The Innovative Marketer

The ABCs of Lead Nurturing

Note:  Updated with edits and new information.

I’ve been speaking at a number of conferences recently where marketers and sales people are quite interested in adopting a demand generation discipline within their organization.  Frequently, a marketing manager or director will ask me the steps necessary to start developing a lead nurturing program .

The answer is simple as A,B,C.

Here’s a framework I’ve used with dozens of companies in the past to help start their marketing program planning:

A is for Audience

Here is where you define who you are looking to talk to in your campaign.  Confusingly, even though you’re going to be talking with many people at once, you have to define a specific “who” in order to rationalize the creative material you develop.   The solution is touse personas, or what OgilvyOne used to call CustomerPrints.   Personas allow you to define a specific customer with all the traits – attitudes, needs, behaviors and attributes of a set of customers.  Ardath Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, writes extensively about how to develop customer personas on her blog.

B is for Behavior

Once you’ve defined the audience you want to communicate with, next map out what you want them to do as a result of your nurturing program.  Think in terms of verbs – should they download a longer form paper, listen to a podcast, watch a customer testimonial, call a sales representative for more information, visit you at a trade show?   By determining what call to action you want your persona to follow, it will clearly direct the next step in the process.

C is for Content

Here’s the creative part.  Now that you know who you want to communicate with and what you want them to do, you create compelling visuals and copy that will resonate with your prospective customer.  The advantage to having done the previous two steps is it allows you to have a specific conversation with the copywriter and designer putting together your material.  Ask yourself “does this layout resonate with the persona we described?”  There are a lot of great blogs on writing compelling copy and one of my favorites is Copyblogger. 

D is for Delivery Channel

You know who you’re talking to, what you want them to do and what you want to communicate with them.  You also need to plan for a delivery channel.   Will you be nurturing via email (the most common method)?  Will the email come from the marketing department or a sales rep who’s assigned to the lead?  Will you be using LinkedIn groups or Facebook pages?    Generally, lead nurturing is done via a long-form medium, which means it uses different delivery channels than, say, Twitter, which is great for customer engagement, but not entirely appropriate for an automated nurturing program.

E is for Evaluation

Finally, start your program with the end in mind.  What are you going to measure?  The ease of collection data in the digital realm makes data easier than ever to grab, but actionable intelligence much harder to glean, as you have to sift through much more information in order to make decisions. Make sure that all of your metrics are designed to answer a question, like “how many?” or “what is compelling?” or “when do they…?”  And, determine in advance what actions you may take as a result of that information.

By using this framework every time you begin planning a lead nurturing program and communicating it out to your team, you’ll find it easier to communicate with the right person at the right time with the right message – which is the goal of a well designed lead nurturing campaign.

Note:  This is a revised and updated version of an article I originally wrote for the Savvy B2B marketing blog.

Marketing Automation: Insource or Outsource?

Over the past three weeks, I've had a couple of in-depth conversations with business leaders about whether it's better to get a jump start on your marketing automation initiatives by outsourcing to an agency or to develop the organizational capacity in house. 

It's a fantastic first question to ask as you begin your demand generation journey because it's one of the first forks in the road that lead you towards different outcomes later on.

For the purposes of this discussion, I differentiate marketing automation as a set of technologies that enable different pieces of your demand generation strategy.  Regardless of whether you outsource or bring it in-house, it's critical that you own the demand gen strategy for your own company and not leave it to an external vendor to define and maintain your marketing vision.

When to outsource your marketing automation function

1. When it's not core to your business

2. When speed of deployment is a critical issue

3. When you need to prove success to your management team or Board before they commit to a long term strategy

4. When you can't find the right people to hire or train internally

5. When budget/cash flow is not a major issue

6. When you have the ability to manage the vendor and hold them accountable for results

7. When technology vendor selection is not key to your long term success

What type of partner do you need?

You also need to determine what type of vendor or consultant you need to hire to help you.  Most vendors have a core competency -- creative, IT integration or business process transformation.  Here are some questions to ask:

1. Does your vendor need expertise with a particular product?

2. Are you looking for someone with local presence and support?

3. Do you need training services?

4. Do you need someone who can help you plan your requirements before you buy technology?

5. Can you do a small pilot project first before you commit to large, ongoing costs?

6. Are they getting paid by anyone else associated with your project?

Be careful about signing up with a vendor who promises that they will run all marketing servces on your behalf, then gradually transfer the knowledge over to your team.  First of all, this is so rare that most services companies don't do that kind of education and training.  Secondly, their business model likely depends on a retainer or ongoing projects, so they are not as incented to hand over their organizational expertise to you. If your plan is to outsource first, then bring it in house, make sure you have a plan and proposal up front from your services vendor before you lock in to a contract.

And, if you aren't prohibited from doing so, a good first step would be to hire people from your vendor's project team to work for you.

When to build your organizational capacity in house

1. When marketing automation is essential to your business, such as when marketing owns sales quota or marketing staff is compensated based on revenue production

2. When you have specialized requirements that outside agencies don't have the capacity to support

3. When the organization has committed to success in the long term and understand that marketing automation is part of a larger change management initiative

4. When you have the abilitity to manage a team of experts

5. When you need tighter control of costs

6. If you are providing marketing services to an outside customer or client

 

How to Deal with a Medical Crisis

The following is not a post about marketing, but since a lot of you have picked up on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook that something is going on in my family now, I share this post with you.

Two weeks ago, my young son suddenly developed a serious brain condition that affected his speech and made him confused about where he was and what he was doing.  After rushing him to the emergency room that night, we were thrust into the medical world literally head first, enduring CT scans and MRIs, spinal taps and endless blood tests.  What followed were days in the pediatric ICU, wondering what caused it, what treatment he could receive, and most of all, if whatever Sam experienced was over.

During that week, I got a firsthand look at the running of a major medical department at a world-famous hospital in the Bay Area.   While these lessons aren’t necessarily marketing lessons (though there are some familiar marketing themes tucked in here), I wanted to share a few thoughts on how to cope if you are ever in the same situation:

 

Be your Own Advocate

Nobody knows what you need more than you do.  If you, or your child, is a patient in a hospital, get vocal.  The temptation is just to accept what the medical professionals say –- after all, you are playing on their field.  You don’t understand their language. You don’t know what all their equipment does.  You are stressed.  You need to summon the fortitude to ask questions like “why is this necessary?”  and “What could happen if we don’t do this?” If all else fails, contact the hospital’s ombudsman to help you get some answers.  Be sure to take notes on every conversation you have, including the time, the person’s name and what they told you.

Find Conversations About You and Listen 

Much of what I learned about my son’s condition, I learned from doctors and nurses during shift change. Why then?  It’s the time when they have to explain to their replacement what is going on with the patient, what changes have occurred and what the working diagnosis is.  As a parent, I had to continually ask for this information.  As an eavesdropper, I could hear them explain it to one another, correct them if they were inaccurate in handing off some data, and generally trying to make myself a useful part of the team.

Trust, but Verify

Don’t accept what someone says on you blind faith.  Even if they are wearing a white lab coat and sporting a shiny stethoscope, you can’t count on their interests being completely aligned with yours.  Most doctors take into account what’s best for the patient as a whole person, but there are others who look at medical issues as problems to be solved, and forget that there’s an individual involved.  Trust that the professional caring for you or your child has your best interests at heart, but still ask questions until you are comfortable with the answers.

Find the Person in Charge

I was terrible at this. The first night we came in through the ER, I was only focused on my son, but quickly I discovered that in a teaching hospital, there is a hierarchy of command, not unlike the military.  By the fourth day, after we saw dozens of MDs, I began asking for the one person in charge of my son’s medical care.  The staff seemed surprised that a parent would ask this -– apparently, it’s not a common question.   After I told them I wasn’t going to be allowing any more tests until I spoke to the person in charge, a doctor materialized (whom we had never met).

Follow Up

In a hospital, there’s always another case waiting for attention.  While we were there, we saw some very sick children, many of them quite young.  I knew that the medical staff were paying attention to whatever was urgent, whatever was life threatening, and if that case happened to come after my son’s, there was a chance that follow up on some medication or procedure wouldn’t come quickly, or at all.  Kindly reminding everyone involved in your case can help you get the kind of care you need.  And after you leave the hospital, make sure to call and email the doctors involved to remind them of your case and continue to stay in their minds.

Show Gratitude

Being in a hospital for any length of time, you’ll encounter hundreds of people.  Many of the staff will demonstrate brilliant flashes of kindness to you, from the maintenance person who holds an elevator for you while you are carrying cups of coffee, to the nurse who chases down a senior doctor to answer your question, even though he’s not responding to her pages.  Be sure to say “thank you” and realize that the amplifying effect of these kind gestures while you are in need is a true gift.

Sam is home now, back to school, and apparently doing much better.  We saw a total over 26 doctors over the past three weeks, and many more have been consulted.  While we don’t know what caused it, how it should best be treated, and if the problem is resolved for good, we are staying on top of his care and continue to be his best advocates.  Thanks for your thoughts and well wishes.

Can You Align Sales and Marketing?

If you do a search for "sales and marketing alignment" on Google, you'll see we've been talking about this elusive concept for more than 20 years. So if some of the brightest minds in management and systems thinking have been ruminating on this problem for so long and it's still plaguing board rooms all across the world, is this a solvable problem?

Yes and no.

It's a challenge of multiple facets including change management, systems thinking and proper implementation of technology. And most of all, you need discipline and honesty throughout your company. If you have the willingness to solve the problem of functional mis-alignment, here are a couple of places to start:

1. Get agreement from the CEO that this is important.

If you don't get buy in from the head of the company, trying to do this is an academic exercise. And you'd be surprised how many CEOs aren't interested in the change management exercise that makes up the backbone of really bringing marketing and sales into alignment. Advice: If your CEO is one of these, quit your job, short the company's stock and be grateful that you escaped the pit of doom that the company will become.

2. Promise sales that if they tell you what they want, marketing will deliver it.

Doesn't matter what it is. Do they want a list of names? Provide it. They looking for fully qualified leads with all BANT (budget, authority, need and timeframe) criteria defined? Fine. it just costs money. But the flip side is once sales agrees to it, you write it down, sign it, send it to everyone who may be called in a deposition in the future, and make it law. Because marketing departments who are trying to fix a problem with sales often have low credibility, this is critical.

3. Report on the same metrics.

If you ask sales and marketing leaders what they report to the management team (or the Board), very often you'll get things like this from them: Marketing: downloads, names of trade show attendees, "touches" (unless you are in the spa industry, this probably isn't an important metric), web traffic, social media mentions Sales: closed deals, total revenue, opportunity pipeline, sales forecast, qualified leads Make sure the management team cares about, and talks about, the same measures. and here's one bonus action that's been a controversial topic these days:

4. Bite the bullet and give marketing variable compensation.

There's a lot of resistance to this in the marketing world. The logic goes, "we can open the door to a lead, but sales has to close it." That's pithy. And hogwash. Marketing can do a lot to affect lead volume, quality, velocity and close of business. If it means one less doodad they produce and get out in the field to help close, so be it. By paying marketing in part on closed business, the organization puts its money where its alignment is.

Lastly, you can't tell your marketing and sales organization HOW to do this. Alignment is a code word for change management and the only way you can be successful is if all stakeholders have a part to play in figuring out the tactics to implement. If you try to impose things on the organization (like forcing marketing and sales to attend each other's meetings), you increase the chances of fomenting resentment among people who are very creative at inventing ways not to do things.

How to Not Get Fired as a Marketer

Consider this job description on LinkedIn:

 Pre-IPO startup looking for a marketer with experience in advertising, trade shows, long-cycle product management, public and analyst relations and big-budget campaigns.  Must be able to create 18-to-24-month marketing plans and adhere to them rigidly.   Experience managing a creative team of marketers and Madison avenue agencies.  Must be able to present in front of management team on metrics to include reach, brand value, amount of marketing activity and hits in conventional media.  

What do you notice about this description? 

Well, first of all, it doesn't exist.  And it will never exist again.  It's a relic, a souvenir of an era that is coughing and sputtering its final breaths.   This job description embodies the closed, herarchical, company is in control of the buyer's process that was so prevalanet in industrial marketing during most of last century.

What else do you notice?

It's probably the job description of someone you know, someone who went to a top-tier school, got a great education, maybe lives in a great house with Italian marble entryways and sub zero refrigerator.  Someone who is great at Scrabble and likes to golf.  Someone whose educational background has left them as unprepared for the new world of marketing as a bicyclist at the Daytona 500.  Someone who will soon be fired.

If you want to ensure a short-lived career at a company as a B2B marketer, limit yourself to only those skills you learned in business school years ago.

Today's marketing leaders must have a diverse set of skills, perhaps more diverse than anyone on the executive management team. The ideal CMO has the analytical mind of Galileo, the creativity of Picasso, the leadership skills of Ghandi, the foresight of Nostradamus, the design sense of Steve Jobs, the communication skills of Franklin Roosevelt and the patience of Mother Theresa.  

Modern marketing automation solutions have democratized the availability of the tools necessary to tie the jumble and pace of marketing activities to real revenue results for business.  The way to not get fired is not to buy a piece of marketing automation.  It's to become a better marketer and contribute to real revenue growth.

Lauren Carlson over at the Software Advice blog wrote an interesting article last week about the skills gap in most marketing organizations.  She spoke with Carlos Hidalgo, who started the Marketing Automation Institute (I'm an advisory board member) earlier this year to help address that gap.  My partner and I also started DemandCon in order to spread best practices in the world of demand generation to the marketing world in general.

And there's evidence that the battleship of marketing is slowly adjusting its course towards a brighter future. Consider these other promising signs:

• The average CMO tenure is up to 42 months, a huge increase over five years ago, when it was less than two years.  
• There's a tremendous amount of capital flowing into the marketing automation market now, indicating that investors see this as a huge area for growth in the coming decade.
• Sales is coming around to the idea that they are no longer in control of the sales cycle.  The buyer is.  And that requires good sales people to work closely with marketing to stay close to customer's needs and intents.

Now is a great time to become a demand generation marketer.  See this article over at the Post-Click Marketing Blog which gives some advice on how to succeed as a marketing professional.

 

 

 

Put the Fun Back in the Funnel

Content marketing is a gaping maw, endlessly begging for a variety of words and pictures and videos, insatiable in its need for the new and better and more attractive.

Some of the hottest trends in B2B marketing this year -- Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, Twitter, Inbound Marketing -- all require you to have something to say and an interesting way in which to say it.

So why is content marketing so boring?  Does it always have to be this way?

In working with hundreds of demand generation marketers this year, I've seen the same situation over and over again:  Folks have been told to focus on people, process and technology.  

And dutifully, they get their organization primed for change management, organize dozens of meetings (held while standing, because that's also the trend these days) with sales and marketing leadership to get alignment, and buy sophisticated marketing automation systems to power it all.

Then they write copy like this:

The proliferation of mobile devices within the enterprise is one of the hottest technology trends in business today. The explosion of mobile devices in use has created a headache for IT managers struggling to cope with the security implications of this growth. At the same time, this disruption has created a unique opportunity for solution providers to capitalize on this need.

XXX has expanded our XX lead delivery service to adapt to this rapidly growing segment of the market and help our customers identify and reach qualified prospects at every stage of the purchase cycle... Blah blah blech

We need to step up our game. But how?   Here are a couple of ideas:

• Hire a great direct response copywriter.  
• Find an out-of-work humor columnist to write for you.  
• Get a little loose and attempt it yourself.  

Just stop with the boring corporate-speak, please?

And if you think you don't have it in you, you need only to look to our B2C colleagues for inspiration, this one from Woot.com's web site on August 2, 2011 this year, selling a ballistic grey looking USB drive:

BURIED TREASURE

There’s gold in them there USB Flash Drives.

Legend has it that Thornton B. Centon, reclusive billionaire and founder of Centon Electronics, buried his treasure in one of these here 32GB USB flash drives. Legend has it that upon his deathbed, as his twelve spoiled-rotten children begged him to reveal the secret of the location of his wealth, he screamed “I shall never tell. I will take the secret, compatible with both Windows and Mac and ensconced in durable aluminum, to the grave!” And then, legend has it, he patted his pockets nervously and said, “Oh crap, I think I forgot it!” and with those words, he died.

Some say that the treasure is the access code to an off-shore bank account. Some say that what is on the drive is not a treasure but a map to a treasure. And some say it is a map that leads you to a treasure map. And some say the second map will bring you to a chest, in which is a second USB drive which contains a document that says, “there is no treasure.” And some say that the knowledge of there not being a treasure is a treasure in itself, but those people are just dumb.

Some believe that the treasure is an executable file that takes up all 32 gigabytes of the Flash Drive. And when its finder runs the file, his computer’s DVD-drive will eject a platinum DVD ofRequiem for a Dream except all of the characters are played by cats, making it hilarious and fun to watch. Others claim that the file will transform the finder’s computer, in front of your very eyes, into the woman of his dreams, as long as he dreams of a woman who only likes to talk about backing up his hard drive and has lips that taste like hard plastic...

 You can do it.  Put a little more fun into your funnel.

B2B Marketers Are Getting it All Wrong

Recently, I was introduced to Sharon Drew Morgen, an Austin-based, marketing veteran and NY Times best-selling author who created a buyer-centric sales and marketing model long before those of us in the demand generation discipline started teaching the process.

Sharon Drew is whip smart, opinionated and (in typical Texas fashion) not shy about calling it as she sees it.  Here’s an excerpt of our interchange:

Sharon Drew, you coined the term "buyer's journey" decades ago. How has the buyer's journey changed in recent years?

Not as much as you think. To begin with, we haven't spent much time considering the buying decision path.  Sales focuses on needs assessment and solution placement, and ignores  the behind-the-scenes change management issues that buyers must  address before they can buy.  So the trip between the non-solution based decision issues necessary for internal agreement/buy-in and purchase, still has the same steps it always has (Even more, given the economy and global workforce.)

Note that until a Buying Decision Team is fully formed, and their voices added to the solution choice, no solution will be purchased.

The computer and net has made it both easier and more complex  for the buyer to decide. But the journey is still a human one: without buy-in and change management addressed, our brilliant solutions and technology are meaningless. The addition of marketing automation is offering prospects more data, but that doesn't change the buyer's off-line journey.      

Billions of dollars in time and purchasing is wasted every year in pursuit of the "lead."  What is everyone doing wrong? 

The baseline assumption  is  that because it there is a 'need', there should be a sale.  But a 'lead' is  merely a name until the entire Buying Decision Team determines all of the folks who will touch the solution.  With our Marketing Automation System, we have no idea at what stage of the buying decision path this 'lead' is at. The time it takes for buyers to come up with their own change management answers is the length of the sales cycle, regardless of the data we send them.

And our leads are most likely not leads, as evidenced by the very low closing rate we have. Sales closes 7%; marketing automation closes less than 1%. We spend so much time trying to figure out the behavior of what a 'lead' looks like, but we are merely looking through the solution placement prism. It's an entirely different picture when you realize the off-line, private, buy-in journey they must take prior to a purchase.  And we aren't facilitating them, which we could be.

Why are companies getting it all wrong, Sharon Drew?

I see companies throwing a lot of money at sales and marketing automation, and still maintaining the focus on lead generation and appointment setting - all with the belief that getting in front of the right people (impossible until the entire Buying Decision Team has been put together) will allow them to present their data. But they end up getting small numbers of people into a meeting - often only a fraction of the Buying Decision Team - and offering good data far too early for them to know what to do with.

I also see a lot of time/resource waste, chasing prospects rather than helping them navigate the decision path and change management issues. At the moment, I'm not seeing a lot 'right' in the field, although some marketing automation folks are working with me to design software that will enter the buyer's decision path at the point of the first idea. 

Is the problem with marketing automation the technology, the process people use to take advantage of the technology, or the people themselves?

Marketing automation technology follows the  inefficient  sales model of needs assessment and solution placement.  We should use technology at the beginning of the buyer's decision path. I have coded the 13 steps that happen behind-the-scenes, and prospects get on line for three of these steps. We can not only "follow" them but also influence them early on in their path. 

We need to start thinking differently about what we want to do: do we want to sell? or have buyers buy? There is a different technology need for each.

If you were giving one piece of advice to a newly minted demand generation professional, what would that be?

Begin as a change agent. Develop your site  and marketing automation capability to help buyers align the entire Buying Decision Team and figure out how to get the buy-in with everyone who touches the solution. Put on a leader hat, rather than a marketer/sales hat first. Until or unless they do this portion - it's about 90% of the buyer's decision path - they can't buy anyway. Instead of pushing on those few who we believe to be 'leads'  and picking off the low hanging fruit , we can help so many more  buyers  to buy.  There is no reason we can't have a 40% close rate - from first call.

Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? Two different activities. 

Sharon Drew Morgen is a self-professed marketing automation curmudgeon.  She's based out of Austin, Texas.  You can contact her at http://sharondrewmorgen.com

Crafting Messages That Stick with Chip Heath

This is an all-time favorite of The Innovative Marketer radio show listeners.  And the principles are even more releveant in today's content marketing-obsessed B2B circles.  Enjoy.

A lot of authors have written books on copywriting, but Chip and Dan Heath have written the definitive book on crafting lasting stories.

Dan is a teacher and Chip is a Stanford professor, who has studied and analyzed hundreds of urban legends (remember the man who woke up in his ice-filled hotel bathroom to learn his kidney had just been harvested?) to determine what makes them so memorable.

The result are six concrete attributes of stories that I guarantee you'll remember.

Listen to this Podcast I recorded with Chip a few years back for a lot more on how you can create messages that stick. And, he'll be speaking live this fall at the Eloqua Experience in San Francisco if you want to hear more from him.

Here's a link to the urban legend catalog site I mentioned during my intro.