September 2010, Issue 79

• Take the Executive Benchmark Assessment to see how your demand-generation activities compare to recommended practices.
• Three ways marketers are aligning Marketing and Sales to drive growth
• How marketers can earn their seat at the revenue table
• An invitation to a live Webinar about achieving true integration between marketing and sales automation
• A Q&A about how to enable Sales with content they can actually use

Featured Article Sales and Marketing Must Win the Three-Legged Race (and Other Lessons Learned at Frost & Sullivan's GIL Event) As a marketer who markets to marketers (did you get all that?) I couldn't ask for a better platform for real-time market research than sitting with my peers at Frost & Sullivan's Growth, Innovation and Leadership event earlier this month. From the insight shared at the event, I noticed these three trends emerging. > Read more By Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing, Bulldog Solutions

Demand-Generation Best Practices 80% of Marketing's Content Is Never Used by Sales? Uh Oh. In a live Webinar last month, IDC Research Manager Gerry Murray and Bulldog Solutions' CEO Rob Solomon discussed strategies for efficiently and expertly enabling Sales with content they can actually use to convert prospects. There wasn't time for most questions to be answered during the live event, but Gerry and Rob have answered them here. > Read more Q&A from How to Enable (and Impress) Your Sales Team with Content that Matters, originally presented August 24, 2010. View the on-demand Webinar.

Social Media Make it a No-Brainer to Spread the Word Here at Bulldog, we realized we needed a process for our most passionate evangelists—our own employees—to spread the word on their social media channels about news and events happening at our company. The biggest challenge was how to make it so easy they could do it in their sleep. > Read more By Kristin Farwell, Marketing Program Manager, Bulldog Solutions

Marketing Evolution Marketers, Pull Up a Chair to the Revenue Table The CMO who is unable to talk in precise terms about their investments and why they're making them is going to be an "extinct CMO." The trouble is, talking about marketing analytics is hard. > Read more By Phil Fernandez, CEO, Marketo; originally posted on Marketo's Modern B2B Marketing Blog

Follow This: How to Create a Compelling Reason to Gain Permission
Here are eight key questions to ask to make sure that wherever your customers and prospects are interacting with you, you make it easy for them to do whatever they came to do.
By Simm Jenkins, CEO, BrightWave Marketing, in ClickZ

BtoB Marketing Needs a Stronger Why
The notion, "We need to create a message around this new product or service," is often misguided when you haven't yet created a stronger why for your company.
By Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya, in his Buzz Marketing for Technology Blog

Four Good Places to Find Content (Where You Might Not Think to Look)
Content well running dry? Dig a little deeper into sources that you may not (yet) have mined, and you might uncover not only a mother lode of great content, but some added benefits as well.
By Jennifer Watson, founder, Context Communications, in Content Marketing Institute