Engagement Systems is one of the newer players in the marketing automation space. We let them “speak for themselves” earlier this week, but I wanted to dive further to check out some of their content. So far they only have a few whitepapers and case studies, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their content. Their whitepaper, Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing, is a quick read packed with great tips. The whitepaper promises 10 tactics for improving revenue and ROI now. After the explantion of each tactic they offer a take-away (great idea for your next whitepaper or eBook). Here are the take-aways from the whitepaper:
Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks. Protect your marketing investment and maximize resources through better lead qualification and lead nurturing.
Unify sales and marketing in the pursuit of common goals.
Continue generating leads, but put greater emphasis on nurturing activities as well as retention and winback strategies to maximize customer lifetime revenue.
Make sure that you have all the materials in place to be the resource for information to support your buyer.
Map out the buying process and help prospects and customers navigate their way to a buying decision.
Automate the sales and marketing process by setting event and behavior triggers that utilize intelligent marketing automation to autoexecute marketing touches.
Deploy one-to-one communications for more meaningful dialogue with prospects and customers to shorten the buying process.
Commit to an ongoing learning process; employ a valuable exchange of information to align your product and service offerings with the changing needs and interests of each individual buyer.
Deploy multiple means of outreach to ensure that your message is received, and to move the customer towards a purchase position relative to their individual needs and interests.
Establish ongoing contact with customers to preserve satisfaction, increase up-selling and cross-selling, and decrease customer defections.
Be sure to read the entire whitepaper for the full story. It is definitely worth the read.
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Rob Hampton at Engagement Systems for this post.
What is Engagement Systems?
Engagement Systems helps companies leverage their CRM investment and maximize sales and marketing resources to grow sales revenue and improve ROI with an automated marketing campaign system. The web-enabled software works with existing CRM systems to access prospect and customer information and make that data actionable to more efficiently capture and nurture leads, retain customers and win-back defecting clients.
From single communications to multi-step, multi-channel campaigns – utilizing email, direct mail, pURLS and landing pages – each personalized communication is automatically created, delivered, tracked and reported within the CRM record; eliminating time-consuming manual processes and ensuring consistent, relevant, timely communications that move prospects through the buying process and build valuable relationships with existing customers.
What Makes Engagement Systems Different?
True Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Communications
Engagement Systems is the only CRM integration that truly automates the execution, delivery and tracking of multi-channel communications via direct mail, email, and personalized web pages (Personalized URLS) from within a single application. Eliminates the need to coordinate multiple vendors.
1:1 Personalized Marketing
Both single communications and multi-touch campaigns can be executed to one contact at a time or to a segmented group of contacts. There are no minimum orders.
Trigger Automation
Engagement Systems automated campaigns are governed by a set of business rules that create automatic triggers to initiate and manage what communications are sent and when. The configuration and integration is completely handled by Engagement Systems; there is no manual intervention on the client’s part to create, set up or kick off communications. This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources or IT involvement.
Customer Lifecycle Optimization
Engagement Systems addresses the entire prospect and customer life cycle with custom-developed campaigns and programs for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer reactivation, up-selling and cross-selling.
Integrated Reporting
All automated communications are written back to and tracked through the CRM system. Clients have the option for custom reporting and metrics or can use the tools inherent within their CRM system. Because of Engagement Systems’ complete integration, all data resides in a single location.
Value-Added Services
Engagement Systems makes it easy to adopt and use the system by providing a combination of optional marketing services that delivers an end-to-end solution. Unlike other systems, Engagement Systems is virtually hands free for both sales and marketing, requiring no one to upload or manage artwork or to initiate campaigns. This makes implementation pain free, quick to deploy and low-maintenance to sustain.
Cost Effectiveness
Engagement Systems’ automated direct mail, email and Personalized URL production systems streamline the creation, execution and delivery processes, making multi-channel marketing campaigns cheaper and faster to execute. All aimed at increasing your sales, profitability and ROMI. This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources, consulting, IT and training expenses. Additionally, there are no expensive recurring seat charges.
Do you know who your customers are? Not just by name, but do you know what they actually do, why your product is a good fit for them? Better yet, do you know what makes some of your customers less than a good fit? Here at ReachForce we try to take a holistic approach to analyzing our customers both those who we do regular business with and those that we may not have continued business with (I know it’s not a pretty subject but everyone’s got them).
In looking at what these customers do, what their price point is and the rates that they convert (from trial to subscription or bookings to revenue) we can get a much better picture as to what types of customers we do well with and where we should focus future data discovery. It’s a simple enough exercise, but take a look at your top 10-15 customers (those who spend the most with you) and your worst customers (those who may have done business with you once and then never again), see what parallels you can draw between the customers within each group. For us we’ve learned that customers with a higher price point, a tech focused business and those who market to more than one vertical seem to have a greater need for what we do an a tolerance for our price point.
Once you’ve gotten a clearer picture of what your good customers look like and what the less than successful customers look like, you can better focus your marketing efforts (and for you sales folk out there, your follow up and prospecting efforts). Now that you have a profile of your best customer, be sure to do continued contact discovery to find more buyers that are similar to your best customers.
Does your sales team understand the metrics you’re measuring? Think about it this way, your sales team is focused on numbers, hitting the right number of activities each day/week, turning out the right amount of proposals to get good closed deals, and of course, the all important quota figure!
So when asked, you tell the sales team you measure click-throughs, website visits, opens, but it doesn’t mean anything to them….why you ask? Because just like all of the rest of us, they only care about what directly impacts them, yes you can make a case for the activity you’re measuring to impact them but it’s a story, it’s not a direct correlation.
What directly correlates to daily life of a sales person? The number of leads you’re putting in the top of the funnel. Let’s be more specific though, not just leads, QUALITY leads. First you’ve got to have a unified definition of a quality lead (is it someone who has shown interest through opening your emails, checking out your site or is it someone who has downloaded a few resources, attended some webinars and who fits a great profile of your ideal buyer?), get on the same page with sales – decide what that perfectly qualified and quality lead is because not everyone who fills out a web form or downloads a white paper fits that mold.
The important thing is to directly correlate what you’re doing with what your sales team is doing – how many leads did you fill the pipe with this week and then track them through the pipeline. How many of those leads generated the right kind of activity to create a closed deal? Bring this full circle for a minute, if you can track how many leads you put in the pipeline that generate activity during each phase of the pipe and then close, pretty impressive stuff to the C-level folks!
Now for tracking this stuff:
In your CRM, use a lead source field – map it to the contact through the process (for all of your salesforce.com users, we’ll have some instructions soon).
Keep tabs on where these leads came, from…not just that marketing delivered them but that you purchased them from ReachForce, got them from an event/trade show, they were a web form, etc. That way you can see what sources generate the most successful leads and you can replicate that success.
Don’t just look at this information once and then toss it – keep track of it historically, the more information you’re armed with the better off you’ll be.
I recently came across a great blog post on the Savy B2B Marketing blog. They are quickly rising to the top of my must read list. I wanted to make sure The B2B Lead readers didn’t miss out on the great tips in Need Content? 20 Formats to Consider.
Here is a short version of the list so be sure to check out the entire article:
White Papers
eBooks
Workbooks and Toolkits
Research reports
Buying guides
Case studies
Checklists and action plans
Glossary
Q&A and FAQs
Articles
Blog posts
Newsletters
Slideshows
Webcasts
Podcasts
Videos
Interactive applications
Microsites
Knowledge base
Demos
Something to keep in mind is that these are merely the delivery mechanisms for your content. Don’t limit the reach of your content by restricting it to one format. There is no reason you couldn’t break up a white paper or eBook into smaller pieces and repurpose as blog posts. One of the best ideas we ever had was to turn our blog posts into eBooks. We took all the posts for a particular category, had our graphics guy drop them into a template and bam, we had 5 new eBooks without having to write any “new” content. We create our monthly newsletter in a similar way, making it a “best of” the last month’s posts.
We are excited to be a part of the B2B Marketing Zone joining the ranks of fellow bloggers, Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay and Jon Miller. The B2B Marketing Zone is a joint venture between Tom Pick of WebMarketCentral and Tony Karrer CEO/CTO of TechEmpower. In their own words here is what B2B marketing Zone is all about:
B2B Marketing Zone is a collection of blog posts and articles all around B2B Marketing. It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create this topic hub. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregates content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content.
The goals of the B2B Marketing Zone are:
Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content from as defined by the community.
Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.
Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.
Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users of B2B Marketing Zone are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.
If you are looking to beef up your RSS feed, you can subscribe to a “best of” or to the full feed of everything. It is a great one stop shop for B2B Marketing content.
Gotta say, when Amy asked if I’d read this whitepaper from Silverpop I was instantly intrigued. Maybe it’s the fact that sitting as the Sales/Marketing Ops person I have sat directly under that bus a few times (as we all have regardless of which side you come from), or maybe it’s the tongue in cheek humor scattered throughout the copy but for once I was entertained and informed by a whitepaper!
While the whitepaper is peppered with humor it also touches on a few key items that cause the friction between marketing and some steps for resolving those items.
Problem: Sales is frustrated when marketing hands off weak leads.
Solution: The key to this isn’t exactly what it sounds like, instead of placing blame, get on the same page about what constitutes a lead, get sales and marketing on the same page so that everyone knows what a lead is and execute on passing leads over accordingly. Unfortunately, if we’re all speaking different languages in terms of what a lead (contact, prospect, etc.) is then it’s just a distraction.
Problem: Marketing sees Sales as only griping about Marketing (therefore causing the split between them)
Solution: Sales needs to talk to marketing – if the leads being sent over are good 1/3 of the time, tell marketing what was wrong with the other 2/3’s. Don’t keep marketing in the dark, let them know how leads are progressing through the pipeline and what leads progress better (therefore better helping to define what kind of leads Marketing should focus on getting to Sales). Don’t take all the credit – yes you guys close the sale but materials, programs, webinars, the website, events all of those things were put together by marketing to help you close that deal – give them a little credit too!
These are just a few of the items mentioned by Silverpop, but they are enough to get the wheels turning for you. I highly recommend taking a little time to read the entire whitepaper, it’s insightful and truly reaches the heart of the problem, aligning Marketing and Sales is all about communication.
I’ll close with my favorite quote from the whitepaper:
Sales asks: How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Sales answers: 15.
One to ignore the request from sales for more light,
One to develop a creative brief on why light is important,
Seven to shoot the YouTube video about screwing in light bulbs,
One to evaluate the amount of light offered by competitors and draft a competitive analysis,
Two to create the product slick,
One to determine competitive pricing for the service and set the cost well above that,
One to buy a 150-watt bulb for a 60-watt lamp,
And one to put just the right “spin” on the process.
Sorry – gotta love a whitepaper with a personality
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) — Silverpop’s Director of Field Marketing and B2B marketing evangelist — for this post.
What is Silverpop Engage B2B?
There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place. Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal. Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.
The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality. MarketingSherpa has published data indicating that for every sales-ready lead that comes into a B2B vendor, there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured until they are ready to purchase.
Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage. Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process. This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.
And yet the impetus for B2B marketers to proactively generate leads, drive sales and support customer lifetime value has never been stronger. Enter marketing automation.
How We’re Different
The drivers above explain the rapid growth in the marketing automation marketplace. But what makes one vendor different from another?
At Silverpop, we believe assessing how one marketing automation vendor is different from another comes down to understanding their approach to helping marketers address this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing as described above.
Our approach is simple.
Total Focus on B2B marketing. First, we have a marketing automation solution built, from the ground up, around the unique needs and issues of B2B marketers. This is our focus, and it’s how we rationalize everything we do to extend, expand and innovate its features and capabilities.
Orchestrating buyer-centric marketing; powering sales and marketing collaboration. Second, our products and services are designed to address the major external and internal issues facing B2B marketers today. What are these issues? At an external/marketplace level, it is being more buyer-centric than ever before (given the environment described above). At an internal/organizational level, it is better aligning and collaborating with the sales organization.
B2B marketing is different. Sure some of the trends cited above — especially the shift in buyer power — are common to both B2B and B2C. But B2B marketing is still different. How?
In B2C marketing — especially with ‘fast moving consumer goods’ — scale matters. Thus, a top-down strategy is taken … where mistakes in customer communication may be made at the individual consumer level, but that is assumed to be okay as long as it is a small percentage of total interactions.
But in B2B marketing — especially with high price points and low unit volumes — relationships really do matter. One mistake made upstream in the lead-cultivation phase can have disastrous effects downstream. Thus, a ‘bottoms-up strategy’ in marketing is more appropriate.
The challenge of modern B2B marketing, thus, lies in building that granular and continuous ‘one-to-one’ relationship with a prospect, pre-sales, while also scaling overall activity to ensure a sufficient volume of leads to meet revenue targets.
This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is built around the entire lifecycle of developing and nurturing B2B buyer leads upstream through converting leads to customers and maintaining those customers downstream.
CRM integration: The system has pre-built integration with industry-leading CRM suites, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Netsuite and Salesforce, and the system can integrate with any other CRM suite via standards-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs).
Industry-leading B2B marketer education: Successful marketing automation begins with successful B2B marketing strategies. That is why Silverpop spends significant time and resources on marketer education. The keystone of this effort is the company’s recently-launched B2B Marketing University series.
Service and support: An intelligent technology platform, alone, is not sufficient to ensure the success of a marketing automation deployment. That’s why service and support is a hallmark of Silverpop’s offering and one of the top reasons why customers select Silverpop Engage B2B.
Orchestrating Buyer-centric Marketing
I highlighted the critical issue in B2B marketing of having a bottoms-up strategy and of driving one-to-one dialogue with prospects. This leads to a subsequent operational challenge: It takes a tremendous scale of raw leads to filter down to a single buyer. Research from SiriusDecisions indicates that an average B2B organization yields 2-3 sales conversions for every 1000 raw/upstream leads. Given this, how do you effectively market on a ‘mass’ one-to-one level — building a repeatable lead management strategy that gives each and every lead individual and tailored attention and personalization and that responds to their pull?
Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: “As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. ”
This is why at the core of Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is a smart, powerful, yet easy-to-use campaign management interface for building and managing buyer-centric marketing.
Dynamic campaign management: The campaign management interface allows you to build complex, dynamic campaigns that deliver marketing communication actions in response to the ‘pull’ of buyers. For instance, did your prospect recently visit your Website, download a white paper or dial your call center? By identifying actions and dynamic responses, Silverpop enables B2B marketers to manage complex, buyer-centric campaigns.
Campaign GUI: A key differentiator of the campaign management interface is something we call our ‘campaign GUI’ — a graphical environment that allows marketers to drag and drop campaign planning elements, that operates a lot like video-editing software and that is highly intuitive.
The major ‘internal’/organizational challenge marketers face lies in better syncing up with their sales teams — an issue closely related to being buyer-centric and of critical importance as sales people are tapped by buyers later and later in their buying process. This requires B2B marketers to better understand and empathize with their sales team colleagues. It also requires systems that can promote transparency and collaboration.
Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing’s role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing’s messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing’s contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next “new” economy.
This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform also focuses on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams — so lead management and buyer dialogue is seamless.
Lead scoring and routing: A robust lead scoring and routing engine both creates a catalyst for improving sales and marketing agreement on what constitutes a ‘good customer prospect’ and also helps to manage roles and lead hand-off on an ongoing basis. Key features include the ability to score based on a variety of demographic (explicit), behavioral (implicit) and BANT (budget, authority, needs and timing) factors, as well as mechanisms for returning cold leads from sales back to marketing for nurturing.
Sales-team transparency: Another key feature is the ability of sales team members to view granular details of lead activity from their Salesforce account. This ensures that a sales team member has complete insight into the pre-sales dialogue that has occurred and can pick up and run with a lead with maximum insight.
Are You Ready for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?
Responding to ‘buyer 2.0′ and leading in this new B2B marketing environment requires a blend of know-how and firepower. Silverpop is focused on both.
The Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform combines best practices with robust performance. And the Silverpop team is dedicated to delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of B2B marketers. We invite you to take a test drive of the system.
A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. However, I for one do not want to pay thousands of dollars in royalties. Images and other multimedia can really bring a blog post to life or capture the attention of your email subscribers. If you are like most of us, purchasing multimedia doesn’t exactly get its own budget line item. Thanks to Barb Dybwad at Mashable for the post, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog.
Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.
Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. Be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:
I recommend digging a little to find an image that is not too overused. It is possible to find stock photography that doesn’t look glaringly like stock photography. Trust me, you will feel like you have been sucker punched when you are driving down the freeway and see the same image you used for your entire fall campaign on a billboard for a used car dealership.
Also, before you use any image, audio or video, double check the license agreement for allowed uses and attribution requirements.
For Barb’s full list, be sure to check out the complete article.
Thanks to Kevin Joyce at Market2Lead for his post earlier this week. In addition to learning about Market2Lead, we want to share with our readers one of their whitepapers, Increase Lead-to-Sales Ratios with Effective Lead Qualification and Scoring. In it Market2Lead’s CEO Geoff Rego walks through some key pieces to developing a robust Lead Scoring process. Some of the highlights:
Define ‘Qualified’ – this is something we’ve spoken about before on the B2B Lead (check out Amy’s post, What is a Lead? What is a Prospect?), it’s key to make sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what a qualified lead is, what a prospect is, etc.
Qualify your leads in stages – don’t assume that you can qualify all of your leads at once or one time, you should continuously be in the process of qualifying what is in your database as well as what is coming into your database. By the same token, make sure you’re also disqualifying things continuously too! (We’ve chatted about ways to disqualify)
Get help! If you can’t do this alone (which is pretty likely), use technology. There are numerous tools out there, both within Marketing Automation Systems and things you can build yourself within Sales Force Automation tools that can score your leads for you. It’s reasonable to assume you can qualify a few hundred (or even a few thousand) leads with good eyes and some manpower, it’s a bit overwhelming to assume you can qualify tens of thousands (or more) leads by yourself. Don’t let this task overwhelm you, look for software that can help.
Do this now! Don’t wait to implement lead scoring and qualification practices, it may not be perfect the first time around but getting the ball rolling is an important step. The faster you start, the more ‘gems’ you might find in your own data.
What is Silverpop Engage B2B?
