Marketers have a plethora of diverse marketing technologies to help with advertising, social media, operations and other aspects of their job. The overwhelming abundance of marketing technologies pulls marketers in different directions. It’s often times helpful to take a step back, re-focus and look at marketing technology from a 10,000 foot view. Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com, created a diagram of the various marketing technology groups. We thought we’d share it with you. Scott groups marketing technologies into three domains:
• External promotion (orange) such as advertising and social media marketing • Customer experience (blue) that you operate and control, such as your website • Marketing management (green) that runs the organization behind the scenes
Where does Lead Liaison fit into this diagram? The toughest part is sticking our software into a box. We’re not just a single product or technology, rather – a platform. Our revenue generation software overlaps with marketing automation, email marketing, landing pages and micro sites, sales automation and business intelligence to improve customer experience and facilitate marketing management. As our platform evolves we’ll likely leverage core feature sets from other marketing technologies to continue to expand our platform while enhancing our value to sales, marketers and executives.
Marketing automation is a simple concept if you’re in the industry or familiar with these types of solutions. But, what if you’ve never heard of marketing automation before? Take five minutes to read this simplified summary of how marketing automation works.
Eric Wittlake made some very important points about marketing automation. Let’s summarize what Eric says about the premise of marketing automation:
Marketing automation is built on the premise of delivering the right communication to the right person at the right time. When your competitor’s delivery of content is more timely than yours, you have been trumped. Even great content will not engage your audience if the need has already been met by someone else’s more timely delivery. – Eric Wittlake, Babcock & Jenkins
Eric also highlights what fuels the marketing automation engine, successfully delivering the right content at the right time hinges on data. Data that is provided explicitly by prospects, and more importantly, data that is provided implicitly through their engagement with your communications and content.
Eric does a great job summarizing the marketing automation workflow. It’s important to note that marketing automation is only as strong as its weakest link. If any of the three links mentioned below break down then the marketing automation model loses strength. Eric discussed the drawbacks of removing a link in the workflow. We’ll invert Eric’s thinking to view the benefits of continuing the marketing automation cycle.
• Continued database profiling and lead qualification enables accurate follow up communication. • With accurate follow up communication, prospects will engage. • With engagement, lead profiles and lead scores are updated to deliver the right message at the right time. • Rinse and repeat…
Check out our other articles to learn more about lead scoring and how to do database profiling.
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Making a business case to your management team for Revenue Generation Software is not difficult to do as long as you’ve got the right information in hand. When presenting your business case we suggest sticking to the following outline:
1. Highlight Problem Areas 2. Show ROI 3. Advocate new marketing strategies
Keep your justification brief and be ready to drill down into specifics if asked. Let’s highlight some data points for each of the aforementioned areas to help you strengthen your business case for Revenue Generation Software:
Problem Areas
Many B2B marketing authorities have studied the lead management automation (LMA) and/or marketing automation industry. Here are some important facts that expose deficiencies in most B2B companies:
• Only 3-5% of new lead inquiries are “sales-ready” • 70-80% of the other inquiries are latent demand that will buy within 2 years, but are typically lost, ignored or discarded by sales • 73% of companies have no process for revisiting leads leaving databases to become “stale” • 80% of marketers send unqualified leads on to sales • 90% of marketing deliverables are not used by sales • 90% of website visitors don’t identify themselves • 87 out of 100 deals are left behind by sales • It takes 7 to 9 proactive communications to gain a B2B decision-makers attention • 30% of sales reps turnover each year, 7 months to ramp up
Consider the points above and assess whether or not your company faces these challenges.
Show ROI
Best-in-class sales and marketing teams generate 4x more closed deals than average teams using the same pool of leads. Closing 4X more deals will surely be an eye-opener for any manager or executive. In addition to a hard-ROI it’s important to highlight the soft-ROI. In other words, how else will revenue generation software positively influence your organization’s people, products and process?
ROI for Marketers
• Gigantic productivity boost for marketing. Marketers no longer have to run campaigns manually; they can automate them and schedule them in advance. Marketers can create more campaigns with fewer resources while delivering more, higher qualified leads to their sales team. Finally, marketing can respond more quickly and push out new campaigns at a rapid pace with drag/drop tools that simplify campaign creation without having to lean on IT for support. • Marketers will keep their business one step ahead of their competition and claim the majority of a prospects mind-share using state-of-the-art technology that intelligently automates and improves processes. Leave no lead left behind and distance your company from its competitors. • Marketers will get more out of their campaigns. Revenue Generation Software allows marketers to better track and measure metrics that help them tweak and tune performance of marketing campaigns. Campaign response rates usually double when Revenue Generation Software is used to drive campaigns.
Marketers aren’t the only people that directly benefit from using Revenue Generation Software. Sales people reap reward as well. Here are some highlights of how Revenue Generation Software will help your sales team:
ROI for Sales
• Sales people will get more information about their leads. Sales will better understand a prospect’s interest, past behaviors and overall interaction with your company. • Sales will receive more qualified leads. Revenue Generation Software uses automated technology to qualify leads using company-specific criteria that’s unique to your business. • Like marketing, sales will also see a gigantic productivity boost. Instead of getting a pile of business cards, an excel spreadsheet or CRM view of a bunch of “leads” from marketing (what sales people would call “contacts”), sales gets quick access to prioritized leads sorted by qualification criteria. Additionally, sales people get real-time alerts when their favorite lead or company visits your website.
Sales and marketing will benefit individually and especially as a whole. It’s not uncommon for sales and marketing teams to be disconnected and think independently. Unfortunately, prospects and customers suffer from disparate sales and marketing processes as communication breaks down. Through the implementation of Revenue Generation Software sales and marketers will naturally become more aligned. Your sales and marketing teams will experience:
ROI for Sales and Marketing Teams Together
• A common view of the company’s revenue cycle. A revenue cycle is a combination of a marketing funnel with the sales funnel. As B2B buyers change, marketing is able to make greater contributions to company revenue garnering closer alignment between organizations. • Improved marketing and sales productivity along with stronger top line growth. • A collective understanding of how to improve marketing campaigns, track leads, measure results, improve data quality and nurture leads through the funnel.
New Marketing Strategies
While making the business case for Revenue Generation Software it’s important to highlight how the software will help you hit your current goals give to you by your manager. It’s equally important to highlight what marketing automation will add to your marketing bag of tricks. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:
• Lead nurturing which increases communication with contacts in your database by sending them timely and relevant information to build relationships and progress them through your funnel. • Monitoring website behavior which keeps a digital trail of information as prospects fill out forms, visit web pages, use keywords to search for your business and make return visits. • Lead qualification using lead scoring to assign numerical values to leads that meet your qualification criteria helping to prioritize who is hot and who is not. • Improved content creation strategies with the use of WYSIWYG editors and templates to build marketing emails. Also, drag/drop tools to build web forms and landing pages. These marketing tools are easy to use and don’t require additional 3rd party resources or IT – which saves companies money.
Building a Hard ROI
The below information is helpful when building a “soft” ROI to support a “hard” ROI (financials). Want to go a step further and build a hard ROI demonstrating financial return? We’ve got lots of experience doing just that! Contact us if you’d like a copy of our model and formulas which will help you build your business case for revenue generation software.
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In an article last week by Mark Wicka on the B2B Lead Blog he talks about the challenges of prioritizing a company’s database. Mark describes how his company used an “opportunity grade” to create a snapshot of a prospect and prioritize the lead for sales.
“When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact?” – Mark Wicka, B2B Lead Blog
The challenge Mark’s company faces is all too familiar for many businesses. It’s imperative to simplify your database for sales and marketing effectiveness. Fortunately, technology can help automate snapshots and create opportunity grades across your database. Lead scoring technology helps businesses grade their database based on various demographics, interests and behaviors. Lead scoring is included with most Lead Management Automation (LMA) software packages. When using lead scoring marketers can create lead scoring programs that grade their existing database as well as future leads added to the database. Lead scoring programs can be run in a one-time-only mode or setup to run continually based on the needs of the business.
Some lead scoring systems allow marketers to create multiple types of grades/scores; for example, a “Fit Score” or a “Behavioral Score”. A Fit Score grades a prospect based on how they match up against your ideal buyers profile wherein a Behavioral Score grades a prospect based on their online behaviors or overall activity (whitepapers downloaded, forms submitted, pages viewed, etc.). Additionally, select vendors provide a snapshot view of leads with the highest grade directly from within a CRM system such as Salesforce.com. Having a consolidated view helps sales and marketers know where they need to spend their time and how to manage their day.
For a glimpse into Lead Liaison’s LMA software and an overview of how we help companies automatically grade their database and simplify their database for sales effectiveness ping us!
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Millions of marketing teams struggle finding the right strategy to market their solutions. Marketing tools help marketers do their job more effectively and efficiently; however, finding the right set of strategic marketing tools can be a bear. Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of strategic marketing tools for you and encourage you to help us build upon this list. We categorized each tool into its respective marketing bucket. If your marketing team doesn’t have these tools to support their campaign, go get them! Note, we’ll keep this list dynamic and continue adding tools to it over time. What are your favorite strategic marketing tools?
One of our founders recently bought a Buick Enclave. Most of the folks on our team are not car experts. Needless to say, we knew little about Buick Enclaves. When we heard she bought a Buick, we thought – “that’s an old man’s car”. Buick Regal, Roadmaster, Park Avenue, LeSabre – the list of old school Buick’s goes on. Why wouldn’t we formulate that opinion? Several of us got to take a spin in her new Enclave. Let’s just say this; it was a real eye opener. It reminds me how one can be so ignorant about new things. After all, you only know what you know. It got us thinking, if Buicks have evolved like this how has business evolved?
Business, in particular sales and marketing, has evolved considerably. Similar to what technology has done for Buicks, technology has given business a boost. For example, consider our founders Buick Enclave. The vehicle is OnStar equipped. Our co-founder showed us the OnStar iPhone app. We were amazed she could remotely unlock, lock and start her vehicle with the press of a button. And check this out – she remotely started the vehicle and it adjusted the climate control inside the vehicle based on the temperature outside. Wouldn’t it be nice if one could automate business with the press of a button?
Guess what, we can! Sales and marketing is no longer the old school Buick. Marketers have an opportunity to “OnStar-their-business”. Businesses can take advantage of software that automates common marketing processes. For example, with a few button clicks marketers can automate lead nurturing, or drip campaigns, lead qualification, lead distribution and alerts that highly benefit sales. Let’s draw from another analogy in the spirit of Buick/OnStar. While having the iPhone OnStar app up, our co-founder showed us how to find a place using Bing, say the closest Indian restaurant, and push that destination to the in-car navigation or turn-by-turn system. When she jumped in the vehicle her Buick asked her if she wants to go to the Indian restaurant.
That’s similar to configuring an automated marketing campaign and pushing it out to your business. With marketing automation software marketers can configure their prospects route, navigating them through your business and driving them forward along the revenue cycle. Marketer can send automated emails and other actions as part of an automated program and either run/activate the program or schedule it to start at any time in the future.
It’s time to harness technology and start automating business.
For a demo of OnStar and Lead Liaison ping us!
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Scott Brinker, a marketing technologist and author of the chiefmartec.com blog, recently posted an article on Why marketers should learn how to program. We couldn’t disagree more with several of Scott’s thought-provoking concepts. Do not complicate marketing – simplify it.
Technology changes marketing – without question. Social media, blogs, online surveys, email marketing, YouTube are all examples of technology that inspires marketers to think differently about marketing strategies and campaigns. Learning to program doesn’t help a marketer harness marketing technology. Computer programming is not for everyone. Some marketers are technical and some are not. For the ones that aren’t technical or analytically-minded, don’t try telling them to program as the solution. You’ll have better luck asking an English teacher to become a microbiologist. There are many types of programming (C/C++, Java, PHP, ASP…the list goes on), all programming is different (web based, machine languages) and learning is not an overnight endeavor. You’ll just confuse the marketer. Make their life simpler, not harder. The answer to how to embrace new and innovative marketing technology is…hold your breath, new and innovative marketing technology.
Technology can improve processes and also simplify them at the same time. Scott is correct; there are a growing number of choices for marketing software. However, marketers must choose wisely. They must be careful to not adopt software platforms designed by engineers – which virtually requires a programmer to configure. Adopting marketing software designed by sales and marketers, instead of engineers, is vital. These packages were built to offer simplicity and ease of use that marketers expect. Case in point, Scott showed a screen shot (snippet below) of a complicated flow chart depicting a marketing campaign. If you want marketers to run then show them a flow chart like this.
Scott also discusses a few other points. He suggests the cast of players around a marketer is growing and learning programming will help you speak their ‘native tongue’. Why not learn from the players themselves? Surely the players don’t understand some of your marketing terms. They might be interested in a quick lesson. Collaborating with your colleagues will only foster intra-company relations and build moral. Maybe you could send them to Douglass Karr’s The Marketing Technology Blog to read about these marketing terms.
Whether it’s marketing terms or marketing software, let’s not complicate marketing, let’s simplify it.
For a simplistic, yet amazingly powerful, software package that increases effectiveness of your sales and marketing team check out Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software.
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Why choose marketing automation for small business? If you’re a micro-sized business (< $5M in revenue) or a small business (< $20M in revenue) then there’s less than one percent (1%) chance you’re using marketing automation technology to help grow your small business. Interestingly, when comparing penetration rates of marketing automation (reference our write-up on the “Marketing Automation Market”) for micro and small-sized businesses to penetration rates of mid-size and large businesses, micro and small-sized businesses have the lowest adoption rates. Adoption rates should be much higher than mid-size and large businesses.
Small businesses stand to gain a lot from marketing automation technology. Two fundamental needs are commonplace in almost every small business:
Two fundamental needs of a small business… • Rapid growth • Large presence
First, small businesses need to grow rapidly to satisfy investors. When there’s growth, especially fast growth, there’s interest from additional investors in injecting capital into your company’s business. In the venture capital (VC) world, entrepreneurs win when multiple VCs want to invest – VCs end up competing against each other, fighting for their (unfair) share of your business.
Second, small businesses need to appear large, as a formidable competitor in their space and as a viable company customers are willing to invest in. Very few potential buyers will find interest in a company that appears small and unstable with limited resources. Appearing larger improves the chances of your business “winning the deal”.
Fortunately, marketing automation help small businesses grow and appear larger. In particular, marketing automation technology introduces a great deal of personalized automation thereby reducing the need to have dedicated resources managing mundane, yet critical, tasks. Lead Liaison goes many steps ahead of traditional marketing automation packages with our revenue generation software that automates emails, lead qualification (lead scoring, buy signals, lead activity), lead distribution, lead nurturing, lead capture and more. Our software provides a cost-effective framework for small businesses to help structure their lead management process.
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Marketing campaign messaging is important, but it’s more important to think about who you’re messaging to. When building a campaign, it doesn’t make sense to make a one-size fits all message. Sales and marketing people need to tailor messaging around the recipient. Similar to giving a presentation, before you present you’ve got to know your audience. You must know who you’re presenting to. Are they engineers or marketers, technical or business savvy? If you don’t know the exact title or role of your recipients then try categorizing them into organization levels. We suggest using three levels; C-level, Director/VP-level and everyone else (rank and file). Here are some tips on how to focus your marketing campaign messaging around these organizational levels:
C-level
Focus campaign messaging on outcome and results.
Director and VP-level
Focus campaign messaging on process and improvement results.
Rank and File
Focus campaign messaging on features and benefits.
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Have you ever wondered how to build a database profile? If you haven’t, it’s time you start thinking about it. Database profiling creates individual, sub-segmented databases to target marketing efforts and personalize messaging. Dust off the cobwebs and consider tapping into your most prized resource, your database, vs. buying lists and using common “spray-and-prey” marketing approaches.
While driving cross country the other day, I saw a big semi truck with the words “Our most valuable asset sits here” plastered across the side of the truck. There was an arrow following the statement. The arrow pointed to the truck driver! The trucking company clearly feels their drivers are a key asset to their company. It got me thinking, what would a business say their most valuable asset is? Rightfully so, some might say their employees; however, companies would be remiss not to mention their database as one of their most valuable assets.
Databases take time to build and contain a host of crucial information on partners, competitors, prospects and customers making them a rich repository for any marketing savvy professional. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t able to unlock the true potential of their assets without a database profiling solution. Sophisticated technology is necessary to build rich database profiles, which effectively partitions a database into smaller, more targeted sub databases. Database profiling solutions allow businesses to do two things, segment and score their database. Let’s cover lead scoring and database segmentation in more detail.
Database Profiling using Lead Scoring
Lead scoring allows marketers to prioritize their database by assigning points to each record based on custom criteria. For example, marketers can run scoring programs across the database to give 10 points to people in a target industry. Similarly, assign 10 more points to people who work for companies generating more than $100M in revenue. These scores are examples of demographic lead scoring. Behavioral lead scoring takes into account contacts interaction with marketing. For example, if someone filled out a web form or clicked through an email campaign. The end result is a prioritized and qualified database, something very handy for a sales team.
Database Profiling using Segmentation
Database segmenting is the process of creating individual lists or groups based on select criteria. For example, marketing can create a list of contacts in a certain industry that have interacted with your company in the past 6 months. With a segmented database, marketers can send personalized communications to prospects that are more relevant and topical. Segmented databases are easier to nurture using lead nurturing technology and result in higher lead to opportunity conversion.
Make sure your lead scoring and database segmentation solutions are dynamic, not just static. In other words, make sure the tools you use can build a database profile that applies to your existing database as well as future contacts added to your database. Case in point, when a new contact is added to your database that fits specific segmentation criteria, the contact should be automatically added to your list. Likewise, once a lead scoring program is setup and defined future contacts should be scored based on your criteria.
Database profiling is easy when you have the right tools to segment and score your database. Fortunately, Lead Liaison delivers solutions to help you statically and dynamically profile your database. Don’t forget to market and re-market with relevant material. Start getting the most out of your shiny new asset today! Maybe the “most-valuable-asset” arrow might get pointed at you!
To learn more about Lead Liaison’s database profiling solutions please contact us.
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