B2B Marketing Automation | The Marketing Fortune Cookie

Use Lead Scoring Like Fantasy Football Free Agent Pickups

Like many of you, I’m a huge football fan. Once the season starts, I pretty much schedule my weekend around the games.  Needless to say, I spend a lot of time talking, reading, and thinking about football.  When I got to work this morning and started prioritizing my leads, it struck me how similar using lead scoring to prioritize my leads is to using players’ stats to pick up free agents in my Fantasy Football League. 

For those of you who dabble in the world of fantasy football, you’re probably familiar with the concept of browsing the free agent market and keeping an eye out for key pickups throughout the season.  Any good fantasy football owner will tell you that you need to keep the team full of talent.  By continually working the free agent market, fantasy owners will be able to navigate bye weeks and work around injuries.

When you go looking for good talent, you identify the key criteria and then sort accordingly. Below is the interface at which Fantasy owners will scour for player talent.

 

Fantasy owners will be able sort based on various fields (rushing yards, tds, total fantasy points, etc.) or columns, bringing the cream to the top. Good fantasy owners know how to use this scoring to their advantage.

With a good marketing automation platform, your sales reps should be able to take advantage of this cherry picking methodology. Your lead scoring model should enable your sales reps to take advantage of up to date points based on data that’s being tracked. Moreover, they should be able to sort by the different criteria (fit for a particular product or offering, recent interest, total lead score, etc.)

Note the Sales rep’s interface for browsing for leads/contacts to pursue (CRM System):

 

In the screen above, a Sales Rep can go and work the “best” leads first by identifying those that are both a great fit AND who have shown activities recently. The fit, interest, and total scores equate to different yet important categories like rushing yards, touchdowns, etc.

Rather than having to go and look at each record individually, your Sales Rep can quickly see if someone, in spite of showing a lot of interest, is a good or a bad fit, and know whether that lead is worth the time. This will help make your sales team more productive by making them more efficient and by saving them time.

Whether you’re a sales rep or a fantasy football owner, you know that choosing the best players is what makes you successful. Lead Scoring, like players’ stats is put in place to help you determine who is going to make you the most successful.  In both fantasy football and sales, choosing the right players is an important part of your win/loss record.

Marketing Automation: Lessons from the Trenches - Panel Discussion Highlights

Marketing Automation: Lessons from the Trenches Webinar Highlights

Last Thursday, we teamed up with DemandGen Report to host a Panel Discussion expanding on our latest whitepaper Marketing Automation: Lessons from the Trenches.  The discussion prompted some great questions from the attendees and expanded on respondents’ comments and recommendations.  If you’re looking at purchasing a Marketing Automation Solution in the next few months, I’d definitely encourage you to check out the on-demand version of the webinar.  A few of the highlights from the discussion are:

How Does Ease of Use and Implementation Affect User Experience & What Can Users Expect?

Implementation is typically pretty painless.  Most vendors have gotten pretty good at the process, and with the exception of one, most offer it for free.  About 50% of users ran into hidden costs, such as building out new brand-approved templates and rebuilding forms so make sure you talk to your provider about this on the front-end to ensure you are accounting for those costs or have the ability to make those changes internally.  Many organizations hit road blocks or begin to struggle after the first 90-120 days.  At this point, they’ve typically done the basics of email blasts, landing page set-up, lead scoring etc. and are ready to get a little more complex.  This is when usability, a solid customer support team and the flexibility of a system become critical. 

How do you properly prepare your organization to be successful with a Marketing Automation Solution?

Many of the respondents cited the importance of properly adapting content as you gain more intelligence about your leads and then building a library of content that addresses different phases of the buying cycle. 

Aligning Sales and Marketing before implementing a solution is also extremely important and a difficult task for many organizations.  A good starting point is agreeing on what a Qualified Lead is and set up a lead scoring model accordingly.  Marketing should ask for on-going feedback from Sales so lead scoring models can evolve, and they can really hone in on the highest quality leads. 

What are some of the steps that survey respondents recommended to prepare your organization and align marketing and sales?

1.     Sales and Marketing must work together create a starting point on what they consider a qualified lead and acknowledge that change is going to occur within the system on a regular basis. 

2.     Database must be segmented and cleaned. 

3.     Test, test and test again.  Test the flow of your lead nurturing process, the effectiveness of your offerings, the capture rates of your landing pages.  You should constantly be refining your strategy based on your results. 

What questions should people be asking vendors when choosing a solution that’s right for them?

It’s definitely important to ask the obvious questions around usability, extra training costs or fees, flexibility and customer support.  Some additional questions that you might not think of are:

§  Dedicated or Shared IP Address?  If you’re on a shared IP address, other people’s email might affect your deliverability if they’re sending out junk. 

§  Are there any limitations or times that my emails will not go out as quickly?  Some vendors have “busy” times, in which emails take longer to be delivered because of high traffic or a bottleneck in the system. 

§  Customer Retention Rate?  Don’t think because a company is signing up hundreds of new customers that it’s the best vendor – that’s just an indication of a strong sales organization.  You should be more concerned with how well a vendor retains its clients. 

§  Can I speak to 3 ex-customers and find out why they left?   This may be difficult to do, but if you can get an idea of why customers are walking away from a vendor, you can determine if that same thing is going to be a big issue for you as well.

How did respondents feel about Marketing Automation overall?

Overall the feedback was positive and the respondents found value in their solutions.  The majority of respondents felt that being able to measure and track campaign results was the biggest value-add marketing automation offered. 

Customer Nurturing

 

One of the benefits of taking a vacation is that it can provide you with perspective.  When we’re up to our necks in building a business, it’s difficult to recognize opportunities to further engage with your customers.  Getting away allows YOU to be the customer and the service you receive might provide insight to what your customers may be experiencing.  Unfortunately, my insight came from a less than optimal customer experience.

After few years away, my wife and I decided to return to a Caribbean resort we’d been to several times before.  In the past, our repeat trips felt  like returning home – we were greeted by name, found special gift baskets in our room, were invited to special events for returning guests, and offered further discounts for returning – but this trip we received none of that treatment, despite stating it was a return trip when we made the reservation (on-line) and when we checked-in.  I didn’t think much of it until I spoke to other return guests around the pool – they had all received the “usual” treatment.

Feeling a little hurt, I inquired with the hotel manager about the oversight – “We’re sorry sir, we just overlooked it,” she said.  Isn’t it in your computer system and the orders automatically generated?  “No sir, we keep track of it on paper and the manager on duty is required to make the appropriate phone calls to set-up all the arrangements.”  I was shocked, to be honest.  To make matters worse, nothing was done to rectify the error.  Just, “Sorry”.  We will NOT be going back to that resort.

So, what does this have to do with marketing automation?  Many businesses take the approach that the marketing automation system is only for nurturing leads and prospects.  Once they become customers, the responsibility for nurturing the customer belongs to someone else, usually a person.  However, the same systems that are used to nurture leads can be used to automate customer nurturing as well.  You can automate follow-up e-mails, set reminders for phone calls, track customer activity and tie that into your cross-sell/up-sell programs.  Most importantly, it takes an error prone, people-based process and automates it, eliminating the risk of things falling through the cracks.   

Don’t forget to nurture your current customers as you did when they were prospects.  They (and you) will be glad you did.

Marketing Automation – Lessons Learned Survey Results (Part 1)

Over the past couple of months, Manticore Technology has worked with DemandGen Report to develop a comprehensive survey of marketing automation software users to answer a basic question – how’s it working out? 

Beyond that, we wanted to share with future marketing automation purchaser’s knowledge and insight.  What did they like?  What didn’t they like? What advice would users offer?

If you’re considering purchasing a marketing automation platform, the whitepaper is a must read.  I think you’ll be surprised by some of the findings.

The report is chock full of info.  Over the next several weeks I’ll be delving into different pieces that I found interesting.  Feel free to chime in in the comments section below.

You can download the entire report from DemandGen Report here.

Overall Customer Satisfaction

The first major finding of the survey was the strong correlation between usability of the marketing automation system and overall customer satisfaction.  97% of respondents that found their solution easy to use were satisfied with their solution.  This compared to 36% of respondents that found their solution difficult to use, but were nonetheless satisfied.

Additionally, there was a strong correlation between ease of implementation and overall customer satisfaction.  93% of respondents that found their solution easy to implement were satisfied with their solution.  This compared to 58% of respondents that found their solution difficult to use, but were nonetheless satisfied.

While this is somewhat of a no-brainer, it illustrates that marketers need to choose a marketing automation solution that their team can actually use.  This varies from organization to organization.  The $5M company with 3 marketers has a lot on their plate – they’re all over the place in their responsibilities.  Would any of them have the bandwidth to manage a complex platform?

In a larger organization you have more dedicated resources to potentially manage a marketing automation solution.  In this situation, keep in mind – if you have a highly trained individual, you are in essence putting all your eggs in one basket.  If that individual moves on, you may struggle to use the system until you find a new, highly qualified individual (that may be expensive). 

Next week I’ll be filing you in on what respondents had to say about customer support.

3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Outbound Campaign Results

As Demand Generation Manager, I am responsible for using our technology to create powerful, effective outbound campaigns.  Essentially, I eat the dog food here at Manticore.  While the technology provides me with the all the tools I need, strategy and execution determine how successful they are.  Like any marketer, I learn something new from every campaign and hopefully get a little better each time.  I’d like to offer a few tips that I learned along the way that helped increase my response rates on campaigns: 

 

1.       Use HTML Email Best Practices – If you’re using HTML to design your email, make sure you or your designer are using best practices for email HTML.  Designing an email in HTML is very different from regular web design.  Your goal should be to make sure that the email is as viewable and as deliverable as possible to all email clients.  You can’t control the security settings on email clients, but you can follow some guidelines to make sure your images show up and your email does not go into spam for most clients.  Design Label Blog lists some great articles and resources in HTML Best Practices Resources and Inspiration.

 

2.       Coordinate all PR Efforts & Social Media Efforts with Email Campaign – If you have a new Whitepaper, Report, Product Release or anything newsworthy, send out a press release the same day you send out your email campaign.  Also, if you are having a third party distribute your offering,  make sure your email goes out on the same date & time that they send theirs out.  Announce through all Social Media outlets.  The bigger “buzz” you, the more downloads you will see from your email campaign.  

 

3.       A/B Test You Subject Line & Content – The best way to determine what is effective for email campaigns is to run your own A/B testing.  In my last campaign, I split my list down the middle and tested two different subject lines.  Subject line A was short and left out a key qualifier.  Subject Line B was longer but included that qualifier.  Judging by the number of emails opened, and click thrus to the landing page, the shorter subject line performed slightly better than the longer subject line.  You can also test the effectiveness of your content by changing it up slightly and A/B testing it as well. 

 

4.       Segment your List – One thing we preach as a marketing automation provider is that quality is better than quantity.  This starts with your outbound campaigns.  Instead of sending outgoing messages to everyone is your database, segment your list to target only those that you think would be interested in the particular offering based on their behavior, lead score and demographic fit.  Many approach outbound campaigns as a way to pull in as many leads as possible and then weed out the unqualified ones.  This essentially just creates more work.  If you segment your list on the front end, you may not have as many responses but your responses will be coming from the right people, and the number of passed leads will be much higher. 

 

When outbound marketing is done correctly, you should be able to control the quality of the leads more than you can with inbound.  Robert Lesser offers some great insight on the benefits of outbound marketing in his recent post Marketing on the Outbound.  I encourage you to check it out. 

 

The Case for Customer Support

In a recent DemandGen Survey, 53 Marketing Executives shared their biggest lessons learned on purchasing and implementing a Marketing Automation Solution.  An overwhelming majority of the respondents reported that they found their marketing automation solution valuable, and said it had improved their overall business.  But what is even more telling and useful to us as a Marketing Automationprovider, is the advice respondents offered to other buyers and what they said was important when selecting a solution in hindsight.  When asked about their biggest lessons learned, 60% of respondents said, “Customer support is extremely important and should be a top priority when purchasing a solution.”

I thought this was interesting considering many of the solutions tout ease-of-use and a “do-it-yourself” approach.  So, why is customer support so critical?

The reason is simple:  No matter how easy a marketing automation platform is to use, it is collection of marketing tools, as opposed to just a one-point solution. Each component within the application can require a different skill set to set up and operate. There’s a place for Strategists (nurture campaigns), a place for Creatives (email design), and a place for Analysts (web analytics).  Of course, in most cases, it is the same person using all of these functions that has a mixture of those skill sets.    Marketing Automation is a sophisticated world for mapping processes in order to build out efficiencies.

When customer support is done right, it’s the ultimate resource for learning how to maximize a marketing automation solution and not only help you troubleshoot problems, but it also teaches you to be a better marketer.   In our customer reviews, our dedicated customer support model is frequently mentioned as a differentiator among us and other vendors, and we’ve taken great strides to grow this part of the business. Customers Success Managers (CSMs) are a key resource for Manticore customers. CSMs don’t just troubleshoot problems; they are also savvy marketers who can strategize at a high level or go in and implement the tactical elements of a campaign.  Their job is to make sure you are successful.  Customer retention is such a critical component of SaaS offerings that it only makes sense that marketing automation vendors should take great strides to make sure their users are power users.  Regardless of the vendor you choose, customer support should be a top priority – take it from users, who have been there.

Can Social Media help us build better products?

We all understand that Social Media is another tool in your arsenal to improve your sales rep success, but it can be used for more than just delivering marketing messages and keeping customers engaged with sales.  As a product manager, I started thinking about how Social Media could help me communicate with the customers more directly and build a better product. Traditionally, the role of a product manager is to collect customer feedback and enable engineering to update the solution based on customers’ needs.

Integrated in appropriate sources and communities, the requirements collection sample now becomes much larger than traditional sources. Social Media give product managers the ability to collect the requirements and customer/user feedback on much larger scale.  This new communication channel is direct – with no middle man (sales, field engineers, executives and other good faith advisors), who think they know exactly how to re-phrase what customers want. In Social Media communities, all product-feedback-censorship is removed from the conversation, and the best part - it costs much less than traditional sources. Of course, it will take some time to become part of the communities as subscribing to RSS feeds will just not do it.

Social Media will not replace traditional sources of requirements any time soon, perhaps never. But with careful planning, avoiding typical traps and proper prioritization of information sources, it could help us build much better products at a reduced cost.

Marketing Automation or Sales Automation?

 

At Manticore, we think a lot about the value that is derived from our marketing automation platform.  We’re continually asking the question, “Who benefits from our services and how?”  One of the interesting aspects of our discussion has concerned the value delivered to the individual sales person by marketing automation.  At its core, a lead nurturing program is really about the sales process. 

 

In Sales 1.0, lead qualification and prospect education was done by a sales person (or perhaps a tele-prospector) who either called or met face-to-face with those leads who fit the demographic profile of a good prospect.  Presentations, demos and discussions over lunch were all key to establishing the need for the solution, how your product or service was the best fit, determining if there is budget available and if there is a real timeline for the project.

 

With Sales 2.0, lead nurturing programs delivered by a marketing automation platform can take on many of these functions.  Most prospects prefer to start their purchase process online, doing core product research, building their business case, and doing competitive comparisons.  A good lead nurturing campaign can track the lead’s progress through this process and deliver the right content at the right time to advance their education.  Furthermore, inferences can be made about how qualified the prospect is based on the content being viewed.  Most importantly, once the prospect has fully self-educated and self-qualified, an alert can be sent to the appropriate sales rep so that the sale can be closed.

 

Replacing lots of phone calls and face-to-face meetings with automatically delivered content and detailed tracking?  Sounds like Sales Automation to me.

Ramping up with Marketing Automation

I've been working in marketing automation software space for close to six years now.  During that time I've spoken to hundreds of marketers at various stages of adopting MA technology.  When talking at various events, the question/comment that keeps popping up is - "how do I get started with marketing automation? It seems really difficult."  There's no wonder - to an outsider looking in, implementing a system with all the proper business processes can be a daunting process - especially if you think about doing it all at once.

My number one piece of advice -  baby steps.  Rome wasn't built in a day - or a week - or a month for that matter.  At its heart, marketing automation is solving a fundamental business problem - how can we as marketers effectively move leads through the pipeline to ensure that sales is engaging only leads that are ready to buy, while marketing continues to engage those that aren't ready to buy in a dialog with lead nurturing. 

At the heart there are three components that need to be addressed with this business problem:  People, Process, and Technology.  A marketing automation solution is just one piece of the puzzle.  People and process are the other key components.  Each of these offer their own challenges.  Think about the process component - how many people are involved in touching a lead within your organization?  It's impossible to think that this is going to change overnight.

My advice - view marketing automation and it's implementation as a journey - not a destination.  Draw out a road-map of where you would like to get to and all the corresponding people and processes that are involved.  Then build out stages.  Getting from point A to point B is much easier than trying to figure out how to get to the end of your journey in one big implementation.  Every journey starts with a first step.  Take it.

Social Media & Marketing Automation. Worlds Colliding?

There have been two "hot" topics at every marketing trade-show or event I've attended over the past year.  First would have to be social media.  Yes, the marketing world is aflutter with this new medium.  The excitement reminds me a bunch of kids headed to the candy store.  The world as we know it has been revolutionized (again) - do you have Snickers?  Echo chamber aside, social media is an exciting communication channel that every marketer needs to be utilizing to deliver their message to the market.  With all this hubbub, new solutions are hitting the market to enable marketers to more effectively track and manage social media.  Have you heard about Radian6 yet?  Check them out.

The second topic has been marketing automation solutions.  Marketing leaders have been talking about automation for as long as I've been the space -  over six years now.  Based on the wide spread adoption we're starting to see at Manticore Technology, there's no doubt mmarketing automation has  hit the mainstream.  Is it any wonder?  I've seen some pretty amazing results from our customers have put the time in to define their business process and wrap a proper lead management solution around the process.

The next question to me is how are these worlds coming together - or should they?  I think there is a huge opportunities for integration of these types of applications.  If we look at marketing automation solutions as a mechanism to help move prospects into and through the sales pipeline and social media as a means to generate more awareness and broader interest, the two need to work in collaboration since the sales and marketing funnel is unified.  But how?

The first way would probably be around enabling marketers to distribute broad social media messages  within their marketing automation solution.  If I'm executing a campaign, wouldn't I want to spread the word through social media?  You bet.  Today I would need to log into various apps making it quite time consuming.  What were all those passwords again?

Another opportunity for integration would be tracking individuals in the social discussion, then based on their response, perhaps I would want to engage them in an automated manner.  At a minimum, I'd want my sales team to see how a prospect has been responding so they know how to engage the prospect.  For a great example of this, check out Insideview.

What say you?  To integrate or not to integrate?