Tag Archives: silverpop

Learn Holistic Lead Nurturing

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Would you like to learn how Lead Nurturing can turn more of your leads into revenue? On a single afternoon in New York City, Silverpop brings together several expert speakers to discuss Holistic Lead Nurturing strategies. The agenda covers B2B marketing trends, marketing infrastructure, nurturing dialogs, campaign development and implementation advice. Speakers include Adam Needles (Silverpop), Jay Hidalgo (Annuitas Group), Mac McIntosh (Acquire B2B) and myself. See below for an overview of Holistic Lead Nurturing.

Date & Time: September 14th, from 12pm to 5.30pm, with cocktails afterwards
Location: Affinia Manhattan Hotel, 371 Seventh Avenue
Cost: FREE for qualified marketers

Register here: http://sloth.in/9esz8E

Other locations: Boston (October 19th),  San Francisco (November 2nd); see the full schedule

What Is Holistic Lead Nurturing?

For those of you who can’t make it, I’ll give a short overview of the event. First of all, what does “holistic” mean in this context? It means that you identify market trends, then define a strategy for lead nurturing, and then implement it. So it’s not just “let’s do some drip emails”, but a more comprehensive approach to get the most out of your lead nurturing campaigns.

The Changing B2B Buyer

The B2B buying process has changed. There is more information available online and in social networks, and sales people get involved at a much later stage. That also means that Marketing will be involved much longer: not just to generate leads, but also to nurturing the leads until they are ready to talk to a sales person.

New Marketing Technology

At the same time, technology solutions enable a new way to design and automate campaigns. Marketing Automation systems make it possible to design automated multi-step email campaigns. Also, they can track the responses at a very detailed level, including monitoring of website visits. Based on that activity, lead scoring gives an indication of the interests and sales-readiness of leads. And by integrating with the CRM system, sales can also be kept in the loop.

Creating a Dialog

With the new buying and technology environment, you can create a new type of nurturing dialog. It’s about understanding, tracking, scoring and routing leads. However, to succeed you need to put these individual activities together in a process to help leads along in the buying process. That is holistic lead management, which will help you turn more “raw” leads into qualified leads.

Generating Demand

And that brings us to the next step: optimizing your nurturing campaigns to generate more demand for your solutions. This starts with designing multi-track nurturing campaigns, based on the overall lead flow from the previous step. These campaigns should be aligned with the steps in the buying process, they should include appealing offers, leverage Buyer Personas, and possibly also integrate telesales or direct mail.

Putting It Into Practice

Because lead management and lead nurturing are pretty new, it’s sometimes hard to visualize how it will actually work in your organization. First of all, there are few organizations who have implemented all best practices: it can take years to build out a holistic nurturing program, but you can see the first results in just months, by taking small steps towards the ultimate vision. I recommend talking to peers at other organizations to see what they have accomplished with their lead nurturing programs.

Is Holistic Marketing the Future?

What is your take: should every B2B organization with a complex sales process adopt Holistic Lead Management practices? Or do you feel it’s too comprehensive? Did I forget any steps? Please let add your comments.

5 Ways to Use Social Media in Marketing Automation

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This is the first of three posts for the Silverpop B2B Marketing University, March 3rd in Washington DC. I will be speaking about Marketing Automation features, the marketing technology ecosystem, and the impact of Social Media. In this first post I will give an overview of my talk on Social Media: if you’d like to hear the full story, please come to the DC event, or wait until the University comes to a city near you (London, Palo Alto, Boston confirmed; Dallas, New York, Atlanta and Chicago announced).

Social Media

When talking about Social Media, most people immediately think of Twitter or Facebook. I define it much broader: Social Media facilitates any online social interaction, where monologues have been transformed into social dialogs. So it’s about having conversations with your (potential) clients rather than just blasting out your message. Let’s look at the 5 Ways in which Social Media is changing Lead Management and Marketing Automation.

1. Lead Generation

Where do your potential clients “hang out” when they browse the web? Are they on LinkedIn, do they Tweet or are they part of an online community like Marketingprofs? After some initial research, start interacting on the preferred Social Networks and measure the results: add tags to your social media interactions, so you see if it drives new people to your site. Use your Marketing Automation and CRM systems to see if this traffic converts to qualified leads and sales opportunities.

2. Lead Nurturing

It may take a while before potential clients are ready to buy or even want to talk to a sales person. In the beginning, they may not even register on your website, so they are still anonymous. No worries, with Social Media you can offer prospects multiple ways to stay in touch: if they’re not yet ready for your email newsletter, maybe they want to “fan” your company on Facebook, or simply subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. If you incorporate Social Media interaction in your lead score, you can measure the effectiveness of these Social Media activities.

3. Lead Intelligence

Sales & marketing alignment is finally getting the attention it deserves. Marketing is starting to see sales as a customer who demands high-quality leads. With the right technology you can incorporate information from various online sources, so sales people are better prepared when they make the first call. It’s not just status information like the employment history from LinkedIn, but also real-time info from sites like Twitter.

4. Intra-company Collaboration

Social Media does not just transform how you interact with external parties, but also how you run your marketing operation. If multiple people work together on campaigns, it’s extremely useful if you can collaborate in the application itself. This is already commonplace in office applications like Microsoft Office and Google Docs, where you can add notes in the documents themselves, rather than putting those in an email. In the marketing space, the most well-known example is Google Analytics which lets you add annotations below each graph (click on the small triangle to show the annotation pane).

5. Customer Support

Often, Customer Support is in a separate department, and it’s seen as a cost center. Especially for subscription-based businesses, marketing should be closely involved in providing customers with the best possible experience: retaining customers is a lot cheaper than acquiring new ones. Companies like Zendesk, Helpstream and Get Satisfaction provide social support platforms, where existing customers can help each other, rather than channeling all questions to a support technician. You can also use Social Networks to keep customers informed of new products and services, and giving them the opportunity to provide feedback.

Conclusion

Many of today’s customers interact with Social Media. As a vendor, you can take advantage of this by actively participating on external networks, and adding social features to your own applications. I hope this post gave you some ideas to create a comprehensive Social Media strategy, and how to justify this with the right metrics.

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston

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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).

marketingsherpa b2b marketing summitMonday 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):

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)!

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

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B2B Marketing UniversityThere 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

silverpop logoConsidering 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.

What is the ROI of Lead Management?

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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).

lead management roi

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?

Top-10 Demand Generation Vendor Blogs

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UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

In my previous post I listed the Top-10 Demand Generation blog by marketers and consultants. Today I’ve put together a list of vendor blogs. Most of these vendors blogs really get ‘online marketing’, so they talk about best practices rather then just touting their products, and they post regularly.

In alphabetical order:

Sorry, can’t help it: every time I try to make a top-10, I end up with 11 and find it impossible to choose which one should go. So 11 it is :- )

Again, let me know your suggestions for other blogs. I’m pretty sure I still have to discover lots of cool blogs.

Lead Management Automation Systems Compared

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Stagnant email service providers becoming irrelevant? (see conclusion)

In a previous post there was a lively discussion about the terms Demand Generation and Lead Management Automation (LMA) systems. The consensus was that Lead Management System is part of the demand generation process, and focuses on managing leads you already have in your database (and capturing/importing new leads). Some example features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • tracking the source of leads
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready

But how does that compare to email marketing, web analytics and landing page optimization tools? In talking to several marketing managers, they often asked: “How do LMA systems compare to {fill in any other marketing software}”. In the next paragraphs I compare LMA systems with other popular marketing systems, and I hope to go more in-depth in future posts.

Email Marketing

Lead Management Systems can send out batch emails to a list, similar to Email Services Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, ExactTarget and Constant Contact. Interesting enough, I’ve heard of several companies that still use ESPs in addition to their Lead Management System, not sure why. Let me know if you have ideas.

Lead Management Systems also provide lots of advanced email features, such as drip-marketing, event-based emails, heavily segmented and personalized emails (e.g. sent from the account of the responsible sales person), and event reminder emails. However, ESPs are also moving forward, and for example ExactTarget now also offers drip-marketing support.

Data Management

Some demandgen vendors provide data management features for deduplication and normalization. My personal opinion is that these features are usually somewhat limited, and that they’re not mature enough to replace specialized data cleaning solutions (Ringlead, DemandTools). But that may change soon, as LMA vendors keep expanding their offerings.

Web Analytics

All Lead Management Systems offer some kind of web analytics, mostly focused on marketing metrics. Only LMA systems aimed at smaller companies tend to offer generic web analytics (page views, referrers, etc.). In all other cases, you would still need a general-purpose Web Analytics systems, such Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture or WebTrends.

There are also some specialized Web Analytics vendors that identify the company name of anonymous leads (Leadlander) or website activity for known leads (Genius.com). However, more and more LMA systems include this functionality. It ranges from fairly basic (Market2lead) to more comprehensive (Marketo, Genius Enterprise, ActiveConversion, LeadGenesys, Pardot).

Web Content Management

Lead Management Systems also do not replace Web Content Management systems, although it may be more common to have WCM features in Demand Generation in the future (earlier post). The only web pages they currently manage are landing pages or microsites. Those are usually hosted on a subdomain such as http://marketing.company.com. There are some exceptions: both Marketbright and Marqui include a full WCM system.

Landing page optimization & Website Personalization

An area where many Lead Management Systems can still improve is landing page optimization. In my opinion they should offer more features to optimize landing page conversion, which critical for Search Marketing efforts. There are dedicated vendors with a superior feature set, such as ion interactive, magnify360 and Sitebrand.

I’ve heard some vendors thinking about personalizing offers based on behavior of anonymous visitors to make it more likely that they register for an offer. Currently I’m not aware of any LMA vendors that offer this functionality: let me know if you know more about this…

Search Marketing

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click management are usually not included in Lead Management Systems. At most, LMA systems provide reporting on the lead source (which keywords, and organic search or PPC). It looks like SEO and PPC management will stay separate from Lead Management for the short to medium term. Personally I expect this will be integrated in the long term, as lead acquisition and lead management naturally complement each other, and cover the entire demand generation cycle.

Conclusion

Lead Management Automation vendors are rapidly expanding their functionality, but will not replace all specialized tools any time soon. I think we’ll see a consolidation of the industry of the next couple of years. Specialized vendors need to keep innovating, otherwise they will falter. Some categories are there to stay, such as Web Content Management and Web Analytics, but each will also expand their marketing automation features.

I’m not sure about Email Service Providers: In my opinion they either need to move towards lead management or become irrelevant. ExactTarget, Lyris and Silverpop are on the move, but VerticalResponse is at risk: even for small companies there are more effective lead management solutions (such as InfusionSoft).

What do you think: is there a future for pure-play ESPs?

Demand Generation – Week in Review

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Unfortunately the flu got the better of me last week, so my blogging and Twittering came to a halt. But let’s make the best of it, and collect a list of news from the past week. Lots of interesting things happened, and insightful articles were published. I probably missed several things, but these are the highlights:

Top-5 B2B Marketing tips

Jon Miller at Marketo summarizes the key findings of several B2B marketing thought leadership interviews.
1.Start with a solid base
2.Use Push AND Pull Tactics
3.Integrate Your Efforts
4.Innovate
5.Test, Test and Retest

Market2Lead 4.0 released

Market2Lead has launched version 4.0 with a completely revamped user interface. I was planning to write a short review, but haven’t found time for this yet. To be continued…

B2B marketing is Obsolete

Laura Ramos has published the final piece in the “Obsolescence of B2B marketing” series.
1.Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight
2.Shift from simply generating demand to managing it
3.Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations
4.Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles

Social Media and B2B Marketing

Steve Woods wrote this blog post that gives some great ideas on how to use social media for B2B marketing.
1.Set your information free
2.Focus on being credible
3.Understand their buying process
4.Match your marketing to their buying process
5.Keep interest high through nurturing
6.Only sell when they are ready to buy

10 Tips For Tweeting A Live Conference

Mike Damphousse wrote an interesting article for those who want to use Twitter for PR, in this case for the coverage of an industry conference (the Sales 2.0 conference next week in San Francisco). I will also attend this conference, so let me know if you want to meet up!

Vtrenz changes name to Silverpop Engage B2B

After being acquired by Silverpop, Vtrenz continued under its own name for a while, but now the name has changed to Silverpop Engage B2B. Which makes me wonder: do they rule out using Engage for high-value B2C sales processes? In any case, it’s good they make a clear choice and are developing a new brand for this established marketing automation product.

Marketo 3.0 First Look

David Raab got a sneak preview of  the new release of Marketo and writes about usability aspects of Demand Generation systems in general.

Genius.com announces Genius Enterprise

Apparently it’s the week for new releases: also Genius.com is preparing a new product: Genius Enterprise. Key new features are automated lead nurturing and lead scoring. David Raab again has the scoop.

DemandGen Report Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards

Last week I wrote about the Stevie Awards and complained that few vendors had submitted their customer case studies. This week the DemandGen Report announced the winners of their Sales & Marketing alignment awards. The winners are:

  • Enterprise Category: eTrique implementation at Cisco
  • SMB category: Eloqua implementation at Sourcefire
  • Fast Track category: Genius implementation at ADX

I hope this overview is useful. Please add a comment to give your feedback, or to report important events that I’ve missed. Thanks!