In this tough marketplace with companies struggling to make their numbers, I will share an idea in hopes it helps you.  I like to think its the Holy Grail of business today — just three simple things businesses need to get ahead today.

For full results,  you need all three.  One or two won’t do the job.

1. Marketing Automation — Good packages out there like Marketo and Eloqua.
2. Content Marketing — Marketing automation starves without great content.
3. Trigger Events — look for InsideView for software and ShiftSelling for ideas.

Why does this three prong approach work so well today?

Marketing automation is the tool.  Content builds trust (lead nurturing) so businesses turn to your company.  And trigger events help your salespeople know when they are ready to buy.  They call ready buyers at just the right times.

I love the potential.  Try it.  And let me know how you do.  I’d love to hear from you.  jogden at findnewcustomers.net

Jeff Ogden is the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company that helps businesses find and acquire new customers.

Is any type of marketing collateral or activity appropriate to use when connecting with prospects? Of course not! Early in the buyer process, you might want to use more informative and educational materials, while later in the process you might want to become more specific about your solutions. The real question is how do you know when to use a specific type of collateral or engage in a specific activity?

I’ve been working with demand generation guru Jeff Ogden, president of Find New Customers, on exactly that question.One thing we’ve determined is that, similar to the way end users are in control of generating content on the web today, so too is your prospect in control of the buying process.

From our many discussions, Jeff and I have developed and co-authored a new eBook called “Prospect Driven Marketing.” Our premise is very simple:

Prospect Driven Marketing is a way of marketing to the rightprospect at the right time with the right content!

In this eBook, we walk you through the Seven Stages of Buyer Behavior, discuss Active Buying Behavior and Passive Buying Behavior, and point out the best, most Effective Marketing Collateral and Marketing Activities for reaching buyers and influencing their behavior as they move through the buying process.

We’ve also developed a brief presentation which you can view here (that’s Jeff narrating). I encourage you to download a copy of our free eBook at Find New Customers.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers, a lead generation consulting firm that makes Lead Generation Simple.  He’s also the author of the acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers.  For companies looking to drive fiscal results though improved lead generation practices, Find New Customers is the place to turn.

(Author’s note) Kathleen Steffey is the CEO of Naviga Business Services, a terrific company and a wonderful person.  But like most people-businesses today, her business is facing unprecedented challenges.  This is why this personal story rang home with me.  I really feel for her and bet you will too.

If there is one lesson I’ve learned as a business owner trying to navigate the turbulent economic waters, it is that I have to accept that there are some things I cannot control; that survival – and success – will come from setting aside the status quo and looking at our core operations with a fresh perspective.

It’s been a learning experience for me.  I’m a “Type A” personality heading up a business that has known only growth. It was a difficult pill to swallow when the realization hit that the economy was a force beyond my control. Doing everything right was no longer good enough.

I know I’m not alone in this battle. I also know I’m not the only one who takes it very personally when growth remains elusive despite attacking it with every weapon in my arsenal.

Once I accepted that, I recognized that this is the ideal opportunity to put into practice many of the suggestions made on our salesjournal.com blog over the past year. When strategies that were successful in the past are no longer working, it’s time to step back and see what changes can be made to the business that will carry us through the lean times and put us in a position of strength when the economy finally turns.

To that end, I gathered my entire company for some creative brainstorming on what directions we could take that would open new revenue streams while still remaining true to the integrity of our core mission and values.  It was an exploratory process that was undertaken in a thoughtful, collaborative and meaningful manner rather than as a knee-jerk reaction to a temporary situation.

First and foremost, we are focused on solidifying our position as trusted advisors to our existing clients. We’re reaching out to find out how we can add value to their businesses right now, even if they aren’t in buying mode. By sharing white papers, webinars, best practices and other valuable information to help them steer their own ships, we are staying in front of our customers and letting them know that we aren’t going anywhere. When they’re ready for us, we’ll be here.

We are also conducting ongoing surveys of our customers and prospects so that we can better gauge when they are once again ready to buy.  We’re making strategic use of data and trending information to help identify the “path of least resistance” in terms of investing resources into business development activities that will bear fruit sooner rather than later. Finally, we are identifying new and creative ways to maximize our strong business partnerships in mutually beneficial and cost-efficient ways.

Beyond that, we have identified multiple new business solutions that we are rolling out over the next several months. They relate directly to our core business, and will generate new revenue streams to carry us through the downturn and into the future.  Best of all, when the economic pendulum swings back to stability, we will be stronger because our company will be familiar to an entirely new audience of prospective customers.

Is mine the only business making these kinds of strategic decisions?  Certainly not. But I hope that my example will inspire those who may be close to giving up in this economy to find new paths to execute and succeed.

Take advantage of the situation to identify new strategies that can carry your business through the downturn and that will make your organization increasingly more competitive and chartered for strong growth when the market turns.

We are and I’m proud of it!

More on my interview with Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage.  In this question, I ask Jim

“What kind of mistakes people make with marketing automation and what can they do to get more out of it in this economic downturn?”

Jim responds:

The first challenge is “What is this thing called marketing automation?  How does it fit into my business?”

I read many, many years ago a British author who in 1977 asked, “Given my business, how should I use a computer”  That’s fundamentally the wrong question.  The question should be “Given the computer, how should I establish my business?”

Through re-engineering in the ‘90s and into the 2000′s, we’ve seen a lot of businesses evolve given the computer.  I think we’re going through something similar with marketing automation.  We start out and say well, given my need to generate leads, my marketing automation can help me generate and nurture leads.

But like the computer, there’s a better way to ask the question “Given marketing and automation technology and what it can do, how should I be setting up and executing both my marketing and sales programs?”

That’s the right way to think about marketing automation.  Rethink how you execute your sales and marketing programs.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Collaborator, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation made simple” and author of the famed white paper, How to Find New Customers.  He’s been called the guru of lead generation and Find New Customers helps businesses execute lead generation programs to excel at acquiring new customers.

I’m proud to say that Find New Customers has its first channels partner, Business Intelligence Solutions.   Good guys.  Work with them if you get a chance.

But I also wish to share just how radically different this channels program is from the ones you all know.  We used a radically different approach:

• Before starting anytime, we turned Find New Customers into an education hub — a Purple Cow, if you will.
• People started coming and accessing this information in droves.  They gladly gave me their email address.
• For several months, these folks were carefully nurtured.  An educational email was shared with them every 2-4 weeks.

After years and years working as a channel partner, the story has been the same.  Support you with training, software and marketing collateral, but after that, you’re on your own.  Lead generation belongs to the partner.  It does not work very well.  I believe there has to be a better way.  There is:

Business Intelligence Solutions just got over 300 well-nurtured leads!

Going forward, Find New Customers will be THE thought leader — the place to go to learn about lead generation.  And it will keep driving more and more leads — which I will share with my channels partners.

It’s a very different, and dramatically better — way to run a channels program.

For companies looking for marketing campaigns in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads through great marketing campaigns and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Collaborator, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create marketing campaigns for their lead generation campaignsand continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

Great post from Illuminating the Future blog.  Mastering the Customer Success Cycle.

Very similar to the podcast I did with John Keenan, former VP at Oracle.  John talks CARE process — Customer Acquisition, Retention and Expansion and argues that companies need to focus on thee entire process.

Both men are right.  Companies buy businesss improvement — not products.

For companies looking for marketing campaigns in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads through great marketing campaigns and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Collaborator, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create marketing campaigns for their lead generation campaignsand continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

More from my interview with Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage.  In this question, I ask Jim for examples of how marketing automation can be improved with strong content.  After a great story, Jim summarizes:

JB:  We think the technology’s going to solve the problem and it isn’t.  It requires a process, it requires a program, and that I think of marketing automation and fishing with a hook, but the content is the bait.  And that’s the key.  Without the content, you’re not going to get people clicking on your various links to give you the information you need.

JO:          Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right.  Paul Dunay, who writes Buzz Marketing for Technology told me that we live in a war around content today.  Whoever has the best thought leadership content wins.  And I think Paul’s right and it goes right to your point, is that the more you can have great content, it’s the bait on the hook.  One of the analogies I always like to use is I can go to Sears and spend, you know, $3,000 on crafts and tools, doesn’t make me able to build a mansion.  You know, automation is just a tool.

JB:          Well, I think that one of the things — again, I mentioned epiphanies earlier — years ago, it required pretty good dollars for the marketing automation technologies and then bodies to implement it.  I think one of the changes in the last couple of years that we’ve seen is you can implement very capable systems for not a lot of dollars a month, $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 a month.

You still need the activity behind it to build out the content and to manage those programs, but now this is very practical for even small and midsized businesses to take advantage of.  So two things that we’re seeing.

One is if you don’t have marketing automation implemented in the next, you know, 12 to 18 months you really are going to be at a competitive disadvantage.  However, if you implement it, but you don’t put the right program behind it with an active content development and then active campaigning plan you’ve got a vehicle, but you’ve got no gas in it; you’re not going to go anywhere.

So on the one hand you’ve got to do it in our view, on the other hand you got to do it right in order to really — and Paul’s right, content’s what’s going to differentiate all of us.  And not just differentiate — more important is why are we doing this?

• We’re doing this to add value to our customers even before they become customers.
• We’re doing it to impact our brand, we’re doing it to be discovered by people who are new to the industry.
• We’re doing it to discover people that we should be engaged in conversations with so that we can determine how to apply our salespeople more efficiently than spending 30, 40, 50, 60% of their time banging the phones, you know, blindly just trying to go out and find people to talk with.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Fun and Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.”

Find New Customers helps businesses develop and implement demand generation programs to improve the way they find and acquire sales leads using best practices in lead generation.

“Find New Customers, can certainly help your business dramatically improve the flow of sales-ready leads to salespeople.” Paul Dunay, Buzz Marketing for Technology.