Lead Management & Marketing Automation

This Tuesday (June 22nd at 11am PDT) I’m presenting a webinar on the 7 steps to finding untapped revenue in your marketing database. Do you have many leads in your database who have never been followed up on? If yes, you have a lot of untapped revenue in your database. View this webinar to learn how to generate additional revenue from your existing leads.

This video gives an overview of the content of the webinar:

The webinar is now available for watching on-demand.

This week there are a couple of interesting Lead Management events, so I thought I’d share them with you in a short blog post:

• Hubspot Show & Tell, new features including lead management, June 8th (tomorrow)
• Genius Demand Gen Academy, series of 12 webinars, starting June 9th
• MarketingSherpa Lead Management webinar, June 10th (sponsored by Eloqua)

Hubspot Show & Tell

Hubspot is best known for their Inbound Marketing evangelism and a software product that helps small to medium-size companies generate leads through search engine optimization and social media. They are taking some steps towards lead management, and will be showing their email marketing and lead nurturing capabilities in this webinar. It’s not a full-blown marketing automation system (not sure if they want to go there either), but it’s interesting to see them adding these features.

More info & registration »

Genius Demand Gen Academy

The Demand Gen Academy is a free online learning program to help you master the process of demand generation with practical, hands-on training. It covers Demand Generation, Lead Management, Return on Investment and Inbound Marketing in a series of 35-minute webinars. There is a webinar every Wednesday for the next 12 weeks. You will earn a Demand Generation Certification badge if you successfully complete the exam. I’m co-presenting the email nurturing session this Wednesday.

More info & registration »

MarketingSherpa Lead Management Webinar

The full title of this event is “Lead Management: Tackling the Top 5 Questions about the Lead Cultivation, Qualification and Hand-Off Process”. It’s presented by Sean Donahue, Editor, MarketingSherpa and Jennifer Horton, Best Practices Consultant, Eloqua. During the webinar, they will cover practical strategies that highlight the best way to attract new leads, how to find the right approach for the type and timing of messages, and when to complete the transition to sales.

More info & registration »

What are the key events to attend when you’d like to learn more about B2B Marketing, Marketing Automation, Lead Management? I’ve compiled a list of the events that matter:

• Click here for the full list: B2B Marketing Events for 2010

I’ve started with a much longer list, but decided to focus on those events where Marketing Automation vendors exhibit, and where the speakers cover lead management and marketing automation. Some featured events:

Silverpop B2B Marketing University

I’m speaking at the B2B Marketing University. Although it’s organized by Silverpop, it’s primarily a thought leadership event: no product demos, customer cases, or other company promotions. Other speakers are Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), Malcolm Friedberg (@LeftBrainMktg), Mac McIntosh (@B2B_Sales_Leads), David Raab (@draab) and Adam Needles (@abneedles).

Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference

Even though the name makes you think otherwise, the Sales 2.0 Conference also covers Lead Management. Forward-thinking sales people realize that Sales & Marketing alignment is essential to increase sales (just like forward-thinking marketing people). Because of this, there will also be a Sales & Marketing 2.0 conference this fall! That’s an exciting development, and I will certainly try to be there.

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit

Last year I attended the MarketingSherpa events in San Francisco and Boston. They have high-quality presentations on both lead generation and lead management. I can highly recommend these events.

User Conferences

The Marketing Automation vendors with a bigger installed base have their own user conferences. I hesitated whether I should include these, but ultimately decided that they would fit my criteria: the presence of a Marketing Automation vendor, and relevant talks.

Final Words

There are several interesting events if you want to learn more about Marketing Automation. I hope you will be able to attend one of these events (or more, of course). Let me know if I missed any events. If you are organizing an event, I’d happy to speak or join a panel discussion (contact info).

PS. For more events, see the Marketing Consigliere’s list.

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):

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:

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?

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 recommendations for 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.

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

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)!

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.