Sybase: Buyer Profiling for Micro Segment

We all know that it is often best to engage with our markets by segment. However, in some industries, this can be extremely challenging as the segments can be so small that they are extremely difficult to target. Sybase faced this challenge, as one of their products was of most interest to an extremely small audience - the "data elite".

To tackle the challenge, the Sybase team catered to the data elite's natural competitiveness - Peter Kim would call it an "ego trap", but regardless of what you call it, it's great marketing.

Enjoy the case study, it's from Digital Body Language:

Sybase: Buyer Profiling for Micro Segment

For one of its key data-management products, Sybase IQ, Sybase needed to engage with a specific set of its customers: “the data elite” – people who needed fast response times in a solution to tackle extremely high volumes of data. The Sybase IQ product leveraged a new approach to data storage and querying that resulted in performance improvements of many orders of magnitude. The target buyers, however, in many cases were not aware that such a solution was possible, and may have been grudgingly purchasing ever larger hardware in order to tackle the problem.

To connect with this audience, the Sybase team leveraged the naturally competitive nature of administrators of huge volumes of data, and their desire to compare themselves against their peers. The campaign targeted a scrubbed list of existing Sybase contacts and asked them for information on the extreme challenges they were tackling - data volume, response time, or both. Based on their answers, one of three cartoon icons guided them through an information-gathering process where they were ranked as a Pro, an Expert, or Elite by comparing them to their peers.

With this basic knowledge, the campaign guided them through five stages - from collecting basic information through to fully engaged, through sharing thought leadership from industry gurus and case studies of similar professionals becoming corporate heroes through delivering massive performance increases. At each step, the content and detailed information provided was tightly matched to the individual’s biggest challenge and rank. By observing their interactions with available content, the campaign transitioned the customer from one buying stage to the next.

By cultivating that competitive spirit among database experts as to who tackles the larger data challenge, Sybase engaged with the “data elite” in ways that enabled the company to better understand who would be an ideal audience for the product. By catering to this competitive spirit, Sybase was also able to develop the opportunity to present to them possible solutions, that they had never thought possible, to a very real challenge they were having.

D&B: Digital Body Language Throughout Customer Lifecycle

A lot of our conversation focuses on new customer marketing, but for many or even most businesses, the successful retention of their existing customers is equally critical. I had a good conversation with Jeff Yee at D&B Canada while writing Digital Body Language, and this was his core focus. By leveraging insights into interest levels, usage profiles, and adoption, he was able to optimize their subscription renewal efforts. Enjoy the case study:

D&B: Digital Body Language Throughout Customer Lifecycle

D&B (Dun & Bradstreet) Canada, given their leadership position in business and credit information, wanted to focus on the end of year renewals for their customer base. With significant existing market share renewal and retention was just as important to them as new customer acquisition.

The initial project they undertook to achieve this goal was focused directly on the
renewal period. A progression of emails, triggered by an upcoming renewal date, was sent to the customer at 90, 60, and 30 days prior to renewal. Over the progression of communications, the tone would become increasingly clear in order to encourage the renewal process.

Watching the results, the D&B team noticed two trends. The first was that the customer response to the emails increased as the renewal date approached. Early communications had open rates of 33%, but as the renewal date approached, these rates would jump to 40% showing a significant uptick in interest.

The second trend noticed was a correlation between the renewal interest and direct usage of the D&B service. Adoption was a critical driver of renewal regardless of product line or industry. To continue to grow their adoption rates, D&B then turned to understanding the digital body language of their customers as expressed in their usage of the service. The service was well instrumented, and provided excellent marketing insight into overall usage and feature specific usage patterns for each user.

Conceptually, the team split the customer’s first 12 months of their lifecycle into 3 phases, adoption, usage, and renewal. With the renewal phase now fully automated, the marketing team is now focused on the other two phases. Leveraging their understanding of the prospect’s actual system usage, combined with their insight into the relationship between usage and renewal, a series of onboarding communications will ensure every new customer is quickly and seamlessly able to derive value from the service, while a series of tips and tricks emails will then work from an understanding of what features are and are not being used to suggest areas in which a customer can see even more value from the service.

By taking their understanding of digital body language beyond marketing and into the customer lifecycle, D&B is focused on ensuring that their customers’ renewal decision is based on a year of maximum success with their service.

Flyers: Renewal Marketing Leads to Deeper Interest Profiling

In the case study on the 76ers, we'd talked about using a multi-channel campaign to build upon the emotional excitement of an NBA franchise. In doing so, however, the opportunity to build a much deeper understanding of exactly what each fan is most passionate about was not overlooked. In this case study, from Digital Body Language, the Flyers leveraged the digital body language insights to better understand which player each fan was most enthusiastic about.

This insight will be leveraged to deepen the emotional tie in future marketing campaigns by focusing communications on what each individual fan is most interested in. I hope you enjoy the read:

Flyers: Renewal Marketing Leads to Deeper Interest Profiling

The Philadelphia Flyers wanted deeper relationships with fans while also driving the highest possible rates of renewal for season-ticket holders. With careful planning, they were able to achieve both of these goals at once.

The team created personal URLs (PURLs) for each season ticket holder (such as http://www.myflyerstickets.com/johnsmith) and invited each customer to his/her personal site to complete the renewal process. On the personal page, personalized content and offers enticed the ticket holder to renew. But just as importantly, the Flyers began to build the basis for a direct online relationship with each fan.

The Flyers’s site contains rich information (including video) on players, stats, schedules, and the draft, and through the direct relationship with each season ticket holder that they have now built, the Flyers better understand each fan. By observing each customer’s unique digital body language as they look at stats, read up on players, and watch highlights, the Flyers can identify things such as favorite players and whether they prefer stats or highlight reel footage.
In upcoming seasons, the Flyers plan to leverage this rich base of knowledge based on the fans’ digital body language to continually strengthen and hone the message. Personalized video and audio messages from each fan’s favorite player and RSS feeds of stats and highlights tailored will deepen the team bond.

The Flyers increased online season-ticket renewals from 1% the previous year to 18%. Renewing online also allowed real-time processing so these numbers were available immediately to senior management opposed to the time lag that occurs with processing renewals manually. Of course, the Flyers were also able to deepen their understanding of their fan base and strengthen those relationships significantly.

National Instruments: Multiple Activities Leading to Multiple Responses

National Instruments has done a great job of creating an information rich web presence that provided relevant and useful information to their audience of scientists and engineers. They had implemented a very elegant equitable exchange of information process that asked for small amounts of information from their audience in exchange for access to the information resources, and were nurturing their prospects based on the information they had requested.

The challenge that Helena Lewis and the team at National Instruments needed to tackle though was what happened in a prospective buyer was very active on their site and accessed multiple information resources in different areas. Here is a case study on how they tackled the challenge, from Digital Body Language:

National Instruments: Multiple Activities Leading to Multiple Responses


National Instruments leveraged the rich information on prospects’ interests that it gleaned from prospect digital body language on its Web site to deliver highly targeted and relevant communications. The success of these communications was evident in the very high open and clickthrough rates discussed earlier. To achieve this, however, National Instruments had to overcome an operational challenge.

The mapping of online activities to communications was straightforward, but also created a challenge. What should happen if a site visitor performs multiple actions that warrant a communication? For instance, downloading four whitepapers should not result in four communications.

To ensure that prospects are not inundated if they perform a number of triggering activities, National Instruments built a waiting period of 24 hours into its scoring. If multiple actions were seen in a 24-hour period, the actions were scored individually and the most relevant communication was selected. Similarly, if an action had been performed before (for example, downloading an automated test guide), the prospect was not sent communications that had this as a call to action.

This solved the challenge of too many communications, but National Instruments also realized that certain key actions should bypass this logic. For example, if a visitor abandons a shopping cart, or saves the configuration of a product, a communication would be immediately triggered. The 24-hour delay was reserved for communications that were deemed less critical.

Since National Instruments is a global organization, each time it learned a better way to interact with customers and built processes for doing so, it replicated that logic and structure and separated it from the content. In this manner, it only needed to translate content and messaging to roll out its program to any of 35 countries.

Synopsys: Centralized Marketing Communications

Large organizations whose marketing groups have grown organically over time can often have fairly disparate functions, content, and databases. To bring those distributed marketing efforts into a central marketing database can often be an interesting challenge. Mital Poddar at Synopsys walked me through how they had tackled that centralization effort when I chatted with her during the writing of Digital Body Language.

Using a combination of incentives, including tracking of digital body language, high quality branded templates, and management of opt-out requests, Synopsys was able to win over the distributed marketing teams and centralize over 100 independent marketing databases.

Synopsys: Centralized Marketing Communications

Synopsys is a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing. As such, the sales process is very knowledge and education oriented. Sophisticated buyers and sophisticated sellers exchange lots of information throughout a lengthy process. Because of this, Synopsys discovered that each of their product marketing managers were sending micro campaigns to small lists of prospects at various stages of the education and sales process.

This had been a somewhat functional process, but did not allow Synopsys easy control of their brand and messaging and the risks of over-communicating to customers due to a lack of centralized control had become significant. It also did not allow Synopsys any insight into the digital body language of those prospects as each individual salesperson would send their small scale campaigns in their own way – often from their desktop – in a way that did not allow centralized tracking.

To operationalize these communications in a way that still allowed the knowledge-intensive sales process to progress, but gave Synopsys better control over brand and better ability to provide insights into their prospects’ digital body language, they decided to centralize the process. Each salesperson could send any communication that they desired to, to any list of their prospects, but it would be executed centrally by a marketing service bureau (of one individual). This enabled consistency in brand messaging and started the process of keeping historical campaign data in one location.

As with any organization, there were pockets of resistance to either the creative
standardization (all communications would now share a common look and feel) or to giving up control of a list of contacts. The centralization, however, offered three benefits that outweighed these hesitations. A common theme was more aesthetically pleasing than most of the individual efforts, winning over many. The reduction in effort was a second significant selling point. The ability to instantly see the results of each campaign, and the individuals who had clicked through and sought further information, was the final advantage to win over skeptics.

During two months, the transition was made to this new operational model. The field team was able to quickly craft the message and the target audience they had in mind, which was then passed to the central marketing service organization. By centralizing management of the final creative touches and the distribution of the messages, the marketing organization was able to maintain control over the branding and look & feel. The team was also able to ensure the proper tracking was in place to allow insight into the prospects’ digital body language.

Through centralizing these communications, the Synopsys team was able to gain control over their brand and the frequency with which they communicate with prospects, while at the same time building rapport with their sales organization. By adding in the ability to observe the customers’ digital body language, they also began to build a foundation for deeper insights into their audience, and for an internal culture of analytics.

VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads

Almost any of us in B2B marketing wrestle with the challenges of the leaky funnel. As we pass leads to sales that are not ready, perhaps due to them being a "future likely" rather than a current opportunity, we end up with a dead lead pile.

Re-engaging with this dead lead pile can be one of your easiest ways to generate more active opportunities without significant additional expenditure. Amy Marks from VFA took this approach, and I had the pleasure of chatting with her about it when I was writing Digital Body Language:

VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads

VFA, a leading provider of end-to-end solutions for facilities capital planning and asset management, had many dormant leads in its marketing database. Amassed over a period of years, through tradeshows, lists and sales activities, these “dead” leads were stored in VFA’s CRM system, had never been converted to opportunities, and were no longer receiving communications from VFA.

To engage these leads, VFA implemented a 5-part nurturing program that provided unique content to each of the 6 verticals targeted by VFA. The initial communications were case study focused, and progressed to white paper and webinar downloads, then offers to request a demo or engage directly with sales.

At each step of the process VFA’s marketing team enabled the prospect to engage in a way that was governed by the prospect’s own buying process. Each email offer connected to a landing page that described how similar organizations were able to meet their business challenges.

Additional resources—articles, case studies, white papers—were offered, allowing prospects to select the information they needed depending on their stage in the buying process. At each step, the prospect had the ability to “short cut” the process and jump straight to a later stage; by either requesting a demo or engaging with the VFA sales team.

The campaign succeeded in bringing back a tremendous number of leads from the “dead”. Over 120 highly qualified leads were passed to sales, and over $1.6M in pipeline was created. In a typical example, a lead may have been disqualified at a much earlier date, but given changes in the prospect’s organization, they were now ready to purchase and a sales opportunity was discovered. Only through nurturing and observing the buyers’ digital body language were these opportunities rediscovered.

Kadient: Search Rebranding Leads to Greater Insights

We all put a lot of effort into our search strategies, and spend a lot of effort carefully optimizing around key words or phrases. The reality is, however, that buyers evolve over time, and so do the terms they use to connect with you. Kadient noticed this when a rebranding of their company gave them a reason to have another look at how buyers discover them, and how they looked for solutions to problems that Kadient was able to solve.


It's a great reminder to all of us to take a fresh look at how we appear to our prospective buyers and whether that corresponds with what they are searching for in their buying processes. Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

Kadient: Search Rebranding Leads to Greater Insights

Kadient is a leading vendor of sales-knowledge, RFP, and proposal-generation software, using a free trial strategy that enables buyers to better experience the product’s value and positively compare Kadient to other possible solutions. In order to reflect their evolution from a niche, premise-based solution to a broader software-as-a-service solution, they undertook an ambitious rebranding from its prior name – Pragmatech. In doing so, they realized that a significant effort would be needed to ensure that the search engine optimization work they had put into the Pragmatech name would carry over to the new name and new URL. They ended up, however, realizing some much deeper insights into how their buyers found them.

As they optimized their search efforts to the new name, the Kadient team made careful observations of the digital body language of the prospect who found their way to their site and also the ways in which the broader universe sought information on sales challenges. Kadient quickly realized that they had been optimizing against terms such as “sales effectiveness”, which reflected their solution, but the broader market was seeking help with “sales coaching”.

Armed with this insight, the Kadient team realized that they could tap into a new opportunity. By explaining to prospective buyers, who were searching for “sales coaching” why they should think about the more than just a glib guy in a suit giving an inspirational session, Kadient was able to engage with a much broader audience and make them aware of the Kadient solution.

By analyzing the digital body language of its prospects, Kadient quickly identified a broad new opportunity for market awareness and education, and has begun to engage with buyers who may not have even initially realized that the problem they were wrestling with could be solved by a solution such as Kadient’s.

76ers: Multi-Channel Campaign To Win Back Season Ticket Holders

Last week's case study was on Bella Pictures use of direct mail as part of their nurturing campaigns. Multi-channel campaigns give us some interesting options as they open up new angles of communication and, when well coordinated, reinforce messages we've seen in other channels.

I greatly enjoyed chatting with Mark Di Maurizio and the team running marketing for the Philadelphia 76ers as they market a product with a great emotional tie - the basketball team. They used a multi-channel campaign to enhance the emotional tie their fans had with the team and drive renewals. Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

76ers: Multi-Channel Campaign To Win Back Season Ticket Holders


The purchase of seasons tickets for the Philadelphia 76ers is a purchase decision driven by the excitement and emotion that a basketball team brings its fans. It is also a purchase decision that involves a significant financial outlay, however, so the 76ers marketing team needed to ensure that they made the right emotional connections as they communicated with their audience.

A campaign to reconnect with past season ticket holders who had not renewed was initiated. A multi-channel campaign brought the excitement of the basketball experience to the target audience. First, a direct mail piece and a postcard were sent, inviting the recipients to a Select-A-Seat event. A follow-up email campaign shared the creative of the direct mail pieces, and both media types provided a personal URL (PURL) to each recipient that provided highly personalized content and introduced the recipient to their sales representative.

An outbound IVR-based phone campaign recorded by the 76ers president and general manager Ed Stefanski again invited recipients to the Select-A-Seat campaign. At each step, an option to jump straight to purchasing tickets was provided, and for those who showed interest by interacting with the marketing campaign, but either did not attend or did not purchase, the sales team followed up with directly.

The campaign was a great success, with numerous people rejoining the Sixers family as season ticket holders. The resulting revenue generated was more than 35 times the cost of the campaign. By using a variety of media types to bring the emotional experience of basketball into a marketing campaign, the 76ers were able to better connect with their audience.

Bella Pictures: Direct Mail in Nurture Marketing

The marketing team at Bella Pictures is one of the most interesting and innovative groups I've had the pleasure to work with. I ended up adding two Bella case studies to Digital Body Language because of the interesting work they were doing. In the first of those case studies I'll share here on this blog, Teresa Almaraz and her team used direct mail - post cards - as part of a drip nurture campaign. Usually reserved for bulk, outbound, large list campaigns, direct mail worked extremely well as part of a nurturing campaign timed around the bride's wedding date.

By taking advantage of the fact that print on demand providers were able to deliver direct mail in an on-demand way, Teresa and the team at Bella were able to use the media type in an unexpected way, with great effect. I hope you enjoy the case study:

Bella Pictures: Direct Mail in Nurture Marketing

As the premier provider of wedding photography in the United States, Bella Pictures deals with a very defined prospect audience: recently engaged brides-to-be. The sales cycle itself involves an equally well-structured timeframe as anyone who has been involved with the planning of a wedding can attest. To maximize its success, Bella guides brides through photography selection using a carefully crafted nurture program that starts with the first contact with the bride.

One of the key conversion points for brides-to-be was the initial meeting with a photographer to discuss her photographic preferences. In the hectic process of planning a wedding, a meeting with a photographer could easily be forgotten, or the bride could show up without having thought through the questions she would be asked, such as the type of photography, styles, album choices, and special shots to request.

To resolve this challenge in the process, Bella Pictures turned to direct mail. A postcard was sent to each bride, targeted to arrive just days before her scheduled meeting date. The direct-mail piece served three purposes. First, it reminded the bride of her upcoming meeting, with her meeting. Second, it presents a tangible, high-quality piece to the bride to impress on the bride the aspects of photographic quality that are likely to be important. And third, the direct-mail piece provided a checklist for the bride to work from, ensuring that she had considered all the key photography decisions she would have to make.

In a sequence timed around the bride’s wedding date, the nurture process guides the bride through the timelines and decisions needed. By orienting its marketing process around the bride and her decision process, Bella significantly lifts its conversion rate from initial contact to booked appointments. Even with direct mail, which is typically not viewed as a drip/nurture marketing vehicle, Bella aligns with the bride’s buying process.

TriNet: Sweet Music - Targeting of Purchase-Ready Buyers

I talk a lot about using lead scoring to understand what stage a prospect is in their own buying process. I also talk quite a bit about analyzing the value of inquiries vs the value of qualified leads. It was great talking with Ian Brown and team at TriNet during the writing of Digital Body Language, as they done a great job of this style of very precise targeting. By understanding first who was at which stage of the buying process, and second, what the value was of moving those specific prospects to the next step, TriNet was able to offer a significant incentive. By using that level of buy cycle segmentation, they succeeded in creating a creating a very effective campaign.

Enjoy the case study:

TriNet: Sweet Music – Targeting of Purchase Ready
Buyers

TriNet (http://www.trinet.com/), a leading provider of HR outsourcing services for small and medium-sized businesses, found that a face to face meeting with a sales consultant was a key step needed to push decision-making executives over the goal line. It built a strong base of thought leadership through several nurture campaigns, but wanted to motivate purchase-ready prospects to take the plunge.

To do this, TriNet devised a campaign with the call to action being a meeting with a TriNet salesperson - a significant commitment of time for any busy executive. The personal incentive: a free MP3 music player just before the upcoming holiday season.
This large incentive, combined with the call to action, meant that TriNet needed to ensure its targeting was accurate. Otherwise, it risked wasting money on a large number of respondents taking meetings simply for the free MP3 player. The real targets: decision makers who had previously engaged with TriNet but had NOT taken a meeting with a sales consultant.

To build that list of targets, TriNet turned to its database of prospects who had been nurtured with thought leadership campaigns. By segmenting on title, industry, and employee size, the ideal target list was constructed.

Using that list, TriNet launched a combined direct mail and e-mail campaign driving the prospects to a personalize site (www.mytrinet.com/prospectname). The mailer consisted of a small box containing MP3-player earphones to highlight the value of the offer and catch attention. Response activity from the prospects initiated a notification to the appropriate rep to begin scheduling the meeting before interest waned.

The campaign was highly successful in moving prospective buyers to the final stage of their buying process. Conversions to meetings increased by more than 20% over previous quarters and sales directly attributed to the campaign have generated more than 10 times the cost of the campaign.

Based on this success, the campaign has been repurposed as a key marketing asset in TriNet’s nurturing process. Now, each potential buyer who becomes aware of TriNet through search, advertising, webinars, or whitepapers is entered into a nurturing campaign combining email and direct mail to build the case for TriNet’s solutions. When interest (as measured by the prospect’s digital body language) is detected 3 times, the incentive-based offer to take a meeting with a sales consultant is launched.

Sybase: Process And Analysis Ecosystem

You would expect that Sybase, as a provider of some great analysis products, would have a good sense of how to analyze their marketing. They do, but under the hood, their great analytics is built upon a very well thought out approach to all aspects of the sales and marketing process. By focusing on the three main goals of sales effectiveness, campaign success, and coverage optimization, Sybase was able to optimize their overall marketing efforts, while providing rich insights into what was and was not working.

This case study is from Digital Body Language. Enjoy:

Sybase: Process And Analysis Ecosystem

As a billion-dollar enterprise software company, Sybase has a broad and complex sales and marketing ecosystem. For the Sybase marketing team, given that they a provider of some of the industry’s leading database and analytics products, and have highly analytical executives, this leads to a need to present a clear overview of what is happening within marketing to all levels of the organization.

To do this, the Sybase team focused on three key areas of analytics; sales effectiveness, campaign success, and coverage optimization. The first of these analytics efforts, sales effectiveness, became the focus of the bi-weekly pipeline review between sales and field marketing. For each region, a detailed review of marketing activity and prospect response would be performed for the key accounts in the region. Highlights of the prospects’ digital body language in accounts that had gone quiet would be used to trigger different account strategies for those accounts.

The second focus, campaign success, was a marketing-driven effort to analyze the effectiveness of campaigns against stated goals. Each campaign would be given different goals based on the call to action (ie, web seminar marketing campaigns would be analyzed on % registered whereas telemarketing campaigns would be analyzed on qualified leads captured). The campaigns were then analyzed against expected goals to understand where successes were being achieved and where ideas could be better shared. This analysis generally remained at the tactical level, as, given the length of the buying process in question, the macro analysis found marketing influence in over 90% of deals.

The third main focus, coverage optimization, was again done as a bi-weekly exercise. Top level marketing expenditure amounts were defined based on industry comparables, but within that overall framework, each expense item was coded by region and product. Comparing both marketing expenditures and prospect interest levels on a region and product grid allowed Sybase to identify areas in need of additional focus and reallocate investments quickly to the needed regions.

By leveraging its own analytics technology to better understand the digital body language of its prospects, Sybase was able to provide its sales team, its marketing team, and its executive team with a previously unavailable understanding of what was and was not working in the revenue funnel.

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.

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.

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.

Sourcefire's Open Source Marketing Ecosystem

One of the great things about writing a book is that you have so many great conversations with leaders in the field. Chatting with Michele Perry and Karin Pindle, at Sourcefire was definitely one of those conversations. They have an interesting challenge as marketers; too many leads. Their open source product, SNORT, is wildly popular in the security space, and leads to large numbers of downloads. The marketing team's challenge, however, is to translate that interest into purchases of their commercial product, Sourcefire 3D.


Here's a case study on their efforts from my upcoming book Digital Body Language, to give you a sense of how the Sourcefire marketing team tackled that challenge:

Sourcefire: Open Source Marketing Ecosystem
As a leader in network security solutions, Sourcefire had both an opportunity and a challenge. Their freely available and popular open source SNORT® intrusion prevention system drove significant awareness and interest, but for their sales team to be most effective, they needed to engage with only the leads who were likely to purchase a commercial offering. To enable this, Sourcefire’s marketing team had to enable prospective buyers to progress through the maturity spectrum and identify those who were ready for sales engagement.

Search engine strategies targeted buyers at all phases of the buying cycle, with education offered to those searching for category-related terms and deeper demos and comparisons targeted at those searching for Sourcefire or a competitor directly. To start the process, Sourcefire created an education-heavy web experience. For those new to the category, analyst reports, case studies, demos, webcasts, and thought leadership were provided for little more than a small amount of information. This enabled Sourcefire to establish themselves in the prospects’ minds as a leader in the space, and engage in the start of an ongoing dialog, while at the same time guiding the prospects’ understanding and awareness of what matters most in security.

When engaged, a rich profile on interests and level of engagement enabled both the scoring of leads and the nurturing of those not yet ready for sales. A four category scoring system looked at marketing source, site activity, title, and company
profile in order to score and categorize leads.

With leads categorized in A, B, C, and D leads, the Sourcefire team did an interesting thing; A and B leads were immediately handed to sales, but the entire lead funnel was opened to them. Sales professionals would occasionally notice a D lead in a key account, and use the non-qualified lead as an opportunity to begin a relationship that would be valuable when the lead matures to a later stage.

Leads that were not picked up were nurtured over time, and with
dashboard metrics on lead population by level, they were moved slowly down the
funnel. Each nurturing campaign was measured on its ability to transition
leads between the stages. With this overall marketing structure in place,
the Sourcefire marketing team proudly points to two key data points as measures
of its success; their sales team has stopped screaming for more leads, and most
recently they achieved year-over-year quarterly revenue growth of 42% in 2Q08
over 2Q07. Both of which, of course, are great accomplishments for any
marketing organization."

Kadient: Blogging About Internal Processes Connects With Buyers

Transparency is a great approach to marketing, even when you might think that the internal workings of your organization might not be of any interest to your audience. Heather Stokes and Heather Margolis at Kadient found this out when leading bloggers took note of their internal efforts to develop user personas. The personas were being used to best focus their development efforts for their Sales Enablement products, but the effort Kadient had put in to understand their users (including life sized cardboard cutouts of Anya and Luke, two of the personas) won them recognition, awareness, and credibility with potential buyers in the social media sphere of influence.

The effort resulted in traffic to the Kadient site and an increase in credibility for their products and company. As with many investments of this nature though, it can be hard to measure the economic return. What are your thoughts as B2B marketers? Are these "inner-workings" efforts worth doing? Have you measured them successfully?

Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

Kadient: Blogging About Internal Processes Connects With Buyers

Kadient’s move into Software as a Service (SaaS) brought with it a fundamental shift in their marketing to connect more deeply with their buyer and user audience. A company-wide effort to develop and use buyer and user personas sparked numerous discussions on exactly how “Luke” or “Anya”, and several other personas, would use the product in his or her daily life, and how it should be built, marketed, and sold in order to best connect with him or her.

As they focused more on connecting with their buyers, Kadient fleshed out the personalities with increasing detail. Hobbies, personality traits, and even cardboard cutouts were created to provide insights into Anya and Luke. When a development or marketing meeting was held to discuss the market, the discussion would always focus around their buyer and user personas.

This effort was then noticed by David Meerman Scott, an influential industry blogger and writer, who highlighted Kadient’s efforts in his online forum. Although the main topic of the writing was the use of buyer and user personas, Kadient was identified as a leader in their field. Anya and Luke were highlighted in detail, allowing any reader of the blog to identify with their goals and challenges.

Two other industry bloggers, Charles Brown and Scott Sehlhorst of Tyner Blain, quickly picked up the story, and added their own commentary, further establishing Kadient as a company intently focused on the success of their customers. A Google blog search for Kadient shows these blogs highlighted at the top of the results, adding credibility to any buyer considering Kadient’s solutions. The combined traffic of these blogs was estimated at more than 20,000 regular viewers.

A 37% spike in web traffic to the Kadient site corresponding to this discussion on the blogs highlighted to the Kadient marketing team the importance to their prospective buyers of a company dedicated to continual understanding of the buyers’ needs. Although this was not an effort that generated direct sales leads, the value it provided in awareness and credibility was tremendous, and the cost was essentially zero.

Exeros: A Viral Contest Leads to the Creation of a University

Being a small company often provides interesting opportunities as well as unique challenges. Denise Sparks at Exeros had both, and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with her about her approach to demand generation when I was writing Digital Body Language. Denise's creative marketing techniques got the word out about the Exeros product and lead to an even larger initiative that established them as a thought leader in their industry.

Here's Denise's case study from the book. It's a great story about using market education and content creation to establish a leadership position:

Exeros: A Viral Contest Leads to the Creation of a University

Exeros was faced with an interesting challenge. As a small company with a revolutionary product in the master data management (MDM) industry, they had to get the word out and build awareness of their product. Confident that it had solved a 40 year old data management problem, they used a contest to prove their point. Beat your peers in data mapping with any technique or tool you wish, and win $2500, beat the machine and win $25,000.

As they began to build awareness of the contest, Exeros found a valuable ally in the organizer of DAMA – the largest conference in the industry. In an industry not known for excitement, the Exeros contest was just what was needed as a show highlight, and the contest was promoted to the conference list and the winner announced at a show lunch.

In combination with announcing the contest to their house list and embedding it in the email signature of all their employees, this allowed word of the contest to begin to spread. Independent data management forums and Yahoo groups began passing around word of the contest and soon the industry was well aware of both the contest and Exeros.

All interested participants were routed to a landing page where their information was captured and they were entered in the contest. On the day of the contest, a WebEx kicked off the contest with results due back in 2 hours. Over 200 industry experts competed for the prize, with no-one able to beat the Exeros machine. Coverage of the contest extended to 5 online publications that were highly relevant in the space, and Exeros became a known entity in the data management space.

Analyzing this success, Exeros realized that the viral contest had been a great win in getting awareness in the potential buying audience, but had not directly driven leads that were ready for sales. The challenge for Exeros was to help guide their prospective buyers from the “this is new” phase to the “I’ve got to get it” phase. To do this, the buyers needed to educate themselves on the challenges, approaches, and opportunities of a master data management project and where exactly a vendor like Exeros could help. Trade shows and Exeros-branded webinars were not as effective as needed due to travel costs and the assumed bias of a vendor webinar. The Exeros marketing team decided there was an opportunity to fill the knowledge gap in the market and use that as a way to attract potential buyers…and MDM University was born.

MDM University was launched as a separate brand (although with Exeros and their business partners identified as sponsors), with rich, valuable content, education at all needed depths throughout the lifecycle of an MDM project, and speakers from the industry. The MDM University was marketed through online ads and in trade publications.

By catering to the buyer’s need for education, Exeros was able to attract a large audience of the key people in any buying decisions. Because MDM University was perceived to be vendor neutral, it was able to attract 5 times the number of attendees to a web seminar than Exeros or any of their vendor partners could on their own. Throughout the process, the educational choices of the University attendees were tracked to build a view of their interest areas and the phase in an MDM project they were at. Through sponsorship of MDM University communications, Exeros received tremendous brand exposure. When the Exeros sales team contacted a lead and introduced themselves as sponsors of MDM University, not only were they received as a highly respected and credible brand, but they were contacting prospective buyers at just the right phase of an MDM project.