Marketing Interactions

Staying Top of Mind is Not the Goal for Email Marketing

When B2B marketers first embraced email marketing, the idea was to populate a database and continuously send one-size-fits-all messages to supposed prospects. The idea being that by keeping these folks exposed to your company's name and logo, you'd stay "top of mind." That process is now referred to as "spray and pray" marketing. In a longer-term, B2B complex sales process, just knowing your company's name or recognizing your logo is not enough.

The one-size-fits-all email blast is a tactic, not a strategic marketing process. And, a lousy tactic at that when relevance and value are the admission fee for catching and keeping prospect attention.

Consider this from a personal perspective for a moment. You're aware of a lot of brands. Many of them probably send you stuff. How many of them do you pay attention to? When it comes time to buy a product, how do you decide which one?

Awareness doesn't require action.

I'm aware of Anheuser Busch. I love their Clydesdale ads. But I don't drink beer. I'm also aware of many other beers. If I had to pick one, it would probably boil down to a "close my eyes and point" exercise because I have no expertise in selecting beer. Or, I'd ask a friend I know who loves beer.

Moving back to the B2B side, consider selecting an email service provider (ESP). There are lots of options. In fact, there are so many options people don't know where to start. That's because they have limited expertise in selecting an ESP. 

So let's say that one buyer has been receiving emails from two vendors. Vendor A sends offers of special deals and incentives. They rave about how well their customers are doing by using their superior system.

Vendor B consistently sends educational content that helps the buyer learn about best practices for increasing the effectiveness of email campaigns. They share stories about their customers' ingenuity in deploying email campaigns that produce results, despite the down economy.

When it comes time for the buyer to select a new ESP, the buyer goes online to look at both options. Hey, they were both Top of Mind.

The services are comparable, although Vendor B is bit more expensive. But the buyer feels an affinity toward Vendor B. The buyer has more confidence that Vendor B will be able to provide him with the additional expertise and support he needs to get the best results from the email system. Vendor B just seems to care more. The buyer contacts Vendor B to take next steps in his purchasing process.

This doesn't mean Vendor A isn't all of those things. But staying Top of Mind wasn't enough to win them a customer when compared with all that Vendor B did to go beyond just staying Top of Mind. It won't be enough for your company either, given the likelihood that your competitors are also emailing your prospects.

The goal for B2B marketing has to move beyond the idea of staying Top of Mind to building relationships that accelerate pipeline momentum. Achieving that goal requires the establishment of a marketing content discipline based on relevance and value applied specifically to address target audience needs.

In essence, email marketing must become lead nurturing. Email marketing is tactical. Lead nurturing is strategic. It's a different mindset. The process of lead nurturing helps companies focus on prospects, instead of on themselves. And that's what matters to your buyers.

Demand Gen Academy for B2B Marketers

Genius.com has been facilitating a lot of research into the B2B marketplace to learn more about what's changed for marketers, as well as for buyers. Armed with fresh insights from the Inside the Mind of the New B2B Buyer Survey and the B2B Marketer Skills Survey, Genius.com decided to put more meat on the bones of their Connected Marketer community by developing Demand Gen Academy.

Demand Gen Academy offers four tracks and 20 half-hour courses for B2B Marketers to hone their skills. But, it's not just the 30 minutes of instruction time, but the quizzes, worksheets, guides and other materials that will help you retain the information and put it to use. 

Take a look at what you can learn every Wednesday from June 2nd through September 15th, right from your office...

Track: Lead Generation

• Tweet to Deal - Geoffrey Moore, David Thompson
• Moving from Conventional to Conversational Email Marketing - Jep Castelein, Matt West
• Deploying, Measuring and Optimizing Digital Media - Andrew Gaffney, Matt West
• Conversion Optimization - Learning Pages vs. Landing Pages - Sue Hay, Matt West

Track: Lead Management

• The Basics of Lead Nurturing - Ardath Albee, Craig Rosenberg
• The Basics of Lead Scoring - Malcolm Friedberg, Scott Mersy
• Intro to Content Mapping - Ardath Albee, Craig Rosenberg
• Aligning Sales & Marketing: Less Frustration, More Revenue - Brian Carroll, Scott Mersy
• What You Need to Know About PPC - Crystal Anderson, Matt West

Track: ROI (Return on Investment)

• TAS Group Case Study - York Baur, Parker Trewin
• PhoneWorks Case Study - Anneke Seley, Parker Trewin
• Lumension Case Study - Ed Brice, Parker Trewin

Track: Inbound Marketing for B2B

• Social Media Strategy for B2B - Jay Baer, Barbra Gago
• Building a Socially Armed Organization - Paul Dunay, Barbra Gago
• Inbound Tracking and Success Metrics - Barbra Gago
• Optimizing Your Site for Search - Wil Reynolds, Barbra Gago

That's quite a line up! Did I tell you that it's FREE?

Did you know there's an interactive forum?

If you miss a class, you can go get the materials after it's over, so you can learn at your own pace, when you have the time.

I'm honored to be one of the "professors" at Demand Gen Academy. At the speed of change, every B2B marketer needs to continuously hone their skills to achieve peak performance.

I hope to see you in class!

Takeaways from The Great Content Marketing Experiment

Last week, John Bottom (@basebot) from Base One Group in the UK took a unique approach to his presentation at the IDM conference. He designed an experiment to show 150 B2B marketers the impact that can be achieved with content marketing.

He asked attendees to answer the following questions before the conference:

What the single biggest benefit of social media to your brand?

What is the single biggest obstacle to achieving it?

His firm then compiled all the responses into an eBook, Opportunities & Threats with the goal of getting it downloaded 1,000 times in real time during the conference.

The experiment fell short of the 1,000 downloads, achieving 570 during the allotted time period, but I'll bet there's more to come.

Take a look at what was accomplished:

Doing a search on Google for "Great Content Marketing Experiment" returned 320 results. That's how many people John was able to persuade to publish content about the experiment - from blog posts to media coverage to videos, etc.

Taking a brief look:

The number 1 result is a post on Mark Schaefer's blog {grow} that was tweeted 40 times.

RebeccaS posted it to Sphinn (a bookmarking site) where it was Sphunn 11 times.

A video taken asking attendees at IDM the questions used for the eBook was viewed 92 times.

The video John made explaining the experiment was viewed 172 times.

Social Media UK published a post with a slideshare about Convincing the Skeptics that was viewed 70 times and garnered 10 Tweets.

I could go on, but you get the gist.

In looking at the statistics on http://bit.ly/cUOsuY - the link to the PDF - it shows that 571 unique downloads happened with a total of 607 clicks. It also shows 63 tweets were made promoting the link.

But the interest generated didn't stop there. The link to the live blog where John posted about the experiment during the conference was clicked 477 times and Tweeted 92 times.

The hashtag #GCME was adopted and many more Tweets talked about the experiment.

That's a heck of a lot of exposure and engagement!

Here's what's surprising. Companies spend months planning launches. John sent his first email requesting support from his network on May 14th. The experiment took place 5 days later.

Some Takeaways for B2B Marketers:

Seeding is critical. This is why it's important to establish a presence on social media to build a network of people interested in what you have to say and share. Building credibility in advance of needing it is the key to John's success with this program. There's no earthly reason B2B marketers cannot create this type of response from their own networks if they work toward that goal. 

Social Media is about more than lead generation. Because John spends more time being helpful than asking for stuff from his network, many of us were happy to help and trusted that the content he would provide during the experiment would be relevant and valuable to our interests. He did not disappoint. And, now, when we need some help, guess who will likely be first in line to give back? Yes, John.

We've got to get past this idea that social media is all about what it can do for us. The key is to always give more than you get. Just like you do with your best offline relationships. Online doesn't change that. It's just the medium.

Goose the Gate. If there had been a form in front of the PDF, do you think 570 people would have downloaded the eBook? Doubtful. But that doesn't mean John can't find out about a lot of the people who expressed interest.

• He can see who Tweeted and determine whether they're potential prospects.
• He can follow blog and Twitter comments.
• He could have placed a call to action in the PDF and monitored response to that.
• Or - and here's the big one - he could count on the contagiousness of his content to inspire people to reach out and connect with him. Yes, that happens with really good content promoted to the right target audience.

I know that the experiment was focused mostly on the download goal, but so much more was accomplished that it should inspire B2B marketers about how to create solid content marketing programs that drive results.

This does not mean that you enlist your network every time you have a new content asset. But, if you consistently produce contagious content, focus on sharing and helping others spread the word about what's important to them, what you'll find is that this type of thing just happens.

With social media in the mix, marketers don't have to go it alone. Grow your networks and inspire them to share your content. That's the new way of building awareness in a peer-driven, digital environment. All it takes is the willingness to let go of a bit of control and the creativity to create great content that your audience finds relevant and valuable.

Thanks to John for bringing this experiment to us. It set a great example for content marketing.

B2B Marketers Need Big-Picture Thinking

B2B Marketers are trying to learn how to use social media, content marketing, lead nurturing, personas and a host of other evolving means of attracting buyers through digital marketing. I'm all for it. I applaud your intentions. However, one of the things you need to do first is stop and think.

It struck me today that there are so many opportunities to learn about all these newer marketing tools that we can be fooled into putting the horse before the cart. On any day of the week a marketer can choose to attend a slew of webinars on one marketing topic or another.

I know. I give a number of them every month, as well as attend my fair share given by experts talking about subjects that interest me. I also download eBooks and white papers, read blogs, click on links in Tweets and watch videos. Yes, my name is Ardath and I'm a content wonk.

The problem is that we learn a little bit about a siloed subject. Just enough to make us dangerous. Especially while multitasking. Come on, admit it.

The thing is that when we get excited by something we learn, we want to go out and do something about it. I encourage marketers to stop and think about the big picture view before they choose to embrace tactics or components as stand-alone activities.

Here's a scenario that's not at all uncommon:

One of the tenants of social media is recency. Don't tell me about something that happened in 2006 when I'm dealing with the day-to-day of 2010. Not without a valid reason, anyway.

You say you're not. You point to all of your Tweets and Blog posts and show me how recent they are...how cutting edge.

But when I click on the link to your corporate website and visit your resources page with a healthy list of white papers, I find the newest one is dated 2006. You haven't posted a new customer story for over a year and the latest press release is from 2008.

Oops. Did you forget that everything online is now connected?

What message is that sending prospects about your company? Will they think your company loses interest? Doesn't follow through? Will they think you're in a down spin?

You've worked really hard on your social media efforts. You got my attention and I went to your website to find out about your fantastic company only to leave without seeing one relevant thing that backs up the street cred you've earned with me through social media.

Marketers need to stop and think about the big picture. We need to think about all the ways in which prospects and customers may experience our content and digital marketing efforts. We need to think about consistency, overall impression and possible paths to the experiences our audiences may have—regardless of how they find us or engage with us.

Big picture thinking can help us put the strategy back into our marketing efforts. eMarketing requires a different mindset than manual marketing. I know. It's hard. We want action. But in order for it to pay off in ways that help you achieve corporate objectives, marketers need to think about the impact of every activity in relation to all others. That's what will make all of your efforts pay off in spades.

The Impact of Social on B2B Brand Personality

One of the things made noticeable through social media participation is the personality of a previously impersonal B2B brand. Whether or not the company has individuals participating on their behalf or flies under the avatar of a company logo, the audience has greater access to what makes the company tick. In other words, personality shines through.

So, what happens when your audience applies their filter to that experience?

We all have filters. Each of us makes split-second decisions about what or who we like or don't like. We determine our level of curiosity or disinterest and respond accordingly.

For example, when someone follows me on Twitter, I do the following:

• Click on the link in the email to view their Twitter page.
• Read their bio and look at the link they've added.
• Look at the ratio of followers to following.
• Scroll through the first page of their Tweets to see if anything interests me.

Then I decide if I want to follow them back. Yes, I do that every single time. It's amazing what I can learn. I bet you have your own process for determining who you follow. For me it's not about volume, but about discovering fresh voices that have something to say that interests me professionally.

One especially telling factor is if—after reading their thread of Tweets—I click through to their website and find a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experience it's a sure sign that there's a disconnect in the company message. Therefore, unsure of what to believe, I choose not to engage further.

One thing people like is to be sure of their beliefs. If they find a bubbly, intelligent personality during a LinkedIn group discussion, but receive email messaging and content from your company that's dry as dirt, their interest in your company as a potential partner will diminish quickly.

We must remember that marketing is like a test drive of doing business with our companies. The overall experience counts.

I know social media is the new shiny object that has marketers' attention. However, if we're going to use it as a component in the B2B marketing mix, we need to think about how our participation will reflect back on the company. The story we tell our prospects and customers needs to be consistent across all channels - at the least in tone, quality and style. 

Here are a few things to think about:

• Listen to the types of people you want to attract and determine what type of participation you can engage in that will be relevant to them—and on which platform. (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Slideshare, industry community portals, etc.)


• Determine what presence your company has on social networks right now, and what's being said to whom. I've worked with a number of companies that say they have no one using social media, only to find a number of employees already participating on their own or regional offices that have taken the initiative to set up company pages on social networks. Given what you learn, what's your plan for incorporating them into your efforts?


• Set goals. Do you want to build awareness, drive web traffic, get in conversations, provide customer support, build specific relationships...?


• What supporting content do you have to share that will help you meet those goals? And, do you have a plan to continuously and consistently fuel your efforts?


• Who else is out there that your audience is listening to? Is what they're saying complementary to your message or different? Should you steer clear or reach out?


• Given your goals and what you've learned, do your other web properties support the messages you'll share with social networks? If not, what will it take to change that?

Think about what kind of personality your company has and then design your social media program to enhance it. It's very important to consider the big-picture view that's created when a company's instances of online behavior become a connected whole.

Use Story Elements in B2B Marketing Content

Lou Hoffman, who blogs at Ishmael's Corner, wrote a great post about Storytelling in Social Media and Traditional Media. He wrote the post in answer to a question about how storytelling benefits business executives and their respective companies.

He used this example - drawn from a journalism website - about how media has changed:

Don’t limit your inquiry, or your thinking, to the basics of journalism: Who, what, when, where, why, how. Think in terms of story elements: setting, character, plot, conflict, climax, resolution, dialogue, theme.

With that last sentence in mind, I thought it might help to discuss just how story elements can be used in the creation of B2B marketing content. By incorporating story elements, your B2B marketing content will be more naturally focused on issues of importance to your prospects - something hard to do when your content is product focused.

Setting: This is the business context of your prospect's specific situation. Think about the differences between verticals, for example. The "setting" is different for each one.The setting can also be oriented around the difficulties the problem they're trying to solve is causing.

Character: This is obviously your prospective buyer. You do use personas, right?

Plot: This is your prospect's business objective. It includes the problem-to-solution route with the business objective as the goal at the end.

Conflict: This is the big, gnarly problem that's keeping them from achieving that business objective.

Climax: This is what I call a Step Back. This is the final hurdle that must be overcome to keep your buyer moving forward to that purchase decision. It's whatever might lead to losing the deal. It could be something that's remained unaddressed and needs to be resolved in order for them to proceed. Or it could be someone on the buying committee who stalls the process with a question that's not arisen previously.

Resolution: This is how you answer whatever caused the Climax to restore your prospect's confidence so that they take the next step to validate you as their partner of choice...and buy.

Dialogue: This is the two-way communication you design to integrate your story elements to engage your prospects over the course of their buying process. Did you get the distinction? Dialogue is not about you talking and them listening. It's about building an interactive relationship through how you design and use your content in the forums where your prospects spend their time.

Theme: The theme is your persona's value proposition:

I need ________to help me________in order to_____________.

Notice that this is NOT your company's value proposition. Using story elements in B2B marketing content must be focused on your prospects' perspectives, not your company's.

When we incorporate story elements into our content, we get closer to creating a narrative that engages people because they can relate to it. Talking about your products will bore them to tears. Talking about the situations they're dealing with in a context they understand—one that helps them visualize solving their problem with your help—will hold their attention and help them transition across each stage of their buying process.

Why Marketing and Sales Need an SLA

The B2B marketing-to-sales process can be a long and complex process for your company—as well as your customers. Without agreement for who does what, when, managing the buying process behind the scenes can get messy, fast. Collaboration between marketing and sales teams to develop a Service Level Agreement (SLA) can help to smooth the process and create appreciable results.

Companies that haven't developed an appropriate work flow and process for the disposition and handling of their leads from start to finish put their customer acquisition success at risk by:

• Sending mixed messages to leads that diminish company credibility.
• Mishandling leads and dropping the ball on expectations.
• Wasting their sales reps time in the pursuit of unqualified leads.
• Unwittingly giving the advantage to better organized competitors.
• and more...

A well orchestrated process with agreement on both sides will foster respect between marketing and sales counterparts by setting the appropriate responses to lead behavior that drive business objectives and productivity. It doesn't hurt at all that the end result is more trust and engagement with leads that become buyers.

You see, your prospects don't care if they're dealing with marketing or sales. What they do care about is gaining access to the right information at the right time in relation to a business problem they're trying to solve. What your leads encounter during the buying process is like a test drive of what their experience as your customer might be like. Regardless of what marketing and sales departments think of each other, to create a consistent and valuable experience for leads, the two departments must figure out how to get in sync.

Since prospects have taken the wheel to steer their buying process, pushing salespeople toward the end stages, this means companies have to make the flow from status quo through purchase decision dynamic and seamless.

Some of the components for managing the buying process that must have agreement between marketing and sales include:

• Lead definition. This includes the demographic and BANT (budget, authority, need, time line) items that sales needs to indicate pursuit will be worth their effort. With the expansion of the number of people in the buying committee, it's also prudent to define which influencers may give sales the "foot-in-the-door" they need to move the process forward. For example, if a lead has need and time line, but not budget or signing authority—and activity is high—they're definitely worth a sales conversation.


• Lead score. Overall qualification of leads including scores for definition, activity profile and timeliness of interest. Marketing needs to get agreement from sales on the exceptions to scored behavior that accelerate or decelerate the hand off. By working together to define how a score is attributed, both sides are taking responsibility for the creation of qualified leads. Marketing can guess all they want, but if salespeople aren't getting what they need, they won't work the leads passed to them.


• Trigger event. What prompts the conversion from marketing to sales? Research which behaviors have resulted in other closed deals. A score on its own is often not enough to warrant sales follow-up. For example, what circumstances would prompt a transfer to inside sales instead of field sales? In addition to specific inquiries, trigger events may include online demos, asking a leading question during a webinar, visiting the How to Buy page on your website in addition to other content views.


• Sales Response. How long does sales have to follow-up with a converted lead? What is their responsibility for providing feedback to marketing on the status of the lead? Are there times when a lead should be "protected" from marketing to ensure that the conversation with the sales rep is not interrupted?


• Sales Returns. What are the criteria for sales returning a lead to marketing for further nurturing? How long is it acceptable for a lead to sit dormant before it should be returned to marketing for further nurturing and qualification? With the cost spent generating leads, we need to make sure that no viable lead gets left behind by closing the loop.


• Nurturing Parameters. At what point does marketing stop nurturing and sales pick it up? Or is there a distinction? Perhaps there's a process where—once a lead has been accepted by sales—the lead is placed in a "personalized" nurturing process that appears to be sent by the salesperson. Creating extensions to nurturing programs for sales can result in consistent messaging throughout the buying process that strategically prompts leads to take next steps in concert with sales conversations.

These are only a few ideas for structuring an SLA. There are many nuances that may be specific to your prospects' buying process and/or your company's culture. The important thing to remember is that responsibility swings both ways:

Marketing is on the hot seat to prove that the leads they send to sales are qualified and ready to engage in sales activities with the intent to purchase.

Sales is on the hot seat to sell. Their responsibility is to share feedback with marketing to help them improve the lead qualification process to ensure that the company's time and efforts on their behalf are not wasted.

What would you add or change?

Survey Highlights Contradictions for B2B Marketers

In reviewing the results from the B2B Marketing Skills Survey conducted by Genius.com and BtoB Magazine, I saw a few disconnects that should be flags for concern. Let's talk about two of them.

Contradiction 1:

Driving qualified leads is seen as the most important mission of the marketing department.

Lead nurturing is seen as the least important marketing role.

How does marketing drive qualified leads for a complex sale without nurturing? We know buyers have taken control of their purchasing processes. In fact, Genius.com and DemandGen report did a B2B buyer survey a few months back that showed the value of consistent content from the buyers' perspective.

I just don't see how one is done without the other. It's the "qualified" part that eludes me. How the heck would marketers know?

According to the Custom Content Council, 32% of marketing budgets are now dedicated to content marketing. So, if marketers are not creating nurturing content, what are they creating?

What might be interesting to note is that lead nurturing is not confined to email campaigns sent to your lead database. If B2B marketers are embracing a content strategy, every content asset will be designed as a nurturing piece - regardless of where it's displayed or shared.

Over on Focus.com, I answered a question about the definition of lead nurturing with:

Lead Nurturing: The process of engaging prospects by providing the information and dialogue they need at each stage of their buying process to position your company as the best choice to help them achieve their business objectives.

Nowhere in there does it say that lead nurturing can only be conducted with opt-in lead lists. This said, if you have leads and you're not nurturing, you're content to let them languish? Or are marketers still pushing sales offers?

Contradiction 2:

58% of marketers believe that marketing's involvement doesn't end when the lead is transferred to sales.

However, nearly 1 in 10 marketers admit to never meeting with the sales team.

The report also finds that the sharing of information between the two departments is lacking. If marketers are not talking or sharing with salespeople (or sales isn't talking to them), exactly how is marketing staying involved with transferred leads with any sort of effectiveness that produces a consistent experience?

If marketing never meets with the sales team, how do they know if leads are truly qualified or even learn about ways they could be improving the lead's disposition? What data and insights are they using to improve their marketing programs?

If the marketing-to-sales process has a big, black hole of disconnect in the middle, how will it ever evolve into a seamless end-to-end process?

From the two contradictions above, it seems to me that marketers are compartmentalizing how they think about the components of demand generation and prospect engagement. With the rise of digital marketing there are a lot of moving parts. The thing is that they don't move separately, but rather work best when integrated through an eMarketing strategy to achieve the best outcomes.

It's not that I think marketers are lacking in skills. I think a new way of thinking is required to shift from the way things were done in the past to what will be effective in the future. Happily, I'm beginning to receive calls from companies that have recognized this and are truly interested in learning how to apply a new way of thinking to accomplish bigger goals with measurable outcomes.

Why do you think these contradictions exist?

The Fallacy of Control for B2B Marketers

Even with all the ways in which B2B content marketing is evolving, I'm still hearing a lot about the desire to control prospect behavior. See if any of these sound familiar:

• We don't want to send prospects to any page not on our website.
• We want to have control over where our content is displayed.
• We must gate our content to make prospects give us their information.

What I want marketers who are still having these considerations to ask themselves is - Why? Why exactly do you think this attitude will help improve your marketing performance?

Here are a few reality checks:

Allowing and enabling your content to spread beyond web properties you own has many advantages. One of them is credibility by association.

Depending on where and how your prospects become aware of your company may play a role in their willingness to engage with your content. If they see an article or blog post displayed on a community portal they rely upon to provide valuable information, their willingness to pay attention will increase.

Isn't this why many companies engage 3rd party experts to participate in their webinars or choose to sponsor their eBooks and white papers? 

Another advantage is findability.

Unless you've got page 1 search result ranking for the keyword phrases your prospects use in a search engine, how confident are you that they'll find you?

Are you willing to give up prospects to competitors because their information is more accessible than yours?

B2B Marketers should be actively pursuing ways to get their content displayed across the web to gain exposure, brand awareness and increased engagement. Isn't that why we issue press releases? We need to start thinking of ourselves as media participants. Not just for press releases, but for continuous content distribution.

The more places your content is seen, the higher your reputation and the less effort prospects have to expend to engage with your company.

Gating content diminishes response and sends a message you may not intend.

No matter how much research has been done about the percentage of prospects who will leave without completing a form to access content (as high as 75% seen recently), marketers still apply this method of lead generation with determined purpose. Even to the point of blocking access to content that could predispose a prospect in your favor - like case studies. Yes, it's true.

What you're really telling prospects when you gate all of your content is - "I don't trust you." You're saying, "I don't trust that you'll return to my website on your own if you find something valuable in my content." You're telling them that they need to turn themselves over to you to tell them what to do next because you don't trust them to ask on their own.

The reality could also be that you don't trust your content to provide a compelling reason for them to return. If so, that needs to be addressed immediately.

Here's the thing. Your prospects are in control of how they want to buy. Your efforts to control them cause friction that keeps them from engaging with your company.

The idea that by controlling their access to content that you have control over their buying process is a fallacy. In fact, your prospects can find all the information they'll need to make a buying decision for a product similar to yours without access to your content at all.

The amount of information made available everyday is massive. If you want to differentiate your company and improve prospect relationships, it's time to give up control and focus on freely serving the educational and expertise needs of your potential customers.

Now, before anyone says that they have a responsibility to generate leads, I'll agree with you. It's all in the way you gate. You've got to think about what it takes to build a foundation of value that won't diminish response when you choose to control access.

The question isn't form or no form. It's have we earned enough credibility to justify the request for our prospects to share their information with us?

The funny thing is that by giving up control, it actually comes back to you in new ways that are more effective. Give it a shot. You may just be surprised by the results.