Publicly Available Pricing: Theory and Practice

A lot of what I write on this blog has to do with the changes that have happened as a result of buyers’ increasing access to information. Often, these changes are looked at from a general perspective. Today, I want to look a very specific example of how this overall market transition affected us at Eloqua. It’s a very representative, specific, example of what’s going on in the market in general.

Last week we made the pricing for Eloqua’s software product packages public on our website for the first time:

The starting prices range from $1450 to $10,000 per month, depending on the level selected.

Just hearing this likely makes everyone who has ever been a field sales rep cringe. Won’t this blow up deals? What if an Enterprise buyer hears of an SMB buyer making a purchase at 1/10th the price? Won’t you be excluded from deals based on the price being seen as too high (or too low)?

Unfortunately, these arguments are based on an incorrect assumption that without talking to our sales team, buyers will not have the ability to form these perceptions of our price. That assumption, however, is false. Now, buyers are able to gather information, form opinions, and come to conclusions without ever talking to a salesperson. The sales team is competing with Google as a source for information, and that is not an easy battle to win.

So, with the market transmitting information very efficiently, the question for us was not whether the market should have access to opinions on our pricing – they already had formed opinions. The question was whether those perceptions could be better guided by contributing accurate information to the conversation.

In our case, the breadth of organizations we served had led to a perception in the SMB market that we were significantly more expensive than we actually were. So, we were better off to correct that data point in the market, rather than allow mis-perceptions to be the guiding data point, as that could easily lead to not being considered in a deal at all if the perception was significantly different than reality.

As with any change of this type, agreeing on the theory of what is happening in the market is much easier than the tactical implementation of the changes that are needed. There was much debate internally, and many points of view were raised. However, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and even in the short time it has been public a number of conversations have started with buyers who had held misperceptions of price.

Are there any changes like this that your organization is considering that are easier to agree to in theory than in practice? Will you move forward with them?

Happy Holidays from all of your friends at Eloqua

Ahh…the dreams of youth; so full of hope for the future. This holiday season, we invite you to view the Eloqua Holiday Cinema eMovie special release, ‘Career Day’ for a glimpse into youthful aspirations.
This eMovie was inspired by a scene from the award winning romantic comedy, Annie Hall, which was directed by Woody Allen in 1977.

Watch ‘Career Day’ by clicking the player below.




Happy Holidays from all of your friends at Eloqua!

Winners of the 2009 Markie Awards

It was a great night last night in San Francisco with the Markies awards gala being the show highlight at Eloqua Experience. The competition was intense this year with submissions from all sizes of companies, all industries, and all regions of the world.





Congratulations to the winners, to the finalists, and to all the marketers who created great campaigns, deepened their alignment with sales, or achieved new heights in their analytics.


Sales and Marketing Alignment Award
For their work in providing their sales team with buyer insights, based on their online activity around Meridium’s annual user conference, that drove both new revenue and a new relationship between the sales and marketing teams:
Meridium


Marketing Center of Excellence
For a marketing operations center that smoothly handles the communication around over 10,000 products serving scientists and engineers in over 30,000 customers:
National Instruments


Most Creative Marketing Campaign
For their “I want my hour back” campaign at the change of Daylight Savings Time to promote their telepresence solutions:
Tandberg


Best Lead Nurturing Program
For a lead nurturing program in the ultra-wealthy set that not only decreased costs, but grew revenues in one of the most difficult economic times for luxury real estate in memory:
Exclusive Resorts


Marketing Visionary Award
For a worldwide implementation across all geographies and product lines, simultaneous with a worldwide implementation of their CRM platform, in record time:
NetApp


Best Customer Lifecycle Program
For a campaign that onboarded users, nurtured their adoption, and grew the usage of their loan origination platform:
Ellie Mae


Best Lead Scoring Program
For a picture perfect implementation of the Sirius demand waterfall that allowed a lead to be managed from first contact through to sales and through to close:
Omniture


Social Media Marketing Award
For a “Willy Wonka” style campaign that developed significant word of mouth and enable the rebranding of the TD Banknorth Garden to the TD Garden:
TD Garden


“Getting to Know You” Award
For a deeply personalized Flash campaign that presented a highly personalized and highly interactive experience to the VMWare audience:
VMWare


Eloqua API Connect Award
For a deep integration between their free trial process and their marketing database that allowed marketing campaigns to trigger off of actual user adoption and behavior:
Bomgar


Best Channel Marketing Award
For a great campaign called Let's Talk Business that allowed channel partners to manage fulfillment of Point of Purchase materials. In doing so, it not only reduced fulfillment time by 99%, bu also provided much richer visibility into the channel and ensured up-to-date information was being used by partners:
Intel Australia


Sales Impact Award
For implementing an end-to-end, metrics driven process that allowed their CMO to understand the exact flow of leads prior to sales, and to adjust resources accordingly, resulting in both cost efficiencies, and a significant uptick in qualified lead flow:
Infoblox


Marketing “All-Star” Award
For all-round excellence in marketing, across all categories:
NIIT (USA)


Congratulations again to all the winners, and I'm looking forward to seeing what next year's Markie gala brings

Our B2B Facebook Marketing Strategy

It's a work-hard, play-hard world out there, and there's nothing better to end a day of deep discussions on marketing than sharing a few drinks or going out to grab a bite to eat.


At Eloqua, we are lucky to have some of the most interesting, fun, and social customers around (they are marketers, after all), so when we started talking about what one might do with Facebook from a B2B marketing perspective, an obvious answer came up. Keep it friendly.


I suspect we're not the only marketing team who was on one hand intrigued by the reach and the buzz of Facebook, but on the other hand not quite sure what would work from a B2B marketing perspective. The idea of discussing the latest whitepaper or marketing best practices did not seem to fit the social vibe of Facebook. When the discussion turned to our customers though, we quickly realized that the social interactions we had with them were as interesting and valuable as the marketing discussions we had.


Another thing that we discussed was that many of our team will work with our clients remotely before ever meeting them face to face. Friendships develop over email and phone conversations far before having a face to face interaction.


So, our Facebook plan developed. We wanted to explore and expose the social side of Eloqua. As we go to events, share a few drinks with clients, or have dinner with marketing groups, we'll post the pictures on Facebook so the clients we are already friends with can get to know us better as people, and the people who have met at user groups around the country can reconnect online.


What is our business rationale for this? That's a great question. The Gallup organization did a workplace poll a few years back that observed that having good friends at work was a significant factor in employee retention (http://gmj.gallup.com/content/511/Item-10-Best-Friend-Work.aspx). Could the same idea hold in client retention? We're not sure, but it's fun to try, and a great reason to get more social with our clients.




Our commitment is that we won't "talk shop". Every marketer we have interacted with who experiences an Eloqua event and feels the vibe and energy of the community is excited to join it, and that is motivation enough for us. Will this strategy work, we're not sure, but as David Armano said the other day, we're all learning by doing - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/03/brands-will-learn-by-doing-get-used-to-it-.html




I'm interested in your comments, whether you're an Eloqua customer or not. What have you seen with this type of a B2B Facebook strategy? What has worked, what has not? What are your first reactions? If you are a customer, what are your thoughts on our Facebook presence? What would you like to see more of or differently about the social side of Eloqua?

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.

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.

Fresh off the presses

I just received the final, final, final proof copy of the layout for my upcoming book - Digital Body Language. We're sending it to the print on demand presses tonight, and I should have a copy in hand within a week. Exciting times, to be sure. Also a good time to look back on the overall process for creating it. I had only a limited idea of what I was getting into when I agreed to write a book, so for anyone who is considering it, here's what it actually entailed...

• ~ November 20, 2007: original idea formulated and discussed. Really vague discussions, where I think I said "yeah, that sounds like a good idea".


• ~ November 25, 2007: as a complete surprise to me, Joe Payne, our CEO, announced at the company meeting that I would be writing a book. Nothing like pressure.


• December-February 2008: I spent quite a bit of time sketching out a rough outline (bullet points - maybe 20 per chapter) of what might make a compelling book.


• February-March: Here's where the fun began... by this point I had spent a bit of time reading a few articles on book writing, but I would say that the best advice was "just start writing", so I did, scratching out a rough draft of the first chapter (and a bit).


• March 2008: introduced to Dave Morris, at New Year Publishing, who agreed to take on the title as a publisher. He described a publisher as being basically a project manager who knows all the ins and outs of the book industry, and can get the right set of layout editors, printers, copy editors, and proofers together. Fair enough.


• March-July 2008: Writing like mad. I end up travelling a lot from Toronto (home) to the West coast, and 5 hrs is about the right amount of time for putting in a solid writing session. Mike Dowding, my copy editor kept me sane by massaging my writing into a more readable form.


• June-July 2008: The thing that I really wanted to do with this book was highlight a lot of real-world case studies; what real marketers are doing to improve their marketing. During this period, I did deep interviews with around 50 organizations that are doing very interesting things in their marketing functions


• July 2008: Live on Amazon - http://tinyurl.com/5mmbjx. Seriously, you only need cover art and an ISBN number to be live on Amazon - I was amazed.


• July-October 2008: Getting a case study from a client published in a book requires a LOT of back and forth. A draft, multiple revisions, PR approval, legal approval, changes from both of those, signoff; lots of back and forth. I was doing around 40 case studies, of which about 30 got to final approval. I had no idea going into the process that this would prove to be the most time-intensive part of the whole book creation process.


• October 6, 2008: We had Eloqua Experience, our international user group in Las Vegas, and the goal was to have copies of the book for everyone there. It takes about 6 weeks to offset print and ship books and about 1 week to digitally print and ship books. We missed both deadlines. Disappointment, for sure, but we did have a single advanced release copy available to hold up to the audience. Small victory...


• October 15, 2008: Final version of manuscript and all finalized case studies and approvals submitted to layout for the final time. The approval back-and-forth had lead to a LOT of changes; case studies in and out, pull-quotes in and out, stats in and out. This was now final. Big weight off my shoulders, sigh of relief...


• November 22, 2008: Just back from vacation, realized that the "final" layout I had been sent for review had used the wrong version of the manuscript and case studies. Oooops, all wrong, back to the drawing board.


• December 11, 2008: Final PDF of layout arrives, all is good, sending it for print-on-demand proof to be created.

So, that's the process - just over a year from idea to completion - from what I've heard that's about the norm. All in all, it was interesting and even enjoyable in parts. Working with a broad spectrum of marketers tackling interesting and difficult problems was by far the best part; it's amazing how open people are to sharing the good and the bad of what they've been working on. It was fascinating to hear many of the stories.

Next up, the book as part of our Marketing efforts. Anyone who has done this before, I would love to hear from you on what worked, what didn't. Anyone who is thinking about it, I'd be glad to share more of the trials and tribulations if you're interested.

Giving Sales an "Out"

Any of us who work with longer sales cycles have experienced the leaky funnel. Laura Ramos at Forrester talks about it a lot, as do most other luminaries in B2B, and at Eloqua, it's one of the most common things our clients ask us about.

So, as marketers, what can we do to "plug" it... not a simple task, as leads leak out of the funnel for so many reasons; interest wanes, priorities shift, or sales connect too early or with someone without enough pull to get something done. Mostly, these leads just go quiet. Sales is hesitant to call it "dead" right away as it might not be, and by the time they're sure it's dead, they're unlikely to dig back into their lead pile and set a status on it.

So, how do we as marketers help?

One trick is to give sales an "out" - build one or more "rewarm" nurture campaigns that are designed for cold leads. Give sales a simple (ie, one click) way to add a lead to that campaign from where they are (ie, their CRM system, most likely). When a lead is suspected to be dead, all they need to do is throw it back over the fence to you in marketing and you'll nurture it until it pops up again as a hot lead due to lead score.

I blogged about a simple way to think about Nurture Marketing the other day here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/nurture-marketing-vs-pachinko.html

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.

Holiday Time: Top 10 Wish List for Sales

An interesting chat between Rob Leavitt (http://tinyurl.com/66ox38) and Drew Neisser (http://tinyurl.com/6lsmdl) on Marketing as a Service got me thinking about Marketing's other customer - Sales. What can we as marketers do for them.

Okay, sales complains about marketing. But, it's the holiday season, so in that spirit, let's look at the Top 10 gift ideas for marketing to give to sales. Most of these are quick to implement and show real value to sales. Who knows, maybe next year, sales will even have you on their holiday gift list. (okay, I don't guarantee that, but it's a nice thought...)

1. Real-time alerts when their own prospects visit your website so they see interest as it happens


2. A weekly (daily?) list of their hot leads who have shown activity that week to help them make sure they are talking to anyone showing interest


3. All leads passed to sales scored explicitly (who they are) and implicitly (how interested they are), to give them insight into who needs a call


4. Lead score displayed in their CRM system for all leads


5. Account rollup showing the hottest accounts based on recent activity, so they can plan their day at a glance and know who needs a follow-up


6. One-click access to a marketing history for each contact, so they can see what each person has received, read, reacted to


7. Latest marketing collateral available to them in Outlook so they can download, modify, and send, saving them effort in creating content


8. Trackable emails sendable from Outlook so they can see when their own prospects click on emails sent to them directly


9. Marketing communications being automatically sent "from" each salesperson rather than from a corporate address to help develop their relationships


10. A nurture program available to them to add their "not ready to buy" leads to, with one click, so they can be kept warm until they are ready to buy

Am I biased, can all these things be done with Eloqua? Yes. But, regardless of your Demand Generation platform, they're great ideas to get sales more engaged and enthusiastic about your marketing efforts.

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.

Dimensions of Lead Scoring

I get asked very frequently how marketers should think about lead scoring... how do you come up with a rule that scores leads based on "explicit" things like title, industry, and company size, while at the same time counting "implicit" things like what they've done on your website.

The way I see it, you don't. The two don't really mix. One of them, the explicit criteria, is about whether the lead is the right person, in the right role, at the right company at the right company. It measures ability to purchase. It's a key thing to measure, certainly, but it's not the whole picture. You also have to understand whether a buying process is actually happening in that company, and for that person.

The way that's measured is another dimension - intent to purchase. For this, you look at much more implicit information; web activity, searches, repeat visits, deep dives into specifications, response to marketing campaigns, etc. This tells you whether you are looking at a person who is actively considering your solution based on what is happening in their business.

Without looking at both of these dimensions, you're not able to tease out the right prospects for your sale team to focus on. Looking at the four corners of this chart, you can see why, it all comes down to what you'd want to do with each lead type:

• A1: Great leads; the right buyer and showing a lot of interest. Sales needs to call them right away
• A3: Right person, wrong time; this is a prospect who is the right role in the right company, but they are showing minimal interest. Calling them aggressively is wasting your time and theirs. They need to be nurtured over time until you see them showing the signs of being truly interested.
• C1: Not the right person, but excited; lots of interest, but minimal ability to purchase. Perhaps their interest can be leveraged into an introduction to the right people. Or, perhaps they are a student or a job seeker, and will never be a buyer.
• C3: Not the right person, and not showing interest. There's not much point marketing to these people or trying to call them.

Lead scoring needs to look at both of these dimensions, but trying to merge them into one will always risk confusing the keen student with the mildly interested CEO. Obviously you want to communicate with them very differently, so you need to separate the dimensions you score on in order to differentiate between them.

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