5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect from Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is becoming a vital tool in today’s B2B space, as more marketers need to gain a better understanding of their customers’ buying cycles and increase their ROI from every campaign.

However, many marketers become enamored with the latest technology and jump into marketing automation without considering the human investment and business processes needed to make their efforts successful. If you focus on the technology over the planning, you won’t have the backbone necessary to support your marketing automation efforts and convert more leads into sales.

Whether you’re considering marketing automation or have already begun the process, you must understand exactly what you can – and can’t – achieve with the software. Here are five things you shouldn’t expect marketing automation software to do:

1. Model how your buyers buy. A key to marketing automation is reframing your thinking to focus on your customers’ buying process rather than your selling process. Before you implement a marketing automation program, you should map how your customers move through every stage of the buying cycle and become aware of their questions and concerns throughout each stage.
2. Define buyer personas. For your marketing and sales efforts to succeed, you need to understand your buyers’ challenges. One of the best ways to get inside a buyer’s head is to develop a profile of your ideal customer that includes his/her demographic, firmographic and psychographic details. You can even give your ideal customer a name and hang a photo of him/her near your computer.

   Buyer personas enable you to create targeted marketing materials that speak to your customers’ exact needs. If your marketing automation program sends your buyers information that is off-target, they will ignore your messages.

3. Get sales and marketing to agree on what a qualified lead looks like. How often does your sales department complain about the quality of the leads you send them? Unless your marketing department has sales intuition (the ability to read your prospects’ behaviour and anticipate their next actions), defining a good lead will be difficult to do on your own. Meet with your sales team and discuss what makes a lead “qualified.”
4. Create interesting and relevant content. Many marketers fail to consider the amount of educational content necessary to address their buyers’ concerns. For example, a customer in the early stages of the buying cycle might want to read articles and white papers, while someone who is closer to making a purchasing decision is more likely to request sales literature or product demos. While a marketing automation system will deliver the content, you’ll still need to develop a content strategy and create engaging communications.
5. Engage with others through social media. Marketing automation allows you to communicate with your leads without human interaction. However, human interaction is vital to your success with social media. Although some aspects of social media can be automated (such as inserting sharable links into emails and landing pages), you still need to personally interact with your online communities. One-on-one conversations with buyers can help you discover what messages are the most relevant to them.

After you lay the initial groundwork, marketing automation software can help you eliminate repetitive marketing tasks and increase your ROI. Here are three things marketing automation can do for you:

1. Understand individual buyers. Marketing automation software collects powerful data about your buyers to help you understand their interests and needs. The software follows the footprints buyers leave on your website and shows you what content they have accessed. This means you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and have an advantage over competitors who are not using marketing automation.
2. Deliver the right message – at the right time – to each buyer. One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation software is its ability to deliver targeted content to your leads throughout every stage of the buying cycle. For example, if a lead responds to a campaign about your XYZ solution, your program can send her a case study about a customer who achieved strong business gains after implementing your solution. Imagine how this targeted information can educate your leads and convert more of them into customers.
3. Identify the right leads for sales. Once you and your sales team identify what makes a lead “qualified,” marketing automation can help you deliver those leads to sales. Your sales team can view specific data about your prospects, including the links they clicked, the registration forms they completed and their lead scores. This detailed information makes it easier for your sales team to reach their quotas.

A successful marketing automation program involves more than just implementing the latest technology. Have you considered the sales and marketing processes you’ll need to make it work for you?

(this post originally ran as a guest post on Astadia's marketing automation blog)

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Lead Scoring - Providing Disposition Options

Handing scored and qualified leads to sales in order for them to follow up is an inexact science. Continual optimization of the process is necessary in order to understand what aspects of a buyer’s digital body language are key to understanding buyer’s intentions. One of the best sources of this information is the sales team themselves. However, as any marketer knows, getting information out of a sales team can be challenging. On a topic such as the quality of an individual sales lead, it may in fact seem almost impossible.

Recently, we talked about the need to implement a claw-back system for scored leads that are passed to sales and show no sales activity. This approach is useful, but is a black and white system. Either a lead is good and is worked by sales, or it is not good and is ignored and quickly clawed back. There is no opportunity for middle ground, and no opportunity for feedback from sales.

If, instead, the sales team is presented with disposition options for the lead that feed directly into appropriate lead nurture campaigns, the best of both worlds is achieved. By having an option to pass a lead back to marketing, with a specific disposition that guides what will happen next, the sales person is able to maintain ownership of the lead. However, by carefully constructing the set of disposition options, marketing can learn much more about why the leads were not accepted by sales than they ever would have by asking sales to fill out a feedback form.

For example:
- If a lead is deemed by sales to be slightly too early in their buying process, they might enter the lead into a “Late Stage Buyer Nurturing” lead nurture program that provides case studies and ROI analysis to guide a prospect towards buying

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be too junior to make a buying decision, they might enter the lead into a “Convince Your Executive Team” nurture program that provided key information to make an internal business case for your solution

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be more interested in an alternate product (Product B), they might enter the lead into a “Product B Nurturing” program

These are only a few examples, each organization will have different options. The technique of providing these “lead disposition” options to sales in order to provide sales with a “middle ground” option, while at the same time providing rich insights to your marketing team as to why a lead is being rejected is extremely valuable.

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

Looking for an Outcome - Testing in B2B

I was watching Tamara Gielen's video of Jim Sterne from the EIS keynote (http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/2008/12/eis-keynote-cro.html), and it got me thinking about the challenges of testing in B2B. It's a tough exercise because of one fundamental challenge. Testing of marketing involves defining an outcome you're looking for so that you can say that option A did a better job than option B of driving that outcome. The trouble with B2B marketing is that those outcomes make a quick jump from irrelevant to immeasurable.


What do I mean by that?


Well, in B2C marketing, you can often define the outcome of a marketing campaign as purchase revenue. Send an email, observe how many people buy and how much they spend. You can then test against that outcome to see which copy, creative, subject, or list drives more of it and that's your best marketing option.


In B2B marketing, your sales cycles are often much longer - months if not quarters or years - and the sales cycle is often concluded off-line by a sales rep getting a signature on a contract. This means that any testing you might want to do against the ideal results - the driving of revenue - are both extremely difficult to tie together, and require more time to elapse than is practical (if you have to wait 3 months to see enough results to determine which marketing campaign to launch, you've likely missed your window).


Similarly, if you look at things that can be easily measured in B2B, they are usually not significant enough to guide decisions; opens, clickthroughs, and form submits are not great indicators of revenue. If you are testing against which campaign drives more of these activities, you are likely going to find that free iPod giveaways perform fairly well, but as we've all seen, they are not likely to turn into good leads for your sales team to follow up with.


Luckily, there is an interim outcome that you can test against, does correspond to revenue potential, and is quickly determined; the qualified lead. With a definition in place of what a qualified lead is, you now have a measurement of what outcome your campaigns are trying for.


Note that what we're talking about here is leads qualified based on their interest (implicit scoring) rather than who they are (explicit scoring), as your marketing campaigns are unlikely to change the titles or industries of your audience. (for a deeper discussion on dimensions of scoring, see here:

http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html)


The advantage of this approach is that it can test more than just a single-point communication such as an email. In B2B marketing, we are often looking to test one sequence of communications against another (let's say it's a 3 step program for post-webinar follow-up and we're testing two different messaging options, or an all-email version against a multi-channel version using email, direct mail, and voice). If you're doing that, you have even more need to use an abstracted outcome like qualified leads to be able to look at the overall effect of one sequence over another.


I look forward to you comments on what has and has not worked in your testing efforts against longer sales cycles. Read More...

High noon at the web form

Quickest draw wins... well not quite, but speed is more important than many B2B marketers realize (or at least act upon). Fine tuning your response to inbound inquiries can have a significant impact on your success without requiring much of an investment.

Leigh Anne Wallace at Reachforce had a blog entry recently that was a good reminder for all of us of the studies that show the real benefits to responding quickly to inbound inquiries: http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/what-is-your-web-lead-response-time-b2b-marketing-and-sales-tip-177/. From the original report:

"The speed of first attempt (time to first dial) to a newly generated web lead
correlated with a significant increase in the number of qualified leads. For
each tier of delayed response in the survey question (for instance, responding in 30 minutes rather than 10 minutes) the percent of leads qualified dropped 4.3% and close rates fell nearly 2%."

It's more difficult than it seems as you need to put three basic processes in place to have it make sense, unless your flow of inquiries is small enough that you really can follow up with every inquiry. You need:

1. a basic call/no-call qualification process
2. the basics of routing to the right rep
3. a quick notification process
   

For the lead qualification process, I'd hesitate to call it lead scoring just yet, because you many want to lower the bar a little bit and follow up with most inquiries, even those that would not pass as A leads. There is a strong argument in favour of automating most of this process because it's all too easy to come up with an "I didn't call because..." reason after the fact if you leave it to the individual callers. You'll likely need to manage and measure follow-up speed in a hands-on way, and if it's open to loose interpretation, that process might fall apart quickly.

For lead routing, again, simple is best. The best I've seen had a very small dedicated person/team on it, rather than distributing more broadly. It's likely that your first call outcome goals are relatively simple in nature (more details, setting a meeting, etc) and can be managed by someone who is not that territory's sales rep.

For notification, once you know you're going to call them, and you know the right rep to make the call, email is usually quickest and easiest. Its main drawback is that it's more difficult to close the loop and monitor response times, but to get a process up and running quickly it is the easiest bet.

It doesn't take long to get a feel for what your actual response times to inbound marketing inquiries are, and if it's not what you'd hoped, there may be an easy way for you to improve your team's performance. A quick "mystery shopper" inquiry or two can give you a good idea of how you're really performing. In fact, I might try that with the Eloqua team right now... Read More...