The B2B Lead

Sales and Marketing Tips



What is ExactTarget? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

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 Colby Cavanaugh at ExactTarget for this post.

ExactTargetWhat is ExactTarget?

ExactTarget gives B2B marketers the ability to harness the power of one-to-one communications to nurture leads, engage prospects and improve customer relationships. ExactTarget supports the backbone of your B2B marketing strategy with:

  • The ability to automate emails, processes and programs—from lead nurturing campaigns to welcome emails—with ease.
  • A single management console that triggers mission-critical messages across emerging digital communication channels, including SMSVoice, and Email.
  • Robust integration capabilities that offer an opportunity to improve customer value management and seamless integrate your business systems, no matter how many disparate data sources you may have.
  • A scalable architecture to ensure your time-sensitive emails are delivered.  Whether you’re processing hundreds of transactions an hour or millions a day, our system is designed to scale as your demand dictates.
  • Precision targeting tools to reinforce local relationships and dynamically turn your emails into powerful marketing messages that your customers want to receive.
  • A powerfully reliable data center that takes the worry out of your data storage and availability, no matter how much data you have.

Use what you know about your prospects and customers to improve customer relationships and increase conversion.

Industry leading research shows that integrating sales and marketing technologies can help organizations deliver more relevant communications—and improve their return on marketing investment by delivering the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. ExactTarget offers a variety of tools to help you integrate your critical business systems and allow for seamless, pain-free Marketing Automation. From customer relationship management (CRM) tools (e.g. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to web analytics applications (e.g. Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics), we’ve partnered with the leaders and done the difficult integration work so you don’t have to.

Get the support and expertise you need to be successful.

ExactTarget provides our clients with the email marketing support they need to solve complex marketing challenges. Our team combines both marketing and technological expertise with a proven approach to understanding our client’s objectives to help you develop the best possible email marketing strategy.

Serve your subscribers well and be rewarded with their business.

At ExactTarget, we believe it is the duty of every Email Service Provider (ESP) to help marketers deliver permission-based email and digital one-to-one communications to their customers, prospects, and partners. To better convey what we feel is our best-in-class approach, we have developed our SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy which consists of three simple tenets:

  • Serve the individual
  • Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
  • Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives

We not only embrace the reality that subscribers own the inbox, but we also work diligently to develop products that provide consumers control over the manner and frequency by which companies communicate with them. By helping clients pursue more strategic segmentation and personalization efforts, we help them better deliver on the true promise of one-to-one communications—the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right channel.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about ExactTarget, we invite you to visit www.exacttarget.com. You can also get tips, best practices and other marketing insight from our blog and featured whitepapers.

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Monday, October 5th, 2009

 

3 Steps Towards Tackling Your Database Woes – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #262

Having trouble seeing the good in your database?  Separating the diamonds from the dirt can be tough and time intensive, but if you map out a plan ahead of time it can save you time and sanity!

  • Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
    • Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (i.e. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
    • Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM system to work – if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses for instance, outline what those rules are and what format data has to be in to fit within those rules.
    • Information that people have asked for to make marketing, sales, and customer support, etc. work better.
  • Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields idenitifed above.  (I.E. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, make a designated location for name pronunciation guides (input by sales) so they don’t clutter the name field, etc.
  • Next, do a quick data quality analysis on each data element in these three categories. Score the data quality by answering questions such as:
    • Does this data element have an undisputed owner? Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time?
    • What percentage of the CRM records has this data element missing, clearly incorrect, or duplicate? Determine the best course of action for filling in the gaps, do you have the resources in house or do you need to find a vendor who can do this?

Based on the results of your scoring (step 3), you’ll have a better idea of who you can assign items to for fixing and where you need to focus your efforts in terms of filling in the gaps.  Assign them out to the people who can fill in the gaps and make sure to supply everyone with the same set of ‘rules’ or standards for what the end result should look like.

Once you’ve got your data cleaned up, make sure your data standards sheet is up-to-date with any changes in process you may have made during the clean up process and then circulate it.  Your teams will be much more likely to keep the data looking the way it needs to if they know what the standards are.

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Friday, October 2nd, 2009

 

What is Engagement Systems? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

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 Rob Hampton at Engagement Systems for this post.

What is Engagement Systems?

Engagement Systems helps companies leverage their CRM investment and maximize sales and marketing resources to grow sales revenue and improve ROI with an automated marketing campaign system.  The web-enabled software works with existing CRM systems to access prospect and customer information and make that data actionable to more efficiently capture and nurture leads, retain customers and win-back defecting clients.

From single communications to multi-step, multi-channel campaigns – utilizing email, direct mail, pURLS and landing pages – each personalized communication is automatically created, delivered, tracked and reported within the CRM record; eliminating time-consuming manual processes and ensuring consistent, relevant, timely communications that move prospects through the buying process and build valuable relationships with existing customers.

What Makes Engagement Systems Different?

True Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Communications

Engagement Systems is the only CRM integration that truly automates the execution, delivery and tracking of multi-channel communications via direct mail, email, and personalized web pages (Personalized URLS) from within a single application.  Eliminates the need to coordinate multiple vendors.

1:1 Personalized Marketing

Both single communications and multi-touch campaigns can be executed to one contact at a time or to a segmented group of contacts.  There are no minimum orders.

Trigger Automation

Engagement Systems automated campaigns are governed by a set of business rules that create automatic triggers to initiate and manage what communications are sent and when. The configuration and integration is completely handled by Engagement Systems; there is no manual intervention on the client’s part to create, set up or kick off communications.  This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources or IT involvement.

Customer Lifecycle Optimization

Engagement Systems addresses the entire prospect and customer life cycle with custom-developed campaigns and programs for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer reactivation, up-selling and cross-selling.

Integrated Reporting

All automated communications are written back to and tracked through the CRM system. Clients have the option for custom reporting and metrics or can use the tools inherent within their CRM system.  Because of Engagement Systems’ complete integration, all data resides in a single location.

Value-Added Services

Engagement Systems makes it easy to adopt and use the system by providing a combination of optional marketing services that delivers an end-to-end solution. Unlike other systems, Engagement Systems is virtually hands free for both sales and marketing, requiring no one to upload or manage artwork or to initiate campaigns.  This makes implementation pain free, quick to deploy and low-maintenance to sustain.

Cost Effectiveness

Engagement Systems’ automated direct mail, email and Personalized URL production systems streamline the creation, execution and delivery processes, making multi-channel marketing campaigns cheaper and faster to execute.  All aimed at increasing your sales, profitability and ROMI.  This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources, consulting, IT and training expenses.  Additionally, there are no expensive recurring seat charges.

For more information, visit www.EngagementSystems.com, call 866.938.3658 or email info@EngagementSystems.com .  You can also check out an Overview Demo of Engagement Systems at  http://www.engagementsystems.com/onlinedemo.  And be sure to look at our Resources (Case Studies & White Papers) http://www.engagementsystems.com/resource-center/resource-center.html

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Monday, September 28th, 2009

 

How to Find More of Your Best Customers – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #261

Lauren Kincke
on September 24th, 2009

Do you know who your customers are?  Not just by name, but do you know what they actually do, why your product is a good fit for them?  Better yet, do you know what makes some of your customers less than a good fit?  Here at ReachForce we try to take a holistic approach to analyzing our customers both those who we do regular business with and those that we may not have continued business with (I know it’s not a pretty subject but everyone’s got them).

In looking at what these customers do, what their price point is and the rates that they convert (from trial to subscription or bookings to revenue) we can get a much better picture as to what types of customers we do well with and where we should focus future data discovery. It’s a simple enough exercise, but take a look at your top 10-15 customers (those who spend the most with you) and your worst customers (those who may have done business with you once and then never again), see what parallels you can draw between the customers within each group.  For us we’ve learned that customers with a higher price point, a tech focused business and those who market to more than one vertical seem to have a greater need for what we do an a tolerance for our price point.

Once you’ve gotten a clearer picture of what your good customers look like and what the less than successful customers look like, you can better focus your marketing efforts (and for you sales folk out there, your follow up and prospecting efforts).  Now that you have a profile of your best customer, be sure to do continued contact discovery to find more buyers that are similar to your best customers.

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Thursday, September 24th, 2009

 

Content – 20 Formats and Ways to Repurpose – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #259

Leigh Anne Reynolds
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • TwitThis
on September 22nd, 2009
 

I recently came across a great blog post on the Savy B2B Marketing blog.  They are quickly rising to the top of my must read list.  I wanted to make sure The B2B Lead readers didn’t miss out on the great tips in Need Content? 20 Formats to Consider.

Here is a short version of the list so be sure to check out the entire article:

  1. White Papers
  2. eBooks
  3. Workbooks and Toolkits
  4. Research reports
  5. Buying guides
  6. Case studies
  7. Checklists and action plans
  8. Glossary
  9. Q&A and FAQs
  10. Articles
  11. Blog posts
  12. Newsletters
  13. Slideshows
  14. Webcasts
  15. Podcasts
  16. Videos
  17. Interactive applications
  18. Microsites
  19. Knowledge base
  20. Demos

Something to keep in mind is that these are merely the delivery mechanisms for your content.  Don’t limit the reach of your content by restricting it to one format.  There is no reason you couldn’t break up a white paper or eBook into smaller pieces and repurpose as blog posts.  One of the best ideas we ever had was to turn our blog posts into eBooks.  We took all the posts for a particular category, had our graphics guy drop them into a template and bam, we had 5 new eBooks without having to write any “new” content.  We create our monthly newsletter in a similar way, making it a “best of” the last month’s posts.

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Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

 

B2B Marketing Zone

Leigh Anne Reynolds
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • TwitThis
on September 17th, 2009
 

We are excited to be a part of the B2B Marketing Zone joining the ranks of fellow bloggers, Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay and Jon Miller.  The B2B Marketing Zone is a joint venture between Tom Pick of WebMarketCentral and Tony Karrer CEO/CTO of TechEmpower. In their own words here is what B2B marketing Zone is all about:

B2B Marketing Zone is a collection of blog posts and articles all around B2B Marketing.  It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create this topic hub.  Topic Hubs are sites that aggregates content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content.

The goals of the B2B Marketing Zone are:

Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content from as defined by the community.

Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources.  They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them.  This links them across to the sources themselves.

Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.

Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites.  Most users of B2B Marketing Zone are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.

If you are looking to beef up your RSS feed, you can subscribe to a “best of” or to the full feed of everything.  It is a great one stop shop for B2B Marketing content.

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Thursday, September 17th, 2009

 

What is Silverpop Engage B2B? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

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 Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) — Silverpop’s Director of Field Marketing and B2B marketing evangelist — for this post.

SilverPopWhat is Silverpop Engage B2B?

There are many challenges facing B2B marketers today, but they are almost all traceable to one inflection point — a fundamental, Internet-age shift in power that has taken place.  Today, the B2B ‘buying unit’ has immense information-based resources at its disposal.  Couple this with a corporate accountability and transparency mindset, and the result is a B2B buyer that is now calling the shots … not the B2B vendor.

The implication is a new B2B marketing dynamic that demands responding to customer ‘pull’ over a traditional marketing ‘push’ mentality.  MarketingSherpa has published data indicating that for every sales-ready lead that comes into a B2B vendor, there are 5-6X more leads that are longer-term and must be patiently nurtured until they are ready to purchase.

Buyers increasingly set the ground rules on when and where they will engage.  Buyers also increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education, not sales people … whom they engage as an almost final stage in their process.  This means B2B marketers must focus heavily on ‘getting found,’ nurturing prospects and managing pre-sales buyer dialogue.

And yet the impetus for B2B marketers to proactively generate leads, drive sales and support customer lifetime value has never been stronger.  Enter marketing automation.

How We’re Different

The drivers above explain the rapid growth in the marketing automation marketplace.  But what makes one vendor different from another?

At Silverpop, we believe assessing how one marketing automation vendor is different from another comes down to understanding their approach to helping marketers address this ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing as described above.

Our approach is simple.

  • Total Focus on B2B marketing. First, we have a marketing automation solution built, from the ground up, around the unique needs and issues of B2B marketers.  This is our focus, and it’s how we rationalize everything we do to extend, expand and innovate its features and capabilities.
  • Orchestrating buyer-centric marketing; powering sales and marketing collaboration. Second, our products and services are designed to address the major external and internal issues facing B2B marketers today.  What are these issues?  At an external/marketplace level, it is being more buyer-centric than ever before (given the environment described above).  At an internal/organizational level, it is better aligning and collaborating with the sales organization.

This is the approach that underpins and drives our Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform.

Total Focus on B2B Marketing

B2B marketing is different.  Sure some of the trends cited above — especially the shift in buyer power — are common to both B2B and B2C.  But B2B marketing is still different.  How?

In B2C marketing — especially with ‘fast moving consumer goods’ — scale matters.  Thus, a top-down strategy is taken … where mistakes in customer communication may be made at the individual consumer level, but that is assumed to be okay as long as it is a small percentage of total interactions.

But in B2B marketing — especially with high price points and low unit volumes — relationships really do matter.  One mistake made upstream in the lead-cultivation phase can have disastrous effects downstream.  Thus, a ‘bottoms-up strategy’ in marketing is more appropriate.

The challenge of modern B2B marketing, thus, lies in building that granular and continuous ‘one-to-one’ relationship with a prospect, pre-sales, while also scaling overall activity to ensure a sufficient volume of leads to meet revenue targets.

This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is built around the entire lifecycle of developing and nurturing B2B buyer leads upstream through converting leads to customers and maintaining those customers downstream.

  • Industry-leading B2B marketer education: Successful marketing automation begins with successful B2B marketing strategies.  That is why Silverpop spends significant time and resources on marketer education.  The keystone of this effort is the company’s recently-launched B2B Marketing University series.
  • Service and support: An intelligent technology platform, alone, is not sufficient to ensure the success of a marketing automation deployment.  That’s why service and support is a hallmark of Silverpop’s offering and one of the top reasons why customers select Silverpop Engage B2B.

Orchestrating Buyer-centric Marketing

I highlighted the critical issue in B2B marketing of having a bottoms-up strategy and of driving one-to-one dialogue with prospects.  This leads to a subsequent operational challenge:  It takes a tremendous scale of raw leads to filter down to a single buyer.  Research from SiriusDecisions indicates that an average B2B organization yields 2-3 sales conversions for every 1000 raw/upstream leads.  Given this, how do you effectively market on a ‘mass’ one-to-one level — building a repeatable lead management strategy that gives each and every lead individual and tailored attention and personalization and that responds to their pull?

Laura Ramos with Forrester touched on this in a recent blog post on sales-marketing alignment: “As any rep can tell marketing, no two deals close the same. Learning how buyers buy is a huge challenge in B2B made more complex by the myriad of digital channels that buyers now use. ”

This is why at the core of Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is a smart, powerful, yet easy-to-use campaign management interface for building and managing buyer-centric marketing.

  • Dynamic campaign management: The campaign management interface allows you to build complex, dynamic campaigns that deliver marketing communication actions in response to the ‘pull’ of buyers.  For instance, did your prospect recently visit your Website, download a white paper or dial your call center?  By identifying actions and dynamic responses, Silverpop enables B2B marketers to manage complex, buyer-centric campaigns.
  • Campaign GUI: A key differentiator of the campaign management interface is something we call our ‘campaign GUI’ — a graphical environment that allows marketers to drag and drop campaign planning elements, that operates a lot like video-editing software and that is highly intuitive.

Powering Sales and Marketing Collaboration

The major ‘internal’/organizational challenge marketers face lies in better syncing up with their sales teams — an issue closely related to being buyer-centric and of critical importance as sales people are tapped by buyers later and later in their buying process.  This requires B2B marketers to better understand and empathize with their sales team colleagues.  It also requires systems that can promote transparency and collaboration.

SiriusDecisions highlighted this issue in a recent blog post, which discussed the era of ‘Buyer 2.0′ and its impact on sales/marketing alignment.

Technology is the driver behind the shift in buyer/selling behaviors, but more so in terms of its impact on the buyer rather than the seller. Buying 2.0 amplifies the power technology has given buyers and further increases marketing’s role throughout the buying process beyond demand creation. Buyers seek out knowledge in their education phase independent of a campaign or cold call. Content, collaboration and knowledge drives marketing’s messaging impact into the opportunity. Pipeline acceleration initiatives and nurturing strategies further influence the buying dynamic. Measuring marketing’s contribution and improving its ability to target their initiatives puts marketing in the cross-hairs of sales productivity. Sales and marketing integration is a requirement for success in the next “new” economy.

This is why Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform also focuses on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams — so lead management and buyer dialogue is seamless.

  • Lead scoring and routing: A robust lead scoring and routing engine both creates a catalyst for improving sales and marketing agreement on what constitutes a ‘good customer prospect’ and  also helps to manage roles and lead hand-off on an ongoing basis.  Key features include the ability to score based on a variety of demographic (explicit), behavioral (implicit) and BANT (budget, authority, needs and timing) factors, as well as mechanisms for returning cold leads from sales back to marketing for nurturing.
  • Sales-team transparency: Another key feature is the ability of sales team members to view granular details of lead activity from their Salesforce account.  This ensures that a sales team member has complete insight into the pre-sales dialogue that has occurred and can pick up and run with a lead with maximum insight.

Are You Ready for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?

Responding to ‘buyer 2.0′ and leading in this new B2B marketing environment requires a blend of know-how and firepower.  Silverpop is focused on both.

The Silverpop Engage B2B marketing automation platform combines best practices with robust performance.  And the Silverpop team is dedicated to delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of B2B marketers.  We invite you to take a test drive of the system.

And if you’re interested in taking your B2B marketing ‘game’ to the next level, we hope you will join us this Fall at B2B Marketing University — either in  Palo Alto, Boston, Atlanta or Seattle, or in another city after the New Y ear.

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Monday, September 14th, 2009

 

Add More to Your Blog Posts and Email with Multimedia, Free – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #258

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say.  However, I for one do not want to pay thousands of dollars in royalties.   Images and other multimedia can really bring a blog post to life or capture the attention of your email subscribers.  If you are like most of us, purchasing multimedia doesn’t exactly get its own budget line item.  Thanks to Barb Dybwad at Mashable for the post, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog.

Here is part of what Barb had to say:

Creative Commons search:

1. Creative Commons search

2. Yahoo Creative Commons search

3. Flickr Creative Commons search

Free stock and public domain images

Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.

5. Stock.XCHNG

7. Everystockphoto

8. PDphoto

WikiMedia Commons

Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. Be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:

12. Public domain

13. Creative Commons

14. Sound

15. Video

Free audio sources

16. opsound

19. Internet archive open source audio

Free video sources

20. Internet Archive Moving Images Collection

21. Open Source Cinema

Further resources

25. TeacherLibrarianWiki’s list of copyright-friendly image sources

26. NASA

I recommend digging a little to find an image that is not too overused.  It is possible to find stock photography that doesn’t look glaringly like stock photography. Trust me, you will feel like you have been sucker punched when you are driving down the freeway and see the same image you used for your entire fall campaign on a billboard for a used car dealership.

Also, before you use any image, audio or video, double check the license agreement for allowed uses and attribution requirements.

For Barb’s full list, be sure to check out the complete article.

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Friday, September 11th, 2009

 

Increase Lead-to-Sales Ratios with Effective Lead Qualification and Scoring

Lauren Kincke
on September 10th, 2009

Thanks to Kevin Joyce at Market2Lead for his post earlier this week.  In addition to learning about Market2Lead, we want to share with our readers one of their whitepapers, Increase Lead-to-Sales Ratios with Effective Lead Qualification and Scoring.  In it Market2Lead’s CEO Geoff Rego walks through some key pieces to developing a robust Lead Scoring process.  Some of the highlights:

  1. Define ‘Qualified’ – this is something we’ve spoken about before on the B2B Lead (check out Amy’s post, What is a Lead? What is a Prospect?), it’s key to make sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what a qualified lead is, what a prospect is, etc.
  2. Qualify your leads in stages – don’t assume that you can qualify all of your leads at once or one time, you should continuously be in the process of qualifying what is in your database as well as what is coming into your database.  By the same token, make sure you’re also disqualifying things continuously too!  (We’ve chatted about ways to disqualify)
  3. Get help!  If you can’t do this alone (which is pretty likely), use technology.  There are numerous tools out there, both within Marketing Automation Systems and things you can build yourself within Sales Force Automation tools that can score your leads for you.  It’s reasonable to assume you can qualify a few hundred (or even a few thousand) leads with good eyes and some manpower, it’s a bit overwhelming to assume you can qualify tens of thousands (or more) leads by yourself.  Don’t let this task overwhelm you, look for software that can help.
  4. Do this now!  Don’t wait to implement lead scoring and qualification practices, it may not be perfect the first time around but getting the ball rolling is an important step.  The faster you start, the more ‘gems’ you might find in your own data.

Need more tips on Lead Scoring? Check out the Market2Lead white paper!

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Thursday, September 10th, 2009

 

What is Market2Lead? – Marketing Automation Who’s Who

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
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Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

 
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