Powering Marketing Automation with Targeted Leads - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #251
Monday, June 22nd, 2009Written by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of the recent book Digital Body Language.
Amy was kind enough to ask me to write a post to the B2B Lead audience to answer a question that frequently comes up. What is the relationship between Demand Generation/Marketing Automation, such as what we provide at Eloqua, and Targeted Contact Discovery, such as Reachforce’s service.
It’s a great question, and the answer touches on a number of areas.
The key relationship is the critical importance of understanding your target audience. The cost of raw, untargeted data continues to drop. With various social or data scraping services in the market today, the cost of a raw name, even a name with title information attached, has been reduced to pennies.
However, this has led to a market dynamic where untargeted marketing messages are prevalent, and the ability to precisely target the right buyer with the right message at the right time is the most important differentiator.
Role-based contact discovery is a crucial step in understanding who is a potential buyer of your product or services. Going beyond title to discover actual functional role allows you to precisely identify the individual who would, when the time is right, progress through a buying cycle and purchase your product or services.
And this is where demand generation, such as the platform we provide at Eloqua, comes in.
The key synergy is that by using a demand generation platform to understand the digital body language of our buyers, we can identify the critical second piece of the equation - where each buyer is in their buying cycle. By understanding the stages of a buying process for your product or service, and then using scoring to map each potential buyer to the stage of the buying process he or she is at, you can see whether they are at the education and awareness stage, are discovering potential vendors, or are validating a vendor as their final choice.
With a clear understanding of the “who” (based on role-based discovery) and the “how interested” (based on reading their digital body language), targeting the right message to the right person at the right time becomes possible.
However, there is another crucial link. Even though the differentiated value of understanding role, vs just title, is clear to most marketers, the difference may be lost on the CFO. Demand generation processes allow you to paint a much clearer picture of the value of one name over another.
With Eloqua, you can rethink your marketing analysis around the full buying funnel. By taking a top-down view of your marketing analysis, you can begin to get a clear picture of where each buyer is in their buying process. As you do this, you can begin to push your analysis of the value of a name further down the buying funnel. Determining, through using lead scoring, which source of names actually turns into Marketing Qualified Leads and revenue opportunities allows you to view the value of the incoming names more clearly. If a targeted name costs more by a factor of 5, but converts into revenue opportunities at 10X the rate of untargeted names, it is clearly more valuable. Demand generation allows you to prove that value further down the buying funnel.
A third critical link is in sales understanding. Sales needs to engage with individual buyers in individual conversations. The only way to do this is for them to understand the interests of each buyer. Targeted discovery allows you to provide your sales team with insights into what the potential buyer’s role and major focus areas are, while Eloqua allows you to provide your sales team with insight into their area and level of interest through giving them insights into the buyer’s digital body language.
With these approaches in place, it is even possible to reverse the standard approach of seeking, through targeted lead discovery, folks in the right roles, followed by using lead nurturing to cultivate and generate interest. Interest may already exist, and can be identified through seeing individuals from ideal target companies anonymously visiting your website. In this case, these companies, where interest has already been seen, can be passed automatically to Reachforce for targeted lead discovery. This provides you with an immediate win, as you have a person in the right role, at a company that is already showing interest in your product or solution.
Together, targeted lead discovery through Reachforce and demand generation through Eloqua form a powerful combination that allows you to find the right person, at the right company, showing the right level of buying interest. For your sales team, there can be no better lead than that.
How Dirty is Your Marketing Data? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #243
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009According to SiriusDecisions, “The Company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.” Whether you love it or hate it, we all have a marketing database filled with web leads, customers and trade show lists.
If kept up to date, this database is invaluable to the success of our marketing campaigns. If it is used as a general repository of contacts and never cleaned up, your email bouncebacks/mail returns will be through the roof and your response rates will be abysmal. According to MarketingSherpa, 2.1% of contact data goes bad every month. This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty. Do you know which 25%?
Based on these stats, ReachForce has created a dirty data calculator to show you just how much of your data is dirty. See how dirty your data is now.
Adding Custom Links to Hoovers, Google and Maps in Salesforce - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #238
Friday, May 15th, 2009A few weeks back the Eloqua Artisan blog spotlighted posting up links within your CRM system to connect your CRM and LinkedIn, it’s a very helpful post that walks through how to better enable your Sales team with seamless integration between your CRM and LinkedIn. Prior to reading this post I had done some similar linking within our salesforce.com instance and were inspired to share.
A few of the items we’ve linked into our Lead records:
- Hoovers Profile
- Map It!
- Google It!
So now for the how-to:
- I (as our salesforce.com admin) opened up the set-up page, under “App Setup” and from the “Customize” menu selected “Leads” and then “Buttons and Links.”
- Select “New” button, once the New Button or Link interface opens up, you’ll want to put information in all of the boxes that have a red line alongside them (those are mandatory). Using our “Hoovers Profile” button as an example, you’ll want to fill in the Label and Name with the appropriate information.
- Under Behavior you’ll want to make an appropriate selection, I have it set up to display in a new window and since this is replicating a search string, the Content Source is URL.
- In the larger box with formulas and fields, I dropped in the following: http://search.hoovers.com/cgi-bin/hol_search?which=company&query_string={!Lead.Company}
- After you’ve entered your formula/search string, select ‘Save.’
- Now you’ve got a button, you need to add it to your Lead Record. Select the “Page Layout” menu under “App Set Up,” “Customize,”, “Leads,” “Page Layouts.” Decide which of your page layouts you’d like to edit and choose ‘Edit.’
- Once the interface for editing the lead layout appears, you’ll want to select ‘Custom Links’ (noted in blue below) in the gray box and find the link you created (it’s name will appear). From there you can drag it and drop it within the links portion of the Lead record.
- Hit “Save” and you’re done.
Here are the strings I use for the buttons we’ve added:
- For a Google Search:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS275&q={!Lead.Company} - For a Map:
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?cn={!Lead.Country}&csz={!Lead.City}+{!Lead.State}+{!Lead.PostalCode}+&addr={!Lead.Street} - For a Hoovers Company Profile:
http://search.hoovers.com/cgi-bin/hol_search?which=company&query_string={!Lead.Company}
This has been a great help to our sales reps to give them a little more info about their prospects and has been a huge time saver.
10 signs your in-house database needs help BEFORE you launch another program - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #236
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009Part of my job here at ReachForce is helping our customers with a quick analysis of their marketing database and then helping them update and repair the company and contact information needed for their lead generation programs. Here’s a list of 10 things I see in almost every marketing and sales database I’ve looked at:
- Names are mis-mashed up with erroneous information. Examples:
- Web-to-Lead forms have left you with a lot of trash. Examples:
- Your Customers are still listed as your prospects.
- You have multiple copies of any one person.
- Employees of your company are listed as prospects.
- You have records created with companies someone wants to target but no contacts, instead of holding a valid contact your CRM is being used as a place holder. OR, you have holey records, pieces and parts of a contact but no whole contact.
- Phone numbers are missing digits and/or area codes.
- Bad or Blank email addresses.
- Invalid or incomplete mailing addresses – maybe you don’t do direct mail, but chances are you need this for something…
- You have no way to segment your data. Do you have information on these companies in a standardized format, for instance all tech companies have some kind of tag, or all operations contacts have a specific designation? If not, how are you segmenting your data? Wouldn’t it be easier if everything had the same system of tagging applied to it?
John “No Longer There” Smith
Jenny (female) Jones
Byron (buy-ron) Doe (Dough)
First Name Last Name Email Company
Test Test test@test.com None
None of Your absc@asklfjsl.com Business
Examples:
First Name Last Name Email Company
Find Name In Hoovers na@na.com Microsoft
IT Dept Mgr na@na.com Exxon
Amy H. ???@reachforce.com ReachForce
L. Wallace ???@Reachforce.com ReachForce
Is is not the most exciting or the most glamorous part of campaign planning but getting your database in order will have a huge affect on the success your marketing programs.
Sales - Here is How to “Work” Your Data, Love Marketing
Monday, May 4th, 2009Dear Sales,
Now that we’re on the same page about the data, let’s talk specifics on how to make this happen.
- You know that we work hard to segment the data before it goes into campaigns, so first, get to know how we segment things. Talk to us, find out why we do things the way we do and who gets batched together. Seeing the world the way we do will help you better understand why certain types of contacts are getting certain messages and will help you better reach out to and tailor your messages to those contacts. We are open to your ideas too. You know your prospects better than we do. Help us to help you.
- Get to know the companies in your database, ask for help from Sales Operations or export a report of your prospects. Spend time learning about each company on your list, what do they do, who do they sell to, what events do they attend, make yourself an expert on them so that when you talk to them they feel like you really do know them and their pain points. Make notes in the record so that you don’t lose track of this valuable information.
- Do you use mail merge fields in your emails or letters? If so, then really spend some time cleaning up the names of prospects and their companies. Make sure people aren’t listed like this: “John NO LONGER THERE Smith” or “Jane SHE IS A REAL JERK Doe” – there is a notes section in your CRM, use it!
- If you’re using salesforce.com, set up views that capture activity, for instance, if your marketing automation tool integrates and marks activity on prospect records, set up a view where you can see that kind of activity. Keep tabs on what people are doing so that you can reach out to those active prospects.
These are just ideas, but the idea is that if you are truly in the ‘weeds’ of the data, you’ll get a good handle on what you own, who you’re calling and hopefully begin seeing some great results!
Love,
Marketing
Marketing Campaign Tracking in salesforce.com - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #227
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke. Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems. She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient. She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.
As Sales and Marketing become better aligned, so do our tracking systems and metrics. For a while, we at ReachForce have struggled with the question of how best to track our campaigns, we wanted to know (for instance), how many emails it took to get someone to respond, what email was it that seemed to be the trigger? And the bigger piece to this puzzle, since we all know the Sales team doesn’t have the bandwidth to really track this information, how can we automate it?
Lucky for us, salesforce.com has a few cool features that we have found useful in tracking this type of things, the first is their Campaign Management tab.
Within the Campaign Management tab you can create a campaign, drop in the list of people who will be part of the campaign and as opportunities arise from that campaign, you can see exactly who they are. Along with the ability to watch as opportunities join the funnel as a result of your campaign, you can keep tabs on the cost of your campaign, its possible ROI and its actual ROI. Campaign Management gives you a full window into your programs. For a full run-down on the Campaign Management feature as well as new Marketing related features in salesforce.com, you should check out their Marketing Blog.
Outside of the Campaign Management feature, we use individualized Dashboards to track activity on specific events/campaigns. For instance, after Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s user group conference and our one big trade show) this past year, we tagged leads that we gathered as having attended Dreamforce, exhibited at Dreamforce, or having had a conversation with someone at our booth. To do this, we utilized a custom field we already had on our Lead and Contact records called “Marketing” – we populated all of the leads connected to Dreamforce with the right information (either a tag called “Dreamforce 08 Exhibitor”, “Dreamforce 08 Attendee” or “Dreamforce 08 Scan”). One quick caveat is that not only did all of our leads go through a rigorous scrubbing process (to determine whether the companies were a fit for us), but in instances where we knew we needed a different person (i.e. we hadn’t had enough conversation to verify that these persons played a role in the Decision-Making Unit or buying process) we submitted the company to a role-based contact discovery project so that we could gather the right person.
Once all of those people were tagged, we were able to track them through the pipeline based on knowing they attended/exhibited at or were scanned at Dreamforce. We built out a full dashboard tracking this information, it helps Marketing see the value in our investment at the event and helps Sales see the value of the data collected at the event and track to make sure that all of those leads get the proper follow-up.
On the Sales side we set up a view for all of our reps that showed their individual Dreamforce related leads. This made follow up clean and easy because our Sales people knew exactly who attended Dreamforce and whether they showed up at our booth (we imported certain information to indicate whether leads had been at the booth and who they had spoken with).
Salesforce.com continues to roll-out new features that better enable Marketers to track the progress of their campaigns once from lead to customer. As we test and use them, we will be certain to share our findings! Have you found an easy way to track things once they hit the pipeline? What tricks do you have for tracking your campaigns?
Dirty Data – Do You Care? - Marketing WTF?
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009I’m not a marketing or sales guy per se so please help me understand something here.
As the classic saying goes, “I know at least half of my data is bad…I just don’t know which half”.
Marketing Sherpa tells us that contact data degrades at a rate of 2.1% per month (and it’s probably gone up substantially given the current rate of job loss), it’s easy to see how this is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having said all that, does it matter you could be sitting on piles of dirty data?
Contact data cleanup seems to experience a run-up of demand at the end of the year when marketers have just enough budget to burn on something small to mid-sized but not enough to do anything substantial with. Or at least this is what we saw. In fact, we cleaned up some of our own CRM data in December as well.
But come the turn of the new year and new budget, the psychology of “new” is the all the rage. Sales reps are innately in perpetual want for new leads, but as we say around here, it seems most marketing and sales teams would rather keep building new add-on rooms to their houses than spend the money to fix the basement that is flooded with sewage.
So what is the psychology behind using what you have vs. buying something new? Is it simply fueled by an unquenchable thirst for “new, new, new” (and the perception thereof)? Or do you have a more systematic approach to if and when you elect to use what you have vs. buy new stuff?
Is it the same mentality of buying something that is on sale even if you don’t really need it?
I just don’t get it.
5 Things to Consider When Marketing to your In-House Database - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #196
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
When times are tough we are forced to make use of what we already have. After many events, lead forms, list exchanges and sales rolodex’s you have probably built a nice size database of prospects. Before you get ready to launch your next program to your in-house database consider these things:
- Marketing Sherpa has said that 2.1% of data goes bad every month. (This stat is about 2 years old, with so many people losing their jobs over the last couple of months I bet this number has gone up, but for this, we are going to use the 2.1) This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty. Do you know which 25%?
Contact records stay fresh about as long as a gallon of milk. Well maybe a little bit longer but you get the idea. Here’s some other interesting stats (also about 2 years old) According to Gartner, more than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. In the same time, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Again, I bet these numbers are up too.
- Are you marketing to the entire DMU (decision making unit)? Do you have your entire DMU in your database?
B2B purchases are typically made by a group of people. Each one with different concerns and specifications. To accelerate sales cycles it pays to start the connections before your prospect moves into the sales funnel. DMUs can include – end users, business managers, finance specialist, technology specialists, senior management, key influencers, procurement specialists, etc.
Marketing Sherpa also says…For purchases of $25K or more -
100 – 500 employees 6.8 people in the DMU making buying decisions
501-1000 employees 13.5 people in the DMU making buying decisions
0ver 1000 employees 21 people in DMU making buying decisions - If you are trying to upsell or cross sell to your existing customer database, do you have the right buyers and their contact information?
If you are selling a platform or have solutions that affect multiple groups within a company, there’s a chance you don’t have the right buyers for your new product or solution. Here’s an example: You sell a CRM platform and have recently added accounting and marketing modules. Marketing to the sales leader that bought the CRM piece probably isn’t your target audience for the new modules and won’t get you very far. Their needs are already met. And while they may be involved in the additional purchases they probably are not the ultimate buying decision maker for your upsell or cross sell.
- Do you have all of the relevant contact information needed to executive your marketing programs?
Example – You are planning a breakfast city tour and want to invite people in each region via email and also with a direct mail piece. Do you have everyone’s correct physical address for the actual events and the direct mail? Do you also have correct email addresses for the series of emails you plan to send reminding people about the event? Missing just once piece can hinder your results.
- Have you considered international privacy and SPAM laws?
While we’re all very familiar with our US CAN-SPAM laws, have you researched the other countries you are marketing to? Each countries laws are different, like for example Germany requires a double opt-in for email marketing.
Am I missing anything here? Remember the grass isn’t always greener with the unknowns. Work what you have, at some point you thought these people were worthy of holding on to.
Customer Experience Index Scoring - Part 7 - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #192
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009This is the 7th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEITM) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6)
Here is the outline we’ve been following:
- CEI Initiative Planning
- Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
- Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
- Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
- Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
- (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting
So far we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for scoring to examine three existing customer scenarios as examples:
- An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
- Applying CEI-metrics for better account-by-account management planning
- Building CEI-lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
Next on the list is to take a look at using CEI response data to help locate, target and engage with net-New prospects.
Reference Account Management
The most obvious and useful way CEI scoring benefits the new sales process is the buttoned down way it sorts advocacy dynamics and pinpoints which current customers would make the best references based on data analysis, not on someone’s opinion. There is nothing more powerful from a news sales perspective than having a well stocked supply of sales ready references. It happens every day across the world, thousands of times a day ― a sales person bursts into the marketing or account manager’s office needing three references to connect with their prospect. Not only is the list of needed attributes arms length, but it all needs to happen before tomorrow afternoon. Sound familiar? Yes it does.
This scenario takes us back to the first exercise we did for determining what a customer’s advocacy rating is. Remember it’s a matter of reading how a customer feels about their entire experience with your company using a scoring schema that takes metrics from both qualitative (loyalty) and quantitative (satisfaction) feedback into account. So if asked to produce recommendations about what customers should be the best sales-ready references we’d produce response scores rendered from a two-step lens build that would look something like this:
Step 1 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts
Once each row on the customer list has an assigned CEI Advocacy Score, simply sort this column in descending order and in combination with the column for customer response time to your survey plus overall satisfaction scores, plus Key Weight. This (if you remember back to the 1st and 2nd posts in this series) is because the survey invitations were sent as an integrated campaign, i.e. first an email, then another, then a phone call reminder from the account manager, then another from an executive, then perhaps another email, etc., thus determining how quick to respond each survey taker was. It stands to reason that someone who responded quickly in combination with high scores from Advocacy, Satisfaction and Key Weight are going to be a good sales ready reference account.
Step 2 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts
So the above mentioned sort produces a top 10 list based on:
Next week we’ll cover ways to build rules-based profiles of your most successful customers and your relationships with them and then use the data to score how well new company targets match the rules.
Dirty Data — Think Relevance Before Repair - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #186
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009As we kick off the New Year, we’re typically in an “out with the old, in with the new” mindset. While that may be true for a lot of things, it doesn’t have to be the case for your marketing database. As we ponder in 2009 how to do more with less, think about what you can do with what you have.
Most Marketers are overwhelmed by a customer or prospect database with hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in myriad states of completeness. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.
Did you know?
- More than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months – Gartner Group
- In that same 12 months, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau
- “The Company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.” – Sirius Decisions
Dirty data, whether purchased or collected from download offers hampers your lead generation results and drives up costs. So sticking with the same theme from my last couple of posts, doing more with what you already have, consider this.
Before throwing out your dirty data and buying new or taking on a massive database clean up initiative, think relevance.
What lead data do you have in your database that is relevant to your target markets and buying roles today? From there you can put together a repair program. Here’s a starting point for determining what relevant data you already have at your fingertips.
- What businesses you need to target? Industries? Vertical markets?
- Who in those businesses are involved in the buying decision for your product or services?
- What are you going to do with the data? (Email campaign, direct mail, telemarketing)
Now it is time to repair that relevant data. Start with what’s missing. Here’s a list of things to consider:
If you are doing segmented email programs, do you have the right buying roles within your target markets?
- Do you have all of the email addresses you need for each role in the decision making unit?
If you are doing a direct mail program, do you have accurate mailing addresses for everyone you are targeting? - Are there more companies out there that are in your target market that you currently don’t have in your marketing database? If so, find these and add them.
- Is there data older than 6 months in your database that needs refreshing? Remember how many people are moving around and how many companies are merging or going out of business on a monthly basis. Consider refreshing this data. **This does not have to be a manual solution.
Thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of records in your database, there’s bound to be gold there, you just have to uncover it and dust it off.
Here are a few resources for you to consider as you ponder your marketing initiatives in 2009 and the value of your current data.
Is Dirty Data Sabotaging your Marketing Results?
Dirty Data: Even More Expensive Than you Thought
Understanding the Role of Role
