Thanks to Laura Folio and Adam Blitzer for their blog post on Pardot earlier this week. We want to continue to discuss what Pardot is offering by taking a look at one of their great whitepapers.

Marketing Automation is an integral part to any marketing organization, but there are a lot of choices out there. With so many top vendors to choose from, how do you make the best decision for you and your organization? Pardot has written a great whitepaper to help you through the process, Web Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide.

Their whitepaper is set up in a very easy to read with a number of charts that help walk through the decision-making process.

I also found their list of ten questions to ask when evaluating a marketing automation tool particularly useful:

1. What marketing solutions do you currently employ (email marketing, paid search, etc.)?
2. Does your sales team use a CRM system?
3. How does marketing pass leads into the CRM system (if applicable)?
4. Which areas of your marketing and sales process could be more efficient?
5. Who in your organization will use the marketing automation system?
6. What is the projected timeline for deciding on a solution?
7. What are some of the short-term goals to be achieved with marketing automation?
8. What are some of the long-term goals to be achieved with marketing automation?
9. What type of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) do your employees typically use?
10. Do you have web programmers in-house, or do you use an outside agency?

One of the most important things to remember when selecting a Marketing Automation tool is that it needs to work for you and your team, which means you want something that works with the flow of your data, your CRM and your processes. Pardot has set up some easy to follow check-lists of things that will help you make the best choice between the systems you are evaluating. They aren’t exactly tear-sheets but could easily be utilized as such to help you along the way.

Their whitepaper is extremely informative and a must-read for anyone in the market for a Marketing Automation system.

Remember in school when you took a quiz to see what kind of learner you are?  In case you didn’t, there are three types of learners:

• Visual (seeing) learners
• Auditory (listening) learners
• Kinesthetic (touch/experience) learners

Does your marketing mix appeal to all three types?  We are trying to add more to our mix to appeal to a greater audience.  We have a new way for visual learns to understand what we do.  We created a map that shows a live feed of contacts we are discovering right now.  It is pretty cool if you haven’t checked it out yet.  Thanks to Jason for creating it.  Is there a cool or new visual way you could explain your business?

When trying to reach visual learners, consider:

• new graphics
• charts
• videos

For those who are auditory learners, you might try experimenting with:

• podcasts
• video or recorded case studies
• webinars

For kinesthetic learners, look into:

• interactive demos
• in-person events
• free trials

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been highlighting some of the most well known Marketing Automation players out there.  This week we’re profiling MarketBright.  Thanks again to Caitlin and Mike Pilcher for the previous blog post.

So now that you’ve read about and studied up on each, what’s next?  Just getting the right technology in place isn’t going to solve all of your headaches.

MarketBright’s whitepaper, Tips To Improve Your Lead Management Strategy, has some great ideas on creating and building out your lead generation strategy.

Here’s a few things that caught my eye…

When getting started here’s a few things to think about:

• Who has ownership of each stage of the process?
• Is there a defined lead management flow that exists today?
• What essential performance indicators or ROI measures are associated at key points throughout the process?

Just like taking a road trip, best practice says you should have a map before you take off.

Lead Generation/Acquisition – the following elements are absolutely necessary to provide QUALITY leads:

• Have you agreed with your sales team on what a qualified lead looks like?  Any of these sound familiar?
• Clearly define and know your target market.  An effective lead generation process always begins and ends with knowing the audience.
• Use effective lead generation tools.
• Optimize landing pages and forms.  Be clear on the action you want your audience to take and focus the content on just that action.
• Use accurate and reliable campaign metrics for tracking, reporting and testing.  This keeps everyone involved in the process honest .

Remember – the secret with any lead management system is to maximize the efficiency but not lose the impact of a personal customer experience. I think this is a great point!  As we continue to use automation to be more effective and efficient we have to remember that people buy from people.

Thanks again to MarketBright for contributing this week.  Now go download this whitepaper to ensure you are set up for success.

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 Caitlin Marco at MarketBright for this post.

What is Marketbright?

For starters, Marketbright is simply a centric platform for marketing automation. However, a ton of information is packed into that one, little sentence. So what does it really mean? Marketbright has rethought the way marketing automation should work for you; making you, the marketer, more in control of the development, execution, and result of your campaign. Marketbright’s marketing automation platform acts as a central hub for multi-touch marketing campaigns. By automating best practices of Sales and Marketing, you can execute any campaign from direct mail and telemarketing, to events and online advertising. Even the management of your website can be taken out of the hands of the webmaster and put into the hands of Marketing. Our philosophy is that marketing automation leverages the technology and best practices of multiple departments in order to produce faster, more efficient campaign deployment and reporting, right out of the box.

But, wait, how do you do all that?
One thing we firmly believe is that marketing should be done by, well, marketers. Being marketers ourselves, we have a good idea of the kind of tools our clients need to get the job done. If the job has to rely on the use of the IT department to update the events on their website, or the sales team to do nurture marketing instead of closing deals, then resources are being wasted and productivity is falling. Bottom line is that their ROI isn’t what it could be.

Now that you have an idea of what we mean by a “central platform,” here are a few items that help make marketing more productive and less dependent on outside resources:

Campaign Management: Marketbright’s campaign management tools allow any nontechnical person to easily create quarterly campaign plans that are automatically tied to powerful reporting and tracking tools. The result is streamlined budgeting capabilities and seamless campaign management.

Lead Nurturing:  approach is unique in the marketplace because it has automated the difficult task of managing multi-touch campaigns and the resulting, often complex flows. The platform provides an easy way to deploy and manage multi-touch campaigns across all marketing channels.

Resource Center: is the easy to use solution to keeping relevant content and marketing collateral updated on your website. Your company’s most recent case studies, white papers, and product brochures will be readily available to potential prospects without any edits to your website

Event Center: is a great addition to Marketbright’s Event Management solution. Without the help of your IT department, the Event Center automatically publishes all of your upcoming on and offline events directly to your website.
As mentioned before, Marketbright incorporates aspects from multiple departments in its platform to create one central hub. It also helps align Sales and Marketing to act as one organization. With the use of lead nurturing and lead management, Sales and Marketing are able to work together to get the most out of your lead generation.

Lead Scoring: One of Marketbright’s key strengths is scoring leads so only the best leads go directly to sales. Marketbright’s platform automatically sorts and prioritizes leads based on customizable rules. Marketbright’s lead scoring system features:

• Highly customizable rules to generate more accurate lead scores.
• Intelligent monitoring of customer activity, including web pages visited, time spent on the site, and visits from multiple people from the same company.
• Validation of data entered onto lead forms helps weed out inauthentic leads by scoring them lower.

Just as the collaboration between Sales and Marketing effects the quality of the contacts in the pipeline, a consolidation of data between Marketing and Sales gives a full view of the path a contact took to becoming a customer.  Marketbright’s marketing analytics provides insight into the sale funnel and instant feedback as to what’s performing well and what’s not, allowing for on the spot campaign optimization.

Marketing Analytics: Marketbright analytics enables closed loop marketing that equates to traceable return on investment. Marketbright’s pre-integrated platform is designed from the ground up to provide a 360 degree view of all customer interactions:

• Visibility and metrics from campaign to cash
• Data consistency across all customer interactions
• Access to reporting for campaigns at-a-glance.
• Visibility into what’s working, and what’s not
• Automated profiles of promising prospects for targeted follow up

By understanding where marketing resources and budget are being lost, Marketbright fills in the gaps to improve your productivity. A centralized marketing automation platform brings in all the different resources used by Marketing and combines it into one solution. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketbright, please visit us at www.marketbright.com

MarketingSherpa just came out with a very interesting how-to on using LinkedIn for lead generation.  While most of us have a profile, many marketers are unsure on how to use this new channel as a lead source.  MarketingSherpa interviewed Jason Rushin, Director, Marketing at Quantivo on his process and found 6 lessons that all B2B marketers can learn from.

Here are some of highlights from the article:

Lesson #1. Target groups by activity level, not just size

For each group, Rushin spent 15 or 20 minutes reading through recent posts to assess group members’ interest areas, and how much activity each post generated. In the end, he identified 17 groups that matched his needs.

Lesson #2. Join groups under an individual name, not a company identity

Social media is a two-way channel, which makes it especially important to assign a point-person to oversee your social media initiatives, establish themselves as a community member, and respond to feedback.

Lesson #3. Place collateral in the context of a conversation

Every time the team had a new piece of collateral to promote — such as a webinar or a white paper — Rushin looked for opportunities to share that information with the team’s LinkedIn groups.

- For example, when promoting a white paper, he would write a message to the group announcing the new title, sharing a link, and asking group members to provide feedback on the white paper itself.

Lesson #4. Response rate is highly variable

By participating in several groups, Rushin quickly saw that response to his lead-generation offers (in the form of landing page registrations) was highly variable. Each group has its own characteristics and dynamics, which make some white paper or webinar offers highly successful and others relative duds.

Testing content offerings among different groups is essential. Beyond that, Rushin also saw two factors that affected response rate:

- Placement in the weekly or daily update newsletters

- White paper or webinar topic

Lesson #5. Create social media-specific landing pages

Rather than taking LinkedIn members to a standard landing page, Rushin created landing pages that specifically addressed the LinkedIn audience.

The tactic did not require a complete landing page redesign. Instead, the team modified the landing page text to create continuity for visitors arriving from LinkedIn, using phrases such as: “Thank you for your interest in this discussion”

Lesson #6. Quality can be an issue with leads from LinkedIn

To discourage job-seekers, the team changed its registration form to require prospects to use an email address from a company domain — forbidding the use of free email accounts such as Yahoo! or Gmail. The technique backfired, though, when LinkedIn members began complaining to Rushin (and sometimes to their Twitter followers) that the company was preventing unemployed people or independent consultants from viewing their thought-leadership content.

Rather than risk alienating LinkedIn members, you may have to rely on inside sales follow-up or further nurturing to eliminate non-qualified leads from your marketing funnel.

Ultimately lead generation on LinkedIn is the same as any other lead gen channel.  Be targeted, stay relevant to your audience, measure everything you can and always go for quality over quantity of leads.

The entire article is open to non-MarketingSherpa members until August 5th, be sure to check it out.

Thanks to Emily for the Manticore post earlier this week.  Manticore has great resources section on their website full of best practices and tips for anyone trying to learn more about marketing automation.  For those of you who are trying to make the tough decision to decide on the best marketing automation solution for your company, Manticore has 23 Questions Demand Generation Companies May Not Want You to Ask.  The checklist coves five categories of questions you should be asking:

• Key Features and Functionality
• Customer Support
• Usability
• Company Reliability
• CRM Integration

Questions to consider include:

• What is the specific version of the product that you are showing me?
• Do you have your own email engine?
• How long will the implementation take?

The best part is it is not just a list of questions.  Manticore breaks down why you should care about the answers to each and how it will affect your business.

Don’t forget to download your own copy for the full list of questions (it is the first item under the whitepapers tab).

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 Emily Mayfield at Manticore (@ECMAYFIELD) for this post.

What is Manticore?

Manticore Technology delivers marketing automation solutions with the ideal combination of power and usability.  Marketing Automation improves marketing and sales alignment resulting in increased close ratios, decreased marketing spend, and increased revenue.  We’ve been asked many times how our company got its name.  Our name and our solutions were inspired by a Manticore, which is a legendary creature that has the body of a lion and a human head – a combination of power and intuitiveness.   Manticore Technology provides marketers with marketing automation solutions with the power, usability and support needed to ensure success.  How do exactly do we do that?

Our solutions are intuitive and user-friendly without sacrificing power and sophistication.  Manticore customer Aaron Raymo, Marketing Manager at Gevity, says, “When it comes to marketing automation, I believe that form and function are equally important.  Manticore’s user interface is incredibly easy for every day marketers to understand and utilize effectively.”  Unique features and services that contribute to Manticore’s user-friendly reputation are:

• Demand Booster – Intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows you to build powerful lead nurturing campaigns with no IT resources or extensive training.  Its incredible flexibility enables you to build, copy, and modify programs on the fly.
• Easy Implementation – Complete integration with your CRM system in just one-hour with no implementation fees or consulting costs allows you to start running campaigns immediately and quickly show ROI.
• Email Marketing Management – WYSIWYG Editor enables you to design emails and landing pages quickly with no HTML.  Templates and image hosting allows for quick deployment and advanced personalization.

While a user-friendly interface is an important feature, at the end of the day, you need a solution that has the power and functionality to meet your demand generation needs.  Manticore customer Robyn Foreman, Online Marketing Director at Jaspersoft, notes, “We looked at a number of demand generation solutions, focusing on usability, price and performance before deciding on Manticore Technology.  Manticore offered the most extensive capabilities for lead nurturing, lead scoring, email marketing management, real-time campaign analysis, list management and multi-channel PPC tracking at its price point.”  In terms of power and functionality, Manticore is an industry leader in:

• Holistic CRM integration – Unified platform allows for exceptional alignment between marketing and sales.  Custom objects enable users to enter leads into lead nurturing processes from within their CRM.  Marketing activity history, lead scores, and promotion codes exist within your CRM interface.
• Dynamic Content – Deliver targeted messages based on a lead’s specific attributes and interests within one email campaign or lead nurturing process.
• Multi-Model Lead Scoring (M²L) – Run simultaneous models to match leads with unique products.  Depreciate scores based on lack of activity over a period of time.  Automatically send leads to sales or add to a Demand Booster process based on their score.

Because we are dedicated to ensuring your success, we deliver unmatched customer service.  When you become a Manticore customer, you are assigned to a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM), who has deep expertise with our platform.  Your CSM’s job is to make sure that you’re successful in achieving your desired results. Diane Block, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Liquid Machines notes, “Manticore’s customer support team has been instrumental in helping with the implementation of the tool, as well as in setting up effective processes and campaigns, and in addition, are very responsive to all of our requests.”

Bottom line, Manticore Technology improves your business and enables you to be a better marketer.  Like the mythical beast, Manticore Technology is a combination of power and intuitiveness unlike anything you’ve ever seen.   If you would like more information on Manticore Technology or are interested in taking an online demo, please visit www.manticoretechnology.com.  For marketing automation best practices and insight, check out our blog at http://blog.manticoretechnology.com/.

Thanks again to Maria for the Marketo post earlier this week. As an add on to her post we wanted to make sure our B2BLead readers check out this onDemand webcast, Marketo’s Secret Sauce.

Jon Miller, Marketo’s VP of Marketing, has a done a great job of explaining how they have set up and work their marketing and sales funnel to drive success. And it’s obviously working. Just last week they announced surpassing the 200 customer mark in only 15 months. My guess is most of these customers originated in marketing.

Any B2B Marketer out there looking for guidance should watch this and be sure to take notes. I promise, it’s worth your time.

Here’s some of the things covered in the 45 minute webcast:

• Marketo’s demand generation funnel
• Growth in our organic awareness
• Effectiveness of various lead generation channels (paid and organic): % qualified, % sales-ready lead, % opportunity, cost per lead, etc.
• How we use lead nurturing to develop relationships with prospects that are not sales ready; the ROI of lead nurturing
• The exact lead scoring rules we use (demographics and behaviors) to identify sales-ready leads
• Our 21 day lead follow-up process
• Metrics and conversion rates for every stage of the demand generation funnel
• How we present marketing forecasts to the board

No forms, just click here to get started.

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: