Data and science are playing a more prominent role in demand generation, and the marketers with the best data-driven marketing strategies are pulling ahead of their peers. In their upcoming keynote address as part of the Content2Conversion Conference and Demand Gen Summit Feb. 15-Feb. 17, SiriusDecisions’ Marketing Leader Brad Gillespie, and Carrie Rediker, Research Director Demand Creation Strategies, will discuss the role of analytics and experimentation in generating demand.

Traditional direct mail is still an important means of communication among B2B marketers, and industry experts are seeing signs of its resurgence as a lead gen tool. This is due to marketers seeing better response rates to mail pieces, and leveraging it with other channels and disciplines such as account-based marketing for a targeted and integrated approach.

The image of the B2B sales rep flying around the country to make in-person presentations — followed by long lunches with prospects — is fading. While most experts aren’t predicting the total elimination of B2B field sales reps, leading organizations such as Cox Media, Betts Recruiting and DoubleDutch are using tools such as social data mining, predictive technologies, video emails and more to bolster the success of their inside sales teams.

In his upcoming presentation at the B2B Content2Conversion conference, Jim D’Arcangelo, SVP of Marketing at service commerce platform provider Booker, will be discussing the next generation content-driven demand gen during his presentation. Demand Gen Report, which hosts the conference, sat down with D’Arcangelo to talk about the tools and techniques needed to build a content-centric demand gen strategy.

MindTouch, a 10-year-old customer management software company, has raised $12 million in venture funding. The company will use the investment to enhance its product offerings, grow its marketing and increase integrations with partners that include Salesforce, SAP and Oracle.