-of-day laptop session to access their CRM system. Still, Best-in-Class organizations generally yield an adoption rate of over 60 percent for mobile CRM, indicating that real value can be linked to a successful deployment of the technology...