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Salespeople are notoriously poor in following up on qualified leads. In fact, experts say, sales does not follow up on more than 70% of leads. Why? Field salespeople in most organizations are compensated, motivated, and managed to focus on short-term opportunities, not on the pipeline. Contrast that scenario with the strategic marketing experts at CenterBeam, a San Jose-based IT outsourcing firm that provides IT outsourcing services on a fee-for-service basis. By making the lead-generation process a cornerstone of its strategic marketing program, CenterBeam is getting many of its sales from long-term leads cultivated on the "farm"—and a ten-to-one return on its outside investment in the farmers. Here's how.

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Nothing gets the adrenalin pumping quite like an AdWords campaign that delivers a strong ROI. Success brings a big grin on your face when you realize you can invest more in the campaign, expand the base of keywords, and make even more money. The more you spend, the more you make. It's a great moment, while it lasts. But the problem is, it doesn't. There will come a point when you hit a plateau. You have tested and optimized different headlines, body text and ad groups, you have adjusted the bid prices, and included just about every related keyword you can imagine. What now?

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Thanks to the time constraints and laziness of both traditional journalists and bloggers, you may be quoted in a story (sometimes at length), without having been interviewed—the victim of a stealth interview. There was a big brouhaha when something similar happened to actor George Clooney recently, but it's really nothing out of the ordinary.

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Patricia Hume, global VP of Avaya, gives her own views from the top about what she looks for in new hires, why she sometimes hugs her co-workers, and why women just might be the best marketers.

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Do your customers prefer to get information from email newsletters? Web sites? Blogs? Feeds? A mix? A growing number of users are relying on RSS feeds to satisfy their hunger for information.

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One of the most exciting and promising developments in marketing is the emergence of something called Net Promoters. First described two years ago in Harvard Business Review, Net Promoters is now being adopted by a growing number of highly respected firms, including General Electric, Intuit, and SAP. What is it? And what does it do?

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If you run a nonprofit, you know that marketing is essential to your mission. To many nonprofit managers, marketing equals fundraising and nothing more. But your organization exists for more than just bringing in donations. By using social marketing methods, you can boost the effectiveness of programs and activities that are the reason your organization exists in the first place—to make a difference.

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Advertising and marketing has changed. What could possibly be the cause of so many beleaguered established players and fortunate newer ones?

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If you want to improve the response rate to your direct mail, the answer may be as simple as making a better offer. To paraphrase Don Corleone: Make your customers an offer they can't refuse.

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Old news: Green products don't work, and consumers won't pay a premium for them. New news: Investment in environmentally preferable products and technologies can lead to a potent new source of innovation and competitive advantage.

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Writing for business-to-business lead generation is a balancing act: On the one hand, you want as great a response rate as possible; on the other, you don't want to clog the sales pipeline with useless leads—people who don't have the authority, interest, or money to buy what you're selling. Here are five pragmatic ways for you to increase your success rate with the prospects who matter.

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What gets a resume more than a 10-second glance? What's the surest way to impress during an interview? Scott Davis, Senior Partner at Prophet and author of two widely acclaimed books on branding, offers must-read career insight.

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Customer experiences are the foundation for competitive differentiation, value creation, and brand identity. While some companies create emotion-driven customer experiences that leave an impact on shoppers, others create "co-production" experiences in which customers are active co-producers. Here's how it works.

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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is not just the marketing flavor of the week. It is a very profitable way to get prospects to Web sites for a long time to come. It is direct marketing at its purest. To succeed with PPC, you need to apply all the rules for media, offers, copy, and testing. Here are 10 sure-fire tips.

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When you're setting the price for physical goods, particularly commodity goods, you may not have a great deal of flexibility. But if you are selling something less tangible—like a service, a subscription, a seminar or downloadable report or book—the range of prices you can charge is very broad, and often surprising.

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Consumers want to align themselves with brands, employers and even investments that stand for something we believe in and that we can feel good about. Here's how smart companies are responding (and how your organization can, too).

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We've never seen a CEO who wouldn't sign up for customer loyalty, customer focus, and just plain improving things for their customers. It's getting them to drive the company to do something about it that's the challenge. A number of telltale signs determine pretty quickly whether a company is serious about the job or not—beginning with the CEO and leadership and cascading all the way through the ranks of the company.

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The Olympic flame has been temporarily extinguished, the athletes have gone home, and the sidewalks of Turin are quiet again. As we look back at the highs and lows of the winter games, there are three definitive business and marketing lessons to be learned.

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Shopping portals, comparison-shopping sites, and search engines allow merchants to promote increasingly detailed merchandising offers with the goal of cost-effectively increasing brand visibility, acquiring new customers, and driving incremental revenues. But how does an online retail merchant ensure that third-party shopping destinations and other referral-based merchandising channels contribute to the bottom line?

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The aggressive drive to be the number-one search result in Google continues to change the nature of communication. No one is feeling that more than today's copywriters. In less than a decade, many copywriters have fundamentally changed, or felt pressured to change, their approach to the craft. They have learned that some traditional communications tactics don't register well with a greasy machine named Googlebot.