Author: Leo Dirr

How do you meet your marketing goals with a small staff and a tight budget?

It’s a crucial question almost every marketing team on the planet is struggling with right now. Easy answers are tough to find.

We can tell you, though, what is working for us, so that you can grab an actionable insight or two.

Our strategy boils down to one odd, little word: co-marketing. It’s all about leveraging the resources and relationships you have, rather than worrying about all of the shiny new things you don’t have the time or money to do.

Co-Marketing, Briefly Defined

Co-marketing is the process of aligning your company’s interests, resources and marketing muscle with other like-minded companies to accomplish much more than you might on your own.

The concept has been around a long time in advertising. Any airline magazine has ads with the Top Steakhouses, Top Seafood Restaurants or even Top Plastic Surgeons.

Basically, these similar and complementary companies band together and unite their advertising budgets to cut the cost of an ad by 10 times or more (depending on the number of participants).

It’s brilliant.

And it isn’t all about just saving money. It’s also about brand and credibility.

Putting all of these top names together dramatically increases brand recognition, customer value and customer retention. Every time business travelers fly to a location where one of these top providers is located,  they have a ready-made reference to help them find a good meal … and, if need be, a top-notch surgeon.

How Does This Apply to Internet Marketing?

At InsideSales.com, we do a lot of webinars. Webinars are one of the most cost-effective ways for B2B companies to generate leads and sales.

We usually team up with another reputable company that has some good data and best practices to contribute. Both companies promote the webinar and we share the leads. For example, here’s a webinar we ran with Marketo, The Ultimate Revenue Engine: Maximizing Results Through Inside Sales and Marketing Automation.

This is an example of co-marketing on a small scale. And it works really well. Another webinar we did with two other companies generated 3,830 leads. Without those partners, we probably would have only earned a third of the leads for the same amount of work.

How It’s Done: 4 Quick Tips

Now that you’re sold on the value of co-marketing, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of how it’s done.

Here are four quick tips we’ve learned from trial and error:

1. Make it a win-win: Identify partners that align well with your business. Show them the value of joining forces with you by sharing data about what results they can expect based on past successes.
2. Give more than you get: Selling your value to somebody else is the easy part. Strive to exceed your partners’ expectations by throwing all of your marketing might behind your joint efforts. Don’t hold back and expect your partner to do the heavy lifting.
3. Make it easy: Asking somebody to join you in a marketing campaign is kind of like inviting them over to a backyard barbecue. The less you ask them to do or bring, the more likely they are to show up smiling. Create a simple checklist and a promotion kit, complete with sample emails, tweets and other collateral, and share these items with your partners.
4. Do a debriefing: After every webinar we do, we link up with our partner for a quick debriefing call to review what went well and what we can improve on next time. This step is easy to overlook in the hustle and bustle of a busy day. But it’s an absolutely critical step.

If you use these four tips, you’ll run successful co-marketing campaigns. And you’ll also build lifelong relationships with valuable business partners.

It works so well, in fact, that we recently decided to do it on a bigger stage.

Marketing on Steroids

On June 20, we are bringing together the top minds in sales and marketing for an all-day virtual summit. Everybody who participates will earn exposure and get the chance to showcase their thought leadership and expertise. The more we all help one another promote the event, the more we’ll all win. Through collaborative marketing, we’re creating an audience that the individual organizations could never amass on their own.

It’s called the Inside Sales Virtual Summit. The all-star lineup features 62 leading experts, including 11 best-selling authors, including the following:

• Guy Kawasaki – Author, Social Media Thought Leader
• Jon Miller, VP of Marketing, Marketo
• Jeffrey Gitomer – Author of the Little Red Book of Selling
• Josh James – Founder of Domo and Omniture
• Yusuf Tayob – Partner, Accenture
• Brian Frank – Global Head of Sales, LinkedIn
• Jason Garoutte, CMO and GM, Mintigo

It’s a virtual trade show, so it will be a much more dynamic experience than a regular webinar. It also requires a lot more coordination. But we’re sure it will be worth it for everybody involved.

The Inside Sales Virtual Summit will take place June 20 and attendance is free. Join more than 10,000 of your peers.

How Co-Marketing Can Expand Your Reach was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Jason Miller

Google recently announced a new Penguin update furthering the search giant’s objective to decrease Web spam and reward good quality content and effective white hat SEO techniques. If you’re practicing black hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and link schemes, be careful; the Penguin or Panda might swallow you whole.

For us folks who take our content marketing seriously, these are welcomed updates because Google is rewarding remarkable content and penalizing the poorly written crap. Another important part of this update is that Google is increasingly looking at social signals as a sign of content quality and relevance. The more social shares and interactions that a piece of content has, the more likely it will show up in search results. But, keep in mind that the number of shares are not the only thing influencing search results, but also the influence of those individuals who are doing the sharing. (Time to pay attention to Google+)

The infographic below illustrates what you need to know to keep your content on good terms with Google’s new algorithm. But don’t get too comfortable, as I’m sure the next update is just around the corner.

Copy and Paste The Code Below to Share the Google Bought a Zoo Infographic

<a href="http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2013/06/google-bought-a-zoo-infographic.html"><img src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Google-Bought-a-Zoo.png" border="0" />

Google Bought a Zoo [Infographic] was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Stephen Frapart

Conversions are part of everyday life. 45% of Stephen Curry’s 3-pointers are drained.  Barack Obama won 62% of the electoral vote in last year’s election.  Solar cells generally convert 15% of solar energy to electricity.  A blackjack dealer will bust on 42% of the hands with a 6 showing.

Why Conversions Are Important

Every business wrestles with the same challenge: how to increase revenue (or users / customers) most efficiently.

The fastest-growing businesses think about increasing revenue in a very systematic way.  They too think in terms of conversions, and they believe that driving revenue is a science.

As depicted in the graph below, businesses think about how they can most efficiently increase their conversion percentage from prospects to customers and from customers to promoters / upsells. They map out each stage, determine conversion percentage, and decide what needs to happen to move a prospect from one stage to the next.

Each conversion should be considered systematically.  If you want to increase revenue by X%, then think backwards about what needs to happen:

• How many more opportunities do you need to create?
• How many more qualified leads?
• How many more free trials?
• How many more webinars?
• How many more demos?

Driving Customer Acquisition

Marketing automation drives prospects and customers through the revenue funnel with various sub-conversions such as ebooks, webinars, demos, conversations with sales reps, etc. Every business is different. And many have specific content that is served up to prospects based on where they are in the sales cycle. As an example, a prospect who just learned about your company is probably not ready for a demo or pricing page. So you move prospects from one stage to the next through providing relevant content.

Marketing automation enables businesses to optimize and automate engagement with your prospects with the right message at the right time through lead nurturing. Forrester Research suggests that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.  With marketing automation, businesses can:

1) Arm its sales reps with the intelligence to act accordingly (and be as effective at selling as Stephen Curry is at draining three-pointers)
2) Analyze data that is easily digestible to prove what is working (and what isn’t) to ensure repeatable success.

The Forgotten Conversion: Post-Sales

Marketing automation has largely been marketed a pre-sales enabler.  Your customers have already committed their time, resources and likely money to engage with you. But what you are to see moving forward is marketing automation will become a post-sales enabler.  Once a customer signs up, now your business is tasked to galvanize their interest.  You may begin to focus on questions like:

• What percentage of your customers are promoters?
• What percentage of your customers are heavy users?
• What percentage of your customers have bought additional products / services / solutions?

While some companies (e.g. Apple, Amazon) and their products / services / solutions elicit strong emotional connections and consequential referrals, upsells /cross sells, and renewals, some companies may need a boost to further engage their customers.  Marketing automation can do exactly that.

The underlying technology and process is very similar.  After the initial sale, companies should focus on nurturing their customers to drive engagement, share success stories and highlight new product features and company updates.

How does your business think about conversions?  Has Marketing Automation helped drive conversions?  Pre-sales and Post-Sales?  What else works well for you?

Driving Conversions Throughout the Customer Lifecycle was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Tania O'Connor

Webinars, done well, can be an integral part of your event marketing mix. They are a chance to get to know your market, leverage the expertise that resides in your organization, and establish thought leadership. Better still, if you engage your listeners effectively enough, webinars can result in immediate opportunities for sales.

In my experience, webinars have become a more and more powerful lead qualifier. This post contains some key insights I’ve learned.

1. Target your topics and help your attendees learn.

By examining your web stats and other metrics, you will likely see a pattern of what attracts interest and what creates sales opportunities. For example, say you are marketing office supplies. Which of these webinars is more likely to attract attendees?

• “Introduction to ABC Office Supplies”
• “Learn to cut your spend on office equipment by 60%!”

You’re right. B. Why? You are likely targeting leads that have never heard of you before, so while many potential attendees won’t yet be interested in learning about your company, they will probably be interested in learning about something to ease a pain point—in this case, how to cut spend.

2.  Make sure your presenter is prepared.

Get any visual aids (videos, slides, etc) as far in advance as you can to make sure the material is of the right length and of sufficient quality. Edit credibility-killers like misspellings or conflicting messages.  And keep your eye out for bad graphics! Unattractive or unprofessional slides can really hurt you.

3.  Practice.

Get any new presenters to do a run through with you days in advance of the presentation date. I have never failed to be surprised how many problems come up in practice sessions.  You don’t want to have issues with poor sound quality or visual aids not working on the day. Be prepared to get a new microphone for your presenter if necessary!

Also, make sure that you do platform training. 10 minutes before a webinar is certainly not the time to go through how the presenter needs to use the platform. To make sure that you take care of any technical issues well before the webinar start time, dial in 30 minutes early.

 4.  Send a last-minute reminder.

Sending an email reminder with “Your webinar starts now!” in the subject line increases the percentage of people who actually attend. Providing a contact for tech support in case of issues logging into the webinar helps increase attendance as well. (Webinar applications are not always 100% intuitive, and people often struggle with the login process.)

 5.  Involve the audience.

For example, for a 45-minute webinar I would plan 1-3 regular Q&A breaks. Ideally, there should be someone hosting the webinar, doing the following things:

• Introducing the main presenter
• Asking attendees’ questions during the breaks
• Preparing a few “dummy questions” just in case no one asks any
• Responding to any simple questions or comments directly to audience members via chat window

Also, two different voices on the webinar are simply psychologically more engaging: it helps people stay awake!

6.  Gather information.

I found that running polls during the webinar – often just before/after a Q&A session – is a useful exercise for both engaging the audience and learning about our market. Asking the audience about particular concerns or problems they have is a great start.

I usually also put in a question like, “What did you think of this webinar? A. Informative B. Boring C. Confusing D. Entertaining”. That often sparks a bit of humour. Alternatively, you could ask quiz-style questions to test the audience, to highlight little-known facts or pique interest. Think about potentially including an incentive for those who answer the questions right.

7.  Follow-up.

I’m sure you do this anyway, but here are some things I tested that proved effective for webinar follow-up:

• Address any unanswered questions after the webinar. If you have a lot of questions that went unanswered, consider a blog post! This is also a great way to promote the webinar recording to those who couldn’t attend.
• Record the webinar and make it available for download on your website. *This is particularly important. According to Forrester Research, videos are 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive a first-page ranking.*
• Highlight any particularly interesting things that come up in Q&A on your social media channels and link to the download.
• Send a follow-up email to registrants with a call to action.
• Configure your marketing automation solution to alert sales to any leads that get qualified during the webinar (i.e. attendees with the right demographics who attend and ask questions).

One key thing to remember when it comes to follow-up, is make sure that you follow up in a timely manner. Our research shows that timely follow-up substantially increases click rates since the event is fresh in the mind of your attendees.

I like doing webinars and videos because they enable a valuable form of two-way communication with your customers and prospects. And, the more targeted and relevant they are, the more power and engagement they put behind your brand.

If you want more information on performing killer webinars, be sure to take a look at our helpful webinar checklist.

7 Rules to Live By for Creating Legendary Webinars was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Seth Lieberman

You have seen the benefits of content marketing, but are your recent campaigns falling a bit flat? You have a marketing automation system in place, but are you getting the most out of it?  By layering interactive content into your marketing efforts, you can drive more leads, enhance profile building and scoring, and improve nurturing.

Interactive content is content that creates a dialogue with your audience that leads to an exchange of information.  Unlike the passive, one-sided way we generally consume content (e.g., viewing, reading, watching, or listening), interactive content requires active engagement from your audience because it is a two-way experience where your audience can, vote, rank, compete, assess, or otherwise participate in an exchange.

Interactive content comes in many forms including polls and surveys, personality tests / persona assessments, contests, quizzes and more.  It may be marketer defined content or it might, in the case of a photo contest, be user generated.  Depending on your specific needs and objectives, this content may be published on websites and blogs, in emails or on social channels including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The “shareability” of this type of content further contributes to its distribution. In our research, we have found that a personalized result is 11 times more likely to be shared than a static web page.

Why interactive content?

Interactive content is powerful stuff.  On average, when companies produce and distribute interactive content, they generate:

• Click rates of 50%
• Lead form completion rates of 80%
• Social sharing rates of 20%

Compare that with average email click rates of 5% and it doesn’t take much to understand why modern marketers view interactive content as the next generation of content marketing and are weaving it into their email marketing templates, landing pages, blog posts, websites and social media channels.

Companies use interactive content for a variety of marketing goals from branding to top of the funnel lead generation to collecting relevant information for profile building and scoring, to nurturing—both pre and post-sale.

For example:

• PBS uses quizzes and polls embedded in their CMS and Email marketing to generate leads for donor/ fundraising outreach
• Forescout uses personality quizzes to perform pre-sales qualification and deliver targeted whitepapers.
• Webroot uses various types of interactive content across channels to drive software trial downloads
• RSA (security division of EMC) uses QR codes coupled with personality assessments at events to capture leads
• Los Angeles Times and New York Times use daily trivia quizzes to drive time on site and advertising revenues
• Kong runs photo contests on its website to drive email newsletter signups and build profiles
• Luxury Link creates travel-related personality surveys to funnel prospects to highly targeted online offers.

How does interactive content fit with marketing automation?

If you consider marketing automation to be the engine for your sales pipeline, think of interactive content as fuel. From a top of funnel perspective, the sharable, engaging nature of interactive content grabs people’s attention. And from a mid to late funnel point of view, the enhanced user experience helps keep things moving by reducing much of the drag that usually slows leads down. By presenting interactive content in your templates and capturing the user data in your marketing database you can put more gas in and get more power out of your marketing automation/ CRM solution.

Metaphors aside, here are a few specific examples of how interactive content can integrate with and enhance your marketing automation efforts:

• Interactive Content in Email Campaigns: Embedding interactive content—such as surveys, personality assessments, quizzes and even contests — directly in your email templates can dramatically improve open and click rates — to the tune of 10x.
• Drive and Qualify Leads More Rapidly with Personality Tests: Enable early stage prospects to identify their own pain points or interests, and you can score based on their responses. All of the data collected can be appended to the lead or contact record.  Marketers and sales executives then use these self-assessments to deliver just the right message/ content based on responses provided.
• Increase Traffic to Webpages and Other Valuable Content: On average, when marketers integrate interactive content into their programs, site traffic increases by as much as 400 to 500% from the sharable, engaging, and well directed user experience. With web content measured and optimized by marketing automation, more traffic invariably means more leads in your pipeline.

How are you using interactive content in your marketing automation efforts? We would love to hear about it.

Get More out of your Marketing Automation with Interactive Content was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Phillip Chen

At Marketo, we are always testing to see how different lead nurture tracks work. This helps us optimize our processes and get creative with how we think about prospect engagement.

At a certain point in nurturing, you reach a level where you have an abundance of content pieces that span a wide range of topics. Marketo’s nurturing tracks have content pieces that range from email marketing all the way to inbound marketing.  But, we have found that lead interest differs per track. For instance,  in one nurture track some marketers may be interested in social marketing, while others are  more interested in event marketing.

We wanted to know how we could be more relevant to each lead, which is why we implemented an interest-based nurturing track based on a person’s last activity to see whether or not more targeted content would do better.

Choosing Tracks

So how does this work? We created nurture tracks based on four different topics that we thought our customers were interested in: email marketing, social marketing, marketing automation, and Microsoft Dynamics for example. When a person attends a social marketing webinar, we assign them to the social marketing nurture track. Once they are in that interest based track, they receive a set of social marketing focused emails.

The Test

Intuitively this makes sense. If someone is interested in social, send them social content pieces. Theory however doesn’t always produce results as we very well know, so we dug a little deeper to pull some data.

We started by only looking at content pieces that had deliveries of more than 500 in the past two months so that we would have enough data to look at. We then looked at how many content pieces we could compare between our interest based track and our regular nurturing track.

The Results

So what do the numbers tell us? Our interest based nurturing track has higher numbers on an absolute level across our 3 email marketing metrics which are:

• %Opened: Out of deliveries, how many people opened the email
• Clicked to Open Ratio: Out of those who opened their emails, how many people clicked
• % Clicked: Out of deliveries, how many people clicked

That’s good, but not enough. What is the actual increase in open rates and click through rates? There is actually a 56.68% increase in open rates and a 147% increase in click through rates, which means that so far our interest based nurturing track is producing results!

Our topic of interest based nurturing is still in the testing phase since we don’t have other tracks with enough deliveries to make accurate comparisons, but so far the results look promising.

Would love to know if anyone else is nurturing by interest and how your tracks are performing. We will keep you posted on how interest-based nurturing does!

Topic of Interest Based Nurturing was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Bill Binch

Little did I know that when I started selling 20 years ago, I’d end up creating, managing, and espousing Service Level Agreements.  While SLA’s were normally applied to the tech support world (i.e. priority 1 tickets get a response time in 60 minutes or less, priority 2 in four hours etc), they are a growing presence found in use between marketing and sales departments.

The Old Way

We all know the old adage of marketing chucking leads over the fence to sales. Sales ignores 99% of them with no follow up and no outreach.  Marketing gets pissed, says we’re spending good money and sales is dropping the ball.  Fingers get pointed, sales don’t get made.

Closed Loop Processing

But that’s changing.  The hand-off today between marketing systems (used by the marketers) and CRM systems (used by sales) now permits you to determine when a lead gets passed.  Only leads that meet an agreed upon criteria get sent to sales, so that marketing may demonstrate they’re not wasting sales rep cycles.  Sales reps then have to take action on that lead, which is tracked in the CRM & marketing system so there’s proof the rep did their part (or as my marketing team calls it – closed loop processing).

Marketing-to-Sales SLAs: The Beginning

At Marketo, we make marketing software that fuels this process.  In Marketo’s early days, we built our first Marketing-to-Sales SLA: when a rep received a lead that “met” marketing’s criteria, they had 24 hours to make the reach out (which was then indicated by a value change in the CRM).  If they didn’t make the reach out, they got a reminder 24 hours telling them that the lead is getting stale.  At 48 hours, the rep and their boss got an email and eek, at 72 hours that alert went to our CEO.  No bueno if you’re a sales rep working in a marketing automation company.

Marketing-to-Sales SLAs: The Last Mile

But that wasn’t enough. The process didn’t go the last mile and tell us the true disposition of the lead. All we knew was that a rep had followed up. What happened to the lead after that?  So we extended the SLA — once a rep reached out, a new SLA started:  the rep had 7 days to qualify and convert the lead.  They had 3 choices on what could happen to the lead.  They could turn the lead into an opportunity — best outcome!  They could defer the lead — there was no opportunity at the time.  Or they could recycle the lead, meaning push it back to marketing to manage while they focus on selling active opps.

This gave our marketing team that coveted “closed loop” view of their marketing efforts.  It also gave us killer data on what percentage of our leads converted to opportunities and what percentage of opps became deals.  This was great for us as we grew.  It improved our forecasting and helped us decide when it was time to hire new reps.

I’m fascinated by SLA’s inside companies and how it’s helping them look holistically at their business. I’m interested in learning about your marketing-sales SLA’s and how you’re using them to run your business, so please comment!

No Lead Left Behind was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Jason Miller

It continues to happen each and every day. A self-proclaimed social media expert rails on Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm on a major social media website complaining that Facebook should change their ways. I get riled up when I see these types of posts as I believe it turns off businesses from going out there and trying new things–Facebook marketing being one of them.

It’s the same conversation over and over again “Edgerank only shows my posts to a small percentage of my business page’s following”–the average being 16%, and again that’s only an average, many pages do much better than that organically.

Somehow these folks missed the original memo sent out years ago; marketing is hard work.

In this case specifically, marketing is hard on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean that you go out and tell the world that it’s a waste of time. If you are a social media marketer it’s your job to figure out how to make it work. In many cases the problem is not Edgerank itself, but instead the lack of creativity, a shortage on good content and no budget assigned to this very important marketing channel.

Why Edgerank is a Good Thing

If Facebook decided to go the Twitter fire-hose route it would lead to a cluttered newsfeed disaster of crap content. The casual user would have a horrible experience of too much garbage flooding their newsfeed and have to painfully sift through it all for meaningful content. It’s a much different experience for us power users who can simply set up lists and follow them individually and not miss out on the content we specifically seek. The average user is not going to take the time to build these lists and Facebook knows that. So it’s Egderank’s job to keep these users engaged by awarding good content and penalizing the crap.

But Even Good Content Sometimes Goes Unnoticed

I know what you’re thinking; “Even my best content goes unnoticed on Facebook because of Edgerank.” You can’t see it, but I have in my hand the world’s small violin playing a song for you. This argument could be said about any individual marketing channel from email to PPC to blogging; it’s nothing new. Some of the best content in the world goes unnoticed by its target audience each and every day. Again, your job as a marketer is to find a way to get your message in front of buyers in the right place at the right time. It’s a challenge that all marketers face and it’s time to take responsibility for your campaigns and the results they deliver.

Ready to Do Something About it? Of Course You Are.

As I mentioned before, marketing is hard. But so is writing and coming up with original ideas. It’s this very content and the creativity behind it that becomes the catalyst for breaking through Edgerank and managing it effectively. B2B or B2C, it doesn’t matter when it comes to engagement. What works for one business will often work for the other, and what their fans engage with is often universally accepted. Don’t sell to them. Instead entertain them, tell them a story, give them something to share, and help them along the way. When it comes time for them to purchase, your company will likely be top of mind. A lot of the work has already been done for you as there are thousands of businesses managing Edgerank and getting their content in front of their fans and prospects.  Take someone else’s ideas, tactics and strategy and make it your own. This is where you as a marketer should be able to shine and if you can’t, then you probably shouldn’t be a marketer in the first place.

The View from the Cheap Seats is Just That, Cheap

It’s OK to fail at something, especially in the world of social media. But don’t preach your failure as a blanket statement that could potentially turn off other folks from ever trying. I can’t even begin to tell you how many of my “great” ideas have totally bombed, but I can tell you that I don’t jump up on pedestal and tell other not to try. That’s just reckless.

Edgerank is not going away. If anything, it will continue to evolve and get better at filtering and disseminating the massive influx of content. If you can’t figure out how to manage it effectively, that’s fine, simply move on. Facebook is just one channel of what should be a full on integrated marketing approach to lead generation that includes email, PPC, Twitter, Slideshare, events, webinars, and any other channels where you can reach your customers and prospects. Giving up on Facebook or any of these channels too early will only lead to missed opportunities.

Stop Whining about Edgerank and Do Something About it was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Greg Higham

Because digital business is so omnipresent in how companies operate today, many of the traditional C-level roles have begun to overlap.  Since technology and infrastructure investment have become a central focus, the CIO’s role is becoming more integrated into business process than ever before. In the past, it was the IT department that controlled technology and infrastructure purchase decisions. But with the advent of cloud-based technologies such as marketing automation, CRM systems, social media, and the proliferation of mobile devices, purchase decisions have become a collaborative endeavor.

IT in a Silo

In the bad old days, IT tended to work in a bit of a silo. The focus was primarily on delivering IT solutions and infrastructure, with minimal collaboration between the IT and other departments across the organization. More of an “IT for ITs sake”, rather than with a business-focused approach. And this philosophy still exists today in many companies. There is also the aspect of large scale IT implementations with high failure rates (think ERP), that run the risk of causing the IT leader to remain cautious in delivering against challenging business priorities. While understandable to some degree, this approach will ensure that those businesses will be stunted, while those that adapt new agile philosophies of a collaborative C-suite will dominate.

The CIO as a Business Partner

CIOs need to be a true business partner. We exist to support our business counterparts in delivering business results and differentiation; to help Sales sell more effectively, to help Engineering deliver a better product to the market faster and error free, to help our Marketing teams market better, etc.

Process Before Technology

The old adage regarding People, Process, and Technology remains true and the successful IT leaders of today drive much more focus on the former than the latter.  Whether you are implementing CRM or marketing automation solutions, you’d be ill advised to map a bad business process to a new technology. Strategize with an eye on customer success and ensure that you are creating not just a solution for your customers, but an enhanced interaction with your customers and your company. The technology, which is more often than not the easy part, is simply one piece of it.

Internal Executive Alignment

Ensuring business alignment against IT project delivery is critical and helps ensure one isn’t deploying technology for technology’s sake (shiny object syndrome). A successful approach is creation of an IT Steering Committee, where the CIO is joined by the functional leaders across the company to collaboratively decide priorities and investments against the backdrop of overall corporate strategies. Also, work to ensure that you have complete transparency across all of your activities. In our case, all Steering Committee output, project plans, meeting notes and IT initiatives are posted for everyone in the company to see. This transparency helps breed communication and awareness of what we’re up to, as well as showing the variety of areas that we, the IT team, are delivering business value across the company.  Share all of your meeting notes, all of the standing lists of priorities. Make them available for your company, so that everyone can see what the executive team is focusing on together.  Once you have your plan, execute against it and articulate what is required from business and IT in order to build a plan and get it done on time and on budget.

The Overlapping CMO and CIO

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the relationship between the CIO and the CMO. In fact, according to many reports, the CMO is outspending the CIO. Here at Marketo we don’t look at it like that. It isn’t a competition. It is about making the right investments across the company at any given time, sometimes that investment is in Marketing, sometimes in Sales, sometimes… well, you get the idea. Having said that, it is clear that investments in Marketing technology are on the rise, and for good reason. We now have technology solutions that can help automate historically manual processes. But even that isn’t a blind spend. With these new tools, Marketing can make intelligent investments to do what they do better—and that is just smart business.

In it Together

The reality is that marketing is no more or less a business partner than sales, engineering, customer service, or finance. We are all in this together and we truly act as a group. Each department makes investments collaboratively. No one is in a silo anymore. The idea is less “marketing is spending more than IT” and more “what do we collectively need to get it done for the business?” And that makes our approach incredibly successful.

My $.02,
G

The Changing Role of the CIO and Aligning Organizational Priorities was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Author: Evan Liang

Just like a hiker drinking untreated and unfiltered water from a dirty creek, putting raw, untreated and unfiltered data into your marketing automation and CRM will make these systems perform at a suboptimal level. And that’s putting it politely!

Unfortunately, many marketers see dirty data as too costly, too time consuming or, and let’s be honest, too unexciting of a problem to solve. However, we at LeanData, LOVE addressing our customers’ dirty data issues, as we believe that the convergence of cloud technology, readily accessible social channels, and smart process can deliver highly impactful results from data quality investments.

Regardless of the vendors or systems you use to address your dirty data, here are some best practices that every company can do to get started:

Change your Company’s Mentality

Your marketing automation and CRM systems shouldn’t give the people featured on Hoarders a run for their money. The first step is easier than you think: search for “test”, find a completely useless test lead… then press DELETE. Congratulations, you’ve taken the first step in your journey, but more importantly you have now changed the mentality that data should never be deleted or merged. In data quality, the adage “less is more” definitely applies as marketers need to focus on quality over quantity.

A bloated database full of test leads, bots, orphaned contacts, or bounced emails, is not just an annoyance, it is harmful and gives the sales team an excuse to declare that “marketing just sends us junk” (we are sure you have heard that many times). The willingness to delete junk or merge duplicate accounts is a very important shift in mentality. As you find more junk data or duplicates, take the extra couple of seconds to get rid of them – you will be surprised how good it actually feels!

Focus Your Collection/Sanitation Efforts on Key Data Points

Sure, it would be great to know every lead’s height, weight and astrological sign, but chances are there are only a couple of key data points that will actually allow your company to market and sell to each prospect more effectively via better lead management, scoring, segmentation and messaging. Common highly actionable data points include: location, vertical, annual revenue, and title. Once you have picked the 1-2 impactful fields for your company, be fanatical about collecting those data points on every form, list upload and sales calls.

If it’s Important, Standardize

Ever notice how many different ways there are to greet someone:  “hi, hello, hey, yo, what’s up, how’s it going?” People have just as many ways to abbreviate their title or describe their industry, or even share the size of their company.  Because of this, it really pays to bucket and summarize the myriad of possibilities for important data points. Marketing automation is a great tool to use to this end, as it makes it easy to match your CRM revenue bands with those displayed on your forms, or to automatically bucket titles by common keywords or abbreviations. The big benefit here is that bucketed values allow for easy reporting and segmentation across the fields that matter to you.

Low Hanging Fruit is Fast and Just as Delicious

Even if you are in the unfortunate position of having complex account ownership rules or back pointing integrations that make data cleansing daunting, there are easy wins available. Start with the safest and easiest – 2 records belonging to the same rep, for example. Get those done first before trying to tackle harder merges or issues.  Even if these only cover 10% of the dirty data problem…you just fixed 10% of your data quality problem!! You now deserve a glass of ice cold refreshing lemonade (or maybe even a margarita if it’s a Friday afternoon).  Not only does this type of approach allow for bite size improvements, but it builds momentum for the harder, trickier merge sets.

Sure, dirty data can seem like a tough issue to address, but with the trend towards data driven marketing, data quality is a critical factor that can make or break your ability to achieve your sales and marketing objectives. So try out these best practices that will make your data healthier or share your own in the comments below.

How Every Marketer Can Change Their Dirty Data Culture was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com