The Innovative Marketer

What is lead nurturing?

Salesforce.com’s big Dreamforce conference is over. The keynotes have been distilled down to talking points for the media. The hangovers from the after parties have been dealt with. The Black Crowes have flown away, the hangovers from the after parties have been dealt with.  Things are back to normal. Too normal. 

This year I managed to stop by nearly every booth, hearing pitches from brand new Salesforce systems integrators to established partners like Bluewolf and Astadia.  My badge was scanned so many times there’s a horizontal laser burn across my standard blue trade show shirt.   It was great meeting a lot of people.

But the silence since then has been deafening.  Like a group trip to Vegas in which the shared experience binds individuals together in a momentary relationship, so has Dreamforce led many of the vendors to disappear from the tableau.  To the companies that followed up, kudos for following the first rule of trade shows: it’s still not over when the final bit of swag is given away

For the others, think about the most powerful tool you have at your disposal to support your trade show presence: lead nurturing.  It’s not a difficult concept: You stay in touch with people who have expressed interest, periodically checking in with bits of information that you think will be of interest to them.   In that way, you cultivate the relationship you started when they stopped by your booth at the show.

      Here are a few best practices to consider when putting together a lead nurturing program:

 

1.      Plan to follow up no later than 48 hours (not business hours) after meeting someone.  There’s plenty of research out there to suggest that by waiting longer than that, your prospect is more likely to consider this a new interaction than a stay-in-touch one.

2.      Unless the person you met expressed an interest in talking directly to a salesperson, make sure your next communication is not salesy in nature.   The goal is to build rapport, authority and interest, so don’t spoil the nascent relationship by getting too commercial.

3.      Something is better than nothing.  Pick a message, make it interesting and relevant and start using it to follow up on your online or offline campaigns.

 4.       Don’t get too complex.  Many companies I work with attempt to boil the ocean by putting together a comprehensive lead-nurturing program equivalent to the Lead Nurturing Ring of Power, able to nurture anyone at any time.  Unless you have a marketing operations team that will function as your internal traffic department, you’ll find that your program will get too unwieldy to manage effectively.

 5.      Don’t try to do it manually.   There’s plenty of software out there that allows you to schedule periodic emails that include filters that route a recipient to a particular communication path depending on his responses and then measures the effectiveness of your efforts.   Many of these products are like Swiss Army chainsaws – useful and powerful and capable of doing great damage (like sending the wrong message to your entire database).  As Spiderman said, with great power comes great responsibility.

  6.      Plan your strategy well in advance of your trade show presence.   You know how much goes into attending a trade show – travel and logistics, print and display considerations, not to mention meeting with customers, media and analysts at the show.  If you leave the lead followup discussion for the end, it won’t get done.   Start thinking about it during the quiet moments between campaigns--hey, like now.

  7.      Bring in help.   There are a number of experts available to help companies plan and develop their lead-nurturing strategies.   What’s valuable about them is they come equipped with tools that you can use to plan future nurturing campaigns.  

When you engage these experts, make sure you ask a lot of questions so you don’t need to continue bringing them in for each nurturing campaign you put together.

Humans have a fundamental need to connect to each other.  Lead nurturing is a powerful technique for staying connected to your customers as prospects, ensuring that you develop long-term relationships rather than Vegas-like hookups.

A click is not currency

Oh, the coveted click.  It’s traditionally been considered the Holy Grail of the Internet, and marketers have spent millions in search of clicks. Google made billions by providing them. The legendary dot-com bubble was fueled by an ever ballooning belief that eyeballs (really clicks) were a source of found wealth. 

But today’s smart marketers know that you can't bank a click. Clicks aren't reported on the balance sheet, in the annual report or to Wall Street. Your CFO doesn't care about clicks.  Neither, for that matter, does your CEO. And your VP of Sales is just humoring you when he tells you how great it is that your Web site received a million click-throughs from e-mail. The reality, my friends, is that clicks by themselves are meaningless.

What really matters? Revenue. And unless you're selling advertising like Google and getting paid every time someone clicks on a link on your Web site, clicks don’t represent revenue – the process of exchanging goods and services for negotiable currency.

Many businesses are spending big bucks to drive traffic to their Web sites: placing tiny ads on Yahoo, Business.com, and Google; buying banner and text ads; and using social media. It’s all in an effort to garner clicks. We do it, spending north of $10,000 per month – and that’s pretty modest for a company our size. How much do you spend?

And here’s a better question: What are you getting for your money?

Sure, it’s gratifying to measure clicks to your Web site. And if you use Google analytics, Omniture, or one of the other Web-tracking packages out there, you can tell yourself interesting stories about which pages are most popular, how people walk through your Web site, and which pages precipitate an abrupt departure. But does all that truly measure what you get for your search engine advertising? Nope.

But there’s a better way. A new model is evolving, one in which marketers track and measure not pay-per-click, but pay-per-close. This approach analyzes how your Internet marketing efforts translate to real business. Clicks still matter – but it’s what the click leads to, not the click itself, that counts.

Here's how we track pay-per-close at Eloqua.

When someone clicks on a keyword on Google and lands on our Web site, we start tracking their behavior (using our own product, of course). We don't yet know who they are, but that's fine because right now, we don't mean anything to each other. The prospect doesn't care to hear from us and we don't know that they are even interested in what we’re offering. We're just providing them information and passively observing their behavior, like an attentive shopkeeper watching someone browse his inventory.

However, when a person signifies interest -- by downloading an eBook, viewing a demo, or signing up for a newsletter, for example -- we take the opportunity to approach and engage them. "Can I help you find something?" we ask them. And they tell us, through their behavior, what they're interested in. 

At that point, we can tailor our communication. "I see you're interested in deliverability," we can say to them.  "Did you know that we have a full-time deliverability officer who maintains relationships with the major ISPs and spam experts around the world?" And now we're engaged in a digital conversation with them.

Throughout the course of that conversation -- which can last days, weeks, or longer -- we're always remembering what they did before and modifying our message like any good conversant. Oh, and we record every campaign they respond to, from first click all the way through to close of business.

Why is this more effective than tracking simple clicks? Because when the revenue comes in, we can now credit our search advertisements, social media efforts, or other sources of clicks with the actual amount of cash they contributed to our top line.

And that's a conversation that our CEO likes to have. It's one that our CFO can engage with. It's of interest to the Board and to Wall Street and it makes the VP of Sales authentically happy. 

So instead of getting excited about clicks, think about changing your approach.  Track the metrics that really matter. Using the pay-per-close approach is a better way of measuring marketing's contributions to the organization.

2008 State of the Marketer Survey Released

Last month, Eloqua released our 2008 "State of the Marketer" survey to uncover marketers' views of the industry today and take the temperature of our fellow marketers.

We spoke to nearly 200 U.S. marketers at companies ranging in size from $10 to $500 million in revenue, hailing from industries spanning business and professional services, high technology, manufacturing, retail and hospitality.

Good news:  Despite the sagging economy, the survey results indicate that marketers have a positive outlook on their contributions to their companies' success, and plan to significantly increase their budgets in the next three years as well as increase their staffs.

Marketing spending trends

We asked:  Compared to three years ago, how has your spending for the following marketing media changed (print advertising, online advertising, Google AdWords, broadcast advertising, direct mail, email, social media, texting/SMS)?

They said:   There will be more online advertising growth than expected -- More than 40 percent of respondents said they have radically increased their spend in online advertising, indicating that online advertising is their most increased expenditure out of all marketing media. But only 23 percent said they have increased their Google AdWords spend.

Texting/SMS spend is a lot less hot than anticipated -- Spend has stayed the same, according to 60 percent of respondents.

Direct email isn't dead -- More people have increased spend on email over the last year (26 percent) than on Google AdWords (23 percent). 

Traditional channels stagnant -- Print advertising, direct mail and broadcast spend stayed the same.

We asked:  Overall, by what percentage has your marketing budget increased or decreased in the last three years (increased by more than 50 percent; 25 to 49 percent; 10 to 24 percent; 1 to 9 percent; stayed the same; decreased by 1 to 9 percent; 10 to 24 percent; 25 to 49 percent; more than 50 percent)?

They responded: Marketing budgets have increased over the past three years -- Respondents indicate that 72 percent of them have an increased marketing budget with nearly 50 percent increased by more than 10 percent, and 11 percent increased by more than 50 percent.

Marketing effectiveness

We asked: How effective are the marketing programs you run today compared to the marketing programs you ran three years ago (more effective; equally effective; less effective)?

They said: Marketers are getting more effective -- Sixty-four percent of marketers said they feel that their marketing programs are more effective today vs. three years ago.

Marketers' views of media

We asked: How important do you believe Second Life or other virtual marketing media will be to your marketing campaigns (very important; important; not important)?

They said: Not so important -- More than half (52 percent) of the marketers said they feel that Second Life or virtual marketing media are not important.

We asked: Have you yourself ever responded to an unsolicited email (yes; no)? Have you yourself ever responded to an unsolicited direct mail piece (yes; no)?

Marketers feel that direct mail still works -- Sixty-four percent of marketers have responded to unsolicited direct mail vs. 49 percent who have responded to an unsolicited email.

We asked: Have you yourself ever responded to an unsolicited text message on your cell phone (yes; no)?

They said: Marketers aren't always supportive personally of the campaigns they use -- Although 93 percent said they have never responded to an unsolicited text message, 65 percent will increase their spend on SMS over the next three years.

Dealing with industry issues

We asked: Over the next three years, do you plan to increase or decrease your marketing staff (increase by more than 50 percent; 25 to 49 percent; 10 to 24 percent; 1 to 9 percent; same; decrease by 1 to 9 percent; 10 to 24 percent; 25 to 49 percent; more than 50 percent)?

They said: 95 percent of them will maintain or increase their marketing staff over the next three years, with nearly 30 percent expecting their staff to grow by double digits over the next three years.

We asked: How would you characterize the relationship between the sales and marketing departments in your organization (terrible; ok; excellent)? Over the last three years, how has the relationship between sales and marketing departments changed in your organization (gotten better; stayed the same; gotten worse)?

They answered: Sales and marketing are finally bridging the divide -- More than 90 percent of the people surveyed said that the relationship between sales and marketing departments is okay or excellent.
This good relationship is a fairly new thing -- In just the past three years, 54 percent have seen the improvement in the relationship.
Marketer accountability

We asked: As a marketer, how has the pressure on you to account for results changed in the last three years (greatly increased; increased; stayed the same; decreased; greatly decreased)?

They said: The pressure is growing -- No one said that the pressure has decreased; 86 percent of the people said that the pressure has increased on them to account for results.

We asked: Does your organization have a way to quantify the contribution of marketing to the bottom line (yes; no)?

They replied: Marketing is accountable -- According to the respondents, 68 percent of organizations are measuring the quantifiable contribution of marketing to the bottom line.
When the company has a bad quarter, who shoulders more of the blame (marketing; sales; equal)?

Sales and marketing are starting to share the blame -- More than half (58 percent) said they feel the blame is shared equally.

It's good to be a marketer

We asked: How does the senior management team of your company value marketing (a lot; some; very little; not at all)?

They said: Marketers feel valued -- The respondents claimed that 91 percent of them feel valued by senior management (57 percent a lot; 34 percent some).

We asked: If you could turn the clock back to college graduation, would you still go into marketing (yes; no)?

They said: Most marketers enjoy their jobs -- A whopping 74 percent say they would reenter the field.

Lead Management Success Using Lead Scoring

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.

What is Lead Scoring?

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.

Integrating Blogs into Your Demand Generation Mix

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

Highlights from the Search Engine Strategies Conference

My colleague Shawn DeSouza staked out the Search Engine Strategies conference a few weeks ago, getting a feel for what’s going on with search engine marketing and search engine optimization these days. 

He reported back as follows:

For the search marketer, life has become even more challenging. Now, not only should you worry about optimizing your web content, you must also optimize for multimedia – images, videos, podcasts, blogs, wikis. What’s more, nothing is sacred. A less than flattering picture of your CEO ( posted by an irate ex-employee or worse, a competitor) might surface in the search engine results page, along with your company’s last quarter results.

***

Another session worth mentioning, only because it had people talking about it well into the 4^th day of the conference, was the one entitled “Are Paid Links Evil? which saw Google’s Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) valiantly defend his company’s policy against some very passionate paid-link proponents who say they do it because it works.

A related topic is, of course, paid blog posts. A growing industry has mushroomed with offshore teams scouring the blogosphere and posting link-laden comments on industry blogs.

The Search Engines consider paid links that pass PageRank a violation of quality guidelines and a form of ‘pollution.’ Matt said that it was also very difficult to buy paid links effectively as a search marketer because Google does such a good job detecting and eliminating the value of those links. A blow-by-blow account of this highly contentious session can be found on Rand Fishkin’s blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-paid-links-debate-rages-on-ses-san-jose-2007

Other quick hits from around the show:

Patricia Hursh, from SmartSearch quoted a Forrester 2006 survey which showed that only 59% of B2B marketers were utilizing any form of search.

Karen Vogel of Clearguage suggested companies need to map visitors needs to assets and content that you have available for them. Vogel talked about mapping chunks of web content to stages in the buying cycle and then scoring and measuring web activity.

Simplified forms, offering action options eg. Using a primary conversion tactic such as “Download a Free Trial” alongside secondary ones like “Register for a Webinar” or “View Demo”.

Paul Slack from WebDex showed how the two critical players in B2b – influencers and decisions makers search differently – influencers look for products/solutions to specific pain points while decision-makers look for validation – financials, management profile, press, reviews, analyst reports etc.

Verbing the Sales and Marketing Divide

I've been speaking a lot the past few months about bridging  crossing jumping hurdling  dealing with the sometimes competing objectives of sales and marketing.  There has been plenty written about it, for example, here, here and here.

And you can check out the recording of a panel I moderated at the most recent Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference if you'd like. (note: they posted the sessions on Google video. Is there any B2B company more hip than salesforce?)

Oftentimes, we talk about technology being the answer to this relationship problem. But it's not. Technology can help you automate and systemize the solution, but it won't get to the root of it. CRM systems are great repositories of customer information, but they do not populate themselves. Marketing automation platforms are wonderful revenue building tools, but unless you have a blueprint for success, your tools will merely be expensive toys. Is this obvious? Every time I think I say something overly transparent here, I meet someone in the real world who has purchased a whole lot of CRM and can't figure out why their sales people never update it. Which leads me to this.

I wanted to elevate a voice I heard on Brian Carroll's blog last year on the topic.  One of the things that annoys me about the blogging format is that the blogger's voice is preferenced over the commenters, who often lend a valuable, insightful and fresh perspective on the issue being discussed.  So I thought I'd repost what Don Hicks from Salesvistas.com said in a comment and then I'll be back at the bottom of this post with a few additional notes:

Let's role play.

Management: "Some of our sales people are really good and some are not so good. How can make the not so good ones as productive as the really good ones?"

Management's idea man (CFO?): "We measure their activity with CRM software. The metrics will tell us what good activity is."

Marketing: "Since we are getting CRM anyway, if we have the sales people enter key demographic data we can do our jobs better."

Product Manager: "If you can collect this additional information we can better determine what features to add to our future products."

CFO (idea man?): "With additional data we may get better forecasts and therefore I can do a better job of managing our cash flow."

Management Announcement" "OK team, we have this really cool application that is going to let us know who the really good sales people are and who the not so good sales people are. And if you fill in all the boxes, the marketing department, product managers, and the financial department (who we know are ALL really good at their jobs even though we don't measure that) will have MORE data so they can be really, really better."

Common Sense:

The really good sales people know who they need to talk to, where they are in the sales process (even if the company doesn't have a sales process), why the prospect is going to buy, and who is going to sign the check. A "traditional" CRM system is NOT going to make the really good sales person more productive. The really good sales people are also probably generating their own leads.

The not so good sales people don't want you to know that they're not so good. Just like the not so good marketing, production, financial, cleaning people don't want you to know they don't know what they're doing.

Hence, nothing good will come from the data in the CRM system anyway. The really good sales people will enter the minimum data required and the not so good sales people will "pad" their data with garbage.

There are technologies that can make sales people more efffective, knowledgable, and professional (CRM/SFA are management tools not sales tools). But, in order for these to work, the foundation of a sound CRM system supported by a well designed sales process must be in place.

New Role Play:

CEO Announcement: "We have decided to implement a new CRM system to help us better communicate with our customers and prospects. We understand that an additional administrative load will be placed on our sales team. We have the best sales team in the world and I am sure they can handle the additional load. If you work diligently to be thorough and keep the data current, I promise our effort and investment to make you better and more professional sales people.

I promise I will use the CRM system as a management tool to better interact with you, the life blood of our business, and help you be more effective, knowledgeable, and confident when representing our company value.

I promise I will use the CRM system to focus more resources toward your success.

I promise to never again ask you "What will you close this month?", and instead I will be prepared to speak to you in terms of what resources you need to close your most immediate opportunities and advance your other opportunities through the sales process.

I promise better collaboration between management, sales, marketing and customer service.

And finally, I promise continuous improvement of the system, driven mostly by input from you, our customer-facing teams."

So what should you take away from all this? Start with a meeting. Lure your salespeople into a room with the promises of beer and wine and quota attainment, and start whiteboarding it out. Give it a shot. And if you post a great comment, I'll be sure to promote that too.

Plan of Action

Raise your hand if you have a written plan for how you're going to generate more and better leads in 2007.

Yeah, I didn't think so.

For B2B marketers, the beginning of the last quarter of the calendar year is the best time to put pen to paper (or pixels to word processor) and come up with answers to the following:

1. What is the definition of your ideal lead?
2. How does your target company buy the kind of stuff you offer?
3. How do the individuals at these companies participate in the buying process?
4. What can you do next year to broaden the reach of your message?
5. What can you do to turn your existing customers into fanatics about your stuff?

Answer those questions and you get an A.

Oh, and by the way, if you need help coming up with your total demand gen plan for '07, hop on over to Atlanta at the end of this month for a two-day Marketing Effectiveness Summit that Eloqua is presenting along with our partners.

You can get the brochure here.

Ten Attributes of a Trusted Advisor

In business-to-business sales, a number of marketing gurus say you need to sell consultatively, that is, behave like a consultant, rather than a vendor.  Or they say you must become a trusted advisor and craft your sales cycle around that notion.  Charles H. Green of Trusted Advisor Associates has a good article on the topic.

So let's say you want to become a trusted advisor to your customers and prospects.  What does that mean?  For this, I turn to numerous children's books, where a fabled King always had a trusted advisor by his side to provide counsel on important matters of the day. 

Here are 10 key attributes of successful trusted advisors (that is, those who didn't have their heads lopped off for violating one of these rules):

1. A trusted advisor puts your success ahead of their own.
2. A trusted advisor doesn't hold back critical information that could influence your decision.
3. A trusted advisor gives you the best advice he or she has at the time.
4. A trusted advisor has information that you don't have.
5. A trusted advisor wants a long-term relationship with you.
6. A trusted advisor has your best interests at heart.
7. A trusted advisor knows she or he will get punished if they give you bad advice.
8. A trusted advisor is willing to trust what you say.
9. A trusted advisor always invests more in you initially than they expect in return.
10. A trusted advisor doesn't spread rumours or speak ill of his competition.

Feel free to add more in the comments.