Here’s a problem a lot of companies face — the marketing team complains that the leads they drive to the sales team get ignored, and the sales team complains that the leads marketing drives to them aren’t any good.

Sound familiar?

According to Lisa Cramer with LeadLife Solutions, there’s a solution to this problem. It involves developing a lead scoring system that grades leads based on a number of variables including visits to your website, length of time on your website, trade show engagement and a whole host of other important factors.

The result is that companies (like yours) can now more accurately gauge whether a prospect is in the “tire kicking” mode or the “ready to buy” mode.

I saw Lisa speak yesterday at the Customer Relationship Management Association’s Return2Customer conference in Atlanta, Georgia. If you’re interested in improving the effectiveness of your salesforce, visit the LeadLife website. Or, read “How to Win New Customers Before They’re Even in the Buying Mode.” on The 60 Second Marketer site.

Email marketing is big. You know that already.

But did you know there are several key tips that you should keep in mind if you’re using an email newsletter to stay in touch with your customers and prospects?

A company called ReturnPath recently subscribed to 61 companies’ email programs and studied how those companies used email.

The Return Path Subscriber Experiences study found that:

• 60 percent of companies did not send a welcome email message.
• 30 percent failed to send any message at all within the 30-day study period.
• The first regular email message arrived an average of nine days after subscribing.
• While 70 percent of companies asked for more than email address at sign-up, three-quarters of the companies that collected additional information didn’t use it to personalize or customize their emails.

If you’re interested in creating an email newsletter, you might check out the full article on The 60 Second Marketer site. It’s called “How to Create a Great Subscriber Experience with Your Email Newsletter.”

Does sex help sell products? You may be surprised by the answer.

A recent study by MediaAnalyzer looked at whether sexy images in ads improved ad effectiveness or decreased it. The finding was that sex is a great attention-grabber, but disastrous for ad effectiveness.

Men and women alike are strongly attracted by sex in ads. However, men are so engrossed by the sexual imagery that it diverts their attention. The end result is a less effective ad.

If you want to check out the entire article, click “Does Sex Sell? 7 Golden Rules of Print Ad Effectiveness” by Charles Boyar, Vice President at MediaAnalyzer who wrote the article for The 60 Second Marketer.

One of the most common questions we get asked at The 60 Second Marketer is how to pitch a story to the media. People want to know what the difference is between pitching a story to local media vs. national media. They also want to get inside the mind of the journalist so they can understand their needs and wants for a story.

There’s a good article on the 60 Second Marketer Articles section called, you guessed it, “How to Pitch a Story to the Media.” It’s by an industry insider and should give you most of the information you need.

All in about 60 seconds.

During the early part of 2008, Proctor & Gamble topped all other advertisers on Nielsen’s list of top advertisers, with a total of $1.179 billion spent. They were followed by General Motors, which spent $646 million.

The remainder of Nielsen’s list follows this order (in millions):

3. AT&T: $579.1
4. Verizon: $489.2
5. Pepsico: $455.0
6. Johnson & Johnson: $427.3
7. Toyota: $406.3
8. Time Warner: $391.1
9. Ford: $373.8
10. GlaxoSmithKline: $373.2

AOL Mail has released its fourth annual survey of email usage habits. It’s a good report and one worth checking out.

One trend highlighted in the report is that 24% of email users said they don’t even use a salutation when using email — they just dive into the email messages. Slightly fewer (23%) write “Hi, Bob” and 20% say “Hello, Bob” when they start an email to a co-worker. (This, of course, begs the question — who is Bob? And why is he getting all these emails?)

In any case, it’s a great report and one worth checking out. You can read the full report here: http://www.CrazyForEmail.com. You might also be interested in checking out The 60 Second Marketer’s email benchmark report, which can be found by clicking here: Email Benchmark Study.