Sunshine and Unicorns; Marketo Announces “Marketo Next”

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Dave Lee

A day trip to San Francisco, wireless Internet on the plane, and beautiful Bay Area weather all had me in a great mood.  Point of my quick trip?  Hobnob with the Marketo crew and customers during their 2011 product launch event.

Marketo Next Announced

The theme of the event was clear… marketing automation is fast becoming “revenue performance management”.  Basically, no more excuses for marketing spend to be looked at as an expense.  Rather, marketing is an investment that should have a direct and measurable link to revenue production.  Agreed.  Marketo’s mission?  Drive $2.5 trillion in incremental growth across their customers. Nice.

“Marketo Next” will start rolling out to customers June 25th, 2011 and will be their largest release to date.  Here’s a sneak peak of the more significant features along with screen shots swiped from the back table:

Influence Analyzer – visually see how different marketing activities influence accounts throughout the life cycle… powerful intel for marketers and executives.
Marketo Next - Influence Analyzer

Program Analyzer – another analytics enhancement that visually shows effectiveness across different marketing programs based on adjustments to variables and slider bars on-screen. Translation:  visually see which marketing efforts are bringing in the cash.
Marketo Next - Program Analyzer

Visual Modeling – it’s hard to remember how everything fits together sometimes (i.e., initial email driving smart list members to a landing page to a thank you page with multiple follow-up flows).  This enhancement provides a single area where you can see all the pieces of your elegant marketing puzzle.
Marketo Next - Visual Assets

Event Module – integrated with WebEx and other event hosting apps (GoToWebinar/Meeting?), this new module will let you easily manage online events, reminders, messaging to attendees vs. non-attendees, etc.
Marketo Next - Visual Assets - Events

Social Scoring & Messaging – move lead score based on social engagement and movements. Automatically send marketing materials to individuals based on their tweets, Facebook posts, etc.
Marketo Next - Social Scoring

Social Publishing & Sharing – publish landing pages to Twitter and Facebook, and enable email recipients to share great content with their followers and friends.
Marketo Next - Social Publishing

Looking forward to June 25th and getting our hands on these significant changes! In case you were really expecting unicorns in this post, sorry.

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Marketing Automation Haterade

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Justin Gray

Over the last few months it seems that a lot of folks are riding the Marketing Automation coat-tails, and not in a good way.  Focus continues to be one of my favorite forums for debate, partly because I think a lot of excellent thinkers in the space participate, and partly because it hasn’t gotten as spammy as LinkedIn – yet.

Anyway, you can check out the full thread here.  I’m going to vomit my portion again below anyway.

Ultimately Lead Management Software will at some point shake the term that has left it open to ridicule – automation. It sounds obvious but I’ll say one of my favorite sayings yet again – in order to automate something, you first have to have something worth repeating.

What I consider to be Marketing Automation is a Godsend. The ability for an on-demand software platform to enable repeatable, track-able and relevant messaging for the purposes of identifying interest is something that simply did not exist 10 years ago. Because of the youth of this industry and the platforms that have taken center stage many are looking for chinks in the armor of an entire emerging industry. The weaknesses they uncover are anything but weaknesses in technology. Technology does what you tell it to. You’ll notice earlier I said ENABLE. The Ron Popeil message of ‘set it and forget it’ (which I will admit some tech vendors perpetuate) is simply not achievable. BUT, if you design a great campaign with repeatability in mind – a good Marketing Automation platform can execute it for you. Simple as that.

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A Nod to the Buddha Belly

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Justin Gray

I was recently forwarded a link by Lauren Carlson @CRMAdvice to Mac McConnell, partner and founder of BlueBird Strategies talking about Lead Scoring and it’s effect on the marketing and sales funnel. Although Bluebird is technically my competitor I think Mac touches on some good points here, most importantly that firms who teach lead scoring should be using it themselves! All to often we run across the “cobblers children” scenario where firms talk a good game around lead scoring but rarely execute on their own advise.

Bluebird seems to have a firm grasp of Lead Scoring from a Marketing Automation perspective and the notion of “stalled” leads or Buddha Belly bulges (BBB?) It’s a little too sanitary for my own liking but being that most organizations don’t lead score at all this vid serves as a nice high level overview. We publish a lot of Lead Scoring 101 materials of our own and you can find them in the resources area of our site:

http://www.leadmd.com/best-practices

At the end of the day marketers need to know their audience and Marketing Automation helps them assign quantifiable and repeatable scores to ensure that behavior, demographics and interest allow the best leads to “bubble up”. I will note that to begin a lead scoring implementation probably the WORST team to have build the initial blocks of that system are your own marketing employees. I’ve dealt with many an organization that wanted to roll out lead scoring and thought they knew their buyer very well. If you start by saying you know your buyer well and you haven’t ever purchased your product – you’ve probably already lost the battle. To know a buyer you have to be the buyer or get actual buyers in the virtual “room” and see where they fall in terms of how and why they bought. Don’t start with job titles, don’t start with budget or business need. Start with psychology. And have some one ignorant of your product facilitate this. If it’s done right, you WILL learn a lot about how and why people buy – not even just in relation to your product or service.

We are all consumers, we all need to feel fulfilled by what we consume. Just because we are at work and buy in a B2B environment doesn’t mean we leave our personal needs at the door. Lead Scoring should get to the bottom of our “felt need” as a B2B buyer. Where does trust fall? How do we justify cost? How does our role within an organization determine what the product means to me? A lot goes into developing a Lead Scoring system that your existing marketing team will simply make assumptions around or skip over. I strongly recommend involving your best customers in the process and look to a demand generation agency for help in facilitating this. We ARE a demand gen agency and YES we did hire an outside resource to facilitate this exercise. It sparked conversation, argument – and ultimately a set of buyer personas that I have yet to see one of our customers fall outside the bounds of. Each of our 60+ engagements went through our own lead scoring system, bubbled up to our sales team and fit one of our 4 profiles of our target buyer. Not many organizations can say that.

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The Power of Stereotyping

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Justin Gray

Recently the topic of lead score has heated up again.  It must be a full moon or a shift in the tides or something.  Or maybe that ball just came up in the lottery.  It’s cool, I love lead quantification – so I’ll bite.

I thought it was interesting that the notion of lead score is often looked at separately from buyer/user persona development.  I guess ultimately that’s more of a commentary on how marketers tend to view lead score – as some sort of formula that quantifies potential for lead ratings and ultimately monetization.  In essence, “where’s the low hanging fruit”?  Because all of our time is so valuable that we can’t be bothered with lead follow up unless it’s truly warranted… right?  Wrong.  Lead Scoring should be a derivative from good buyer persona development.  This means after looking at WHY and HOW past customers purchased or interacted with your business, you will likely see similar personality trends emerge. What does your buyer need in order to FEEL fulfilled when purchasing, why do they LIKE you and your widgets better than the next guy.  After we get to the root of WHY and HOW buyers behave the way they do – then we can develop score models and hopefully apply them correctly.

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Implement Me – The Short Sale of Technology

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Justin Gray

What does an implementation mean?  I suppose the definition is different to everyone.  When in comes to technology like Marketing Automation I’ve found that the definitions take on an even broader meaning.  As we’ve seen this space become well defined by users who purchase it and embrace its potential, all too often implementations are being passed off as simple plug and play.  The fact is it simply doesn’t work like that.  If you believe that marketing technology will “run itself”, “solve all your problems” or flood your organization with leads at the push of a button – then frankly I have some property in AZ to sell you.

Marketing Automation is the expose of your problems.  Dirty Data?  Guaranteed you will see the impact on your first CRM data sync.  No defined lead process?  Nothing will tell you faster than Marketing Automation if your funnel has holes.  Don’t know who your prospects really are?  Try giving them the wrong automated message and you will find out quickly.  So how do we avoid these pitfalls?  The answer is something I am famous for saying everyday – “just do it right and we won’t have a problem”.  The inherent problem of course is that “right” is like “good” – we use it so often it has no real meaning.  So, what is “right”?  Well, let me try to better define ‘right’ by highlighting what’s wrong.

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Marketing Automation: What Have You Done To Sales?!

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Dave Lee

Today is the last day of the month and if you’re tied to Sales in any way, you know it’s going to be an insane day filled with dialing/emailing for dollars, stress, and no time to even hit the bathroom!  Leaving at 5 PM today?  I don’t think so – you’ve got quotas to hit.  Sound familiar?

The picture here at LeadMD is a bit different.  Here are my quick observations of what the last day of the month looks like in our sales department:

  • I’m writing a blog post, not making phone calls to prospects
  • Company is 143% of quota
  • We hit quota last week
  • Pipeline is not drained
  • We have accounts queued up to close the next two weeks (on their schedule, not ours)
  • We feel confident – no ‘last day of the month desperation’

So how is this possible?  Blame it on Marketo’s marketing automation platform plus a killer content marketing strategy.  But it doesn’t stop there.  We also use Marketo’s Sales Insight plug-in to Salesforce.com, which gives our sales reps tremendous visibility into which leads have the highest likelihood of closing, what leads are doing on our website and with our emails, etc.  In the end, we only work with leads that call us… or are ready to engage in conversation if we reach out to them.

Enough for now… I’m heading out to lunch.

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At the end of the day, just do it!

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Justin Gray

Recently @Craig Rosenberg wrote a kind of “end of year’ prediction regarding 2011 being a boring year.  You can view the post on Craig;’s popular blog here. Not in the literal sense (but the journalistic sensational sense of course) , but 2011as a response to all of the hype that has gone into Marketing Automation and it’s complexities over the course of 2010.  I agree with him, or perhaps more with the implied notion that it’s time to actually DO something with these tools.  They’re cool, we all get it.

I’m fond of saying that after an hour overview of Marketing Automation with a prospect, I have yet to hear someone say, “wow, that’s a terrible idea – I can’t use that”.  Everyone wants tools that make life easier, better (faster?), etc.  However, when it comes to the actual legwork, the hype sort of dies off.  Therefore, I’m not quite sure “boring” is the term I would have used for 2011. Perhaps, “simply” would be more accurate.  Simply, get out there and work in 2011.

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Marketing Automation Players for 2011

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Dave Lee

I’m often asked by clients and associates who the major “marketing automation” players are. My first response is always to have them define the term “marketing automation”.

You see, there are dozens… even hundreds of email blast and ecommerce/shopping cart tools, but I don’t consider those to be “marketing automation”. Yes, email marketing systems like SilverPop, ExactTarget, ConstantContact, MailChimp and others are a great place for a business to start. However, true marketing automation players extend far beyond just email marketing. They include things like lead scoring, trigger and tripwire marketing, anonymous lead tracking (monitoring pages visited even before the visitor fills out a form and becomes ‘known’), sequential campaign management, offline marketing integration, nurture marketing, deep integration with CRM systems, and more.

Recently, Lauren Carlson (a CRM market analyst with Marketing Automation Software Guide) put together an interesting map of all the serious marketing automation players. If you’re interested in going down the marketing automation path and you’re starting your research… or you just want to see who’s in & who’s out, take a look.

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Focus Article: Best Practices in Lead Scoring

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Justin Gray

This is a re-post of a recent Focus article dealing with Best Practices in Lead Scoring.  I’ve also included a link below to the full article download.

Best Practices

Not all leads are created equal. Lead scoring — assigning a numeric value to a prospect — provides a way to pursue leads who are more likely to buy, and thus avoid wasting time on less likely prospects. A solid method for lead scoring is necessary to help you “separate the

Best Practices in Lead Scoring

Best Practices in Lead Scoring

wheat from chaff,” and surface high-quality leads time and again. In this guide, Focus Experts Scott Benedetti, Christopher Doran, Justin Gray, Carlos Hidalgo, Paul Mosenson, Debbie Qaqish and Steve Woods have suggested their top tips and best practices for lead scoring so you can hit a bull’s-eye more often.

Build consensus by getting both sales and marketing on board.

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The Shrinking Sales Process & The Growing Need for Demand

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Justin Gray

The revolutionary changes in the buying process mean that the sales process seems to be getting smaller while the marketing cycle is growing. How do we then stay engaged and determine when the time is right to strike? We need to get involved early – when the buying process begins – by providing educational content that creates a positive image in the buyer’s mind. It also means we have to stay in touch with potential buyers regardless of their timeframe to buy. And we need to clearly identify when a company is ready to buy, so we get involved with the right decision makers at the right time. This new approach is Demand Generation and email is the driving force in nurturing leads from realization to revenue.

Imagine your marketplace is like a bunch of water pots. Your marketing people are the heat who nurture and cause the water to boil. When the water gets hot enough, it boils and bubbles start to reach the top. Some pots are different sized and filled with different liquid so they boil at different rates.

It used to be that most of these boiling pots were caused by sales. They found the container, applied the heat and got the pot boiling and reveled in the success. Until something strange happened. The liquid in the pots started getting thicker and thicker and harder to manage, soon the same amount of heat wasn’t causing the pots to boil. In fact, there’s an old saying that applies to this.

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