April 25, 2008 5:00 PM

Last week I was down in Portland presenting at Innotech Oregon, which bills itself as the region's premier business and technology innovation conference and expo. My topic was called “Optimize the Customer Funnel for More Sales-Ready Leads” and was part of the e-marketing summit. If I was to summarize the presentation in a couple of sentences:

• Think about demand generation as a single process – the customer funnel from first interaction right through to closed deal
• Prioritize sales-ready leads by lead scoring to improve campaign results
• Systematically nurture leads to generate more sales-ready leads

I’ll be saying more on each of those topic in future blog posts, but if you just can’t wait you can get a copy of the presentation you can get the PDF here.

It was fun presenting to “real” people for a change. Marqui delivers frequent webinars and even through you know 300 folks have logged in to listen and watch, it’s very much a one-way format. You can’t beat looking into the whites of the audiences eyes to get a sense how engaged or otherwise they actually are.

Based on a quick show of hands, the vast majority of the audience were marketers – probably 90% of the estimated 150 attendees. That’s not surprising. However only three people admitted to currently scoring leads before passing them off to sales. Given the tech-savvy bunch we had in the room that’s pretty shocking.

It was also good to see several of our local clients at the event including the Software Association of Oregon, Ethicspoint and Centerstance. All in all a great event and one I look forward to participating in next year.

Posted by Richard Sharp at April 25, 2008 5:00 PM
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