Greg Jordan has more than fifteen years of success helping companies make sense of the intersection of business and technology. His broad range of experience spanning internet advertising sales, search marketing, consulting, and business development add to his perspective on the digital marketing space.
Greg is President of Greg Jordan DesignDigital Marketing for Growing Gusinesses. Services include search engine management, SEO, email marketing, mobile marketing, content marketing ...read more.
I think there might be an interesting opportunity for lead nurturing campaigns to eventually include daily deals into the marketing mix. Eventually, there may be room for marketing automation software companies like Eloqua and Marketo to integrate a daily deal platform into the software.
U.S. consumer spending on daily deals is forcasted to reach $3.9B by 2015. Although it's largely erupted as a retail consumer play with little activity in the B2B space, there may be an opportunity for B2B marketers. After all, we transform into retail consumers when we're on our lunch break, after we get home from work, and on the weekends. And we're increasingly interested in daily deals.
Lead nurturing software companies can take advantage of the exhileration consumers experience when they get a daily deal. Marketing automation software companies can partner with daily deal platform software providers to integrate daily deals into campaigns that promote exclusive, high quality content used for nurturing high-value B2B prospects.
The big difference would be that the content would still be free. B2B prospects would be discovering the lead nurturing content in yet another (familiar) way: via a daily deal that is targeted to them.
Waiting too long to follow up on a lead can drastically affect a sales opportunity.
A recent blog post from marketing automation software company Marketo comments on how sales responds to leads. As it turns out, it's not a pretty picture. Marketo's blog post cites data from an independent lead response management study that says if sales waits even an hour to follow up on a lead from marketing it can ruin a sales opportunity.
While somewhat dated (2008) there's another study from Omniture that highlights some alarming findings about how sales follows up on leads from marketing. Here are the key points:
Only 4.6 percent of the businesses use a strategy involving both phone and email
Less than 5 percent called within 24 hours
19 hours 31 minutes was the average sales response time by email
36 hours 57 minutes was the average sales response time by phone
45.2% of companies sales teams never responded at all
Marketing Automation Is About Generating Better Leads
According to this industry report on marketing automation, 76% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) agree that generating high quality leads is the most pertinent marketing challenge they face. The data was collected from nearly 300 respondants and is statistically significant.
While generating leads has always been marketing's charter, generating better leads has always been a challenge. That's one of marketing automation's strong suits: you can use slow-drip marketing tactics to help ensure the leads that finally make it "over the wall" to sales are as high quality and ripe as possible.
Too often, leads are contacted by sales too early, too often, or the prospect simply isn't the right fit. The process of implementing and using marketing automation helps to alleviate this conundrum.
70% of the CMOs interviewed are in the process of, or have implemeted marketing automation software.
76% of CMOs say that they need higher quality leads.
84% of CMOs indicated that there are three to four decision-makers involved in the buying process of their product.
89% report that their product's buying cycle spans over more than one month.
Research Methodology
This report was published as a cooperative effort between MarketingSherpa and Marketo. MarketingSherpa has an objective Partnered Research Program that makes these types of reports possible. MarketingSherpa's involvement means they are getting a sufficient demand for this type of marketing automation industry research. And Marketo's willingess to participate reflects their commitment to supporting the industry segment as a whole, and not solely beating their own chest. Kudos to both Marketo and MarketingSherpa!
To preface my argument I want to start with three points:
Growing companies face many online marketing struggles. And one of the challenges is on whom they should be focusing their marketing and sales efforts.
Most companies think their baby their product is very, very important is strategic. But that's rarely the case. Most of the time it's tactical. Occasionally it's both strategic and tactical.
One of the cliché recommendations that management likes to chirp is, "We need to be selling higher in our prospect organizations. We need to get more sales meetings with the C-level." The trouble is that most products aren't sold at the C-level. They may require sign off from the C-level, but the decision making is happening at other levels. Decision-making happens over time. And many people are in on the decision-making process. Actually, this is a fundamental reason why marketing automation works.
A recent blog post from Marketing Automation Software entitled,Why the Marketing Automation Market Is Floundering & 5 Fixes to Fuel It is another example of a strategic thinker making a recommendation that doesn't quite fit. The author, Jeff Pedowitz' first recommendation for fixing what he describes as a "floundering" market is to sell over the marketing department because they don't have the budget.
I don't agree that the marketing automation market is floundering. The fact is that the top two marketing automation leaders (Marketo and Eloqua) are experiencing impressive growth and attracting real investment. Ancillary companies, like ReachForce, are also experience growth on the coat tails of marketing automation.
And secondly, I think Pedowitz' recommendation to sell beyond or over marketing is incomplete logic. As an example, everyone is interested in their computer working, it's mission-critical, and affects core revenue-generating departments within a company. But that doesn't mean you sell to the CEO. Instead, you sell to the IT Director and make additional resources available to the other parts of the organization, people in charge of due diligence, IT steering committees, or whatever.
One of the positive, yet sometime unanticipated outcomes of installing marketing automation software is more alignment between sales and marketing. Marketing and sales have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship, but now marketing is increasingly being held accountable for helping to drive revenue. Sales recognizes why this is important. And that's why both marketing and sales are involved with the decision to implement a revenue performance management system.
Marketing automation salespeople need to keep selling to the marketing executive. And marketing automation is clearing not "floundering."
Ultimately, both sales and marketing will get pulled into the decision-making process. And the CEO will sit up and take notice if the investment of budget and time is noteworthy. But I can practically guarantee you that it will be both the marketing and sales leaders that will continue to be the most influential people in the marketing automation purchase process.
Step one is realizing that your organization will benefit from marketing automation software. But getting past step one can be a daunting task, especially when you are trying to distill your vendor choices down to a short list.
This handy interactive graphic from Marketing Automation Software Guide helps the savvy online marketer quickly categorize who's who in the marketing automation world. While it's not exhaustive it's certainly a great place to start and features most of the leading marketing automation companies:
Doing Your Due Diligence - Avoid The Traps
Cogent marketers will realize that selecting a marketing automation vendor requires due diligence. It's an important decision and requires a significant investment of company resources.
Once you've selected a vendor you can learn from understanding some of the common traps into which many of the pioneer marketing automation users have fallen. Following are three of the traps that Jeff Ernst, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, highlights in a recent blog post:
The process trap. They don't get buy-in and support from the sales organization, so they generate more leads without changes to how sales works those leads.
The content trap. They don't anticipate that effective, targeted lead nurturing greatly increases the content requirements.
The skills trap. They don't have people with the skill sets to define their customer buying cycles and information needs at each stage.
Ask For Help
Before you take the next step, regardless of where you are in the selection/installation process ask for support from your vendor, get advice on marketing software choices, consult with other marketing professionals, and consider outsourcing parts to a consulting organization that has experience developing and automating lead flow.
Should Marketing Automation be re-named Email Automation? Isn't it true that so-called lead management automation is really just a dressed up autoresponder?
Automated lead nurturing is one of the reasons companies invest in a marketing automation platform. The lure of slow drip marketing is that salespeople don't get bogged down working immature leads. Instead, the prospect is teased with a series of emails that maintain contact and offer different goodies [bait] along the way: invitations to free webinars; invitations to download free whitepapers (eBooks), case studies; invitations for free product demos; invitations to visit salespeople at upcoming conferences. Then, once the lead has been nurtured and is ripe for the picking, the salesperson is unleashed to lap up the new business.
Is it really that easy?
Yes, because when it's implemented correctly, lead management can translate into an increase in sales. Furthermore, the volume of leads your company can now handle increases dramatically. And sales still is, in part, a numbers game.
No, it's not that easy because success of the campaign hinges on the ability of marketing and sales to work together as a team. What's more, there is a pesky little thing called content that has to be of exceptional quality, value, well-thought-out and accessible.
What should be the goal of lead nurturing?
We ultimately want the lead we're nurturing to take the desired action, right? Right! But remember, the desired action might not be a purchase, per se. The interaction may not be solely with a prospect. And our reaction may not necessarily be an email:
Use marketing automation to stay in touch with high value mavens. Maybe you've identified bloggers for whom you want to provide high quality and special content about your products and services.
Put your new customers on a slow drip enrichment campaign and introduce them to the wonderful new features and benefits of doing business with you. Introduce certain types of stuff to certain types of customers.
Before they sign on as customers, use lead nurturing to encourage prospects to interact with people at your company and begin feeling like they're part of your community. The value of community is strong. It's a powerful way to make your company more cult-like.
Make some of the lead nurturing triggers result in something other than email! For example, one of the triggers can result in a call from a human being outside of the sales department. Use old-fashioned marketing tactics like sending the prospect a hand-written note from the VP of Marketing thanking them for attending the latest webinar. Send the prospect a FedEx package. Everyone opens an overnight FedEx envelope that's sent to them.
If your product is distributed through the channel, set up a routine for sending the reseller special kudos when they meet certain criteria. Maybe it's an email, but maybe it's a quick congrats call from your CEO.
However you slice or dice it, there's no getting around the fact that marketing automation and lead nurturing has wiggled its way into the world of marketing and sales. The following infographic is from Forrester Research analyst, Laura Ramos, and it's useful for visualizing where lead nurturing can "plug the leak."
What's the takeaway for marketing and sales?
Be creative and avoid becoming myopic about your new marketing automation campaign. It's not only for creating autoresponder email messages to prospects!
Marketing automation software continues to gain momentum. The reason marketing automation has become so appealing is because it allows businesses to do more with less—more marketing and sales with fewer marketers and salespeople. And one of the helpful side effects of the software implementation process is that it encourages a much-needed alignment of marketing and sales.
But the real value of anything a business implements is how it will help to attract and retain customers. A company's decision about which marketing automation software to purchase and how to implement it once they have committed to it are paramount. And the purchase decision can have a profound impact on marketing, sales, and IT.
Use marketing automation for lead nurturing
The most appealing aspect of marketing automation is the ability to automatically manage a lead—managing the buyer who has decided to begin evaluating your product but who is not quite ready to pull the trigger and sign on the dotted line. Traditionally, salespeople have managed this process. But salespeople get antsy, call the prospect too much, and if the prospect doesn't buy in a "reasonable" amount of time the salesperson moves on too soon. But what if that buyer is on one of those long and winding roads to purchase? What if there are little nuggets of value you can spoon feed the buyer during that long-and-drawn-out buying process? Lead management software helps salespeople spend more time with fewer prospects.
Use marketing automation to deliver the right value to the right prospect at the right time
The beauty of being able to automatically score a lead and begin the whole nurturing process is that you can begin to segment your marketing efforts. Naturally, there are some prospects for whom you want to roll out the red carpet. And while you certainly don't want to dismiss the other prospects, perhaps you know that they can be effectively developed without as much attention.
Demand generation is most effective when you're delivering something of value during the research phase before a buyer purchases.
Traditional pamphlets and brochures filled with marketing jargon just don’t cut it anymore. Buyers are looking for informative and interesting content that provides actual value and education. They expect vendors to provide them the content they need throughout the sales cycle. Increasingly, the first two-thirds of that cycle is spent researching the market and vendors, without regular contact with a sales rep. To remain top of mind with the buyer and claim the "thought leadership" position, marketers are deploying marketing automation to provide a steady stream of educational content for buyers. —Lauren Carlson, Tailwinds for Marketing Automation Software
I think Lauren has a strong point. But what is that pearl of value that we should be giving away to our prospect? This is where the collaboration between marketing and sales can really pay off. Sales will reveal what the buyers are asking for, and marketing can help to develop the types of valuable devlierables that can be used during the lead nurturing process. These deliverables are apt to be different for different types of buyers.
Beware of the overuse of email
A recent Forrester Research report points out that marketers are overusing the email feature in marketing automation. Just because you've got a marketing automation tool that can deliver a customized email every week doesn't mean that will be the most effective deliverable for the prospect.
If you can imagine that your qualified prospects are simply customers that haven't yet officially signed on, what would you be providing them? Is there anything you can provide that will be valuable for them and not incrementally cost you and your team substantially more time and money to deliver?
I think marketing automation is here to stay and it's an exciting new development in the whole world of customer relationship management (CRM). But like many other evolutions at the crossroads of IT and business there is due diligence that needs to happen before the purchase, and cogent analysis of the planning process once you're ready to go live.
Today, Shirley S. Wang of the Wall Street Journal published an article in the Health Section entitled Why So Many People Can't Make Decisions. The article discussed how our approach to decision-making can affect our lives and relationships. Some people make decisions rquickly, while others take longer.
Some people are what psychologists categorize as ambivalent. They tend to weigh both the pros and cons when making decisions. And they take longer to make decisions.
Other personalities see decisions as being more black and white. These folks tend to have strong positive or negative views, and require less time to make decisions.
The article caused me to consider both of these camps when thinking about sales and marketing campaigns, especially when we're using marketing automation applications like Eloqua, Marketo, and Sliverpop. Likewise, our general email marketing outreach should be segmented based on the different types of decision-makers. At the very least, we should be testing different messaging that appeals to these different buyer behaviors. The black and white-minded decision makers are probably going to respond more positively to a direct response type of message, while an ambivalent decision-maker is more likely to respond favorably to more information and time.
The Take Away
Always be testing. Adapt your marketing message to speak to both types of decision-makers.
Think act now direct response messaging for the black and white decision makers: special offers, incentives, discounts.
Use more of a progressive approach with the ambivalent people: white papers, case studies, statistics.
As the alliance between marketing and sales becomes more prevalent and increasingly interdependent, there's mounting pressure for marketing to contribute to the bottom line. While all companies measure their success by revenue and profit, there are varying tolerances with revenue-producing timelines. Typically sales is on the front lines and held responsible for driving the lion's share of results. But what about marketing? And how does this fit in with the new world of marketing's direct role in driving B2B lead generation?
Public companies are laser focused on quarterly results with a lot of emphasis placed on monthly numbers. Sales managers are asked to update forecasts on a weekly basis, if not daily, all with the aim of submitting more accurate forecasts. Shareholders are anxiously waiting for their ROI and company management is eager to demonstrate its ability to hit its number. The pressure on sales and marketing is clear, but sales and marketing still struggle to find the best way to attribute revenue. Was it a sale that originated because of a lead generation campaign that was birthed in marketing? Or, was it the pure grit of sales that muscled it through and got it closed before month-end? Who should be held responsible if target number isn't reached?
Many private companies are bank rolled by investors who are looking to hit an annual target. And public companies answer to the shareholders and board members. Encouragement from investors is correlated with how far along the year has progressed. If it's the 4th quarter and the numbers look iffy, investors are calling for board meetings. Re-orgs are right around the corner and heads might roll! Small businesses are focused on monthly performance but even more excited about what can be done to increase revenues year-over-year. By the way, it's easy to forget that 99% of businesses in the United States are small businesses.
What this means for marketing and sales
The marketing timeline should absolutely be correlated with the sales timeline. Lead generation efforts and marketing activities should be carefully mapped to company requirements to show revenue. New product announcements, events, and client/prospect communications should always be arranged in consort with sales campaigns.
Also, marketing efforts need to be rewarded. And since marketing and sales are increasingly working together in true team fashion, that means management may want to re-examine how to incentivize marketing and sales.
The convergence of marketing and sales has left some managers scratching their heads. What's the best way to approach commission programs and create compelling incentives that motivate both marketing and sales, working together?
Traditionally, marketing and sales have operated in segregated silos with separate incentive programs. Salespeople = brawn. Marketing = brains. Now that marketing and sales are increasingly working side by side, especially in the B2B world, what kinds of incentives and goals make sense?
B2B marketing automation software (eg. Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop) has caused an awkward task for some organizations: how to get marketing and sales to the same table and agree on how to integrate lead generation, marketing automation and sales force automation with a predictable and smooth hand off from marketing to sales. This leads to re-working the incentive plan.
Should both marketing and sales be on a progressive, juicy commission plan?
Most upper-management and sales force personnel, as well as workers in many other jobs, are paid based on performance, which is widely perceived as motivating effort and enhancing productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards can in some cases produce supra-optimal motivation, resulting in a decline in performance. To test whether very high monetary rewards can decrease performance, we conducted a set of experiments at MIT, the University of Chicago, and rural India. Subjects in our experiment worked on different tasks and received performance-contingent payments that varied in amount from small to large relative to their typical levels of pay. With some important exceptions, we observed that high reward levels can have detrimental effects on performance. – Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
I think we can look to the 2005 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Study for some revealing insight. The study demonstrates the paradox of how people will surprisingly perform more poorly if they are working under a tiered reward schedule that offers a really big carrot on a stick at the top end - like most sales organizations. So what's the secret to success? Dan Pink says we need to be working in an environment that allows:
Autonomy
Mastery & Challenge
Transcendent Purpose
Let's think about this...
1. Autonomy: Contrary to the hype and thinking of sales as "team," salespeople are largely autonomous. Sales isn't a team sport, per se. Management, however, may see sales as a team effort because that's how they get compensated - for overall performance. But the salesperson isn't necessarily thinking of the team's success when s/he closes a deal.
Because the art of sales is normally not mechanical and involves more than rudimentary cognitive skill, salespeople react favorably to environments where they are given an opportunity to pursue mastery and be challenged...
2. Mastery & Challenge: While most mature sales and marketing organizations encourage the development of advanced skills the time has come for marketing and sales to work on these skills together. For example, some progressive organizations encourage all levels (not just management) to devote a day, or two, to be creative and try to think up new ways of doing things better, or differently. This highly focused, free time together has the potential to birth some exciting new ways of approaching marketing and sales.
3. Self Purpose: Organizations should consider becoming more cult-like. Why? Because people who are involved with a goal that is larger than themselves, or larger than their company, or even industry, will reach deeper and produce extraordinary results. If a person's raison d'être becomes interwoven with their company's mission, there's a powerful synergy. Sales and marketing professionals will stick around if you've got a retention plan that involves intrinsic rewards.
What this means to executive management
Marketing and sales goals can, and should, align with what is most important to executive management:
Higher revenues
Lower costs...
Leading to higher profitability
Increase in market share, with new customers
Increase in both short and long-term value for the shareholders
Comments [0]