Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Maria Pergolino of Marketo (@inboundmarketer and @marketo) for this post.

What is Marketo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing Automation Demo Sales Insight Demo

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:

Earlier this week, we featured a post on Genius.com, which takes a unique, “Sales 2.0” approach to email marketing and marketing automation.  In fact, David Thompson, CEO and co-founder at Genius.com and former CMO at WebEx, helped launch the whole Sales 2.0 phenomenon, first by founding the Sales 2.0 conference and then by authoring Sales 2.0 for Dummies, the first book about Sales 2.0.  This past spring, David updated Sales 2.0 for Dummies in an executive edition that broadened the focus from Sales to look at Sales and Marketing alignment.

This eBook goes in-depth to define the new technology-based sales and marketing process to help shorten sales cycles, increase revenue and foster Marketing/Sales alignment.

Here’s a short excerpt to wet your whistle:
When Sales and Marketing are aligned, prospects move seamlessly from hearing about you in an online article to browsing your Web site or joining a Webinar to educate themselves to engaging with Sales when they are ready to learn more — and hopefully take the next step toward a purchase. Internally, when Sales and Marketing are aligned, they function like a professional NBA team, where players pass the ball (the Lead) back and forth, dribble down the court (qualifying and following up) until they make the basket (deal closed), and if they miss the basket, Marketing gets the rebound, and the process starts again (remarketing to prospects).

I love this basketball analogy.  I say it again and again. Marketing cannot just throw leads over the wall never to touch them again thinking, “now they are Sales’ problem.”  It has to be a closed loop process where Sales is able to return leads back to Marketing for further nurturing and Marketing is able to push back to Sales once the lead is sales-ready.

David also defines the new funnel:
The Sales 2.0 Funnel (see Figure below) updates traditional sales and marketing cycles by identifying each stage of the Sales 2.0 process and providing you with a sampling of new Web-based technologies that enable you to approach each step in a faster, more cost effective, and measurable way.

Sales 2.0 for Dummies really outlines all of the technologies needed to streamline the funnel and to effectively align Marketing and Sales.  The end of the eBook also gives you a checklist to see how well you have shifted to Sales 2.0 and to help you recognize areas for improvement.

Be sure to download your own copy of Sales 2.0 for Dummies to learn how to put the right technologies in place today to improve your marketing and sales results.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Felicity Wohltman at Genius (@felicity_genius) for this post.

What is Genius.com?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forrester, via Mashable, reports that $716 million will be spent on the social media marketing this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014.  Granted, it doesn’t appear to break down this forecast by B2B and B2C, but it’s pretty staggering any way you cut it.  Another interesting comparison stated in the article:

“At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).”

I’m a firm believer that email marketing will see its effectiveness reduced to the point of near-extinction within the next 5 years, due in part to social media as well as increasing proliferation of anti-spam technologies that will drive email into an almost completely whitelisted experience.  But it’s still unclear how all this social marketing spend is going to manifest itself.  The costs and ROI of social media are poorly understood at this point, especially with virtually all the tools and services being free.  I’m sure we’ll see more of this develop very soon.

In the meantime, congratulations to CoTweet who closed their Series A round of funding yesterday.  Good to see some of this activity happening in that booming hotbed of technology (and the town I grew up in), Hershey, Pennsylvania.

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…

Lead and Prospect -  Two words we hear a lot in marketing and sales roles so I decided to ask around and see how other people define a lead and a prospect.  Here’s what they said…

Dean Cruse, Internet/enterprise software VP of Marketing @deancruse:
Prospects are people who have shown some interest in your product or service, either by responding to a campaign, finding you through an inbound link, organic search, etc. They could also be subscribers to your blog, followers to your Twitter account, etc. who have an interest in your company’s point of view, or the market you serve. They could also be existing customers for one/some of your products who could be prospects for additional products. Prospects have opted-in to your message – until then they are just contacts on a list.

Leads can also come in from one of the above sources. Prospects can also be nurtured into leads through a variety of content-related programs (blogs, whitepapers, newsletters, events, articles, …). A lead is a person that has been qualified to a point where a sales person can take it over to work. Sales and marketing must agree on the definition of a qualified lead and it will vary based on the business.

Brande Bradshaw, Strategic Enterprise Sales Executive @bcoltb:
A lead is not yet a prospect.  Leads are people who you have some information on, you think they could potentially be a good fit, needs nurturing, someone you are cold calling and emailing with relevant information to get a meeting.

A prospect on the other hand is someone you’ve had a meeting or initial conversation with and this person can be categorized as a good fit.  Still needs nurturing and some coaching but they are engaged and moving through the sales process.

Mike Pilcher, SaaS VP Sales and Marketing @mike pilcher:
A lead is an individual contact with a person at a company who has the potential to purchase, or influence the purchase of your product. Usually in-bound focus.

A prospect is a company that has multiple stakeholders (hopefully represented by multiple leads) with the potential to purchase your product. Usually outbound focus.

In both cases a “lead” and a “prospect” are proxies for deeper definitions that change with your business cycle. Any definition needs to be company-specific incorporating concepts such as sales cycle, budget, existing customer, new product, product value, etc. @jonmiller2

Jon Miller, SaaS VP Marketing @jonmiller2:

This webcast from Marketo (presented by Jon) is actually what got me thinking about this.  Check out Marketo’s definition of each and be sure to watch all of this 45 webcast; it is PACKED with great information.  It’s worth your time, I promise.

Interesting…Which one do you agree with?  Or what do they mean to you?  And would your marketing and/or sales counterpart have the same definition?  Please share your thoughts!

Earlier this week we featured a post on Eloqua – what it is, what it does and why B2B marketers should care.  Well there’s more.  Eloqua not only has built a platform that enables marketers to execute but as a team they are committed to providing best practices that ensure results.

If you are an Eloqua customer, chances are you’ve recently received your copy of Digital Body Language by Steve Woods, Eloqua’s CTO.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  Here’s a preview of chapter 4 – The Profile of the New Buyer.

As expected the smart marketers at Eloqua have turned a few chapters from the book into eBooks.  Great idea!  Be sure to download the Digital Body Language eBooks for yourself.

The Profile of the New Buyer, we talk about it a lot here on The B2B Lead.  This chapter starts with this list of 5 key questions about a potential buyer that any sales person wants to know before engaging:

• How ready to buy is this person?  You’re probably thinking…uh yeah, if I knew that I wouldn’t be working so hard on the messaging for my next program…
• What role does this person play compared to his colleagues?  Roles, I love it.  We often refer to this buying group as the decision making unit (DMU)
• How interested is this person?
• What type of message best resonates with this person?
• What information on this person would be useful to obtain?

All great questions and today getting the answers to these questions is now marketing’s job.  Here’s where Digital Body Language comes in.  The goal is to create programs that help provide consistent, predictive insight into buying intentions.  This means tracking all engagement activities and trends aka digital body language.

To get the answers to these questions we must understand the following –

• Buyer’s Stage – At what stage of the buying process is the buyer?
• Buyer’s Role – Who is the prospective buyer?
• Interest Level – How interested is this buyer
• Communication Preferences – How does this buyer find information?

Woods goes on to further break down and explain how to use a prospect’s digital body language to build out the information needed to further qualify the lead before it is sent to sales.  For more, you’re going to have to get the book or at least download the eBook of this chapter.  It’s worth the quick read.

One of the best things about the Digital Body Language book is that it not only forces you to expand your thinking on marketing’s new and improved role of creating a sales pipeline of qualified, interested buyers but it also provides some great ideas and how-to’s.  Here’s a couple from this chapter:

Web Sites and Meaningful URLs
Avoid storing multiple distinct information assets on one page or using incomprehensible strings as URLs.  Instead, achieve the highest level of insight into the prospect’s interests based solely on their path through you Web site.

Web Site Hot Spots
Make sure you can view this traffic by area, rather than by individual page.  Tagging these pages with “meta” meaning will show you when a visitor views five case study pages and seven product pages – rather than 12 unique pages

For more on Eloqua, go to www.eloqua.com.  To get your copy of Digital Body Language, go here.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. First up on the list is our long-standing partner, Eloqua.  Thanks to Steve Woods at Eloqua (@stevewoods) for this post.

What is Eloqua?

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

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

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

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

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

Some unique points about how Eloqua helps you score leads:

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

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

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

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

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

Lead nurturing with Eloqua gets you to success faster because:

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

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

Eloqua’s Marketing Analysis stands out because:

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

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

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

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

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

LinkedIn seems to be the most commonly used social network amongst most B2B Marketers. Or at least the one where people seem to be seeing real results.  Today we’re able to participate in groups with those we have things in common with, answer questions, and look up contacts/prospects and see how many connections away we are. To date there has been no real way for Marketers to collect leads in a systematic way. Well, it looks like this is changing.

Yesterday, LinkedIn CEO sent out a tweet saying he just downloaded his first whitepaper from LinkedIn.

This new feature doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet but here’s what we do know:

• There will be a form to collect info. from those that download
• Looks like costs will range from $40 – $100 per lead
• LinkedIn users will not have to pay for whitepapers
• Whitepaper ads will can be targeted by title and industry
• Content is still king here. People are only going to download interesting content that provides value.
• Whitepaper titles are going to be even more important. It’s what’s going to catch your target’s eye.
• When someone downloads a form, they are basically opting in for follow up communications.
• In addition to the targeted advertising, there will be a whitepaper directory for LinkedIn members to search for relevant content.

Here’s another example of how B2B Marketers are able to mix their social media with direct lead generation. Once this is rolled out, I think we’ll give it a try. How about you?