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.

Forrester, via Mashable, reports that $716 million will be spent on the social media marketing this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014.  Granted, it doesn’t appear to break down this forecast by B2B and B2C, but it’s pretty staggering any way you cut it.  Another interesting comparison stated in the article:

“At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).”

I’m a firm believer that email marketing will see its effectiveness reduced to the point of near-extinction within the next 5 years, due in part to social media as well as increasing proliferation of anti-spam technologies that will drive email into an almost completely whitelisted experience.  But it’s still unclear how all this social marketing spend is going to manifest itself.  The costs and ROI of social media are poorly understood at this point, especially with virtually all the tools and services being free.  I’m sure we’ll see more of this develop very soon.

In the meantime, congratulations to CoTweet who closed their Series A round of funding yesterday.  Good to see some of this activity happening in that booming hotbed of technology (and the town I grew up in), Hershey, Pennsylvania.

ReachForce has teamed up with MathMarketing to offer Funnel Academy, a 2-day B2B marketing training, on August 10-11, 2009 in San Mateo.

Author of The Leaky Funnel and B2B Marketing Funnel Master Hugh Macfarlane, will focus on how to select tactics that move buyers and how to size the funnel for success.

This training was designed for both those who set the tactics at a strategic level and those who roll up their sleeves and execute.  During this 2-day session you will learn how to:

• ensure your marketing dollar delivers a return, with emphasis on tactics like email campaigns and search engine marketing

• get buyers that leaked out of the funnel, back in

• determine the most critical levers of your funnel: volume, size and velocity, and what affect each of these has on success

• build a model funnel with different rates of effectiveness

The standard price for this training is $2,500 per attendee however, ReachForce would like to offer a special discount price of $1,250.
Places are limited, so if you would like to attend, go here for more info and to register.

P.S.  I attended this 2-day training in April and was VERY impressed with the content.  The Funnel Academy team does a great job of sharing proven best practices along with actionable tactics and take aways.

Lead – a simple word, very powerful impact to YOUR business.

Does it mean the same thing to both your Sales and Marketing teams? As it turns out, the crux of most sales and marketing quarrels (read: logjams) are tied to this one unique issue – how do you define a lead?

Does it mean the same thing to your management team?

My suggestion is that it may be time for a brown bag lunch to find out what your company thinks and getting on the same page on that simple definition.

Here’s a list of things commonly tagged as leads and typically end up in your marketing database and/or CRM:

• tradeshow scans
• contact form downloads
• contact list buys
• sales rolodex contacts
• customer referrals
• cold calling contact discovery
• partner programs
• target company CEO
• webinar registrations
• partner’s customers
• inbound call
• event attendee lists
• advertising responders
• competitor’s customers
• target company with no contact attached
• contact with no company attached
• contact with personal email address
• whitepaper/eBook form downloads

Are some of these better than others?  Are some of these prospects?  Are they all?  It depends.

Depends on what you have defined as a lead and as a prospect?  Does one come before the other?  Are they the same thing?  It depends.  Depends on how you have defined your marketing and sales funnel (pipeline) and what it takes to convert from one stage of the pipe to the next.

The key to every solid B2B lead generation engine is the agreed upon definition of a lead, a prospect and a suspect.

If you’re reading this and you’re unsure if your sales team would define a lead the same way you would, STOP what you are doing right now.  Set up time for your marketing and sales team to get together and define each stage of the buying process and what a lead (or prospect or suspect) looks like at each stage along the way to becoming a customer.  Remember, this will more than likely cut down on the quantity of leads but the quality will make up for the difference.

Once these definitions have been defined for your company, decide as a team how contacts are going to be touched in each stage and by whom.

Interested in how others define leads and prospects?  Check these out…

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.

Now that most of us having been using Twitter for a while, you might have looked at your followers and those you follow and thought to yourself “who are these people”.  I came across a great article by Josh Catone, “10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps.”  With so many Twitter apps out there, Josh organizes the best ones to manage your Twitter followers:

Find Out Who You’re Following

1. Twitter Grader – Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every user you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them. To me this seems a little tedious but the Twitter Elite tab is very interesting.  You can even check out the top Twitter users in your city or state.

2. Twinfluence – Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow. It is kinda like having the biggest nerd in school do your homework for you.  Again this one can be a bit tedious to analyze each person you follow.

3. Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

I am sensing a opportunity here.  All of these apps are great but I don’t have time to look at each person I follow individually.  Do you?

Find Your Friends

4. Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.

5. Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

6. Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).

UPDATE: We’ve had some reports that Qwitter hasn’t been as reliable lately as it had been in the past. An alternative service that also notifies you when you lose a follower is Twitterless. If you really want to keep on top of when your followers jump ship, it might be a good idea to sign up for both services to make sure you have all your bases covered.

Get Rid of Inactives

7. Nest.Unclutterer – Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

8. Twitoria – Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

Manage it All

9. TweetSum – TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

10. Tweepler – Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.

I personally like to follow lots of people and then create a group on my TweetDeck that lets me pick the people I want to make sure to pay attention to.  Will you make it into my Awesome Marketers group?

LinkedIn seems to be the most commonly used social network amongst most B2B Marketers. Or at least the one where people seem to be seeing real results.  Today we’re able to participate in groups with those we have things in common with, answer questions, and look up contacts/prospects and see how many connections away we are. To date there has been no real way for Marketers to collect leads in a systematic way. Well, it looks like this is changing.

Yesterday, LinkedIn CEO sent out a tweet saying he just downloaded his first whitepaper from LinkedIn.

This new feature doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet but here’s what we do know:

• There will be a form to collect info. from those that download
• Looks like costs will range from $40 – $100 per lead
• LinkedIn users will not have to pay for whitepapers
• Whitepaper ads will can be targeted by title and industry
• Content is still king here. People are only going to download interesting content that provides value.
• Whitepaper titles are going to be even more important. It’s what’s going to catch your target’s eye.
• When someone downloads a form, they are basically opting in for follow up communications.
• In addition to the targeted advertising, there will be a whitepaper directory for LinkedIn members to search for relevant content.

Here’s another example of how B2B Marketers are able to mix their social media with direct lead generation. Once this is rolled out, I think we’ll give it a try. How about 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.

Trying to handle Search Engine Optimization in-house can be a challenge for many B2B marketers.  I handle all of the web design/content/SEO here at ReachForce with zero formal training on the subject (granted I do have a wonderful developer but he basically just executes on my plans).  I recently came across an article I had earmarked a while back that I wanted to share with anyone out there who is also trying there best to get this whole SEO thing right.  In “Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search,” Galen DeYoung outlines where many B2B marketers are falling down:

Inadequate site architecture

To be found for a specific keyword, there needs to be an optimized landing page on the website that revolves around that search term. Simply put, this means you need to review your business and ensure your site has at least one page that promotes each specific revenue stream. However, the complexities of B2B keyword strategy—which include the lack of shared lexicons in most B2B verticals—mean that you may have to create and incorporate several landing pages for each revenue stream. For instance, an accounting firm promoting litigation support services may have a page on expert witness services, but it may do well to also consider having a page on forensic accounting.

Simply put, most B2B websites need more content, both to respond to likely organic search and to be seen as being by the search engines as an authoritative site on a given topic.

If you are having difficulties creating this content, try looking for it other place.  Take a look at your whitepapers, past articles, press releases, and blog posts.  You might find content that just needs a little tweaking to work for the website.

Lousy meta descriptions

When B2B marketers actually specify the meta descriptions for site pages, they often write from an internal standpoint, using corporate and internal lingo that doesn’t speak to the searcher. (Unfortunately this is often true for the actual content as well. ) Typically, B2C marketers are much better at writing meta descriptions that promote click-through. When you write meta descriptions for B2B, think about what will entice the searcher (your prospect) to click on your search result versus all the others on the page. While you can write as much as you want, Google will only display about 165 characters. Make sure you use those characters wisely to create a keyword-rich, compelling message. You’ve only got a few seconds before searchers decide on which results they will click.

Not analyzing organic landing pages

Many B2B marketers don’t bother to evaluate, let alone manage, organic landing pages. Test your organic landing pages for all significant, ranking keywords. You may rank highly in the search results for a given search phrase. You may even have a meta description that drives click-through. But is the page searchers land on the page you want them to land on? If not, optimize a different landing page or make changes to the content at the current landing page.

Not monitoring analytics

The analytics associated with PPC landing pages are often scrutinized in great detail. Bounce rates are analyzed. Alternate landing page versions are tested. Ad copy is tweaked. Yet organic landing pages rarely see the same rigor, despite the fact that B2B purchasers tend to first look at and click on organic results almost twice as often as they do paid search results. So, dive into your analytics and do the same for your organic visitors. Isolate your organic traffic. Look at the organic landing pages. Analyze the bounce rates. Adjust landing page content. Tweak meta descriptions. You’ll be glad you did.

Failing to optimize printed marketing assets before converting them to the web

B2B marketers are frequently guilty of mindlessly posting lots of print marketing communications to their websites, often in lieu of html content. Hundreds of hours and great sums of money have been spent creating these pieces, yet most people won’t spend even an hour to optimize these pieces before posting them to the web. These often include PDFs of brochures, case studies, technical or white papers, and product and spec sheets. While these represent valuable, influential information, if you don’t optimize them, they won’t show up in the search results; the only people that will find them are those who actually visit your site. Why not make sure searchers can find them, too.

Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions

B2B sites are often rife with duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions. In addition to decreasing the chances that more of your site’s pages will rank well, this practice will likely lead to less of your site’s pages being indexed by the search engine. Moreover, it’s a clear sign that you haven’t optimized your site for searchers. Title tags and meta descriptions help determine whether a searcher is actually going to click on your search result. Today, there’s really no excuse for this. You can easily check for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions using Diagnostics>Content Analysis in Google Webmaster Tools.

Be sure to check out the full article for all of Galen’s tips.

Looking for more Online Marketing Tips? Download 30 Online Marketing Tips from The B2B Lead

MarketingSherpa is a great resource for studies and stats.  Even if you are not a member you can sign-up to receive their weekly newsletter and chart of the week.  This week’s MarketingSherpa chart of the week really peaked my interest.

We’ve been working with the folks at MathMarketing (Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel) lately and have been having a lot of discussions about the marketing and sales funnel, the lead flow into the funnel and the leads that leak out. The ones leaking out have me wondering…

With the introduction of marketing and salesforce automation systems, B2B lead generation teams are able to better measure and analyze activities that drive leads into the funnel and ultimately to customer wins but what about those that fall out?  Where do all of these leads go?  And who’s in charge of keeping them in the mix?

How Organizations Manage the Pipeline from Lead to Sale

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart.

The 2 at the bottom of this chart further confirm that there’s still work to be done here and I’m not the only one wondering about leaked leads.  We work so hard for these leads and just because they aren’t ready to buy right now they are getting kicked out. We’re missing opportunities and most of us probably don’t even know it.

What are you doing about leads that have leaked?  Do you have a way to get them back into a nurturing cycle?  And most importantly, is the sales team providing information on why the lead was kicked out or back?

What’s working for you?  Please do share.