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The Marketing Automation Mistake

August 18, 2011/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

There’s a big marketing automation mistake. The marketing automation industry is growing fast. At least $200M was spent acquiring marketing automation software over the past year. That’s a staggering figure considering the “marketing automation mistake”. If some very fundamental misnomers were avoided in the infancy stages then the market would not just grow, but grow rapidly.

Misnomer #1 – Marketing automation is a horrible name. Think about it. If I were a marketer and heard about marketing automation for the first time would I want to automate my job? If I did, I might not have a job. That’s like hiring your replacement. No one would volunteer for that. What these solutions do is automate very mundane or historically expensive tasks such as building web forms, landing pages or email marketing campaigns. Marketers no longer have to rely on creating html or 3rd party IT resources to get the job done. Now, they can do it on their coffee break. Marketers can visually build web forms and landing pages to easily wrap lead capture around any marketing campaign or event. These solutions also automate the process of following up with leads and building relationships with prospects over time via personalized and relevant communications- also known as “lead nurturing”.

Misnomer #2 – Lead scoring is a really poor term and misconstrues the real benefit of this feature. What lead scoring does is help sales and marketers automatically qualify prospects and/or customers. Why wouldn’t vendors call it “lead qualification” then? By using the term “lead scoring” it’s caused several other vendors in the space to follow suit and *only* score a lead. In reality, lead qualification is much more than just associating a number to a person. It’s about listening to what a prospect/customer wants and monitoring their overall engagement with your company. It’s much more meaningful to measure overall activity as well as key buy signals to properly qualify a lead.

Educators in the marketing automation space preach – “think like the buyer, not the seller”. I wish initial vendors in the space did just that. If they did, we wouldn’t be talking about “marketing automation” or “lead scoring”. Instead, we’d be talking about revenue generation and lead qualification – what matters to the buyer.

Weeding through the varying vernacular and various misnomers could lead to a serious headache. We side with advice from one of the industry’s top analysts, David Raab. If you’re looking for a solution from a vendor in this space do as David suggests:

…there’s just one right way to select software, and that’s to have vendors walk through scenarios based on how you plan to use it. – David Raab, Raab Associates Inc.

What mistakes have you seen in this space? What do you disagree with in this article? We’d love to hear from you.

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Marketing Automation for Small Companies

August 16, 2011/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

If you’re thinking marketing automation is only for big businesses, think again. Marketing automation for small companies is available now. Historically, micro, small and medium sized businesses (typically <= $5M in sales) couldn’t afford marketing automation systems. It used to be a requirement to spend six figures on a professional program. With the introduction of scalable features and pricing in software packages such as Lead Liaison’s, small companies can benefit from marketing automation.

Putting economics aside, let’s discuss why marketing automation for small companies is advantageous. Most small companies share many of the same problems. For example, they

• need more leads
• have limited sales and marketing resources
• need to understand their market and audience better
• have fairly primitive marketing processes

Marketing automation for small companies will help a business appear larger than they actually are by automating marketing processes such as email marketing, drip nurturing, lead response, lead follow up and more. Small companies also benefit from marketing automation through automated lead qualification technology. Marketing automation what leads are interested in by tracking search words, pages viewed and place a score on the lead (lead scoring) to help prioritize hot leads for sales. Systems such as Lead Liaison also include unique “Buy Signals”. Buy Signals are triggered when prospects and/or customers express certain conditions indicative of a potential sale. Here are a few additional reasons why marketing automation for small companies is ideal:

1. Capturing leads via lead capture technology – creates a new source of leads, vital for any small business.
2. Closed loop email marketing – helps an organization raise awareness of their solutions and boosts brand awareness. A “closed loop” alerts sales of leads that are genuinely interested saving precious time with trade show or webinar follow up.
3. Building relationships with customers and prospects via lead nurturing – automates sending of relevant and personalized communication based on your prospect’s interests.
4. Know how leads find your site – connecting search words and page views with a visiting website company via lead tracking.
5. Consolidated activity into a single repository via CRM integration.

If you’re in search of marketing automation for small companies look no further and reach out to Lead Liaison. We’d love to help.

Are you a small company using marketing automation? If yes, how has marketing automation helped you?

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Sales Automation Software

August 11, 2011/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog, Sales/by Lead Liaison

There’s a lot of talk on the web about marketing automation; consequently, sales automation gets left behind. Although, it’s arguably the most important thing! Are you looking to provide automation for your sales team? If yes, you’ve found the right corner of the web. Sales automation software helps organizations improve productivity, relationships and employee satisfaction – all key contributors to revenue generation. Three core technologies make up a sales automation software package. We’ll discuss these three technologies and to help you understand how software simplifies a sales person’s life and can get your company on the fast track to higher revenue.

The Ideal Way

Ideally, every business would fully automate their sales processes if they could. However, that’s not possible especially given the need for most B2B companies to personalize the sale. The “human touch” is often times a requirement, especially for B2B companies with transactional-based businesses. Regardless of your sales process almost every lead goes through the following lead management life-cycle:

Many of the pieces in the lead management life-cycle can be automated using sales automation software. Three key areas that must be automated to achieve an effective sales process are sales prospecting, lead qualification and lead nurturing.

Core Sales Automation Software Technologies

Automating Sales Prospecting

Sales automation software makes prospecting easy by integrating company, people, news, job, competitor, social media profiles and financials together in a single platform. Additionally, sales automation software natively integrates a professional contact database of millions of people making it easy for sales to find prospective buyers who match their target profile in a single click. With a second click, sales can import the contact along with their full contact information into their CRM.

Automating Lead Qualification

Sales automation software automatically qualifies leads by listening to a prospect as they interact with your marketing material. For example, monitoring a lead’s online behavior as they traverse your company’s website. When key buying signals are met and/or the prospect meets your qualification criteria they become a marketing qualified lead (MQL). At that point, the lead is ready for sales. Sales automation software quickly delivers leads to sales by sending a text message and/or email alert. Advanced sales automation software also pushes hot leads into a CRM such as Salesforce.com and automatically schedules a task for sales to follow up.

Automating Lead Nurturing

Sales automation software automatically nurtures leads to advance them through the sales pipeline. The majority of all sales people don’t have time to follow up with all their leads especially if the lead is not quite ready to buy just yet. Let’s say a marketing qualified lead is presented to sales via sales automation software, sales has a call with the prospect, but the prospect is in research-mode only. Nine times out of ten the sales person will take some notes, update their CRM and move on to the next hottest lead – the “archived” lead is forgotten. Lead nurturing automates the sales process by sending personalized (looking like it comes from sales and sent from one individual to another) emails over time to help sales build a relationship and connection with the prospect. More importantly, the prospect won’t forget about the sales person (and their solutions) either. When the prospect is ready to buy, sales will know.

Finding a great sales automation software package to deliver sales prospecting, lead qualification and lead nurturing is not easy. Fortunately, Lead Liaison has one. If you’re interested in sales automation software and much more let us know!

What part of the sales process not mentioned above would you like to automate?

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Remove Politics for Marketing Automation Success

August 8, 2011/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

This is the final article on our blog series related to marketing automation obstacles. The last obstacle has to do with challenges inside an organization. Unfortunately, dealing with corporate politics is something we all have to go through. Politics are not as “thick” with small companies vs. large companies; however, it still persists to a certain degree. When it comes to having a hyper-efficient sales and marketing process, one political barrier that must be removed is communication between head of sales and head of marketing. It’s important to remove politics for marketing automation success.

Sales and marketing alignment is a vital component of a successful business. Although creating alignment is priority number one, maintaining alignment is equally important. Sales must work with marketing on demand creation activities to help create, qualify and nurture leads. After all, sales is good at selling, but they can’t sell if they have no one to sell too. That’s where marketing steps in. Marketing creates leads and sales closes them. Marketing must be equipped with the right marketing content, lead management technology and lead nurturing solutions to meet the demands of any sales organization. At Lead Liaison, we take sales and marketing alignment seriously; so serious that we’ve created a contract between our sales and marketing teams. The contract, or Service Level Agreement (SLA), gets our teams on common ground – providing them with a framework for common definitions, metrics and responsibilities. Let us know if you’d like a copy of it. As mentioned above, alignment is the first step and maintaining alignment is the second step. Make sure you have periodic meetings to review progress against your desired goals. Also, have a set of common/shared goals that benefit both teams and leverage the core competencies of each respectively. Matt Smith, Executive VP and Co-Founder of 3forward, noted there are four shared metrics for sales and marketing to follow to align their efforts.

1. Mutually define a sales-ready lead
2. Decide how many sales-ready leads must be created each month
3. Set a shared target % for how many sales-ready leads convert to qualified pipeline opportunities
4. Agree on the target % for how many qualified opportunities become new wins

What are the political barriers you face between your sales and marketing teams? How have you been able to remove politics for marketing automation success?

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Good Content Marketing Strategy

August 4, 2011/2 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

In July we wrote about “Marketing Automation Challenges – Avoiding Status Quo” and “New Marketing Technology” as two obstacles facing adoption of marketing automation. The third obstacle, which we’ll discuss today, is being “content challenged”. Whether you’re using marketing and sales automation technology to help your business or not, a good content marketing strategy never hurts.

Personally, I’ve worked for several companies with a bad content marketing strategy. All companies had three things in common. First, they knew they had to create content. They did so in a reactive way, they were not proactive about content creation. Second, they had no schedule. They created content on a whim at infrequent periods. Third, their content was misguided. The marketing teams thought like the sellers, not the buyers.

Now that we’ve defined what a bad content marketing strategy is, let’s discuss a good content marketing strategy:

The truth is – we live in a digital content era and the internet completely shifted business to business sales. Buyers conduct the majority of their research online instead of calling the vendor. A good content marketing strategy requires a company to become a “content creation machine” – stretching their marketing footprint far and wide across a multitude of internet outlets; including social media, blogs, corporate websites and partner websites. Content should be re-purposed into emails, whitepapers, webinars and more. See our article on 101 business to business lead generation ideas and tips to light a spark.

Framework for a Good Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Blog at least two times a week
2. Put on monthly webinars
3. Produce quarterly whitepapers and/or eBooks
4. Tweet at least two times per day to promote new content and share relevant material
5. Comment on other blogs and/or forums at least two time a week
6. Produce a useful and/or educational tool for your buyers at least two times per year (ROI analysis, calculators, templates, guides, etc.)

Most importantly, stay committed for the long run. Do not start, stop then start again. It does you no good. Part of a search engine’s ranking formula is content-freshness; i.e. how often content is updated or added. If necessary, hire a marketing assistant to help create and distribute content. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to a good content marketing strategy, one hell of an inbound marketing program (see Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing) and more leads for sales!

We’d love to hear from you, how do you create a good marketing content strategy? What would you add to our framework?

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Alternatives to LeadLander®

July 29, 2011/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Looking for alternatives to LeadLander®? Looking for a lead tracking product? Look no further, welcome to Lead Liaison. Lead Liaison can track your website and much more! LeadLander® has been used effectively by a number of organizations to track website visitors. LeadLander®’s solution is great at identifying which companies visit your website and fits the bill for companies with basic needs. However, if you’re looking to deepen relationships with prospects/customers, automate processes for sales and adopt a scalable sales and marketing platform to fit the needs of any growing organization you should consider alternatives and contact Lead Liaison today.

“I was impressed with LeadLander®’s solution, I had no idea you could track companies visiting your website. Then I was introduced to Lead Liaison’s revenue generation platform. Their true real-time technology allows them to do so much more. I look forward to leveraging some of the things Lead Liaison has coming down the pipe. Rather than having a single product to fit a niche need, I feel like we’ve got a platform to fit our long term needs.” – Global High Tech Company

Whether LeadLander® or Others – Qualify your Vendor

When comparing Lead Liaison to LeadLander® and other competing solutions it’s important to consider the big picture. Ask your vendor the following 10 questions. If they can’t help you – we will!

Marketing Trade Shows

July 26, 2011/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog, Sales and Marketing Tools/by Lead Liaison

Marketo put together a nice wall-hanging-graphic on marketing trade shows in the United States. Attending all marketing trade shows would be exhausting; but, surely there are a few shows to highlight for attendance. The graphic groups marketing trade shows by region and orders them by month. Dreamforce and MarketingSherpa are two of the biggest shows around. SXSW is a great show that adds lots of social events to the agenda, mixing entertainment and business together. But before you invest $10K+ per show, let’s discuss how to make marketing trade shows successful.

Making Marketing Trade Shows a Success

Keep three rules in mind when you attend marketing trade shows. Plan, qualify and follow-up. A great teacher once told me, “Output equals input”. Make sure you make a list of targeted prospects or customers, schedule meetings before hand, get promotional material in place and assign roles and responsibility to your team. Next, qualify your leads at the show. It’s amazing to me how many marketing trade shows I’ve been to where the marketing person comes up to me – while I’m chatting with someone else – and asks, “Can I scan your badge”. I think they’re just doing that because they’re paid on how many contacts they can collect. Make sure you engage with attendees at your booth. Try not to sell, but to listen. Finally, make sure to follow-up. It’s amazing to me that some of these companies do not follow up after I’ve expressed some interest at marketing trade shows. So, how can lead qualification and lead follow up be improved?

Simplifying Trade Show Qualification and Follow Up

By using Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software sales and marketers cut through the clutter of qualifying and following up with leads from marketing trade shows. Using our software allows marketers to:

1. Upload collected contacts into our database
2. Send relevant email communications to their contact list (email marketing)
3. Listen to how recipients respond and engage with your communications (lead tracking)
4. Automatically qualify respondents based on how they engage with your brand and marketing content online (lead scoring)
5. Keep a complete record of the respondent’s current and future engagement with your company (lead management)
6. Nurture the contact by sending them relevant communications over time to further build the relationship and educate them on your solution (lead nurturing)
7. Surface only the hottest marketing trade show leads ready to be handed to sales (lead distribution)

We’re compiling our own list of top marketing trade shows for 2012. Are there any shows that are missing in the graphic? Which marketing trade shows are your favorites?

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Online Lead Generation Services

July 22, 2011/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Generation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

With the influx of social media tools – Google+ being the latest, greater online marketing demands and a changing B2B buying process lead management has become difficult and complex. Without a lead management framework, companies are like a ship without a sail – going nowhere. Lead generation services have sprung up to try to mitigate process complexity. For example, there are many companies offering lead generation services to handle lead qualification, appointment setting, event promotion, email marketing, content delivery, inbound call handling and more. What companies don’t know is that many of these lead generation services can be accomplished using cost effective technology. In many cases, less than the cost of a trade show.

Lead Liaison’s lead generation services are packaged into web-based software, which ultimately is a service – or Software as a Service (SaaS) as the industry calls it. Although SaaS-based technology cannot deliver the human element, such as inbound call handling, it can deliver a multitude of lead generation services online. Lead Liaison’s online lead generation services enable companies to:

Automate marketing and sales processes such as lead qualification and outbound marketing
Prospect for new leads
Synchronize activities with CRMs such as Salesforce.com and cleanup database records
Nurture leads with intelligent and intuitive campaigns
Capture leads with easy to create landing pages and smart forms
Target prospects with professional-grade email marketing

Hopefully this post leaves you with some food for thought. Should you reach out in desperation to traditional lead generation services agencies or embrace technology to mitigate the complexity of the lead management process?

Let us show you why you should choose the latter.

To learn more about how Lead Liaison’s online lead generation services can jump start your lead generation activities and simplify the lead management process let us know. We’re more than happy to explore how we can help you solve your problems in a complex sales and marketing environment.

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Marketing Automation Market

July 19, 2011/1 Comment/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Last month we wrote an article on the size of the marketing automation market. A couple weeks after writing the article we picked up David Raab’s article on “B2B Marketing Automation Industry Size and Segments”. David’s post presented some interesting data on the marketing automation market worth summarizing as a follow up to our last post on the industry.

The report shed some light on how many clients per company type are using marketing automation. Company type was split up into four categories using revenue ranges, defined below:

Micro business: Under $5M in revenue
Small business: $5M – $20M in revenue
Mid-size business: $20M – $500M in revenue
Large business: $500M+ in revenue

The report then estimates annual revenue of the marketing automation market for each segment, yielding $257.5M in annual revenue, which comes very close to our estimate of $200M in last month’s post. David’s estimate does not include smaller marketing automation vendors as well as B2C marketing automation vendors. When these vendors are included, the marketing automation market is around $325M in annual revenue.

Here’s a breakdown of estimated revenue per company type:

Company Type	Customers	Revenue/Client/Yr	Annual Revenue	% Total
Micro business	11,917	$3,600	$42.9M	17%
Small business	2,848	$12,000	$34.2M	13%
Mid-size business	3,609	$30,000	$108.3M	42%
Large business	1,203	$60,000	$72.2M	28%
Total	19,557	$26,400 (Average)	$257.5M	100%

Experts typically estimate about 2% to 5% of all businesses use marketing automation technology. Interestingly, actual penetration may be lower than that – particularly very small businesses (<$20M in revenue). It’s estimated that less than 1% of all micro and small businesses use marketing automation technology, which presents a huge opportunity for these businesses to grow and gain a competitive advantage in the market place. Using data from Manta about the number of companies in each revenue range we can estimate approximately half of all businesses are a candidate/fit for marketing automation. Based on this data we can estimate the footprint of the marketing automation market relative to the TAM (total available market).

Segment	Companies	TAM	Customers	% Total
Micro business	2,991,627	1,500,000	11,917	0.8%
Small business	645,121	320,000	2,848	0.9%
Mid-size business	237,130	120,000	3,609	3.0%
Large business	9,245	4,500	1,203	26.7%

Growth potential in the marketing automation market is huge. Micro and small businesses outside the manufacturing and high tech industries (current adopters) stand to gain the most. Lead Liaison uses marketing automation technology as part of our Revenue Generation Software. If you’re a business looking to adopt marketing automation below are a few additional resources to help:

Risk of not using revenue generation software
Revenue generation for marketers
Revenue generation for sales

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New Marketing Technology

July 15, 2011/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Earlier this week we published a blog post entitled “marketing automation challenges – avoiding status quo”. Our second post in the marketing automation challenges series covers new marketing technology. The primary challenge marketer’s face in adopting new marketing technology is lack of awareness. Marketers need to know that new marketing technology exists that represents today’s minimum marketing requirements.

Let’s begin by comparing old marketing technology with new marketing technology. The marketer using old marketing technology feels their “batch and blast” email program works just fine. They use the email program to send the same email bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly or bi-annually to their entire database. They track opens and clicks to measure campaign effectiveness. Sadly, they feel this is adequate.

Conversely, the modern marketer uses new marketing technology to communicate with prospects and customers. The modern marketer uses marketing segmentation and sends tailored email communications to related groups within their database on behalf of sales (appearing to come from the sales person). They schedule a series of relevant email communications and track how recipients respond and interact over time. They setup optimized landing pages and use lead tracking technology for lead capture. Finally, their new marketing technology automatically qualifies leads for sales and alerts sales when a hot lead is ready to buy.

Additionally, the modern marketer integrates newsletters, testimonials, content libraries, events and more into their company’s website and uses landing pages and other opt-in strategies to grow a segmented database.

Are you a marketer using old or new marketing technology? Below is a table that further compares old marketing technology to new marketing technology. Lead Liaison provides new marketing technology that transforms Flinstone marketers into Jetson marketers. Please ping us if you’re still in the Flinstone era!

Comparing Old to New Marketing Technology:

Old Marketing Technology	New Marketing Technology
“Batch and blast” email marketing tool	Intelligent, closed-loop email marketing
Communication to a single database of contacts	Ability to quickly and easily segment database by various parameters such as demographics, company information and interests
Leave contacts that have hard bounces in their database	Marks the contact as “graveyard” status and/or adds “email opt-out” automatically to the record
Automatically opt-in contacts to their batch and blast email	Uses landing pages, web forms, email campaigns and email client plug-ins to opt-in contacts
Manually pull reports to count opens and link click through	Real-time updates of whose interested and when. Tracks current and future page views to build a prospect profile and prepare sales
Subjectively qualifies leads	Uses automated lead scoring technology to find only the hottest leads ready to speak with sales
Uses google analytics to measure website traffic	Uses real-time lead tracking technology to identify businesses and people visiting your site
Relies on web forms to capture information	Uses real-time lead tracking technology to capture web form submissions as well as general website visits
Has no way of auto-responding to leads	Uses intelligent automated campaigns to send relevant, personalized and automatic email communications based on a prospects interaction with your website and marketing content
Consults a web master or IT group to build a landing page or web form	Marketers do it themselves using PowerPoint-like tools to visually build web forms and landing pages in minutes

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The Marketing Automation Mistake

Marketing Automation for Small Companies

Sales Automation Software

The Ideal Way

Core Sales Automation Software Technologies

Automating Sales Prospecting

Automating Lead Qualification

Automating Lead Nurturing

Remove Politics for Marketing Automation Success

Good Content Marketing Strategy

Framework for a Good Content Marketing Strategy:

Alternatives to LeadLander®

Whether LeadLander® or Others – Qualify your Vendor

Top 10 Questions to Ask your Lead Management Vendor

Marketing Trade Shows

Making Marketing Trade Shows a Success

Simplifying Trade Show Qualification and Follow Up

Online Lead Generation Services

Marketing Automation Market

New Marketing Technology

Comparing Old to New Marketing Technology:

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