Follow the discussion in the Linked In Group:  Marketing Automation Experts

At the end of the month, I'll post a wrap-up that, who knows... might serve us all as a useful ( if not tongue-in-cheek ) guide on what to look out for in the evaluation / buying process.

Pass this along to anyone you know who has purchased or is thinking of purchasing marketing automation software. -- Should be a lively discussion !

To get things rolling, here are some we've heard:

1.   "We'll double your sales -- guaranteed."
2.   "Your team will be fully trained in 1 hour"
3.   "Integration with the CRM is like the flick of a switch"
4.   "It's so easy a caveman can do it"
5.   "Just set it... and forget it"
6.   "Sales will love it"
7.   "You won't need professional services"
8.   "We're the 800lb gorilla in the space.. you can't go wrong"
9.   "All of our customer service reps are marketing automation experts"
10. "You'll cut your admin / reporting time in half"

Some progressive B2B companies are starting to create the CRO ( Chief Revenue Officer ) position that oversees both marketing and sales. Others have experimented with it and reverted back to the traditional split of sales and marketing.

I believe it will still be at least another decade before this blended position becomes more commonplace just because it's rare that you find a marketer who can manage a large sales team or sales person who has the experience to optimize marketing ROI.

Has anyone worked with a CRO and or managed both sales and marketing at a company generating over 75 million in annual revenue? If so:

1. What were your observations on their effectiveness managing both teams ?

2. What do you believe is the key experience / attribute or other factor to success in this blended position ?

3. Do you believe we'll see more CRO's in the future or is it unrealistic for top sales producers to take a pay cut to gain the requisite marketing experience and also unrealistic to expect seasoned marketers to switch to a commissioned sales position to earn their sales chops.

Do you have any other observations on the potential CRO position and what it means for demand generation / marketing automation specialists?

Check out and/or contribute to the discussion on Linked In's Marketing Automation Specialists Group.

The first thing that has already been cut is the marketing budget.  That's closely followed by a decline in traffic to the website, resulting in fewer leads.  We can continue with this downward spiral and very easily paint a very bleak sales outlook…or… we can recognize this recession is forcing sales teams to evolve.
To: 

• be even more efficient than before. 
• adopt new processes
• embrace new sales-enabling technology 

The name of the game now is speed.  How fast can you evolve? 
Is it faster than what your competitor is doing?
What are you doing to dramatically accelerate your sales cycle?

From what we are seeing, progressive B2B sales teams are aggressively seeking efficiency, and doing more than just recession proofing their business.  They are preparing themselves to leapfrog the competition DURING AND AFTER the recession. 

How specifically…?

One way is by identifying valuable website visitors before they fill out a form.

Take one of our clients, a print and fulfillment firm that started to see a slow down in demand for traditional direct mail printing.  They focused on a niche printing capability and advertised it on Google.  They saw a bump in response rates as a result of the very focused Google ad.  Unfortunately, the very targeted website traffic was all anonymous except for the 3% of click throughs that actually filled out a form.

Enter Pipeline Builder.  

By placing tags on their website that can recognize who is visiting the website, and triggering instant alerts out to the sales team, hungry reps are now proactively calling a steady stream of truly interested prospects while those prospects are on the website.  Within two weeks of knowing who is on the website, the sales team secured two new long term clients simply by calling into the companies that were clearly researching their offering.

According to the owner, “cold calling has now been replaced by warm calling, connection rates are through the roof.   Even though we have competitors offering a similar product for less, we are finding that reaching the decision maker before our competition does, enables us to shape the purchase criteria, and ultimately close more deals – quicker.”

This is just one example of how a firm increased efficiency, adopted new process and a new technology.  During the boom times, it's easy to keep doing things the same way.  It’s easy to sweep a little inefficiency under rug.  No one really notices as long as sales are not taking a nose dive.

I think it will be very interesting to see how B2B sales teams emerge from the recession.  One thing is for sure, as long as companies have a sales team and a website, new sales enablement technology will be a widely adopted within the next few years.

So let’s hear it for the recession…and the evolution of more efficient B2B sales teams !

I’m interested in hearing how some other B2B sales teams are responding to the recession.  If you have some examples to share, drop me a line at jeffk@leadgenesys.com

What’s a B2B marketer to do… assign ROI to the first touch, the last touch, divide it amongst all the touches? 
The answer is none of the above. 

A better metric than “actual” ROI, is anticipated or “projected” ROI. To dial in on this metric you must have a lead grading schema in place and have a conservative estimate from sales on what the sale or conversion ratio will be on A leads vs B leads over the length of the typical sales cycle. 

With an agreed upon conversion ratio of A and B leads to actual sales, you can now project sales based on the number of A and B leads in the funnel.  Nurturing leads to the status of A or B takes some time, but arguably not as long as it takes to make the sale.   With some simple trending and response analysis, marketing can easily identify some common touches, sources, messaging and sequencing that converted A and B leads have in common.  This in turn should enable a B2B marketing team to adjust fire earlier and with a higher degree of confidence than waiting to analyze actual ROI among a much smaller sample size, and after a longer time span where more -- and harder to measure -- variables may contribute to sales and no-sales.

In a nutshell, if you have a long sales cycle. with multiple touches to multiple people at target companies, you’ll be much better served by focusing on the net number of A and B leads you can deliver to sales vs trying to compute actual marketing ROI on sales.   This concentration on cost per A and B lead brings into focus some other bogus metrics:

Cost Per Lead:  
Who cares... especially when the majority of leads are graded C or worse.  Cost per A and B quality lead is a much better measure of B2B marketing effectiveness.

Cost Per Click:
Most of you who are seeing the typical capture ratio of Google and other Banner sponsorships below 1% already know cost per click is worthless without knowing the capture ratio of A and B leads from these sources.

Response and Open Rates: 
Without the A and B lead qualifier, these rates could conceivable relate to D and F quality leads.

Average Sales Cycle:

This is meaningless if the sales team is sifting through leads of differing quality.   The average sales cycle should start when a truly “sales-ready” lead is delivered to sales.    Once this base-line is established, a better metric is average length of time from a “B” lead to an “A” lead.  Best-practice based lead nurturing combined with tailored alerts to the sales team should shorten the length of time it takes a B lead to become an A lead.  Continued triggering of alerts in the later stages of the sales cycle should also help accelerate the time to close a deal.

Average Annual Attrition Rate: 
Clients leave for a reason.  Know why each and every time so you can remedy the root cause.  Without breaking this down by the top causes, don’t expect to do anything about the average annual attrition rate.

Before introducing yet another great initiative from marketing…

Understand the sale cycle:   Know the sales team’s pain and process.  Ask lots of open ended questions that help you understand the sale cycle, the process, the obstacles to purchase (“perceived” by the prospect and real), the buy signals, the competitive landscape, etc.  Understanding the mindset and process of the sales person is one of the single most important things you can do as a marketer supporting a B2B sales team.   (stay tuned for a future post on this topic listing actual questions to ask your B2B sales team)

Create demand from the sales team:  Once you understand the challenges of the sales cycle, ask how sales deals with those challenges.  Questions like, “How is that working out for you? How much time do you spend doing that? What would you do to improve that?”  and a host of others will help you quantify and qualify the demand.  Those same questions will help you formulate some compelling ways communicate the benefits of rules-based lead nurturing. 

Let others convey the benefits for you:   How often have you thoroughly researched an “optimal” solution, and introduced it to the sales team only to see it not contribute to revenue the way you thought it would?  The sales team of course needs to stay focused on opportunities, but there’s nothing wrong with sharing a few case studies with them to get their input on a potential solution.  It naturally lends credibility  if they see others realizing success with a lead nurturing solution.   Being an insider, you are in prime position to know who the informal influencers are on the sales team.  Get their input.   They are the squeaky wheels, so getting them to embrace a solution is arguably more important than getting sales management on board.  After all, if they don’t leverage the solution, sales management can very well conclude the lead nurturing solution is not as valuable as you think it is.

Refrain from introducing new processes:  Good sales people have a clearly defined process for moving a prospect to an opportunity and then to a sale.  Great sales people execute this process consistently, and document a prospect’s status sufficiently to determine the appropriate next steps.  Additional documentation steps for the sole benefit of marketing just won’t happen. So make sure that any demand generation and nurturing solution is sufficiently well though out to trigger automated nurturing on data that is routinely updated by the sales team.  The little things are important, like sharing nurturing and hand-raising activity on the same CRM screen regularly viewed by sales.  Expecting sales to hunt for this data on a new screen or tab may seem inconsequential, but it's a new process nonetheless. Each time you introduce something that is not a part of an effective salesperson’s normal routine, you invite the process to breakdown.

Transparency is key:    Sales needs to be aware of how their leads are being nurtured.  They should of course help define the steps of a drip marketing campaign, but also be able to see how it’s being executed and have the ability to modify the steps as needed.  While selling is a process, exceptions to the process happen all time. Make sure your nurturing solution is flexible enough to allow sales to halt or postpone nurturing steps based on their judgments.  ( more on this topic in a future post )

Get sales to “own” the solution:  Since the lead generation, qualification and nurturing solution ultimately benefits the sales team, it’s understandable that they will want a hand in crafting how the solution will be leveraged.  Sales should of course define the “sales-ready” lead, and the related alert triggers and nurturing schemas.  You’ll get many different definitions of a “sales ready” lead and just as many opinions on how to move prospects through the sales cycle. Listen to all of them, and then get sales management to agree on some basic assumptions that can be adjusted later on as those assumptions get validated. 

Create an internal case study:  If you have a very large or disparate sales team, consider getting just a few sales team members to participate in a pilot before rolling out the solution to the rest of the team.  This is a good way to iron out lead scoring / grading and nurturing assumptions.  Almost every time a client has done this, the sales team ends up dialing back or tightening the criteria for automated alerts, because the automated nurturing inherently stimulates more hand raising activity.  For instance, sales may only want to be alerted on “B” quality leads that view at least 8 pages on the website in 24 hours vs just 4 pages.  With positive results on a pilot, sales management is much more likely to support your initiative during the roll-out phase. 

Prove a contribution quickly:  You want to show proof of success quickly, and build on that with additional adjustments.  Complex sales cycles greater than 60 days definitely benefit from lead nurturing, but waiting 60 to 90 days to show a handful of results is not an option.  Make sure your solution automatically gives you the detailed metrics you need in order to show benefits within 30 days.  Some of these metrics include sales probability percentages and hand raising activities of nurtured opportunities compared to a baseline of non-nurtured prospects.  With best practices applied to the nurturing and alert triggers, you should also be able to convey significant time savings.  One of the key metrics here is the time saved hunting down and disqualifying leads that just aren’t sales-ready.

So you might be thinking all of this just takes too long…welcome to selling.  Sure, you already know automated lead nurturing is a no-brainer.  You know sales will shorten sales cycles and benefit from the lead grading and triggered alerts they define.  You already know the time savings alone will ROI justify the solution and that you can get up and running in just two days.  But here’s the rub…the proposed solution can’t be your idea – or at least perceived to be yours.  Much of my training as an Army Psychological Operations officer focused on this, but quite frankly, most parents who have raised a 4 year old, already know this "rule of influence".   If you are blissfully unaware of this tactic, it’s really very simple.

All you need to do is plant the seed with the sales team, and with effective nurturing, you’ll soon generate the demand you need to successfully introduce rules-based lead nurturing to your organization.  Of course you could take the shortcut "because I said so" approach, but if you do, expect some push back...and maybe even a tantrum or two.

Profile attributes: 
These attributes include firmographic, BANT (budget, authority, need, and timing) and other qualification questions you ask throughout the marketing and sales cycle.

Activities:
Make sure the score is being impacted by all activities to include interaction with the website, physical events, direct mail and all emailing activity.  Basically the entire integrated marketing mix.

Timeline:
One of the pitfalls of bumping up a lead score based on a flurry of activity is that an active lead could actually be a student doing research or a competitor that keeps checking the website. The last thing you want is to grade these leads “A” and share them with the sales team.  It only takes a few of these activity-boosted “A” leads to discredit marketing sourced leads and put the entire lead scoring schema in question. 

A smarter approach is to have activity thresholds trigger a notification to the appropriate sales rep who can decide whether or not to accept the lead as “sales-ready” -- which then impacts the grade.  If you have to score or grade leads based on activities, make sure the score diminishes over a period of inactivity that you can stipulate.

Weighting:
Weighting is important when one or a few profile attributes are particularly more important than others.  Be sure to test many different scoring scenarios before applying weighting.  Again, applying weighting to an activity like the viewing of a particular website page or PDF is a risky proposition.  Once a lead with low scoring profile attributes (but with a high level of activity) is delivered to sales as an “A” grade – the damage is done. 

There are a number of other nuances to be considered when choosing a lead scoring solution, but one of the most important is working with a partner deeply rooted in B2B marketing best practices.  Even if you choose a solution without a robust and flexible feature set, as long as you are getting sound advice based on experience, you’ll avoid the common pitfalls of lead scoring and still deliver marketing accountability and leads that are truly “sales-ready.”

1.  Get “buy in” from sales: 
Some of the questions you’ll want to ask include:

• Should leads only meeting certain criteria synch with the CRM?
• Will all new leads regardless of lead score/ grade flow into the CRM?
• What data on a record should synch with the CRM?
• When should triggered alerts notify sales of hand raising activity?
• How will sales act on the data and be held accountable for follow-up?

If your Marketing Automation provider has been doing this for over at least 5 years and is well versed in best practices, seek their advice on the best way to get buy-in and demonstrate immediate value.

2.  Ensure the integration is secure and certified by the CRM vendor:
Beware if the integration is not certified.  If not certified, ask why and then ask for references.
Security of your data is paramount, so make sure any certification includes a comprehensive security audit – ideally by a third party.

3.  Make the set-up quick and easy: 
Marketers have more important things to do than get wrapped around the axel on an integration.
Leverage best practices input from your marketing automation provider.  Ask if they have a Smart Start program with recommended deployment configurations that you can modify.  Start small by not adding a bunch of new reporting tabs to your CRM. You can always do this later as you get more comfortable with the integration.  The idea is to start leveraging synched data, ideally within 48 hours, pin down some process, and build any custom reports as the data starts to build.
  

4.  Make it flexible:
Your integration must be able to support your marketing and sales process.  You should have control over:

• bi-directional synching vs. one-way.
• which lead scores / grades get synched
• which activities get synched
                    to include website visits, opens, bounces, and opt-outs, etc.

5.  Make it easy to modify:
Granted, once a tailored integration is in place that enables sales to be more productive and marketing to prove their contribution to revenue, not too many adjustments need to be made.  But as you add additional fields and make occasional tweaks to process and data flow, those adjustments should happen quickly and without additional cost.

6.  Ensure the integration keeps your CRM data clean:
Make sure your integration does not introduce a bunch of duplicate records into your CRM.
Nothing will irritate sales faster – other than notifying them of leads that are not “sales-ready.”  Your marketing automation solution should be checking for duplicates and enforcing data hygiene on all records entered into the system.  If your CRM solution creates a new ID for records that “graduate” from a lead to a contact, make sure your marketing automation solution accommodates and reconciles that.

7.  Ensure the data is synched quickly:
Responsiveness is a key advantage in sales.  Data should be synched in a near real-time fashion.  Have the solution you are evaluating show you a synch to ensure it’s not being batch processed.  Some marketing automation solutions rely on third party or internal batch processing that can delay synching up to 6 hours.

8.  Ensure synched data is easy to find and actionable:
This is one of the most important points.  The feedback we’ve gotten from sales professionals using other synched solutions is that actionable data for sales should be displayed in the screens they normally view on a daily basis.  Expecting sales reps to hunt for data in other tabs is unrealistic and counterproductive.  Hidden data rarely gets viewed. 

Resist the temptation to over think integration or postpone it until you find the time to focus on it.  Synching data with the CRM may seem like a daunting project, but assuming your certified marketing automation provider has already figured out a quick and easy way to integrate, you should rely on their expertise to get up an running quickly.