Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Kevin Joyce (@nivenor1) at Market2Lead for this post.

What is Market2Lead?

Here is the story behind marketing automation, and Market2Lead:

Sales folks spend most of their time in proposal and negotiation stages. For the most part, they do not like cold-calling or prospecting. Also, a day of a sales person’s time can be quite expensive. To make sales folks more effective, we look for ways to give them only marketing-qualified, sales-ready leads. And if we do that by having marketing people do tele-prospecting on the phone, we would spend almost as much as using the sales folks. So we need automation to make it cost-effective. The further back you go in the sales cycle (left in the graphic below) the less expensive the touch has to be! The majority of CRMs simply don’t have the depth of functionality to take on this marketing role of nurturing. So we look for marketing automation to help us nurture and develop relationships with prospects, gathering more information about their needs and offering them relevant educational materials that support the value proposition. Then, at the right time, we hand the prospects off to Sales. Market2Lead excels at doing this.

Market2Lead offers marketing automation software and services that provide the automation and analytical insight to move more prospect relationships into customer relationships. The Market2Lead software assures that marketing programs are more effective in producing sales-ready leads, and that marketing investments have a measurably better ROI.

A marketing automation system must provide these benefits to be of value to Marketing:

• Increased Marketing effectiveness
• Deliver more sales ready-leads to sales teams
• Nurture prospects so they move through the funnel faster
• Measure the marketing influence on opportunities in the funnel
• Provide marketing accountability and ROI
• Ensure that Marketing only adds validated, standardized data into the CRM

The success of any marketing campaign is dependent first and foremost on the target list, then the quality of the offer and finally on the presentation of the offer. This is why at Market2Lead, we have a strong focus on helping organizations execute campaigns that are measurable, leverage cleaner, richer data and produce predictably great results. The goals for marketing organizations everywhere are to produce more sales-ready leads and to contribute in a measurable way to increasing revenues and profitability of their firms. This requires greater marketing effectiveness and accountability.

A New Level of Marketing Measurability
Marketing automation not only brings efficiencies through automation and effectiveness through better execution, it also brings to marketing a new level of measurability. Market2Lead brings the unprecedented ability to define business rules to connect marketing campaigns and programs to sales opportunities, so the precise impact of marketing on the business results can be measured. With the costs entered into the campaign definition, we can even show you your ROI and cost per lead. Market2Lead has full marketing data warehouse capability, in addition to operational reporting, so that custom dashboards can save you the time you’d otherwise spend to aggregate and present data.

Capture More Leads
Market2Lead’s sophisticated response management captures more leads in less time. Our web forms can be configured and deployed by marketing managers (rather than involving IT staff), and are dynamic, allowing you to do progressive profiling of prospects. Our forms also have field validation and standardization, so you can ensure a richer and cleaner marketing database. And since only a fraction of the marketing leads come through a company’s website, we offer sophisticated contact data integration capabilities to enable pooling of all offline and online data. These include a web services API, scheduled FTP imports, and an elegant import wizard that helps ensure the data integrity and completeness of your database.

Nurture Smarter
The best nurture campaigns take into account the entire behavioral history of each person and go about presenting the best possible next offer that is appropriate for that person. The Market2Lead system has the unique ability to automate arbitration of the most relevant offer for each individual.

The 5 Core Areas of Functionality in Marketing Automation
There are five areas of functionality that are essential in any good marketing automation system. All five are listed below, along with information on how Market2Lead excels at them all.

Contact Data Integration
CDI centralizes all of your online and offline marketing data in one database. Market2Lead provides:

• Dynamic integration with the SFA system
• Scheduled FTP and API for data integration

Response Management
The capture of validated, standardized data is key to effective campaigns. Market2Lead provides:

• Dynamic forms with progressive profiling
• Data format validation and address validation
• Personalized microsites and PURLs

Lead Management
New leads and responses must be scored, sent to the appropriate queues and in some cases routed to the appropriate channel. Market2Lead provides:

• Sophisticated scoring based on all prospect behavior, association with opportunities or accounts, and demographic data
• Notifications that can be initiated to Sales, Marketing, and others based on new responses
• Support of multiple queues, including SFA, tele-qualification, partners and reseller queues

Campaign Automation
Market2lead provides campaign automation that measurably increases the productivity of marketing:

• System-arbitrated adaptive campaigns that determine the best next offer for each individual
• Ability to copy all assets and deep copy of programs that include all program attributes
• Sophisticated list segmentation that includes: opportunity, account data, and time-based selection

Marketing Business Intelligence
Market2lead provides a business intelligence platform that includes:

• A historical data warehouse with custom reporting and dashboards
• Reporting on Marketing’s influence on the sales pipeline
• Web analytics and tracking of unknown visitors

Why Market2Lead?
What makes Market2Lead the best solution for so many firms?

• The strongest response management capability
• The best data integration capabilities
• A strong focus on data quality and metrics
• The best marketing business intelligence capabilities in the industry
• The most powerful automated campaigns
• Ability to support the needs of large corporations in many countries

It’s Show Time!

Welcome back from summer vacation!  The economy seems to be picking up, it’s event season and B2B marketers are being tasked with their biggest jobs yet – driving enough leads to make up for a slow first half of the year.  With the help of a marketing automation tool, your job gets a lot easier.  As marketing automation becomes more of a necessity to get the job done, B2B marketing teams are forced to evaluate their needs and choose a solution that best fits.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been highlighting our marketing automation partners and friends on The B2B Lead.  In addition to a post each of them contributed describing their solution, we also featured some their best practices.  If you haven’t visited us lately, here’s a snapshot of what you’ve missed:

What is Eloqua?
Power Marketing Automation with Targeted Leads
The Profile of the New Buyer – Digital Body Language

What is Genius.com?
Sales 2.0 for Dummies

What is Marketbright?
Tips to Improve Your Lead Management Strategy

What is Marketo?
Marketo’s Secret Sauce for Demand Generation

What is Manticore?
23 Questions Demand Generation Companies May Not Want You to Ask

What is Loopfuse?

What is Pardot?
Web Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide

Remember your marketing automation system is a powerful engine but you need the right fuel to get the results you really want.   Be sure you are capturing the right roles at your events, cleaning up those PPC leads and identifying everyone in the decision making unit before you launch your next program.

Thanks again to our partners and friends for contributing!  We look forward to working with you again soon.

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 Matthew Quinlan (@mattquinlan) at LoopFuse for this post.

What is LoopFuse?

Sophistication Made Simple

LoopFuse was founded on the principle that marketing automation should be powerful yet simple. In fact, it was the founders’ experience of implementing a marketing automation system at JBoss that led directly to the creation of LoopFuse OneView. Some marketing automation vendors achieve power and flexibility, but at the expense of usability. Others have a fantastic user interface, but a shallow feature-set. LoopFuse OneView strikes the delicate balance between sophistication and simplicity by hiding complexity with integrated contextual help, intuitive defaults, and wizard-driven configuration.

In addition to making LoopFuse OneView easy to implement and easy to use, we also make it easy to buy. Our complete pricing list is publicly available from our website so that our prospects know exactly how much LoopFuse will cost before engaging our sales team. (Refreshing, isn’t it?) Even better, there are absolutely no hidden fees. No setup fees. No support fees. No per-user fees. No API fees. You can even pay by credit card. Try LoopFuse OneView with zero risk by signing up for a fully functional free trial on our website. Your account is immediately provisioned without ever speaking to a LoopFuse salesperson.

Lead Management

Target, track, capture, score, segment, nurture, route, convert, close, and analyze your leads in a single tool that tightly integrates with your CRM. Start with anonymous web activity collection that provides the basis for web analytics such as most popular pages, best referrers, search terms, and most active companies (via IP address). Collect registration data and convert anonymous visitors into identified prospects. Continuously evaluate the quality of each prospect according to his/her profile and behavior and route qualified prospects to the CRM. Nurture unqualified prospects by providing a constant drip of highly relevant and timely information (via email) to engage the prospect until they are ready to buy. Arm the salesperson with all of the relevant information necessary to close the deal. Finally, analyze the effectiveness of each lead source to determine the best use of your marketing dollars.

Sales Enablement

LoopFuse will automatically create new leads/contacts/tasks in the CRM based on the LeadFlow you define. Existing leads/contacts in the CRM are continuously updated with information such as lead score updates, new registration form data, email campaign activity, and latest web activity. Within 1-2 clicks the salesperson has access to every piece of data ever collected about a prospect, including the prospect’s company & location (even if prospect left it blank), and all of the activity (anonymous included) associated with the prospect’s company. The prospect data is further enriched with one-click access to the prospect’s LinkedIn profile as well as data about the company from Hoovers, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, and Google. By adding a prospect to their watchlist, a salesperson can be immediately notified when the prospect visits the website. Calling a prospect while they are browsing your site ensures that you have their full attention.

Performance & Scalability

While much of our early success was concentrated within open-source companies, LoopFuse continues to add customers from traditional software companies, SAAS providers, media companies, etc. One of the advantages of having so many open-source customers early on was that it required us to build a highly scalable infrastructure to manage the millions of transactions (page views, emails, registrations, etc.) per day that result from our customers offering free software. This continues to be a strategic advantage for LoopFuse as we can easily scale to accommodate customers of any size.

Why LoopFuse?

• Basic setup in less than 1 hour via configuration wizard
• Unlimited database size at no extra charge!
• Free trial to prove the value before you purchase
• Because it works

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.

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

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