Do you know who your customers are? Not just by name, but do you know what they actually do, why your product is a good fit for them? Better yet, do you know what makes some of your customers less than a good fit? Here at ReachForce we try to take a holistic approach to analyzing our customers both those who we do regular business with and those that we may not have continued business with (I know it’s not a pretty subject but everyone’s got them).
In looking at what these customers do, what their price point is and the rates that they convert (from trial to subscription or bookings to revenue) we can get a much better picture as to what types of customers we do well with and where we should focus future data discovery. It’s a simple enough exercise, but take a look at your top 10-15 customers (those who spend the most with you) and your worst customers (those who may have done business with you once and then never again), see what parallels you can draw between the customers within each group. For us we’ve learned that customers with a higher price point, a tech focused business and those who market to more than one vertical seem to have a greater need for what we do an a tolerance for our price point.
Once you’ve gotten a clearer picture of what your good customers look like and what the less than successful customers look like, you can better focus your marketing efforts (and for you sales folk out there, your follow up and prospecting efforts). Now that you have a profile of your best customer, be sure to do continued contact discovery to find more buyers that are similar to your best customers.
Does your sales team understand the metrics you’re measuring? Think about it this way, your sales team is focused on numbers, hitting the right number of activities each day/week, turning out the right amount of proposals to get good closed deals, and of course, the all important quota figure!
So when asked, you tell the sales team you measure click-throughs, website visits, opens, but it doesn’t mean anything to them….why you ask? Because just like all of the rest of us, they only care about what directly impacts them, yes you can make a case for the activity you’re measuring to impact them but it’s a story, it’s not a direct correlation.
What directly correlates to daily life of a sales person? The number of leads you’re putting in the top of the funnel. Let’s be more specific though, not just leads, QUALITY leads. First you’ve got to have a unified definition of a quality lead (is it someone who has shown interest through opening your emails, checking out your site or is it someone who has downloaded a few resources, attended some webinars and who fits a great profile of your ideal buyer?), get on the same page with sales – decide what that perfectly qualified and quality lead is because not everyone who fills out a web form or downloads a white paper fits that mold.
The important thing is to directly correlate what you’re doing with what your sales team is doing – how many leads did you fill the pipe with this week and then track them through the pipeline. How many of those leads generated the right kind of activity to create a closed deal? Bring this full circle for a minute, if you can track how many leads you put in the pipeline that generate activity during each phase of the pipe and then close, pretty impressive stuff to the C-level folks!
Now for tracking this stuff:
In your CRM, use a lead source field – map it to the contact through the process (for all of your salesforce.com users, we’ll have some instructions soon).
Keep tabs on where these leads came, from…not just that marketing delivered them but that you purchased them from ReachForce, got them from an event/trade show, they were a web form, etc. That way you can see what sources generate the most successful leads and you can replicate that success.
Don’t just look at this information once and then toss it – keep track of it historically, the more information you’re armed with the better off you’ll be.
We are excited to be a part of the B2B Marketing Zone joining the ranks of fellow bloggers, Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay and Jon Miller. The B2B Marketing Zone is a joint venture between Tom Pick of WebMarketCentral and Tony Karrer CEO/CTO of TechEmpower. In their own words here is what B2B marketing Zone is all about:
B2B Marketing Zone is a collection of blog posts and articles all around B2B Marketing. It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create this topic hub. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregates content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content.
The goals of the B2B Marketing Zone are:
Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content from as defined by the community.
Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.
Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.
Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users of B2B Marketing Zone are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.
If you are looking to beef up your RSS feed, you can subscribe to a “best of” or to the full feed of everything. It is a great one stop shop for B2B Marketing content.
Gotta say, when Amy asked if I’d read this whitepaper from Silverpop I was instantly intrigued. Maybe it’s the fact that sitting as the Sales/Marketing Ops person I have sat directly under that bus a few times (as we all have regardless of which side you come from), or maybe it’s the tongue in cheek humor scattered throughout the copy but for once I was entertained and informed by a whitepaper!
While the whitepaper is peppered with humor it also touches on a few key items that cause the friction between marketing and some steps for resolving those items.
Problem: Sales is frustrated when marketing hands off weak leads.
Solution: The key to this isn’t exactly what it sounds like, instead of placing blame, get on the same page about what constitutes a lead, get sales and marketing on the same page so that everyone knows what a lead is and execute on passing leads over accordingly. Unfortunately, if we’re all speaking different languages in terms of what a lead (contact, prospect, etc.) is then it’s just a distraction.
Problem: Marketing sees Sales as only griping about Marketing (therefore causing the split between them)
Solution: Sales needs to talk to marketing – if the leads being sent over are good 1/3 of the time, tell marketing what was wrong with the other 2/3’s. Don’t keep marketing in the dark, let them know how leads are progressing through the pipeline and what leads progress better (therefore better helping to define what kind of leads Marketing should focus on getting to Sales). Don’t take all the credit – yes you guys close the sale but materials, programs, webinars, the website, events all of those things were put together by marketing to help you close that deal – give them a little credit too!
These are just a few of the items mentioned by Silverpop, but they are enough to get the wheels turning for you. I highly recommend taking a little time to read the entire whitepaper, it’s insightful and truly reaches the heart of the problem, aligning Marketing and Sales is all about communication.
I’ll close with my favorite quote from the whitepaper:
Sales asks: How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Sales answers: 15.
One to ignore the request from sales for more light,
One to develop a creative brief on why light is important,
Seven to shoot the YouTube video about screwing in light bulbs,
One to evaluate the amount of light offered by competitors and draft a competitive analysis,
Two to create the product slick,
One to determine competitive pricing for the service and set the cost well above that,
One to buy a 150-watt bulb for a 60-watt lamp,
And one to put just the right “spin” on the process.
Sorry – gotta love a whitepaper with a personality
Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation. Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) — Silverpop’s Director of Field Marketing and B2B marketing evangelist — for this post.
What is Silverpop Engage B2B?
There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place. Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal. Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.
The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality. MarketingSherpa has published data indicating that for every sales-ready lead that comes into a B2B vendor, there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured until they are ready to purchase.
Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage. Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process. This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.
And yet the impetus for B2B marketers to proactively generate leads, drive sales and support customer lifetime value has never been stronger. Enter marketing automation.
How We’re Different
The drivers above explain the rapid growth in the marketing automation marketplace. But what makes one vendor different from another?
At Silverpop, we believe assessing how one marketing automation vendor is different from another comes down to understanding their approach to helping marketers address this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing as described above.
Our approach is simple.
Total Focus on B2B marketing. First, we have a marketing automation solution built, from the ground up, around the unique needs and issues of B2B marketers. This is our focus, and it’s how we rationalize everything we do to extend, expand and innovate its features and capabilities.
Orchestrating buyer-centric marketing; powering sales and marketing collaboration. Second, our products and services are designed to address the major external and internal issues facing B2B marketers today. What are these issues? At an external/marketplace level, it is being more buyer-centric than ever before (given the environment described above). At an internal/organizational level, it is better aligning and collaborating with the sales organization.
B2B marketing is different. Sure some of the trends cited above — especially the shift in buyer power — are common to both B2B and B2C. But B2B marketing is still different. How?
In B2C marketing — especially with ‘fast moving consumer goods’ — scale matters. Thus, a top-down strategy is taken … where mistakes in customer communication may be made at the individual consumer level, but that is assumed to be okay as long as it is a small percentage of total interactions.
But in B2B marketing — especially with high price points and low unit volumes — relationships really do matter. One mistake made upstream in the lead-cultivation phase can have disastrous effects downstream. Thus, a ‘bottoms-up strategy’ in marketing is more appropriate.
The challenge of modern B2B marketing, thus, lies in building that granular and continuous ‘one-to-one’ relationship with a prospect, pre-sales, while also scaling overall activity to ensure a sufficient volume of leads to meet revenue targets.
This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is built around the entire lifecycle of developing and nurturing B2B buyer leads upstream through converting leads to customers and maintaining those customers downstream.
CRM integration: The system has pre-built integration with industry-leading CRM suites, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Netsuite and Salesforce, and the system can integrate with any other CRM suite via standards-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs).
Industry-leading B2B marketer education: Successful marketing automation begins with successful B2B marketing strategies. That is why Silverpop spends significant time and resources on marketer education. The keystone of this effort is the company’s recently-launched B2B Marketing University series.
Service and support: An intelligent technology platform, alone, is not sufficient to ensure the success of a marketing automation deployment. That’s why service and support is a hallmark of Silverpop’s offering and one of the top reasons why customers select Silverpop Engage B2B.
Orchestrating Buyer-centric Marketing
I highlighted the critical issue in B2B marketing of having a bottoms-up strategy and of driving one-to-one dialogue with prospects. This leads to a subsequent operational challenge: It takes a tremendous scale of raw leads to filter down to a single buyer. Research from SiriusDecisions indicates that an average B2B organization yields 2-3 sales conversions for every 1000 raw/upstream leads. Given this, how do you effectively market on a ‘mass’ one-to-one level — building a repeatable lead management strategy that gives each and every lead individual and tailored attention and personalization and that responds to their pull?
Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: “As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. ”
This is why at the core of Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is a smart, powerful, yet easy-to-use campaign management interface for building and managing buyer-centric marketing.
Dynamic campaign management: The campaign management interface allows you to build complex, dynamic campaigns that deliver marketing communication actions in response to the ‘pull’ of buyers. For instance, did your prospect recently visit your Website, download a white paper or dial your call center? By identifying actions and dynamic responses, Silverpop enables B2B marketers to manage complex, buyer-centric campaigns.
Campaign GUI: A key differentiator of the campaign management interface is something we call our ‘campaign GUI’ — a graphical environment that allows marketers to drag and drop campaign planning elements, that operates a lot like video-editing software and that is highly intuitive.
The major ‘internal’/organizational challenge marketers face lies in better syncing up with their sales teams — an issue closely related to being buyer-centric and of critical importance as sales people are tapped by buyers later and later in their buying process. This requires B2B marketers to better understand and empathize with their sales team colleagues. It also requires systems that can promote transparency and collaboration.
Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing’s role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing’s messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing’s contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next “new” economy.
This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform also focuses on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams — so lead management and buyer dialogue is seamless.
Lead scoring and routing: A robust lead scoring and routing engine both creates a catalyst for improving sales and marketing agreement on what constitutes a ‘good customer prospect’ and also helps to manage roles and lead hand-off on an ongoing basis. Key features include the ability to score based on a variety of demographic (explicit), behavioral (implicit) and BANT (budget, authority, needs and timing) factors, as well as mechanisms for returning cold leads from sales back to marketing for nurturing.
Sales-team transparency: Another key feature is the ability of sales team members to view granular details of lead activity from their Salesforce account. This ensures that a sales team member has complete insight into the pre-sales dialogue that has occurred and can pick up and run with a lead with maximum insight.
Are You Ready for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?
Responding to ‘buyer 2.0′ and leading in this new B2B marketing environment requires a blend of know-how and firepower. Silverpop is focused on both.
The Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform combines best practices with robust performance. And the Silverpop team is dedicated to delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of B2B marketers. We invite you to take a test drive of the system.
A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. However, I for one do not want to pay thousands of dollars in royalties. Images and other multimedia can really bring a blog post to life or capture the attention of your email subscribers. If you are like most of us, purchasing multimedia doesn’t exactly get its own budget line item. Thanks to Barb Dybwad at Mashable for the post, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog.
Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.
Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. Be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:
I recommend digging a little to find an image that is not too overused. It is possible to find stock photography that doesn’t look glaringly like stock photography. Trust me, you will feel like you have been sucker punched when you are driving down the freeway and see the same image you used for your entire fall campaign on a billboard for a used car dealership.
Also, before you use any image, audio or video, double check the license agreement for allowed uses and attribution requirements.
For Barb’s full list, be sure to check out the complete article.
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.
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
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.
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?
What is Silverpop Engage B2B?
What is 
