Fit, Engagement, and MQLs: Mapping the Lead Handoff to Sales

Marketing organizations looking to only hand qualified leads over to their sales teams are faced with an interesting analysis challenge. Whereas it might seem to be a simple task to look at implicit data on a prospect and understand their engagement, or look at explicit data on a prospect and understand their fit, the reality is that this is often a relatively difficult task.

The first task is to look at the raw data in order to define a score between, say 0 and 100 points. This is not as simple as more activity leading to a higher score; some areas of activity may in fact be worth more score than others, and time needs to be taken into account in order to ensure that scores do not grow indefinitely over time. The machinations of this scoring algorithm, however should be kept separate from the sales organization.

For a sales organization to be comfortable building a process, they need a stable definition to be applied to the leads that are sent their way. This is where the fit/engagement matrix is highly useful. A value for the lead’s “fit”, in other words their title, industry, and size, can be mapped to a standard definition of A, B, C, D, where A is a high fit, and D is a low fit. Similarly for a lead’s “engagement”, or their activity on the website, a standard definition of 1,2,3,4 can be applied, again with 1 representing high engagement and 4 representing a low engagement.

The sales team can then understand leads as A1s, C3s, or B4s. The underlying scoring definition of what earns a lead points, how those points are adjusted over time, and which range of points maps to the each rank, does not need to be visible to the sales team at large. A core group of key individuals within sales and marketing can debate the definitions and make necessary adjustments each quarter.

With a clear definition of what makes each lead rank, the discussion can then progress to which leads should be passed from marketing to sales, and to which sales team if there are multiple teams involved. A1 leads will obviously be passed directly to sales, likely to a field sales force, but a mapping is needed for where each other lead rank goes. Some may be passed to an inside sales team, some may be passed to a partner channel, and some may be held back to be further nurtured. The set of leads that are passed to sales from marketing are deemed marketing qualified leads (MQLs). This higher level definition is useful in looking at a higher level view of your marketing analysis.

There are two key questions that these efforts in lead scoring allow you to tackle in analyzing your marketing programs:

Does our scoring accurately correlate to a higher propensity to purchase?
- A lead scoring algorithm should be continually revisited in order to ensure that a higher score actually correlates with a higher propensity to purchase, based on both fit and engagement.

Which leads are worth sending over to sales based on the sales team’s ability to engage them in relevant conversations?
- Adjustments in your marketing, sales, and channel mix can mean that you may
wish to send more leads or less leads to sales. This adjustment comes into play
as you adjust which leads, A1, B2, C3, etc, are sent to sales as Marketing
Qualified Leads (MQLs)


In order to better enable analysis of what is working and what is not, it’s a good idea to keep the lead score and lead rank tracked. As these are values that change with time the best way to do this is to stamp the values at the point in time that the lead is passed to sales. This value pair can then be analyzed against later in order to understand whether the score and rank at that moment in time accurately indicated an intent to purchase.

Setting up a lead scoring and lead handoff process in a way that allows you to both analyze and adjust it as you learn and your business grows, sets you up for long term success.

Market Relationships, Social Relationships, and B2B Marketing in Social Media

I just wrapped up a great book – Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely – that discussed, among many other things, the different relationship types we have between people; especially market relationships and social relationships. Dan’s example was a great one for capturing the essence of the challenge; you have a great Thanksgiving dinner with the family at your mother-in-law’s place, and everyone has enjoyed the great food, drinks, and conversation. The meal ends and you pull out your wallet to pay your mother-in-law for the great meal she has provided. Obviously a very awkward moment, and entirely the wrong thing to do.

Essentially, the situation becomes very awkward because you have flipped the relationship from one form (a social relationship) to another form (a market relationship). Neither type of relationship, by itself, is problematic. We provide and receive dinners based on our social relationships frequently, and we receive dinners based on market relationships each time we eat at a restaurant. However, it’s the flipping between the two that causes that feeling of awkwardness.

Social media, for all its promise, does not change the nature of the way we categorize relationships. It just makes those relationships more visible. One of the most common questions that comes up in discussions of B2B marketing is how social media can be used to drive revenue. It can, and there are many great examples of ways in which social media can be used to drive revenue, but none that I have heard of ignore the ways in which humans categorize relationships.

What I mean by that is that each of our presences on social media needs to fit neatly into a relationship category, or it will seem awkward. If we want to use social media to connect with friends, exchange photos, and share stories, great. If we want to use social media to educate, inform, and guide buyer behavior, that’s equally great. However, it is when we attempt to merge the two that awkwardness can result.

I’m not in any way saying that if you’re in a market relationship, you cannot be fun, engaging, and interested in a person’s family and personal life. You can, and it’s a great way to connect with people; in the same way that a waiter or waitress can be gregarious, social, and interesting. However, the relationship category is clear.

Many of the known successes in social media are clear market relationships. The team at Dell, ComcastCares, Chris Brogan, and the Kado Barbeque Truck are all clearly engaging us in market relationships within social media. They may be engaging, personable, and friendly, but there’s no awkwardness when they try to educate or guide our buying behavior, as we know from the start that it is a market relationship, and an ultimate goal is business.

If a social media strategy, however, relies on this boundary being crossed, it may face more of a challenge than you anticipate. Social media can be a great environment for ideas to spread virally. However, if those ideas would appear to change the relationship type, they will likely not spread. We forward viral videos to our friends that are funny, cute, inspiring, or provocative. These fit within a social relationship. We generally don’t forward videos that appear to be selling anything or promoting a product or company too strongly. This steps over the line into a market relationship.

Relationship types form an interesting framework to understand what allows certain messages to be forwarded and others to fail miserably. We have each seen examples of enthusiastic PR teams suggesting that we try to get everyone we know to pass along a great press release to their friends on Facebook. It does not work, as it is asking for a relationship (social) to flip to a different type (market). An interesting example, is the viral success that is seen in forwarding “friends and family only” discount coupons in retail scenarios. The sense that it is an internal only offer, rather than a sales promotion, allows people to pass it on in the context of a social relationship. Promotions that are just as strong economically, but do not have the “inside scoop” angle generally do not see the same level of success among groups in social media who mainly share a social relationship.

However, not all social media platforms are based on purely social relationships. People who connect on LinkedIn, for example, likely are sharing a market relationship, and may be more likely to share, discuss, and engage in pure business conversations. Twitter forms an interesting hybrid environment where both types of relationships exist.

Thinking about the relationships our initiatives are resting on allows us a new perspective on our social media campaigns. If the campaign relies on a social relationship becoming a market relationship, chances are it will not work. This transition is fraught with awkwardness and established etiquette, as much in the realm of social media as it is at Thanksgiving dinner at your mother-in-law’s.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/09/25

It’s been more than a week since I wrote my last weekly wrap-up, and that is more a reflection on me than on the writing this week. There are again a lot of great posts out there this week, and I enjoyed reading many more than I was able to highlight here. I hope you enjoy some of this week’s highlights as much as I did


Laura Ramos (B2B Marketing Posts) published her long awaited, and very well thought out Lead Management Market Overview. If you are thinking about an investment in marketing automation or lead management, this guide is well worth reading. Laura’s insights and depth really show through well.
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/09/22/lead-management-market-overview-published/


Dianna Huff (B2B MarCom Writer blog) writes about the challenges, but ultimate success, of a B2b video testimonial campaign with details on how to get approvals, how to plan, and how to structure questions in a non-salesy way to allow customers to speak freely.
http://marcom-writer-blog.com/2009/09/22/b2b-video-waters-customer-testimonial-campaign-a-hit/


Sirius Decisions reports on a trend that Inside sales is on the rise in 2010 – due to cultural acceptance, better technology, and budgetary constraints.
http://www.siriusdecisions.com/live/home/document.php?dA=C1522.78


David Raab (Customer Experience Matrix) reviews the recent Adobe/Omniture acquisition acquisition and what it means for marketers, Adobe, and Omniture. David takes the position that this will squeeze the marketing automation space, but most of the comments disagree with that view.
http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2009/09/adobe-buys-omniture-good-for-marketers.html


Brian Carroll (B2B Lead Generation blog), as part of his series on lead generation, talks about developing and intensifying your ideal customer profile – mostly based around pains you can solve for them, and their motivations, rather than demographics or firmographics.
http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/09/develop-your-ideal-customer-profile.html


Adam Needles (Propelling Brands) does a deep dive into the nature of the changing B2B buyer and the evidence for that change. As with all of Adam’s posts, this reflects his history as an analyst, and truly dives into the data and factual evidence.
http://propellingbrands.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/nailing-down-evidence-that-the-nature-of-the-b2b-buyer-has-changed/


Tom Pick (WebMarketCentral) writes a posts on Product Launches, and why a Rolling Thunder approach may be a better idea than the typical Lightning Bolt approach we often use.
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/better-way-to-launch-new-products.html


Andy Hasselwander (B2B Marketing Confidential) looks at the buying process, and our ability to facilitate it, from the perspective of a “barrier removal strategy” – with an interesting comparison of the B2C and B2B Apple strategy.
http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/09/barrier-removal-marketing-strategy.html


Carlos Hidalgo (Annuitas Group), writing on the DemandGen Report, gives an overview of the processes to audit in looking at a marketing automation investment. He makes a very strong case to look at the process first, and not assume that technology can fix a broken process.
http://demandgenreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/process-audit-needed-to-identify-breaks.html


Ardath Albee (Marketing Interactions) makes the case that lead nurturing is very different than stringing together existing marketing campaigns – it needs to lead buyers on a well thought out journey, rather than just communicating frequent messages.
http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2009/09/lead-nurturing-is-not-about-campaigns.html

Lead Handoff and Sales Measurement - Video

Scoring leads to determine which are qualified for sales is only valuable if the sales team works with those leads appropriately when they are handed off. This is complicated by the fact that in many cases, a sales attempt to connect with a lead can result in ambiguous outcomes, like leaving a voicemail, or discovering that the prospect is interested, but suggests speaking again in three months.

In this quick video, Eloqua’s Director of Marketing Operations, Chris Petko maps out the key elements of a process for handing leads to sales, providing sales with a way to easily take action on a lead, and then automatically handing each of the lead dispositions that are likely to happen.



(if the above video doesn't load, please click here for the lead handoff and sales measurement video)

The ability to select which leads, by both fit and engagement, are qualified for sales allows very flexible control of the flow of leads to sales, so the flow can be increased or decreased based on the propensity of the leads to close and the size of the sales force. Similarly, creating a task for sales for each lead allows very rigorous management of the overall process, as the task completion can be managed and measured very carefully.

This all follows from effectively defining which leads are truly ready for sales. This was covered very well in a recent video on lead scoring best practices that is worth watching if you missed it.

Marketing automation is of course a key element in handling the lead dispositions, as Chris highlights in the video. For each disposition option on the task presented to sales, a marketing automation program can handle the lead, nurture them as appropriate, and monitor them for signs of renewed activity.

Enjoy the video, Chris lives and breathes marketing operations, and truly knows his stuff.

Influencing Sales Behaviour - Tips for Marketers

(excuse the image as a metaphor for influencing sales behaviour... but anyone in B2B marketing who has tried to guide what sales does will understand)


Being able to accurately understand and score leads is only as valuable as the likelihood that your sales team picks up those leads and begins to work with them. If you cannot change behavior in sales, then your lead scoring efforts are of limited value. However, if you are able to influence sales, the effect on your overall revenue creation can be tremendous as effort is focused only on leads that are nearly ready to convert.

Influencing, and ultimately changing, the behavior of a sales team, however, is a challenging undertaking. Sales behavior can be difficult to change, and it may seem as though there are limited tools at a marketing team’s disposal to help guide this behavior. However, there are a few techniques that can be used to guide behavior and ensure success.

Firstly, and most importantly, is buy-in. Both sales management, and the sales team, should be engaged in order to get their buy-in as early in the process as possible. Without this buy-in, it is extraordinarily difficult to enact the needed changes in behavior.

Sales Management

For sales management, there needs to be a common view on the fact that buyers’ buying processes have fundamentally changed, and that success in today’s environment depends on a shift towards understanding where buyers are in their buying process and aligning sales resources with only those buyers who are ready to buy. If this philosophical agreement can be reached, then marketing is in a good position to offer a much clearer view into buyer behaviors.

The next step with sales management is to reach alignment on metrics. In an ideal B2B marketing process, there should be common agreement on the definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL), and that those leads will be worked on by sales. However, if the sales team is managed (and compensated) by metrics on activity, such as a number of calls per day, they will not respond well to a lower number of more highly qualified leads.

Sales Team

Getting the sales team’s buy-in, as discussed in last week’s video on lead scoring best practices is a matter of having them understand and agree with why a lead is scored a certain way. Both dimensions of lead scoring should have agreement from sales; the explicit criteria (“who” a lead is) and the implicit criteria (“how interested” a lead is). If sales is engaged early on, they can provide critical input into which of your content assets truly indicate an interested prospect. This forms the basis of your structure for how to score a lead’s activity.

Once a lead scoring structure has been defined, a clear marketing focus on sales enablement can show sales more detail on their leads, accounts, and territories than they have historically seen, and give them insight into the underlying digital body language of their prospects upon which the lead scoring is based.

These sales enablement techniques allow you to build credibility with the sales team. By showing the sales team incremental aspects of the value that your marketing team can provide, you can gain their trust, buy-in, and enthusiasm for leads that have been qualified based on their buying activities.

Carrots and Sticks

With the definition of a marketing qualified lead created, and the need for alignment between marketing and sales agreed to by the management of both functions, you can then build a process that facilitates sales, while still encouraging adoption of the overall system. First, with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place between your marketing and sales teams, you can define an agreement on how long sales should have to follow up with a qualified lead. If they do not, marketing is allowed to “claw back” the lead in order to nurture them, or pass them to another sales person.

If you manage this sales hand off carefully, the growing acceptance within sales of the fact that marketing qualified leads are better to work with can act as fuel for sales motivation to adopt the process. With claw-backs in place, having a lead pulled back and perhaps passed to a channel partner or another rep can be a strong motivation to act quickly. Likewise, for sales people who are performing well and are quickly following up with their leads, an increased flow of these leads can keep their enthusiasm high for continued quick follow-up.

Top-Of-Mind Presence

Like any initiative, keeping your efforts top of mind with your sales team is helpful for success. Prospect activity can be communicated in real time to your sales team with email alerts each time prospects do anything interesting on your website. Similarly, each of your successes with sales engaging with qualified leads can be marketed internally. This can build upon those successes and lead to a much broader awareness in your sales team that qualified leads are critical to their success.

Influencing Sales Behavior

Gaining traction with a sales organization is difficult for any initiative. For deeper sales and marketing alignment, however, your marketing organization must engage with the sales organization in order to facilitate a change in behavior. However, by focusing up front on buy-in from both management and the sales professionals, and at the same time delivering value at each step, this alignment can be achieved.

Direct Mail, Email, and the "Teaser" Concept

Email and Direct Mail are very different marketing media types for B2B marketers. However, there are always lessons to be learned from one media type that can be applied to others. In Direct Mail, a lot of thinking goes into the "teaser" to get people to open the envelope. Laura Cross, who has done a lot of Direct Mail work in her career as a Marketer, talks about the techniques and strategies used for a Direct Mail teaser, and applies them to email marketing.

The ways that we inspire our audience to click through to a landing page are very similar, as Laura explains in this quick video:




(if this video does not load, click here to watch the Direct Mail, Email, and Teasers video)

Laura highlights the six key questions that email recipients answer as they decide whether to click through on your email:

Who – is this relevant to me?
What do I need to do?
Where do I need to go or to click?
When should I do this? Is there any reason it's urgent?
Why should I care?
How will this help me?

If those questions are answered clearly, in a way that compells the recipient, they will click through from your email to your landing page. I hope you enjoy Laura's video.

Social Media, Demand Generation, and the Evolution of Marketing

The relationship between Social Media and Demand Generation is a hot topic these days. Most B2B marketers are thinking about how Social Media fits into their strategies, what works, and how to measure it.

To help with that discussion, Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) from Hubspot, Craig Rosenberg (@funnelholic) from The Funnelholic, and I got together on a web cast to discuss the topic. It's a wide ranging discussion on how Social Media and Demand Generation coincide in today's B2B marketing world.








(if the above does not load when clicked, click here for Social Media, Demand Generation, and the Evolution of Marketing)

Craig, Mike, and I cover topics from the shift in buyer behavior to how social media can be used in a thought leadership, service, brand, or revenue generation capacity. I hope you enjoy viewing the webinar as much as we enjoyed the discussion.

Marketing Automation for SMB Organizations

Marketing in a smaller business can be challenging. You wear many hats, from strategist, to copy-writer, to campaign manager. It can often be hard to find the quick wins that will give you more free time in your day while making you a hero with your management team and your sales team.

In this quick (4 minute) video, Heather Foeh (@heatherfoeh) talks about some of the things you can focus on that are fast, will free up your time, and will get you the most bang for your buck.

Heather knows what she's talking about, as she heads up our SMB customer success team. Her team works with the largest and fastest growing community of SMB customers in the marketing automation space.




(If this video doesn't load, click here to watch Heather's Marketing Automation for SMB Organizations video)

Heather looks at a number of areas that are key to marketing automation success for SMB organizations:

- Auto-responders on web forms
- Simple lead nurturing
- Real-time alerts for your sales team
- Tradeshow follow-up
- Webinar marketing

And with each one, she provides actionable information on how time-strapped and resource-constrained marketers in smaller organizations can quickly implement marketing techniques that free them from ongoing work, while delivering ongoing value.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/09/11

In this week's marketing automation weekly wrap-up, there seems to be a theme of "lists" as lists are published, and list nominations are called for. At the same time, some recent listings of great B2B and Marketing Automation related blogs have surfaced some great writers I did not have on my own reading list previously.

Galen De Young (@GalenDY) from Proteus B2B Marketing published the 2009 list of B2B marketing blogs, many of which are classics, and many were new to me. It’s a tremendous (and comprehensive) list, and I was able to add a few new ones to my own list of blogs to read:

http://www.proteusb2b.com/b2b-marketing-blog/index.php/big-list-b2b-marketing-blogs/



The B2B Marketing Zone is also worth introducing, on our theme of "lists", for those who haven't come across it yet. Managed by Tom Pick and Tony Karrer, it aggregates many of the best B2B marketing blogs, and provides their content in an easily accessible way:

http://www.b2bmarketingzone.com/


Kate Brodock (@just_kate) from B2B Voices makes a push for video as a key part of the B2B marketer’s tool kit, if nothing else, because of its SEO effects. I like the fact that Kate avoids the idea that B2B videos must “go viral” to be successful:

http://www.b2bvoices.com/2009/09/using-video-as-a-b2b-marketing-tool/


Susan Fantle on B2B Marketing Smarts looks at resurrecting the dead with a discussion of the merits of direct mail in a B2B environment. It’s definitely a media type that has been under-utilized recently and has some compelling benefits:

http://b2bmarketingsmarts.com/?p=393


Stuart Wheldon on B2B Magazine with a post about SaaS, Social Media, and the economics of educating buyers. Makes for an interesting read in looking at the economic reasons behind why we are more apt to invest in buyer education than ever before:

http://www.b2bm.biz/blog/2009/09/saas-social-media-and-the-econ.html


Simon Salt (@incslinger) from Inc Slingers provides an Essential Social Media bookshelf of must-reads for social media, and it’s not the list you might expect as he goes beyond pure social media titles. (note: I’m biased here, as Digital Body Language was included – thanks Simon!):

http://www.theincslingers.com/2009/09/the-essential-social-media-bookshelf/


James Obermayer from the Sales Lead Management Association continues the theme of “lists” this week as he has opened nominations for the 50 most influential lead management professionals list:

http://blog.salesleadmgmtassn.com/2009/09/01/slma-seeks-nominations-for-first-annual-50-most-influential-sales-lead-management-professionals-list.aspx


Craig Rosenburg (@funnelholic) from The Funnelholic looks at webinars and what makes them work, with his recent post on the ABC’s of highly converting webinars:

http://www.funnelholic.com/2009/09/03/the-abcs-of-highly-converting-webinars/


Tim Wilson (@tgwilson) from Gilligan On Data covers data, business, math, and the irrational quirks of human psychology in this post on data cleansing processes – worth a read for anyone wondering why data always seems to be a mess:

http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/09/04/the-inertia-of-the-status-quo/


Kipp Bodnar (@kbodnar32) from Social Media B2B looks at 3 examples of B2B companies using Facebook as part of their marketing efforts. Lots of experimentation in this area, but it’s hard to see the ideal path. Kipp’s examples are interesting success stories:

http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/09/b2b-company-facebook-lead-generation/


I hope you enjoyed this week's writings on marketing automation and B2B marketing as much as I did. It's great to have a new set of writers to keep track of.

Renewal Marketing and Social CRM

Much of our discussion to date on this blog has focused around the new purchase scenario. However, in today’s world, the focus on existing business is often equally or more important. I’m not even referring specifically to the economic climate, although that enhances the focus. I’m referring to the general shift towards both a market-controlled reputation through social media, and a shift towards recurring revenue models in many industries.

As social media gives everyone in the market a voice, brand reputation becomes more and more in the control of the market. This reputation guides future purchase decisions of your prospective buyers, as it is usually both more prevalent and more trusted than the messages that your own marketing department can communicate.

As I’ve worked with clients in many industries, there is an increasing emphasis placed on marketing communications that target existing customers. The motivators vary from industry to industry, but regardless of whether it is an information subscription in the publishing industry, or a software purchase from a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor, the general reasons are as follows:

- Initial Engagement: Get the customer initially engaged in the product, and up the deployment/first use curve as quickly as possible in order to maintain the momentum of their initial purchase and ensure that successful usage of the service takes place.

- Success/Depth: Engage the customer in progressively deeper and more advanced capabilities or usage patterns in order to ensure they are receiving (and recognizing) maximum value from the service.

- Stickiness: Drive adoption patterns within an organization, or integration points within a set of corporate systems that both add value and increase “stickiness” on renewal by making the solution a more integral part of the business.

- Community: Introduce the customer to other customers in the community to share experiences, ideas, and best practices, both with each other, and also back to the vendor in order to enhance understanding of where the solution needs to evolve towards.

The marketing communications to drive customers through these phases of success are one element, but likewise, so is the Social CRM platforms that allow the customer community to interact with each other, and with you.

Next week (Tuesday, September 15th, 1 EST), I’m honored to be on a panel to discuss the evolution of Social CRM with none other than Geoffrey Moore from the Chasm Group. In a panel put together by Helpstream, I’ll discuss the evolution of Social CRM, and whether it has crossed the chasm to the mainstream with Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, and Brent Potts, Vice President of Hewlett-Packard:

http://info.helpstream.biz/Crossing-the-Chasm-to-Social-CRM.html

I hope you can join me as it should prove to be a very interesting discussion.

Relationship Sales and Today's New Buyer

For years, the prevailing thinking in sales has been oriented around relationship sales. The idea was that by being a friendly person, a good listener, and a decent golfer, you could gain the opportunity to build trust with potential buyers. In initial conversations, sales would ask a lot of questions, learn about the prospect’s business, delve deep into areas of pain or business challenge, and finally wrap things up with a solution that was oriented to curing these pains and solving these challenges.

However in today’s world, there is often not an opportunity to have that conversation in the first place. Unless you have information of value to offer first, the chance of a prospective buyer wanting to spend an hour with you to describe their business while you ask questions is plummeting . The access to information, which was once mainly managed by sales, is now open to all. This has forever changed the dynamics of relationship selling, as the early conversations, upon which the “trusted advisor” relationship were built, are now being diligently avoided by most prospective buyers.

Now, that trust is built by educating prospective buyers early in their buying process, providing information of value to them, and establishing the credibility of knowing enough about the space to be able to solve their problems. Rather than relying on large sales teams with good golf skills, this now relies on marketing and sales teams who are able to work together closely to understand prospective buyers and educate them on topics of interest to them so they remain engaged throughout a lengthy buying cycle.

So where does that leave the discipline of Sales?

The discipline of sales is changing fundamentally, as there is a shift away from the upfront concepts of relationship building social functions and the discovery call. Sales is shifting towards being a discipline that builds trusted relationships based on providing real business value based on prospective buyers true needs and discovery based on guiding, and observing, buyers own education processes.

For those in the Atlanta area, I’m excited to be joining Rick Page, author of Hope is Not a Strategy, and Debbie Qaqish, Principal Partner at the Pedowitz Group in a luncheon and panel discussion on these exact topics. The event is on Friday, September 25th, and more information is available here:

http://success.eloqua.com/?elqPURLPage=2557

For those unable to attend this event in Atlanta, I will definitely share the ideas, thoughts, and discussions that come out of the event with the audience here.

Best Practices for Webinars and Online Events

Online events, such as webinars, are one of the top techniques used by B2B marketers focused on demand generation. The reasons are clear:

• they are effective at generating interest and attendance
• they are not expensive, compared to in-person events or tradeshows
• a recorded webinar can be re-used as a content asset for many months
• thought leadership can be established through events that feature in-house or industry experts
• prospects appreciate the ability to attend from their desk and drop off if the content is not of interest

However, there is a difference between doing online events, and doing them well. In this video, Rhonda Wunderlin discusses the best practices for promoting the event, minimizing the registrant/attendee drop-off rate, and maximizing the effectiveness through great follow-up.




(if this does not load, please click here for the best practices for webinars and online events video)

Online events and webinars are great for lead nurturing, as they are generally non-salesy, and thus more appropriate in the early stages of a buying process. Registration and attendance also for key indicators of interest and are often used as components of lead scoring programs.

Marketing Dashboards

The old adage of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is as true in marketing as in any other discipline, but in marketing there is often a challenge of defining what one wants to measure. Especially in B2B marketing, the length of the buying process leads to challenges in defining metrics that make sense for a marketing dashboard. Some metrics may seem too transient, being only relevant to a particular campaign. Some metrics may seem too tactical, not strategic enough to the business. Still further, some metrics may seem too difficult to achieve, requiring a broad change in processes before the metrics are possible.

This challenge leaves many CMOs, VPs, and Directors of Marketing without the same level of dashboard metrics that their peers in other functions rely up on to run their businesses.

However, there are a number of key areas of B2B marketing that can be greatly enhanced with dashboards with today’s capabilities. Here are a few key areas to think about as you build critical management metrics for your marketing organization:

Funnel Management:

As we adapt to today’s buying processes where the buyers are in control, we need to adapt our thinking on how we look at a marketing funnel. Buyers progress through their own buying process at a pace that is controlled by them, and the best way to measure it is to use a top-down marketing analysis structure. First, an understanding of digital body language allows us to determine where in their buying process each person is. From there, we can measure the marketing funnel using a balance sheet and income statement metaphor.

The balance sheet view gives us a snapshot of the current state of the marketing funnel. How many suspects, inquiries, and MQLs, are in the marketing funnel at that moment in time. The income statement view gives us an understanding of how the funnel has changed in the last quarter as leads move up, down, into, or out of the funnel.

These top-down views of the performance of a marketing organization allow a high level understanding of what the health of the overall organization looks like. If there are too few leads in one part of the funnel, it indicates a future challenge in revenue generation. A strong motion in the funnel in one quarter can indicate a highly successful marketing push to move buyers through certain stages of their buying process. As these views do not change with time, they are excellent high level dashboards for a CMO or VP of Marketing.


Communication and Response

Communication of messages is a key role of any marketing organization, and most do so with the goal of generating a response. As an executive in charge of a marketing organization, it is important to remain aware of the pulse of messaging and response with your marketing organization. First, a high level view of your email campaign history is key; how many campaigns have been sent and how many recipients were communicated with. Seeing this communication pattern over time allows you to understand if there are spikes or lulls in your communication pattern. Another key view of your outbound communications would show your email frequency – how many times you are communicating to each person in your database – to indicate if you are having any over or under-communication challenges.

Response, is also critical to measure. In terms of web traffic, new and repeat visitors are important to understand as they give you a view into trends of potential buyers visiting your website. Likewise, inquiry counts (submission of web forms), give you an understanding of the number of individuals engaged with your marketing offers. If you are making any search or social media investments, a measurement of the raw traffic being generated by source is also critical to understanding the success in each of these areas.

The patterns in your outbound communication and response patterns are ideal for dashboarding, as they are each views that do not change over time, but provide very valuable insight into the trends, challenges, and successes you are facing.


Database Growth and Data Quality

A marketing organization focused on demand generation is only as good as the marketing database it is nurturing. To do this successfully, the database growth and quality must be carefully managed. That means that dashboards of database growth and data quality are key in understanding trends, problems, and opportunities.

There are a few factors involved in database growth, each of which can be easily monitored and managed through dashboards. Raw growth through net new names, and tempered by unsubscribes and hard bounce-backs is a key component of any marketing dashboard. On top of that, however, monitoring the growth and relative size of your inactive segment gives you an understanding of those who are on the path to being emotionally unsubscribed, essentially becoming an inaccessible part of your database.

Data quality has many aspects that are deeper than a top-level dashboard allows, but a few key aspects of data quality can still be measured effectively. Data completeness is one such aspect. For the 10 or 20 fields in your database that you are most concerned about, a dashboard showing data completeness allows you to quickly understand your progress towards ensuring that these fields are completed by the majority of your marketing audience.

Sales Alignment and Adoption

A successful B2B marketing organization needs to focus as much on enabling the sales team they serve as on their own marketing activities. Even more so in this case than in others, the use of marketing dashboards is crucial in understanding how successful they are being with enabling the sales team. As content is provided to the sales team to use in their communications, a dashboard should be set up to provide insight into which content assets are being used, and which members of the sales team are most active. Similarly as lead nurturing programs are provided to sales as disposition options, a marketing dashboard should show which nurture programs are being used.

Similarly, when leads are passed to sales, if a service level agreement has been reached with sales beforehand, a dashboard can be very useful in monitoring and measuring how quickly qualified leads are followed up on, and whether these timelines are sufficient.


Dashboards on Marketing Assets

So far, we’ve mainly discussed top-level marketing dashboards that provide a glimpse into the performance of an overall B2B marketing organization. However, of equal importance are the dashboards on individual marketing assets. For example, when an email campaign is launched, a landing page is posted, a web form created, or a search campaign initiated, being able to quickly run a dashboard of critical metrics on that marketing initiative is important to building a culture of marketing analytics.

With dashboards on individual assets available quickly and easily, each tactic that is used can be analyzed, understood, and compared against similar assets to understand its performance in context. This culture of analysis quickly weeds out underperforming campaigns by focusing management attention on the metrics that determine their success.

Dashboards as a B2B Marketing Tool

Whereas other functions have leveraged dashboards successfully for many years, marketing has historically been without the ability to devise effective, relevant dashboards that allowed CMOs, VPs, and Directors of Marketing to understand and manage their businesses. Now, with the transition in today’s buyer to be more in control of their own buying process, while also being much more online, marketing dashboards are both possible and necessary.