Evaluating Marketing Automation - 10 Questions To Ask

The market for marketing automation software is doing very well these days. This has lead to an unprecedented variety of options for marketers to choose from, and the range of options can be dizzying. While many of the discussions can focus on software and feature/function comparisons, this is only one element of success. To be truly successful, you need focus on the people, process, and technology changes with equal energy. As a big believer in the economics of smart buyers, I wanted to share ten question areas that are key to dive into when evaluating a marketing automation investment.

The people and process elements of the investment are often the most interesting. Some organizations have the skills in house to make the needed business process changes, and some organizations are more comfortable bringing in outside expertise in order to facilitate discussions, avoid mistakes, and gain consensus on the changes.

If you have not gone through this process before, you will want to ask your team, your consulting partner, or your chosen software vendor some deep questions in order to ensure that you will be able to succeed with your software implementation.

There are no "right" answers to look for, but these are areas to discuss, debate, and understand. These questions will differ based on your business and your team, but the following list of ten questions will hopefully get you started.

Ten questions to ask your team, your services partner, or your software vendor, in order to highlight key questions, process issues, and areas of concern:

1) How will we define a qualified lead for sales?

Having sales buy in to your definition is crucial, but reaching agreement between marketing and sales on the definition of a qualified lead is not as easy as it seems. What mistakes can be avoided? How will you score explicit (who) and implicit (how interested) activity? Are there multiple product lines that need to be scored separately?


2) What is marketing's service level agreement with the sales team?

How are leads routed to sales? Are there overlays for strategic accounts, specific product lines, or geographies we need to take into account when routing leads? How will these be handled? How is routing in “large” geographies like New York city or California handled – zip code? Area code? How quickly do leads need to get to sales? What happens when leads are passed to sales – does sales have a specific time frame for follow-up? What if this is missed, are leads clawed back?


3) What do we do with leads that are not yet ready for sales?

Can we establish a lead nurture program? Do we have the right content? How will we monitor whether the audience is losing interest? How will we make sure we are not over/under-communicating to each person? Do we have the content in place to guide buying criteria over time as we nurture?

4) How will our marketing automation data and CRM data integrate seamlessly?

What if a person doesn’t exist in the CRM system? What if they exist multiple times? If a person is influenced by multiple campaigns, how does this appear? How is digital body language presented to our sales team? How do the data, activities, and process aspects of the integration work together with our business?

5) How good is our data? How good does it need to be?

Are our titles/geographies/industries/revenues all standardized and normalized? Is new data from lists, web forms, CRM systems, and tradeshows standardized? Are we building rules for personalization, segmentation, lead scoring, or lead routing on top of data that is not standardized? Are there best practices for building a contact washing machine that we want to leverage?

6) Do we need to add data from external sources?

Are we going to ask prospects for every piece of information we need? Can we leverage sources like Dunn & Bradstreet to append data and avoid asking excess questions? Where in the process will we do this? What do we do about internally sourced info like sales territories or geographic regions – how can we append this data if we need to? Do we have an understanding of how to balance the customer experience between asking for too much, and too little data?

7) Do we understand how to maximize email deliverability?

How will we ensure that our emails are delivered? Do we have the right people to understand what technologies need to be in place to maximize email deliverabililty? Do we have the right relationships with ISPs and policy boards? Will emails appear to come from us, or from a third party? Can we allow our audience to manage their own preferences? What are the best approaches to use? What metrics will we look at to understand and report on email deliverability to see if we’re starting to encounter problems?

8) What analysis and dashboards will we present to management?

What are our key metrics? What industry benchmarks will we compare to? How will we define the stages of the buying process? How will we measure each of those stages? If there are many touchpoints in an overall buying process, how do we measure the effectiveness of an individual campaign? What will our executive marketing dashboards look like?


9) Where are we going? What is our strategy and roadmap for success?

Is there a marketing maturity framework we are using in order to guide our progress year over year? Do we know where we are currently on that framework? Do we have a plan for how we are going to make progress each quarter/year? Is management bought in to the goals?

10) How well do we understand the needs of our international colleagues?

Do we understand the cultural difference in marketing to each geography that we need to be aware of? Do we understand the regulatory differences in terms of permission and data management? How are we going to deploy a single platform to our international team? Do we understand the best approaches?


A few of these questions may not be relevant to your business, but many of them will, and they will take the discussion beyond feature comparisons in software platforms and into the realm of what it will take to truly drive success in your business. By taking a deep dive into each of these areas, you will gain a better understanding of your own needs, and the capabilities of various providers in meeting those needs. By doing so, you will move yourself one step closer to success.

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

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 - 2009/08/07

There are so many great writers in the field of demand generation and marketing automation out there that create fresh and interesting content each week. Some are entertaining, some are practical, some are thought provoking, and they are all worth a read. Here are some of the posts I have enjoyed over the past week or so (in no particular order):





Tom Pick (@tompick) from Web Market Central questions the quest for "Return on Investment" in social media with the concept of "Return on NOT Investing". An interesting read and definitely another way of thinking about the opportunity costs involved:
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-media-roi-vs-roni.html





The Savvy B2B Sisters (@Savvy_B2B) provide a detailed guide on the how and the why of writing eBooks for B2B marketing and thought leadership: http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/194051/5-things-you-should-know-before-you-write-an-ebook





Robert Lesser from Acquiring Minds gives an entertaining (but surprisingly accurate) run-down of the Top 10 Signs that Sales & Marketing are Mis-Aligned:
http://www.directimpactnow.com/leadgentools/blog/2009/07/10-signs-that-sales-marketing-are-mis.html







Chad Horenfeldt (@ChadHorenfeldt) from Anything Goes Marketing posts a very comprehensive set of ways of using Twitter for B2B marketing and sales:
http://anythinggoesmarketing.blogspot.com/2009/08/tips-on-using-twitter-to-boost-your.html




Brian Carroll (@brianjcarroll) from Start with a Lead reviews the book “Professional Services Marketing” that talks about the marketing and selling of professional services, and why it is that clients buy:
http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/08/good-advice-for-growing-your-company-from-industry-experts.html




Laura Ramos (@lauraramos) from B2B Marketing Posts dissects a stat that shows that social media use is soaring in B2B marketing, and makes some great comments on "use" vs "success" in social media for B2B marketing:
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/08/04/social-media-use-soars-among-b2b-marketers-really/




Mike Damphousse (@damphoux) from Green Leads made a compelling argument for lead quality over lead quantity. Mike's coming at it from the appointment setting business, but the argument still holds water in regular demand generation circles. Quality will pretty much always trump quantity:
http://www.damphousse.org/2009/07/sales-ready-leads-quality-vs-quantity.html





Steve Kellogg (LinkedIn) from Crowds2Crowds wrote an entertaining obituary for batch & blast marketing. I can't agreee more, the sooner we move away from batch & blast campaigning towards truly understanding our prospects, the better we all do. RIP batch & blast: http://crowds2crowds.blogspot.com/2009/08/for-those-still-using-batch-blast.html






Britton Manasco (@brittonmanasco) from Illuminating the Future writes a very thought provoking post on whether the "Guidance Economy" is the next wave. Lends a new imperitive to thought leadership initiatives:
http://www.brittonmanasco.com/2009/07/confronting-the-guidance-imperative.html





Jep Castelein (@jepc) from Lead Sloth breaks apart the various types of "free trials" that are used in B2B marketing and discusses how they can best be used and what they are appropriate for. Worth thinking about before a mad rush to offer a free trial:
http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/free-trials-arent-what-they-used-to-be/






Mac McIntosh (@B2B_Sales_Leads) from Sales Lead Insights posts a comprehensive list of decision criteria for lead qualification from demographics and firmographics to activity and interest profiling. A good discussion starts in the comments:
http://www.sales-lead-insights.com/2009/a-list-of-b2b-lead-qualification-criteria-by-category/

Data Quality: Balancing the Customer Experience

I was in a conversation recently with Tim Wilson from Gilligan on Data about the balance between the client experience and data quality when it comes to semi-standard data like title or industry. On one side of the spectrum, the best user experience is often free-form text. Forcing a user to select from a defined set of choices often leads to a frustrating experience. A short list of titles, for example, will often be missing a good match for the visitor’s title, and lead to a poor selection. A longer list forces the user to select from many, many options, and impacts their ability to quickly use the form.

However, on the opposite side of the spectrum, demand generation relies on clean data. Rules for such activities as segmentation, lead scoring, and lead routing may be built on such data fields as title or industry. Personalized content rules might select a piece of content based on visitor data, and analytics may present results that build off of the underlying data. In all cases, having clean data is critical to the success of these initiatives.

So, how do we balance the requirement for the best possible visitor experience with the need for cleansed data to work with within our marketing database? The answer is through using secondary data fields for standardized data. The user is allowed to input free-form data on the web form, which provides them with an optimal user experience.

As the form is submitted, this data is fed into an inline data cleansing system (such as a contact washing machine) to scrub the data. The free-form data is compared against a standard list of titles in the contact washing machine. Because this step is automated, and not part of the user’s experience, the size of the list of titles used does not matter, and accuracy does not have to be sacrificed.

However, when a match is made, the resulting data can be fed into a secondary field, rather than back into the original field, leaving the user’s free-form data intact. In many cases, it may be useful to feed the data into more than one field. For example, when looking at a visitor’s title, it may be useful to split it into a “level” component (Vice Presidente, C-level, Manager, Director), and a “department” component (sales, marketing, finance, human resources).

As an example:

• User Inputs: "V.P. Marketing"

which is then split into three data fields:

• Raw Title is Maintained as "V.P. Marketing"
• Level is Standardized as "Vice President"
• Area is Standardized as "Marketing"

The personalization, scoring, segmentation, and routing rules that are needed can be built on the cleansed and standardized data, giving maximum accuracy and ease of use to the marketer. At the same time, the visitor is able to submit free-form data, which provides them with an excellent user experience.

The SaaS Experience; Application, Knowledge, Best Practices

Our customer success team recently released our Customer Central portal, which provides a wealth of material to aid in customer success. The project has been under way for some time, but its release got me thinking about the future of the SaaS application experience.

Much of the discussion around the user experience that a software vendor provides is focused on the technology itself. This is very much a key aspect of the experience a user has with a software application, but it's very much not the only aspect of that experience.


There are three main areas of the overall experience a user has with software:



The Software Application: the product itself, and the aspects of the technology and user interface that guide a user to better understand and use it


Help and Documentation: the explicit knowledge that surrounds the application and provides instructions on its use. Whether in a help center, support portal, or knowledge-base, this documentation is generally application specific and task focused.


Community and Practice Information: the implicit knowledge of how an application can best be used to achieve a business goal. Often this information is shared through peers who have gained experience with using the application to tackle a business objective, and embodies a broader scope, including business, process, and political issues likely to be encountered.


Why bring this up?


Because I suspect we are at an interesting inflection point in the market after which these three experiences will no longer be separate.

Currently, these three main areas of experience with an application are separate. Software vendors provide the application experience, and whereas they may use a variety of third party tools to do so, it is delivered as a relatively self-contained experience.


The documentation for a software application is, similarly, delivered as another experience. Very often, a third party provider of documentation software is used that provides the ability to store and present information, and allows users to search for information in a variety of ways.


Community and best practice information is delivered in a much less standard way. Sometimes it is delivered through a single portal interface that manages a vibrant community, but often it is an amalgamation of a variety of sources, some company sponsored, and some user driven, where best practice approaches are shared.


There are a few interesting trends in each of these that makes me think that within a few short years we will be dealing with a single user experience across all three.

First, SaaS technologies, unlike installed software, easily allow integration of the experiences of the software application, and the help documentation. As both the software application and the documentation libraries are now built to be deployed in the cloud, it is a simple exercise in software engineering to embed the help documentation directly into the application experience.

Today's documentation systems are rapidly evolving to better support this approach, as it allows contextual access to key information, and thus greatly improves the users experience with the application.

Secondly, there is a significant evolution in both community software and help documentation software to move their experiences closer together. Idea exchanges, discussion forums, and collaborative voting on enhancements, all allow the viewers of once-passive documentation forums to interact with one another and exchange ideas.

Thirdly, applications themselves are beginnning to enable the sharing of best practice approaches. In demand generation and B2B marketing, the best automation programs for event management, free trial optimization, data management, lead routing, or lead scoring are being shared among marketers within, and even between, organizations.

As these transitions take place, we are evolving towards a user experience that combines all three, for the benefit of the marketer. As an example, a marketer looking to build a lead nurturing campaign should be able to, from a single experience:

• compare notes with other marketers who have tackled similar business challenges
• download sample nurturing campaigns as potential starting points
• understand the precise functionality of a particular software feature being used
• build and deploy their own lead nurturing campaign

Today's marketers, when evaluating software offerings, are increasingly pushing the evaluation envelope of demand generation software beyond the software itself. In its early days, SaaS software shifted an element of the burden to achieve success back towards the software vendor through a pricing model that was recurring, not upfront. It has been a very healthy shift for the industry and clients. Now, as marketers increasingly push to evaluate how each vendor will provide an overall, wholistic experience that allows them to achieve success, we will see this shift continue.

Software continually evolves, and at each evolutionary step, disparate parts of the software stack become seamlessly integrated for the benefit of the user. I suspect that one of the next evolutions we are about to see is the integration of the application, the documentation, and the community into a single, seamless experience for the user. I, for one, am very much looking forward to it.

I look forward to your comments. Is this a shift you can see happening? Are you beginning to evaluate software in general, and demand generation software specifically on its overall experience and path to success?

Metaphors, Mental Models, and Nurture Marketing

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


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


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


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


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


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

You can't build your own television network

I was in a long conversation the other day trying to explain the importance of social media in the world of marketing, as I suspect many of us have tried. Given that I'm originally a techy and an engineer, I tend to approach things in a certain way, so my explanation went down that path also.

Regardless of whether messages are consumed via push or pull, word of mouth or television, social media or mass marketing, there's a fairly simple structure. You, as a marketer, want to get a message out, you have a "messaging infrastructure" to communicate that message, and you have an audience who you would like to receive (or discover) and digest your message.

Social media, and its broad set of tools and platforms is a way in which your message gets out to your audience. Mostly this is through through them discovering the message, rather than receiving it directly from you, as it is passed on through various nodes in the social networks that each recipient is a part of.

There have been a lot of posts about the growth rates in social media, and the way in which people consume their information. You get that. At some point in the future, "investing in social media" will have to be a key part of everyone's marketing plans. Right now it's not; some are investing in it, some are not. So the question is, why invest in it NOW, rather than wait to see how it evolves and what investments make sense. The current arguments on the proven ROI of social media are, to be frank, a bit anecdotal.

However, I think that the analysis is thinking of things a bit incorrectly. In the world of mass media, you are essentially renting the messaging infrastructure from an established provider such as a TV station or mailing house. You pay a certain amount and your message gets delivered. You measure the return of this investment on a single message basis - what effect did one advertising campaign have, for example.

Social media is VERY different, each message you send has two aspects you need to care about; the message itself, and its effect on building or deteriorating your network. You cannot effectively buy your messaging infrastructure in social media, you must build it yourself, and this is a fundamental change in the way many of us think about getting a message to an audience.

So why invest NOW? The answer comes by looking at what it takes to influence an audience with a single message. Influencing an audience has two key aspects to it, getting the message to the audience (Distribution), and having them pay attention to it (Strength). In mass media, this is accomplished by acquiring a large distribution for your message using a media buy (television, radio, print), and developing an impactful message to deliver, through great creative, a compelling offer, and elegant copy. Success on both dimensions is roughly determined by how much you spend (many counter examples of expensive campaigns that flop miserably, notwithstanding).

Social media is very different. You are building a network, and it is not a network that you can acquire (note the controversy even in sponsored posts with Chris Brogan's now infamous (but well handled) controversy: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/advertising-and-trust/)

If you look at what drives our two key dimensions of influence in social media, strength of message and distribution, it could not be more different. Strength of message, as we all know from our own lives, is governed by the source of the message more than anything. I was looking for a new receiver a while ago, and I asked Chris Dias, a friend of mine, who happens to be a guy I trust on the topic of A/V equipment. He said "buy the Pioneer Elite, it's good". I bought it. Nothing to do with the creative of the message, everything to do with the source of the message.

Chris enjoys his status as the guru of A/V equipment in our social circle, and he maintains it by being knowledgeable, helpful, and usually right about the topic. Social media is no different.

Influencing influencers comes down to providing them with content of high enough quality that they find it useful to the groups they influence. Providing this high quality content, over time, in order to build credibility with the right influencers takes time, effort, integrity, and insightful content.

Then there's distribution. Social networks evolve over time, and as they evolve, they develop an ability to manage message retransmission through quality filters. Clay Shirky, one of my favourite writers on social media, puts it well in saying that it's not information overload, it's filter failure. (http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/4817) If you think of Aunt Maud's (everyone has one) constant forwarding of those rehashed joke emails from the 90's you'll know what I mean about filters. The message may be received, but won't make it past the filter.

For a message to pass through a social network, it has to pass three milestones:

• Received: the message comes from someone who is a connection


• Filtered: the message passes the filter criteria; either actual system rules (TweetDeck), or engrained habits (reflexively deleting Aunt Maud's emails)


• Retransmitted: the message is interesting enough ("remarkable" enough, as Seth Godin would say) to be passed on to colleagues and friends

The key thing though is that the paths in a social network are strengthened by traffic. A source providing quality content will be a source you view more credibly later. Being viewed as a quality source in the network for a single message will translate into being seen as a quality node in the network in general.

The way to grow a network in size and strength is to steadily and reliably contribute high quality, remarkable content to it.

Investing in social media is not the same as investing in TV advertising. It cannot be measure in the same way as the return on investment in a single message as an ad campaign can because of the fact that the network cannot be acquired, it can only be grown. Each message that passes through the network will be judged on its own merits and will increase or decrease the quality of your overall network and your ability to influence the influencers. The organic nature of this growth means that time is a critical factor, and one that cannot be expedited.

Unless you have fundamental doubts that social networks are likely to be one of the most critical information sources for prospective buyers in the coming years, there's every reason to begin your investment in social media sooner rather than later, to allow sufficient time for your network to grow and mature.

Looking for an Outcome - Testing in B2B

I was watching Tamara Gielen's video of Jim Sterne from the EIS keynote (http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/2008/12/eis-keynote-cro.html), and it got me thinking about the challenges of testing in B2B. It's a tough exercise because of one fundamental challenge. Testing of marketing involves defining an outcome you're looking for so that you can say that option A did a better job than option B of driving that outcome. The trouble with B2B marketing is that those outcomes make a quick jump from irrelevant to immeasurable.


What do I mean by that?


Well, in B2C marketing, you can often define the outcome of a marketing campaign as purchase revenue. Send an email, observe how many people buy and how much they spend. You can then test against that outcome to see which copy, creative, subject, or list drives more of it and that's your best marketing option.


In B2B marketing, your sales cycles are often much longer - months if not quarters or years - and the sales cycle is often concluded off-line by a sales rep getting a signature on a contract. This means that any testing you might want to do against the ideal results - the driving of revenue - are both extremely difficult to tie together, and require more time to elapse than is practical (if you have to wait 3 months to see enough results to determine which marketing campaign to launch, you've likely missed your window).


Similarly, if you look at things that can be easily measured in B2B, they are usually not significant enough to guide decisions; opens, clickthroughs, and form submits are not great indicators of revenue. If you are testing against which campaign drives more of these activities, you are likely going to find that free iPod giveaways perform fairly well, but as we've all seen, they are not likely to turn into good leads for your sales team to follow up with.


Luckily, there is an interim outcome that you can test against, does correspond to revenue potential, and is quickly determined; the qualified lead. With a definition in place of what a qualified lead is, you now have a measurement of what outcome your campaigns are trying for.


Note that what we're talking about here is leads qualified based on their interest (implicit scoring) rather than who they are (explicit scoring), as your marketing campaigns are unlikely to change the titles or industries of your audience. (for a deeper discussion on dimensions of scoring, see here:

http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html)


The advantage of this approach is that it can test more than just a single-point communication such as an email. In B2B marketing, we are often looking to test one sequence of communications against another (let's say it's a 3 step program for post-webinar follow-up and we're testing two different messaging options, or an all-email version against a multi-channel version using email, direct mail, and voice). If you're doing that, you have even more need to use an abstracted outcome like qualified leads to be able to look at the overall effect of one sequence over another.


I look forward to you comments on what has and has not worked in your testing efforts against longer sales cycles.

How much is too much? Frequency management and control

One conversation I end up in a lot with clients is the "how many times can I email a person per month?" conversation. Unfortunately, there is not a magic number, and attempting to govern around one can be damaging.

The reason that there's not a magic number is that email is only useful in the context of building a relationship, and in a relationship communication frequency changes dramatically depending on the type of relationship and where that relationship is at the moment. Think of this question in terms of your communications with your friends and family - how many times per month do you communicate with your spouse? kids? Aunt Hilda? Neighbors? Old friends from school days? The answer is that it depends on the relationship.

It's the same thing in B2B marketing. If you are actively engaging with a prospect, and they are highly interested in what you are offering, they will want, and appreciate, frequent communications. However, if you're only lightly engaged with someone, and they have only displayed minimal interest, you will turn them off with more than a communication per month in many cases.

The answer is that you have to manage this from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

There is not a top-down X emails per month number that you can manage to. Instead, you need to understand your audience in terms of how much you have communicated to them and, more importantly, how engaged they are with you, and use that to guide communication frequency.

Use your understanding of your audience's response to your marketing (their Digital Body Language) to segment them into groups. Use communication frequency and response frequency(email opens, clicks, form submits, web visits, etc) to define three segments:

• High Engagement: you have sent them many communications, and they have shown great inbound interest


• Moderate Engagement: you have sent them some communications, but their inbound activity remains occasional


• Low Engagement: you have communicated with them, but they show little to no inbound activity
  

From here, you can then use these segments to build a bottom-up frequency management structure. Look at your communications and define what category they fall into. If they are a "required" or "all recipients" category, you may not suppress against any of the groups (eg, registration confirmation for events the recipient just registered for, or the quarterly thought leadership newsletter). If the messages are in an "active interest" category, you may suppress Low and Moderate Engagement segments from receiving them (up to the minute news, detailed product information, etc), and if the messages are in a "moderate interest" category you may only suppress the Low Engagement segment.

This gives you a good bottoms up model for structuring your communications strategy to avoid over-communicating with some of your recipients (causing Emotional Unsubscribes: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/emotional-unsubscribes.html) without preventing the formation of deeper relationships with those who are showing great interest.

I look forward to your comments or experiences with managing communication frequency.

High noon at the web form

Quickest draw wins... well not quite, but speed is more important than many B2B marketers realize (or at least act upon). Fine tuning your response to inbound inquiries can have a significant impact on your success without requiring much of an investment.

Leigh Anne Wallace at Reachforce had a blog entry recently that was a good reminder for all of us of the studies that show the real benefits to responding quickly to inbound inquiries: http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/what-is-your-web-lead-response-time-b2b-marketing-and-sales-tip-177/. From the original report:

"The speed of first attempt (time to first dial) to a newly generated web lead
correlated with a significant increase in the number of qualified leads. For
each tier of delayed response in the survey question (for instance, responding in 30 minutes rather than 10 minutes) the percent of leads qualified dropped 4.3% and close rates fell nearly 2%."

It's more difficult than it seems as you need to put three basic processes in place to have it make sense, unless your flow of inquiries is small enough that you really can follow up with every inquiry. You need:

1. a basic call/no-call qualification process
2. the basics of routing to the right rep
3. a quick notification process
   

For the lead qualification process, I'd hesitate to call it lead scoring just yet, because you many want to lower the bar a little bit and follow up with most inquiries, even those that would not pass as A leads. There is a strong argument in favour of automating most of this process because it's all too easy to come up with an "I didn't call because..." reason after the fact if you leave it to the individual callers. You'll likely need to manage and measure follow-up speed in a hands-on way, and if it's open to loose interpretation, that process might fall apart quickly.

For lead routing, again, simple is best. The best I've seen had a very small dedicated person/team on it, rather than distributing more broadly. It's likely that your first call outcome goals are relatively simple in nature (more details, setting a meeting, etc) and can be managed by someone who is not that territory's sales rep.

For notification, once you know you're going to call them, and you know the right rep to make the call, email is usually quickest and easiest. Its main drawback is that it's more difficult to close the loop and monitor response times, but to get a process up and running quickly it is the easiest bet.

It doesn't take long to get a feel for what your actual response times to inbound marketing inquiries are, and if it's not what you'd hoped, there may be an easy way for you to improve your team's performance. A quick "mystery shopper" inquiry or two can give you a good idea of how you're really performing. In fact, I might try that with the Eloqua team right now...

Interesting Times in The Demand Generation Space

I spent a bit of time this weekend reading (okay, more like skimming, I admit) a report on our recent SAS-70 audit. I would be lying to call it an interesting read; detailed descriptions of our process controls, policies, and operations as a software company. But, it did get me thinking about the ongoing evolution of the Demand Generation space.


It's an interesting space, and it has been evolving very rapidly. When we started Eloqua back at the end of 1999, Google was still 10 months away from launching adwords, blogs only existed in primitive form as frequently updated web pages, and most B2B websites were barely more than brochure-ware.


Now, 9 years later, finishing a SAS-70 audit is one of those moments that makes one take a moment to reflect on the space, where it came from, and where it's going (I guess it's a bit like that first grey hair; a sign of age and wisdom, they say, but also a moment to reflect on times past). After a few years in which us early Demand Generation vendors stumbled around unsure of our own identities, the space has taken on a somewhat clear identity (*nowhere near as clear as the identity of spaces like CRM, but Demand Gen is a lot newer of a space than CRM).


Demand Generation essentially entails, at its core, the use of web analytics to understand prospect behaviour and intent (what we call Digital Body Language). Based on that understanding, marketers then:

• Personalize the targeting, timing, and content of messages to prospects based on their interest area and interest level


• Determine which leads are ready for sales through lead scoring and lead routing, while nurturing the leads that are not


• Analyze the success of their campaigns based on how they facilitate prospects' buying processes


• Continue to grow their understanding of each prospect's Digital Body Language through management and enhancing of their marketing data

So, that leads to a fairly defined set of functionality; email, web analytics, search tracking, landing pages, form capture, lead scoring, marketing automation, lead routing, CRM integration, basic data management, and analytics. As we close out 2008, that's where the core capabilities are in the space.

As we've had the good fortune to work with a wide variety of clients over the years, the directions in which they are hoping to see the space evolve are not always identical, and the SAS-70 audit process made that point quite clear. This is an audit that larger organizations (especially public companies) are seeking, whereas smaller organizations often do not have the same requirements.

The next few years will show an interesting evolution in the Demand Generation space as this is just one aspect of its continuing evolution. Here's what we're seeing if I use a way-too-broad brush to show the trends:


Larger organizations: as they shift their marketing efforts more towards demand generation and inbound marketing and away from outbound marketing, they are looking for ways to manage 100s of marketers, 1000s of campaigns, and 10s of 1000s of marketing assets around the world. Campaign planning, calendaring, and approvals are of interest. Similarly, the need to communicate with millions of contacts and score leads across multiple geographies and product lines makes data management a key area of focus for them.


Smaller organizations: often more nimble and innovative in their approach, and more aggressively adopting social media tools for demand generation, such as search engine optimization, blogs, Twitter, etc. This drives an increased need for cross-media integration, embedding of RSS content, and social media awareness.


So, we're at an interesting cross-roads as an industry, because although I have bucketed each of these needs by size of company, both groups benefit from each other's investment. It's an excellent benefit of the SaaS model. Even things like the work that was done in preparation for our SAS-70 audit, although not required by the smaller organizations we work with, will benefit them in terms of process management and organization, in the same way that the investments we have been making over the past while in simplicity and usability are also benefiting our larger clients.


It will be interesting to see how the Demand Generation industry evolves over the next 5 - 10 years. Will it evolve into very different and distinct solutions for small organizations and large, as we see in the difference between accounting and ERP software? Or will small and large organizations use shared aspects of a common platform as is the model with SaaS CRM?


Looking forward to the next few years, and I'm very interested in your comments.

What I Learned in Kindergarten about B2B Marketing

There's a lot about B2B marketing that can be learned in kindergarten. Like sharing. It's all the same except that the currency has changed from chocolate bars and those little packages of cheese and crackers to information.


As a provider in the space, you (hopefully) have something to share in terms of your insights, ideas, best practices, and advice, and you definitely have something that you want in terms of an opportunity to share your value proposition with the right audience who may eventually become buyers.

If you haven't yet, think of each of your marketing interactions in terms of a your-chocolate-bar-for-my-cheese&crackers metaphor, and you might come up with some easy wins to better engage your audience.

Top 6 B2B Marketing mistakes of sharing we all should have learned in kindergarten:

1. Asking for their entire lunch: one of the things that you can ask your audience for, and most B2B marketers do, is their contact information. This is a significant ask, and many potential buyers are hesitant to give it for good reason. But as a marketer, ask for just a little bit (name, email, that's it) at first, and make sure you are offering something good in exchange. Don't ask for 15 fields of information because you "might" need it. Every field makes the hurdle higher.


2. Trying to trade away the black jelly-beans: We all love our own products. That's healthy. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that "10 reasons you need my product" is rich, value-add content. It's a sales pitch. Even if you get away with it once, you won't get away with it twice.


3. Going hungry - not asking for anything in return: A contentious point, I know. But, we're all under pressure to build our businesses, and if you don't ask for information, you won't get it. Be respectful, don't ask for too much, but if you continually provide great content, you can ask for a small amount of information in return.


4. Stealing lunches: It's bad, don't do it. Ever. Kindergarten, or now. Every time you ask a person to pay attention to your message, you are requesting something from them. You'd better provide something in return. If you're emailing them, it is NOT free, it's an "ask", you're asking for their attention. If you don't provide quality content, you've given nothing in return, so pay attention to content quality or you'll lose people's interest quickly.


5. Taking something you already have in your lunch bag: You don't gain anything, and they feel taken advantage of. If you've already asked them for their industry, title, company size, etc, don't ask again. Put the effort in to make sure you know that you've already got the information, and don't ask for it again. If your content is rich enough, ask something new that you don't already have.


6. Mistaking your carrots for a chocolate bar: The concept of "valuable content" is thrown around very loosely in some marketing circles. You're not the judge of that, your audience is. Don't let your standards slip until you think you're trading away carrots and convincing yourself they're a chocolate bar. Things like a 1hr webinar with rich, non-salesy content from an independant market expert are good; Things like Top 10 reasons to buy your product are not good.

We at Eloqua have called it "Equitable Exchange of Information", but at the end of the day, it's really about sharing, and the same principles apply to information as to chocolate bars. Create great content, share generously, ask for only a little in return, and you're off to the races.

What Obama's Campaign Can Teach about B2B Marketing

The folks over at the Jaffe Juice blog had an interesting post regarding Stephen Geer, Obama's lead email marketing strategist's presentation at the Email Insiders summit. It got me thinking about the similarity between their highly effective strategy for a Presidential campaign, and the approach required to be a highly effective B2B marketer.

See the full blog post here: http://www.jaffejuice.com/2008/12/keynonte-at-email-insider-conference-stephen-geer-obama-email-director.html


They used a "3 M's" strategy, Messaging, Mobilization, and Money. I think their approach has some great lessons for us B2B marketers looking to connect with an audience.


The order of the Ms is important, and Money is the last M. First is Messaging; follow all the messaging threads and discussions that are going on, whether in the media, blogs, Twitter, etc. This is as important for B2B marketers as it is for political campaigns, as it is the best way to understand how to connect with the audience (by listening) and then establish a connection in whatever arena (blogs, Twitter, events, etc) makes sense for your audience. No money at this point, it's far too early for the sales pitch, just a focus on establishing a connection.


The next M is Mobilization; getting the audience engaged, interacting, organizing, voting. This is a step that is often under-invested in in many organizations. Use your web presence to "mobilize" in a way that makes sense for your audience. Attending events, downloading whitepapers, coming out to breakfast seminars, and joining webinars, are great ways to engage with your audience.


Only then do you get to the last M - Money. If you ask for the sale from someone you have not connected with and truly engaged, you will likely be wasting your time and frustrating them. Make it easy for them to raise their hand to say that they are ready to buy, as Obama's campaign did with "Donate" buttons in emails, but don't push hard for the sale until you are sure they are ready. Obama's campaign used forms, surveys and behavior to identify the right influencers, in the same way that we B2B marketers can use our prospects' Digital Body Language and lead scoring.

6 Really Simple Marketing Metrics for your Execs

We've all seen a similar cycle.... if you ask a marketing exec in a B2B company what metrics they'd want, it ends up in a complex description of ROI, funnel velocity, or influence measurement. Great goals, for sure, but not exactly quick wins. So, the reports aren't created for them and they end up with nothing. Let's start from the other direction, and look at 6 very simple measurements that you can provide them that they give them some simple insight into what's actually going on in marketing.


If you already provide this, fantastic, but I suspect there might be more than a few execs who don't have this data about marketing, and who would truly appreciate it. I get the pleasure of chatting with lots of present and future Eloqua clients, and from them I commonly hear that even high level data like this is very much appreciated.


-Contact database growth over time; gives a good sense of new name acquisition, unsubscribes, and overall size of list.


- Web traffic (new and returning visitors); this is where you're driving most people to if you're successful, it never hurts to have execs know about traffic levels. Knowing that x-thousand people are viewing your site on a daily basis never hurts in ensuring budget for the site redesign doesn't get cut, either.

-Raw Inquiries (form submits); I'm a huge proponent of lead scoring, but if you're not at the point where you can provide an executive dashboard of leads, properly scored and tallied, at least put out a list of raw inquiry counts to show inbound interest


-Total Campaigns; How many unique campaigns have been sent in the last month. This shows the level of activity of your marketing team in creating and promoting content, events, and webinars

-Communication Frequency; How often are you communicating with your database, are you under/over communicating


-Top Search Terms; How are people finding you? What are they most interested in, and is it more awareness, discovery, or validation?

So why these metrics? Well, for one, they're easy to do. Not much work with data or business processes involved, and you can have execs looking at them quickly. But, the more important reason is that they begin to focus attention on the right issues. It's only a beginning, but the direction is the right one.


As the world moves from outbound marketing and promotion to inbound marketing and demand generation, you need your execs to be asking things like: How do people find us? How many people are we educating? How frequently do they come to us for more information? Are they only passively reading that information or willing to provide their information in order to get it?


The more that execs ask this type of question, the more they will be bought in to the concepts of inbound marketing and demand generation. They will push for better nurturing of leads, more investment in social media to generate market awareness, more lead scoring, and better coordination with sales on which leads to hand off, and when. Those are the right directions for them to push, and if you can provide them with some of the right data at the start, you'll inspire more of those questions.


If you're already an Eloqua client and just want to build this out, there's some info on dashboarding on Eloqua Artisan - the user blog: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/quick-win-whats-going-on-in-my-database.html. Enjoy - I'd love to hear some of your best dashboards that people can get started with quickly and easily.

The Contact Washing Machine

I think we can all agree that B2B marketing has shifted from a purely creative discipline to a much more operational, process-oriented, data-centric, analytical discipline. It's a long road though, as the data we get to work with is often... well... terrible.

Data comes in through so many sources, most of which are not controlled in any way - free-form text. Web forms, tradeshows, lists, internal systems, etc. We're then expected to use that data for analysis, segment targeting, lead scoring, etc.

The best thing that anyone in Demand Generation can do, to set up for long term success, is to build a "Contact Washing Machine" that standardizes and normalizes this data as it comes in. For Eloqua users, I'll talk about some of the pieces of a good Contact Washing Machine on this blog's sister blog - Eloqua Artisan (http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name-job-titles-and.html).

If not, the things I typically see addressed on all incoming data are:

• Standardize Title to allow it to be used for Segmentation or Scoring
• Standardize Country to a 3-letter or 2-letter code
• Fix Zip codes from New England... they have a leading 0 and Excel drops that if the list has ever been in Excel
• Map to sales (or field marketing) territory
• Validate physical address (if you'll be using this)
• Match company to existing company list (or use a standard code such as DUNS)
• Map industry to SIC, NAICS or other industry code (if this is important for you)
• Any other data standards or fields that are key to your business

Putting this in place, and having all incoming data flow through it, is a great way to avoid the cycle of data continually degrading over time until a major undertaking (at great cost) is done to cleanse it, whereupon it immediately begins degrading again. Time is too short for bad data...

Books, Blogs, and Demand Generation

I'm in a bit of a circular world right now as I write a blog about Demand Generation that explores the topics in a book I've just written about using various web media, including blogs, for Demand Generation, and of course both the blog and the book will be used for generating demand. So, I should probably explain that, me, this blog, and the book.

It all started about a year ago, in a conversation with our CEO, after a long series of trips to visit a lot of clients. We were chatting about what each client was doing, how they were using our product (Eloqua), and what interesting things they were doing to do campaigns, score leads, automate marketing processes, manage data, coordinate with sales, measure effectiveness, etc. At first glance, it almost sounded like every client was doing something totally unique, but in our conversation I tried to tie it all together and say that it was all part of the same challenge.

And then Joe (our CEO) said "you should write a book about this". Kind of in the same tone as saying "you should order pizza for lunch"... I was not quick enough to say "but I have a day job", and so, with that, the book project was born.

It's been a very interesting year, spending a bit more time working to explain the new world of Demand Generation, but it's been a very fun one. I had the pleasure of interviewing over 50 customers throughout the year, and getting into a lot of details on how they were approaching the changes that are happening in marketing, and what they are doing to build a Demand Generation practice. From small startups through to Fortune 500 multinationals there were common threads in the changes they were seeing and the challenges they were tackling.

But, the most fun part of it so far has been getting to know the "new marketers". Operational, driven, process-oriented, data savvy, quantitative marketers - the exact opposite of the stereotypes.

So, the book... it's in layout right now (aah, that's it's own fun story, more on that another time), and due very soon. Which gives me a bit of time to take the ideas in the book online into a forum for more people to jump in with ideas, stories, and challenges. And, of course, the more people we can educate about Demand Generation, the more people may want to talk with us about how Eloqua can help. Nothing wrong with that at all...

I'll keep this blog updated on our progress with the book, and its trials and tribulations (I'm sure there will be some), as we use it in some of our campaigns.

Lead Scoring; Points, Ranks, and Sales Handoff

Everyone uses the term "lead scoring" in demand generation. It's definitely a foundational concept for the industry, but under the covers, there are (or should be) two things happening, only one of which is scoring. The goal, of course, is to look at your prospects, and understand whether they are the right person (explicit scoring) and/or are showing the right level of interest (implicit scoring). But, implied in this is the assumption that you will do something different with those that score high from those that score low.



If that's the case, and you are looking to do something different with some leads than others, you need to think about "lead ranking" as a core part of lead scoring. Let's look at an example. Say you want to divide up your leads using explicit (fit) criteria into As, Bs, and Cs, and then divide your leads using implicit (interest) criteria into 1s, 2s, and 3s. Then, the A1s would be passed to sales, the A3s would be nurtured, the C1s would be cultivated by inside sales to get to the right contact, and the C3s would be dropped (obviously the other categories would be dealt with also, but for the sake of simplicity bear with me).



Here's the challenge. We're now looking at two distinct undertakings:

1. Finding the right mix of criteria to score the leads in order to determine whether they are A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3. (See http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html for a discussion on why you really need both dimensions of scoring)



2. Building the business process for appropriate follow-up, nurture, or cultiviation of the leads once it has been decided that they are an A1, A3, or C1.

These undertakings are actually very separate, and both will need a lot of tuning over time. As your website changes, you launch new marketing campaigns, or you tweak the relative weights of one criteria over another, the scores of leads will change. Likewise, as you add sales people, change territories, or alter quotas, you may wish to send more leads of lower quality, or less leads of higher quality.

Separating the "lead scoring" - ie assigning 0-100 points based on activity - from the "lead ranking" - ie determining what is ranked as a 1, 2, or 3 - lets you build your business processes independent of any tweaking and optimization. Your field sales team may get A1 and B1 leads, your inside sales team may get A2, B2, and C1 leads, and you may route A3, B3, and C2 to your nurture marketing programs. Regardless of what you do to change your approach to scoring, or what the thresholds are for each rank, your team knows what to do when they see an A1 lead coming their way.

Not only can you better build your sales or nurture marketing follow-up processes based on abstracting the lead score from the lead rank, but you can look back at your sales successes after a few quarters, and by comparing the underlying score against the sales success rates, you can get good insights into whether you are able to loosen the ranking criteria and have more leads flow through to sales, or would be best to tighten the criteria and have less leads of higher quality.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

Nurture Marketing vs Pachinko

I had a great chat with a client the other week, and he had a very simple model for nurture marketing. It's a topic that a lot of people seem to over-think, when it comes to managing the who-has-received-what-message, and how-do-I-add-more-content issues that come up as soon as you want to make sure that everyone is nurtured BUT people aren't hit with similar messaging multiple times.

The model for this one was very simple - he called it Pachinko - the Japanese game that's half pin-ball, half slot machine, and I think I'll steal that term from him. The concept is to keep a very simple set of independant messages - the high level, educational, value add messages that you need to use in nurture marketing - and cycle prospects through the set continously like the marbles in a Pachinko machine.

The trick is that you need to manage the messaging within each box to make sure, at that level, that the person has not received the same message before. To do this, he had a simple two bucket control mechanism; people who had received the message and people who had read the message (by clicking through the email to read the full article).

Each "attempt message" breaks out into a quick routine, as pictured, and puts everyone flowing through the nurture program into "has been sent" and "has read" groups. Messages are never resent if the person has received it before (from this nurturing program, or from any other source).

The beauty of this approach though is that it is completely self-contained. You can add contacts to the program at any time, and at any place, and they will only receive the messages they have not received before. Similarly, you can add new messages to the nurture program at any time, and it will intelligently deliver them only to the right people.

The fact that this system cycles people back to the start continually means that any new content will be immediately picked up and delivered, while if they have received the content before they will receive nothing. Great for staying top-of-mind without overcommunicating, and any new connections can be added to this nurture program automatically.

Nurture marketing is a great way to stay in touch with prospects who have great potential, but are not ready to buy yet... borrowing a few ideas from Pachinko gives us an easy way to nurture without the headache of trying to manage who has seen what message.

If you're an Eloqua user, there is a more detailed view of how to build this here: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/building-pachinko-machine.html