On Monday and Tuesday, I accompanied our Marketing team at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit in San Francisco. It was one of the most informative conferences I have attended in recent years. I'll do a few posts over the next few days about some of the topics that were covered.

One lesson we learned was that MarketingSherpa's analysis of industry trends is probably the most extensive in the marketing world. Every time we were presented with a study that they performed themselves, the data was conclusive and actionable. You can acquire a lot of that information by purchasing a copy of their Business Technology Benchmark Guide (and the supplementary B-to-B Homepage Design Study).

Some of the data that was presented by their guest speakers was certainly suspect, especially the 30 minutes we spent on the topic of when to respond to incoming inquiries from interested prospects. Um, you don't need to do a study on that. A little common sense or more than a day in the shoes of a salesperson/telemarketer will tell you that the answer is simple: contact that person now, if not sooner. (After university-driven studies, mountains of data, and 30 minutes of bar graphs, they told us the same thing.)

Anyway, the first presentation was by Sean Donahue, Senior Reporter for MarketingSherpa. He covered a few trends in the B2B world to consider:

1. More decision-makers are involved in each purchase (over $25,000 in value) than ever before - almost 7 people in organizations of 100-500 employees, 13.5 people in organizations of 500-1,000 employees and 21 people in organizations over 1,000 employees.
2. More decision-makers are finding solutions through marketing campaigns than sales endeavors - 80% of decision-makers and 75% of decision contributors say they found their technology vendors (rather than the salesperson finding the prospective customer). Don't fire your sales team just yet...read the next trend first!
3. Still, more than half of decision-makers have added vendors to their evaluation as the result of cold calls they received - 53% of them say cold-calling has influenced their technology buying decisions, and 48% attended an online event to initially evaluate potential vendors.
4. Designed HTML sales prospecting emails often don't render well - 64% of decision-makers generally view these messages on a mobile device. As a person who was a salesperson for many years and is now bombarded by salespeople every day, I have to say...that impersonal mass email that you sent me with the "first name" tag in the subject line and body doesn't impress me at all. Do a little research on my company and send me something that is truly tailored to my needs. Otherwise, join the circular file with the other marketing automation messages I will receive today.
5. Blogging, podcasting and webinars are extremely prevalent and generally credible - still, whitepapers are the most effective form of passive marketing. However, a high percentage of decision-makers admit to submitting false information into registration forms in order to obtain access to whitepapers or other sources of data.
6. Marketing organizations are nurturing/qualifying leads much more before handing them off to salespeople - leading B2B organizations are only handing off 12% of their generated contacts as leads for their sales team. More organizations are recycling leads back from sales to marketing as they grow cold.

So, there's a little taste of the first presentation. There is obviously more information in the report and conference program, but I'm not a big fan of plagiarism or 100-page blog posts.