When I was growing up, one of my favourite TV shows was The A-Team. Each week, the group of mercenaries would get into a crazy situation but Hannibal, the leader, always formulated a brilliant escape plan. It helped that he had Mr. T’s mechanical skills, Face’s charm and Murdock's pilot skills but the important thing for us all to remember, is that like MacGyver (who came much later), he analysed the situation and put together a solution based on the resources he had.

But what happens after you formulate the plan? In my first blog, ‘Good systems make business sense’, I explored how to establish a successful lead management process. In this installment, I want to focus on the implementation of the system itself. How do you ensure that it works, is it accepted and is it progressing in the right direction? The next bit is the hard bit, implementing your best laid plans to ensure success.

Systems and processes — we all know we need them. Every marketing textbook, industry expert, blogger, university lecturer, just about anyone you can think of in the marketing world, will tell you they are essential. They tie everything together, allowing marketing teams to measure activity and increase efficiency. Reading this blog you are probably thinking, yes we have them and yes we have a system in place that works.

However, have you ever wanted more? Is it easy to measure what you do and the contribution that you and your team make to the bottom line? Do you want to align more closely with sales to fully realize activity contribution to the pipeline? And have you ever wanted to re-jig your processes or even formalize the one you already have to make it better, faster and more robust?

If so, this blog is for you.

This is the next in a series of guest blog posts by IntraLinks’ collaborators, partners, and vendors. David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR opened people's eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web. Six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese, New Rules is now a modern business classic. Scott's popular blog and hundreds of speaking engagements around the world give him a singular perspective on how businesses are implementing new strategies to reach buyers. His new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now, will be published on November 1, 2010. Download a free chapter here.

I'm thrilled to contribute this post to the IntraLinks community. Like me, IntraLinks straddles the real-time sales and marketing fields in the financial markets. When I first got out of school, I worked on a Wall Street bond trading desk and then moved into the real-time financial information business. While I spent most of my career in B2B marketing, for four years I was in B2B sales. So I've seen both sides.

Day 4 at Search Engine Strategies New York focused on Search Engine Marketing training. One of the downsides to a lot of conferences is that one hour sessions don’t allow a deep dive into the topics we really want to discuss. No fear here, as these are four hour long sessions. Here’s what we learned...

All buyers want and need to be educated. One of the best ways to do that is making it easy for them to get the information they need to make decisions. Blogs provide an excellent mechanism to do this, especially when paired with other social media tools.