Making a Decision for Marketing Automation

As I talk to marketers about their goals and objectives for 2009, many are looking at marketing automation systems. While I applaud their forward thinking, I also find that they are making decisions without iron clad ROI and/or a true understanding of what a marketing automation system can do for them.

We highly recommend building out a series of Use Cases which will:
- Show specifically what the investment will return for you and by when
- Provide a clear vision to how the solution will be used
- Engage and align all key areas of the company – sales, marketing and senior management in the process thereby producing buy-in, collaboration and a common vision
- Create your “Go To Market” campaign schedule with agreement from all parties
- Provide your training case around your solution

How did you approach this important spend?

An Interview with Kelly Scott

Today we interviewed Kelly Scott about viewpoints on Demand Generation and what best practices are being used to help marketing drive revenue. TPG: 1.  What are some of your most effective lead generation programs? Kelly : We've had lots of success with webinars, "lumpy package" direct mail campaigns, and live product demo events. TPG: 2.  How do you measure your marketing performance?  What are some of the key metrics you use? Kelly : Our #1 metric is the % of leads that convert into 1st appointments for our sales team. TPG: 3.  What percentage of your budget is allocated towards lead generation? Kelly : Not nearly enough. TPG: 4.  How do you achieve alignment with your sales organization? Kelly : Blunt force... just kidding! We constantly communicate back and forth to make sure everyone's on the same page. TPG: 5.  How do you define a qualified lead? Kelly : A qualified lead for us is someone who is in the market for a new phone system. TPG: 6.  What role does technology play in your lead generation efforts? Kelly : It plays a major role. As a technology firm, we have to make sure we stay on the cutting edge. TPG: 7.  How is your organization leveraging social media to drive demand? Kelly : We have a company blog, our CEO twits (or is is tweets?), and we're also on FaceBook. TPG: 8.  What are your three top priorities for this year? Kelly : 1. Increase Revenue 2. Increase Revenue 3. Increase Revenue Oh, and I think we're trying to increase revenue. TPG: 9.  What advice would you give a marketer who is just getting started with lead generation? Kelly : Don't be afraid to try something new. Just remember to test and retest. You never know when you'll stumble across something that works. TPG: 10.  How do you see the role of marketing changing? Kelly : I see marketing becoming less and less "theoretical" and more metrics and results driven, especially with the new technology that's available to give marketers more access to data.

Email and Beyond!

After attending the Marketing Sherpa Email marketing conference, I can tell you, we have a LONG way to go for marketers to fully understand, embrace and leverage the incredible new processes and tools available on the market today. This in no way diminishes the focus of the conference – it enhances it! I saw an incredible thirst for education around all elements of using the web to improve lead flow and lead quality to sales. The rooms were packed, great questions were asked and marketers were very engaged. Learning these basics is incredibly important and these marketers were out to get all they could! Education, certification and training for marketers will continue to be a major theme in 2009 and 2010.

At the same time, my life everyday is about working with marketers who have a huge need to move well past email marketing as a singular solution and squarely into the land of demand generation. We define demand generation as the revenue focused activities from both sales and marketing that get quality leads into the top of the funnel and help pull opportunities through the sales funnel faster and more effectively. Demand generation is based on the notion of building unique one-on-one relationships, automatically, with your prospects based on their “digital body language.” It’s the other half of the discussion that sales and marketing is missing.

I frequently hear that the percent of demand generation marketers is small, maybe as high as 4% of all marketers. Consider this statistic. If you add up all the customers held by the marketing automation companies like Eloqua, Marketo, VTrenz, etc, the number is probably around 1500, tops! What are all the other marketers doing?

They are getting up to speed. Where are you?

What are your thoughts?

Thinking Like Your Prospect, And Why You Need to Do It!

Last week I had the opportunity to work with a large, well-known education brand to develop a demand generation strategy. One area of deep exploration was who do they sell to and how do these people buy. I think every marketer would agree that this is fundamental to any effective lead generation program. Yet, because marketing is at least one step removed from the actual prospect/customer and because thinking about online behavior is new, this is a challenging exercise to work through.

Here is what we did to help this company begin to sort this out. Please feel free to share how you have addressed this issue!

1. Develop a Persona Profile – this is not your typical marketing profile. We were looking for who they are, where do they go to get information, how they think, who do they talk to. The idea behind the persona is to understand them well enough so we can get them into the sales process WHEN THEY ARE READY. This is not about collecting marketing data.
Execution Idea: Have the cross-functional team (sales and marketing) who is creating the persona present their findings in ROLE of the persona. It’s fun and even more importantly, it’s easy to remember and associate!
Execution Idea: Do Not let a single word or phrase be anything but the prospect perspective. NO corporate language allowed.

2. Map the Decision Making Process – how does this persona make decisions, who do they talk to, where do they go? Based on where they are in their process, what kind of information helps them take a step closer to your solutions?
Execution Idea: Have the cross-functional team (sales and marketing) who is mapping the Decision Making Process use flip charts and think in big buckets of stages such as Realization (I realize I have a problem), Education (what kind of solutions are out there), etc.
Execution Idea: Stay in role!

3. Map the Life of a Lead in your company – this is the process of walking through all the steps you take a lead through from first contact to a piece of closed business to life cycle of the lead
Execution Idea: Make someone in the group “a lead” and have them walk through what happens to them from the first contact to being a closed piece of business – this is your “As Is” state

4. Define the Gaps between how the prospect makes a decision and how you process them from lead to close
Execution Idea: Use your flip charts from Steps 2 and 3

5. Develop the New Life of a Lead – this is your “To Be” state
Execution Idea: Re-write Step 3.

Working with very clear personas in Step 1, helped this process be successful. Otherwise, it would have been all over the map!

What have you seen that works?