Top-of-Funnel Analysis - Net New Names, Inactive Leads, and Reactivated Interest

Analyzing marketing actions at the top of the funnel has some interesting nuances. This is a direct result of the fact that having a contact’s name within your marketing database does not in any way imply interest. You may have a name in your database that is from many years ago and has not shown interest in recent years, there may be names that were input as part of a list purchase, and have never shown interest. In looking at the top of the funnel, it is critical to be able to carve out these “inactive names” from the rest. Without that, the measurement of campaigns targeted at the top of the funnel, and also your overall funnel conversion metrics will be challenged.

The best way to account for this, is to have a rigorous process of eliminating inactive names from an “Interested” stage at the top of the funnel. If a lead, interested at one point, has made no inquiries, and taken no actions in a period of time, say 3 months, then that lead is placed back in the inactive lead pool.

Campaigns targeted at the top of the funnel then, can have three main effects:

- Generate Net New Names via Inquiries; a campaign that generates buzz in the market may generate net new names for your database that come in as active inquiries. For example, if a whitepaper is offered as the call to action for a campaign, and an individual who was not originally in the database downloads it, they are both a net new name and are now part of the “Interested” stage of the funnel

- Reactivate Inactive Names; a campaign may target Inactive Names in your marketing database, and by doing so cause some of them to re-engage. This is a very valuable transition as those are names that were otherwise not showing any interest in your organization.

- Acquire Inactive Names; A campaign that involves a list purchase or other name acquiring techniques may add names to your database, however these are not people who are showing any interest, and therefore must be deemed to be part of the Inactive Name pool until a campaign succeeds in interesting them

In measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns at the top of the funnel, it’s crucial to separate these transitions. If not, highly successful campaigns that re-engage large portions of your existing, but inactive, marketing database will appear to be minimally successful due to not creating many net new names. Similarly, campaigns that involve an element of list purchase may appear more successful than they truly were as they create many net new names, even though only a small percentage of these individuals will engage with your communications.

Service Economics in a "Something Failed to Go Right" World

I don’t think I’ve been to a conference lately that didn’t have a mention of Twitter and its effect on service teams everywhere. Frank Eliason from Comcast, Tony Hsieh from Zappos, and their teams, as well as a number of other great examples are shown as the “new way” of providing customer service. I don’t disagree, but the challenge here is that this must cause a massive shake-up of budgets and the way that organizations are structured if it is to succeed – and that is not a topic that is discussed in any significance.

What I mean is, the idea that Twitter and social media can, and should, be used to enhance our service offerings will almost certainly fail if we just think of it as a service team challenge.

Let’s look at the math.

If you look at an average service team, let’s say a call center, they receive calls that generally meet three criteria:

- Definable: a discrete problem that can be identified, discussed, and either resolved or not resolved

- Significant: enough of a problem that a person saw fit to pick up the phone, wait in a call queue, and bring it to your attention

- Solvable: a problem for which one can generally visualize a defined, near-term solution

If the problem is outside of that criteria set, we will likely not bother phoning support as they will not be able to help us.

Given these criteria, which I would call the “something went wrong” set of problems, we staff our support centers. Rarely do the teams in these support centers find themselves lacking work, and they are often very strapped for resources, as we manage the budgets for the call centers to maximize utilization and minimize costs.

Then, however, if you look at the set of problems that might surface in social media you see that these three criteria are not met.

- Definable: a complaint can surface without being discrete, or naturally resolvable. General dissatisfaction with airline flight delays, as an example.

- Significant: a negative Tweet about a company or its products requires less effort than calling a service center, so the bar of significance is much lower

- Solvable: many problems that are discussed in social media are not inherently easy to solve, and success may mean guidance, coaching, or training, as much as technical support

I’m not in any way suggesting that these are not important problems, just that they are a much bigger universe of problems than the problems that make their way to today’s call centers. This is the “something failed to go right” set of problems.

So, if we are to staff our service teams to proactively reach out and deal with the “something failed to go right” set of problems, rather than reactively deal with juse inbound “something went wrong” problems, we are dealing with many more problems. Whereas there may be some mild efficiency gains from connecting in an online environment, I would guess that these gains are far outweighed by the increase in size of the problem set.

Where will this budget come from? My suggestion is Marketing. I have long believed that social media is forcing marketers to think of their overall brand experience, including product and service realities, rather than just the visuals like logos, when they are considering brand. Rather than set your service team up with Twitter handles and send them an article on Frank Eliason and the Comcast Cares team, proactive marketing organizations should realize that this new approach to service opens up a much broader universe of problems that must be addressed. Doing so will have a significant positive impact on your company’s brand, but may require a significant investment in service people.

Next time you allocate marketing budget to “brand”, think about whether the best investment in brand that your marketing team can to is to hire an extra few people for the services team and start tackling more of the “something failed to go right” problems.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/10/23

Some interesting posts this week from the B2B marketing and marketing automation universe. I haven’t yet seen the start of prediction posts for the coming year, but as it’s almost November, I’m eagerly awaiting those. I have had some fascinating conversations lately with some very smart folks in the industry, and the year ahead should prove to be interesting and very different than anything we’ve experienced before if those conversations prove accurate. I hope you enjoy this week’s selection of posts.



John Caddell on Customers are Talking with a quick but important reminder that B2B customers are very different than consumers because of the various constituents we must deal with. Feedback from the groups or individuals we deal with every day is not the same as feedback from the whole user base
http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/2009/10/how-b2b-customers-talk/


Chris Henneghan on Schubert’s B2B Marketing Blog takes a contrarian view at the idea of Crowdsourced creative marketing campaigns, especially in a B2B marketing context
http://blog.schubert.com/2009/10/04/crowd-control/



Scott Brinker on Chief Marketing Technologist looks as the balance of automation and human insight within marketing operations and borrows some lessons from the military’s use of UAVs like the Predator – automation, but in the context of a dynamic, ever-changing, and unpredictable environment. Like marketing, but with missiles:
http://www.chiefmartec.com/2009/10/marketing-operations-and-the-predator.html


Jamie Wallace on Savvy B2B drew lessons from her toddler’s kindergarten’s ability to carefully nurture, build trust, and overcome objections with one of the most discerning demographics, that can be very relevant to our thinking about lead nurturing.
http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/296121/marketing-with-the-kindergarten-conversion-technique


Suaad Sait from the B2B Lead builds a three part marketing maturing framework that gives a comprehensive view of what marketers need to look at in assessing their own marketing maturity and effectiveness. The three posts work well together and give a lot of great topics to think about:

Measuring what Matters: http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/marketing-effectiveness-assessment-measuring-what-matters-assessment/

Effectiveness and Marketing Execution: http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/marketing-effectiveness-marketing-execution-assessment/

Marketing Database Assessment: http://blog.reachforce.com/database-marketing/marketing-effectiveness-marketing-database-assessment/


Michelle Bowles from the Online Marketing Blog set out a framework for a content marketing strategy. As a structure for thinking about what content you are creating, for whom, and why, this framework gets you thinking about the right questions and issues:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/10/content-strategy/


I hope you enjoyed the continueing conversation on marketing automation and B2B marketing as much as I did.

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.

Loose Coupling and Analysis of the Marketing Process

When analyzing the flow of leads through your marketing organization, and into your sales organization, how you design the stages in the process has a significant impact on both how you are going to be able to analyze it, and how you are going to be able to optimize it in the future. Without the ability to both analyze and optimize a process, you will find that errors begin to creep into the process due to the lack of visibility, and your ability to adapt the process as your business changes or grows is minimal.

The best approach, when you have a hand-off between one team and another, is one that is “loosely coupled”. Your marketing team, for example, may pass marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to your sales team. However, what the sales team accepts should not be termed the same thing – MQLs – as this does not allow the system to account for, and measure, a drop-off in the acceptance rate. Instead, these leads that are accepted by sales should be termed differently – in this case Sales Accepted Leads – SALs.

Even in a system where your current design parameters state that 100% of MQLs should be acted on by sales, you should still name and handle them separately. The reason for this is two-fold. For one, no system involving people can ever operate at 100% accuracy. Some of your lead will slip through the cracks due to bad data, absent employees, or inattentiveness. Without having both MQLs and SALs to measure, and thus a SAL/MQL acceptance rate, it is not possible to measure how close to 100% your system is operating at.

The second reason to avoid the tight coupling that is implied by having the same name in subsquest process stages is that most marketing organizations will change their processes over time. Perhaps your current design specification is a 100% acceptance rate of MQLs within the sales team. This may change in a quarter’s time if you decide to open up the funnel a little bit, and pass more leads to your sales team, while allowing them to selectively choose. You may reduce the design parameter to 60%. Without the “loose coupling” that having unique naming provides, it will require a full change of your marketing funnel process just to shift this one parameter. Instead, build in the flexibility up front by having the pre, and post-handoff leads named separately.

The example of MQLs being passed to sales is an obvious one, but this becomes a more interesting challenge when the names are not as obvious. For example, if you have an inside team focused on lead generation. They would take a lead at some level of quality, place a call, confirm interest, perhaps budget and authority, and deem the lead ready for the field sales team. If this team is part of the marketing organization (in some organizations, this team is part of sales), then you might wish to call the output of this team’s work an MQL. However, the question is, what is the input to this team?

Obviously, you will be scoring the leads prior to handing them to this team, so you might call them “Qualified Inquiries” to differentiate them from the raw inquiries you see on your website. The Qualified Inquiries that are then picked up by the inside team might be called “Qualified Inquiries Accepted” in order to allow you to manage the handoff between your marketing campaigns team and the inside team and allow that handoff ratio to be adjusted as needed.

The loose coupling provided by having unique names for each relevant stage of the buying process allows you to both analyze the operation of your process and also make adjustments as needed. Some upfront planning to define sufficient handoff points to allow the right amount of adjustment later can save you significant future rework.

Relationships Salespeople's Biggest Competitor

Truly great sales skills are both rare, and genuinely valuable in the overall revenue creation process. The art of understanding the people, politics, and pains within an organization, and positioning your offering in such a way to navigate through to a closed deal is difficult and needed. In almost any situation, as you try to navigate the buying process, your competitors will be working to disrupt your progress and further their own.

This is definitely a threat, but many sales people seem to overlook an even bigger competitor to their efforts. Google.

Quite simply, the reason that you, as a B2B salesperson, are invited to meet with prospects is because you carry the promise of unique and valuable information. Whether it is insights into their business, unique perspectives of industry trends, anecdotes of what others in the industry are doing, or access to negotiation options on pricing, service, or terms. Only by providing that valuable insight do you earn the right to their time and consideration.

However, more and more, executives and mid-level decision-makers are becoming less willing to grant that time to salespeople. The reason is not economics, as this trend was here in good times and in bad. The reason is not even solutions that are competitive to yours, as this trend is affecting everyone. The reason is access to information. If a prospect can get information on your capabilities, understand the market’s opinion of your fit in circumstances close to theirs, and form an understanding of the effort and costs involved in making and investment, then the information you provide is not a unique value.

This makes Google your largest competitor for prospects’ attention. If you can’t add more value than Google (or Bing) in your sales call, then you should not go.

The major search engines do a great job of providing access to generally available information, opinions, and perspectives. To provide value, as a sales person, the level of information you provide needs to improve beyond this. To add value above and beyond the search engines, top salespeople need to provide unique perspectives on the prospect’s own situation, inside access to pricing, service, or terms, and intelligent commentary on which industry trends may be relevant to the prospect.

The early stages of buyer education are best done, in today’s environment, by the marketing team, using marketing automation and lead nurturing. This change in the roles of marketing and sales may be uncomfortable, but it is needed in today’s changing buying environment. The insights that might have been gained in the initial discovery conversation is best understood by observing the buyers’ digital body language.

Sales, as an art, will continue to be a key element of delivering revenue to a business. However, as access to information continues to increase for prospects, good B2B salespeople must continue to increase their ability to provide unique information and perspectives.

Natural Search in B2B Marketing - Analyzing Discoverability

Being discoverable by your potential buyers is critical to success in many businesses. As buyers control their buying process more and more, the need to be found when a prospective buyer is searching for a solution to a business pain is increasingly critical. One of the most obvious elements to this is natural search engine optimization. If a prospective buyer is searching for terms related to your business or the pains you solve, you want them to discover your organization.

If they are early in the buying process, you may want them to discover your thought leadership writings, and recognize you as a leader in the field. If they are at a vendor discovery phase or moving towards solution validation, you may want to have them discover writings that clarify how to think about important aspects of the buying decision.

Measuring this discoverability, however, is an interesting challenge, as there are many search phrases that might be relevant to discovering your solution. Against each of these phrases, your main web site, your social media properties, and your competitor’s web properties may be discoverable.

The first challenge is listing the search phrases that are relevant to finding your solution. For each phase of the buying funnel, you will have a different set of phrases, and this will differ based on the marketing challenge you face. If, for example, your main challenge is a Flying Car challenge, you may wish to focus mainly on the awareness stage, and think about search phrases that are related to, but not identical to, your solution. If prospective buyers are unaware that your solution category exists, they may be looking for solution categories that are peripheral to yours. You will want to be discoverable when they are looking.

At each stage of the buying funnel, list out the key phrases that buyers may be looking for. At the vendor discovery phase, the prospective buyers may be searching for more exact solution category names. At the solution validation phase, the searches may involve your product name directly, but be searching for specific capabilities or objections.

With the search phrases listed, it’s then key to understand where your main web properties, your social media properties, and your competitors rank against those key phrases. One of the simplest ways I have seen of presenting this, is a table that shows your best ranking against each phrase in the form of points on a grid.

On the left side, place your own web properties, both your main web properties, and any social media properties your team runs. For comparison, place your key competitors’ web properties on this side of the chart also. Along the top row, build columns for each of the following search ranks: First place, top 3, top 5, top 10, top 30, and top 100. Then, for each of the search phrases in your list, each property a point in the highest category it is discovered in.

For example, if “widget transportation” is a search phrase of interest, and your website appears as number 8 on the natural ranks on Google for that page, you would give yourself one point in the “top 10” category for your main website. Note, that if you use a marketing automation system or web analytics package to understand which search phrases are being used to find you, this will only show you the phrases where you are already successful. Be sure to include search phrases where you would ideally be found, but currently are not.

Complete this process for all the search phrases (around 100 phrases is often a useful number to gain a good perspective), and you will find an overall discoverability profile for you and your competitors. Note that the first page of search results is generally seen as the only page offering significant value in terms of traffic, so the results that are lower down than that can give indications of progress, but are unlikely to be driving traffic.

This view gives an easily digestible sense of your natural search engine discoverability. It should be noted, however that results will vary by search engine, geography, and over time. It is not a report that gives a definitive answer, but it is useful for providing a perspective as to where you are as a business and whether you are making progress in terms of being discoverable.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/10/9

As with any week, themes seem to develop. This week's theme appears to be influence - measuring influence, developing influence, and understanding influence. Although a number of the posts don't have a lot to do with marketing automation this week, they are hopefully of interest to anyone working in B2B marketing in general. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did.


Laura Ramos on B2B Marketing Posts covers 7 degrees – a tool for mapping connections among people in your network that has a lot of promise in understanding who is able to influence whom:
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/10/05/peoplemap-a-real-tool-for-sales-enablement/


Kipp Bodnar on Social Media B2B looks at some interesting tools for understanding influencers - although it is still a very nascent industry, there are some interesting developments that might have longer term implications:
http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/10/b2b-social-media-influencer-marketing/


Aaron Pearson on B2B Voices talks about using storytelling to draw in and ultimately influence customers – even in B2B marketing:
http://www.b2bvoices.com/2009/10/use-storytelling-to-draw-in-customers/


Kyle Flaherty on Dance With Strangers looks at the abundance of self proclaimed experts and sets out the requirements for truly being a Rock Star in an industry and having influence on people within that industry:
http://www.dancewithstrangers.com/2009/09/29/social-media-rock-stars-as-abundant-as-oxygen/



Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent, one of my long term favourite writers, list some insights she picked up at the inbound marketing summit:
http://www.conversationagent.com/2009/10/12-things-i-learned-at-the-inbound-marketing-summit.html


Roger Dooley on Neuromarketing reviews the book “How We Decide”, which, although I haven’t read it, sound like a great resource for understanding how decisions are influenced, both emotionally and rationally:
http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/decide.htm



Rob Meyerson from Semantic Argument looks at elements of differentiation in B2B branding, and some of the approaches that can successfully be used to differentiate enough to influence buyer behavior:
http://www.semanticargument.com/2009/10/01/dimensions-of-differentiation/

Marketing Automation in Europe and Asia - for North American Marketers

Many organizations with a history in North America are legitimately concerned about what they need to consider when engaging with their European and Asian teams on the topic of marketing automation. In this information-packed video, Stuart Wheldon, Eloqua’s Director of Client Services for EMEA and Asia-Pacific walks through some of the important factors to consider.

Stuart looks at how data models may need extra consideration in modeling prospective buyer information, how language plays a role in more than just your marketing content, and the team structures that generally work best to achieve success.



(if the above video clip doesn't load, click here for the Marketing Automation in Europe and Asia (for North American marketers) video)

Stuart’s experience in both the North American and non-North American markets give him a unique perspective on what marketers from North American need to think about when considering marketing automation software rollouts globally. His views on how teams localize marketing campaigns, well beyond just translation, and how this affects both team structure and rollout planning are very insightful. I hope you enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed talking with Stuart on this subject.

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.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/10/2

I was thrilled to see an extremely kind accolade from Pete Jakob on his B2B Marketing blog about these updates, so hopefully this week's selections don't disappoint. The pressure is on now, I realize.

A few of this week's best posts tackled topics around word-of-mouth marketing. Who is most likely to be influenced to recommend you, and some new technology announcements that will change how we have to think about word of mouth, comments, and influencers.



Jim Novo on the Marketing Productivity Blog had an interesting post with some counter-intuitive thoughts on who in your audience can actually be positively influenced to recommend you more. It might have some significant implications for B2B marketers thinking about social media and influence:
http://blog.jimnovo.com/2009/09/23/awareness-versus-persuasion/


Interleado, on their company blog, wrote a good article on the importance of internal links (within your own web properties) to how the search engines see and rank you. Worth considering, as it is very much in your control:
http://www.interleado.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/01/internal-links-why-are-they-important-5-tips-for-improvement/


Louis Gray looked at Twitter's recent announcement on their Lists capability. This will likely have some significant implications to understanding who people *really* follow vs just having in thier follower list. Very interesting implications to understanding true influence:
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/09/twitter-readying-public-lists-extending.html


C. Edward Brice at Marketing Gimbal looks at Google’s new SideWiki and its ability to bring the social element and word of mouth to any web page. A wake up call for marketers to engage with SideWiki, if nothing else but to understand it and listen to the conversation:
http://marketinggimbal.typepad.com/marketinggimbal/2009/09/marketers-wake-up-googles-sidewiki-brings-new-social-dimensions-to-your-companies-digital-doorstep.html


Scott Gillum from MarketBridge looks at some good techniques for embedding social media discussions into a live B2B event. Admittedly, this was a social media event, but the ideas are good for borrowing:
http://b2bknowledgesharing.blogspot.com/2009/09/insights-and-epiphanies-from-recent-b2b.html


Josh Stailey at the Pursuit Group takes on the myth of sales velocity. The buying process is slow and steady. You can influence it but not push it. A very cutting analogy with car manufacturers' deep discount policy and how it stole from future demand drives the point home:
http://blog.thepursuitgroup.com/Blog/bid/10631/The-myth-of-sales-velocity


Michele Linn at Savvy B2B talks about the SEO effects of FAQ pages (and other benefits), which makes a great starting point in thinknig about content marketing and SEO:
http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/279141/5-reasons-to-include-faqs-in-your-content-marketing-strategy


Dennis Dayman on Deliverability.com looks at privacy policies, fine print, and disclosure; where the letter of the law may not be enough. In today's world, any disconnect between your brand promise, and what your brand delivers, will be quickly exposed, both legally and socially. Fine print will not make up for that:
http://blog.deliverability.com/2009/09/privacy-policy-not-.html


Mike Damphousse on Smashmouth Marketing publishes some interesting data on the best time to call – not at lunch time – in continuation of last week's theme of the resurgence of the strategic relevance of the inside sales function:
http://www.damphousse.org/2009/09/lead-generation-tip-take-3-hour-lunches.html



Another great week, with lots of interesting posts. I hope you enjoy this week's selection of the best from B2B marketing and marketing automation writers.