Medical Symptoms and B2B Marketing Processes

The medical world is very used to the fact that symptoms such as pain, headaches, and nausea are often the body's way of indicating that something has gone wrong. When a treatment is applied to the symptoms alone, it can mask an underlying problem. For example, regular unsupervised use of antacids for heartburn or reflux disease might mask the symptoms of more serious things such as barrett's esophagus, a stomach ulcer, or stomach cancer.

I was reminded of a similar challenge when a lively discussion ensued on LinkedIn about whether marketing should allow sales to “cherry pick” leads. I had written a post talking about the challenge to the overall flow of the funnel when sales is allowed to cherry pick leads. The natural flow of scoring leads, qualifying them, and then handing them off to sales is disrupted when a sales team is allowed to grab the best leads from the funnel regardless of where the scoring system has placed them.

The group discussing the issue agreed, in general, that the disruption of having a salesperson cherry pick leads was not ideal, however, it had the critical benefit of pointing out flaws in the scoring process. A salesperson cherry picking leads that the lead scoring algorithm has not deemed ready for sales may be an indicator of a deeper underlying issue. Perhaps the scoring algorithm misses certain key activities as criteria, perhaps there are opportunities in verticals outside of where the lead scoring algorithm focuses.

In the same way as medical symptoms are uncomfortable for a reason, to get your attention to a problem, the disruption of the smooth flow of leads caused by sales cherry picking can be seen as a symptom of an underlying problem. Whereas I still feel that sales cherry picking is an undesirable outcome, I do believe that if analyzed as a symptom, it can provide interesting and crucial insights into where a lead scoring process is missing the mark.

Sometimes, allowing a few "breaks" in a marketing automation process is a great way to identify opportunities to improve the overall process. When looking at your marketing team's interaction with sales, look for where you see breaks in the process, and look for processes that would completely prevent or totally mask breaks in the process. Removing a symptom of a broken process, much like removing a medical symptom, may only be hiding a deeper underlying problem.

Marketing Automation - What does it mean?

Consistently, the term “marketing automation” is applied to our industry. I find it a term that is less than ideal when it comes to describing what the industry does, but nonetheless, the term has stuck. I often get the question of “can marketing really be automated” and I think that there’s an opportunity to clarify what aspects of marketing truly can be automated, and what aspects cannot. Also, given that the industry’s growth is surging, there’s an opportunity to look at the dynamics that are driving this desire to automate marketing.

If asked for a definition, I would say:

Marketing Automation is the art and science of automatically managing the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound marketing messages.

Let's look at why.

The Changing Buyer

First, let’s look at our buyers. Over the last decade, their ability to self-educate and manage their own buying processes has increased astronomically. Whether it is through vendor websites, analyst websites, social media, or peer reviews, buyers can acquire the information that they need in order to move towards a purchase decision.

However this transition in our buyers has meant that we as marketing organizations need to work with our buyers differently than we did previously. If we hope to facilitate their buying process, and guide them to consider, prefer, and select the products and services we are offering, we need to provide them with the precise information they need as part of their buying process.

The most critical factor is relevance. If we are able to deliver information that is relevant to the buyer’s role in the buying process, their stage as a buyer, their level of interest, and the areas of decision making of interest to them, we will establish a connection, and our message will get through. If not, our message will be lost in the clutter.

So where does marketing automation come in?

If you look at what is required, we need to first understand each of our prospective buyers individually, then we need to provide a message to them that has ideal timing and content based on their interests and stage in the buying process. This level of precision on targeting, timing, and content is nearly impossible without having a solid underlying platform to work from. The art of marketing, when it comes to creating persuasive, compelling copy, great offers, and elegant positioning cannot be automated, and likely won’t be in our lifetimes. However delivering the right selection of those messages to the right person at the right time is something that can no longer be done without automation.

Marketing Automation and Timing

Marketing automation gives us the ability to work on the exact timeframe of the buyer. This is best understood in the context of marketing initiatives like downloadable free trials. In downloading a free trial, the buyer has indicated that, at that exact moment in time, they are at the stage of their buying process where spending time with a trial is their most appropriate use of time. Your communications, as a marketer, need to reflect this buyer timing in order to best connect with this buyer.

Without automation, if a marketer is to attempt this with batch communications, the more closely one tries to align with the buyer’s timing, the smaller and smaller your batches must become, and the larger your workload as a marketer grows. Only through automation can a marketer effectively deliver a message on day 1, day 15, day 30, and day 90 to each individual prospective buyer.

Marketing Automation and Personalization

As one communicates with prospective buyers, each communication should ideally contain content that is precisely in line with their interests. The best way to do this is with dynamic content that automatically matches content to their interests. However, most prospective buyers will not explicitly declare their interests. If they do, the data is likely to be inaccurate. Marketing automation, by letting you tie web activity into buyer insight allows you to understand buyer interests based on what they do, not what they say.

On top of this foundation of buyer understanding, marketing automation gives you a platform from which to have that insight automatically personalize outbound content. Manual processes to personalize the content would quickly prove impossible, and the impact of not personalizing the content is a significant decrease in its relevance to the buyer.

Personalization and the Sender

However, the content itself is not the only aspect of personalization that impacts the buyer’s likelihood of engaging. Who it comes from is equally important. Recipients are 30% more likely, in most cases, to interact with content if it comes from a known person, rather than from a company. A marketing automation system can automatically have each communications come from the appropriate member of your sales team, building the relationship while increasing the response rate. To send your communications on behalf of 5 or 10 sales people might be possible if done manually, but to send on behalf of 50 or 100 requires automation.

Marketing Automation and Sales

As buyer progress through their own buying processes, they eventually reach the point when they would be willing to talk with someone in your sales team about pricing, contracts, or other elements of the purchase process. Knowing when they have reached this stage involves understanding their digital body language. Signs of buying activity can be seen and with the appropriate lead scoring algorithm, sales ready leads can be identified and passed to sales.

Whereas this analysis of leads has in the past been done manually or with spreadsheets, the need to identify and follow up with leads when they are most ready means that it must be done quickly. Using automation allows marketing teams to objectively and automatically score the leads in their marketing funnel in real time, identifying those that are sales ready and those that are not. Those that are not yet ready can be kept warm over time through lead nurturing, again a process that automation greatly facilitates.


The New Importance of Data

What we’re seeing in the above discussion is a shift away from batch communications that are not highly differentiated to true one-to-one personalization. However, as we do this, and we have marketing automation platforms, rather than people looking at the data to make decisions, the importance of data quality takes on a new priority.

Data, in order to be used by rules for personalization of content, segmentation of lists, and scoring and routing of leads, needs to be clean and consistent. Marketing teams are being tasked with ensuring this consistency is maintained at all times, even though marketing data may be touched by web forms, list uploads, CRM synchronizations, or sales input. The only way to consistently and constantly maintain a clean and standardized set of data is to use automation to manage marketing data quality in-line within the marketing database.


What Can’t be Automated?

Marketing remains as much art as it ever has been, even as the new buyer requires elements of science in automating how the targeting, timing, and content of a message is delivered. Compelling offers, captivating visuals, great positioning, and elegant copy are as difficult as ever to create. Likewise, the understanding of market segments, buyer journeys, stages of a buying process, and what moves a buyer along their buying process still differentiate excellent marketers from merely good marketers.

However, as today’s marketers shift from outbound messaging to understanding a buying process and facilitating it, they can only do so if enabled with a platform that automates the conversations, timing, and personalization needed. That is where marketing automation comes in.

A/B Testing; What Result are you Testing Against?

Most B2B marketers today understand the importance of testing. A quick change in a subject line, some copy, or an offer can dramatically alter the performance of a campaign. At Eloqua, our own marketing team does A/B testing on almost every piece that is sent out. However, the question we all face as marketers, is what result we should be testing against. In B2C marketing, it is often significantly easier, as campaigns are often designed to drive explicit purchase behavior, and success can be measured against revenue results.



In B2B marketing, however, the revenue result is often significantly further away. Ideally in testing a campaign, one would be able to determine which drove more actual buying behavior, but with most buying processes stretching out over months, it would be impossible to efficiently test and launch a campaign in this manner. Inversely, testing against the common results of opens, or click-throughs only tells a small fraction of the story, as there is only a very loose tie between an email open or clickthrough, and the final result of a purchase.

Luckily, our options for what results we test against, in fact, span a spectrum. A careful selection of the end result to test against guides exactly what our tests will show. Looked at along two dimensions, we have the following options to test against:



Email Opens: The easiest to test against, but the least accurate by far. This is mainly an indicator of the quality of your subject line. Whereas this can be tested very quickly, it suffers from technological differences in email platforms, as well as a very limited testing scope.


Email Click-throughs: Slightly more difficult to test against as it requires tracking of links clicked, but this is common in most email platforms today. However, this also suffers from a very limited accuracy, as it does not indicate much about the recipient’s interest in purchasing


Inquiries: Tracking of which email drove more inquiries (landing page form submissions) is a significant bump in test accuracy. This now tests whether the subject line was compelling enough to lead to the email being read, the content and offer was interesting and drove a click-through, and the landing page was optimized to maximize form submission rates. This is a very comprehensive test of your campaign, and usually sees results within one or two days of running an A/B test campaign


Qualified Inquiries: Even higher in terms of testing accuracy is testing against qualified inquiries. If, in the A/B test, email A drove 100 inquiries, and email B drove 80, but most of B’s inquiries are the right target executive, while most of A’s inquiries are students and more junior staff members, clearly email B is the best option. Note that the dimension of lead scoring we are talking about here is explicit scoring, as we are just looking to see whether the right executives are the ones inquiring.


Opportunities: We do see an increase in accuracy as we move to Opportunities as a result to test against, but this also increases our difficulty significantly. There are often many more factors involved in qualifying an opportunity as being ready for sales than just one campaign, so this leads to a significant increase in complexity of the situation to analyze.


Revenue: This is clearly the highest accuracy to test against, but the length of a sales cycle means that it is prohibitively difficult to work with, and the ideal timing to run the campaign in question may have long passed by the time that the test results are available. The way we need to think about B2B marketing analysis means that, in general, it is nearly impossible to test the effectiveness of a single campaign on revenue in a meaningful way.



Each of these options has benefits and drawbacks, so it is important to consider what you are testing against when defining your A/B test. In my experience, in a B2B marketing situation, testing to determine which option produced more qualified inquiries often provides the optimal balance between ease of testing and accuracy of results.

Marketing Automation: Facilitating the Conversation

I was at a conference recently where a guy was talking about Marketing Automation with a cocktail party analogy. His idea was that in a cocktail party, you don’t know what stories you’re going to tell in advance, you just get a sense of people and then tell the appropriate stories. He then jumped to a conclusion that, therefore, you could not automate your marketing as that would be like pre-scripting which stories you were going to tell at the cocktail party.

Having worked with a lot of marketers in implementing marketing automation for lead nurturing, I can say that he’s partly right and partly wrong.

If you automate a one-sided conversation, you are just alienating your audience more efficiently.

A conversation only works if your stories are of interest to your listeners. When we’re in the room, we quickly get a sense of what the people we’re talking with are interested in and tell stories accordingly. With some people at the cocktail party, we’ll talk about sports, and who’s doing well in the playoffs. With some groups, we’ll talk shop, and with some groups, we’ll entertain with tales of travel disasters we’ve experienced. All groups are not the same. We read their interest through looking at their body language and adjust our stories accordingly.

One on one, this works very well. However as marketers, we are faced with two challenges when it comes to replicating this approach in marketing.

The first challenge, we’ve dealt with quite a bit on this blog. We need to read our buyer’s digital body language to see what they are interested in. We do this through observing their response to marketing and their areas of interest. From there we leverage those observations to understand what their main area of interest is likely to be, or what role they play in a buying process. It is our way of determining what stories are most of interest to them.

Once this has been accomplished, the next challenge comes down to logistics.

That challenge is how to facilitate not just one conversation, but thousands or tens of thousands of conversations. Each person is interested in a different conversation, and will likely be turned off by stories that aren’t of interest. Compounding the challenge is the fact that we need to deliver these stories when the audience is interested, not when it makes sense for our own campaign schedule.

This is where marketing automation comes in. Without marketing automation, it’s hard to imagine being able to carry on more than a few conversations at one time, let alone thousands or tens of thousands of individual conversations.

However here’s where there is some truth to the idea that marketing automation and conversations don’t mix. If you are hoping to automatically deliver the same story to each person without any awareness of their interests, you will fail. Marketing automation that forces your audience down a single track just automates a one-sided conversation. This alienates your audience as it does not alter the conversation based on their interests.

The marketers who succeed are focused on listening first, talking second. By understanding, through their audience’s digital body language, the topics of interest to their audience, successful marketers cater the conversation accordingly. Through the understanding gained by looking at digital body language to understand interest, each person can receive stories of interest to them.

A list of stories, told in sequence regardless of audience interest, will fail just as surely at a cocktail party as it will in marketing automation.

Social Media in B2B Marketing: The Importance of the Periphery

The rising interest in social media in B2B marketing leads to an interesting and challenging question; what is the role of social media in lead scoring? We’ve talked a lot about lead scoring and how to approach it successfully, but the relevance of social media should be addressed. The challenging aspect of leveraging social media in your lead scoring is that you do not control the main sites of social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This makes it impossible to track the Digital Body Language of your buyers on those sites.

However, it is important not to underestimate the periphery – the point at which a person in the realm of social media enters a web property within your web presence.

This point of handoff, the referring URL, has been trackable for a long time, and can be seen in most web analysis tools. Its relevance in understanding your buyer’s digital body language though, needs to be fully understood. The referring URL shows you exactly where a person came from when they came to your site. Importantly, it includes valuable information on the context of why they ended up on your web site. There are three key aspects to look at in understanding the context of their visit:


- What site they came from
- What other information can be gleaned from the URL
- Where they landed

The first of these is the easiest. Understanding whether they came in to your site from Google, LinkedIn, a community support portal, an industry Blog, or Twitter can give you some context as to why they are on your site and what they are looking for. For example if they are visiting your site from an industry blog, the themes of that site will likely relate to the interest of the visitor. For example, blogs focusing on advances in mathematical modeling, insurance in the pharmaceutical industry, or employment opportunities in the Dallas area may all refer visitors to an insurance company’s site, but with very different contexts for their visit.

With certain sites the more relevant information is contained within other aspects of the URL. Search is the best example of this, as the exact phrase that was used is presented in the query string of the referring URL. Knowing the search query can give you very relevant and actionable insight into where in their buying process a visitor is, as we saw with Sourcefire’s use of query strings to understand buying cycle stage.

The third important piece of information to be gleaned from the periphery is the page to which the visitor was referred. If this page is not the main home page this destination URL can provide extremely valuable insights into what the context of the link was. If, for example, the visitor followed a link to your site shared on Twitter that led to a deeply technical specifications page, that is more likely to be a technical buyer who followed a link from Twitter to a case study.

Understanding what this periphery can tell us about why the visitor found something interesting in the realm of social media, and has chosen to visit our site is key in guiding our communication with them from that point forward. As we score them as a lead, or begin to nurture them over time, this insight is extremely valuable in understanding them as a buyer.

LA Fire Department has lessons for B2B marketers

I was in a conference session the other day and a case study on the Los Angeles Fire Department’s use of social media. I mentioned it on Twitter and was quickly thanked by the good folks behind @LAFDTalk, their Twitter handle for general community engagement.

The conversation got me thinking about the parallels with B2B marketing. I think there are many.

The first parallel is that at first glance, it’s not obvious what either should be doing in the social media realm. Although there are examples of fires being reported on Twitter, in general people still report fires using 911. Similarly in B2B marketing, when the deal is finalized, it is usually with a direct sales person in the field, not over Twitter or any form of social media.

However, when looked at more deeply, both are able to take advantage of the tools of social media extremely well. The difference is in how broadly you view your mission. I had the opportunity to ask Ron Myers at LA Fire Department his thoughts, and he expressed their mission in a very broad way:

A short answer to how broadly we view our mission lies in the LAFD Labs projects currently deployed or in beta production. With over 80 Web 2.0 projects in our sand box, we are able to assist in life saving efforts not only here at home, but, around the world. By using social media tools, we are able to provide real-time life safety information to those in harms way. Evacuations, fire information, recovery, and other real-time information saves lives.

By translating our safety messages into nine different languages, we have the awesome privilege of helping others around the globe while providing safety messages locally. LAFD Everywhere focuses on sharing our City’s experience and expertise with those who don’t have the resources to produce the information on their own.

Over the past 4 years, we have embarked on an aggressive campaign known as the “LAFD Everywhere Initiative”. Without a funding stream and with no staff, we have been able to utilize a wide variety of open source, social media tools to deliver the Department’s message and prepare for disaster management.

This is clearly far beyond fighting fires, and even beyond Los Angeles. The overall emphasis is on changing mindsets, awareness, and precautions in order to maximize the safety of the public in general. A quick glance on the LAFD blogs shows a broad array of articles talking about fire safety, traffic safety, and home safety as well as the stories of recent fire incidents. LAFD, through their social media efforts, including a great blog on all things fire and safety related in LA, has truly engaged their overall mission to educate the public on safety issues and keep us all safe.

In the same way, as marketers, if we think of our mission as purely generating leads for sales, we are focusing far too narrowly. As marketers, our goal must be to guide the market’s buying decisions to ensure they take into account the key factors that affect how purchase decisions are made. I talked with Ron about where he felt their social media efforts were most effective, and he had this to say:

This is an interesting question, one that we struggle with when deciding which projects take priority when developing new tools. Our primary focus is to protect lives. We have been able to take advantage of Twitter, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and other social media tools to provide real-time information for evacuations, floods, fires, and other life changing events.

We use blogs extensively to distribute preparedness message, recovery information, evacuation maps, and other messages almost daily. The old adage of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is true. Nothing haunts Firefighters and Paramedics more than the needless loss of life. Preparedness, Prevention, Mitigation, and Recovery all play a roll in our Emergency Public Information delivery system.

Similarly, as B2B marketers, if we focus on education throughout the buying process, as early as the education and awareness phase, we can alter perceptions and behaviors that will guide buyers to consider buying factors in a new light. By challenging ourselves as to how broadly we think of our mission as marketers, we are able to think of social media in a new strategic light. We spoke earlier about the three types of challenges that B2B marketers face, and each of these challenges can be thought of as an education challenge. Through addressing those education challenges, one potential buyer at a time, we are able to leverage social media to improve our organization’s overall brand perception.


Ron Myers, Brian Humphrey and their team are working to make the Los Angeles population safer through their use of social media as an education tool. Similarly, as marketers, we can begin to guide buyer decision making through our use of social media as an education tool in a similar manner.

A Logo is Not a Brand: B2B Marketing and Social Media

I’ve been part of the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) tour this summer, and it has given me a great chance to interact with a lot of marketers about the challenges they are facing. One recurring topic, as you would expect, is social media and the role it plays in marketing and sales. A common focus has been on the potential for using social media for demand generation and direct connection with sales. I would argue instead, that social media is best thought of in the context of an organization’s brand.

Wikipedia defines “brand” as “A brand is a collection of experiences and associations connected with a service, a person or any other entity.” Other definitions exist, but the concept of a brand being the associations that we have with our overall experience of a service or entity is common to most of them.

B2B Marketing has always had an interesting relationship with the concept of “brand”. Perhaps dominated by impressions of what it means to be a strong brand that came from the consumer space, we’ve been hesitant to think that brand plays a strong role in B2B purchases. However, I would argue that the opposite may be true. Each aspect of a buying decision in a B2B purchase cycle is heavily influenced by reputation, and hence brand.

The following questions, which your prospects may be asking themselves, represent various perceptions (or misperceptions) of your brand:

- What companies have solutions to this problem?
- Which solution provider has better service?
- Which product is best in my industry or for my company size?
- Which product is the “cheap and cheerful” of the industry? Which is “robust and full-featured”?
- Which product is the most or least expensive?
- What are the key factors in deciding on a solution to this problem?
- Which company is going to be innovating more as we move forward?
- Which solution is more reliable? More stable? More scalable?

Although each of these decision aspects can be researched independently, more often than not, we all rely on general industry reputations to provide us with at least a good sense of the answer. I have spoken with many marketers who are frustrated by situations in which the general reputation they have in the industry on certain questions, such as the above, does not match with reality. This, in many ways, is a brand question.

Social media has one of the best opportunities to influence this brand reputation of any marketing approach I have seen in recent years. Each discussion in social media that concerns these questions is an opportunity to adjust the brand perception of your solutions. If you have a reputation for being the expensive provider in the industry, but in fact have a very competitively priced entry product, you have an opportunity to correct that misperception. If you have a reputation for poor service, addressing each individual with a complaint, as Frank Eliason did with ComcastCares on Twitter, allows you to reverse that reputation. If decisions are being made that overlook key factors that lead to success, you have an opportunity to educate the market one conversation at a time.

A good framework for thinking about these challenges is provided by looking at the challenges that buyers face in a buying process. Each challenge, whether it is a Flying Car, Wallflower, or Red-headed Stepchild challenge can be addressed by looking at the reasons potential buyers choose not to include your organization at each stage. Social media provides an excellent means to address each of these challenges.

The rise of social media has given us B2B marketers a unique opportunity to address and improve their organization’s brand in the marketplace. However, to do so, we need to think of brand beyond the logo. The entire experience, from market education through purchase to service quality and the customer experience affect our brand.

Is Good-Enough-Marketing-Automation Really Good Enough?

Today's post is a guest post from Paul Teshima, Eloqua's Senior Vice President of Customer Service. Paul is the person responsible for the team that drives the success of our clients, and is very hands on in working with clients big and small.

As such, he has been the brains behind many of our innovations on how to tackle various business processes, new approaches to scoring leads, and innovative ways to manage global deployments.

I'm thrilled to have Paul post as the insights he brings are without parallel.

Steve

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There is a lot of activity and discussion today on best practices in demand generation and marketing automation. Marketers are now realizing they don’t have to build the perfect campaign or program to generate value from marketing automation.

So on one side I am very happy that we are seeing rapid adoption of marketing automation, but on the other side, I know that we need to do more. Marketers may have become happy with “good-enough-marketing-automation”, which is a great place to start, but you need to continue to improve to get the most out of these programs.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

1. From Auto-Responders to a Warm Welcome
Many marketers have seen good results with targeted auto-responder emails (not just "thanks for downloading") once you fill out a form. this is a great tactic and can drive high response rates. But you would be surprised to know that on average 15-20% of your new leads in a quarter receive no communication in the first 60 days outside of an auto-responder.


This is largely due to the fact that your list pulls don't always account for "new leads", but rather focus on specific profile information (e.g. CIO, in New York, in Financial Services).

We have seen rapid adoption of what we like to call a "Welcome Program". This program targets new leads that for one reason or another don't receive any marketing communication due to your segmentation strategy. It can be as simple as 3 emails over 3-6 weeks that provides value-add information on why you should stay interested in your business.

Customers have seen great results with these types of programs as these leads have already raised their hand. Welcome programs can generate qualified leads at a rate of 10-15%. This is the first nurturing program every customer should have.



2. From Lead Qualification to Strategic Account Management
Many companies, small and large have targeted account or vertical strategies that involve lists of thousands of named or strategic accounts. When implementing a scoring program often this targeted list is ignored because how do you setup scoring rules for 3,000 company names, when often the field data varies by record (i.e. IBM, I.B.M. IBM Corp., etc.).

But these leads are actually some of the best leads from an Explicit or Ability to Purchase perspective. You would always call them back. So it is imperative that you include them in your scoring program (note: this may involve data tools and some complex deduplication.)

In fact we have found that 20% of all of our customers use a Named Account List in their scoring program - and many of them also route these leads directly to field sales - reducing delays in the right follow-up, and also cost of generating the quality lead.

It is important to understand that starting simple with marketing automation is definitely the way to go. But instead of thinking of it as a one step process, think of it as an effort in continual improvement. I believe that marketers who take on this challenge, will have more effective campaigns and drive significantly more value for their business.