Inbound Marketing seems to be all the hype these days.  B2B marketers are getting their feet wet with new social media tactics, online marketing is bigger than it’s ever been and word-of-mouth strategies are being built into most marketing plans today.  But what are you doing with all of this inbound activity on your web site and leads from registrations?

Are you adding them to your next email program?  Are you including them in your newsletter list?  Are you inviting them to your next webinar or live event?  Is your sales or tele-sales team following up with them via phone or email?  Chances are pretty high you’re using these inbound leads to fuel your outbound marketing programs.

What about all those web site visits?  Do you know what companies are visiting your web site?   What pages are they on? How long are they there?  Should you develop a Outbound Marketing program to reach and target the right person in those companies?

With the explosion of marketing automation, B2B Marketers now have the tools they need to better segment, target and reach these inbound leads with tailored messaging via Outbound Marketing.  But it’s not as simple as just loading these inbound leads up and hitting the send button.  To get the results you’re looking for you have to be more deliberate about your outreach.

We all know that in any typical B2B sale there is more than one person involved in a buying decision.  An inbound lead is a good sign someone is interested but chances are high they are collecting information for a team to evaluate.

Instead of waiting on the entire decision making unit to announce themselves, identify the roles you know to typically be involved in the decision and kick up your Outbound Marketing with messages tailored to each of their pain points.  This can only help your marketing results and conversions and getting everyone to the table at the same time also speeds up typical sales cycles.

While Inbound Marketing may be all the rage, you need a targeted Outbound Marketing program to reach all of the decision makers.  So as you are getting ready for 2010, make sure you have set up your Inbound Marketing to fuel your Outbound Marketing programs.

Measuring What Matters Assessment

Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the “father of modern management”, once said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.  Now, more than ever, measurement is a fundamental part of the marketing process.  Good marketers are expected to understand marketing analytics and use marketing performance as the basis for allocating budget effectively.  As a result, marketers must measure metrics that matter; metrics that can translate to strategic actions and drive accountability.

The key to measuring marketing effectiveness lies in the ability to benchmark performance over time.  Measurement is of little value unless it can be used to assess the current state of operations and help marketers determine how to optimize performance.  Ultimately, organizations can only improve marketing effectiveness if they have a baseline to compare existing performance.  Marketers should be utilizing unique metrics to measure three areas of marketing operations:

• Budgeting and Execution:  Metrics for measuring how well the current marketing plan is tracking against budget and on-time execution.   This includes a top-down and bottom-up view of budget allocation and the ability to track performance against plan and forecast accuracy.
• Campaign Performance:  Metrics for measuring closed-loop marketing on marketing campaigns; to help link marketing spend with related performance. (For example, increase lead-to-sales conversion, increase click-throughs, increase sales for a certain product, maximize form captures, etc.)
• Operational Efficiency:  Metrics for measuring the cost of marketing operations; workflow and processes cycle time, time spent managing activities, time spent on analysis, content re-use, shipping costs, etc.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve measurement practices.

Read each question and write down the appropriate points based on an honest assessment of the current state of your marketing operations.

Does the marketing function have a set of pre-defined metrics that are benchmarked over time?

• Yes, there’s no room for improvement – Award yourself 4 points if you are confident marketing is measuring the right metrics and using these metrics to make better decisions over time
• Yes, but we could do better- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident you are measuring some metrics over time, but there is still some room for improvement
• We need to work on this- Award yourself 0 points if you know your marketing function needs to spend some time defining which metrics to measure and how to measure them

Do you measure customer lifetime value?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if your organization has ever tried to measure customer lifetime value, and used this to determine the maximum cost per lead.
• No- 0 points if you are not quite sure how to calculate customer lifetime value

How confident are you in your ability to measure current performance and adjust marketing campaigns in mid-cycle?

• Confident- Award yourself 4 points if your organization can adjust marketing campaign effectiveness based on mid-cycle campaign performance
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if your measurement activity tends to be weeks or months after a campaign is executed
• We can’t do this today- 0 points if, for whatever reason, you can’t measure marketing campaign performance

Do you have access to data required to measure marketing performance?

• Yes, and it’s timely- Award yourself 2 points if you have access to the data necessary to calculate the metrics your organization uses (or would use) to measure marketing performance
• Yes, but it’s difficult to get- Award yourself 1 point if you have access to the data necessary to calculate the metrics your organization uses (or would use) to measure marketing performance, but the time it takes to gain access impacts the ability to maximize marketing effectiveness.
• No- 0 points if the data required does not exist, or is very difficult for marketing to get their hands on

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-4 Points:  You’re falling short – A final score between 0 and 4 indicates you could increase marketing effectiveness considerably by measuring and benchmarking metrics over time.  Every organization must determine pre-defined metrics for measuring marketing performance.  Start by mapping out a few different “nice to have metrics” to measure each of the three main categories of marketing measurement: Budgeting and Execution, Campaign Performance, and Operational Efficiency.
• 5-10 Points: You’re a few inches shy – A final score between 5 and10 indicates you marketing group could use some education on marketing measurement.  Consider automation and technology to help standardize and benchmark performance over time.  If access to data is a significant barrier to effective measurement, list out the different sources of data in your organization.  Then prioritize each source and start tracking small win’s by going after the low hanging fruit.  Partial data is better than no data in the eyes of the CFO.
• 11-14 Points: You’re measuring up – A final score between 11 and 14 points indicates you have a good grasp of marketing performance.  Quality data and superior marketing execution suggest you have already used marketing measurement to optimize marketing execution and operational efficiency.

The success of any business endeavor is dependent on one thing; execution. Even the best marketing strategy will fail if the organization is incapable of executing. In the context of marketing effectiveness, execution has to do with the tactics and processes an organization utilizes to market a product or service. With limited resources and finite budget, marketers need to make sure that all marketing activities are both influencing and driving demand. While it’s critical to have access to a robust centralized marketing database, the database is of little value unless marketers use the data to increase revenue.

In order to improve marketing effectiveness, marketers need to start using the data to build more intimate relationships with prospects and customers. Research proves that mass untargeted email blasts yield an average 1-2% conversion rate.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve marketing execution. Remember to check out the marketing automation category for more about marketing automation vendors that can help you here.

Read each question and write down the appropriate points based on an honest assessment of the current state of your marketing operations.

Do you have clearly defined segments and targets?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you currently customize marketing campaigns for unique segments of prospects/customers
• Yes, but we could do a better job- Award yourself 1 point if you segment your database, but you feel you could do a better job creating customized marketing messages for these segments
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not currently segment or target unique segments of prospects/customers

Do you currently use any personalization in outbound marketing campaigns? Award points for each applicable answer then add up all the points at the bottom (this question could award a total of 21 points)

• Mass Email (1 Point): _______

• Segmentation and Targeting (2 Points): _______

• Personalized- Name in Salutation (4 Points): _______

• Personalized- Using other database criteria: purchase date, product purchased, etc.

(6 Points): _______

• Event Triggered- Marketing interactions are triggered by customer behavior (8 Points): _______

• Total Points:_________ (Enter in b.)

Do you have one or more lead nurturing campaigns that are designed to educate potential buyers that are not yet ready to make a purchase?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have exclusive marketing campaigns designed to nurture and educate prospects
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not use lead nurturing

Do you know which marketing channels result in (or influence) the highest number of leads?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Can you name 3 companies that visited your website this week?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____ +e._____ = ______

How did you score?

With the right tools and processes in place, marketing execution can be quick and painless. Without those tools and processes, it can be painful and yield poor results, possible causing you or your programs to get the ax.

• 0-6 Points: You don’t quite have the hang of it - A final score between 0 and 6 indicates you could increase marketing effectiveness considerably by increasing the use of personalized email campaigns or even basic segmentation of your marketing database. Consider lead nurturing campaigns to increase the number of sales-ready leads that are passed on to sales.
• 7-18 Points: You’re getting there, keep on hacking away - A final score between 7 and18 indicates you are using a moderate level of personalization or segmentation and probably achieve average conversion rates on outbound campaigns. Consider tracking prospect performance across multiple channels (the web, email, landing pages, keywords, etc.) By tracking prospect behavior you can more accurately predict propensity to purchase and relevant materials that will have the biggest impact on driving revenue. Automation can help deliver highly relevant marketing interactions that are triggered by prospect behavior. This increases the likelihood of delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time.
• 19-29 Points: You’re killing it - A final score between 19 and 29 points indicates your taking full advantage of your marketing database to build more intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers. The question is, are you measuring performance over time to constantly improve marketing execution?

The marketing database plays a vital role in maximizing marketing effectiveness.  A lack of a centralized and complete marketing database impacts the marketer’s ability to both create and execute highly effective marketing strategy.

The marketing database feeds the marketing mix, it helps determine which targets and segments a company should pursue, and it ultimately allows the organization to consistently develop better products and services and market these products and services efficiently and effectively.

Most importantly, the marketing database is the lifeblood of marketing campaign execution.  The ability to deliver relevant, timely marketing messages to prospects and customers across one or more marketing channels is directly correlated to the quality of your marketing database.  As a result, marketers need to trust in their marketing database; therefore ensure that the data is accurate, complete and reliable.

Market leading organizations heavily rely on their marketing database to build intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve the quality of your marketing database and ultimately the ability to execute more effective marketing campaigns.

Read each question below and write down the appropriate number of points according to your answers.  Once you’re done, add up your score to determine if you are a database slacker, an average Joe database marketer, or a database jockey with the right customer and prospect data at your fingertips all day, every day.

Rate the quality of your marketing database?

• Complete- Award yourself 4 points if you are confident in the quality of the marketing database you rely on execute marketing campaigns
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident in the quality of your marketing database but there’s still some room for improvement.
• It’s in bad shape- Award yourself 0 points if you are confident in the fact that your database marketing practices are less than desirable and leave room for significant improvement.

Do you currently have a centralized marketing database that provides one source of the truth for marketing, sales, and service?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have a centralized database that delivers a 360 view of customers across marketing, sales and service
• No- 0 points if you are still operating multiple siloed databases or worse excel spreadsheets

Do you augment your marketing database with information to enhance, authenticate, or supplement your marketing database?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you enhance the quality of existing data through third party data sources or marketing database integration tools.
• No- 0 points if existing marketing database is rarely enhanced

Do you regularly scrub the database for erroneous or outdated information?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if you constantly monitor the quality of the data (regardless of whether it’s manual or automated)
• No- 0 points if you can’t remember the last time you acted on the quality of your marketing database.

Do you collect multi-channel information to build customer profiles?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you supplement individual leads data with information from two or more marketing channels: email campaigns received, click-through history, website visits, landing page form captures, survey questions, direct mail, etc.
• Sort of- Award yourself 1 point if you supplement individual leads data with information from one marketing channel
• No- 0 points if you have yet to integrate multi-channel activity at the customer account level.

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____+ e._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-5 Points: Database Slacker -  A final score between 0-5 indicates you need to spend more time focusing on your marketing database.  Your competitors and peers are utilizing marketing database techniques that will give them a competitive advantage.  Your marketing database can become outdated and erroneous rapidly; particularly with the rapid growth in digital marketing channels.  The most effective marketing creative is useless if the customer or prospect never sees it, and poor data quality in personalized campaigns can erode brand reputation.  Consider devoting organizational resources to (1) manually scrubbing the marketing database for duplicate data, erroneous data, or missing data and (2) refreshing the marketing database through a third-party marketing data provider.
• 6-12 Points: Average Joe – A final score between 6-12 indicates your marketing database is in reasonable shape, but you should consider initiatives to improve data quality.  This could include augmenting or validating the current marketing database with a third-party data purchase or assigning resources to manually scrub the database by hand.  Consider cross-checking bounced email addresses from outbound email campaigns and removing these email addresses from the database.  Likewise, make sure you are constantly offering customers an opportunity to opt-out of communications.
• 12-14 Points: Database Jockey- A final score between 12-14 points indicates your marketing database is in great shape.  The question is, what are you actually doing with this robust marketing database to improve marketing effectiveness?

What is Marketing Effectiveness?

We’ve spent the last few weeks getting to know our marketing automation partners and friends.   They all share the goal of increasing marketing effectiveness.  This got me thinking, really what IS marketing effectiveness.

Wikipedia defines marketing effectiveness as the quality of how marketers go to market with the goal of optimizing their spending to achieve good results for both the short-term and long-term.  So essentially, effective marketing must grow top line revenue while minimizing the impact on bottom line cost.

There are three fundamental ways marketers can influence marketing effectiveness:

• Marketing Strategy: How you will engage customers, prospects, and competitors in the market.  This includes the marketing mix, product development, positioning and segmentation / targeting.
• Marketing Execution: The people, process and technology that enable effective execution of marketing strategy and highly impactful creative.  Successful execution of a superior marketing strategy increases marketing effectiveness.
• Marketing Measurement: Good marketers are expected to understand marketing analytics and use marketing performance as the basis for allocating budget effectively.  As a result, marketers must measure metrics that matter; metrics that can translate to strategic actions and drive accountability.

At its core, marketing effectiveness is about increasing revenue.    Higher returns on marketing investments are a byproduct of effective marketing. However, calculating a true return on marketing investment is no easy task.  With today’s multi-channel marketing strategies, it’s difficult to accurately allocate measurable returns to marketing spend.

By scoring best practices across these three areas, organizations can rapidly measure and identify immediate opportunities to improve marketing effectiveness.  But, remember the effectiveness of marketing is tied to marketing and sales agreeing on WHAT is handed off and at what stage. If this definition and agreement are NOT in place, marketing effectiveness and overall marketing ROI can go quickly to zero.

Interested in how you measure up?

Be sure to stop back here next week for a few quick assessment quizzes to identify areas of improvement and the overall ability for your organization to maximize marketing effectiveness.

It’s Show Time!

Welcome back from summer vacation!  The economy seems to be picking up, it’s event season and B2B marketers are being tasked with their biggest jobs yet – driving enough leads to make up for a slow first half of the year.  With the help of a marketing automation tool, your job gets a lot easier.  As marketing automation becomes more of a necessity to get the job done, B2B marketing teams are forced to evaluate their needs and choose a solution that best fits.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been highlighting our marketing automation partners and friends on The B2B Lead.  In addition to a post each of them contributed describing their solution, we also featured some their best practices.  If you haven’t visited us lately, here’s a snapshot of what you’ve missed:

What is Eloqua?
Power Marketing Automation with Targeted Leads
The Profile of the New Buyer – Digital Body Language

What is Genius.com?
Sales 2.0 for Dummies

What is Marketbright?
Tips to Improve Your Lead Management Strategy

What is Marketo?
Marketo’s Secret Sauce for Demand Generation

What is Manticore?
23 Questions Demand Generation Companies May Not Want You to Ask

What is Loopfuse?

What is Pardot?
Web Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide

Remember your marketing automation system is a powerful engine but you need the right fuel to get the results you really want.   Be sure you are capturing the right roles at your events, cleaning up those PPC leads and identifying everyone in the decision making unit before you launch your next program.

Thanks again to our partners and friends for contributing!  We look forward to working with you again soon.

After reading Leigh Anne’s post on Sales 2.0 for Dummies, by David Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Genius.com, this got me thinking…

I think David’s funnel left out a big piece of the active funnel – outbound marketing.  This part should be between the attract and interact parts of David’s funnel.  We’re calling this piece – Outbound Marketing 2.0.
If only 3% of people fill out forms and announce themselves, you’re either going to have a skinny funnel or have to do a TON of inbound marketing to drive enough activity to keep the top of the funnel full.  Here’s where the outbound marketing 2.0 comes in.

While keeping your inbound engine running, and pushing the hand raisers to the appropriate sales person or marketing program, there are economic factors that may also lend to considering new verticals (i.e healthcare has $$ to spend but the financial services industry is still struggling).  Also, don’t forget about where you’re already winning.  Take a look at your current funnel and see what’s moving and what’s not and ultimately, what your new customers look like.  And finally, 97% of visitors that are not announcing themselves,  with a robust analytics tool you can identify the companies visiting (shameless promotion ahead) and ReachForce can help you discover the right buying roles for your business.

From there, you’re ready to execute your outbound programs using a marketing or email automation solution.

Here’s what I think the top of the funnel should look like:

Lead – a simple word, very powerful impact to YOUR business.

Does it mean the same thing to both your Sales and Marketing teams? As it turns out, the crux of most sales and marketing quarrels (read: logjams) are tied to this one unique issue – how do you define a lead?

Does it mean the same thing to your management team?

My suggestion is that it may be time for a brown bag lunch to find out what your company thinks and getting on the same page on that simple definition.

Here’s a list of things commonly tagged as leads and typically end up in your marketing database and/or CRM:

• tradeshow scans
• contact form downloads
• contact list buys
• sales rolodex contacts
• customer referrals
• cold calling contact discovery
• partner programs
• target company CEO
• webinar registrations
• partner’s customers
• inbound call
• event attendee lists
• advertising responders
• competitor’s customers
• target company with no contact attached
• contact with no company attached
• contact with personal email address
• whitepaper/eBook form downloads

Are some of these better than others?  Are some of these prospects?  Are they all?  It depends.

Depends on what you have defined as a lead and as a prospect?  Does one come before the other?  Are they the same thing?  It depends.  Depends on how you have defined your marketing and sales funnel (pipeline) and what it takes to convert from one stage of the pipe to the next.

The key to every solid B2B lead generation engine is the agreed upon definition of a lead, a prospect and a suspect.

If you’re reading this and you’re unsure if your sales team would define a lead the same way you would, STOP what you are doing right now.  Set up time for your marketing and sales team to get together and define each stage of the buying process and what a lead (or prospect or suspect) looks like at each stage along the way to becoming a customer.  Remember, this will more than likely cut down on the quantity of leads but the quality will make up for the difference.

Once these definitions have been defined for your company, decide as a team how contacts are going to be touched in each stage and by whom.

Interested in how others define leads and prospects?  Check these out…

June is a big month. School is coming to an end, it’s the beginning of summer and vacation season is in full swing. For many businesses, June marks the end of the first half of the year and a slow couple of upcoming months.

With all of the summer distractions lead generation teams must have a plan to stand out in the crowd and be able to demonstrate value clearly and quickly. To help you jumpstart your thinking about your marketing and sales aligned programs and initiatives we’ve got 2 upcoming events you won’t want to miss.

June 4th, 3pm EDT – Join ReachForce and MathMarketing for a webinar to learn 3 strategies to better align Marketing and Sales teams to create a funnel that delivers.

We’ll also share a few surprising do’s and don’ts that debunk the classic understanding of the roles of Sales and Marketing. Things like: DON’T measure salespeople on proposals closed. Surprised? We were too.

Join us on June 4th at 3pm EDT to find out why successful companies DON’T use this as a metric and have increased growth as a result. Register Now

Then we’ll be in San Mateo on June 23rd -24th with Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel, for a 2-day Funnel Academy. This 2-day in-person event will explore the following topics:

• Selecting a strategy based on the way your markets buy
• Aligning and allocating resources for multiple markets
• The buyer’s journey – understanding how buy and creating your strategy around your buyers
• How to build a model funnel and resolve disconnects
• How to plan campaigns that move buyers

Click here to learn more and to register.

For many businesses, the upcoming summer months can feel like they drag on forever. This summer use this time to set up for bigger success in 2009.

Ready, Set, Go! It’s a short year, 8 months to go and 12 months of results to deliver.

Planning since last Fall has been a challenge, chances are you’ve been holding off (or have ratcheted down) on your spending hoping the bad news would stop and you would be able to get to work as normal. Well it looks like that time has come. The economy seems to be coming back and now you’ve got to make up for lost time. Here’s a few ideas to jumpstart your lead generation initiatives:

• Check out those web logs or unknown visitor reports, this is a great opportunity for you to start reaching out to companies who have already been checking you out. Once you’ve identified the companies, make sure you have the right targeted leads to market to. This is key to your program success.
• Think and be positive/upbeat — get new content (that’s not talking about the recession). Make sure it’s everywhere – your social networks, your website, as a possible link in your email signatures, offered on your blog, your email programs and don’t forget to share it with your customers, this could be used in the introduction you need help with.
• Dust off your old whitepapers, add some images and turn them into a new eBook. Use this refreshed content for your nurture marketing and email programs.
• Put together a news release schedule, remember to include your keywords. Press drives website visitors. Make sure you have your Google Alerts set up so you know when someone picks up your news and don’t forget to check those weblogs and unknown visitor reports so you can market back to those checking you out.
• Don’t forget your customers, they are your greatest asset. Talk to them. Ask them what they need from you. Ask them how you can better deliver your product or service and don’t forget to ask them for a referral or two. There’s no time better than the present to kick off a customer referral program.

The point is to get the most out of what you already have, be everywhere your prospects and customers are, and stay positive.