The more B2B marketing changes, the more it stays the same.

Eric Gannon’s recap of the B2B University event in Washington DC was posted recently on the Business Marketing Institutes Tuesday Marketing Notes. It’s a great post. Without the cost of travel or attendance fees, BMI readers can partake of  “Six Lessons from B2B University“ that are detailed enough to provide real take-aways.

Here are the six points in his recap:

1. Your Prospects Are In Charge Now
2. Marcom 2.0: It’s All About the Content
3. Marketing Automation is Smart. It’s the People Who Do Dumb Things With It
4. In B2B, Social Marketing is Much More than Twitter or Facebook
5. If You’ve Wondered How to Use Social Media for Lead Generation, Here’s How…
6. To Make Your Marketing Program Indispensable, Link Your Marketing Results to Sales and New Business Generation

You’ll want to read his entire post for all the details he shares on each of these points. But it’s the first point that I take one small issue with. It’s not that the explanation is wrong. He notes that prospects can now “use Google, news and vendor Web sites, and social media to freely search and gather all of the information required for making their initial product and vendor selections, largely bypassing your company’s typical marketing program and ‘story’ as their sole source of their information about your product.”

My issue is the dramatic title of Point #1 that “Prospects are in Charge Now.” From my direct marketing point of view, prospects have always been in charge. Whether marketing is inbound or outbound, it’s the prospect who can take action to conduct product research on their own or respond to the outbound content offers sent out by the company.

Offering free informational content has always been the key to effective B2B outbound lead generation. The approach just gets more blog time now. My objection to the language is that marketers should NEVER think that their prospects are not in charge. With that attitude, marketers might give up actively generating leads and only nurture the leads that come their way through SEO, social media outreach and other inbound channels.

When done correctly, generating leads through email, direct mail, SEM, outbound telemarketing and trade shows still works. So marketers should not think that saying “Your Prospects are in Charge Now” is an excuse to give up proven, profitable marketing channels.

If B2B marketers do nothing else, they should follow these 9 rules.

The Sales Lead Management Association recently invited its members to vote for the 50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professionals. Jim Obermayer, host and author on the Association’s blog, has been conducting a series of interviews, each featuring one of the “winners.”

As a member of the Association and subscriber to its blog, I have been reading and learning from each interview. Recent interviewee Joe Lethert of Perfomark gave two answers that were so on-target for B2B marketing best practices that I feel they are worth sharing.

In the area of lead generation, when asked, “Which 4 basic skills or process steps do you recommend,” he answered . . .

1. “Start with a great database – it will reduce your costs by as much as 50%. If you don’t have one, build it.
2. Shoot for depth in your profiles. People buy from us not for what they know about us, but for what we know about them.
3. Build a comprehensive nurturing program based on delivering only relevant data, at the right time in the buying process, in the prospects’ preferred media, and all based on the prospects’ profile data.
4. Measure everything. Testing and refining should grow your ROI by 10%+ per year even if you’re already an industry leader.”

In the area of lead nurturing, when asked, “If someone wants to nurture sales inquiries, what process would you recommend?” he answered . . .

1. “Become a trusted source of reliable data. Most buyers will not want to engage with sales until they have done their due diligence.
2. All content must be relative to the prospect’s needs, which should be specifically defined in your database.
3. All interaction should be appropriate to the stage in the buying cycle for that individual prospect.
4. Measure the effectiveness of timing, message, offer and media for each type of prospect.
5. Do not buy into the perfect process. Keep continually improving it.”

This isn’t new advice. I and other B2B marketing bloggers have shared this information many times in many forms. But his advice is so direct, so concise and so well-said that I would advise B2B marketers to print it out and use it as a daily reminder to focus on these processes, which have proven to make lead generation and nurturing efforts successful and profitable.

Conduct B2B marketing research in 15 minutes or less.

Most good B2B marketers today know that effective marketing requires the insight of market research.

Research reveals much of the critical information needed to make productive marketing decisions. This information includes the answers to:

• Who is the buying decision-maker?
• Who influences the buying decision?
• What are the biggest pains experienced by the users, influencers and decision-makers that the product or service being sold can relieve?
• What other options are open to prospective buyers for solving this problem?
• Is the product and/or company known in the market?
• How is the company and/or product perceived by the market?
• What channels and resources are prospective buyers using to research and evaluate solutions?
• What are the objections to purchasing the product or service?
• How can these objections be overcome?

Products and services are usually created to fill existing gaps in business processes or operations. Thus, many of these questions must be answered before the product is even created. But once the B2B marketing has begun, fresh research is needed to determine which channels, messaging and content offers have the best chance of producing the desired marketing results.

In addition to traditional research methods (industry surveys, benchmark studies, analyst insight) there is one research method that can take as little as 15 minutes and yield immeasurable insight. That is to sit down and ask the above questions to one or more of the sales people in the organization.

Because sales people are in direct contact with prospects on a daily basis, the answers marketers need are safely tucked inside their heads. Having frequent 15-minute one-to-one conversations with individual sales people is a smart and easy way to help keep marketing messages, content offers and even channel choices on target.

Content by any other name would smell as sweet.

A new LinkedIn group I joined, “DemandGen Specialists,” featured an article by Jon Miller that appeared on Marketo talking about the value of using content to position a company as a thought leader. “Why Thought Leadership Is Your Most Valuable Asset” covers how providing content is the key to achieving thought leadership and provides excellent tips for how to make sure content delivers real value. Then a BtoB online post by Christopher Hosford reports that, when providing collateral, “White papers remain most influential for tech buyers.”

The conclusion from both of these posts is that getting the edge in B2B marketing today is all about content.

As a direct response marketer, I’m pleased to see that the rest of the world has finally discovered what the direct response marketing community has known for about 100 years. That is that giving someone something of value to their business in exchange for making contact with you is the most effective way to generate qualified leads – or, as it is now called, “generate demand.”

In direct response, what is now called “content” was once called an “offer.” Although the percentages will differ, depending on who is presenting them, here are the influencers that determine the potential success of any direct marketing program — and as you can see the quality of the offer is right up there:

The accuracy of reaching the target market can affect response by 200%.
The success of a direct marketing program can increase by as much as 200% by accurately targeting the email or mailing list chosen, the Web site on which the banner appears, the ad words used in SEM, the trade show attended, the print advertising placed and much more.

 The strength of the offer (content) can affect response by 100%.
The offer, or the content, is the second most important element in successful lead generation, whether it is a free white paper, Webinar, checklist, case study, demo or all the other options that are so nicely outlined by Michele Linn of Savvy B2B Marketing in “Need Content? 20 Formats to Consider.”

The quality of the messaging can affect response by 50%.
My specialty is writing content offers and the messaging (regardless of channel) used to get prospects to request the content. However, I am constantly humbled to know that unless the market is well targeted and the offer has value, the marketing messaging will not have the impact it could have.

 The design of the marketing communication can affect response by 50%.
Just like the marketing copy, effective, eye-catching design has no impact unless the channel targets the right market and the offer has value to that market.

So whether you call it content, or an offer or collateral material, after 100 years, it’s still the sweetest tool for successful demand generation marketing.