“About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age.”
- noted cookbook author Gloria Pitzer

The best marketers may make their programs look effortless, but don’t be fooled. There is no such beast. Well planned, well executed strategic marketing is a lot of work. But then again, so is filing for bankruptcy, selling off your assets and shuttering your business – which is the alternative to putting in effort. Which makes me wonder why companies bother to invest in marketing activities and then put nearly zero effort into executing them. This is just throwing good money after bad.

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Sales leads are the life blood of your company. That’s a fact. Unfortunately, it’s also a fact that B2B leads are expensive.

What’s does a qualified B2B lead cost you? $100? $500? $1000? More? Yet B2B companies often quickly lose track of their leads. Sales wants HOT leads. HOT leads represent the low-hanging fruit…companies that want to buy NOW.

However, lead tracking research shows that only 20 percent of your leads are HOT leads. What about the other 80 percent? Half of this group will be buyers in three to nine months. At most companies they get filed away in the prospect database – which is really a mausoleum where not-so-hot prospects get buried alive.

A nurturing campaign can help keep these leads alive until they become HOT, usually at a much lower cost than finding new leads. Result: Treated right, a prospect database is an incubator for buyers, not a mausoleum.

Schubert has likened its staff to B2B Marketing Animals, and even to communication cats…but never to ninjas. I stand to change this. As Debra pointed out in her post yesterday, on a daily basis we are working, stealthily, to make “it” happen. This normally does not involve hiding in ceiling tiles or cat-quick movements, but we are tasked with covert operations each day — from making placements in trade pubs to calling the Pentagon or even calling Arnold “The Govenator” Schwarzenegger (yes we have done that).

In terms of sly, yet effective, PR/Marketing tactics – podcasts are one of the best, giving a voice to your company. I’d like to let this PR Ninja (not on Schubert’s Staff, unfortunately)break it down for those readers that aren’t quite willing to jump on the podcasting bandwagon. In fact, this is a good example of both video podcasting and viral marketing. (See the video after the jump.)

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Day in and day out, public relations executives tackle tasks that clients never see. These are the calls, e-mails and research that get the job done, and get the job done well. Here at Schubert, I work with a diverse group of clients ranging from companies specializing in agriculture and biometrics to scientific instrumentation and steel fabrication. Each client brings its own challenges, and every so often, I find myself doing things I never imagined I’d do.

Today, I called the Pentagon.

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“No one plans to fail, they just fail to plan.” It’s one of the oldest clichés on the planet, it’s certainly one of the most time worn axioms in the business universe, but it’s as true today as it ever was. Need proof? Look at what happened to the U.S. Census Bureau when it failed to plan. Now, no one ever cited the government as a good role model for business, but there’s hardly a more textbook case to illustrate the need for planning, and nowhere is planning more important than in communications programs.

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