Scoring the Stages of a Buying Process

When we talk about lead scoring, the goal that comes to mind most often is determining which leads are ready for handoff to sales. This, however, is only part of the picture. Some of us are able to map out a full buying process that is common to many or most of our buyers. If this is possible, as it was for Terracotta, then we can use lead scoring in a different way to provide a much more meaningful way to connect with potential buyers.



If there are specific stages in the buying process to look for, then you can apply the same methodology of lead scoring to determine which phase of the buying proces each buyer is in.



Each buying process is unique, so there is no universal process that all prospective buyers go through (see the example from the Terracotta case study to the right). However, there are three general phases that are common; awareness, solution discovery, and solution validation. Within these phases, prospective buyers of your solution may go through individual steps that you can map out.



Exploring free trials, learning about increasingly detailed aspects of solution capabilities, design, or implementation, reviewing case studies, viewing help documentation, and doing topic-specific searches can all be signs that a prospective buyer is at a specific stage of the buying process



Mapping the stage of the buying process allows some unique approaches to marketing:

• Offers or communications can be targeted at specific stages of the buying process in what is essentially buying process specific psychographic segmentation
• The size and shape of the lead funnel can be understood and shared with a broader team providing insights into marketing effectiveness
• Conversion gaps in the lead funnel can be identified allowing refocusing on specific points at which buyers are not moving forward in the buying process

If your prospects' buying process is one that can be effectively understood through observation of their digital body language, and application of lead scoring techniques to the overall buying process, the benefits of doing so are tremendous.

We ALL Use Twitter - Short Term Memory, Long Term Memory, and the Consciousness of the Internet

We all use Twitter. So do all our prospects and customers.

I made that argument to our CFO and CEO the other day and was met with a rousing chorus of guffaws and comments about teenagers and people with too much time on their hands.

But it turns out, that is the critical importance of Twitter, we are all users, just not in the way you might think.

First, let’s look at how Twitter is used by those who use it directly. To be honest, the main users (in my limited sampling) seem to be lots of journalists, PR people, Twitteratti, and bloggers. Ideas are discussed and commented on, links are shared and re-tweeted, and relationships are built. Anything that is more than a day old is extremely outdated news on Twitter.

Twitter functions, in many ways, as the short term memory of the Internet.

However, what happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter. A significant segment of the audience on Twitter is in the segment that Nielson identifies as the heaviest content contributors. Based on their 90/9/1 rule, only 1% of the audience are heavy content contributors, responsible for around 90% of the content.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

This contribution of content is not limited to Twitter, much of it is contributions of content on blogs, journals, and discussions. The relationships, links, topics, and opinions that were formed and shared on Twitter are written down in longer form and discussed on these blogs and other online sites, which remain relevant for many months, or even years in some cases.

Blogs, and similar forums, form the long term memory of the Internet, and due to Participation Inequality, much of the input to this long
term memory comes from the short term memory of Twitter.

Then, as any of us involved in SEO are familiar with, Google indexes and ranks all of this content, pushing to the top the ideas and discussions that are most popular with, and linked by, the rest of the audience. This is where the vast majority of internet users interact with Twitter; through their Google search box. They are not aware that behind the scenes, the ideas shared on Twitter, and blogged about by the 1% who are active content contributors have formed a major factor in the selection of results they see, but it is nonetheless critical.

Google, as the consciousness of the Internet, indexes the long term memory, and ranks results based on their popularity in that forum. This is where the largest audience becomes exposed to those ideas.

If, as execs, we discount Twitter as unimportant because its direct users are not our peers, or our prospects, we are missing the point. We are all users of Twitter, either directly or indirectly, and if our marketing strategies discount that fact we do so at our own peril.

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

The merits of lead nurturing are hard to underestimate. Especially in challenging economic times, it is extremely wasteful to have a leaky funnel that you spend great effort and resources on getting potential buyers into the top of, only to have them leak out the side. More often than not, this is due to mismatches between buyer timing and the handoff to your sales team.

In writing Digital Body Language I had the pleasure of speaking with Hollis Chin and the team at Voxify who had one of the best examples I had seen of using lead nurturing to generate tremendous value from a set of leads that had been discarded as dead leads.

Enjoy the case study:

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

Voxify is a provider of powerful speech applications for contact centers in retail, travel, hospitality, entertainment, financial services, and healthcare. Its complex sales cycle can often stretch 12-18 months, which makes it a challenge to align sales resources with leads. At one point, more than 3,000 leads sat idle – leads that could potentially buy Voxify’s software.

Without a structured follow-up system, Voxify was wasting opportunity. If a lead was not ready to buy at the time of initial contact, the lead was recycled; however there was not a process to ensure further communication. Given the length of the sales cycle, and the type of internal project that would drive the need for Voxify’s solutions, this meant that many valid – but early – leads were leaking out of the funnel.

The breadth of Voxify’s target markets, combined with the range of possible solutions, meant the company employed a broad matrix of messaging to ensure relevance with the prospect. A matrix of 26 separate industry and education topics was created with each topic adding value to each unique buyer type and stage in the buying process. An automated nurture campaign kept this messaging in front of the “cooler” leads to maintain their interest level and watch for signs of changes to buying behavior as the messaging evolved from “why speech applications” through to “why Voxify”.

Within six months, the so-called “cooler” leads became the largest source of conversion for new sales opportunities. The campaign created 1,500 responses and enabled more than 400 companies to re-engage with the sales force. The nurture campaign also allowed the sales team to better understand whether the prospect was more interested in a specific vertical application such as a flight check-in system, or in a horizontal application such as a generic routing agent, and cater their conversation accordingly. By keeping relevant, topical messaging in front of prospective buyers, without overtly selling, Voxify identified and acted on buying interest when it arose.

Social Media and B2B Marketing - 6 Things You Can Do

The conversations are happening, and as marketers we do not have control of them. That much we know, and for anyone who doubts it, David Meerman Scott's discussions on the topic are excellent - http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451f23a69e2010536ba07b6970c.

But, what does that mean for us as B2B marketers? What do we do to help prospective customers discover what we offer, learn about it, evaluate it against other options, and come to a buying decision?

The most important learning that we can take from the rise of social media is that we need to think in terms of a buying cycle not a selling cycle. When we use the term “sales process”, or anything similar, we are subconsciously acting as if we are in control. We have to re-orient our thinking to a buying process, controlled by the prospect, guided by their social conversations, and on their timeframes.

Okay, but what does that mean exactly:

1) The prospect knows what information they need: social media provides an excellent source of context, awareness, and discussion. If a prospect’s interest is piqued, they may end up on your web site, through things they have discovered in social media, or guided through search. However, when they do, they are coming with a specific question in mind. It may be high level (what is this company all about) or highly detailed (exact product specs on a certain model), but they are coming to your website with a specific question in mind.

2) The prospect is operating on their own timeframe: whether they are doing research, looking for a demo, or making a comparison among possible solutions, the prospect’s timeframe is governed by events that are happening in their business. You can make information and resources available that assist them to move from one stage of the buying cycle to the next, but you cannot control this timeline. It is also not linear; they may move from general awareness and light research to a deeper evaluation or demo, and then return back to merely doing light research for a few months.

3) The prospect does not want to be “sold” to. They do want assistance in understanding whether to buy, how to buy, and what is available to them, but they do not want a sales pitch. Aggressively selling to someone who is just educating themselves on what is available from your organization will push them away.

So, if this is reality, how does this appear to a marketer? Instead of inquiries and leads coming to you in predictable “buckets”, governed by your schedule of outbound campaigns, the flow reverses. It is governed by the world of the buyer, not the schedule of your campaigns. The inquiries and leads will come in a continual flow; each unique in terms of what stage of their buying process they are at, what they are looking for, who they are, and when they appear.

To succeed in this environment, you need to shift your marketing organization’s posture from outbound to inbound. The following 6 areas of focus are important for that shift:

1. Set your information free. Make all of the resources a buyer will need to educate themselves readily available. You can ask for some information in return if the information is valuable enough, but make sure it is readily available. If you provide great, non-salesy, information, you will be one of the sources passed about in the world of social media.
2. Focus on being credible. The transparency and availability of information in the social media world means your audience will know more about you than they ever have before. If the information you provide on your web site is entirely mis-matched with what your prospects have learned, you will lose credibility. Use the opportunity to broaden their perspective, show them ideas they may not have been exposed to, and provide ways of framing issues that they may not have thought of.
3. Understand their buying process. Use your interaction with the prospect to gain an understanding of where they might be in their buying process. What they search for, what they look at, and what they respond to gives you great insights into where they are in their buying process and where they are not. Work to understand whether they are educating themselves on your space, comparing you against a competitor, or evaluating one of your products against a very specific need. Terracotta did a great job of this as seen in this case study.
4. Match your marketing to their buying process. Match how you communicate with your prospects to both their timeframe and their interests. If they are in an education and awareness phase, high level nurturing on the main concepts in the market area are often best. If they are mainly interested in customer case studies, ensure they are aware of any upcoming customer webinars. When they are ready to discuss how to purchase and negotiate contracts, help put them in touch with the appropriate salesperson.
5. Keep interest high through nurturing. Buyers obtain a variety of views and opinions through their exploration of social media resources. However, if you have identified their interests, and understand where they are in their buying process, you can add value to them by sharing ideas, insights, and resources. By doing this, you'll be able to keep the prospect funnel from leaking.
6. Only sell when they are ready to buy. Only connect salespeople with buyers who are ready to be connected to a salesperson. If you connect them too early, you will offend the prospect and waste the time of the salesperson. Lead scoring, based on the prospect's interest level, is necessary to understand who is ready for engagement with sales.

As B2B marketers, we don't control the conversation. However by adjusting our marketing approach to the new realities of how buyers gather information, we can help influence those buying processes. In doing so, we can add tremendous value to the organizations we serve.

The Gambler and the Perfect Path; Retrospective Determinism in Marketing Analysis

Let’s say that your organization gets one of those “ideal” client wins – great logo, fair price, smooth sales process. If you’re like most, one of the things that you’ll probably ask is “how did we market to that organization such that the sales process went so well”. I think that’s one of the more dangerous questions that is being asked today. The reason I think it’s so dangerous is that it can lead to the slippery slope of thinking that the success can be replicated like a prescription. It can’t.

Taking a single, ideal, outcome, and then looking for a “perfect path” through a very chaotic, chance-driven process is what Nassim Taleb, in his book The Black Swan calls “retrospective determinism”. The problem with it, is that it ignores the vast number of data points from people who started the process, but did not end up as the ideal client win. Those who did not end up as an ideal client win do not make a story that is at all interesting, so their story does not get told with the same enthusiasm as the story of the ideal client win.

It’s a lot like the gambler who writes a book on his or her gambling strategy. The only gambler who would write such a book, by definition, is the gambler who was able to achieve success. Those who did not succeed at gambling are highly unlikely to become authors on the subject. The gambler will write about the successful strategy, and the proof is in the winnings. The problem is that because only a winning gambler would write the book, there is no way to tease apart the effects of strategy and blind luck.

B2B marketing is in a similar situation when looking for the “perfect path”. It is an amalgamation of 100s if not 1000s of influences that cause a client to buy a product of any reasonable size. We can analyze individual efforts in the chain, and look at certain measurable aspects to see how well they performed (on those measurements) compared to similar efforts. However, when we attempt to look for the “perfect path”, we are fooling ourselves into thinking that we have more control of a process than we really do.

In each marketing interaction that you have with a prospective buyer, many factors are well outside of your control or knowledge. What is happening in their organization, their mood, whether they are distracted by another thought at that moment. At a high level we can see one campaign performing better or worse than another in general, but predicting whether a given individual will respond to a campaign in a certain way is not possible.

So, the advice I always give to people who are looking for the “perfect path” in B2B marketing – don’t. Optimize individual tactics, look for which campaigns were the best contributors in general to results, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there is one perfect path through your marketing messaging that is waiting to be found. The world is too random for that.

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

The buyers are in control, we all realize that. But it's significantly more difficult to market when we acknowledge that it's a buying process not a selling process, as it is very difficult to know where the buyer is in their buying process at any moment in time. Without that knowledge, it's very difficult to deliver the right message to that buyer.

Jeff Hartley and the team at Terracotta faced that exact challenge, and used a very interesting approach to lead scoring in order to categorize their buyers based on where they were in their buying journey. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with Jeff while writing Digital Body Language, and hopefully you'll enjoy this case study as much:

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

As a leading open-source software company, Terracotta has a challenge that most marketers would gladly choose to manage: too many leads. However, that wealth can create problems when you only have a few direct sales professionals. Those leads were generated from interest in a very strong, full-featured, open-source
version of its software – but which were ideal prospects to target for commercial service offerings?

The Terracotta marketing team turned to lead scoring to allow them to understand the process their buyers went through in understanding and evaluating their products. First, they categorized the buyer’s journey into a path called RESITD – Recognize, Evaluate, Sample, Integrate, Test, Deploy. Lead scoring was used to categorize each buyer in this buying path. The key metrics of each phase differed, depending on the likely approach a buyer would have:

• Recognition: Awareness metrics such as the number of visits


• Evaluate: Reading of introductory documents on Terracotta benefits


• Sample: Downloading of the Terracotta open source product


• Integrate: Forum activity, application-specific integration documents, or
  downloading of pre-packaged integration modules


• Test: Reading of detailed tuning guides, sample test plans


• Deploy: Reading deployment guides, reading about enterprise subscription or deployment services, and “phone-home” capabilities in the software itself

This framework allowed Terracotta to map and guide the buyer’s journey, even in an environment where direct interaction with the end purchaser was quite rare. Sales professionals at Terracotta were provided with deep insights into the buyer stage for each of their accounts, and were sent real-time notifications as buyers progressed from one stage to another.

Over 6 iterations, the Terracotta team continually refined their algorithms for understanding their audience. Insights such as a tight focus on recency and frequency as factors in evaluating any sign of interest came from this iterative refinement process. Evidence of a need for the high scale clustering software that Terracotta provides could be deemed out of date if it was more than a few months old, due to the changing nature of buyer needs. This detailed, automatically-created map of a buyer’s journey allowed their sales team to focus on the key prospects who were ready to move forward with a purchase, and allow marketing to guide the evolution of the others.

Understanding the buying process is a critical thing to focus on in B2B marketing, and Jeff and the team at Terracotta have done a great job of mapping it out and scoring prospects to understand their stage.

Interview with The Funnelholic

I had a great chat the other day with Craig Rosenberg, better known as "The Funnelholic", based on his popular blog The Funnelholic (and of course to all of us on Twitter as @funnelholic). Craig is a great guy, fun to chat with, and smart as a whip when it comes to the challenges of managing the top of the funnel.

Our conversation ranged across a number of topics, from the evolution of social media and its B2B marketing applicability, to measurement and the challenges of today's CMO. I got a lot out of our conversation, and I hope you will too.

From my conversation with Craig Rosenberg, the Funnelholic:

Steve: Will social media scale? As it increases in popularity, the 1 to 1 conversations become increasingly more difficult to maintain, and the top names in social media are evolving towards a bit more of a 1 to Many communication model (although many are exerting great effort to maintain as many relationships as they can). Where do you see this evolving to?

Funnelholic: This is a complex question not only for me but for everyone. As I mentioned in my post, Fear of a Twitter Planet (http://www.funnelholic.com/2009/02/04/fear-of-a-twitter-planet-the-11-things-i-know-about-the-twitter-phenomenon/), if I could give the state of the union on social media, I could achieve “internet fabulous” status. I am not there yet.

But your question has a number of interesting elements to it. First of all, is the 1-to-many model bad? Yes, platforms like Twitter are becoming 1-to-many, but that is the whole point. I never thought of a Twitter as a place to house my 1-to-1 connections, although as a result I have had a number of them. To me Twitter is a new broadcast platform. Let me put this in perspective, I spent a year getting hundreds of readers to my Funnelholic blog (http://www.funnelholic.com/), 5 years getting 600 connections on LinkedIn, and a year getting 600 members to my LinkedIn group “Friends of the Funnelholic.” It took me 1 month to get 1,000 followers on Twitter and growing. My buddies in audience development are saying that blogging is dead and sites like Twitter is where it is at. From a promotional aspect, the 1-to-many benefits are great.

Whatever 1-to-1 communication that is lost will be picked up by someone. The Internet runs like a free market -- if there is demand someone will fill it. Facebook continues to have great 1-to-1 relationship capabilities, and LinkedIn has a ton of potential in this area.

As far as b2b marketing and social media, there is the promotional aspect I mentioned above. I can see marketing automation software watching b2b buyers’ social media behavior and incorporating this into scoring and sending customized, relevant tweets or messages.

Steve: Many B2B organizations are getting involved in social media, but as they do, the media shifts and becomes much more commercialized. There have even been recent reports of teens leaving Facebook. Do you think that there will be a clear distinction between purely “social” social media sites and sites where there is more commercialization as we evolve? Or will these lines remain blurred?

Funnelholic: First of all, I haven’t seen reports of kids leaving Facebook. All I see are kids (and by kids, I mean from preteens to 20s) using Facebook and using it ALL the time. I watch the twentysomethings in my office and they live in Facebook -- that is, message their friends, trade links and videos, sign for events, etc. In many ways, for that generation, Facebook is more important than Google.

Commercialization is the biggest problem for social media. For all the traffic and frequent visits, Facebook and LinkedIn should be making billions of dollars but they aren’t. And Twitter hasn’t even shown the market that they have any plan for making money (except probably by getting bought). In your first question, you asked about scale. To me, the ability to commercialize is the biggest impediment to scale. If these organizations can’t figure out how to make money, then social media can’t scale. So, the lines have to blur, but visitors will resist if their social media platform is ALL commercial. If anything, LinkedIn and Facebook have risen quickly for a lot of reasons, but one of them may be their ability to keep the spammers out. The trick: make money without intruding on user experience.


Steve: As marketers continue to refine their ways of measuring their success at the top of the funnel, will we see more standard CMO reporting on their successes (similar to the standard reporting that sales, finance, and operations usually does)? What do you think those CMO metrics will be?

Funnelholic: For the record, I believe marketing will always have fuzzy math. No one can argue that brand and thought leadership isn’t vital to corporate sales success, yet it will and always remain difficult to quantify. And furthermore, the fact that today’s buyer takes 29 touches before they buy means marketing will have to continue to perform a lot of activities that aren’t specifically recorded in ROI. An example: you “buy” a whitepaper lead from an online media source, you begin your marketing automation processes and after watching 2 webinars, talking to a sales rep, reading your blog, etc., it ends up becoming part of the pipeline. As sales is selling, marketing is still working in providing sales tools, pushing the latest article about the CEO, and so on. These are critical elements to one’s marketing department and not easily quantifiable.

That being said, I think the key metrics are:

1. Cost-per-opportunity. Opportunity means pipeline opportunity.
2. Total pipeline dollars created by marketing programs

By focusing on these two metrics, marketing has essentially done “their” job. If sales isn’t doing theirs (closing business), marketing should not be punished. Also, by focusing on cost-per-opportunity and pipeline dollars, it gives marketing flexibility to spend on important, but less-quantifiable, activities that are critical to the marketing funnel.

We can’t ignore ROI. By ROI I mean, marketing spend that turns into real revenue for the organization. The problem with is ROI is that marketers are at the mercy of the sales team. It’s one of the metrics that aggravates the “Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus” dichotomy (http://www.funnelholic.com/2008/11/18/sales-is-still-from-mars-and-marketing-is-still-from-venus/). But I realize it is a reality, so if you must, keep one thing in mind: Time. If ROI is measured too early, than marketing will fail. This is the reason we put marketing automation into place in the first place is that buyers take a LONG time. (especially now). Nurturing has to be factored into ROI, so if you are watching ROI, make sure you watch it over time because it will grow.

What is most important is that marketers have moved away from the “look what I made” marketing strategy of judging oneself by beautiful design, copy, cool booth design at trade shows, etc. Those days are not over (as long as they convert), but aren’t the way to prove your value. The numbers are.

Steve: People still buy emotionally. As we push towards ever-increasing measurability of our marketing efforts, how do we avoid not investing in some of the marketing programs that are less measurable, but might generate the emotional hooks that motivate buyers.

Funnelholic: Well since the theme is social media, I will give this question a “LOL” -- laugh out loud, for the uninitiated. I talk about this above. Everyone assumes as a demand-generation guy, I don’t see the benefits of the entire non-quantifiable marketing mix. Well I do, and this why in the above I believe in creating metrics that can incorporate these types of elements. Here is what I believe every marketing department should have in place in 2009:

1. An optimized lead-management process: This includes humans AND marketing automation. None of your marketing elements will work as well as they should without both. So to recap, these are the elements:
a. A lead-qualification team: In place to convert and qualify leads before reaching sales
b. A marketing automation system: Designed to support the lead-qualification process with a coordinated nurturing program. (Nurturing in my mind begins the minute a lead enters your lead-management system.)
2. An aggressive lead-generation process: This is designed to feed the lead-management process and should include a diverse portfolio of lead sources. You should buy from a variety of different sources to feed your marketing funnel. Your ultimate gauge should be conversion and whether lead sources help you achieve your cost-per-opportunity goals not just CPL. These sources include online media sites, Google Adwords, and so on.
3. A diverse offer set: Offers support all of the processes above, and they include whitepapers, webinars, online video, etc. All of your prospects have different preferences for “how” they like their marketing, so make sure you have something for them
4. Branding and thought leadership support: Marketing departments should include blogging, social media, speaking engagements, and PR. By the way, there are marketing vehicles that incorporate a number of your marketing goals. For example, webinars are a great way to achieve all four goals above: quantifiable lead generation, nurturing, thought leadership, and branding.

I think trade shows should come out of the sales budget. They don’t drive leads and cost a lot of money. They are really good for face-to-face contact with current customers and to create business development deals. Print is dead, too, and shouldn’t be part of one’s mix anymore.

Steve: As marketers focus on responding to buyer interest at the top of the funnel rather than large outbound campaigns, the need for different skillsets in marketing is growing. Where do you see the biggest change in marketing skills/roles in the next 5 years?

Funnelholic: Metrics has changed every business in the organization and marketing is the big one. I have already seen marketing departments start to have more “geeks” in the organization. There are essentially three kinds of “geeks”:

1. SEO/SEM geek – Everyone has one now, and I don’t blame them.
2. Lead management geek – As the marketing automation revolution continues on, it has created a new role in the organization to manage these processes
3. Metrics geek – A lot of times, the person who does No. 1 or No. 2 above also does overall metrics, but the point is, a lot of organizations have a metrics and optimization functions now.

I’m using “geek” as a term of endearment here, by the way, not as derogatory. All in all, every marketer will have to be metrics-centric to survive. I am seeing more and more, consumer-focused Internet marketing folks getting jobs in b2b organizations because they can bring the type of rigor that is needed to be compete.

Twitter, Evolution and the Cambrian Explosion

I’ve always been a fan of the history of early evolution. Seeing the way that life adapts to drastic changes in its environment is fascinating. Often a significant change in the environment can trigger a wave of adaptations and a wave of extinctions, and the resulting effect is an ecosystem that is substantially transformed from what it had been previously.

So what on earth does that have to do with Twitter? Bear with me for a second.

I recently read a book called “In the Blink of an Eye” by Andrew Parker that talks about light, sight, and the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity. The Cambrian explosion is the term for the rapid appearance of most complex animals in the fossil record about 530 million years ago. Whereas there had been mainly simple organisms prior, there was a sudden appearance of most major groups of complex organisms in this period. The theory proposed in the book was that this diversity corresponded with the advent of the ability to see, albeit in very basic form.

Once organisms were able to see, a back and forth cycle of predation, defense, and consumption mechanisms exploded through the animal and plant kingdoms:

Predation: Organisms that were better able to see and better able to capitalize on that site through becoming predators did extremely well in the defenseless environment of the time

Defense: Organisms that were able to defend themselves through shells, or through rapid escape (again aided by sight) survived, and those that were not so lucky perished

Consumption: Organisms who used their sight to identify resources (water, shelter, food) were at an advantage over organism who felt for these same resources blindly.

The development of teeth and shells in this explosion of diversity also meant that there was something to fossilize, and lead to the sudden appearance of a broad fossil record.

This one simple capability - sight - resulted in the most significant acceleration of evolution ever seen.

Twitter, and social media in general, may result in an equally similar acceleration in the evolution of how we all do business.

It’s that simple. With Twitter and social media, you can now see conversations happening among customers, prospects, influencers, and your competitor’s customers. In the same way that the advent of eyesight enabled a broad range of new evolutionary strategies, social media enables a broad range of customer engagement strategies. In the same way that species unable to adapt to the new environment did not survive past the Cambrian era, businesses who do not adapt to this reality will be challenged over the next decade.

Similarly, this new vision can be used for today’s business equivalents of predation, defense, or consumption:

Predation: Okay, it's a harsher word than we'd like to use, but companies are able to see your customers conversations. If your customers are dissatisfied, you can be sure that your competition will not hesitate in connecting with them.

Defense: Companies are actively putting the processes in place to defend their customer base by ensuring maximum satisfaction. Unsatisfied customers are now visible, and without the processes to quickly rectify this situation, your biggest asset is left defenseless against aggressive competitors

Consumption: Companies are listening, understanding, and seeing where prospect gather, what they are looking for, and how they acquire their information. This insight makes them significantly wiser as they work to acquire new business. Organizations who are not listening to the conversations are like those organisms still feeling blindly for resources – likely to be outmaneuvered at every step.

Social media, and tools like Twitter have made a drastic change in our business environment. Where business evolves to in the next 5 or 10 years is anybody’s guess, but the only safe bet is that it won’t be the same as it is today and that following a script is more dangerous than improvising. Now is our chance to recognize the changes in the environment and consciously and quickly adapt to them. If we don’t we may share a similar fate to the pre-Cambrian organisms who saw the early versions of eyesight as “just a neat little toy that teenagers play with”.

National Instruments: Exchange of Value for Digital Body Language

I wrote about equitable exchange of information in a previous post, and it is a concept I believe in strongly. It was great to chat with Helena Lewis and her team at National Instruments when I was writing Digital Body Language, and see how they had put the concepts into practice. With an audience of scientists and engineers, and a very broad product shelf, it was inspiring to see the exchange of information concepts operationalized to such a degree.

Enjoy the case study:

National Instruments: Exchange of Value for Digital Body Language

National Instruments is a worldwide leader in software and hardware for scientists and engineers, with a very broad set of products and solutions serving nearly all industries and project types. Those products carry price tags anywhere between $100 and several million dollars. With more than 25,000 corporate customers and a Web presence that offers deeply detailed information on its products, National Instruments had both an incredible opportunity and a daunting challenge.

The company’s marketing strategy fully revolves around its Web site. All direct marketing, search, ads, and tradeshows drive traffic to the Web site where the marketing team guides prospects through successive stages of engagement -- from anonymous to known to understood.

To move visitors from anonymous to known, marketers at NI used Web forms to carefully execute an equitable exchange of value for key information on the site using a modular user profile as a building block. In exchange for presenting a two-minute video, it was acceptable to ask for an e-mail address and basic contact information. For a free trial download, a broader information request (buying cycle phase, budget, timeline, etc.) was appropriate.

To make these Web forms more valuable, the team ensured that all marketers could quickly manage which aspects of the modular user profile were required. Pre-population was used extensively to ensure visitors did not repeatedly answer the same question. Emphasis on global usability meant, for instance, that ZIP/postal codes were not required fields in geographies where that wasn’t appropriate.

By increasing the percentage of known visitors, NI elevated the rich data from the Web visits to highly actionable information. For instance, nurture and follow-up communications catered to the areas of interest based on activity. By using digital body language to tailor communications this precisely, NI achieved open and click-through rates of 50 percent and 30 percent respectively - extremely high numbers compared to industry norms, and reflective of a strong engagement level with prospects.

All You Never Cared to Know About Deliverability

I'm very happy that we have Dennis Dayman on the Eloqua team - a man who lives and breathes email deliverability. That means I don't have to, and to be honest, I'm very much okay with that.

I did have an interesting time the other week though, trying to explain what email deliverability was all about to a not-so-technical audience. There is a lot of highly technical, complex, and fast-evolving pieces of the deliverability equation, but at the end of the day, it comes down to this:

• there are spammers attempting various creative, and evolving, strategies to get their messages into inboxes everwhere


• the managers of those inboxes are working to keep spam out and allow legitimate messages in


• if you want your message to be allowed in, you need to make sure it is very obvious that you are the sender of a legitimate message

In many ways, this parallels the work of the fine folks who patrol our borders. They employ a variety of techniques and technologies to identify individuals who are not welcome to cross the borders, while allowing legitimate visitors into the country with minimal headache.

Let's look through a few of the approaches that are used.

Your Passport: this is key to your identity, and it is one of the main pieces of information used by the border agents to identify you. In the email world, this is best represented by your IP address. Most of today's deliverability systems use your IP address as the basis of your reputation. Don't share it, any more than you would share your Passport.

Retina Scans: There are more advanced ways of identifying who you are, often involving advanced technology, such as retina scans. Adoption varies, and there's usually a bit of setup and registration you would have to do. In the email world, similarly, there are advanced technologies for identifying who you are, such as DKIM and SPF. Certainly worth doing, however not universally adopted yet.

Criminal Record: Having a clean record is definitely a good thing when you interact with the folks at the border. The same holds true in the email world, one of the key things to look at is an email reputation score that provides the closest thing to a "criminal record" of the IP address you are using. If you are using a partner to manage your emails, be sure to have a look at this.

Police Background Checks: the border guards can obtain a lot of information on a potential visitor by doing a police background check. In the email world, you can run scans and tests of your emails in a similar vein to a background check, flagging anything suspicious or problematic. In the real world a criminal record can be tough to erase, but in the email world, if you see something flagged, there's a good chance you can fix it. Use a Return Path or Pivotal Veracity scan to see what gets flagged before a major mailing, and learn from it.

Visa Stamps: These tell the border guards a lot about where you've been and whether you have been accepted or rejected. Similarly, in the email domain, most major ISPs offer Feedback Loops to indicate whether emails have been rejected, and that there was a complaint. You can then better understand the issue and quickly resolve it. If you're not taking advantage of these, you're missing a key source of information.

The Inside Connection: Okay, I don't claim to have one of these in the border security world, but the world of email deliverability is actually a relatively small world. Knowing who's who, and how the systems operate is very helpful. Being involved with the working groups and commitees forming the policies and legislation gives great insight into how the world of deliverability is continuting to evolve. Having someone like Dennis Dayman around allows us to stay on top of the best approaches both today and tomorrow, so make sure you have someone like Dennis on your team.

Getting your emails delivered is a lot like getting across a border. Know the rules, play by the rules, and keep a clean record. If you have a partner who delivers your emails for you, make sure they also play by the rules.

Four Practices to Increase Webinar Effectiveness

Are you using webinars as a lead-generation tactic in your marketing efforts? According to MarketingSherpa, webinars are "one of the top two lead-generation tactics for B-to-B technology marketing". Couple that with the current economic climate and you have a few great reasons to include webinars in your 2009 marketing strategy.

If you're not sure where to start, or if you're already running webinars and want to improve upon your current strategy, consider these 4 best practice tips that we've learned through over 10,000 webinar event registration programs.

Tip 1: Compelling and Simple Email Copy

Provide Value: When putting together your event email copy, always remember that your email is about the webinar and not your product. No one is going to want to attend your webinar if all they are going to get is a sales pitch, and your email copy will set the tone. Provide your audience with compelling benefit based information on why they should attend your webinar.

Keep it Clear and Simple: Be sure to include all key event points, so that your audience can easily identify if your webinar will be of value to them. Your webinar invitation should clearly indicate the following key points:

• The Topic
• Speakers
• Date and Time
• Why You Should Attend?
• How to Register

Don't Forget About Structure: The structure of your email is also very important, again making sure that your audience can find the information that they need as quickly as possible.
When constructing your invitation ensure that:

• The call to action for registration is clear, and is located 'above the fold' in the email
  


• Use a custom header in your email to showcase the event details AND link to the registration page. This is a great way to capture your audiences' attention.
  



• Always include a TEXT link for the call to action located above 'the fold', for recipients who do not allow images to appear in their email client.

Tip 2: Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel, Automated Promotion to Boost Registration

Use multi-touch, multi-channel promotion to help drive event attendance. Leverage automation to develop an effective and automated event promotion program. Follow this sample Best Practice Registration Workflow, as a starting point to building your program. When building your program, keep in mind these four tactics that help boost registration numbers:

1. Add additional channels to your promotion mix. Doing so has seen the following increases in registration:
2. Company.com links lift registration 3% - 15%
3. Partner Banner Ads and Email Sending lift registration 1% - 4%
4. Send follow-up emails to those who have not registered after the first invitation. This tactic has resulted in increases in registration from 30-45%
5. Use Batch Signatures to increase response rates. Sending emails on behalf of the sales agent (who owns the lead), using Batch Signatures, has resulted in increased open rates of 10-15% and click-through rates of 2-4%. See here for details on how to do this in Eloqua.
6. Leverage offline channels. Recent success has been seen using 'text-to-voice' functionality. Sending a recorded voice message at the same time as the 2nd invitation, or in a day-before reminder, helps to increase registration and attendance. See here for details.

Tip 3: Make Sure You Convert Webinar Registrants into Webinar Attendees

Today webinar attendance rates are at 25-35% for a well run webinar. That means up to 75% of the people who actually registered don't get the value of the live event! Of course, you want your registrants to attend, to warm up prospects, and educate customers, so it's critical you do all that you can to ensure those registrants attend.

Some quick tips to turn your registrants into attendees:

1. Include an ICS calendar object in your webinar confirmation email. This effective tactic has resulted in increases in attendance from 10-20%. See here for details on how to do this in Eloqua.
2. Send timely webinar reminders. Send a webinar reminder email to registrants 1-2 hours before the webinar, instead of a day before. This practice has increased attendance by 10-15%.
3. Use telemarketing (for large webinars) or call-on-demand to remind registrants about the upcoming webinar, and increase attendance up to 20%.

Tip 4: Ensure Timely Follow-up to Generate Qualified Leads

So if the majority of people are not actually attending the live webinar – how do you maximize lead generation for all of those registrants? It is well known that follow-up connection rates drop significantly if you wait more than 24 hours, so it is critical to quickly assess who attended and who did not attend, and then send a targeted communication to both groups.

Here is what we recommend:

1. Split follow-up communications into those who attended, and those who did not attend
2. Follow-up no later than 24 hours after the webinar
3. Ensure you provide access to a recorded version of the webinar to BOTH groups
4. Provide an additional call-to-action for more value-add content
5. Monitor activity and pass on qualified leads to sales for follow-up

Like other marketing processes, driving webinar ROI is becoming more of a well thought out science. There are key tactics and strategies to follow to ensure your webinar is a success. Once you've implemented your first webinar program don't forget the importance of measuring your success and keeping your program up to date. Why not add in some testing – test subject lines or sender names, monitor what resonates best with your audience, and continue to improve your promotional plan.

Metaphors, Mental Models, and Nurture Marketing

Neil Davidson from the Business of Software blog had an interesting article recently on how your choice of metaphor guides how people think about a problem (http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2490288/36910714). This reminded me of a conversation I was just in with Mike Zavershnik, where we were thinking through what the right metaphor is for nurture marketing.


If you look at a very simple case, like a 30/60/90 day communications program, it seems like the right metaphor is a "timeline". At the 30, 60, and 90 day "points on the timeline", communications are sent out. But, the more robust it gets, and the more you have different nurture paths, rules, and loops, the more the metaphor changes. Now marketers tend to think about it as more of a "machine" or a "structure", ie, I have a "nurture marketing campaign" that I "add people into" - like putting quarters in a vending machine.


This presents an interesting challenge in software product design because it's all about matching the software to the way that a marketer thinks about the task. From our conversations with Eloqua clients so far, it almost seems like the mental model "flips" at a certain point as the nurturing campaign gets more robust. Very simple nurturing is thought of as a "timeline", more complex nurturing is thought of as a "machine".


It's an interesting challenge, and there isn't any definitive right answer.


Still, it's what makes building software for marketers fun, interesting, and challenging. Mike and I ended our lively discussion on the right metaphor without coming to a conclusion, interrupted - as many good discussions are - by the start of the next meeting.


I would love to hear any marketers thoughts on how they think of nurture marketing - "timeline" or "machine", and how complex the nurturing campaigns they are running are.