Blogging for pay has always been a touchy subject, some people are rabidly against it, some think it’s ok…really I figure it is like any other paid endorsement, if you tell people that you blog about a product because they pay you to do it then at least I can read your article with eyes wide open.

Funny thing, you don’t typically consider blogging to fall under the purview of the federal government, but guess what, October 6, the FCC issued guidelines requiring that bloggers or other ‘word of mouth’ marketers disclose payments (in-kind or cash) that they receive to review a product.  Guess it’s like anything else, now we’ll see blog articles that are paid endorsements just like political ads or any other product endorsements.

Check out the article here.  So what’s next, is the FCC going to try and regulate reviewing white papers and eBooks for other people too?  Not technically an endoresement, but still might be some extra PR or positive spin that the FCC won’t like.

Having trouble seeing the good in your database?  Separating the diamonds from the dirt can be tough and time intensive, but if you map out a plan ahead of time it can save you time and sanity!

• Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
  • Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (i.e. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
  • Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM system to work – if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses for instance, outline what those rules are and what format data has to be in to fit within those rules.
  • Information that people have asked for to make marketing, sales, and customer support, etc. work better.
• Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields idenitifed above.  (I.E. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, make a designated location for name pronunciation guides (input by sales) so they don’t clutter the name field, etc.
• Next, do a quick data quality analysis on each data element in these three categories. Score the data quality by answering questions such as:
  • Does this data element have an undisputed owner? Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time?
  • What percentage of the CRM records has this data element missing, clearly incorrect, or duplicate? Determine the best course of action for filling in the gaps, do you have the resources in house or do you need to find a vendor who can do this?

Based on the results of your scoring (step 3), you’ll have a better idea of who you can assign items to for fixing and where you need to focus your efforts in terms of filling in the gaps.  Assign them out to the people who can fill in the gaps and make sure to supply everyone with the same set of ‘rules’ or standards for what the end result should look like.

Once you’ve got your data cleaned up, make sure your data standards sheet is up-to-date with any changes in process you may have made during the clean up process and then circulate it.  Your teams will be much more likely to keep the data looking the way it needs to if they know what the standards are.

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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)
3. 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.
4. 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.

Need more tips on Lead Scoring? Check out the Market2Lead white paper!

It’s the topic of discussion for so many webinars, whitepapers and blog posts (even here), but do you actually do lead scoring?  Until very recently, we hadn’t figured out a way to incorporate all of the various technology tools (Eloqua for Marketing Automation, HubSpot for its unique Internet Marketing tracking/features and Salesforce.com for Sales Automation) we use into one comprehensive score.  So the question is, how do you close the loop with that many systems interacting?

To regress a little bit, we have always had lead scoring on the list of to-do’s.  It’s been on that list for easily the last three or four quarters, but each time it comes down to the wire either there’s not enough time or there is just so much for us to wrap together that it’s a little overwhelming.  Honestly, it wasn’t a high priority this quarter, but our Sales team was looking for a way to prioritize the accounts they were working so we initially (accidentally) built an explicit lead scoring system.   We set point values for things like:

• Having key players in the decision making unit in our CRM and/or knowing that they exist
• Knowing if the prospect markets to more than one vertical (and what space they play in)
• What Marketing Automation system the prospect uses
• What CRM the prospect uses
• ASP (Average Sales Price)

Eventually this all gets tabulated into a score (and the information collected in creating the score), that score determines a few things.  First, what kind of marketing messages the contacts within the account get and secondly, whether or not the rep even wants them followed up with.  That second item is determined by a score in the negative range…we’ve got some accounts that our reps don’t want to work with for specific reasons and those automatically get a -100 added to their score so we can better differentiate them from the rest of the crowd.

Originally this was good for us, we felt that it was a start towards the lead scoring we wanted to have and that it would give our sales team the info they needed to better prioritize their follow up.  Well it left something out…in focusing only on the accounts they were selling in to, we left out the leads they still need to follow up with in order to efficiently prospect for new business. So we went back to the drawing board.

Our next pass ended up being a more implicitly focused lead score.  With the help of one of our more development minded co-workers, we were able to employ an Apex Trigger in salesforce.com that checks for activity on the lead records and gives a score according to the frequency and creator of the activity.  To speak slightly more English (and less tech), if a lead has 3-5 activities from either HubSpot or Eloqua, meaning a form download, website activity or email open, created within a 3 month timeframe then they are ‘cold’ – if they have 3-5 activities within a 1 month timeframe then they are ‘warm’ and if they have 3-5 activities within a week they are ‘hot.’  Our basic idea being that within salesforce.com we set up views of cold-warm-hot leads and our reps can just follow up with those, instead of worrying about who is coming out of what nurture cycle behind the scenes.   So the sales team essentially gets a window on who is actually raising their hand and only those who do so often enough to be considered interest in us and our products.

By no means have we completed this process but we’re definitely off to a start. Closing the loop between our various tools one score at a time…do you score your leads, if so, how?

Do you constantly feel the pull for newer, better, more data?  Is there always that feeling that if you could just get a few new contacts a sale would be right around the corner?  Of course there is value to new leads data, but what about the data you already have?  Your internal database is likely an underutilized gold mine, but if it hasn’t been properly maintained it’s likely in need of a tune-up.

Did you know?

1. Up to 20% of all postal addresses change every year.¹
2. Up to 18% of all telephone numbers change every year.¹
3. Up to 21% of all CEO’s change every year.¹
4. 25-33% of email addresses on a “house” file will become outdated every year.²
5. In the next hour, 58 business addresses will change, 11 companies will change their names, and 41 new businesses will open¹ … not to mention how many companies will go out of business.
6. In addition, up to 66% of people change companies or job functions every year!³

Scared yet?  If you’re not, you should be, these statistics are enough to worry the most seasoned marketer.  What are you doing to keep your database from being impacted by these figures?   Here at ReachForce we run a series of data hygiene reports on our database regularly, they give us information on what data has been marked as bad, where it came from and how old it is.

Ok, so let’s say you already do something like this, you’ve got your dirty data bagged and tagged, what do you do now? Check out our Top 10 signs your database needs help, some of these top 10 can easily be identified in an error report, for those that you can’t identify, you really need to take a deeper dive into your data.  These things can’t be remedied overnight, but with some elbow grease and time you too can turn around the state of your database, after all, according to  Sirius Decisions, companies marketing to a database that is routed through a healthy data-cleansing routing can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an average organization, based purely on data quality.

For an idea of how dirty your data might be, check out the ReachForce Dirty Data Calculator, with a few simple numbers from you, it will give you some real-life idea as to how much of your data has ‘expired.’

SOURCES:
¹D&B
²Lyris Technologies: “Guru’s Guide to Email Marketing Success”
³Sales & Marketing Institute

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Are Your Leads Lying to You?, I want to dive a little further into David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie.  There are some truly interesting statistics in this article, but the meat of the article is his call to focus on the creation of opportunities as a key indicator/metric rather than the creation of leads.  Sitting at the cross-roads between Marketing and Sales I can echo his commentary that is a key indicator but I feel that it’s also a bit hasty to claim that it is the only meaningful metric.

Taber argues that by focusing on ‘sales-cycle starts’ (i.e. creation of opportunities) you get a true view of the over all process and communication between Sales and Marketing.   His position is that by using opportunity creation as the key metric you will encourage better alignment between Marketing and Sales.  While I think that he is on the right path, I feel like using only creation of opportunity as a metric fails to take into account the activity on all sides of the table that goes into feeding the creation of opportunities.

If one side fails to fulfill their end of the bargain, then you’ll end up with a lopsided equation and little to no opportunity creation.  For example, if Marketing is not held to the standard of feeding ‘X’ amount of leads and then drumming up activity via an email campaign, webinar, etc. then there is nothing for Sales to use to stir up the opportunities.  On the other side of the coin, if Marketing regularly adds leads, keeps the activity going and continues to feed the fires but Sales isn’t following up then opportunities won’t be created either.   Both pieces of the puzzle are necessary to create opportunities and by looking away from the metrics that measure each of these activities, spotting upcoming problems (or finding the root to existing ones) is difficult at best.

Taber argues that an opportunity centric focus will create the collaboration necessary to convert leads to opportunities, while I agree that if all the pieces are in place it can happen I guess I’m just a bit of a cynic (or a big metrics nerd).  I feel like it’s important to see the whole picture to ensure the process works all the way around.  Keeping everyone accountable to key metrics (lead input, campaign activity, meeting setting and execution) that are relevant to their role in the cycle will allow better visibility across the process and will ensure that if something breaks you can easily identify where the problem was and fix it.

Sitting down with my coffee this morning I stumbled across David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie,.  In it, Taber makes the case for really focusing on the right metrics in measuring performance, interesting stuff, but I got stuck on a particular statement he makes: “In many B2B and B2C businesses, the unqualified leads that are in the nurturing cycle may be numbered in the millions. Industry statistics show that up to 40 percent of leads may make their first purchase after having been in the “remarketing database” for 18 months or longer.”   As someone who works with our database and manages the cleansing of our customers database (via our Relevance & Repair Process), I was really struck by this.

On a day to day basis I look at lots of data (ok that’s an understatement, in the past two months I’ve looked at tons of contacts/prospects), most people who engage in our data appending and cleansing services do so to clean up old data – to find the diamond in the ruff. They are looking for that 40%, but what if they’ve had the right name and the wrong email for the last eighteen months?? And assuming they have been emailing this person for that time and they’ve had the wrong email, wow – that’s someone that they have lost some serious time with.

So how do you avoid falling into the abyss of not knowing if you’re marketing but no one’s listening?  Know who you’ve got good information for and who you need to get the right information for.  One more pitch for data cleanliness here but the idea is very simple, how will you ever reach that 40% if you don’t have their contact information right?