PPC driven year-over-year branded sales are down – so the first natural recourse is to find someone to blame. Logical deduction would have it that it is the fault of whoever is managing the PPC campaign, because surely, if the PPC campaign was driving strong branded sales last year, well then, what has changed this year to lower those sales figures? Surely, it should just be identified and fixed.

This is, unfortunately, not quite that simple. It is difficult to exert a great measure of control over branded sales online – certainly, a branded PPC campaign can facilitate branded sales but it cannot be managed in the way that the competitive landscape is managed within non-branded terms.

Whether people are actually searching under a branded term is a function of the strength of the brand, word-of-mouth and offline brand building marketing efforts designed to drive branded online traffic. The branded PPC campaign may have been built, but certainly it does not mean they will come and it is not the role of the branded terms online to make them come.

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I’ve started an eight-part series I’m calling the ‘Lead Generation Checklist.’ Each post in the series addresses a step that will help to make your lead generation campaigns work like a well-oiled machine.

In the first installment, I discussed tackling your organization’s lead generation mindset. Your touches should be conversations not just campaigns. Your “marketing” approach should be more consultative. The post received a lot of great comments. Ardath Ablee was fascinated by one and wrote about it in her blog. I think you’ll find “How to Use Existing Content in B2B Demand Generation Programs” helpful. Thanks Ardath.

Now for Step Two. I want to focus on dissolving the discord that inevitably exists between your sales and marketing teams. 

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