Four Interesting Trends from Dreamforce

Last week I had the pleasure of wandering the floor at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual conference. As the SaaS conference of the year, it’s a great time to get a pulse on how everyone is thinking about the next few years. This year, I spent a lot of time talking with the exhibiting ISVs, both large and small, and as I did so, I found a few key themes that resonated.

At Eloqua, we’ve been talking about Revenue Performance Management for a while now, and it was good to see that many of the themes that are driving that are common across other ISVs in the ecosystem. Here are four themes I noticed as I chatted with vendors on the show floor:

1) Data is Increasingly Critical: One clear trend was the increasing importance of data to those focused on driving revenue. Both as a source of new conversations, and as a source of continually updated insight into a buyer’s fit, data is one of the most important RPM stories of the next few years. Salesforce.com has clearly made a significant investment in this area with their acquisition of (and deep integration of) Jigsaw as a data cloud, but folks like Hoovers, D&B, and StrikeIron were very present on the show floor with data sourcing, append, and cleansing services.

2) Communication Contributes to Buyer Insight: There were many vendors who provided communication tools, ranging from PDF trackers to videoconferencing tools and Webinar providers. This was not new, but in each conversation with these providers, including Vitrium, ReadyTalk, iLinc, and more, their focus was on how the use of that communication tool by a buyer can provide rich insight into a buyers intentions. By leveraging attendance data as a key part of a buyer’s digital body language, marketers and sales people are much better armed.

3) Integration Must Be Seamless: Salesforce.com has long focused on the need to seamlessly tie together all interactions with customers, and this viewpoint is spreading throughout the entire buying process. Integration providers like Cast Iron, Informatica, and Pervasive had packed booths as visitors looked to understand how to seamlessly tie together every pre-purchase interaction, whether in social media, search, webinars or in any other communication vehicle.

4) 2011 will be the Year of Analytics: It is now beginning to be possible to see the entire buying process from end to end. With that possibility, revenue analytics jumps to the forefront as an extremely hot area. Both on the floor and in the track sessions, executives were asking about the right metrics, measurements, and KPIs to measure in order to ensure that their revenue engines were running in the most efficient manner possible

I have never been more excited about the RPM space, and seeing the breadth of solutions on display at Dreamforce tells me that others quite definitely share this excitement. 2011 will be an exciting year indeed.

Read More...

Cash Flow Statement as a Metaphor: Sources and Uses of Leads

Earlier, we introduced the financial metaphors for balance sheet and income statement when looking at B2B marketing analysis. Following on the same financial metaphor, a “cash flow” statement can show valuable insights into the sources and uses of leads, allowing you to dashboard the lead flow within your organization in order to understand which territories, product lines, or business segments are seeing more lead flow than others, and whether the leads are being successfully converted into opportunities.

Understanding which sales teams are seeing the best sourcing of leads gives a good sense of whether there is any imbalance in the lead flows. For example, in the following data, you can see that although the West is generally getting more leads, they are of significantly lower quality. Similarly, while there are lots of leads for Widget B being generated, there is a significant imbalance in lead flow to reps in the East.





With this understanding of which territories, product lines, and salespeople are provided with leads, the next step is to provide insight into the outcome of those leads once they have been handed off to sales. Done properly, the disposition of leads by a sales team after they attempt to connect with them should not only trigger a marketing process to correctly handle the leads, but also provide clear insights into the quality of the leads. If the leads were unreachable, lacked interest, were not the right role, or only had early stage interest, this insight allows marketing to see whether there are potential quality issues with their leads.

Likewise, if certain sales reps are doing a poor job in following up with the leads they are given, this will also show up in the analytics of lead disposition. In the following lead disposition chart, for example, you can see that both Bob Clark and Jane Chen received a large number of leads, but failed to convert many of them to opportunities, instead resorting to voicemails or calling back in 90 days. This may be an indication of a performance or training challenge with these two sales reps.



The more visibility we introduce to our processes for building interest, qualifying leads, handing them to sales, and having sales connect in order to grow a revenue opportunity, the better we are able to improve those processes. The cash flow statement, as a metaphor, provides a great way to look at which sales teams are getting good sources of leads, and what the uses of those leads are. The ability to optimize this lead flow or guide the sales team's response lets us optimize revenue quickly and effectively. Read More...

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Operational Challenges Might be a Good Sign

I often get asked how one measures success in aligning marketing and sales. Alignment is a fairly fuzzy concept, so it’s hard to find a definitive metric to look at in order to determine alignment. However, there are some very interesting signs of great progress that I have seen a number of times that are worth highlighting. One of those signs is when the different operational styles of marketing and sales become an observed problem. That is actually a symptom of growing alignment between sales and marketing.

What does that mean?

Sales and marketing are very different organizations with very different natural ways of operating. Marketing, even in forward-leaning organizations that have invested heavily in lead nurturing, is often organized around campaigns or events. Sales, being very much a people discipline, is organized around sales people’s time.

This operational style become very apparent when your sales and marketing teams become very closely aligned around the sales lead handoff process. In this process, leads from marketing are handed to sales for follow-up, and sales calls in to those leads to engage with them and work towards an opportunity. However, the natural propensity of marketing to run campaigns or events, which generate a point-in-time spike in leads, begins to conflict with the sales team’s ability to follow-up on those leads, which is governed by the number of sales people on the team, and the number of hours in a day.

It is usually very difficult to make instantaneous adjustments in the number of sales people available to call hot leads, and the number of hours in a day is even more difficult to adjust. This leaves a challenging disconnect. As we’ve addressed earlier, the ability to connect with leads successfully is very dependent on the speed with which you follow up, so this disconnect has significant implications on sales success.

If a marketing campaign generates a spike of marketing qualified leads on a Monday, for example, and those leads are passed to sales, there will likely be an overwhelming number of leads for that Monday. The calls will spill over into Tuesday, and Wednesday, where the sales team will face declining success rates due to the elapsed time, and by Thursday, the sales team will be out of leads.

A far better solution would be to “throttle” marketing campaigns so that a more steady stream of leads flows to sales. Not all campaigns can be throttled, but many can. If there is to be an outbound email marketing campaign that generates leads, it is better to split it into 5 equal sections and spread it over 5 days than it is to send it all at once. Not only will the sales team not be overwhelmed with leads on one day, but the increase in successful connections they make will keep them busier with the same number of leads as in the original scenario.

When marketing and sales begin to get more closely aligned, the operational differences between the two groups become more apparent. Many of the challenges your teams will face in shifting their operations to be better in synch are actually signs of a growing level of alignment. Read More...

Evaluating Marketing Automation/CRM Integration

In a recent post, we talked about the three key elements in the Marketing Automation/CRM integration stack; data, activity, and process. This gives a good sense of the key elements that need to be integrated in order to have a seamless flow of the business process between marketing and sales. The next challenge in evaluating an integration between your marketing automation and CRM systems is understanding how to approach the integration. Depending on what systems you are using, and how complex your requirements are, this can end up in one of 4 buckets, each of which has its own unique characteristics.

The way to think about this is a 2X2 matrix. The first dimension is whether your Marketing Automation software is natively “aware” of the CRM system you are working with or not. The second dimension is whether your business processes for the integration are standard, or customized.

Native Support of Chosen CRM System

There is much confusion in the industry on this point, as the claim to “be able to integrate with” a particular CRM system leaves much to be clarified. There are, to significantly simplify, two main approaches to an integration. In one method, the marketing automation system itself is natively aware of the API calls of the CRM provider, and can update data, make notes of web activity, or create leads as appropriate.

The second method, however, is a more passive approach. Instead of taking care of the calls directly and natively, the information is provided through an API, and is available for integration as needed, but a third party integration tool would likely be required. This approach definitely allows integration, but requires a more technical investment on behalf of the organization looking to perform the integration.


Standard or Custom Business Process

When examining the business processes for the integration, many businesses will discover that they have unique requirements that are outside of the standard and typical business flows. Unique sources of data for segmentation, lead scoring criteria that come from your CRM system, novel lead handoff or claw-back processes with sales, or data requirements based on analysis needs can all drive custom integration processes.

Depending on your approach to integration – native support or non-native support – these custom process requirements can be handled in different ways.


Integration Scenarios, and Questions to Ask

Each integration scenario leads to different integration considerations. Each allows integration, and each can lead to a very successful and viable integration, but the difference are important to be aware of.

Standard Business Process, Native CRM System

This is the best available option, as it combines standard business processes with a known, and natively supported CRM platform. This should be a very quick process, and ideally will incorporate best practices and experience into the standard integration processes that are enabled. If this is the situation you find yourself in, ask questions around the marketing automation provider’s experience with that CRM platform:
- How many integrated clients do you have on that specific CRM system?
- Are you that CRM vendor’s recommended provider of marketing automation?
- If custom business process requirements arise down the road, is there the flexibility to customize?

Custom Business Process, Native CRM System

Either on initial engagement, or after the initial processes begin to show their success, there is often a need to expand the depth of the integration between CRM and Marketing Automation. As your lead scoring, handoff, and nurturing process grows in maturity, you will need to expand how the two platforms coordinate. As you are dealing with a CRM system that is natively understood by your marketing automation provider, the flexibility of your marketing automation provider is what will govern your success here. Ask questions both around the flexibility of individual calls into the CRM system, and the ability to customize the workflow that governs when those calls are used:
- What entities within the CRM system are accessible; contacts, accounts, tasks, activities, custom objects, etc?
- Can any updates (ie creating a task), be fully customized to control exactly what is written?
- Can a workflow process be created to give you as a marketer complete control of the update process?

- Do you have full decision/branching control in that workflow process


Standard Business Process, Non-Native CRM System

If the CRM system you are using is not natively supported by the marketing automation provider you are considering, integration will be possible, but there will be a significant amount more work to be contemplated. Essentially in this case, both your CRM provider and your marketing automation platform will expose an API, and you will need to use either custom code or an integration platform to build the integration.

If this is the situation you are looking at, a few key questions to ask your marketing automation software provider:
- How robust and deep is their API? Does it cover all of the key functions you will need to replicate a standard integration with your CRM system?
- How much experience do they have with integrations outside of their most familiar CRM system? (If they only have experience integrating with one CRM system, you will likely find that the flexibility to integrate with other CRM systems is not present)
- Will there be an experienced best practice team to help you with the business process aspects of the integration?
- Is there a deep partner ecosystem with experience in building integrations that you can rely on if needed?


Non-Standard Business Process, Non-Native CRM System

This is the most interesting and challenging of all the integration options. With both a non-standard CRM system, and a custom business process, your integration project will likely be more challenging than the previous options. It is important in this situation to accurately assess your integration plan in order to avoid surprises as you move forward.

Some important questions to ask of your marketing automation provider:
- Does their API cover all key areas of interest? Has there been a community of partners and developers working with the API for at least a year in order to ensure that the necessary depth and robustness is present?
- Is there a workflow engine within the marketing automation platform that can work seamlessly with the API in order to allow marketers to configure unique business processes which are then easily integrated?
- Is there a community of clients and partners who have built integrations with a wide variety of systems – data warehouses, business intelligence, purchasing, CRM, etc – whose experience you can draw from


Integration Between Marketing Automation and CRM

The integration between a marketing automation platform and a CRM system is the technological underpinning of the alignment between sales and marketing. As such, it is a key area to understand and investigate in thinking about a marketing automation investment. Whereas many things are possible in looking at integration between two systems, understanding the scenario you are in and what that means for integration can make your marketing automation journey significantly smoother.

Read More...

Sales/Marketing Integration - The Technology Stack

Integration between Marketing Automation systems and CRM systems allows a very powerful and valuable flow of data, and business alignment, between marketing and sales. It forms the technology and data basis for a new relationship between your marketing team and your sales team. This is a very powerful concept, and worth digging into in some depth as there are a lot of questions worth asking as you evaluate potential solutions.

First, and most critical, is a look at what actually needs to be integrated between marketing and sales.

I think of it as a three-layer system, in order to keep things simple. This is obviously a somewhat simplified view, but it allows some clarity into the discussion of the integration.

Data:
The first layer is the data. Your marketing team and your sales team are communicating with the same audience in many cases. The data should be synchronized between sales and marketing in order to ensure that when a field is updated, both systems know about it. You will want to make sure that you can synchronize all key data; contacts, accounts, purchase history, etc. Any data that is meaningful for segmentation whether it is directly accessed (like contact data) or relational data (like purchase history).

Unless you have a very simple structure, you will want to allow flexibility in both what data passes between marketing and sales, and what data is tracked on each individual. The data model will share many common elements (name, address, title, etc), but most marketing and sales organizations begin to quickly evolve their data model with elements that are unique to their business. Marketing may store information on prospects’ campaign history, event attendance, meal selection, and communication preferences, while sales may store information on whether certain contract, budget, and commitment milestones had been met. Requiring both marketing and sales to use the same data model is a recipe for significant frustration.

You will also want good control on which data is moved to sales. Generally marketing deals with a broader universe of suspects than you want to pass to sales. If your CRM system becomes filled with this lower quality data, your sales team will become frustrated with invalid and poorly qualified entries. It’s worth keeping a “wheat and chaff” model whereby only the good quality data is passed to sales and the lower quality data is kept, and cleansed, in the marketing database.

In order to do this, and in order to manage a marketing database that sees data from many sources, it is also necessary to have good control over the priority of data that is flowing into your marketing database. If, for example, you have the same contact in multiple data systems, all of which are synchronized with your marketing database, you need to be able to select which of those sources will be treated as a priority in updating your data.

Activity:
The second layer of an integration between marketing automation and CRM is the marketing activity and the prospect’s response. This is critical to an understanding of the individual’s digital body language, and is key to allowing your sales team to understand the individual, the company, and their overall territory.

It’s key in integrating activity to have a very flexible model for configuring what shows up where. The main goal of providing the activity information is to provide for sales enablement, which involves ensuring successful sales adoption. Being able to show prospect activity in a rich, interactive, visual manner is as critical for sales rep adoption as the data itself is.

Similarly, being able to configure what data is presented, and how it shows up is key for sales adoption. In some environments, prospect activity can be presented in an activity history record within the CRM system, whereas in other environments it may be more successful to send real-time email notifications, and in other environments, a weekly report is found to be more effective. The key to this level of the stack is configurability in order to maximize sales adoption.

Process:
The third, and final layer of the integration stack is the process layer. This layer is where the lifecycle of a lead is defined. When a lead is qualified, how is it presented to sales? Is it presented through a task, through a lead record, or through a more customized way? Similarly, if a lead is not followed up on, or is not turned into a live opportunity, what happens next? Is a lead that is not followed up on clawed back and re-distributed? If a follow-up attempt only resulted in a voicemail being left, is the lead automatically nurtured for a period of time before prompting sales with another follow-up attempt?

This process layer is where there is a great opportunity to differentiate your business. By optimizing how leads are passed to sales, in a way that makes sense for your business, you can drive noticeable improvements in your revenue. However, to do this, it’s crucial to be able to have your technology match your exact business process. If it makes sense to create structured follow-up tasks for sales so you can manage and monitor follow-up times, you will need to be able to automatically create and allocate tasks. If you need to focus on clawing back leads after they go quiet in order to plug leaks in your revenue funnel, you’ll need to be able to pull in opportunity history data in order to ensure that your marketing is aware of the sales process stage that individual lead is in.


Sales Alignment and the Technology Stack

Aligning sales and marketing in a new relationship is a challenging task that relies on many changes in people’s daily lives, and your overall business processes. In order to be successful with this new form of alignment, you will need your marketing automation system and your CRM system carefully aligned. This relies on alignment and flexibility at all levels, from data, to activity, to process. If you build your sales and marketing processes on a technology and data foundation with sufficient ability to map to your business processes, it will allow you to learn and grow over time and continually enhance the alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Read More...

Renewal Marketing and Social CRM

Much of our discussion to date on this blog has focused around the new purchase scenario. However, in today’s world, the focus on existing business is often equally or more important. I’m not even referring specifically to the economic climate, although that enhances the focus. I’m referring to the general shift towards both a market-controlled reputation through social media, and a shift towards recurring revenue models in many industries.

As social media gives everyone in the market a voice, brand reputation becomes more and more in the control of the market. This reputation guides future purchase decisions of your prospective buyers, as it is usually both more prevalent and more trusted than the messages that your own marketing department can communicate.

As I’ve worked with clients in many industries, there is an increasing emphasis placed on marketing communications that target existing customers. The motivators vary from industry to industry, but regardless of whether it is an information subscription in the publishing industry, or a software purchase from a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor, the general reasons are as follows:

- Initial Engagement: Get the customer initially engaged in the product, and up the deployment/first use curve as quickly as possible in order to maintain the momentum of their initial purchase and ensure that successful usage of the service takes place.

- Success/Depth: Engage the customer in progressively deeper and more advanced capabilities or usage patterns in order to ensure they are receiving (and recognizing) maximum value from the service.

- Stickiness: Drive adoption patterns within an organization, or integration points within a set of corporate systems that both add value and increase “stickiness” on renewal by making the solution a more integral part of the business.

- Community: Introduce the customer to other customers in the community to share experiences, ideas, and best practices, both with each other, and also back to the vendor in order to enhance understanding of where the solution needs to evolve towards.

The marketing communications to drive customers through these phases of success are one element, but likewise, so is the Social CRM platforms that allow the customer community to interact with each other, and with you.

Next week (Tuesday, September 15th, 1 EST), I’m honored to be on a panel to discuss the evolution of Social CRM with none other than Geoffrey Moore from the Chasm Group. In a panel put together by Helpstream, I’ll discuss the evolution of Social CRM, and whether it has crossed the chasm to the mainstream with Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, and Brent Potts, Vice President of Hewlett-Packard:

http://info.helpstream.biz/Crossing-the-Chasm-to-Social-CRM.html

I hope you can join me as it should prove to be a very interesting discussion. Read More...

Sales Enablement: A Key Goal of B2B Marketers

As B2B marketers, many of us have mainly focused on lead flow to sales as our key driver. Lead flow is definitely an important and vital part of good B2B marketing and sales alignment, but it is not the only area that should be focused on. Marketing can also bring insights, process, and relationship-building tools to the sales teams they serve, and by doing so, give their sales teams a better ability to understand, manage, and close deals with their prospects.


In a new eBook - "Beyond Lead Flow - Enabling Sales Through Marketing Automation" - 5 main areas that marketing can enable sales are discussed.


The 5 main areas where marketing can enable sales are:

1. Understanding Individual Prospects - their areas of interest, level of engagement, and hot buttons



2. Understanding Accounts - who the key players, who are your internal champions, and who still needs to be engaged in order to move a deal forward



3. Understanding Territories - which accounts are actively engaged in buying processes with your company within each salesperson's territory



4. Building Relationships - providing your sales team with a strong relationship with prospects through personalized marketing to their prospects



5. Maintaining Top-of-Mind Presence - assisting sales with any sales calling campaigns by actively maintaining top-of-mind presence of your brand with prospects

The Sales Enablement eBook is free, with no registration required. However, if you enjoy the content, my only ask is that you share it with others:

Share this eBook on Twitter.

Read More...

Cherry Picking of Leads: B2B Marketing to Sales Handoff

Should we allow sales to cherry pick leads that, based on lead scoring, we have deemed not to be ready for sales?

Steve Kellogg at Astadia raised the question very aptly in his Endless Lead Loop post, and it's a question we all face as we wrestle with the business process of lead scoring and handing leads from marketing to sales. Let me start by saying that there is no right answer here, and businesses that have consciously decided to allow cherry picking are not necessarily doing anything wrong.

However, I would make a strong argument for "No."

The better we get at lead scoring, the more factors we are able to consider. We look at multiple dimensions of lead scoring to split the "who" from the "how interested", we look at multiple components of a score and allow each component to only contribute a maximum amount, and we take time into account by degrading lead scores over time. Over time, as we work with sales, we are able to build a fairly accurate picture of what matters to them in a lead.

However, there will always come a time when sales is not getting, in their view, enough volume of leads, and they will ask to open up the funnel so they can "cherry pick" the leads that they deem good. Sounds harmless, as some might turn into opportunities, and those that don't can continue to be nurtured.

It is, unfortunately, not a harmless activity. If we are connecting sales with buyers who are too early in their buying process to be ready to talk to sales, we run a very real risk of alienating those buyers and pushing them away. Despite our good intentions, this cherry picking activity can have significant negative consequences, as prospective buyers who might be good opportunities later can disconnect from an otherwise promising education process early in their buying cycle.

Better than allowing cherry picking, is to keep with the same scoring methodology, but open the funnel slightly. If an A-Lead is passed to sales, and 80-100 points is deemed to be an A-Lead, then keep the same process in place, but open the funnel up so that a A-Lead is now from 60-100 points. By doing this, we prevent sales from negatively impacting early-stage prospective buyers, but still allow them more leads in the funnel.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system. Read More...

5 steps to a more honest view of buyer interests

I was talking with Stefan Tornquist the other day while we got ready for a video webcast with On24 (see the webcast here). We spent some time discussing one of the results from an interesting survey that MarketingSherpa did on buyer transparency.



Sherpa had asked the question "How often do you provide accurate information during registration?" of 2,700 technology buyers, in the context of events such as webinars and virtual events. The results were very interesting.

Data such as name and email were generally provided in an accurate manner, with around 70% of respondants always providing accurate information and another 20% sometimes providing it. However, beyond that, the prospects' likelihood of submitting accurate information plummetted. For Job Title, only 53% said they always submitted it accurately, and for company size it dropped further to only 40%. Although information such as readiness to buy, or main area of interest, was not studied in this survey, most marketers would intuitively suspect that it would be significantly less accurate than even Job Title and Company Size.



This challenge underscores the importance of observing what prospective buyers do, rather than just what they say, in understanding them as a buyer.

1. Map your buyer's buying process and understand how each buyer progresses from education through to vendor discovery, validation, and purchase.
2. Understand your marketing assets, and map each of your marketing assets into the "buyer's toolkit" so you can understand where each is applicable in the buying process.
3. Define areas of your website that also map into this buyer's toolkit, allowing you to understand how web activity best maps to buying stage and area of interest.
4. Add in search activity to give you an even more refined view of buyer interest and intent. Understanding what questions each prospective buyer is asking gives you a much more accurate view of their stage in the buying process.
5. Present the information on each prospect's true area of interest, or stage in the buying process to your Sales team in the environment that they are most comfortable in - their CRM system.

There is no way to guarantee that your insights into buyers' roles, interests, and industries are accurate. However, if you look at their digital body language to see what they do, and what they show interest in, and use that information to augment what they fill out on web forms, you will have a clearer picture of their interests than through web forms alone. Read More...

Trucks and Conveyer Belts; Lead Management in a Manufacturing Metaphor

(David Armano wrote an inspiring post last week challenging us to "Think Visually" - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/01/thinking-visually.html. He makes a great point, so I exhausted my very limited artistic talents to come up with visuals for this week's post. Hope they make the point clearer)

One of the things that I often discuss with B2B marketing clients is the details of the process for handing leads from marketing to sales and then bringing them back again if sales is not interested. It's an area not to take too lightly as it can derail a tremendous amount of great work in both sales and marketing if the handoff is not done extremely well.

The most common handoff I see is the Excel spreadsheet of leads. This terrifies me.


I liken this to a manufacturing operation where the production is done in two separate buildings, and half way through the manufacturing process, the product is shipped, via truck, from one building to another. It functions, sort of, but will not give you a strong business.


First of all, speed is critical in responding to leads. This has been talked about many times, including my post a month ago here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/high-noon-at-web-form.html. The essence is, you have a very limited amount of time (hours, not days) to act on a sign of buying interest, before your chance of connecting drops precipitously.


So, why does the truck (Excel spreadsheet) model fail?

1. Trucks work best when they are fully loaded. You would not send a spreadsheet with one or two names in it, any more than you would ship a truck with one or two parts in it.


2. Too many trucks clog the roads. In the same way, tt becomes unworkable to be emailing back and forth more than a few (2 or 3) spreadsheets of leads.


3. Trucks are loaded by people. People have other things on their plate, they take breaks, they take vacations, they get distracted. The same thing holds for Excel spreadsheets

All three of these problems lead to a similar trend. The Excel spreadsheet of leads becomes less frequent and larger. The exact numbers vary, but a once-per-week distribution of leads is not uncommon in many organizations.


The problem with this is that it becomes a downward spiral. We send the leads over to sales, and whereas they might have been well qualified at the start, now that a few days have passed, the prospect's interest has moved on to other things, and the chance of connecting with them has decreased. As sales tries to connect with these leads, they realize that they are not getting through, and therefore sales treats the leads with less urgency adding even more delay to the process.


The only way to break this cycle realistically is with automation, in much the same way that conveyer belts revolutionized manufacturing. The lead qualification, handoff, and clawback must be done with the appropriate sense of urgency. Marketing and sales need to work together to build the agreements, SLAs, and processes so that a prospective buyer is responded to quickly and efficiently. To do this requires allowing each lead to flow through the process as soon as they raise their hand. This requires removing any trucks (Excel spreadsheets) from the flow, and replacing them with conveyer belts (automation).


Automating your lead routing may seem like a small optimization, but like in manufacturing, changing the way a process is managed can have a massive impact on bottom line success. Dell and Toyota demonstrated this with electronics and automotive manufacturing. Now, this operations mentality has shifted to Marketing, where the organization who can best serve the needs of the prospect will win. Read More...

6 Ways to Get Sales to Adopt CRM Systems

As refined as today's CRM systems are, they suffer from an age-old problem; sales rep adoption. They have come a long way in terms of usability, configurability, and universal access, but the problem still remains. The good news is that we as marketers can help to tackle that problem, and in doing so, gain a lot of goodwill with the folks over in sales management.

The thing that we as marketers bring to the table is on the "carrot" rather than "stick" side of the equation. Rather than enforcing adoption through techniques such as commision hold-backs or managerial review, we have the unique opportunity to encourage adoption by making a CRM system (whether Siebel On Demand, Salesforce.com, or Dynamics CRM) into a place where sales people receive enough value to want to adopt it.

How can you do that?

1. All lead flow should be directly into your CRM system. If you have done your work on scoring and qualifying leads to the point that they are truly sales ready, then sales will be eager to receive these leads. See comments on lead scoring here for more: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html


2. Show how you're marketing to them. Sales wants to know what messages their prospects have received in order to prepare for conversations with them. Ensure your outbound communications are logged against the recipient record in your CRM system


3. Show what each prospect is interested in. What emails did they read? What did they see on the website? What searches did they do? What forms did they submit? Sales can be more prepared for a call if they know what prospect hot buttons are.


4. Show both the explicit (who they are) and implicit (how interested are they) score in the prospect's record in your CRM system. It gives a good quick perspective as to whether they are worth putting in a call to.
   
   
5. Show them their Territory visually. For each rep, show them their accounts, rolled up by Activities and Implicit Score over the past few weeks in order to give them a prioritized calling list in Red/Yellow/Green highlights.


6. Give them an out - expose one or two nurture marketing programs or lead-rewarming programs to them that allow them to drop cold leads in and have them kept warm by your marketing programs until they are ready to buy. More on that here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/giving-sales-out.html

Getting sales to successful and eagerly adopt your CRM system is a good thing for more than just the sales team. If you are looking to better understand your marketing campaigns through to pipeline and revenue, you need strong sales adoption of CRM throughout the pipeline. By giving them reasons to adopt you not only strengthen your relationship with sales management, but you help out your own ability to analyze marketing efforts.

Read More...

Holiday Time: Top 10 Wish List for Sales

An interesting chat between Rob Leavitt (http://tinyurl.com/66ox38) and Drew Neisser (http://tinyurl.com/6lsmdl) on Marketing as a Service got me thinking about Marketing's other customer - Sales. What can we as marketers do for them.

Okay, sales complains about marketing. But, it's the holiday season, so in that spirit, let's look at the Top 10 gift ideas for marketing to give to sales. Most of these are quick to implement and show real value to sales. Who knows, maybe next year, sales will even have you on their holiday gift list. (okay, I don't guarantee that, but it's a nice thought...)

1. Real-time alerts when their own prospects visit your website so they see interest as it happens


2. A weekly (daily?) list of their hot leads who have shown activity that week to help them make sure they are talking to anyone showing interest


3. All leads passed to sales scored explicitly (who they are) and implicitly (how interested they are), to give them insight into who needs a call


4. Lead score displayed in their CRM system for all leads


5. Account rollup showing the hottest accounts based on recent activity, so they can plan their day at a glance and know who needs a follow-up


6. One-click access to a marketing history for each contact, so they can see what each person has received, read, reacted to


7. Latest marketing collateral available to them in Outlook so they can download, modify, and send, saving them effort in creating content


8. Trackable emails sendable from Outlook so they can see when their own prospects click on emails sent to them directly


9. Marketing communications being automatically sent "from" each salesperson rather than from a corporate address to help develop their relationships


10. A nurture program available to them to add their "not ready to buy" leads to, with one click, so they can be kept warm until they are ready to buy

Am I biased, can all these things be done with Eloqua? Yes. But, regardless of your Demand Generation platform, they're great ideas to get sales more engaged and enthusiastic about your marketing efforts.

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