Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/08/31

More great posts over the last week-and-a-bit from the marketing automation and B2B marketing blogging community. Some good analysis of data in this week's set - data from surveys, data on FriendFeed usage, and data on how data ages. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did:



Laura Cross (@lauracross) from Marketing Insights draws a comparison between direct marketing teasers and the relationship between emails and landing pages in this quick but insightful video:

http://marketinginsights.eloqua.com/2009/08/25/using-email-as-a-teaser/


David Raab (@draab) at the Customer Experience Matrix looks at the Pedowitz Group’s Sweet platform which ties social media and marketing automation together:

http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2009/08/pedowitz-groups-sweet-suite-builds.html


Lauren Kincke on the B2B Lead blog provides some interesting and surprising stats on how quickly data gets dirty and hence why it should be a key priority for marketers:

http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/6-scary-dirty-data-stats/



Brian Carroll (@brianjcarroll) from Start with a Lead discusses what is actually lead nurturing vs what many execs think is lead nurturing. A focus on helping the prospective buyer better understand the space and solve their pains is key, not just a repeated attempt to sell:

http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/08/what-is-and-isnt-lead-nurturing-.html


Steve Kellogg (LinkedIn) from Crowds2Crowds writes a letter to sales introducing all that marketing can do for them. A great foundation for thinking about how to get buy-in from your sales team to marketing’s efforts:

http://crowds2crowds.blogspot.com/2009/08/but-waittheres-more.html



Mike Damphousse (@damphoux) from Green Leads shared a few results from his recent poll of sales and marketing execs. Key takeaways: outbound marketing is still more common than inbound, for now, and at least 1/3 of senior execs will delegate down to directors when looking to understand vendor offerings:

http://www.damphousse.org/2009/08/poll-demand-gen-experts-use-equal-mix.html
http://www.damphousse.org/2009/08/b2b-appointments-third-of-cvp-execs.html



Jep Castelein (@jepc) from Lead Sloth starts a good discussion by looking at the top reasons that marketing automation projects fail. Typical causes are unclear business focus, and relying on technology alone, rather than people, process, and technology:

http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/marketing-automation-projects-fail/


Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) at Hubspot provides some very interesting stats on FriendFeed and how it’s used. Surprisingly experimental and early adopter usage profile:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5026/State-Of-FriendFeed-14-Things-You-Probably-Don-t-Know.aspx

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.

Data and Predictions in B2B Marketing

I recently read an interesting book on predictions - things like weather, economics - called "Apollo's Arrow" by David Orrell. In the book, he talks about a number of challenges to accurately predicting future events. There are many challenges, but foremost among them are the data you use as a starting point, and the model you have for how events will unfold.

In predicting the weather, for example, a three dimensional grid of temperature, pressure, and humidity values is constructed as a starting point. From here, various computer models attempt to forecast how weather patterns, temperatures, rain, and wind will occur. The resulting predictions (unfortunately still very inaccurate) are challenged by both the inaccuracy of the starting points and the model used to predict an outcome.

Interestingly, an individual model can vary greatly in its ability to predict different outcomes. Temperature may be relatively well predicted, but rain may be no better than guesswork.




In reading the book, I was reminded of marketers' challenges in using lead scoring to predict which leads are good enough to be passed to sales. We have similar elements; the underlying data - in our case digital body language - on the prospect's activities, and the model we use to score leads and determine which is a qualified lead.



This is interesting though in that we are looking at one individual and deciphering their intention to purchase. However in B2B marketing it is a business that purchases, not an individual. Much like predicting temperature vs predicting rain, one aspect of the buying process prediction that often leads to very accurate results is predicting the business that will buy, rather than the individual. Looking at the businesses visiting your website gives very intreresting clues as to where a vigorous buying process is happening.


If you see multiple visitors on your website from one company, they are doing deep investigation, and are using compelling search terms when finding you on Google, you know that there has likely been an internal event at that organization that has caused a group to begin investigating your solutions.


Of course in this scenario, you may or may not know the individual who will guide the final purchase decision. If you do know most of the key members of the team who would be involved in a buying decision, you just need to present to your sales team with the information that the business in question is clearly showing buying signals. You can do this through building account traffic light dashboards in your sales team's CRM system, or other sales enablement techniques.



However, if you don't know the key individuals who would be the decision makers on a purchase of your solutions, you can focus your efforts on what you do know - that a buying process is under way at that organization. Knowing that, a role-based discovery service such as Reachforce can easily capture the names you require and get your sales team in touch with them.


Much like predicting the weather, predicting buying behavior can be challenging and imprecise. However, even being able to predict key indicators like the fact that a buying process is underway at a specific organization adds tremendous value to your sales team.

Marketing Automation Reliability

In selecting marketing automation software, there are considerations that go well beyond features and functionality. In this short but information-packed video, Abe Wagner, co-founder and V.P. Engineering with Eloqua talks about what he would look at if investigating a marketing automation or demand generation software investment.

Abe discusses a number of key considerations, such as reliability, security, and email deliverability. Having worked with his team at Eloqua to build the most reliable and scalable marketing automation platform on the market, Abe knows what to look for in making an evaluation. Watch this video to learn more:




(If this video does not load, click here to watch the video on marketing automation reliability)

For each consideration, he talks about why it is a critical consideration, and then discusses what he would look for, and the tough questions he would ask if he was in the evaluator’s seat.

Reliability – Abe talks about why system reliability is critical to the success of your marketing initiatives, the relationship between scalability and reliability in marketing automation software, and what questions you can ask or 3rd party audits you can look for if you are evaluating a system’s reliability.

Deliverability – There are many components involved in getting your email messages to your intended recipients. Abe talks about the investments that he would want to ensure were present in a marketing automation software platform, both in terms of maximizing email deliverability, and also evaluating and understanding current deliverability of your emails.

Security – Whereas many organizations don’t have the resources to perform a full audit of a marketing automation platform’s security, there are ways to ensure that your selected solution has the security you need. Abe talks about the tough questions to ask, the 3rd party certifications to look for, and the ways to ensure your marketing database is in the most secure hands possible.

As someone who has been on the other side of the table when it comes to evaluating potential marketing automation software vendors, Abe knows what to look for and what questions to ask. By making sure the needed investments have been made, you can be sure that your system will work reliably, your data will be secure, and your emails will be delivered.



For those unsure of how the uptime statistics that SaaS companies quote translate into real minutes of downtime, see the chart to the left.

Those seconds or minutes of downtime are important in that if your marketing automation software is not able to show your prospects a landing page, and capture their information off a web form, due to downtime issues, you may waste nearly your entire investment in that marketing campaign.


For anyone considering an investment in marketing automation software, Abe's short video is well worth watching.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/08/17

Some great posts last week from the marketing automation and B2B marketing blogging community. I've enjoyed a lot, so it's hard to pick out just 10 as favorites. It's interesting how trends tend to surface as the "Cash for Clunkers" theme seems to be present in a few posts this week.


Scott Gillum (LinkedIn) from B2B Sales & Marketing Knowledge Sharing thinks about the future of articles in print publications and magazines as the formats, lengths, and chaotic flows of Twitter, blogs, and online communication become more mainstream:
http://b2bknowledgesharing.blogspot.com/2009/08/future-look-of-articles-blogs-and-im.html



Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) from the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog with a thought provoking piece on the changing nature of branding in a social media world. Social media may be exposing various instances of mismatch between a brand promise and its reality, but there remains a compelling argument for brand relevance:
http://www.chiefmartec.com/2009/08/branding-is-dead-long-live-branding.html



Tim Wilson (@tgwilson) from Gilligan on Data looks at data inaccuracies and how they add up – some great thinking on the risk inherent in bad data vs the risk of inaction and data paralysis - and a strong argument not to strive for absolute perfeaction:
http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/08/10/rare-x-rare-x-rare-in-customer-data-management/



Carlos Vidal (@cmvidal) with a guest post on Demand Gen Report looks at the need to included the time taken to close a deal as a key part of a Cost per Opportunity metric:
http://demandgenreport.blogspot.com/2009/08/lead-source-effectiveness-allocate.html



Tom Pick (@tompick) from Web Market Central talks about Aquent's combination of Email marketing and social media, as an example of one company "doing it right" in combining the two styles of marketing:
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/social-media-email-marketing-one.html



Amy Hawthorne (@ahawthorne) on the B2B Lead Blog makes an argument to look at your marketing database to see if it's more of a clunker than you might have realized. The requisite cash-for-clunkers sales offer is of course there, but it would have been odd if it was missing...
http://blog.reachforce.com/database-marketing/got-a-cluncker-of-a-leads-databasetrade-up/



Paul Dunay (@pauldunay) of Buzz Marketing for Technology raises an interesting thought in a "Cost Per Advocate" model to replace cost per click or cost per impression. Advocates are key, but are we just buying targeted ads, or really winning them over as an advocate?:
http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/2009/08/cost-per-advocate-new-cpa-model.html



Heather Foeh (@heatherfoeh) from Marketing Insights looks at using a marketing automation process not just to create leads for the channel, but also to follow up and make sure that your channel partners have worked with each lead effectively:
http://marketinginsights.eloqua.com/2009/08/12/checking-up-on-the-channel/



Steve Kellogg (LinkedIn) from Crowds2Crowds with our second Cash for Clunkers piece - an analysis of progressive landing pages on various motor company sites, which makes a great point about visitor interaction:
http://crowds2crowds.blogspot.com/2009/08/cash-for-clunkers.html



Jamie Wallace (@suddenlyjamie) from The Savvy B2B blog makes an argument for thinking in terms of a buying process, not a selling process, through her push to drop the "hunting" metaphors we tend to use, which imply a selling process:
http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/202551/social-media-reality-check-you%E2%80%99re-not-a-big-game-hunter



I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did. There are a lot of great writers out there in the marketing automation and B2B marketing community, and they each have an interesting perspective to share.

What is B2B Marketing?

What exactly defines Business to Business (B2B) Marketing?

It’s an interesting question, as marketing is a discipline that is common across both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) organizations. However, beneath the surface, there are significant differences in how B2B and B2C marketing is done in today’s environment. It’s worth exploring what B2B marketing entails.

Let’s look at a few of the areas that differentiate a B2B buying process:

Information Exchange

In B2B marketing, you are often dealing with a buying organization that requires a significant amount of information during their buying process. Unlike in many consumer marketing situations where the need for clothes, food, or cleaning products may be well understood, in B2B marketing, that may not be the case at all. Early stage education on industry transition, technology changes, or regulatory changes can be needed in order to best understand why your solution’s category even exists in the first place.

This need to exchange information continues throughout the buying process. Buyers, when convinced that a potential solution exists to their business challenge, will then need to know which solutions to evaluate, what criteria to evaluate them on, and what evidence exists that one solution is better than the others. B2B marketers need to understand where in this education process their largest marketing challenge exists in order to better educate the buyer.

Social media becomes a critical part of this information exchange in a B2B environment as social media forms a great medium through which to educate, converse with, and build relationships with prospective buyers who may be interested at a point in the future. Over time, a great social media strategy in a B2B organization will improve market perceptions of your organization in ways that other brand investments never could.


Multiple Buyers

In B2B marketing, the most common situation is one in which multiple buyers are involved. Each buyer may take a different role in the buying process, whether it’s a technical evaluator, decision maker, or economic buyer. Each of these buyers needs to be educated at each stage of the buying cycle to ensure that they facilitate moving things forward. This leads to a need in B2B marketing for a significant amount of content. Each buyer in the buying committee, at each stage of their buying process, has specific educational needs. Mapping marketing content to the buying cycle is key in ensuring you have the right assets available for each of the buyers involved.

Whereas in B2C marketing, there may be a husband and wife both involved in a buying decision, the unique roles that are played by B2B buyers allow very clear differentiation of buyer roles. By carefully monitoring buyers’ digital body language, B2B marketers can identify buyer roles based solely on their actions. This allows messaging to be catered precisely to the unique needs and interests of each buyer role.


Sales Involvement

The complexity of most B2B transactions means that there is usually involvement of a sales team prior to a deal being finalized. This may be an inside sales team, a field sales team, or a channel partner’s sales team, but the direct involvement leads to another unique aspect of B2B marketing. One of marketing’s main roles in a B2B organization is to provide sales with a steady flow of qualified leads. Given the length of the buying process, this is a challenging undertaking. First, the marketing organization needs to understand the digital body language of buyers in order to see indications of who is ready to buy, both on their main web properties, and also as seen being referred in through the social media “periphery”.

With this insight, B2B marketers can then establish a lead scoring system that identifies and ranks prospective buyers. Those that are ready for sales involvement can be passed on to sales, those who are not yet ready can continue to be nurtured until they do show the signs of being ready. This active management of the top of the marketing funnel leads to unique challenges for B2B marketers, as there is a need for rich thought leadership content of interest to prospects at the top of the marketing funnel in order to effectively nurture leads until they are ready to consider a purchase.

Marketing needs to work on not only a steady flow of qualified leads to sales, but also needs to provide the insights needed to sell better through sales enablement techniques. Sales enablement involves providing insights into which prospects are actively interested, who within an account is a key influencer, and which accounts within a territory should be focused on.

Length of Buying Cycle and Challenges for Marketing Analysis

The length of the B2B buying cycle also causes significant challenges for marketing analysis. Given that buying cycles can last months or quarters, if not years, the analysis that can be performed on marketing’s effectiveness is very different. B2B marketers must take a top-down approach to marketing analysis that looks at an overall lead funnel, where each prospect is within it, and what changes in the lead funnel have been made within the last period of time.

When looking at individual campaigns, each campaign can be analyzed, or even A/B tested against results, but often should only be analyzed against tactical results such as the creation of marketing qualified leads or inquiries of a certain level of qualification. Analyzing individual campaigns contribution to revenue can only be done in B2B marketing with the acknowledgement that many campaigns will have contributed to one revenue event, and that the resulting revenue must be attributed across the contributing campaigns.

Concluding Thoughts on B2B Marketing

As today’s buyers continue to evolve, and gain more of their education online, through social media, or through any other form of online information exchange, the role of the marketer continues to evolve. Whereas the classic role of marketing (as described by Peter Drucker), to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself, has not changed, the techniques for doing that in a B2B scenario are different from those used in a B2C scenario.

Lead Scoring Best Practices

I sat down with various folks on the Eloqua Customer Success team to hear their experiences on what it took to build out a highly successful lead scoring system. Jocelyn Brown (@jocebrown), Chad Horenfeldt (@chadhorenfeldt), and Adrian Chang (@adrianchang) are the folks who help clients with implementing lead scoring at organizations of various sizes and within a variety of industries, so they have the experience to know what it takes to achieve success. Here is their take:




Some key takeaways:
- get buy-in from sales management in order to best align goals
- use a matrix of A-D for fit and 1-4 for engagement
- define what will happen with each lead, based on that matrix, from lead nurturing to sales hand-off
- define an SLA with sales on how long is allowed for follow-up
- don't be shy about lead clawback if too much time passes
- sales cherry-picking leads is a sign of mis-alignment between marketing and sales
- lead scoring is one of the most valuable things a B2B marketing organization can do

I hope you enjoy the video, I always learn a lot chatting with people like Jocelyn, Adrian, and Chad, as they deal with organizations who are wrestling with these challenges on a daily basis.

The Map is not the Terrain: Marketing Analysis and the Non-Linear Funnel

The conceptual model of a funnel is a great one for understanding buyer stages. At the top of the funnel is the broadest universe of suspects who may at some point have an interest in your product or services, but currently do not show significant interest. There are usually the largest number of these potential buyers, hence it being the widest part of the funnel. Further down the funnel, closer to being an actual buyer, interest levels increase while, in most cases, the number of individuals decreases.

Marketing’s overall role is to facilitate the buying process, through which people progress from mildly interested to active buyers. Lead nurturing is the process that we use, and we think in terms of how that nurturing builds awareness, interest, and then purchase consideration. As such, the funnel forms a great representation of the situation, and acts as a very good map. However, as with any map, it is only a representation of the situation, and is not exact.

The biggest difference in the B2B marketing realm is in the linearity of the buying process. The map that a funnel represents is often taken to be linear. Buyers progress through a buying process as neatly as one can draw a funnel, moving through increasing levels of interest, and then ultimately purchasing. However, this is not a reflection of reality. Realistically, most buyers move up and down the funnel in a very non-linear manner.

For many months or years, a potential buyer might move in and out of being interested, occasionally showing a brief spurt of interest, and then falling back into being inactive for long periods. At certain points, a deep amount of research and a significant amount of activity may show that a buyer has moved much further along in their buying process, but then can be followed by a quiet period as internal business changes temporarily pause the project that had led to the heightened interest. This can lead to a perception of a leaky funnel as leads that may seem almost ready for sales shift back to an earlier phase in their buying process.

Overall, the funnel model works; generally buyers progress through increasing levels of interest towards purchase. However, at an individual buyer level, the movement is much less linear. This leads to the challenges with defining a “perfect path” as talked about earlier, each individual passes through a unique path towards purchase, making it impossible to define a single path that can push a buying decision.

Similarly, this non-linearity means that the most workable way of looking at marketing analysis looks at the marketing funnel from the top down. By analyzing a funnel from a top-down perspective, you can see high level trends in terms of how healthy your marketing funnel is, and whether buyers are moving in the right direction within it, but you are not constrained by the behaviors of individual buyers, which may be much less linear.

Much like a map providing an accurate description of terrain when viewed from a high level, but missing the details at a more micro level, a funnel is a great model of the marketing analysis terrain from a high level, but is not an exact view of individual buyers’ behavior. This is a concept worth keeping in mind in designing nurturing programs - one can't assume that buyers progress linearly down a funnel, so one can't sequence marketing content in that order. Instead, buyers at each stage should be nurtured in a way that is specific to that stage, but watched for signs that they are progressing to more advanced stages.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/08/07

There are so many great writers in the field of demand generation and marketing automation out there that create fresh and interesting content each week. Some are entertaining, some are practical, some are thought provoking, and they are all worth a read. Here are some of the posts I have enjoyed over the past week or so (in no particular order):





Tom Pick (@tompick) from Web Market Central questions the quest for "Return on Investment" in social media with the concept of "Return on NOT Investing". An interesting read and definitely another way of thinking about the opportunity costs involved:
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-media-roi-vs-roni.html





The Savvy B2B Sisters (@Savvy_B2B) provide a detailed guide on the how and the why of writing eBooks for B2B marketing and thought leadership: http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/194051/5-things-you-should-know-before-you-write-an-ebook





Robert Lesser from Acquiring Minds gives an entertaining (but surprisingly accurate) run-down of the Top 10 Signs that Sales & Marketing are Mis-Aligned:
http://www.directimpactnow.com/leadgentools/blog/2009/07/10-signs-that-sales-marketing-are-mis.html







Chad Horenfeldt (@ChadHorenfeldt) from Anything Goes Marketing posts a very comprehensive set of ways of using Twitter for B2B marketing and sales:
http://anythinggoesmarketing.blogspot.com/2009/08/tips-on-using-twitter-to-boost-your.html




Brian Carroll (@brianjcarroll) from Start with a Lead reviews the book “Professional Services Marketing” that talks about the marketing and selling of professional services, and why it is that clients buy:
http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/08/good-advice-for-growing-your-company-from-industry-experts.html




Laura Ramos (@lauraramos) from B2B Marketing Posts dissects a stat that shows that social media use is soaring in B2B marketing, and makes some great comments on "use" vs "success" in social media for B2B marketing:
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/08/04/social-media-use-soars-among-b2b-marketers-really/




Mike Damphousse (@damphoux) from Green Leads made a compelling argument for lead quality over lead quantity. Mike's coming at it from the appointment setting business, but the argument still holds water in regular demand generation circles. Quality will pretty much always trump quantity:
http://www.damphousse.org/2009/07/sales-ready-leads-quality-vs-quantity.html





Steve Kellogg (LinkedIn) from Crowds2Crowds wrote an entertaining obituary for batch & blast marketing. I can't agreee more, the sooner we move away from batch & blast campaigning towards truly understanding our prospects, the better we all do. RIP batch & blast: http://crowds2crowds.blogspot.com/2009/08/for-those-still-using-batch-blast.html






Britton Manasco (@brittonmanasco) from Illuminating the Future writes a very thought provoking post on whether the "Guidance Economy" is the next wave. Lends a new imperitive to thought leadership initiatives:
http://www.brittonmanasco.com/2009/07/confronting-the-guidance-imperative.html





Jep Castelein (@jepc) from Lead Sloth breaks apart the various types of "free trials" that are used in B2B marketing and discusses how they can best be used and what they are appropriate for. Worth thinking about before a mad rush to offer a free trial:
http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/free-trials-arent-what-they-used-to-be/






Mac McIntosh (@B2B_Sales_Leads) from Sales Lead Insights posts a comprehensive list of decision criteria for lead qualification from demographics and firmographics to activity and interest profiling. A good discussion starts in the comments:
http://www.sales-lead-insights.com/2009/a-list-of-b2b-lead-qualification-criteria-by-category/

Data Analysis in Marketing; What Google and the Flu Can Teach Us

I saw an interesting tool the other day from Google, that analyzed raw data on searches related to the flu in order to predict the severity and timing of flu outbreaks. Available at http://www.google.org/flutrends/, this tool is an interesting example of approaching data in a unique way in order to understand a problem.

Whereas an individual person searching for a flu-related topic is clearly not a diagnosed flu victim, the correlation between those searches and an actual outbreak is quite good, and more importantly, the data is available much faster than the medical diagnoses precisely because it is not relying on a properly diagnosed flu victim as the base data point it works from.

As we implement lead scoring algorithms, and other predictive approaches within our marketing automation systems, we face a similar challenge. The best way to look at whether we have scored the leads the right way is to look at whether the leads we passed to sales became qualified opportunities and eventually closed revenue. However, similar to the medical diagnoses in the flu example, this can take a significant amount of time. However, the raw data can show us some very interesting trends and give us immediate insights.

When you have built out an initial algorithm, incorporating the best practices for lead scoring, the simplest thing to do is to pass your entire dataset through the algorithm to see how they would score. This “bottoms-up” look at the data gives a very quick view of the potential results. This technique is best used when looking at the explicit score (the “who” that indicates the right buyer in the right organization) rather than the implicit score (the “how interested” that indicates the level of current buying interest. The reason for this is that the “who” is not likely to change over time, while the “how interested” will obviously vary significantly over time.

With your entire database scored through your new algorithm, the results will tell you some very interesting things.

- Were the final numbers what you expected? If you scored 100,000 contacts on the explicit dimension of lead scoring, and only 0.1% ended up as A leads, was this what you would have anticipated? If you were expecting significantly more, it could easily be a data problem. For example, if your scoring algorithm looks for a key title, such as “Vice President of Marketing”, and you have not cleansed your data, you may miss most, if not all, of the contacts you are looking for. In our own experience, that search returned only 300 results before cleansing, and over 17,000 results after data cleansing to standardize all the other ways of writing “VP. Marketing”, “Vice Pres Mktg”, etc.



- Does the sales team like what they see? If you show your sales team a sample of the leads who scored well in your new algorithm, do they think that these are the right set of leads they should be speaking with? If you show them leads that did not score well, do they agree that these are not leads they would like to speak with? Remember, of course, that you are only looking at explicit information, not buying activity in this example, so it is assumed you would only be passing your sales team these leads when buying activity was detected. Balancing your sales team’s intuition with your objective lead scoring algorithms is as useful here as it is in highlighting flaws in the process through sales “cherry-picking” of leads.


- Does history agree with your hypothesis? When Google looked at their flu data, they compared it carefully with CDC data on actual flu outbreaks to ensure that there were minimal false negatives and false positives. Similarly, your lead scoring results need to match history accurately. If you look at contacts who were scored highly, and who have also been around for a long time, is there a higher number of them who have become customers? It not, what is missing?

Marketing data can be a true gold mine of insight if you use it carefully, much in the same way that search data shows extremely interesting predictive insights when looked at in certain ways.

What insights have you found in your marketing data that surprised you?

The Buying Process; Auditing your Content Assets

Shifting your thinking from a selling process to a buying process means understanding how buyers buy and what stages each type of buyer goes through. When you have mapped out your buyer roles and the stages in their buying process, the next step is to determine what content is needed or available at each step in order to facilitate their buying process.

A very useful exercise to undertake is an audit of your existing marketing content in order to understand what content you currently have available and what new content may be required. This audit leads to a content matrix that forms a very useful basis for defining both your nurture marketing approaches and your content development strategy.

Creating the matrix is relatively straightforward. On one axis, list the key buyer roles you encounter; perhaps these are the standard technical buyers, user buyers, and economic buyers that are common definitions across many industries, or perhaps you have a more specific set of buyers you engage with.

On the second axis, list the stages of the buying process for your customers. Generally, this goes through three stages:

- Education and Awareness, where buyers learn about what is possible or required in a given industry
- Vendor Discovery, where buyers determine what vendors are available to solve a particular business pain
- Solution Validation, where buyers short list and ultimately select a particular vendor to assist them with a specific challenge

However, the phases of a buying process for your business will be quite specific.

With this matrix complete, you can now remove any cells that are not relevant, perhaps if user buyers are only brought in late in your buying process. Each cell in your content matrix now represents a combination of a buyer and the phase in the buying process that they are going through at a certain point in time. Each of your marketing assets should map to one of these cells (or perhaps a small number of cells in the case of certain broadly applicable assets).

By filling in the content matrix with your available marketing assets, and perhaps color-coding with red, yellow, and green based on quality, you get an overall view of where in the buyers’ buying process your content assets exist, and where they are strong. Some obvious gaps may become immediately apparent.

This content matrix can then be compared against the marketing challenge you face. As you plan your lead nurturing strategies, understanding where in the marketing funnel you need to focus on and where in the buying process your content exists is key.