Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) — Silverpop’s Director of Field Marketing and B2B marketing evangelist — for this post.

What is Silverpop Engage B2B?

There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place.  Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal.  Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.

The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality.  MarketingSherpa has published data indicating that for every sales-ready lead that comes into a B2B vendor, there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured until they are ready to purchase.

Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage.  Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process.  This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.

And yet the impetus for B2B marketers to proactively generate leads, drive sales and support customer lifetime value has never been stronger.  Enter marketing automation.

How We’re Different

The drivers above explain the rapid growth in the marketing automation marketplace.  But what makes one vendor different from another?

At Silverpop, we believe assessing how one marketing automation vendor is different from another comes down to understanding their approach to helping marketers address this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing as described above.

Our approach is simple.

• Total Focus on B2B marketing. First, we have a marketing automation solution built, from the ground up, around the unique needs and issues of B2B marketers.  This is our focus, and it’s how we rationalize everything we do to extend, expand and innovate its features and capabilities.

• Orchestrating buyer-centric marketing; powering sales and marketing collaboration. Second, our products and services are designed to address the major external and internal issues facing B2B marketers today.  What are these issues?  At an external/marketplace level, it is being more buyer-centric than ever before (given the environment described above).  At an internal/organizational level, it is better aligning and collaborating with the sales organization.

This is the approach that underpins and drives our Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform.

Total Focus on B2B Marketing

B2B marketing is different.  Sure some of the trends cited above — especially the shift in buyer power — are common to both B2B and B2C.  But B2B marketing is still different.  How?

In B2C marketing — especially with ‘fast moving consumer goods’ — scale matters.  Thus, a top-down strategy is taken … where mistakes in customer communication may be made at the individual consumer level, but that is assumed to be okay as long as it is a small percentage of total interactions.

But in B2B marketing — especially with high price points and low unit volumes — relationships really do matter.  One mistake made upstream in the lead-cultivation phase can have disastrous effects downstream.  Thus, a ‘bottoms-up strategy’ in marketing is more appropriate.

The challenge of modern B2B marketing, thus, lies in building that granular and continuous ‘one-to-one’ relationship with a prospect, pre-sales, while also scaling overall activity to ensure a sufficient volume of leads to meet revenue targets.

This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is built around the entire lifecycle of developing and nurturing B2B buyer leads upstream through converting leads to customers and maintaining those customers downstream.

• Lead management: The lead management capabilities within Silverpop Engage B2B are an integral part of the entire platform.  These capabilities include:  information capture, scoring, routing, nurturing and monitoring.

• CRM integration: The system has pre-built integration with industry-leading CRM suites, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Netsuite and Salesforce, and the system can integrate with any other CRM suite via standards-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs).

• Marketing measurement and ROI tracking: The system tracks every action taken by a marketer to cultivate and covert leads into sales.  The result is a granular, account-level picture of what campaigns worked (and what didn’t).  This helps marketers continuously tune their tactics.

• Industry-leading B2B marketer education: Successful marketing automation begins with successful B2B marketing strategies.  That is why Silverpop spends significant time and resources on marketer education.  The keystone of this effort is the company’s recently-launched B2B Marketing University series.

• Service and support: An intelligent technology platform, alone, is not sufficient to ensure the success of a marketing automation deployment.  That’s why service and support is a hallmark of Silverpop’s offering and one of the top reasons why customers select Silverpop Engage B2B.

Orchestrating Buyer-centric Marketing

I highlighted the critical issue in B2B marketing of having a bottoms-up strategy and of driving one-to-one dialogue with prospects.  This leads to a subsequent operational challenge:  It takes a tremendous scale of raw leads to filter down to a single buyer.  Research from SiriusDecisions indicates that an average B2B organization yields 2-3 sales conversions for every 1000 raw/upstream leads.  Given this, how do you effectively market on a ‘mass’ one-to-one level — building a repeatable lead management strategy that gives each and every lead individual and tailored attention and personalization and that responds to their pull?

Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: “As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. ”

This is why at the core of Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is a smart, powerful, yet easy-to-use campaign management interface for building and managing buyer-centric marketing.

• Dynamic campaign management: The campaign management interface allows you to build complex, dynamic campaigns that deliver marketing communication actions in response to the ‘pull’ of buyers.  For instance, did your prospect recently visit your Website, download a white paper or dial your call center?  By identifying actions and dynamic responses, Silverpop enables B2B marketers to manage complex, buyer-centric campaigns.

• Campaign GUI: A key differentiator of the campaign management interface is something we call our ‘campaign GUI’ — a graphical environment that allows marketers to drag and drop campaign planning elements, that operates a lot like video-editing software and that is highly intuitive.

• Industry-leading e-mail expertise: Often prospects’ actions respond to or trigger an e-mail.  E-mail communication is a critical component of modern B2B marketing, and with a decade of experience, expertise in e-mail communication is a core competency of Silverpop.

• Multi-channel campaigns: The system is not limited to e-mail communication.  It can manage and trigger multiple communication channels, both online and offline — ensuring you engage with prospects when and where they prefer.

Powering Sales and Marketing Collaboration

The major ‘internal’/organizational challenge marketers face lies in better syncing up with their sales teams — an issue closely related to being buyer-centric and of critical importance as sales people are tapped by buyers later and later in their buying process.  This requires B2B marketers to better understand and empathize with their sales team colleagues.  It also requires systems that can promote transparency and collaboration.

SiriusDecisions highlighted this issue in a recent blog post, which discussed the era of ‘Buyer 2.0′ and its impact on sales/marketing alignment.

Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing’s role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing’s messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing’s contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next “new” economy.

This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform also focuses on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams — so lead management and buyer dialogue is seamless.

• Lead scoring and routing: A robust lead scoring and routing engine both creates a catalyst for improving sales and marketing agreement on what constitutes a ‘good customer prospect’ and  also helps to manage roles and lead hand-off on an ongoing basis.  Key features include the ability to score based on a variety of demographic (explicit), behavioral (implicit) and BANT (budget, authority, needs and timing) factors, as well as mechanisms for returning cold leads from sales back to marketing for nurturing.

• Sales-team transparency: Another key feature is the ability of sales team members to view granular details of lead activity from their Salesforce account.  This ensures that a sales team member has complete insight into the pre-sales dialogue that has occurred and can pick up and run with a lead with maximum insight.

Are You Ready for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?

Responding to ‘buyer 2.0′ and leading in this new B2B marketing environment requires a blend of know-how and firepower.  Silverpop is focused on both.

The Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform combines best practices with robust performance.  And the Silverpop team is dedicated to delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of B2B marketers.  We invite you to take a test drive of the system.

And if you’re interested in taking your B2B marketing ‘game’ to the next level, we hope you will join us this Fall at B2B Marketing University — either in  Palo Alto, Boston, Atlanta or Seattle, or in another city after the New Y ear.

1. Creative Commons search

2. Yahoo Creative Commons search

3. Flickr Creative Commons search

Free stock and public domain images

Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.

5. Stock.XCHNG

7. Everystockphoto

8. PDphoto

WikiMedia Commons

Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. Be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:

12. Public domain

13. Creative Commons

14. Sound

15. Video

Free audio sources

16. opsound

19. Internet archive open source audio

Free video sources

20. Internet Archive Moving Images Collection

21. Open Source Cinema

Further resources

25. TeacherLibrarianWiki’s list of copyright-friendly image sources

26. NASA

I recommend digging a little to find an image that is not too overused.  It is possible to find stock photography that doesn’t look glaringly like stock photography. Trust me, you will feel like you have been sucker punched when you are driving down the freeway and see the same image you used for your entire fall campaign on a billboard for a used car dealership.

Also, before you use any image, audio or video, double check the license agreement for allowed uses and attribution requirements.

For Barb’s full list, be sure to check out the complete article.

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

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.

We all work long and hard on our email marketing.  Crafting the perfect attention getting subject line, choosing just the right images, editing and re-editing concise and relevant content.  After all that hard work, no one wants their email to get caught up in a SPAM filter or relegated to the Junk folder.  Many of our recipients are using Microsoft Outlook.  In case you haven’t checked it out before, here is what Micosoft says about the filter that pushes your email to the cyber graveyard known as the Junk folder.

The Junk Content filter works by looking for key words. This file is a description of exactly which words the filter looks for and where the filter looks for them:

First 8 characters of From are digits
Subject contains “advertisement”
Body contains “money back ”
Body contains “cards accepted”
Body contains “removal instructions”
Body contains “extra income”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “$”
Subject contains “!” AND Subject contains “free”
Body contains “,000″ AND Body contains “!!” AND Body contains “$”
Body contains “Dear friend”
Body contains “for free?”
Body contains “for free!”
Body contains “Guarantee” AND (Body contains “satisfaction” OR Body contains “absolute”)
Body contains “more info ” AND Body contains “visit ” AND Body contains “$”
Body contains “SPECIAL PROMOTION”
Body contains “one-time mail”
Subject contains “$$”
Body contains ”
Body contains “order today”
Body contains “order now!”
Body contains “money-back guarantee”
Body contains “100% satisfied”
To contains “friend@”
To contains “public@”
To contains “success@”
From contains “sales@”
From contains “success.”
From contains “success@”
From contains “mail@”
From contains “@public”
From contains “@savvy”
From contains “profits@”
From contains “hello@”
Body contains ” mlm”
Body contains “@mlm”
Body contains “///////////////”
Body contains “check or money order”

Be sure to check out this list before you hit send on your next campaign.

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 the person here at ReachForce ultimately responsible for having a regularly updated blog, I know how very difficult it can be to continually come up with new blog post ideas.  Lucky for me Kipp Bodnar has created a great list of 20 Ideas For B2B Blog Content To Drive Traffic and Boost SEO on the Social Media B2B blog. Here are some of my favorites:

• Profile your customers
• List the top ten twitter users in your industry
• List the top five blogs in your industry
• Start a contest and ask for submissions
• Use Trendrr to create graphs of industry information
• Compile the top ten blog posts on a specific industry topic

I can’t wait to start using some of these ideas myself.  Some things we do on The B2B Lead:

• Guest posts from partners and customers
• Quote great articles and blog posts and then expand on those ideas (hence this post)
• Write a cliff notes version of hit industry books
• Feature other companies who offer complimentary services or products to your own

Don’t forget to read the full list of 20 ideas!

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?