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 Kevin Joyce (@nivenor1) at Market2Lead for this post.

What is Market2Lead?

Here is the story behind marketing automation, and Market2Lead:

Sales folks spend most of their time in proposal and negotiation stages. For the most part, they do not like cold-calling or prospecting. Also, a day of a sales person’s time can be quite expensive. To make sales folks more effective, we look for ways to give them only marketing-qualified, sales-ready leads. And if we do that by having marketing people do tele-prospecting on the phone, we would spend almost as much as using the sales folks. So we need automation to make it cost-effective. The further back you go in the sales cycle (left in the graphic below) the less expensive the touch has to be! The majority of CRMs simply don’t have the depth of functionality to take on this marketing role of nurturing. So we look for marketing automation to help us nurture and develop relationships with prospects, gathering more information about their needs and offering them relevant educational materials that support the value proposition. Then, at the right time, we hand the prospects off to Sales. Market2Lead excels at doing this.

Market2Lead offers marketing automation software and services that provide the automation and analytical insight to move more prospect relationships into customer relationships. The Market2Lead software assures that marketing programs are more effective in producing sales-ready leads, and that marketing investments have a measurably better ROI.

A marketing automation system must provide these benefits to be of value to Marketing:

• Increased Marketing effectiveness
• Deliver more sales ready-leads to sales teams
• Nurture prospects so they move through the funnel faster
• Measure the marketing influence on opportunities in the funnel
• Provide marketing accountability and ROI
• Ensure that Marketing only adds validated, standardized data into the CRM

The success of any marketing campaign is dependent first and foremost on the target list, then the quality of the offer and finally on the presentation of the offer. This is why at Market2Lead, we have a strong focus on helping organizations execute campaigns that are measurable, leverage cleaner, richer data and produce predictably great results. The goals for marketing organizations everywhere are to produce more sales-ready leads and to contribute in a measurable way to increasing revenues and profitability of their firms. This requires greater marketing effectiveness and accountability.

A New Level of Marketing Measurability
Marketing automation not only brings efficiencies through automation and effectiveness through better execution, it also brings to marketing a new level of measurability. Market2Lead brings the unprecedented ability to define business rules to connect marketing campaigns and programs to sales opportunities, so the precise impact of marketing on the business results can be measured. With the costs entered into the campaign definition, we can even show you your ROI and cost per lead. Market2Lead has full marketing data warehouse capability, in addition to operational reporting, so that custom dashboards can save you the time you’d otherwise spend to aggregate and present data.

Capture More Leads
Market2Lead’s sophisticated response management captures more leads in less time. Our web forms can be configured and deployed by marketing managers (rather than involving IT staff), and are dynamic, allowing you to do progressive profiling of prospects. Our forms also have field validation and standardization, so you can ensure a richer and cleaner marketing database. And since only a fraction of the marketing leads come through a company’s website, we offer sophisticated contact data integration capabilities to enable pooling of all offline and online data. These include a web services API, scheduled FTP imports, and an elegant import wizard that helps ensure the data integrity and completeness of your database.

Nurture Smarter
The best nurture campaigns take into account the entire behavioral history of each person and go about presenting the best possible next offer that is appropriate for that person. The Market2Lead system has the unique ability to automate arbitration of the most relevant offer for each individual.

The 5 Core Areas of Functionality in Marketing Automation
There are five areas of functionality that are essential in any good marketing automation system. All five are listed below, along with information on how Market2Lead excels at them all.

Contact Data Integration
CDI centralizes all of your online and offline marketing data in one database. Market2Lead provides:

• Dynamic integration with the SFA system
• Scheduled FTP and API for data integration

Response Management
The capture of validated, standardized data is key to effective campaigns. Market2Lead provides:

• Dynamic forms with progressive profiling
• Data format validation and address validation
• Personalized microsites and PURLs

Lead Management
New leads and responses must be scored, sent to the appropriate queues and in some cases routed to the appropriate channel. Market2Lead provides:

• Sophisticated scoring based on all prospect behavior, association with opportunities or accounts, and demographic data
• Notifications that can be initiated to Sales, Marketing, and others based on new responses
• Support of multiple queues, including SFA, tele-qualification, partners and reseller queues

Campaign Automation
Market2lead provides campaign automation that measurably increases the productivity of marketing:

• System-arbitrated adaptive campaigns that determine the best next offer for each individual
• Ability to copy all assets and deep copy of programs that include all program attributes
• Sophisticated list segmentation that includes: opportunity, account data, and time-based selection

Marketing Business Intelligence
Market2lead provides a business intelligence platform that includes:

• A historical data warehouse with custom reporting and dashboards
• Reporting on Marketing’s influence on the sales pipeline
• Web analytics and tracking of unknown visitors

Why Market2Lead?
What makes Market2Lead the best solution for so many firms?

• The strongest response management capability
• The best data integration capabilities
• A strong focus on data quality and metrics
• The best marketing business intelligence capabilities in the industry
• The most powerful automated campaigns
• Ability to support the needs of large corporations in many countries

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 Matthew Quinlan (@mattquinlan) at LoopFuse for this post.

What is LoopFuse?

Sophistication Made Simple

LoopFuse was founded on the principle that marketing automation should be powerful yet simple. In fact, it was the founders’ experience of implementing a marketing automation system at JBoss that led directly to the creation of LoopFuse OneView. Some marketing automation vendors achieve power and flexibility, but at the expense of usability. Others have a fantastic user interface, but a shallow feature-set. LoopFuse OneView strikes the delicate balance between sophistication and simplicity by hiding complexity with integrated contextual help, intuitive defaults, and wizard-driven configuration.

In addition to making LoopFuse OneView easy to implement and easy to use, we also make it easy to buy. Our complete pricing list is publicly available from our website so that our prospects know exactly how much LoopFuse will cost before engaging our sales team. (Refreshing, isn’t it?) Even better, there are absolutely no hidden fees. No setup fees. No support fees. No per-user fees. No API fees. You can even pay by credit card. Try LoopFuse OneView with zero risk by signing up for a fully functional free trial on our website. Your account is immediately provisioned without ever speaking to a LoopFuse salesperson.

Lead Management

Target, track, capture, score, segment, nurture, route, convert, close, and analyze your leads in a single tool that tightly integrates with your CRM. Start with anonymous web activity collection that provides the basis for web analytics such as most popular pages, best referrers, search terms, and most active companies (via IP address). Collect registration data and convert anonymous visitors into identified prospects. Continuously evaluate the quality of each prospect according to his/her profile and behavior and route qualified prospects to the CRM. Nurture unqualified prospects by providing a constant drip of highly relevant and timely information (via email) to engage the prospect until they are ready to buy. Arm the salesperson with all of the relevant information necessary to close the deal. Finally, analyze the effectiveness of each lead source to determine the best use of your marketing dollars.

Sales Enablement

LoopFuse will automatically create new leads/contacts/tasks in the CRM based on the LeadFlow you define. Existing leads/contacts in the CRM are continuously updated with information such as lead score updates, new registration form data, email campaign activity, and latest web activity. Within 1-2 clicks the salesperson has access to every piece of data ever collected about a prospect, including the prospect’s company & location (even if prospect left it blank), and all of the activity (anonymous included) associated with the prospect’s company. The prospect data is further enriched with one-click access to the prospect’s LinkedIn profile as well as data about the company from Hoovers, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, and Google. By adding a prospect to their watchlist, a salesperson can be immediately notified when the prospect visits the website. Calling a prospect while they are browsing your site ensures that you have their full attention.

Performance & Scalability

While much of our early success was concentrated within open-source companies, LoopFuse continues to add customers from traditional software companies, SAAS providers, media companies, etc. One of the advantages of having so many open-source customers early on was that it required us to build a highly scalable infrastructure to manage the millions of transactions (page views, emails, registrations, etc.) per day that result from our customers offering free software. This continues to be a strategic advantage for LoopFuse as we can easily scale to accommodate customers of any size.

Why LoopFuse?

• Basic setup in less than 1 hour via configuration wizard
• Unlimited database size at no extra charge!
• Free trial to prove the value before you purchase
• Because it works

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 Laura Folio (@LauraFolio) and Adam Blitzer (@AdamBlitzer) at Pardot for this post.

What is Pardot?

Pardot is the maker of Prospect Insight, a “No Hassle” marketing automation suite designed to streamline online marketing campaigns and jump-start ROI for small-and-medium sized businesses. Pardot brings together all the elements of creating an online lead generation program and packages them in a simple, user-friendly marketing automation suite that gives you in-depth insight to your visitors and prospects.

What can Pardot do for you? The Prospect Insight suite was designed to simplify online marketing and make it easy to generate great content that will produce real results for a non-technical user. What does that mean? It means all the tools in Prospect Insight are designed with marketers in mind and consist of pre-formatted templates, easy drag-and-drop builders and step-by-step wizards to guide you through the process. Create custom landing pages in a few clicks. Build a branded email newsletter and personalize it from each individual sales representative with the Pardot template library and a simple, visual editor. Host images and files securely with Pardot, eliminating the need to bug your IT department about uploading your latest logo.

Then, use these shiny new campaign elements to generate prospects and create drip programs to nurture leads. Score and grade your new inbound leads with customizable criteria. Set up rules to automatically segment prospects for follow-up, assign them to your sales representatives and more. Sync this new-found information with your CRM system, creating a seamless flow of data that encourages adoption across your entire organization. Before you know it, the sales team is singing your praise (you’re making their job a lot easier, after all) and you’re able to show meaningful ROI data reflecting the marketing department’s contribution to the bottom line.

That’s right, marketing automation is about results. Its about making the marketing department, sometimes regarded as all “fluffy stuff,” ROI superheroes. Tracking prospects and visitors allows companies to bring in more leads – and more importantly, better leads – while reporting on marketing campaigns like never before. Pardot customers have been able to increase sales team efficiency and generate loads more leads.

Now you know why you need marketing automation, but what makes Pardot different? In addition to building an easy-to-use tool, Pardot designed the “No Hassle Marketing Automation” Promise to define what sets Prospect Insight apart from other choices:

• Pardot is a month-to-month service with no contracts. The simple, low-cost plans include implementation and services, making it easy for smaller companies to get on board without a large upfront investment.
• Pardot includes unlimited users for one monthly fee – that’s right no need to purchase individual seats at an additional charge. Come one, come all!
• Pardot offers personalized services and support. We pride ourselves on client service with our interactive success community and our stellar team of services folks and client advocates. We love to meet clients and invite them to the office to take a spin on the Segway, play a game of ping pong or, of course, chat about all things marketing automation.

To learn more about Pardot and marketing automation, in general, we invite you to visit www.pardot.com and view a quick demo to see Prospect Insight in action. You can also catch up with us on our blog at marketingautomation.net.

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 Caitlin Marco at MarketBright for this post.

What is Marketbright?

For starters, Marketbright is simply a centric platform for marketing automation. However, a ton of information is packed into that one, little sentence. So what does it really mean? Marketbright has rethought the way marketing automation should work for you; making you, the marketer, more in control of the development, execution, and result of your campaign. Marketbright’s marketing automation platform acts as a central hub for multi-touch marketing campaigns. By automating best practices of Sales and Marketing, you can execute any campaign from direct mail and telemarketing, to events and online advertising. Even the management of your website can be taken out of the hands of the webmaster and put into the hands of Marketing. Our philosophy is that marketing automation leverages the technology and best practices of multiple departments in order to produce faster, more efficient campaign deployment and reporting, right out of the box.

But, wait, how do you do all that?
One thing we firmly believe is that marketing should be done by, well, marketers. Being marketers ourselves, we have a good idea of the kind of tools our clients need to get the job done. If the job has to rely on the use of the IT department to update the events on their website, or the sales team to do nurture marketing instead of closing deals, then resources are being wasted and productivity is falling. Bottom line is that their ROI isn’t what it could be.

Now that you have an idea of what we mean by a “central platform,” here are a few items that help make marketing more productive and less dependent on outside resources:

Campaign Management: Marketbright’s campaign management tools allow any nontechnical person to easily create quarterly campaign plans that are automatically tied to powerful reporting and tracking tools. The result is streamlined budgeting capabilities and seamless campaign management.

Lead Nurturing:  approach is unique in the marketplace because it has automated the difficult task of managing multi-touch campaigns and the resulting, often complex flows. The platform provides an easy way to deploy and manage multi-touch campaigns across all marketing channels.

Resource Center: is the easy to use solution to keeping relevant content and marketing collateral updated on your website. Your company’s most recent case studies, white papers, and product brochures will be readily available to potential prospects without any edits to your website

Event Center: is a great addition to Marketbright’s Event Management solution. Without the help of your IT department, the Event Center automatically publishes all of your upcoming on and offline events directly to your website.
As mentioned before, Marketbright incorporates aspects from multiple departments in its platform to create one central hub. It also helps align Sales and Marketing to act as one organization. With the use of lead nurturing and lead management, Sales and Marketing are able to work together to get the most out of your lead generation.

Lead Scoring: One of Marketbright’s key strengths is scoring leads so only the best leads go directly to sales. Marketbright’s platform automatically sorts and prioritizes leads based on customizable rules. Marketbright’s lead scoring system features:

• Highly customizable rules to generate more accurate lead scores.
• Intelligent monitoring of customer activity, including web pages visited, time spent on the site, and visits from multiple people from the same company.
• Validation of data entered onto lead forms helps weed out inauthentic leads by scoring them lower.

Just as the collaboration between Sales and Marketing effects the quality of the contacts in the pipeline, a consolidation of data between Marketing and Sales gives a full view of the path a contact took to becoming a customer.  Marketbright’s marketing analytics provides insight into the sale funnel and instant feedback as to what’s performing well and what’s not, allowing for on the spot campaign optimization.

Marketing Analytics: Marketbright analytics enables closed loop marketing that equates to traceable return on investment. Marketbright’s pre-integrated platform is designed from the ground up to provide a 360 degree view of all customer interactions:

• Visibility and metrics from campaign to cash
• Data consistency across all customer interactions
• Access to reporting for campaigns at-a-glance.
• Visibility into what’s working, and what’s not
• Automated profiles of promising prospects for targeted follow up

By understanding where marketing resources and budget are being lost, Marketbright fills in the gaps to improve your productivity. A centralized marketing automation platform brings in all the different resources used by Marketing and combines it into one solution. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketbright, please visit us at www.marketbright.com

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 Emily Mayfield at Manticore (@ECMAYFIELD) for this post.

What is Manticore?

Manticore Technology delivers marketing automation solutions with the ideal combination of power and usability.  Marketing Automation improves marketing and sales alignment resulting in increased close ratios, decreased marketing spend, and increased revenue.  We’ve been asked many times how our company got its name.  Our name and our solutions were inspired by a Manticore, which is a legendary creature that has the body of a lion and a human head – a combination of power and intuitiveness.   Manticore Technology provides marketers with marketing automation solutions with the power, usability and support needed to ensure success.  How do exactly do we do that?

Our solutions are intuitive and user-friendly without sacrificing power and sophistication.  Manticore customer Aaron Raymo, Marketing Manager at Gevity, says, “When it comes to marketing automation, I believe that form and function are equally important.  Manticore’s user interface is incredibly easy for every day marketers to understand and utilize effectively.”  Unique features and services that contribute to Manticore’s user-friendly reputation are:

• Demand Booster – Intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows you to build powerful lead nurturing campaigns with no IT resources or extensive training.  Its incredible flexibility enables you to build, copy, and modify programs on the fly.
• Easy Implementation – Complete integration with your CRM system in just one-hour with no implementation fees or consulting costs allows you to start running campaigns immediately and quickly show ROI.
• Email Marketing Management – WYSIWYG Editor enables you to design emails and landing pages quickly with no HTML.  Templates and image hosting allows for quick deployment and advanced personalization.

While a user-friendly interface is an important feature, at the end of the day, you need a solution that has the power and functionality to meet your demand generation needs.  Manticore customer Robyn Foreman, Online Marketing Director at Jaspersoft, notes, “We looked at a number of demand generation solutions, focusing on usability, price and performance before deciding on Manticore Technology.  Manticore offered the most extensive capabilities for lead nurturing, lead scoring, email marketing management, real-time campaign analysis, list management and multi-channel PPC tracking at its price point.”  In terms of power and functionality, Manticore is an industry leader in:

• Holistic CRM integration – Unified platform allows for exceptional alignment between marketing and sales.  Custom objects enable users to enter leads into lead nurturing processes from within their CRM.  Marketing activity history, lead scores, and promotion codes exist within your CRM interface.
• Dynamic Content – Deliver targeted messages based on a lead’s specific attributes and interests within one email campaign or lead nurturing process.
• Multi-Model Lead Scoring (M²L) – Run simultaneous models to match leads with unique products.  Depreciate scores based on lack of activity over a period of time.  Automatically send leads to sales or add to a Demand Booster process based on their score.

Because we are dedicated to ensuring your success, we deliver unmatched customer service.  When you become a Manticore customer, you are assigned to a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM), who has deep expertise with our platform.  Your CSM’s job is to make sure that you’re successful in achieving your desired results. Diane Block, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Liquid Machines notes, “Manticore’s customer support team has been instrumental in helping with the implementation of the tool, as well as in setting up effective processes and campaigns, and in addition, are very responsive to all of our requests.”

Bottom line, Manticore Technology improves your business and enables you to be a better marketer.  Like the mythical beast, Manticore Technology is a combination of power and intuitiveness unlike anything you’ve ever seen.   If you would like more information on Manticore Technology or are interested in taking an online demo, please visit www.manticoretechnology.com.  For marketing automation best practices and insight, check out our blog at http://blog.manticoretechnology.com/.

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 Maria Pergolino of Marketo (@inboundmarketer and @marketo) for this post.

What is Marketo?

Hi Amy, Thanks for taking time to ask about Marketo.  Since I am new to the company I thought I would share with you how I choose a marketing automation vendor when selecting for my previous company.

I first became aware of Marketo when I was working as a demand generation manager for a mid-sized IT company.   Here, I had two primary responsibilities- I needed to generate leads and I had to pick out the best leads for sales.  While this may sound like a small job, it involved deciding on a mix of online and offline lead generation activities, vendor selection, social media marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and more.  I realized quickly that my CRM system alone was not able to provide all the data I needed to accomplish my goals, so I started looking at marketing automation vendors.

I went through a detailed search, comparing a number of different marketing automation companies.  There were many differences in the vendors, and I needed to select the one that was powerful enough to meet all my needs without locking me into a complicated, rigid structure that would slow me down.  The features that were most important to me were:

• Powerful email marketing
• Lead nurturing with personalization
• Landing page creation and optimization
• Integration into my CRM system
• Lead management
• Website monitoring
• Powerful  reporting

I also needed to make sure it was easy to use so I didn’t waste a lot of time training and could get started using the solution right away.

I choose Marketo and achieved results beyond what I had ever expected.  My first success with the system happened in just days as I was able to make better utilization of my current house list, interacting with opted-in leads I was missing with my previous email marketing tool.  These successes continued as I was able to create landing pages quickly without needing help from designers or IT anymore.  I was making much better use of new content, as I could deploy programs quickly and ensure it was seen by everyone relevant using my nurturing campaign.

Since then, Marketo has introduced Sales Insight, which helps reps prioritize, understand and interact with your companies hottest leads, saving time and closing deals faster.  This sales tool truly helps close the gap between sales and marketing allowing companies to be better prepared at every stage of the revenue cycle and to deliver the right response at the right time to their prospects.

Also, with Marketo, I felt like I had purchased more than a marketing automation solution – I had found a company that provides thought leadership and best practices.  I found myself reading Marketo’s blog for tips on social media marketing and talking to their support representatives about best practices for marketers.  They even have a presentation that shows how the VP of Marketing at Marketo uses their own system called Marketo’s Secret Sauce, making it easier for new and current customers see how to get the best results.

While I am no longer a customer of Marketo, it is because I am now an employee.  Here I manage Inbound Marketing and can help other marketers learn to make positive impacts in their own organizations.  To learn more about Marketo check out these short demos:

Marketing Automation Demo Sales Insight Demo

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 Felicity Wohltman at Genius (@felicity_genius) for this post.

What is Genius.com?

Thanks for asking. Genius.com delivers two on-demand solutions that help marketing and sales teams solve their biggest challenge – working more effectively together to identify and connect with their best prospects at the right time and with the right information.

How does Genius do that?  First, by unifying a powerful email marketing system with an instant-messenger like sales client that give sales visibility into all the results, in real time.  With Genius, marketers can easily create highly personalized email marketing campaigns, send on behalf of their sales or lead gen reps, and measure results based on website visits as well as email open statistics.  And, at the same time, every sales rep can be notified instantly whenever a prospect is interested enough to open an email or visit the website.  If your company is lucky enough to have so many website visitors that Sales is too busy for real time alerts, Genius makes it easy to throttle back on the volume – all the activity history is stored and available in Genius or in salesforce.com, including access to a page-by-page visual replay of each prospect’s website visit.

That’s the Genius Pro™ solution in a nutshell – powerful email marketing with deep website visit tracking and real-time visibility for Sales.  Genius solutions require no website tagging or server changes, so you can get started sending emails and tracking the results immediately upon sign-up.

For companies ready to automate their lead nurturing, including adding lead scoring to guide Sales activity, Genius Enterprise™ provides a simple drag-and-drop interface for designing workflows that customize prospect follow-up based on demographics (web2lead data) and/or behavioral data (website visit duration, visits to specific page, live chat requests, and more).  Genius lead scoring for Sales is complemented by unique real-time lead conversion events that let our customers specify key prospect qualifying actions that interrupt scheduled workflows and alert sales instantly that a prospect is ready to engage.  With Genius, automation never gets in the way of connecting Sales to interested prospects when the time is right.

Genius customers are typically looking for fast results, and so we’ve focused on delivering essential email marketing, marketing automation, and sales enablement capabilities in a system that can be put to work instantly and without a lot of training or complex implementation requirements.  With Genius, customers have quickly:

• Doubled their pipeline in just one quarter
• Tripled their email marketing success rate
• Quadrupled their previous sales results with half the staff

Determining which email marketing and marketing automation solution will best meet the needs of your marketing and sales organizations can be difficult, given the range of offerings on the market.  Genius Pro and Genius Enterprise stand out for the following reasons:

• Instant implementation, with no website tagging or server changes needed to get started
• Deep experience as a Sales 2.0 leader that’s enabled improved sales and marketing alignment at over 500 corporate customers, including BT, Intuit and Cisco-WebEx.
• Real-time alerts to Sales, along with full visibility into prospect website visits, so Sales can connect with interested prospects, whenever they’re ready to engage
• Proven scalability and performance, including leading email deliverability backed by 24×7 monitoring
• Unmatched integration with salesforce.com, including continuous bi-directional sync

We welcome your questions and hope you’ll get in touch with us through our website or by calling us at 1-888-6-Genius. And, please check out our B2B Marketing for Faster Sales blog.

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. First up on the list is our long-standing partner, Eloqua.  Thanks to Steve Woods at Eloqua (@stevewoods) for this post.

What is Eloqua?

We’re glad you asked.  As you’ll see on our marketing material, Eloqua is the category-defining marketing automation leader and provider of best practices expertise for marketers around the world. Our mission is to make our customers the best marketers on earth.  But what does that really mean?

Let’s start with how we help you become the best marketer on earth.  The first step towards that is allowing you to have the best possible understanding of your prospects and customers.  We do that by letting you see your prospects’ Digital Body Language so you can understand your prospects, their interests, their role in the buying process, and whether they are ready to buy.

The image gives you a good sense of some of the detail we provide in tracking digital body language, things like:

• All aspects of your web visit, including visits to company blogs and landing pages
• Response to all marketing; email, direct mail, or offline
• Capture of any web forms, whether they are hosted on your site or with Eloqua
• All search terms and queries used on all major search engines
• Tracking of any specific area of your website that conveys interesting meaning

With a good understanding of their digital body language, you can then score your leads in order to understand which are ready for sales and which are not.  Scoring against not only who they are, but also, how interested they are is key.  Who they are may not change too rapidly over time, but their interest level may suddenly increase as a business event pushes them towards solutions like yours.

Some unique points about how Eloqua helps you score leads:

• Ability to separately score the “who” from the “how interested” (explicit/implicit) and rate accordingly
• Showing raw scores and ratings within your CRM system exactly as you want to see it
• Unique scoring for each product line if you have more than one product line
• Scoring on more complex concepts, like whether the prospect is from a named account

Those leads that are ready, you can then pass over to your sales team, automatically, and according to the appropriate lead routing rules for your business.  Whether you are using Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM On Demand, MS Dynamics CRM, or any other major CRM system, we can automatically present the lead to your sales team in the way you want.

The depth and flexibility of Eloqua’s CRM integration is unique in the market because it:

• Has access to all objects in the CRM system; contacts, leads, accounts, campaigns, tasks, and any custom objects
• Is completely flexible, letting you customize any business process for how leads are updated, handed to sales, or clawed back
• Is compatible with any CRM system you select
• Allows marketing and sales to each manage their own unique data model, but define exactly which fields are to be synchronized
• Is set up with one click, out of the box, for any new client, but can grow to accommodate any business process

The leads that are not ready for sales need to be nurtured until they do show purchase interest.  The art of lead nurturing is that you are maintaining a conversation that can last for months, quarters, or even years.  As with any conversation, being aware of the changes in mood of the party you are talking to is key.  Understanding their digital body language, to watch for signs that they have begun to emotionally unsubscribe is key.

Lead nurturing with Eloqua gets you to success faster because:

• Our ability to personalize content in emails and landing pages based on what is known about a person, or what they do, is without parallel
• Our email sending infrastructure (and industry relationships) consistently achieves the best deliverability rates in the industry, assuring your messages get through
• Monitoring active/inactive ratios through Eloqua allows you to ensure your audience remains engaged and you are not losing their interest
• With Eloqua, you can empower your sales team with a nurture center that allows them to select a nurture program for their prospects based on the conversation they are having with them if they see they are not ready to buy at that moment

As you use marketing automation to score and nurture leads, you’ll need to understand whether your efforts are successful or not.  By taking a top-down view of your lead funnel in your marketing analysis, you can begin to understand the effect of your efforts.  A “balance sheet” view shows you what leads are in the funnel at the moment, and an “income statement” view allows you to see how things have moved over time.

Eloqua’s Marketing Analysis stands out because:

• Deep and flexible analysis is available from the level of a tactic, such as an email or a landing page, all the way to high level campaigns
• A unique approach allows you to understand how each campaign contributed to revenue, even in a multi-campaign, multi-buyer environment
• Graphical dashboards, and emailed alerts allow real-time delivery of metrics to execs and key sales team members
• The deep integration Eloqua provides with your CRM system also allows many reports to be run in your CRM environment if that is where users are comfortable

By understanding your buyers, determining which are ready for sales, and nurturing those that are not, you can become one of the best marketers on earth.  We’ve been helping marketers achieve great things for almost 10 years now, and have spent a long time making sure that the technology, ideas, best practices, and community is in place to make sure that you also succeed.  In creating the space and defining the category, we’ve also written a book about Digital Body Language and how to use it to succeed in your marketing.

This history of success is unique with Eloqua and of great benefit to you because:

• Each business process brings unique challenges, and we’ve wrestled with solving them already, so you won’t run into any surprises that prevent you from success
• Each industry innovates in unique areas; whether it is in technology, financial services, real estate, or sports marketing.  Eloqua is unique in that we are able to bring ideas, innovations, and experience in demand generation from one industry to another
• The best practices we have developed are available to you out of the box, meaning you don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time
• We have the largest and most experienced team of success managers and certified partners, in North America, and around the world, dedicated to your success

Simply put, we have the people, the technology, and the experience to make you one of the best marketers on earth.  We would enjoy an opportunity to speak with you about how.  If you’re interested in learning more, please come visit us at www.eloqua.com and learn more.  We look forward to speaking with you.

Written by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of the recent book Digital Body Language.

Amy was kind enough to ask me to write a post to the B2B Lead audience to answer a question that frequently comes up.  What is the relationship between Demand Generation/Marketing Automation, such as what we provide at Eloqua, and Targeted Contact Discovery, such as ReachForce’s service.

It’s a great question, and the answer touches on a number of areas.

The key relationship is the critical importance of understanding your target audience.  The cost of raw, untargeted data continues to drop.  With various social or data scraping services in the market today, the cost of a raw name, even a name with title information attached, has been reduced to pennies.

However, this has led to a market dynamic where untargeted marketing messages are prevalent, and the ability to precisely target the right buyer with the right message at the right time is the most important differentiator.

Role-based contact discovery is a crucial step in understanding who is a potential buyer of your product or services.  Going beyond title to discover actual functional role allows you to precisely identify the individual who would, when the time is right, progress through a buying cycle and purchase your product or services.

And this is where demand generation, such as the platform we provide at Eloqua, comes in.

The key synergy is that by using a demand generation platform to understand the digital body language of our buyers, we can identify the critical second piece of the equation – where each buyer is in their buying cycle.  By understanding the stages of a buying process for your product or service, and then using scoring to map each potential buyer to the stage of the buying process he or she is at, you can see whether they are at the education and awareness stage, are discovering potential vendors, or are validating a vendor as their final choice.

With a clear understanding of the “who” (based on role-based discovery) and the “how interested” (based on reading their digital body language), targeting the right message to the right person at the right time becomes possible.

However, there is another crucial link.  Even though the differentiated value of understanding role, vs just title, is clear to most marketers, the difference may be lost on the CFO.  Demand generation processes allow you to paint a much clearer picture of the value of one name over another.

With Eloqua, you can rethink your marketing analysis around the full buying funnel.  By taking a top-down view of your marketing analysis, you can begin to get a clear picture of where each buyer is in their buying process.  As you do this, you can begin to push your analysis of the value of a name further down the buying funnel.  Determining, through using lead scoring, which source of names actually turns into Marketing Qualified Leads and revenue opportunities allows you to view the value of the incoming names more clearly.  If a targeted name costs more by a factor of 5, but converts into revenue opportunities at 10X the rate of untargeted names, it is clearly more valuable.  Demand generation allows you to prove that value further down the buying funnel.

A third critical link is in sales understanding.  Sales needs to engage with individual buyers in individual conversations.  The only way to do this is for them to understand the interests of each buyer.  Targeted discovery allows you to provide your sales team with insights into what the potential buyer’s role and major focus areas are, while Eloqua allows you to provide your sales team with insight into their area and level of interest through giving them insights into the buyer’s digital body language.

With these approaches in place, it is even possible to reverse the standard approach of seeking, through targeted lead discovery, folks in the right roles, followed by using lead nurturing to cultivate and generate interest.  Interest may already exist, and can be identified through seeing individuals from ideal target companies anonymously visiting your website. In this case, these companies, where interest has already been seen, can be passed automatically to Reachforce for targeted lead discovery.  This provides you with an immediate win, as you have a person in the right role, at a company that is already showing interest in your product or solution.

Together, targeted lead discovery through Reachforce and demand generation through Eloqua form a powerful combination that allows you to find the right person, at the right company, showing the right level of buying interest.  For your sales team, there can be no better lead than that.

Written by guest blogger, Jason Morio, VP of Products at ReachForce

Twitter apparently turned down Facebook’s offer to buy them for $500 million (reportedly $100 million in cash and $400 million in Facebook stock).  What is Twitter up to that makes them think they can actually turn this down?  There is apparently a secret revenue model they will be announcing next year.  What does that mean for B2B Marketers?  Will Twitter have advertising now?

While this story still appears to be somewhat speculative, when it comes to things of this nature, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.  The brazen audacity shown by Twitter in declining this offer is mind-boggling.  In a time where less than 1 in 50 VC-backed startups ever sees an IPO and down-round term sheets are the norm, one can only wonder:  how much is enough?  According to GigaOM, Twitter has taken down a little over $20M in funding thus far.  When will the next 25X-multiple-on-money-in surface?  The halls of VC-backed startupdom are littered with the corpses of past offers of this magnitude that were turned down, only to result in eventual liquidations at fractional values (anyone remember Pointcast?).