ITSMA’s lead generation benchmarking survey with RainToday.com revealed many characteristics of best-practice companies. In this piece, we will explore one of them in depth: segmentation.

Following almost 12 months of planning and development, the Professional Diploma Course in Marketing for Business Services and Solutions has begun.

In ITSMA’s lead generation benchmarking study with RainToday.com, we found that to be successful, marketing content must be more targeted than ever. Here’s how to do it.

We’ve spent the past year researching marketing transformation and discussing it with ITSMA members. Here are the 10 ways we see B2B transforming and 5 areas that we think you need to focus on to remain strategic.

We’ve just finished another successful ITSMA annual conference where some top B2B marketers from companies like Cisco, Cognizant, GE Healthcare, IBM, and Xerox gave us insights into how they are dealing with their most important marketing issues. (To our 150 attendees, thanks for coming! To the rest of you, we missed you!) This month, we look at marketing strategy and relationship marketing.

Once again, we were floored by the quality of entries in this year’s ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards. But don’t trust us; see for yourself.

We look back on some of the findings from our last survey on thought leadership.

It’s time to back up our talk of marketing transformation with some real examples. We lead with Cisco and follow it up with many others.

Discovering, training, and supporting employees that participate in social media have become marketers’ responsibilities. Read about how chip-maker Intel created a strategy for its employees to adopt social media.

For many companies, idea marketing (aka, thought leadership) is a checklist of content that has little relationship to the business strategy or offerings. We need to develop themes to guide our idea marketing.

As marketers, we must add something new to our priority list: cloud. Those who do will have an advantage over competitors.

Executives seek blogs that talk about ideas rather than offerings. Here’s how Kronos created a blog that stands apart.

B2B services marketing has reached a turning point. With budgets at an all-time low as a percentage of revenue, marketers can’t afford to add anything on to what they are doing and can’t go back to doing things the way they did before the downturn. This is why we’re dedicating our 2010 Annual Marketing Conference on November 2 to the theme of transformation. Our finalists for the annual ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards are showing us all how it’s done.

We’ve gotten together with some industry heavy hitters to create the world’s first professional diploma for business services and solutions marketing. Online or in-person classes begin this month.

Shared leadership is the best way to assure that the burden to improve performance will be distributed fairly between marketing and sales. The numbers show why.

Based on ITSMA’s research with B2B services marketers, we’re seeing companies successfully using social media to drive more attendance and interaction at events. Here’s how IBM does it.

Providers that contribute to the development of customers’ business cases have an advantage over those that don’t. But customers generally don’t want your help. Here’s how to get past the objections.

Marketers are often tasked with advising employees on how to use social media tools. But teaching employees how they should sound in social media is even more important.

Companies must have a closed-loop system for demand generation and lead management. Unfortunately, very few have formal lead management programs.

At a meeting of ITSMA’s European Advisory Board last year, members commiserated over the lack of B2B services marketing standards and certifications. Then they decided to do something about it.

Now that mobile phones have become computers that happen to ring, they have become irresistible. But what’s behind that irresistibility—and why does it matter to B2B marketers?

Many companies are realizing that ad hoc services created in the field can be costly and difficult to deploy on a larger scale. However, these services can represent a tremendous opportunity if they can be further developed or refined centrally.

The entire organization needs to start leveraging and getting involved in social media, and marketing needs to lead that effort. ITSMA has identified five major areas that marketers need to focus on to lead the rest of the organization effectively.

“We wanted to move beyond the interactions we had at events to capture relevant conversations that occur at any point in time, so that everyone could benefit from that knowledge and experience.”

Forrester’s Peter O’Neill found that more than one third of the survey respondents indicated that corporate headquarters manages all marketing budgets and execution. O’Neill, who is VP and Principal Analyst for Forrester, believes that the situation must change.