Category Archives: Demand Generation

How Are CRM and Marketing Automation Different?

Last week I presented a session at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University in Atlanta. In addition to Marketing Automation, there were two big topics: Social Media and CRM. I will write about Social Media some other time, and focus on CRM in this post.

Many attendees were confused by CRM vendors claiming to offer full marketing functionality. If that’s true, why would you still need Marketing Automation? So let’s dig in and find how Marketing Automation and CRM are different.

Strong Features of CRM

In my presentation I tried to shed some light on the strong points of either system. For CRM, I focused on Salesforce.com. This was the list with strong points for a CRM system (compared to Marketing Automation):

	SFDC	MA
Opportunity creation	Yes	No
Forecasting	Yes	No
Call logging	Yes	Sometimes
Individual emails	Yes	Sometimes
Products & Pricing	Yes	No
Document library	Yes	Sometimes
Case Management	Yes	No
Contracts	Yes	No

So in short, those are the features that individual sales people will benefit from. Marketing Automation also has some features for sales people, but those tend to be focused on lead prioritization, email, and prospect activity notifications.

Strong Features of Marketing Automation

I made a similar list for Marketing Automation:

	SFDC	MA
Native Email Marketing	No	Yes
Drip Email Marketing	No	Yes
Automated Campaigns Flows	No	Yes
Dynamic List Segmentation	No	Yes
Web Analytics	No	Yes
Deduplication	No	Yes
Profile-based Lead Scoring	Limited	Yes
Behavioral Lead Scoring	No	Yes
One Type of Contact (vs Lead & Contact)	No	Yes
Form Builder	No	Yes
Landing Page Builder	No	Yes

Today’s CRM Systems Do Not Help Marketing

My conclusion is that the typical CRM system does not have strong marketing functionality. At the same time, a CRM system is a necessity to support an efficient sales force. So your company will need both. Luckily, all Marketing Automation systems can be connected to Salesforce.com and often also to other CRM systems.

In a earlier post I wrote about an project to use Salesforce.com instead of a Marketing Automation system: the conclusion was that you need a whole range of add-ons to make it work, sort-of. In the long run, CRM systems may offer more marketing features, but today you still need a separate Marketing Automation system.

What is your take? What is the key difference between Marketing Automation and CRM?

Why Are Marketing Automation Managers So Hard to Find?

Even though some vendors have been around for almost 10 years, Marketing Automation is still relatively new. According to Forrester, only 2-5% of B2B firms have invested in full-featured Marketing Automation. But that percentage is rapidly growing. Increasingly, B2B companies realize that Marketing Automation software requires skilled operators. But – if you decide to hire a Marketing Automation manager – what should you look for, and where do you find them?

Note: if you’re looking for a Marketing Automation job, check out the positions below…

Inspiration: Web Analytics 5 Years Ago

New technology requires people with a new set of skills, nothing new about that. The situation with Marketing Automation reminds me most of Web Analytics. In the early days, Web Analytics was touted as the tool that has all the answers. But as Web Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik described, the 10/90 rule applied: for every dollar you spend on a tool, you need to spend 9 dollars on analysts to get the most out of the tool.

If you believe in the 10/90 perspective, it’s suddenly much more important to hire the right people. Avinash has great advice for that in his Signs You Are a Great Analyst blog post. But that’s for web analysts. Let’s try to get a similar list for Marketing Automation managers.

Marketing Automation Jobs

Marketing Automation is really just starting. There are relatively few specialists today. But I see more an more job descriptions for Marketing Automation Managers appear. These are some recent jobs:

Blackboard, Senior Manager, Marketing Operations and Technology (PDF), Washington DC
Bronto, Marketing Campaign Manager (PDF), Durham NC
Genius.com, Product Marketing Genius (PDF), San Mateo CA
Neolane, Online/Digital Marketing Specialist (PDF), Newton MA
Sophos, Marketing Automation Manager (PDF), Burlington MA
Tableau, Marketing Campaign Manager (PDF), Seattle WA
TrialPay, Marketing Automation Manager (PDF), Mountain View CA

When I talk to the hiring managers, they often tell me it’s hard to find suitable candidates, because very few people have all required skills. So let’s first take a look at which skills are typically required, inspired by the job profiles above.

Marketing Automation Job Requirements

First of all, in most cases the person is responsible for lead generation, lead nurturing and lead scoring. These are common job requirements:

Experience with:

Marketing Automation software
Sales Force Automation software (primarily Salesforce.com)
Database management (segmentation, reporting and maintenance)
Email Marketing
List acquisition and import
Website management and basic HTML
Organic and paid search campaigns
Data analysis, reporting and business intelligence
Optimization & A/B testing, Continuous improvement

Required skills:

Analytical and metrics-focused, Excel skills
Technically savvy, comfortable with software applications
Understanding of business needs (incl. sales & marketing processes)
Good communicator, and ability to communicate with a non-technical audience

That sounds pretty challenging to me!

Challenge 1: Analytical Skills Required

Of your high school or college friends, how many were into mathematics and statistics? It my class it was a minority. And that’s just the minority that we need as Marketing Automation managers: people who are good with numbers and heroes with pivot tables. And ideally they’re also good with software applications and can do a little bit of HTML coding.

Challenge 2: Marketing & Sales Skills Required

These analytical skills need to be applied to solve business problems. A thorough understanding of sales & marketing processes is required. This is especially important because sales & marketing collaboration is often a bottleneck when implementing Marketing Automation. The marketing automation manager should just as easily talk to a sales person as to a web developer.

Challenge 3: Experience With 10+ Systems Required

And last but not least: it would be great if the marketing automation manager has experience with the systems that are used in marketing. In addition to a marketing automation systems, these are usually CRM systems, content management systems, pay-per-click systems and reporting applications. And this is not just familiarity with the tools, but also experience with the most common tasks like data acquisition, import, cleanup, testing and reporting.

My Conclusion: Learn From Management Consulting

Today, there are simply not enough people with the right skills and experience. My suggestions is to look at how strategy consultants like McKinsey have solved this problem. Hire associates just out of college, pay them well, coach them, let them work really hard and they grow into experienced Marketing Automation managers within a couple of years. Problem solved?

What is your take? How do we find enough people to support the Marketing Automation revolution?

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston

5 Replies

Monday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some thoughts about the program…

First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:

Classify the Topics

Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:

Lead Generation

Lead Management

Content creation

The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.

The Review Sessions Are Recommended

I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.

Favorite Session

My favorite sessions was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer.

The Marketing Automation Vendors

My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the vendors were attending with a booth. In Boston the following Marketing Automation vendors are worth a visit (in order of booth number):

Pardot (booth 1)

Manticore Technology (booth 2)

Silverpop Engage B2B (booth 4)

Marketo (booth 6)

Genius.com (booth 7)

Marketbright (booth 14)

Hubspot (booth 16)

Neolane (booth 19)

Twitter & Questions

I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com). And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right).

Classify the Topics

Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:

Lead Generation
Lead Management
Content creation

The Review Sessions Are Recommended

My Favorite Session

My favorite session in San Francisco was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer, because they used very advanced web analytics to improve the conversation with prospects and customers.

The Marketing Automation Vendors

My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the Marketing Automation vendors have a booth. In Boston you should definitely stop by at the booths of the following Marketing Automation vendors (in order of booth number):

Pardot (booth 1)
Manticore Technology (booth 2)
Silverpop Engage B2B (booth 4)
Marketo (booth 6)
Genius.com (booth 7)
Marketbright (booth 14)
Hubspot (booth 16)
Neolane (booth 19)

Twitter & Questions

8 Tips to Get Started with Marketing Automation

Choose Your Products and/or Business Unit

If you start doing marketing automation or lead nurturing, first focus on the most attractive subset of your prospects. For example, focus on a particular product or market segment with a high value. SAGE Publications, one of the presenters at the conference, has many business units with different marketing needs. They first focused their marketing automation efforts on academics who pick the text books for their classes, because winning over one teacher could mean selling hundreds of text books.

Make Sure You Have Enough Leads

An often made mistake is to nurture too small a database. If your problem is lack of raw leads, first address that problem. Genoo, another presenter, used Social Media to fill their prospect database, primarily leveraging LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers.

Set Your Goals

What is going to make your boss really happy? Is it more qualified leads, a higher percentage of marketing-sourced opportunities, better ROI on marketing investment, customer loyalty, or something else? Pick the most important one and make sure you deliver. The presentation of Ness Technologies clearly pointed out that the CFO can spend money in many ways: make sure you can justify the CFO’s investment in marketing.

Describe Your Lead Flow

Leads go through various stages, from new leads to existing customers. In each stage the follow-up may be different. Find out in which stage marketing can contribute most in the short term. Tom Hayden from SAGE Publications created a flowchart that guided discussions in the entire organization, from the sales teams to the CEO. It was used to gain consensus and set the right priorities.

Improve Your Data Quality

Marketing automation only works if you clean up junk leads, merge all duplicates, normalize company names, and verify all contact information. Additionally, enriching the data with the prospect’s interests makes it possible to better target your campaigns. National Instruments, another presenter at the MarketingSherpa conference, used website behavior to enrich the prospect profile and personalize lead nurturing campaigns.

Create Some Good Content

The key ingredient for lead nurturing is high-quality content, not about your solution itself, but about the broader issues that it addresses. Although more content is better, you can already start nurturing with a few pieces of good content. For example, Ness Technologies used 3 well-chosen content assets to run an entire campaign.

Make Sales Happy Quickly

Improved marketing will drive better-quality leads to sales, but it takes time and trial-and-error to get there. Create some goodwill by giving sales some quick results, for example a tool that alerts them when prospects visit the website. Or give them more background information on prospects: how did they find the website, which pages did they visit, what whitepapers did they download, and so on.

Don’t Worry About Failure

Okay, this may sound a little strange, but failure is not a big issue in online marketing. Just recognize it and change course and soon as possible. You can measure results fairly quickly, so use this information to learn as you go.

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit Comes Recommended

What impressed me about this conference is how well the speakers were selected. In this post I’ve only mentioned a couple of speakers, but all speakers brought up very relevant issues, and creative solutions to common marketing problems. If you’ve missed this conference, you can still attend the B2B Marketing Summit in Boston on October 5 and 6.

I’d love to hear your tips to get started with marketing automation: please let me know in the comments.

LeadSloth Marketing Automation Blog – Survey Results

The Most Requested Topics

The top 6 topics mentioned in the survey were:

Metrics & ROI
Marketing Automation Best Practices
Lead Nurturing / Drip campaigns
Landing Pages & Forms
Social Media

There were also some runner-up topics:

Data Quality & Data Management (boring but essential)
Multi-channel Campaigns (not for everyone)
Content Marketing (the latest trend)

The Favorite Types of Posts

The first question was about the topics, and this one is about the way it is delivered. These were the preferred types of articles:

Thought leader interviews
Practical how-to articles
Opinion pieces
Advanced topics

Other Interesting Comments

In the text boxes people gave lots of useful suggestions, like these:

Choose your own “purple cow”
Avoid vendor bias
Talk about the best mix of lead gen approaches (also based on the economy)
Explain how to make a business case for Marketing Automation

Conclusion

Based on these results, I will try to keep posting once or twice a week, but with more focus on Thought Leader interviews and on vendor-neutral articles. I will focus on Marketing Automation and Social media, with an emphasis on mid-size to large marketing teams. ROI and best practices will be the main topics, but always with a practical voice. And maybe I will throw in the occasional joke ;- )

Let me know any additional feedback!

9 Marketing Automation Metrics

21 Replies

Marketing Automation is on its way to the peak of the hype cycle. People start adopting software because it’s cool, not because they know what to do with it. The result: inflated expectations.

hype cycle

However, there are a couple of B2B Marketing experts who understand how to avoid inflated expectations. One of them is Megan Heuer of SiriusDecisions. Together with Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic) of Tippit she presented a webinar called The 9 Metrics Every Marketer Must Track. This webinar shows how to focus on the correct metrics rather than on gimmicks.

My recommendation: use your Marketing Automation project to improve these 9 metrics and you have a good chance of avoiding disillusionment (and pleasing your CEO).

Key Performance Indicators

Some long-standing VPs of Marketing seem the best marketers of their own performance: by staying vague about results and telling a good story they can hold on to their jobs for quite a while. However, the truly effective VPs of Marketing promote transparency and have an intense focus on improving the few metrics that matter. The strongest metrics show how marketing contributes to bottom-line revenue.

In the webinar, Megan mentions the following key performance indicators:

marketing sourced pipeline
marketing influenced pipeline
investment-to-pipeline
investment-to-revenue

The first two focus on the influence of marketing on the sales pipeline, and the last two give an indication of the ROI. Obviously, #4 (investment to revenue) is also dependent on the performance of the sales team (whether they are effective in closing deals). You can watch the webinar to get benchmark figures for these KPIs.

Key Metrics

Updates to the KPIs from the previous paragraph take some time to show up, because inquiries first need to turn into opportunities. Megan suggests 5 metrics to keep an eye on this process. These metrics are starting to get broader adoption, so I encourage everyone to standardize on these stages:

Measure Inquiries
Marketing-qualified leads (MQL), definition should be established together with sales
sales accepted leads (SAL), formally accepted by sales
sales qualified leads (SQL), evolved into an opportunity
closed/won business

An inquiry could be any new lead, also someone who dropped off his business card at a tradeshow, or a download of a whitepaper. An MQL is also called a sales-ready lead. Usually some kind of Lead Scoring is used to determine whether a lead is ready to be passed on to sales. For more details and benchmarks, watch the webinar.

The cool thing about these metrics is that you can update them more frequently, so you know immediately whether you are on the right track. This is your Lead Management Thermometer!

How Does Marketing Automation Fit Into This?

Marketing Automation is a tool. It’s supposed to improve business results. In my previous post, I suggested to look only at increased revenue to measure success of Marketing Automation. These metrics are a great way to see if you’re on track.

More practical: how does Marketing Automation influence these metrics? Just some examples: continued lead nurturing turns more inquiries into sales-ready leads; lead scoring shows when leads are sales-ready; lead scoring gives quick feedback on the quality of various lead generation programs. But ultimately, the features of the Marketing Automation are only valuable when they are used well, and improve the above-mentioned metrics.

What is your favorite Marketing Automation metrics? Let me know in a comment…

Marketing Automation ROI: Efficiency or Revenue?

As a response to my posts 7 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Projects Fail and Marketing Automation ROI, several people mentioned that the benefits of Marketing Automation are not just increased sales. They are also increased efficiency. That made me think: aren’t benefits either cost savings, or increased revenue?

Marketing Automation Increases Revenue

The key marketing performance indicators suggested by SiriusDecisions are all related to revenue:

Marketing sourced pipeline
Marketing influenced pipeline
Investment-to-pipeline
Investment-to-revenue

I believe there is a good reason for this: costs savings with Marketing Automation are marginal. The project itself will cost a fair amount of money, both for software as well as for expertise (either hiring an in-house expert, or hiring a marketing automation consultant). Will you save more than you’ve spent? I feel increased revenue is where the real benefits are. But let’s first take a look at efficiency and cost savings.

Marketing Automation & Efficiency

Especially large organizations often talk about efficiency increases as a result of marketing automation. Efficiency in itself is nice, but it’s hard to quantify: will it increase the quality of the work? How does quality impact the bottom line? Is productivity improved? Are there costs savings? Please explain to me the real and measurable benefit of efficiency gains.

Marketing Automation & Cost Savings

Cost savings may be the main result of efficiency gains. However, I don’t think that a marketing automation initiative has ever resulted in significant cost savings. The reason is: the large majority of marketing cost is people, and I have never heard of people being let go because marketing automation software eliminated their job. Maybe spending on lead generation can be better directed, so unprofitable programs can be cut. But in most large organizations there is a budget that needs to be spent: so if you cut on one program, you will spend more on another: more revenue, but no cost savings.

Where Do the Revenue Increases Come From?

That’s a valid question. I suggest three areas:

More cost-effective lead generation
Better conversion rates with lead nurturing
More efficient sales force

Lead Generation: with close loop measurements, you can easily see the effectiveness of each lead generation campaign. One of the best examples is in Marketo’s “Secret Sauce” webinar. You improve your investment-to-pipeline ratio by focusing on the most cost-effective lead generation sources.

Lead Nurturing fixes funnel leakage. If you don’t properly nurture early-stage prospects, they will probably buy from a competitor. If you can increase conversion rates from inquiry to marketing qualified lead to sales-accepted lead, you get more marketing-sourced opportunities.

If sales receives better qualified and better educated leads, they can focus on the most promising opportunities. There are statistics that more sales people make their target if marketing automation does a good job nurturing and qualifying leads (I couldn’t find the source, if you know who published this research, please leave a comment).

Conclusion

So my conclusion is that the only metric that matters for Marketing Automation is increased revenue. I don’t claim that there can’t be any cost savings at all, just that they will be negligible compared to the increased revenue. I realize this is a fairly black-and-white statement, so please let me know what you think.

B2B Marketing University: What Do You Want to Learn About?

16 Replies

B2B Marketing University There has been quite a bit of change in B2B marketing over the past couple of years. Buyers have moved online, which has had a major impact on the buying process. Prospects now have instant access to much more information, so marketing’s involvement reaches much further down the sales cycle: they need to nurture prospects with relevant content until they are sales-ready. Sales people are still very important, but they can focus on facilitating the buying process rather than distributing information.

In addition to this general trend, a whole array of software tools is now available to help the savvy marketer. 10 years ago, email marketing was in its infancy. 5 years ago Salesforce.com was tiny compared to Siebel. And now we have sophisticated marketing automation software that changes how you do marketing.

Continuing Education for B2B Marketers

Considering these trends, now is a great time to to invest in some continuing education. Doctors do it, so why not B2B marketers? Enter Silverpop. They are organizing a B2B Marketing University this fall, with lots of interesting topics. They visit the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Atlanta and Seattle, with other cities to follow. And just like in medicine, the vendor pays for it all: admission is free for qualified B2B marketers (too bad they don’t have a session in Hawaii).

For more details, see the Silverpop B2B Marketing University website. You can sign up to be notified when registration for the university opens.

LeadSloth will present a session at several of these events. I hope to meet several of my readers in person! Let me know if you’re attending.

Question: What Do You Want to Hear About?

There are lots of new trends that B2B marketers need to know about. Unfortunately, my session will only be 1 hour, so it is impossible to cover everything. What topics do you think B2B Marketers should learn about?

Please leave a comment with your preference, and I will use your input in my session.

7 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Projects Fail

Needless to say, Marketing Automation software is very popular today. It can be used for email campaigns, drip marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, landing page management and for brewing coffee. It is often positioned as something that will solve all your marketing problems for a couple of thousand dollars per month. Okay, I made up the part about brewing coffee.

In reality, Marketing Automation can help you automate existing campaigns, and also create new campaigns that would not be possible without automation. But there are limitations to what Marketing Automation can do, and I’d like to mention 7 possible reasons for project failure. And please share your Marketing Automation “horror” scenarios in the comments below!

1. Unclear Prospect Profile(s)

Part of a good lead management process is knowing exactly who are involved in the sale. For best results, the website and nurturing campaigns need to be highly relevant for them. Also, lead scoring only works if you know who you want to target. If possible, create personas for all people involved in the buying process.

2. No Interesting Content

A marketing automation system is great for continuously running campaigns. In complex B2B sales situations you cannot rely on product-centric communications, nor on discounts (“this week 10% off!”). For each persona you need to have relevant content: whitepapers, blog posts, case studies, webinars, and so on. Even more: the content should match the phase in the buying process, from awareness to validation. If you currently don’t have interesting content, and you don’t have capacity to create lots of interesting content, then there is a big chance your project will fail.

3. Not Enough Leads

A Marketing Automation system does not generate inquiries (or “raw leads”). It develops inquiries into sales opportunities. So if you have few raw leads, you should solve that problem first. An exception is when you have a lot of customers, and want to use the Marketing Automation system to cross-sell and up-sell.

4. Sales & Marketing Don’t Get Along

One of the primary goals of Marketing Automation is to deliver better qualified leads to sales. However, if Sales doesn’t believe in the benefits of Marketing Automation, that can kill the project.

5. Lack of Expertise

“Ease-of-use” is big theme in Marketing Automation selection. Several vendors claim to have self-service solutions that does not require IT involvement. The fact that no IT is involved doesn’t mean that you don’t need expertise. Getting the most out of a Marketing Automation system is hard, and if you don’t have people on your staff who’ve done it before, you may want to hire some expertise to avoid failure or unmet expectations.

6. Bad Business Model

A lot of startups and high-growth companies are using Marketing Automation to help them grow faster. However, if growth has stalled because you’re selling the wrong products to the wrong people, Marketing Automation will not help. You will just try harder, and still not sell anything.

7. Selling Simple Products

Marketing Automation is ideal for long sales cycles involving many different people. If you sell low-priced widgets with a very short sales cycle, Marketing Automation won’t help you. You are better served with B2C merchandising tools.

Have You Seen Marketing Automation Failures?

First of all, I think Marketing Automation software has great promise. But I hope we can avoid the same disillusionment phase that CRM went through. So if you have any advice or suggestions, please leave a comment.

What is the ROI of Lead Management?

6 Replies

Earlier this year I downloaded Silverpop’s lead management workbook, and I planned to write about it. Unfortunately, not enough time… Last week I received a copy of Marketo’s Lead Nurturing workbook. Similar books, but each with their unique approach and lots of smart advice.

Both books show how you can increase sales by nurturing all leads, from inquiry to opportunity. Heck, why not nurture customers too? (that is one of the great suggestions in Marketo’s book).

Both books cover lead nurturing and ROI calculations, and Silverpop also explains lead scoring. Silverpop’s book is a little more high-level and written in magazine style, while Marketo’s offers more practical advice on how to set up your nurturing campaigns. Read them both!

By the way: on August 19th Marketo has a webinar about lead nurturing and on August 20th Silverpop has a webinar about lead scoring (hopefully a recording will be available afterwards).

Why Lead Management

Both books do a good job of describing why you need Lead Management. A proper follow-up ensures that leads are nurtured until they are ready to talk to a sales person. And – because of the nurturing – they are much better educated, making the sales person’s job a lot easier. Because you can follow up with 100% of your leads, and because your sales people can be more effective, you will turn more inquiries into sales. See also my post on the MarketingGenius blog for an introduction to Lead Management, and The 4 steps of Lead Management.

Lead Scoring

Silverpop includes a great overview of Lead Scoring. They explain that sales & marketing need to jointly create a definition of a qualified lead. Then you can implement scoring rules to identify those leads, based on implicit and explicit criteria. Marketo has published separate Lead Scoring Guide with similar suggestions. See also my introduction to Lead Scoring.

Lead Management ROI

The word “ROI” is often abused, but not in these workbooks. Marketo provides several worksheets that make it easier for you to calculate your return on lead management. Silverpop presents a 5-step process for proving the ROI. Both vendors suggest to look at conversion metrics between buying stages: from inquiry, via qualified lead and opportunity to a closed deal. This is the best way to get quick indicator of improvements, because waiting for the closed deal can take a while if you have a long sales cycle.

Silverpop suggests starting your ROI calculations with a simple metric, such as the number of leads. Marketo has a great recommendation to identify how many opportunities come from fast-moving leads (say under 30 days old) versus older leads (> 30 days old). If you have few opportunities from older leads, your nurturing should be improved.

I’ve just published a introductory post on Marketing Automation ROI on the MarketingGenius blog.

Some Highlights & Smart Ideas

I don’t want to summarize the entire workbooks in this post, but I’d like to highlight a couple of smart ideas that are mentioned in these whitepapers.

Marketo mentions Accelerator campaigns, in which the prospect can choose to speed up the nurturing campaign. A simple and nice idea. Also, their workbook gives lots of examples of their own nurturing processes (used by Marketo themselves): this makes the recommendations come to life.

One of Silverpop’s lead scoring tips is to decrease the weight of scoring activities over time: older activities are just not as relevant. But how long should you wait? They recommend to take the length of your average sales cycle to start decreasing, and twice the sales cycle to completely omit the activity.

Both papers suggest setting the duration of your nurture campaign to the length of the average sales cycle. By that time the average lead should be sales ready. If not, you can put them on a long-term nurturing program. In principle, leads should not just ‘sit idle’: you either nurture or toss them.

Both papers also look at the buyer roles (e.g. economic buyer, end-user, IT, etc.) and the stages in the buying cycle (e.g. awareness and evaluation). For each stage and role you need to have optimized content. Yes, that means a lot of copywriting!

Oh, and both have hired illustrators to make these whitepaper pretty colorful. Does that make it a not-so-whitepaper? :- )

Conclusion

Big kudos to Marketo and Silverpop for creating these comprehensive workbooks on lead management. Their best practices are useful for any demand generation practitioner, and are not tied to one particular marketing automation system. And even as an experienced marketer I read several new and interesting ideas in both books.

Have you read these books? What do you think: are they good or do you see room for improvement?