Marketing Just Hit the Powerball with Salesforce.com’s Acquisition of Exact Target

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Justin Gray

Early this morning, Salesforce.com announced definitive plans to acquire ExactTarget. For many of you who follow marketing, this is a huge deal. Salesforce has been rumored to be eyeing ET before, and Hubspot and Silverpop and Marketo and pretty much every other marketing solution on the planet. The OMG moment here is that this appears to actually be happening – and for 2.5 billion dollars – its largest acquisition ever. Beyond all of the BS buzz that this will create is the real crux of the deal. For those of you that just missed it, Salesforce’s largest spend to date was on MARKETING. Not service (where it has heavily focused on smaller strategic acquisition and development), not analytics and BI, not sales and not even social. Marketing.

Marketing has definitely been the buzz lately and the recent Marketo IPO again validated that – but nothing of this magnitude has happened until now. This acquisition says to every old school business owner out there that you are dead. Dead. If you want to grow and you’re not focused squarely on marketing to drive that growth, you will die. And furthermore I will laugh at you. I’ve worked at too many companies and fought that uphill battle; I’ve run too many sales deals and lost to that mentality; I’ve consulted with too many clients and hit a wall, to not revel in the validation that this provides.

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Posted in Marketing Automation, Marketo, Sales, Salesforce.com, Social Media | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Intensely personal revelations via Marketing Automation

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Justin Gray

I don’t like talking on the phone, generally, but I’m coming around. The phone, for me, has long since been something that facilitates action, i.e., when you need something or someone you reach for the phone. Otherwise, I have mostly preferred other methods of communication. I didn’t always have this level of disdain for phones, however.

I love that scene in National Lampoons Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold’s boss,

Frank Shirley, power phone user.

Mr. Shirley reaches for the phone demanding that his assistant “get me someone… and get me someone while I’m waiting!” That is how I pictured the phone growing up. I couldn’t wait to get my own phone; the phone was a symbol of power.

The phone at my parents house was not as powerful as that phone in the movies – that phone had rules. When we were young the phone was to be answered in a particular manner, it was then our job to find out which one of the important people who lived in our house was desired on the other end of that line, and to get the phone to them post haste.

As I got older the phone became a point of some conflict. We had one line and some friends of mine seemed not to have the same level of phone etiquette my parents would have liked. This caused issues for me, and again, the phone failed to live up to my expectations.

When it came time for my first job the phone took on a whole new meaning. The phone was now a weapon. When I was 15, a friend and I were hired at a local telemarketing firm. Turns out, we were really good at using the phone to sell things. In those three summer months, we dominated the 20, 30 and 40 something’s who worked at the call center as we peddled the plague that directly precedes the four horsemen of the apocalypse – credit card protection. We were so good that if you are still beholden to a perpetuity of revolving debt due to a poor impulse buy one evening in the summer of 1995, there’s a good chance I sold you card protection. Sorry, really. That stint then led to other phone sales jobs, which ultimately transitioned me into marketing where I learned to wield phones en masse. We were no longer the telemarketers – we now ran telemarketing teams! And on and on until the phone has become for everyone else, what it is for me – a noisy paperweight.

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Posted in Marketing Automation, Marketo, P2P Marketing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Marketing Automation is a robot that hates you

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Justin Gray

Did you know that?  Marketing Automation now has a face.  The face is on the front of a bucket, a metal bucket.  At the top of the bucket is a lever that glows orange.  It seems to beckon to everyone in the visible range of the bucket’s mischievous smile – “pull me, dammit!”  Pull my lever and leads will come out.  Now, where the leads will come out of is probably a bit much to detail in this article but when you put all of these aesthetics together they form a robot and the robot’s name is marketing automation.

Marketo's Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation

Last week Marketo launched something called the Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation.  The first time I became aware of it was in mid-December when I received an email from Jon Miller which described a piece they would be putting out in Q1 that was going to be a biggie.  He wasn’t lying.  The result is a 100-page opus to marketing automation.  What it is, why you need it, how to buy it, how THEY use it and much, much more.  It’s a great guide, but if you think that’s all it is you are sadly mistaken.

Marketo’s definitive guide series has been going on for years now.  They have guides on Social Media, Email Marketing, Lead Nurturing, Scoring, and all those now familiar terms.  Wait.  What? Are you even doing half of these things already?  Be honest.  If you do, you are in the minority.  85% of the clients we work with, at the start of the engagement are NOT using many of those pillars of marketing automation.  The ones that do are just scratching the surface.  So, why then do we have a 100-page guide (with a bar code and a price on the back of it) explaining again, in great detail, why we NEED marketing automation?

The answer is simple.  In order for most of us to attempt to solve something we first have to have a problem.  Well, most of us at least – I’ll admit to, on occasion, creating a problem just to solve it.  Who doesn’t love a good problem?  It presents us with the opportunity to become the hero – and if there’s one thing people love, it’s a hero.

However, assuming that most people aren’t like me and will actually need to experience a problem in order to want to solve it – especially when there is money at the root of that solution – then it’s pretty important to make the buyer aware of the problem.  How do we do this?  Anyone in sales, please answer with me.  Expose the pain.

Robots are our friends... or are they?

Pain is a funny thing.  It tells us when something is wrong, alerts us to threats and notifies us to do whatever we can to make that sensation stop.  If we want to create a case for marketing automation, we have to call attention to pain.  That friendly little smiling bucket is starting to take on an ominous grin.

You see the biggest value in Marketo’s definitive guide doesn’t come from the information within.  In fact, what I would prompt every marketer reading this to ask themselves is this: How much work and money would it take you to create a similar guide and to promote it with the effectiveness that Marketo did here?

I mean… that’s basically what the guide is doing.  Over the course of 100 pages it’s describing the trends, methods and needs for content-driven, right time, buyer engagement – but mostly its giving you a blueprint. The ugly truth is, the majority of B2B marketing is still in amateur hour.  This certainly isn’t a new message for me, but it really is reinforced when a marketing automation vendor has to put out a 100 page guide telling its target buyers how much pain they WOULD be in if they actually started marketing like them.

In my mind this is what a real "funnelholic" looks like Craig.

Craig Rosenberg, the Funnelholic, put out a great synopsis of the cutting edge techniques Marketo used in putting out this content piece.  It’s a great list of things this well funded marketing juggernaut is leading the way with.  I certainly don’t think Marketo’s marketing prowess is in question here.  All of those terms that now seem so familiar — such as nurturing, scoring, revenue models – these were barely in existence five years ago.  When you create the marketplace, you define the marketplace and Marketo does a great job of that.  However, if there’s one thing they’ve learned along the way it’s that if the buyer hasn’t felt the same pain of trying to launch a global, content driven, multi-persona, multi-variant, well-segmented digital marketing campaign – it’s hard for them to identify.

So, that brings us back to our smiley friend – a grinning bucket that attempts to kick the reader into gear for 100 pages with his glowing lever and charming cow-like eyes.  The fact is, he hates you.  He hates you because it takes 100 pages to describe to you how much pain you should be in if you were to attempt to market the way you really want to market.  The only problem that remains is that telling someone about pain just isn’t as effective as a good ole beat down by a bucket.

Not a happy robot

Ultimately the only catalyst for true change is actual pain, felt pain – the kind where marketers are trying to juggle great content with great process but are unable because they aren’t backed with scalable software.  But we can’t really succeed with software until we know exactly what we don’t’ want to go back to.  So, until then, the smiling bucket remains frustrated.  Discouraged but not down, he heads back to the drawing board to formulate a new content piece and even more effective campaign to translate pain to his buyer.  How much he must want to just walk up to that buyer and simply give him a swift kick, a kick right in the rear to get that pain flowing.  Alas, he cannot – because he’s a floating, smiling bucket, without any legs.

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Lies, Deceit & Business

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Justin Gray

At first glance it seems like one of those terms may not belong, after all business is supposed to be about truth, honesty and fair dealing  – right?  Good business at least.  We’ve always been taught that to succeed you should treat others like you aim to be treated.   Why then do professionals find it acceptable to lie to each other everyday with complete comfort and acceptance?  The psychology of business fascinates me and there’s no better time to reflect on this than at the end of another year.

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Kick the Bucket

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Justin Gray

Old habits die hard. If you’ve been in marketing for any length of time, you’ve likely heard the term “buckets.” Marketers love it, but I hate it. Most marketers want to bucketize things by placing them in nice, neat little bins. What they don’t realize is that the world doesn’t work like that and, more importantly, buyers don’t buy like that. You don’t wake up one day and say – “wow, I’m a prospect now – I felt like a suspect yesterday, but today is different! I’m an engaged lead!” It’s a process. What’s even worse is that marketers want to define specific actions you

This guy must be a marketer

take so you can be pushed into a “bucket.” This goes against everything I preach. Interest is fluid, and the path to purchase can be a schizophrenic one, paved with budget constraints, sudden urgency, whimsy, and trust barriers. If you think you are going to force an individual, a member of the thank you economy, a buyer who has grown up with micro-marketing stimulation since birth to follow your buying path – you are, frankly, insane. Let’s dive in a little deeper here and see just how deep that rabbit hole goes.

I speak to a lot of marketers and, nine times out of ten, the conversation starts with a request for “best practices.” People want to know what works – that is, until it goes against their bucket approach. I’m a purveyor of lead score. I believe that you can use lead score to get to the root of the buying path and that, like buyer interest, it can become a fluid representation of a moment in time. In un-romanticized speak, if we score every movement, we should be able to set a threshold and push leads to sales. Based on how well those leads perform – we can move the threshold or change the weights. It’s dynamic and it works.

I’ve been using the same methodology for six years and have made it “the LeadMD way”. I guess you can say it’s our best practice. You can also say that it is often met with resistance. Our methodology does not support buckets. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are milestones along the way and I do believe strongly in the Sirius model. However, when it comes to the notion of placing leads into a bucket based on a set of pre-defined movements (i.e. buyer fills out a specific form), and then requiring that buyer to perform another specific set of actions to move to the next bucket – I call B.S.

When I say that lead score is fluid, I mean it. It moves up and down, it varies by buying role, it’s influenced by demographics, and it climaxes with behavior. I built LeadMD’s scoring methodology three years ago and I haven’t touched it since. I built it using naming conventions so I don’t have to. Early stage content, mid stage, late stage, video, and social – everything has a naming convention. So when I roll out a new video, I simply name the resource a certain way and then the score reacts when a buyer clicks it. On second thought, I think I have touched it a few times – when we switched to Vimeo, when Google Plus came online, and when we started aggregating marketing articles in our industry buzz section. In comparison to some clients I engage with who evaluate score every week and have to make changes because things break when they roll out a new whitepaper, I’m virtually hands off.

Let’s face it, the bucket is evil and it must be punished. It represents a bygone way of thinking –that we know better than the buyer, and thinking we can force the buyer to follow our prescribed path. The web killed this. Even the terms “suspect’ and “prospect” make me cringe because those were the words I was taught as a marketing intern in 1997. It’s 2012, and these days we need to speak of engagement, interest, and nurture. It’s time to lay those old terms to rest.

So how do we do this – how do we kick the bucket, if you will? We shift our mindset. We move away from “campaign” based thinking and into conversations. Through marketing automation, we have the ability to go micro. Smaller, one-on-one conversations – and many of them. We bait our hooks with acquisition programs to acquire new names and, once we have them, we start to nurture them. Our scoring programs measure their engagement in those conversations. If we’ve written our marketing logic correctly, we measure engagement and if the messages we’re serving aren’t working, we switch gears. This takes a lot of planning and development – but it works.

As you are evaluating a marketing automation purchase or perhaps re-evaluating the solution you have – take a moment to pause and determine if you have a fluid, conversation-based plan in place. If not, start there. The worst thing you can do is fit last year’s ass in this year’s jeans. An ex-girlfriend of mine used to say that and I think it’s more than relevant here. Old processes and thinking have no room innew technology. We must listen to our buyers and let them out of the bucket before they not only escape that confine, but also hop into another bucket – your competitor’s customer list.

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Winter is Coming

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Justin Gray

The marketing automation space has been enjoying a pretty good run.  Sales are up, momentum is building, the attention from major decision makers is growing, and with it so are budgets. The space has seen almost a 60% increase in revenue in the last year

Look at this terrible book. Don't take a page from it.

according to David Raab.  Every reporter in the B2B sales and marketing space wants to hear more about MA, because their readers are eating it up.  LeadMD alone has published over 250 articles this year through media outlets and private requests for content.  Basically life is good.  Or is it?

I’ve recently become absolutely enthralled with the HBO series game of thrones.  Enthralled I tell you.  I downloaded it at the behest of several friends and watched it on one ill-fated flight to Florida where WiFi was in short supply and time was in abundance.  Innocently, I tapped into my iTunes library, brought out the ear phones and went to work.  Four hours is all it took to get me totally hooked.

It should be noted that I’m not a TV person, I just like  the ambient noise.  I routinely

Overstimulation at the Gray house.

create sonic ADD by turning all TVs on, firing up a playlist on the home stereo, and the get to work – in an orchestra of indiscernible, conflicting sounds.  Most people can’t concentrate like that – I on the other hand need noise, movement and action – chaos.

Rarely however, does that chaos evolve into something that garners my attention. I simply need to be moving and I have popcorn brain.

That’s probably adequate backstory to provide a relevant Continue reading →

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The Contagious Power of Passion

Posted on July 23, 2012 by abecker

Justin’s note: Andrea Becker who guest blogs this post this week is our VP of Marketing Services.  She routinely does the impossible so her notes here on passion are both interesting and relevant.  As with everything on the Marketing Evangelist Blog – the views of the author are their own.

Dan Patrick has made famous (or obscure, depending on your sports familiarity) a phrase that references a Passion Bucket.  The idea is clear in sports; players, coaches and fans are

These guys freak me out

passionate about their team.  I have personally seen a man rip his shirt in reaction to the opposing team scoring a touchdown.  Full disclosure, it was my husband, an avid Packers fan, during Super Bowl XLV.  I can’t pretend to understand what makes him scream at a TV as he watches grown men run around a field, court, rink or diamond throwing various-shaped balls towards other people or round objects.  It doesn’t make sense to me, but his Passion Bucket is full.  The enthusiasm is admirable.

The idea of a Passion Bucket seems a little harder to come by when you talk about something like “work.”  According to VastlyOverusedQuotations.com, Confucius say, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I think Confucius and Dan Patrick are on the same, simple page… be passionate about what you do.

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Dispelling the Myth of “Grunt Work”

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Justin Gray

Sometimes I find myself embarrassed to be working.  It sounds ridiculous but its true.  I’m not talking about coming to the office and running LeadMD, or managing our team or building revenue models or planning for future growth or analyzing quarter numbers or any of that stuff executives are expected to do.  Don’t get me wrong, that’s squarely what my job entails – but it also entails consulting with marketers and customers. I find myself de-duping databases and building lead scoring methodologies for clients, or coding HTML for a landing page. This is basically, well, “grunt” work.  That’s not my term; a client actually used it the other day while describing some areas where they needed help. They wanted someone to do the grunt work.  On the next call I showed up again on the web meeting attendee list and the client was taken aback.  She thought someone else from our marketing services team would be performing those tasks.  This happens often.

I routinely scope projects, I pride myself in personally managing a handful of accounts and I touch pretty much every account that comes in and out of the company. And I’m often found helping with very routine tasks. Most of the time when a client sees my presence on their project with a bit of surprise, I feel a twinge of shame.  Does my interaction there send the wrong message?  Will we seem like a small organization based out of someone’s living room? (Note: – when I started LeadMD we WERE based out of my home office)  Are we not sophisticated enough?  Will we get a reputation that prevents us from winning larger accounts?  The truth is, it’s become much more acceptable for executives to supervise from afar and leave the execution to “lower level” employees. I think that’s BS.  Every time I feel that moment of insecurity about how a CEO working on a client project will be perceived I want to slap myself.  Frankly, it’s time we all remembered what rolling up our sleeves means – it means we care.

Admittedly I care too much about LeadMD.  I get emotional over things – I’m sure anyone who knows me will attest to that.  That seed was handed down to me, it germinated and has grown into an overgrown tangle of thick branches and roots.  Ever so often I have to remind myself to prune that overgrown bush and control what can easily overshadow the good.  Controlling how much I care about this business in my greatest challenge and I learn from that struggle each day.

The fact is I love all elements of marketing.  Marketing Automation, for me, has become synonymous with the skillset of marketing and therefore I love it too.  I never want to loose the proximity to our client base.  As a service-based business the clients’ success is our product.  Another of my endeavors is an organic farm that I own with my father.  Just like that farm, the only way to maintain quality control over that product is to interact with it daily, let your fingers run through the soil, prune the vine and taste the produce. I’m proud to apply this same level of care in a BtoB environment.

One of my favorite sayings is that perception is reality.  One of our core beliefs at LeadMD is that we can change perception.  The perception that execution and strategy have to be mutually exclusive is not a theory we subscribe to and therefore we attempt to impart the same thinking within our client organizations.  The reason we have no “grunts” at LeadMD – not even our entry-level employees — is that marketing simply is not “grunt” work.  With the adoption of Marketing Automation and the rise of Revenue Performance Management, EVERYONE in the marketing department needs to be highly skilled and also highly productive.  That reality is upon us.

The point that struck me as I reflected on the insecurity I felt while rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty was that it was MY perception that needed to change.  I should feel pride that the skillset of my team is such that the work they do each day is challenging and fun for me.  I’m blessed to be able to work with a group of individuals who make an enormous amount of impact while battling the notion that executing campaigns is any less challenging than strategically formulating them.  I hope never to loose the desire to participate in all areas of the marketing process and moreover, to be effective at it.  So, the next time you have the chance to dive into something that may on the surface seem out of your job scope or even “beneath you,” give it a try, or ask to learn how it’s done.  Likely you’ll find a new appreciation for those who are responsible for the “grunt” work, and that new perception will form a better reality.

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Lead Nurturing Doesn’t Have to be Scary

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Jason Kort

Justin’s note: Jason Kort from Marketing Automation Times sent me a note a few months ago about possibly contributing to the Marketing Evangelist blog.  I really liked the idea, so a few months later we made it happen and below is his commentary in regards to lead scoring.  As with everything on the Marketing Evangelist Blog – the views of the author are their own.

In his article Fear Factor: Stop Avoiding These Three Marketing Automation Features, Justin Gray talked about how many people are intimidated by marketing automation software.  I believe part of this fear is generated by a fundamental lack of understanding that can be caused by complicated definitions and best practices.  Here is our attempt to clear up one of the most common marketing automation features, lead nurturing.

Why is lead nurturing important?

Staying in front of potential customers is crucial to your sales pipeline and a lead nurturing campaign helps convert more customers that might be lost through the cracks.  A lead nurturing campaign is a series of communications sent to new leads after opting into a marketing tactic like a form on your landing page or someone that you met at a trade show.  Lead nurturing is not restricted to email marketing and can also involve other marketing tactics like direct mail, telemarketing, and social media.

Understand What Your Customer Wants

Review your customer data or get feedback from your Sales team to understand what the best prospects look like and what they need to make a buying decision.  Develop buyer profiles or personas in order to better understand what these customers require at each stage of the sales cycle and then tailor your content to address those issues.

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Talent NOT Included – What Marketing Automation Vendors Don’t want you to Know

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Justin Gray

There are a few disclosures I need to make before I start this blog post. LeadMD re-sells a popular marketing automation platform – Marketo. This is well-known. The disclaimer here is that in our business, it simply makes sense to have that option for engagements that are looking for a software – if they want Marketo we can sell it to them and make a small profit – emphasis on small.  Less than 10 percent of our revenue for 2011 came from software sales.  Why?  We are not in the software business, we’re in the reality business.  In order to support the real, we cannot worry about the nuances of disjointed software systems.  For instance, we don’t want to create a nurturing plan and then tell the client they need to build it themselves because we don’t know their software limitations.  I want to build the BEST nurturing plan for the client and while I’m doing so I want to formulate how we will string that logic together in a platform we know better than anyone out there.  It means short learning curves and it means success for the client – simple as that.  My opinion is not influenced by Marketo.  In fact, Marketo and LeadMD disagree on many aspects of HOW to do things – we just happen to agree on what to do them with and that is a robust, flexible, bug-free tool that is easy to use.  If you haven’t heard about all of the controversy this stirred up here’s a link.

The second disclaimer is that I DO feel that most of the popular marketing automation tools on the market can be used successfully.  If you have a skilled marketer at the helm, you are going to figure out a way to make it work.  It may take you some time and you may struggle at first but ultimately you will make software work for your business.  Look at all of the businesses that make QuickBooks work for them.  There are much more robust accounting platforms on the market with much better integrations into CRM, ERP and support platforms. But a good accountant will make it work.  The difference being accounting practices are not only easy to measure in terms of competency but best practices around finance have been roughly the same for a long time.  Marketing – not so much.

So to recap (and yes I know my disclaimer is longer than most blog posts in totality but I feel that this is important to get all chips on the table) this post is NOT about software, it is about a message that is creating a problem.

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Posted in Marketing Automation, Marketo | Tagged , , | 4 Comments