It’s the topic of discussion for so many webinars, whitepapers and blog posts (even here), but do you actually do lead scoring?  Until very recently, we hadn’t figured out a way to incorporate all of the various technology tools (Eloqua for Marketing Automation, HubSpot for its unique Internet Marketing tracking/features and Salesforce.com for Sales Automation) we use into one comprehensive score.  So the question is, how do you close the loop with that many systems interacting?

To regress a little bit, we have always had lead scoring on the list of to-do’s.  It’s been on that list for easily the last three or four quarters, but each time it comes down to the wire either there’s not enough time or there is just so much for us to wrap together that it’s a little overwhelming.  Honestly, it wasn’t a high priority this quarter, but our Sales team was looking for a way to prioritize the accounts they were working so we initially (accidentally) built an explicit lead scoring system.   We set point values for things like:

• Having key players in the decision making unit in our CRM and/or knowing that they exist
• Knowing if the prospect markets to more than one vertical (and what space they play in)
• What Marketing Automation system the prospect uses
• What CRM the prospect uses
• ASP (Average Sales Price)

Eventually this all gets tabulated into a score (and the information collected in creating the score), that score determines a few things.  First, what kind of marketing messages the contacts within the account get and secondly, whether or not the rep even wants them followed up with.  That second item is determined by a score in the negative range…we’ve got some accounts that our reps don’t want to work with for specific reasons and those automatically get a -100 added to their score so we can better differentiate them from the rest of the crowd.

Originally this was good for us, we felt that it was a start towards the lead scoring we wanted to have and that it would give our sales team the info they needed to better prioritize their follow up.  Well it left something out…in focusing only on the accounts they were selling in to, we left out the leads they still need to follow up with in order to efficiently prospect for new business. So we went back to the drawing board.

Our next pass ended up being a more implicitly focused lead score.  With the help of one of our more development minded co-workers, we were able to employ an Apex Trigger in salesforce.com that checks for activity on the lead records and gives a score according to the frequency and creator of the activity.  To speak slightly more English (and less tech), if a lead has 3-5 activities from either HubSpot or Eloqua, meaning a form download, website activity or email open, created within a 3 month timeframe then they are ‘cold’ – if they have 3-5 activities within a 1 month timeframe then they are ‘warm’ and if they have 3-5 activities within a week they are ‘hot.’  Our basic idea being that within salesforce.com we set up views of cold-warm-hot leads and our reps can just follow up with those, instead of worrying about who is coming out of what nurture cycle behind the scenes.   So the sales team essentially gets a window on who is actually raising their hand and only those who do so often enough to be considered interest in us and our products.

By no means have we completed this process but we’re definitely off to a start. Closing the loop between our various tools one score at a time…do you score your leads, if so, how?

Do you constantly feel the pull for newer, better, more data?  Is there always that feeling that if you could just get a few new contacts a sale would be right around the corner?  Of course there is value to new leads data, but what about the data you already have?  Your internal database is likely an underutilized gold mine, but if it hasn’t been properly maintained it’s likely in need of a tune-up.

Did you know?

1. Up to 20% of all postal addresses change every year.¹
2. Up to 18% of all telephone numbers change every year.¹
3. Up to 21% of all CEO’s change every year.¹
4. 25-33% of email addresses on a “house” file will become outdated every year.²
5. In the next hour, 58 business addresses will change, 11 companies will change their names, and 41 new businesses will open¹ … not to mention how many companies will go out of business.
6. In addition, up to 66% of people change companies or job functions every year!³

Scared yet?  If you’re not, you should be, these statistics are enough to worry the most seasoned marketer.  What are you doing to keep your database from being impacted by these figures?   Here at ReachForce we run a series of data hygiene reports on our database regularly, they give us information on what data has been marked as bad, where it came from and how old it is.

Ok, so let’s say you already do something like this, you’ve got your dirty data bagged and tagged, what do you do now? Check out our Top 10 signs your database needs help, some of these top 10 can easily be identified in an error report, for those that you can’t identify, you really need to take a deeper dive into your data.  These things can’t be remedied overnight, but with some elbow grease and time you too can turn around the state of your database, after all, according to  Sirius Decisions, companies marketing to a database that is routed through a healthy data-cleansing routing can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an average organization, based purely on data quality.

For an idea of how dirty your data might be, check out the ReachForce Dirty Data Calculator, with a few simple numbers from you, it will give you some real-life idea as to how much of your data has ‘expired.’

SOURCES:
¹D&B
²Lyris Technologies: “Guru’s Guide to Email Marketing Success”
³Sales & Marketing Institute

As the person here at ReachForce ultimately responsible for having a regularly updated blog, I know how very difficult it can be to continually come up with new blog post ideas.  Lucky for me Kipp Bodnar has created a great list of 20 Ideas For B2B Blog Content To Drive Traffic and Boost SEO on the Social Media B2B blog. Here are some of my favorites:

• Profile your customers
• List the top ten twitter users in your industry
• List the top five blogs in your industry
• Start a contest and ask for submissions
• Use Trendrr to create graphs of industry information
• Compile the top ten blog posts on a specific industry topic

I can’t wait to start using some of these ideas myself.  Some things we do on The B2B Lead:

• Guest posts from partners and customers
• Quote great articles and blog posts and then expand on those ideas (hence this post)
• Write a cliff notes version of hit industry books
• Feature other companies who offer complimentary services or products to your own

Don’t forget to read the full list of 20 ideas!

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Are Your Leads Lying to You?, I want to dive a little further into David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie.  There are some truly interesting statistics in this article, but the meat of the article is his call to focus on the creation of opportunities as a key indicator/metric rather than the creation of leads.  Sitting at the cross-roads between Marketing and Sales I can echo his commentary that is a key indicator but I feel that it’s also a bit hasty to claim that it is the only meaningful metric.

Taber argues that by focusing on ‘sales-cycle starts’ (i.e. creation of opportunities) you get a true view of the over all process and communication between Sales and Marketing.   His position is that by using opportunity creation as the key metric you will encourage better alignment between Marketing and Sales.  While I think that he is on the right path, I feel like using only creation of opportunity as a metric fails to take into account the activity on all sides of the table that goes into feeding the creation of opportunities.

If one side fails to fulfill their end of the bargain, then you’ll end up with a lopsided equation and little to no opportunity creation.  For example, if Marketing is not held to the standard of feeding ‘X’ amount of leads and then drumming up activity via an email campaign, webinar, etc. then there is nothing for Sales to use to stir up the opportunities.  On the other side of the coin, if Marketing regularly adds leads, keeps the activity going and continues to feed the fires but Sales isn’t following up then opportunities won’t be created either.   Both pieces of the puzzle are necessary to create opportunities and by looking away from the metrics that measure each of these activities, spotting upcoming problems (or finding the root to existing ones) is difficult at best.

Taber argues that an opportunity centric focus will create the collaboration necessary to convert leads to opportunities, while I agree that if all the pieces are in place it can happen I guess I’m just a bit of a cynic (or a big metrics nerd).  I feel like it’s important to see the whole picture to ensure the process works all the way around.  Keeping everyone accountable to key metrics (lead input, campaign activity, meeting setting and execution) that are relevant to their role in the cycle will allow better visibility across the process and will ensure that if something breaks you can easily identify where the problem was and fix it.

Sitting down with my coffee this morning I stumbled across David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie,.  In it, Taber makes the case for really focusing on the right metrics in measuring performance, interesting stuff, but I got stuck on a particular statement he makes: “In many B2B and B2C businesses, the unqualified leads that are in the nurturing cycle may be numbered in the millions. Industry statistics show that up to 40 percent of leads may make their first purchase after having been in the “remarketing database” for 18 months or longer.”   As someone who works with our database and manages the cleansing of our customers database (via our Relevance & Repair Process), I was really struck by this.

On a day to day basis I look at lots of data (ok that’s an understatement, in the past two months I’ve looked at tons of contacts/prospects), most people who engage in our data appending and cleansing services do so to clean up old data – to find the diamond in the ruff. They are looking for that 40%, but what if they’ve had the right name and the wrong email for the last eighteen months?? And assuming they have been emailing this person for that time and they’ve had the wrong email, wow – that’s someone that they have lost some serious time with.

So how do you avoid falling into the abyss of not knowing if you’re marketing but no one’s listening?  Know who you’ve got good information for and who you need to get the right information for.  One more pitch for data cleanliness here but the idea is very simple, how will you ever reach that 40% if you don’t have their contact information right?

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.

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 Laura Folio (@LauraFolio) and Adam Blitzer (@AdamBlitzer) at Pardot for this post.

What is Pardot?

Pardot is the maker of Prospect Insight, a “No Hassle” marketing automation suite designed to streamline online marketing campaigns and jump-start ROI for small-and-medium sized businesses. Pardot brings together all the elements of creating an online lead generation program and packages them in a simple, user-friendly marketing automation suite that gives you in-depth insight to your visitors and prospects.

What can Pardot do for you? The Prospect Insight suite was designed to simplify online marketing and make it easy to generate great content that will produce real results for a non-technical user. What does that mean? It means all the tools in Prospect Insight are designed with marketers in mind and consist of pre-formatted templates, easy drag-and-drop builders and step-by-step wizards to guide you through the process. Create custom landing pages in a few clicks. Build a branded email newsletter and personalize it from each individual sales representative with the Pardot template library and a simple, visual editor. Host images and files securely with Pardot, eliminating the need to bug your IT department about uploading your latest logo.

Then, use these shiny new campaign elements to generate prospects and create drip programs to nurture leads. Score and grade your new inbound leads with customizable criteria. Set up rules to automatically segment prospects for follow-up, assign them to your sales representatives and more. Sync this new-found information with your CRM system, creating a seamless flow of data that encourages adoption across your entire organization. Before you know it, the sales team is singing your praise (you’re making their job a lot easier, after all) and you’re able to show meaningful ROI data reflecting the marketing department’s contribution to the bottom line.

That’s right, marketing automation is about results. Its about making the marketing department, sometimes regarded as all “fluffy stuff,” ROI superheroes. Tracking prospects and visitors allows companies to bring in more leads – and more importantly, better leads – while reporting on marketing campaigns like never before. Pardot customers have been able to increase sales team efficiency and generate loads more leads.

Now you know why you need marketing automation, but what makes Pardot different? In addition to building an easy-to-use tool, Pardot designed the “No Hassle Marketing Automation” Promise to define what sets Prospect Insight apart from other choices:

• Pardot is a month-to-month service with no contracts. The simple, low-cost plans include implementation and services, making it easy for smaller companies to get on board without a large upfront investment.
• Pardot includes unlimited users for one monthly fee – that’s right no need to purchase individual seats at an additional charge. Come one, come all!
• Pardot offers personalized services and support. We pride ourselves on client service with our interactive success community and our stellar team of services folks and client advocates. We love to meet clients and invite them to the office to take a spin on the Segway, play a game of ping pong or, of course, chat about all things marketing automation.

To learn more about Pardot and marketing automation, in general, we invite you to visit www.pardot.com and view a quick demo to see Prospect Insight in action. You can also catch up with us on our blog at marketingautomation.net.

Remember in school when you took a quiz to see what kind of learner you are?  In case you didn’t, there are three types of learners:

• Visual (seeing) learners
• Auditory (listening) learners
• Kinesthetic (touch/experience) learners

Does your marketing mix appeal to all three types?  We are trying to add more to our mix to appeal to a greater audience.  We have a new way for visual learns to understand what we do.  We created a map that shows a live feed of contacts we are discovering right now.  It is pretty cool if you haven’t checked it out yet.  Thanks to Jason for creating it.  Is there a cool or new visual way you could explain your business?

When trying to reach visual learners, consider:

• new graphics
• charts
• videos

For those who are auditory learners, you might try experimenting with:

• podcasts
• video or recorded case studies
• webinars

For kinesthetic learners, look into:

• interactive demos
• in-person events
• free trials

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.