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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Genius.com?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Eloqua?

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

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

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

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

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

Some unique points about how Eloqua helps you score leads:

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

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

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

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

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

Lead nurturing with Eloqua gets you to success faster because:

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

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

Eloqua’s Marketing Analysis stands out because:

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

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

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

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

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

Written 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.