Today I spoke to a group of B2B marketers at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketers (CADM) on the topic of B2B Online Lead Generation and Management.

After presenting here a year ago at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, I welcomed the opportunity to return to Chicago (see my photo below).

The timing was good: the results from our third annual LeadGen Tools Survey will be released in the next week.

The CADM audience received a sneak peek at some of the data (more on that later).

The premise of the presentation was that B2B marketers should join a significant number of their peers in deploying Web 2.0 media in lead generation programs.

Second, leads generated through organic search and social media, are of high quality. Unfortunately, our research shows that B2B marketers face significant obstacles in telequalifying quickly and effectively.

The presentation was well received with questions pertaining to the use of video in marketing programs, the role of Twitter and Blogging in lead generation and what other options exist in order to qualify some markets that are difficult to access via phone (e.g. physicians).

I had a good chat with Garth Moulton, co-founder and VP Community of Jigsaw, the sponsor of the CADM event. As it turns out, Garth does not answer his phone anymore because his contact details are featured in Jigsaw as a working example. Garth explained that with 1.5M hits a month, his name is turning up in many searches and folks are mistakenly phoning him, assuming that he is the designated contact at the companies that they are searching for. Ah....the price of success!

Garth and the two other co-founders of Jigsaw formerly worked at Digital Impact together in sales. Digital Impact, an email marketing service provider now owned by Acxiom, was a client of Direct Impact Marketing. It was interesting to hear Garth describe the evolution of the ultra-competitive email market.

I look forward to my next visit to Chicago.