Dear Sales,

We’ve had a long and storied relationship.   When we work well together, we’re pretty amazing, when we fight, it’s ugly but overall we make a great team. I feel like we’ve worked through our differences well and that we see eye to eye more often than not, but we really need to talk about one thing…the one thing that bonds us for life but keeps pulling us apart…our data.

I know, I know, it’s no one’s fault.  But that’s the problem.  I supply the data, I nurture the data and then I send it to you so you can make it flourish.  What happens to the data once I send it to you though?  Some of it gets the proper care, it blossoms into an opportunity and then low and behold we win!  Some of it isn’t really ready and gets nurtured some more, some wither and die on the vine, and some of it, well, it sits and it gets lost in the oblivion of it’s home, our CRM system.

So Sales, here is my proposition to you, let’s work together to cultivate our leads, I will continue to feed you nurtured sales ready leads that suit your need and I ask that in return, you help me keep everything straight.  We must communicate, it’s required for our relationship to work.  Get to know the data (your leads), really learn about your companies and our targets and then, tell me what’s not working (and better yet, what is!).

How do you do this you ask, well we’ll work together and make it happen!

Love,

Marketing

This 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?

Business is growing – awesome, especially in this economy.  Need to expand into a new sales territory – well crap, where am I going to get those new leads?  Buyers don’t just line up in evenly distributed rows by territory no matter how much we would like them to. And we all know keeping a consistent and geographically distributed flow of qualified leads—or even better qualified buyers-in your pipeline is a constant struggle.  Are you feeling the pains of ramping a new sales territory?

Venturing out into a new sales territory comes with challenges like:

• Longer lead time to develop accounts
• Lack of qualified leads in the new region
• Inefficiencies in the Sales organization

To keep your Marketing and Sales pipeline working at peak efficiency you must be able to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to ALL of the Sales representatives on the team regardless of their territory or tenure.  Here are 5 steps to expanding or growing a new sales territory:

Step 1. Customer Profiling and Sales Wins Analysis

• Identify your top performing vertical market segments by analyzing your current customer wins or use CRM analytics
• Profile your best customers to establish qualifying criteria and identify roles of Champions, Key Players, and Decision-makers
• Identify prospective buyers in vertical segments that meet your criteria and that are located in the new territory

Step 2. Prospect Discovery and Validation

• Map list of prospective companies and required roles
• Identify gaps and augment data with a custom role-based contact data
• Phone screen to check for accuracy

Step 3. Marketing Database Segmentation

• Segment by vertical market and role and tag data
• Upload data into CRM or Marketing Automation system to prepare for targeted marketing campaigns

Step 4. Marketing Campaign Execution

• Execute vertical segment-focused campaigns targeted at each member of the Decision Making Unit
  For Champions/End Users – use White Papers
  • Send direct mail w/white paper offer
  • Email w/ white paper offer
  • Follow-up with email demo offer
  • Nurture with ongoing communications

  For Decision-makers/Executives – use Webcasts

  • Email invitation to executive Webcast
  • Follow-up with emailed executive brief
  • Send door-opener direct mail
  • Follow-up with Sales call
  • Nurture with ongoing communications
• Harvest responders, further qualify
• Funnel sales ready leads to Sales team

Step 5. Lead Nurturing

• Support Sales cycle by periodically reaching out to prospects; provide information/offers to stay top of mind Email white papers or analyst reports
• Email to announce customer wins
• Invite to webinar

Want a visual or a handout you can print?  We have put together a best practice template to use when building out territory specific initiatives.  Check out our Expanding or Growing a New Territory Tear Sheet.

Want more free B2B Marketing Tearsheets, Whitepapers and eBooks?  Check out the ReachForce B2B Marketing Resources page.

Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

Not too long ago a couple of us here attended Eloqua’s Marketing Effectiveness Summit.  One of the most interesting things we came back with was their Marketing and Sales Relationship Map.

Check out this post on one of Eloqua’s new blogs, Marketing Insights. It includes a sample relationship map that “can help you identify gaps in perception and prioritize areas for improvement [between sales and marketing], without pointing fingers.”  The idea is to have sales and marketing separately rank performance in specific demand generation criteria.  Both teams ultimate goal is to drive revenue and this map helps define key metrics and align goals so everyone wins.

I like to think Marketing and Sales here at ReachForce are all one team but I must admit I was a little scared to turn the map over to our Sales team to see how they really felt.

Have you ever done anything like this with your Marketing and/or Sales team?  If so, please share.

This 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.

Metrics, metrics, metrics…don’t know about you, but our sales team hates the word!  Some of them claim it’s the big brother feeling, some of them just hate having to keep track of one more thing, but for management, metrics are the lifeblood of our organization.

Here at ReachForce we have an inside sales model so we sell just about every deal over the phone.  We used to be content just tracking meetings set, proposals sent out and deals closed.  We felt like keeping up with these few metrics was enough.  We were at ease knowing most of what was going on, but when our sales team struggled we had zero visibility into why.

As we have grown as an organization we have learned that we can’t be lax on metrics, regardless of what someone “typically delivers”.  When we would notice a hiccup in our sales results, our initial knee-jerk reaction was to change how we approached things, re-visit our value proposition and the way we are communicating it to potential prospects, talk about what triggers, etc.  All great things to discuss and reinforce but it didn’t lead to the big change we wanted to see.  We went back to the drawing board.  We started looking at things a little differently and we noticed some trends among the metric conversion rates and numbers for our top performers, trends we had no line of sight into before.

Here’s what we did:

Displayed activity and metrics for the entire company to see.  It now was very obvious when someone is struggling.  Everyone’s information is updated every day – metrics reporting is now mandatory. Does our sales team like this?  Probably not but my thought is, if they are delivering then what does it really matter?  And, let’s face it, like most start ups sales is the lifeline for our business.

Since instituting mandatory metrics tracking and “the board” we have seen some pretty great results.  Having an instant, always available picture of sales activity makes tracking things through the funnel and forecasting much clearer for us.   Just imagine, if you know how many connects a sales rep has to make to set a meeting and how many meetings it takes to get a proposal, partner that with your proposal to close rate and bingo, you’ve got a good idea of how much activity will be needed to drive a close.  The cool thing about this is that for us, the reverse engineering of activity translates pretty well into results.

On the other side of the house, instituting mandatory metrics has made sales more transparent to marketing.  Our marketing team now has a much better idea of what our sales team needs to hit our company goals.  Additionally, our marketing team uses the same numbers to gauge:

• what marketing messages are the most effective
• what messages aren’t driving hand raisers
• what kinds of programs are needed to drive the leads sales needs
• how many or how big programs need to be so our sales team can spend time talking to warm prospects, not cold leads

Simply put, metrics may be a hassle for some but they are a necessity for both Marketing and Sales to keep a pulse on their ultimate challenge – driving more business faster and more efficiently.

What key metrics are you tracking?  Are they giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your business?

I’d also love to know if anyone else is tracking daily or weekly metrics in a public place.  It seems to be working here.  In fact, it has really upped the competition among our sales team.

We recently just had our 2009 sales kick off here at ReachForce. This time we focused part of the day on nurturing prospects in the sales opportunity funnel. Typically once leads are flipped into the sales funnel it means hands off for marketing. Sales people take over all communications at this point.

Here, we use Salesforce for our CRM and Eloqua for our Marketing Automation. We are able to push marketing campaign activities directly into Salesforce but once a lead is converted, it can’t be converted back to a lead if the prospect goes quiet or isn’t quite ready to buy. Why not salesforce.com? Why not? You’re making it so hard for us to really build a closed loop system. Anyway…

To help our sales team stay in regular communication with their prospects in the opportunity funnel we’ve (marketing) put together a few things to help them. Here’s what our sales team is now armed with:

• A daily prospect intelligence report – a news feed with any public news from companies in our sales funnel. This gives our sales team a little more insight into the company they are selling in to and gives them a reason to follow up if they run across some applicable news. You can do this with Google Alerts too. Set one up for your biggest prospects and see what they have to say or what is being said about them.
• Best Practice email templates in Salesforce – we (marketing) put together a series of emails and added them to Salesforce so our sales team can access them when they need them. My recommendation here was to periodically send best practice or thought leadership pieces to prospects to stay top of mind. These are not sales oriented emails, these are adding value emails. But, they can be customized to fit each prospect’s specific situation. I’m really interested to see if and how they actually use these.
• Blog posts – The B2B Lead is all about giving our readers good B2B Marketing and Sales tips to help them in their day to day jobs. So as we are adding new posts we’re making sure we are sharing those with our sales team. They can then forward these along to prospects when applicable. Not everything is for everyone but who knows, that one tip they forward on might just get them to move. And, who doesn’t want tips that will help them be better at their job?
• Newsletter – we have a very popular opt-in newsletter, in fact, our subscription list grew by 50% over the last 8 or so months. Our newsletter isn’t ReachForce promotional, instead we pull our best tips from The B2B Lead and put them together in a newsletter format. For this, we’ve just added a check box to the Salesforce contact record and if the sales rep wants us to include them in this group, they just mark the box.

So here’s what we just rolled out, what are you doing to nurture prospects already in the sales funnel? And who owns this nurturing? Marketing? Sales? Both?

This is the fourth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 3 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads and Role vs. Title.

Deliberate Marketing techniques make it possible for Marketers and Sales teams to predict the results of their efforts because they know their direct marketing programs are focused on the right buyers in the right type of company. Deliberate Marketers do not spray a rented list of contacts with a generic message hoping the right buyers will respond. Instead, they deliver a highly relevant message to a targeted audience.

Based on preparation and research, they know they are using the right messages and the right medium to deliver that message based on the buyer profile (or persona). They also know that they are delivering this message to buyers in companies with a similar combination of characteristics as their best customers so their propensity to purchase is higher.

With this approach, Marketers can rely on repeatable lead generation efforts to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to Sales.

This is the second post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention.

Sales teams are always clamoring for more leads but smart marketers know that what they really need to deliver are qualified buyers.  A lead status is often applied to anyone who fills out a form on your website or stops by your trade show booth.  Rather than tossing that list of names over to sales, marketers must nurture those leads and weed out the good from the bad, those with budget and need from those still in the education phase.

Deliberate Marketing ensures marketers can extract the most value from their marketing programs based on using the most cost-effective method to move prospects and buyers through the funnel. It is not focused on simply filling the marketing and sales funnel with contacts and expecting sales to follow-up on any lead that downloads a whitepaper.

Deliberate Marketing is about profiling the best possible buyers, recruiting more buyers that are just like them, and then executing the most effective techniques possible to move the prospect through each stage of the funnel.