There may have been a rush to judgment when marketers began putting all their chips into inbound marketing practices.

Sales and marketing teams continue to compete over the same leads. A major step towards successfully implementing the available tools that can help improve sales is to tear down the wall that separates the two disciplines.

Typically there is no single answer to the challenges today's competitors face. Such is the case with lead qualification strategies. There are common hurdles to overcome, such as data sharing among legacy systems, but lead qualification is a practice that is nuanced by the diversity of the markets you serve.

5 Key Ways to Measure (and Predict) Sales Force ProductivityMeeting aggressive sales goals requires more than just a dynamic sales team. It also requires you to do your homework in advance and gain an in-depth view of your company’s operational characteristics. This is where sales force productivity enters the revenue equation. You need salespeople who meet specific quotas and performance goals, reaching competitive preeminence, expanding market share and increasing sales.

How Business Dashboards Can Optimize Sales and Marketing PipelinesIn today's marketplace being organized is imperative to stay competitive. Managers want to be able to analyze sales metrics and track performance of existing campaigns without having to sort through mountains of paperwork and reports. Business dashboards can streamline data, and unlike "scorecard" type reports, can drill down to one sales process such as conversions for an email campaign in real time.

Promotion for B2B companies has become multi-faceted, given the attention paid by marketing experts to SEO, social media, and mobile technology. These promotion discussions tend to revolve around how companies can get more exposure and traffic. However, there is an important aspect of promotion that some B2B companies tend to overlook: how a company is positioned.

Beware of specialist, tactical companies disguised as strategic marketing advisors. While these firms provide important components within strategic marketing initiatives, relying on them for comprehensive marketing advice may put your marketing strategy at risk.

Business intelligence dashboards have been around since the eighties but the jury is still out as to whether these "intelligence" tools are effective at delivering better results. Over the past few years, enterprise managers have adopted marketing and sales dashboards as a way of measuring performance of their marketing and sales teams. Most popular preconfigured models provide a screen full of graphs, tables, and other visual aids which depict real-time outputs. However, out-of-the-box products don't often provide data in a manner that optimizes performance.