The Innovative Marketer

Brian Carroll is one of the smartest thinkers in the demand generation space today.  He's also a great humanist, one who makes sure that we don't forget that every complex sale needs to incorporate some human touch.

On Thursday, Brian and I will discuss his views on The Human Touch in Lead Nurturing.  It's free and only 20 minutes, so stop by and listen in.

So your prospect is interested in what your company provides.  You've qualified them as a great potential customer.   They've requested a demo.  Now what?

In this episode of The Innovative Marketer, I speak to Peter Cohan, founder of the Second Derivative, a company focused on teaching people to deliver relevant, compelling, interesting demonstrations.   Peter also has a blog that's packed with information on making your demo a successful one.

Listen to the Podcast now.

Reading through Roy Young of MarketingProfs' latest eBook, "The Top 10 Biggest Mistakes Marketers Make," I'm amazed at how many issues are pervasive in marketing departments large and small. 

Here are some of the perennial bugaboos that you might find in your company:

Mistake #2 - Using metrics that don't matter to top management

How many marketing meetings have you been in where people were slapping high-fives to one another over 80% email open rates, 25% click through rates, 10% response rates?   Impressive stats? Yes.  But share your enthusiasm with your sales colleagues and chances are you'll get a pasted one smile as they silently beg you to stop talking so they can ask you for my squishy ball giveaways for a client meeting.    

Making sure that what you are reporting is what the person you are reporting it to cares about -- that's pretty key.

Mistake #8 - Swallowing fads unthinkingly

Oh man, I've got to write a separate post on this one.   WAP, Wikis, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts, Vodcasts and of course, blogs.   So many marketers fall prey to what I call the "In Flight Magazine Syndrome," that is, someone at the company reads about some hot new trend in an airline magazine on a cross-country flight and suddenly your entire marketing department is barreling headlong into a project for which there is no real business need, no hope of executing successful, and no reasonable form of measurement (ask me to tell you my "grid computing" and "knowledgebase" stories some day over a beer).

Anyway, it's a good read.  You can read the other eight mistakes and Roy's great commentary when you download the document here.

Forrester smarty Laura Ramos has a great post on her blog this week, where she talks about numeric scoring being a key to a successful lead scoring program.     She's written up a great overview of what you should think about in putting together a comprehensive lead management program using lead scoring.

But what I want to emphasize is that successful lead scoring programs are NUMERIC.   

What do I mean?   If you've been in marketing for some time, you're probably familiar with a lead ranking system that reads Hot, Warm, Cold or even A,B,C.   And many of us have used those systems to communicate relative lead value to sales at one time or another.

Stop doing that.

First of all, tell me the difference between a hot lead and a warm lead.  Do you have defined criteria?  If you do, can all your sales and marketing team give a unified definition of each?  If so, I'd love to hear from you.   Most companies have no unified definition of what an A lead or a B lead is, or if they start out with one, the definition quickly degrades over time and newer sales reps and marketing staff are not aligned.

Secondly, if you've struggled with lead management before, you're probably familiar with this conversation at the end of the quarter:

Sales:  "That wasn't an A lead!  It was a B lead at best.  Probably a C."
Marketing: "How come you didn't complain when I sent it to you?"
Sales: "You send over so many questionable leads  blah blah blah..."

This unproductive conversation is often the result of sales people being measured on how many A leads they convert.  At the end of the quarter, they're trying to move as many unconverted leads out of the queue as they can to avoid being penalized.

What numeric lead scoring does is it eliminates those types of conversations (you're not often going to hear "that wasn't a 72 lead, it was a 69 at best!) from your sales teams.    And it allows you to have an ongoing conversation about the relative value of different types of criteria in a lead scoring system.

And that gets you closer to a comprehensive lead management system.  And, it makes for a more pleasant work environment.

Ah, a meme is born.  Ever since we invented the term "digital body language" last year, folks are beginning to incorporate it into their own marketing organizations.   The interesting thing in watching the development of an idea is how people bend, shape and color it to fit their needs.   

Over the past few months, as I've been presenting the concept of digital body language at conferences and trade shows, marketers are telling me how it's helped them talk about the changing world of marketing.

Why is Digital Body Language important?

In the very old days, pre 1995, marketing fed sales leads and then waited to hear feedback from sales on the quality of those leads.  Buyers generally had to engage with a sales person, who was adept at reading their body language to tell whether the prospect was showing interest, was resistant to a particular message, or was ready to close the deal. 

Since '95, buyers have been increasingly moving online, to research solutions, to do their own comparisons, to check out what others say about your products and services. 

And Google has democratized the buying process so that now sellers need to adapt to the new reality.   By combining demographic and BANT criteria with what buyers actually DO online (what you can observe), marketers can form a picture of the buyer's new digital body language.

Cracking the Digital Body Language Code

When people respond to your online marketing, they leave clues as to their intentions, from a keyword they use to reach your web site, to a click on an email, to the visit to a personalized landing page.   If you use point solutions, like an email marketing blaster, you only get point-in-time snapshots into a buyer's behavior.  But if you have an integrated marketing automation solution, you will begin to build a rich profile of the buyer's behavior - what they are interested in, and when, and, in time, why.

Let's say you have a prospect -- let's call her Amy Snow.   Here's the picture of a typical profile of outbound communication with Amy:

March 1 -  Sent email - No response
March 14 - Sent email - No response
March 21 - Called - Left voicemail
March 31 - Called - Left voicemail

Now your marketing and telesales teams may think that Amy is a cold lead, not interested in what you have to offer at all.   Using the principles of interpreting digital body language, you may find out that she's not so disinterested at all:

March 1 - Sent email - Opened at 8:32 a.m.  Clicked through to a web page at 8:35.  Visited 2 web pages
March 3 - Visited 10 web pages at 8:15 a.m.
March 14 - Sent email.  Opened at 8:45 a.m. Clicked through to three web pages.
March 21 - Called - Left voicemail.  Visited 3 web pages. Downloaded an ebook at 7:48 a.m.
March 31 - Called - Left voice mail.
April 2 - Visited web site.  8 pages.  8:12 a.m.

So what do we know about Amy?  Well, first of all, through her behavior, we can tell that she's actually actively interested in  your company.   What's more, you can tell that she's doing her web surfing and email reading early in the morning, which is likely a good time to reach her at her desk.   Without being able to recognize and interpret her digital body language, you could misinterpret her behavior and miss out on a good sales opportunity.

So why should you care?

Marketers are using the term Digital Body Language as shorthand to explain to their colleagues and their companies the need to more efficiently process the leads they already are generating.   Digital body language calls for a new way of developing sales opportunities, one where the "one and done" practice of marketing in the past gives way to a new, more effective process for processing, analyzing and measuring your lead management system, from click to close.

Do you listen to marketing podcasts?  If you have a lengthy commute or you're on planes a lot like I am, here are some useful free business Podcasts you should check out. 

1. HBR Ideacast
Harvard Business Review's audio companion to their monthly magazine.  Often you'll hear authors of articles in HBR discussing their current research.   Lots of content about innovation here.

2. Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (Stanford)
Don't have time to make it to Palo Alto for their weekly lecture series starring some of the leading thinkers in Silicon Valley?  Check out this Podcast.  One of my favorites was a talk by Tien Tzuo, formerly of salesforce.com, now CEO of Zuora.

3.  Knowledge @ Wharton Interviews
Articles are now available in MP3 format.  Some of them sound like written articles read out loud, which may make them hard to follow if you're doing something else while you're listening.  Still, the content is well worth paying special attention to.

4. Duct Tape Marketing
Small business marketing guru John Jantsch continues to score interviews with high profile marketers from all over the world.  You'll find useful ideas in every one of his frequently produced shows.

5.  Manager Tools
Do you manage people?  This weekly show is a good listen. 

and of course, you can always subscribe to the periodically published Podcast by yours truly, The Innovative Marketer. 


* A Podcast is a free, downloadable audio or video program available via RSS feed on the Internet.  It's different from a regular download online because you can subscribe to Podcasts in a series, much like you can subscribe to a blog feed or a magazine.

Every once in a while, if you have a good product and a responsible company and things are going well, you may receive an unsolicited compliment from your customers.   It might be a note, a phone call or a quick email just to say "Thanks.  You do everything you said you'd do and we're pleased with the result."   

Even more rare is the time where someone singles you out publicly, on a blog, for exceeding their expectations.    Dale Wolf did that on his blog, recently, and it inspires us to work even harder to surpass his and other customers' expectations in the future.

So to Dale, and all the other customers who have expressed their happiness, let me publicly thank you.

And for those of you who are still striving for perfection, and demanding the same from us, know that we want to hear from you, too.  And we're right there with you.

End of the quarter.  Yipes.  This is the time where sales and marketing need to buckle down and work together.   Fifteen years into my marketing career, I'm still surprised by how effective simple little things are with sales.

Like yesterday.  We had a Webinar.  Great turnout.  Lots of interest in the topic.  We, in marketing, declared victory.   

Towards the end of the day, I picked up the phone and called a few of our sales people, randomly.  Asked them if they had prospects who attended the event.   Listened to feedback on the campaign.

At the end of one call, one of our field reps was nearly speechless.  "I've never had a call from marketing after an event to check in with ME, to see if I needed anything," she gushed.  And then she thanked me.

So here we are in crunch time.  End of quarter.  Fellow marketers, how about you place a quick call to some of your sales colleagues and see if there's anything you can do to help them close it out?

My colleague Thor Johnson checks in from the Selling Power Magazine conference over in Vegas, where he was on a panel this week.  Thought you'd appreciate the update:

This week, I’m in last Vegas at Selling Power’s Sales Leadership Conference.  Why is a marketer here, you may ask?  The easy answer is that the sales and marketing cooperation, or alignment, if you please, has become a key theme for salespeople, too.  I was on a panel covering just this topic. 

Gerhard Geschwandtner, Selling Power’s founder and publisher, led the day with his vision of marketing & sales as a Conversation.  No more pitching.  No more sales process.  Not even the Buyer’s Process.  It’s all about The Conversation – and will be.  He sees CRM evolving into CIM – Customer Idea Management. 

Gerhard had a number of top quality, interesting guests and panelists including Mary Delaney - CSO of Careerbuilders.com, Malcolm Reese - Global Head of Sales for DHL Express, Jim Steel - President of WW Sales for Salesforce.com, David Berman - President, WW Sales for WebEx, John Neeson - Co-founder of Sirius Decisions,  Jerry Whalan - VP Sales for the US Postal System, and other sales leaders from ATT, the University of Washington, the Gallup Organization and elsewhere.    Tony Rutigliano’s breakthrough management consulting from Gallup years ago while I was with AGENCY.COM in NYC is still fresh in my mind. 

Gerhard interviewed Fred Hassan – CEO of Schering-Plough, an extremely successful and thoughtful leader who was all about his people.  Hassan’s message to his company is to first earn the trust of their customers.   He spoke of leadership, culture, communications and vision – very inspiring.  What a leader. 

Most of the discussions I had revolved around sales and marketing teams working better together, having mutual contracts on performance, agreeing on definitions, and seeing each other as two halves of the same process – selling your company to customers.  It was refreshing.  I even snuck in Eloqua’s Digital Body Language theme, which went over well. 

On the other hand, I was quickly reminded how many selling teams today are doing all their own cold calling, all their own demand generation, and get relatively little support from an organized marketing team. 

We have a ways to go, still.

I was impressed with this valuable conference, a must-attend for any sales leader or anyone who markets to sales organizations.

Just finished reading Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, where he distills his approach to eating healthy down to seven simple words: "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  What's beautiful about that is that it's general enough that everyone can follow it, and open for interpretation so that it can fit with anyone's lifestyle.

Last week, I stopped by the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami, and it seemed like marketers from every industry, at every level, were grappling with questions about segmentation, frequency of sending email, types of message to send.

So with a nod to Pollan, let me suggest an approach that may fit into any marketer's email marketing approach.

Send email.

No, email marketing is not dead.  If anything, corporate spending on the medium is increasing, and as the next wave of personalization and preference technology becomes more ubiquitous, and spam filters get better, It seems as if a new age of email marketing is nearly upon us.

Not too much.

Sitting with a bunch of my customers in Atlanta, I asked how much email to them from our company was too much.  The consensus was that there is no consensus.

It reminds me of a question I asked the audience at the OMS in San Diego a few weeks ago:  How do you know when your toast is done?

  Some people like their bread toasted super light, barely warm.  Others like it burn crispy so that the melted butter glosses the top of it.    So how much email is too much?  You have to ask your customers.  They're generally more than happy to let you know.   Keeping an eye on their Digital Body Language, their online behavior in reaction to your email send, is the best way to track their interest.

Mostly educational.

This was clear, both at the Sherpa show and at our customer group meeting.  If you are sending email on an ongoing basis to your customers, whether it's a regular newsletter, a multi-touch nurturing program, or an introductory note, be sure that what you communicate is of more value to them than their perceived value of their attention.

In a commercial transaction (as opposed to personal), there is an economy of information, where people trade their attention to you in exchange for something of value -- a new approach, an idea as to how to do their job better, some research that allows them to compare themselves to their peers.

If what you're sending is mostly educational, your perceived value will be high to your recipients, and you will find your open rates go up, your response rates increase.  And you'll likely find that you are top of mind when the customer is ready to move from the investigative phase of their buying cycle into the consideration phase.

More from Sherpa

Other bloggers have written about their impression of the event.  Here are some of the summaries I’ve read:

New objectives in email writing in 2008
http://emailgarage.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/day-3-new-objectives-in-email-marketing-for-2008/

Janine from VResponse had some interesting observations and I'm now 0 for 3 on events we're both at, but have no conversation longer than "hey there."  with her.    Check out her notes:
http://blog.verticalresponse.com/

And Duct Tape Marketing's Ubertaper John Jantsch scored an interview with Sherpa chief Eric Stockton to talk about Sherpa's mission and it's future.

Rosanne Saccone, head of marketing for BEA systems, has a tough marketing challenge: how to grab and retain the attention of information technology buyers.  In this episode of The Innovative Marketer, I spoke with Rosanne about breaking through the noise to reach the IT buyer, the benfits of thought leadership, and her marketing plans for the year.

Listen to the Podcast now.

You can also subscribe to receive updates to the podcast as they become available by searching for "The Innovative Marketer" in iTunes and subscribe for free.

Recently, our partner Salesforce.com worked with us to develop a set of email marketing quick tips for their AppExchange partners, many of whom are small companies with limited email marketing experience.  The tips are universal, so I thought I'd share them with you.

1. Build your own list.
By creating your own database, you can be confident that everyone on the list wants to hear from you. Don't rely on sharing lists from other vendors. Your best prospects are your current, happy customers and prospective customers who've opted in to hear from you. By relying on your own in-house list, you can identify and target repeat customers and your most loyal customers.

2. Deliver value.
Your customers are more receptive if you provide something of value in exchange for their time and opt-in permission. Include free trials, offers, product news or discounts on your solution. Try thought leadership approach with timely industry news, white papers, reports, surveys, market intelligence or research. Good content, especially content they can only get from you, still rules.

3. Research your target.
Find out more about your target customer base. Leverage Google to find blogs and social networks that speak to your customers. Leverage Web sites too. For example, if your target audience is CIOs, go to CIO.com to see what's top of mind.

4. Prospect by phone.
Prospects and customers are much more open to receiving a phone call followed up by an email invitation than an invite alone.

5. Customize your email.
Consider your prospects' limited attention. Invest in tools that allow you to target and personalize email. With targeted offers, your response rates increase dramatically. And, personalized doesn't just mean their name in the email - it also means personalized content and offers based on relevant needs, industry and job function of the prospect.

6. Use the subject line.
Put a customer benefit or business solution in the subject line of your email. Don't use exclamatory punctuation (!!!) or Free! in the subject line. Filtering software will block your mail. Remember that the value proposition to the prospect for their time is the most effective subject line.

7. Perfect your timing. 
If you send too many messages, you risk irritating prospective customers that might drive them to unsubscribe. If you send too few, they forget you exist. The frequency of your messages should be no more than every two weeks, more appropriate is once per month.  Better yet, let your prospects tell you how often they'd like to hear from you and then never, ever violate that permission.  Marketing automation, like that from Eloqua, will help you manage your multi-touch programs.

8. Test your email.
Before launching large-scale email volume, always test on smaller groups for optimization.  Also consider sending to smaller groups to avoid spam filters that pick up on large volumes - especially if the data includes significant bounce backs due to poor data or poor list quality.

9. Never buy lists.  Never, ever buy lists. 
Purchased lists will almost certainly get you blacklisted by the major spam filters.  Purchased lists cause the most problems for you and your email service provider may ban you.

10. One-time and you're out.
When you do email your prospective customers (let's say it's a trade show lead) make sure to include an opt-in invitation and reward. If the customer declines to opt in or unsubscribes, never send to that name again.

Remember: the right creative with the right offer will always prevail. The secret to effective email marketing is to put in the research time and effort before you hit the "send" button.

I hate buying technology.  Not consumer electronics, mind you.  I love my Tivo, my iPod, my GPS, which has navigated me out of the hundreds of Peachtree Roads in the greater Atlanta area more than once.   I love my gadgets.  But I hate buying technology.

It makes me uncomfortable to be the recipient of a sales presentation, to listen to the spin, to not be able to ask the hard IT-related questions like "what is your SLA for guaranteed uptime" and "what is the backup power supply situation for your colo facilities."   But in this era of software-as-a-service buying, where more often than not IT isn't in the room, it's important for we as marketers to ask the right questions.

In the face of a dazzling presentation, where charismatic sales pros (or enigmatic CEOs) are trying to pitch you on their latest offerings, what should we be asking them?

Here are five questions I always try to ask my prospective vendors during that first sales call:

1.  How many employees does the company have?

This is a conversational way to answer some important questions.  Who's going to answer the phone when I call?  What happens if that person isn't there? 

2. Are they going to provide the complete solution they are pitching, or do they need to bring in other companies to complete the solution?

Technology companies are fond of promising you everything.  This is a way to figure out how difficult your life is going to be after signing up with them.  If a core part of their value is outsourced to "best of breed partners," be very careful.  You may be signing up for managing multiple vendors, which may mean some finger pointing if something goes wrong.

3. How many customers do they have?

It's a truism in the technology biz that a small percentage of your customers will be referenceable.  Some don't want to advertise to their competitors what tools they are using.  Others have blanket corporate policies against issuing endorsements.  Still others use case studies as contract bargaining chips.  But any company should be able to tell you how many customers they have.  The number is important, because it says a lot about how mature the product is and whether you'll be a "bleeding edge innovator" who will be beta testing the product as you go.   You also want to make sure they have a mix of customers, from small to large, so you can be sure that you have a growth path into whatever their higher end product is.

4. How many customers did they have last year?

If the answer is 0, be very, very careful.  Few B2B solutions are so innovative that you have to be among the first to try it.   If money is an important factor to you, companies may be willing to buy your business by giving you ultra-low rates to start.  But you can be sure that if the company is successful, those rates will be going up shortly, and if the company fails, well, you've lost a lot of time (and reputation within your company) betting on a loser.

5.  Do they sound too good to be true?

Here's an actual pitch I got from a startup a few years ago:

"Our product (name of product) will allow you to track every single document your sales people access on your intranet and dynamically and automatically serve up information based on the most popular, the most relevant, the most time sensitive and the most profitable information at the time."

But it didn't make coffee too, so we passed on buying it.

And here's a bonus question:  Ask them about their "ecosystem" -- their partners, their online communities, their user groups.  The more active and robust the constellation of activity around them, the safer you can feel.

What other questions do you think about when evaluating a technology vendor?  Post 'em in the comments.   

Next month, Aaron Kahlow is, once again, assembling some of the brightest minds in marketing in San Diego for the annual Online Marketing Summit.  Never mind that San Diego in February is a welcome relief from the damp, cold winters most of us are facing this season.  This is a great opportunity to learn, network with our marketing peers, exchange some great ideas, and recharge ourselves professionally this year.

If you can't make it, I'll be liveblogging at the event and will try to score at least a couple of Podcast interviews while I'm down there.

Seth Godin is the Leonardo Da Vinci of marketing.  His books, including Permission Marketing,  Free Prize Inside, Purple Cow, and All Marketers Are Liars, are perennial best sellers.  His blog is one of the best on marketing, and certainly one of the finest consistently updated sites out there.   And his public speeches are legendary (check out this one from the TED conference in 2003 for a taste).

His new book is called Meatball Sundae, and it's one of the most important books on marketing in the past year.  Seth is famous for saying that he doesn't do a lot of academic research for his books, but he is a professional "noticer of things."   His notes and observations in this book are a must read for any digital marketer working today.

In this episode of The Innovative Marketer, I speak with with Seth about marketing, new media, and his predications for the world of marketing in 2008.

And you can also subscribe to receive updates to the podcast as they become available by searching for "The Innovative Marketer" in iTunes and subscribe for free.

Listen to the Podcast now.

Here's the long-delayed second half to this post, which takes you through your initial lead scoring project.

After meeting with your sales team, the next step would be to complete a lead scoring matrix, the purpose of which is to identify criteria required for lead ratings and the actions that should be taken for leads with that rating.

Here are some common form fields that would represent key explicit (things that people say about themselves or that can be researched) data:

a. Revenue
b. Employees
c. Industry
d. Geography
e. Completeness of business information (phone, email, first name, last name, etc.)

For each form field you select for lead scoring, list the possible input values for that form field and the points to be awarded for each of those values.

Next, think about what implicit (behavioral) data you want to track. You've got a ton of options here. It's best to start simple and then build on your matrix over time.

Here are some implicit attributes that some of our customers have used. If this is your first time, a word of warning.

Don't go nuts.
Just because you can use all of these criteria doesn't mean you should.

8 implicit lead scoring criteria you can use to track prospect behavior

Type	Criteria
Website visits	1.   Website Visit: Scores website visitors within the last N days. Recent visitors are scored, and return visitors in the following week are re-scored. 2.   High Value Web Content Visit: You may tag a variety of content (HTML pages, videos, catalogs, etc.) that represent high propensity for conversion.  Scores all visitors downloading what you deem as high value web contentt in the last N days. 3.   Visited Minimum of N pages ever and Returning Visitor:  Evaluates contacts who have reached a predefined threshold of page views (say 30 page views) and have been on the website as a returning visitor within a given timeframe. Scores contact interest based on both frequency and recency.
Forms	4.   Form Submit:  Checks if the contact has submitted one of your forms within a given timeframe. This implicit attribute does not consider the data submitted in the form, simply if the form was submitted.
Search Engine	5.   Search Engine Keyword: Contacts are scored if they enter a particular keyword in any search engine and return as a website visitor within a given timeframe. Examples of keywords that can trigger higher lead scores might include names of product lines or solutions.
Email	6.   Click-through from Campaign to Website: Similar to above, except that contacts that click-through all email in a specific campaign are scored. This is valuable if a campaign is used to aggregate all related content (product releases, newsletters, etc.) and score contacts based on interest level in that content. 7.  Opened any Email from Campaign: Evaluates if a contact has opened any email brochure from a specific campaign folder more than Ntimes.
Event	8.  Webinar/Tradeshow Attendee: Event attendees can be scored at any time.

Have you completed a lead scoring project at your company?  What results have you seen?

Each year, Marketing Sherpa solicits tips and lessons learned from marketers everywhere and make the compendium available to us at no cost.

The 2008 edition is out now and you can pick up for free here.

Some of my favorite tips:

#21: Don't bribe your leads.  Deb Lambert from Merchant Advantage found that conversion rate from demo to purchase dropped when she offered a gift for trying the demo.

#48: Little Changes, Big Difference.  Amnesty International reported that their conversion rate on forms went up 30% by removing just two fields from the form.

And here's one other I would have sent in, had I thought of it in time:

Don't forget to market marketing.  Too often we occupy our full attention with communicating with customers, with partners, with prospects.  Don't forget to invest the time in letting the company know what you are doing in marketing.  At my last company, we frequently sent out email updates called "Marketing Matters," a brief note sharing results and plans to all of our employees.  The reputation and credibility of the marketing team grew with that consistent communication.

It's been raining quite hard in Northern California this week, so with the power out, we headed to the sports bar to take in the playoff games.  A bunch of us being marketers, we talked about what marketing blogs and thinkings we follow regularly on the web.   Here was my list:

1. Seth Godin - The most astute observer and clearest communicator of marketing trends out there
2. Malcolm Gladwell - not marketing-focused exactly, but he's such a good communicator of business ideas
3. Guy Kawasaki - a great marketer and a wonderful guy
4. Tom Peters - Tom's ideas persist for decades
5. Garr Reynolds - check out his new book - Presentation Zen.  It's great.
6. Harry Joiner - he's a marketing headhunter with a good head for marketing
7. The Brothers Heath - authors of my favorite book of 2007, Made to Stick
8. Brian Carroll - a smart and nice guy, who "gets" new media and old fashioned relationship marketing.  Check out his free eBook here.
9. Charlene Li - Forrester Research's uber-connected social technology guru
10. MarketingProfs Daily Fix - Super smart marketers opine frequently here

Who do you read regularly?

Everyone's coming up with them.  Thought I'd ring in the New Year with my own marketing resolutions.  What are yours?

1.  I will not describe lead development or generation as dating, a relationship or seduction.

No more "dance of the marketer."  It's hackneyed, overused, and worst of all, boring.   Come up with something new.  If I do this, you have permission to point and laugh at me and call me bad names.  If you see anyone else doing this, let me know and I'll join you in chuckling at them.

2.  I resolve to lose the wait.

The forms we use are too long.  They ask for things we don't use (like zip or postal code, when we can easily look them up) or things people don't want to tell us (like annual revenue).  People hate to fill out forms (I do.  Don't you?) and we should make them as short as possible to get them to what they are looking for as quickly as we can.

One of the reasons I bought Eloqua marketing automation was because I didn't want to penalize my most loyal visitors for desiring to access our white papers over and over.  So we set it up so that once they downloaded one, they could save their information and bypass the registration form in the future.

3. I will not produce a boring corporate video and call it "viral" just because it's posted to YouTube.

Viral is a euphemism for word-of-mouth message reach.  It does not mean "available on the Internet."  Just  because it's hard and expensive to make a good video doesn't mean the message isn't lousy or uninteresting.   The stuff that sticks is stuff that's unexpected, emotional, etc. (see this post for the authoritative word on making stories that stick).

4. I pledge to do a better job of marketing the marketing department inside my company.

Focused on customer, channel and prospect demand generation, I've done a crummy job of talking about all the successes we've had as a marketing department to the company itself.  Often, you hear more about our great programs if you're not an employee, than if you share the lunch room with us every day.  I will do a better job of sharing our victories (and setbacks).

5.  I will never, never, ever buy or rent a list of email addresses and load them into my email system.

I learned this from a (former) customer of ours who managed to get blacklisted by some of the major filtering services within hours of sending out a poorly targeted message to a badly managed list.  The effects of doing this are swift and unmerciful.  If I ever get tempted to take the "easy" route and try to buy or harvest lists of names of people, please unplug my laptop and tell me to go make a viral video.

I made the mistake yesterday of walking into a Macy's department store.  You'd think they marked everything down to zero and were handing out hundred dollar bills.  I found a shirt I wanted, but didn't want to brave the lines, and the cashiers looked absolutely exhausted, anyway.

Description in hand, I launched my browser, fully intending to buy the shirt, have it shipped to my house, and on my back by the New Year, at the latest.   That was my plan, until the Macy's web site returned this message:

There are many digital analogs to the physical, atom-based world.  The checkout cart.  The password-locked site.  The webzine.   This is not a good example of them.

Years ago, I went to a seminar presented by usability guru Jared Spool in which he described web site visitors as hunters of information.  The hunter will lock in on his goal as long as he has some indication that he's making progress towards his prey.  Spool calls that the "scent of information."  As soon as you block your visitor from believing that she or he will make progress towards their goal by staying on your site, you lose them, and their valuable attention.

Take a look at at your web site.  Is all your valuable information there, available to be found by your eager hunters?  Or do you have a virtual (or literal) "we'll be right with you" there?   How about your customer support line?  Have you picked up the phone and called your own support lately?

You may be surprised by what you'll find.

You ever wonder what goes on inside an ad agency once you finish up your meeting and leave?   In this episode of The Innovative Marketer, I speak with ad man John January, vice president and director of brand voice at SHS in Kansas City  John's one of the creative forces behind the very popular advertising blog and podcast American Copywriter.

And you can also subscribe to receive updates to the podcast as they become available by searching for "The Innovative Marketer" in iTunes and subscribe for free.

Listen to the Podcast now.

While checking out your favorite articles from the past year or so, I noticed that the most popular by far was the one I wrote last year on lead scoring. And as I've been traveling a lot the past few months, I hear folks asking more and more about how to get started with lead scoring.

I recently moderated a discussion at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce Conference on lead scoring and lead nurturing -- check out the video of What's Next: 21st Century Lead Cultivation -- and thought it would be useful to update and extend that last article.

So, what is lead scoring? Simple, it's a relative ranking of one prospective lead against another. Now you may already be ranking your leads A,B,C or Hot, Warm, Cold or numerically, but what we're trying to find out using lead scoring is who should marketing be continuing to communicating with, who needs to be sent to sales right now, and who will never buy from us at all.

At Eloqua, we use lead scoring to combine explicit data (what people say about themselves – e.g. job title, industry) and implicit data (their behaviour, e.g. web visits, email oepns) to allow you to make these decision.  Based on who you are and what you do determines our communication with you. And we use co-dynamic lead scoring, meaning that we continuously update a cumulative score as people interact with our sales and marketing team.

Ask five questions to get started

Okay, so that's what lead scoring is, but how do you make it happen?

First, call a meeting. Buy doughnuts. Brew fresh coffee (the good stuff, not the premeasured dreck they give you in the break room). Make sure it's not the end of a quarter. Have sales come in, ideally inside sales and your direct field sales folks.

Here are five questions you ask:

1. What is your current process for lead follow-up?
2. What data is most important for the sales team to know about a lead to engage?
3. Can any of the data you need be captured electronically on the web site?
4. What data from forms on the web site do they receive today that is often inaccurate?
5. Can behavior on the web site imply interest and if so, what would they be looking for?

After you've whiteboarded the answers, it's important to come up with a standard lead definition, for example:

"A hot lead is a company that meets our target profile who has budget to spend, has looked at our price sheet online and has indicated they will be making a purchase in the next six months."

Once you’ve had this discussion, you’ve made a significant step towards creating a lead scoring program. 

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about the next step – Entering the Matrix.

In this edition of The Innovative Marketer Podcast, I speak with Gregg Holzrichter,  senior director of global demand generation for VMware.   Gregg honed his demand generation and sales and marketing alignment skills as a star marketer at Siebel Systems. 

He talks about what makes a successful demand generation plan, how VMware is successfully using marketing automation, and what his plans are for the future.

Listen to the Podcast now.

Tip:  You can also subscribe to the Podcast automatically in iTunes by searching for "innovative marketer"

In the future, everyone will have a blog for 15 minutes.

Having started and run two corporate blogs over the years, I'm well aware that the easiest thing in the world is to start one, and the toughest thing is having something to post six months later when other programs are demanding time, marketing programs need to be tended to, and strategic initiatives must be developed.

A lot of folks ask how blogs fit into the overall lead generation scheme.  After all, the basic model of a blog is an open conversation, a free exchange of ideas, free of lead captures forms and registration pages.   

One practice successful companies have implemented is to excerpt valuable content from eBooks, white papers or analyst reports as a way to provide a preview of information the user can get if they share their contact information with you. 

There's an "economy of identity" at work here, where people are willing to exchange small bits of their personal privacy in return for things of value.  You can add as many calls to action in your blog posts as you want, the goal being to provide MORE value to a visitor than you are requesting from them in personally identifiable information.

For example, people may trade their name, company and email address for a white paper from you.  They may give a bit more information (phone number, title, location) for a Webinar.  And you may be able to successfully exchange BANT (budget, authority, need for your product and timeline) information for an in-person seminar.

When in doubt, always provide information freely, rather than place onerous lead capture forms between the visitor and the information they're looking for.  Business buyers are not stupid; they know who is publishing the information and will get in touch with you if they want more.

Here's a good article on what a compelling blog post should contain.  Hm, I'm not sure mine all fit the bill here.

And if you'd like to check out some wonderful examples of business blogs, take a look at some of these:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing Strategies
2. Blogwrite for CEOs
3. B2B Lead Generation
4. Blogging Best Practices
5. Selling to Big Companies