Marketing: Strategy to Solution Blue Print

Nurturing Sales Opportunities - How to increase pipeline conversion

How great would it be for an organization if sales can close all the opportunities that get added to the sales pipeline! Reality is that organizations are elated if they can convert half the number of opportunities into deals. There are quite a few opportunities that get stalled and languish in the funnel for various reasons. In some cases sales continue to pursue such opportunities but more often than not sales people tend to move on to greener pastures. This is the classic “last mile problem”! It’s a shame that companies spend a lot of time, energy and dollars in creating demand, nurturing leads and generating opportunities but not following all the way through to close. Part of the problem is sales people inherently lack the patience and perseverance to work on Leads and Opportunities beyond a certain point because they have to meet quarterly goals or in some cases monthly goals.

Here is where Marketing can step in and help. Imagine a situation where Sales has ready access to content and nurture processes developed by Marketing to specifically address concerns and overcome hurdles that sales runs into during the late stages of the sales funnel. Some of the typical challenges are:

• ROI and TCO justification: Most organizations lack a good framework or methodology to measure the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and also justify spend for a product or service they are buying. This is where vendors can help create whitepapers, case studies and tools that their prospective buyers can use to create a case for executive approval.

• Risk Mitigation: Most sales methodologies talk about how prospective buyers tend to start worrying about risk as they approach the final stages of purchase.

            

                    1. Will my vendor be around in a year’s time?
                    2. Will my vendor’s service and support organization help me with deploying the 
                        product or service?
                    3. Will I be able to influence my vendor’s product roadmap to align with my business goals?

There are the kinds of questions that sales people have to field and might end up losing the deal to a competitor because they continue to push the sale without giving much heed to such concerns. Again, Marketing can be the perfect ally for sales in such situations. Marketing can create great content and programs to introduce prospective buyers to case studies, implementation processes, best practices etc. and also invite them to user groups and customer success programs.

Marketing should have regular conversations with their sales counterparts and get a good understanding of the typical “deal blockers” that sales runs into and design nurture programs specifically to addresses such issues.

Economic Downturn - A chance to leapfrog your competition

It is interesting to listen to the economic pundits talk about whether we are already in a recession or whether we are heading towards one. While the popular definition is 2 continuous quarters of negative economic growth there are other interesting views about this definition. Here is an interesting blog post by two economic professors at UC San Diego and University of Wisconsin, Madison where the authors espouse that "recessions represent distinct and objectively identifiable episodes in which the usual dynamic factors that drive economic growth-- technological progress, population growth, and capital accumulation-- are replaced by a distinctly different dynamic in which lost income in some sectors feeds back into declines in output for others".

While economists fight out the technicalities of a recession what are B2B Marketers doing to brace for a period of sluggish growth (at best)? Here are a few areas that we at Market2Lead think Marketers should focus on in the near future so that they can emerge more effective and efficient when the economy turns around.

1. Consolidation & Automation - Eliminate rote work: Most businesses are extremely sensitive to cash investments vis-a-vis resource investments. Many potential clients that we talk to have a hodge-podge of systems/resources to manage their Marketing efforts. A typical mix includes email tools, data scrubbing tools, landing page tools or web masters, webinar registration tools among others. Some of these tools tie into the client's CRM system while others don't. A significant amount of operations resource time is spent in moving data between the tools, scrubbing data files and manually building reports by collating data from these tools. During recessionary times companies are forced to not just cut back budgets but are also forced to either cut back or extract more efficiencies from existing
resources. At the same time, work load typically goes up. The best way to work within these constraints and still maintain throughput is to consolidate systems. Now is the time to invest in a comprehensive Marketing Automation solution that will help automate/eliminate manual tasks. Another big benefit is Marketing departments will be able to spend time on strategic initiatives that can have a direct impact on top line revenue.

2. Lead Nurturing - Extract more from past investments: Sirius Decisions published a study that mentions 80% of Leads generated by B2B marketing are not followed up by sales. Also in times of slow economy growth most companies either delay buying decisions or are extremely picky in their buying decisions. This basically means that a slowdown in sales cycle time. The smart thing to do at this time is to shift focus from campaigns that drive new demand to campaigns that can nurture existing Leads. With cost effective tactics like emails, webinars, online syndication etc. lead nurturing campaigns are a lot more cost effective than demand generation campaigns. Marketing Automation solutions can help Marketers design and automate nurture campaigns that can extract more revenue from Leads that did not convert. A study published in Marketing Management V3 #2 suggests that 45% of Marketing Respondents buy in 12 months, not necessarily from companies that initially marketed to them. This is popularly called the "Marketing rule of 45" and has held the test of time for 3 decades. In this day and age, with a plethora of cost effective technologies and related processes, most companies barely manage to get a 5% yield from their campaigns. Now is the time to shift focus from Demand Generation to Lead Nurturing and extract more value from existing spend.

3. Funnel Optimization - Plug leaks: Marketing organizations need to scrutinize every stage of the integrated marketing and sales funnel and look for opportunities to increase throughput. Now is the time to look at conversion rates, qualification rates, sales follow-up rates and win/loss rates. Look at campaigns that demonstrate "Spray and Pray" symptoms. Figure out ways to optimize existing segmentation strategies and move towards an "Aim and Shoot" stage. In my observation, most organizations still lock and load a significant portion of their databases hoping for larger conversion numbers. Instead, focus on conversion ratios. You might get the same numbers by targeting a smaller audience segment. Next, talk to your sales organization and find out if there is a change in their capacity to handle Leads. Sales might be happier with fewer Leads if they are better qualified. You can positively impact sales morale and productivity. Recessions impact some industries more than the other. For example, in the current economic climate, it's a bad idea to go after the financial services market to meet revenue goals for the immediate future. Align your demand generation campaigns with industries that are relatively healthy when compared with the others. To facilitate this level of analysis your Marketing Automation system should give you visibility into the extended funnel and sales stages like lead promotion, opportunity management and forecasting.

4. Increase throughput - Implement best practices: This is a fantastic opportunity to take action on those creative ideas you had in mind to improve throughput from your campaigns. When the economy is roaring companies lay more emphasis on velocity to grow revenue aggressively. Inefficiencies are hidden or ignored when companies are in "order taking mode". When the economy slows down companies are forced to change behavior and become smarter. Budgets accommodate fewer campaigns and expect better results. Now is the time to wipe the dust off the best practice guides that you really wanted to implement but never got the time to. Try and micro-segment your campaigns and try different variations for emails, landing pages, microsites among others. MarketingSherpa is a great resource for case studies and best practices. Look for technologies that support A/B testing for emails, multi-variate testing for Landing pages, recommendation techniques for offers on microsites, progressive profiling techniques to improve form completion rates.

5. Measure, measure, measure - justify your spend: Marketer's are always under pressure to demonstrate return on their investments. The scrutiny is all the more pronounced during tough times. Every penny has to be justified and every campaign has to be measured. This job is relatively easy for demand generation campaigns since these campaigns are optimized for generating Leads. But demand generation campaigns always need support from awareness campaigns to build brand equity and buy mind share. As a Marketer, you know that you need to invest in PR and SEO to drive traffic to the website. How do you quantify the value from such investments to a CFO or a CEO who is trying to connect the dots between spend and revenue. The only way you can accomplish this is to be able to correlate data and trends from different initiatives and draw trends that can be quantified. This requires a robust Business Intelligence solution that will give you the flexibility to slice and dice data in different ways and look for interesting trends and patterns that can be used to justify spend. Imagine if you can view web traffic trends and marketing funnel trends side by side on the same dashboard and have the capability to analyze the impact of one on the other. It's a much easier argument to show your boss that by keeping the constraints constant on the demand generation side the quantifiable impact a dip in PR and SEO effort has on the funnel.

Recessions can be looked at with caution and skepticism or can be looked at as an opportunity to get lean, smart and more efficient. History tells us that smart companies emerge from down cycles much stronger and fitter and the weaker companies lose out.

7 Best Practices to ensure Sales and Marketing Funnel Integrity

Last week we launched a new Demand Generation campaign that ran into a minor hiccup prior to launch. None of the Leads we were capturing were getting published to Salesforce.com. Upon troubleshooting we found out that there was a data type mismatch between a field we were capturing in marketing and the corresponding field in Salesforce.com. Our marketing process was asking for a range of values for Annual Revenue:

• $1 million to $50 million
• $51 million to $250 million
• $251 million to $500 million
• $501 million to $1 Billion
• > $1 Billion

But Salesforce.com expects Annual Revenue to be a number field on the Lead object in Salesforce.com. One of our new operations team members made this change without knowing the constraint on salesforce.com. Fortunately, our system allows us to have one set of values that a Prospect sees on a Landing page and another set of values that can be published to Salesforce.com. We were able to quickly fix the problem and launch the campaign.

This is one of the many process and data related issues that can break the integration between marketing and sales funnels. Here is a list of best practices that we have built over time to ensure that the integrity of marketing and sales funnels is always maintained.

Guaranteed Delivery - Ensure mandatory information is always captured: Most SFA systems require a few fields to be always filled in. For example, in Salesforce.com the default configuration expects Last Name and Company Name to be required fields. Most companies make modifications to this default setting and might add more fields to the list. Some typical fields I have seen are Email, Work phone, Job Title, Time frame, Budget among others. Marketing processes might or might not be able to collect all the required information from online and offline interactions. In such cases ensure that there is always a default value that the system can assign to these fields. For example, at Market2Lead we assign a default value of 'noemail@market2lead.com' for email, 'UNKNOWN' for Budget. This will ensure that Leads are propagated to the SFA process.

Appropriate Assignment - Ensure Lead's get assigned to the right sales rep: The one process misalignment that I am very cautious of is broken lead assignment rules. I have seen a few instances where customers find hot leads that require timely follow-up are stuck in some administrator's queue because the lead assignment rules were not triggered appropriately. Marketing processes should ensure that data values that trigger lead assignment rules are always in synchronization between marketing and sales systems. If the sales process uses geo based routing then check whether the rules are based on ISO codes or full names for states and countries. If the routing is more complex like a combination of geo information and product mix then ensure that along with geo values the product names match between the sales and marketing systems. At the end of the day administrators of marketing and sales systems need to keep their systems in sync to ensure Leads end up in the right rep's inbox.

Provide Progressive Intelligence - Search before creating a new Lead: One of the goal's of Lead Nurturing is to keep the sales reps' abreast of marketing activities and their Lead's response to these activities. This objective is defeated if the marketing system is not incrementally updating the Lead record that the sales rep is looking at and instead creates a new record for every interaction. Marketing systems should always search for an existing Lead in the sales system before creating a new Lead. If a match is found the existing Lead should be updated. The search and merge criteria has to be robust too. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
    a. Email is not a water tight method to detect existing Leads. In fact, reps rely on phone numbers more than emails. So, the detection process should be sophisticated to include a combination of multiple checks like email, first name + last name + company name, first name + last name + work phone among others.
    b. *NEVER* update key fields in the sales process without a rep's permission. Marketing systems are good at collective basic information through online interactions but are not always the most reliable method to capture critical fields like phone number. Imagine the plight of a sales rep if you update a real phone number with a bogus number like 111-555-1212 that marketing collects from an online form. marketing should work with the sales team and identify fields that can be automatically updated and fields that require a sales rep's manual oversight. In the second case it's a good idea to publish new information to the comments field and allow the rep to make appropriate changes.      

Align with Sales Follow-up Process - Make it easy for reps to access marketing Leads: Sales reps like to spend as much time as possible selling (and rightfully so). Therefore, it is the responsibility of the operations team to support the sales team by making it easy for them to access Leads from SFA systems and also minimize any change to the way they are used to interacting with these systems. Marketing might be providing top quality Leads to the sales but will not be assured of appropriate follow up if they make it difficult for the reps to access these Leads. Before setting up an automated Lead
delivery method marketing teams should familiarize themselves with the method/methods sales reps use to access Leads from the sales system. In Salesforce.com I have seen different methods being used. A couple of examples are:
      a. Rep based views: Sales rep's have their own views setup and they look for new Leads within this view. In some cases the filter criteria for the views is standardized across the organization and in other cases it varies by territory, product line or other criteria. Get a holistic view of how these view's are structured.
     b. Dashboards with alerts: In other cases I have seen sales organizations use more sophisticated dashboards that have a combined view of Leads, events, tasks, alerts and Initiative based follow-up procedures. Get an understanding of how these dashboards are setup. 

Ensure Timely Follow-up - Ensure sales reps are sent alerts when Leads respond: It is always a good idea to alert the sales team when marketing is able to generate a response from an existing Lead or generate a new Lead that requires timely follow-up. Get a good understanding of how the sales team is setup before coming up with an alerting scheme. For example, in some organizations all follow-ups triggered by marketing have to through an Inside sales organization. In other cases the follow-up process is dependent on where the Lead is in the sales cycle. Early stage Leads will require a follow up by inside sales and advanced stage Leads/Opportunities require follow up by field sales. Depending on the need alerts can be delivered to the the rep's dashboard in the SFA system or can be a combination of dashboard alerts and emails to the reps. Ensure you strike a balance between alerting the sales team and bugging them :-).

Avoid Data Black Holes - Align data standards between marketing and sales systems: I have seen quite a few companies suffer from what I call the 'Phantom Record' syndrome. One will be surprised how many records get buried in the database and don't show up on anybody's dashboard purely because the data values are not visible in the UI. CRM systems are notorious for being very forgiving when it comes to enforcing data integrity checks. For example, salesforce.com allows data to be imported to a pick list that does not match the pre-defined list of values. Here is a typical example. Let's say, a company uses personalized Lead views to allow their sales team access Leads and these view are geography based. One of the area manager Joe's territory includes California, Nevada and Oregon. The view is based on 2 character ISO codes CA, OR and NV. marketing publishes a set of hot leads from California and the state name is set to 'California'.  Joe will never see these Leads since the view will not pull these records and Joe can't access them manually too since the state pull down menu in the UI has 2 character codes. It is always a good idea to have proactive oversight procedures in place to avoid users violating data policies when systems can't enforce them. The next bullet talks about reactive procedures that can be put in place to catch issues that slip through the cracks.

Track Outliers - Setup Exception reports to track outliers: It might not be feasible to systematize all the processes and best practices and build logic  based rules to catch errors pro-actively. As the saying goes, it's better to be safe than be sorry. Always augment proactive checks with reactive exception reports to catch outliers. Some typical reports could be:

    a. Weekly lead flow reports: A mature marketing and sales process will provide guidance into typical lead flow on a weekly basis. Setup a 10%-20% tolerance and trigger alerts if the system detects unusual Lead flow. A few month's back we were working with a customer who used to get regular data feeds from an external source. At some point one of the system parameters (FTP location information) was changed by the operations team to consolidate data feeds from multiple sources. The receiving function was not aware of the change and for a few weeks these Leads went untouched. The problem was caught and rectified before too much damage was caused. An exception report would have caught a sudden decline in the Lead flow and the resolution could have been much more timely.

    b. Weekly lead follow-up reports: It is a good idea to track how many Leads are being followed up by sales. This is a good way for marketing to stay on top of any process changes that might take place within the sales team that requires a change in the Lead publish method. For example, in a particular situation, one of our customer's changed the 'Lead Status' values and the associated follow-up business rules. The marketing team was not made aware of the change and the workflow rules were still setting 'Lead Status' values that was no longer used by sales. With an exception report the marketing team realized that existing Leads were not being followed up on and upon investigation found the cause and made appropriate changes. In this case the exception reporting process was in effect and helped catch the problem right away.

To conclude integrating marketing and sales funnels requires proper attention from both marketing and sales teams since it's a cross functional responsibility. Over and above the 7 steps I mentioned above, a robust communication protocol is extremely critical to ensure that the two functions are always working in tandem. This might sound banal but I still get surprised to see many organizations not investing enough in this critical integration that can directly impact top line revenue.   

Can Data Quality break Integration between Marketing and Sales systems?

Last week I was discussing with one of my clients the criticality of data de-duplication and having the same consistent strategy for both the Marketing Automation system (MA) and the Sales Force Automation system (SFA). The question is, can we have a reliable Lead Management process that cuts across Marketing & Sales if the Marketing Automation system has clean data but the SFA system allows duplicates.

 

Some of the assumptions I am making here are:

1. There is a bi-directional integration between the two systems.
2. Marketing is sourcing new Leads into the sales process and also providing sales reps real time visibility into Leads' (and Opportunities) responses to Marketing campaigns. These could be email activities, web site activities and offline activities.
3. Marketing is getting automated feedback from the sales system on progress being made by sales both from a Lead follow up perspective and Opportunity creation and promotion perspective.

The challenges I see with the SFA system (Salesforce.com as an example) not having a de-dupe process  or a flawed de-dupe process are:

1. Ineffective sales alerts based on Lead activity: I don’t see how we can reliably notify a sales rep on a Lead’s response to Marketing campaigns. For example Joe, a Prospect, meets the criteria of a sales ready Lead and we publish Joe’s as a Lead into Salesforce.com. One of the inside sales rep’s follows up with Joe and, based on the potential deal size, promotes him for a follow up from a field rep. Best practices suggest that any of Joe's responses to follow up Marketing campaigns (email responses, web activities etc.) need to be sent directly to the rep who owns the opportunity. If the de-dupe process is not consistent the system might create a new record for Joe and this new record might go through an elaborate process and eventually might or might not reach the field rep in a timely manner. One of the big benefits Marketing can provide to Sales is to create opportunities for follow-up conversations. This purpose is completely defeated without a consistent de-dupe framework.

2. Broken SLA & ROMI reporting: Marketing Automation solutions bring two big benefits to Marketer's from a reporting standpoint.
    a. Visibility into Sales follow-up of Leads and SLA compliance: One of the big promises of an integrated (MA + SFA) solution is elimination of subjectivity (the dreaded *sales sniff test*) from a Lead follow up standpoint. Marketing can now get real insights into whether Leads are followed up with or not and is the follow up timely. This report will not work if we end up creating multiple records for Joe in the sales system.

   

b. ROI tracking: Marketing can now analyze how many of the Leads sourced by Marketing are turning into Opportunities and how many how many other existing Leads/Opportunities are being influenced by Marketing. Taking Joe's example from above, let's say the rep creates a potential sales opportunity. Joe responds to another campaign a week later and we end up creating a new record for Joe for this follow-up Campaign. The ROI report will show that we sourced 2 Leads and got one Opportunity when technically we sourced one Lead and the second interaction should be counted towards Marketing influence.

We strongly encourage our customers to a) clean up the SFA system before implementing a Marketing Automation solution and b) enforce the same data quality standards across both the systems. At the end of the day, the promise of an integrated Marketing & Sales system is to provide an organization the true integrated Marketing & Sales funnel. And this will remain a dream if the data foundation is inconsistent.

Periodic tune-up for your Marketing database

I recently took my wife's car, a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible, for a tune-up. The service agent at Jiffy Lube inspected the car and came back with a list of recommended services:

1. Oil change (of course)
2. Oil filter change
3. Recycling of power steering fluid

and so on....

I bought a few additional service options along with the oil change based on the service reps suggestions.

This experience got me thinking about a tune-up for Marketing Processes & Databases. The first question that came to my mind was, "Do Marketing Databases really need a periodic tune-up if the right processes and policies are set in place to begin with?". My answer to self was - ABSOLUTELY. Going back to the car tune-up analogy I consider myself to be a conservative driver who stays within the recommended guidelines of the car company (including using 92 octane gas - ouch!!!). But my car needs regular service just like everybody else's for all the obvious reasons like wear & tear, recycling etc.

Here are a few areas where a Marketing database can use a quarterly tune-up:

1. De-duplication checks: We all know that automated checks can only de-dupe new Leads entering a database around 80% of the time. Data enters a Marketing system through different channels - online registrations, off-line file imports, synchronization from CRM (SFA) systems like Salesforce.com. It is always a good idea to verify the de-dupe counts once a quarter using checks like -

    a. Email
    b. First Name, Last Name, Company Name
    c. First Name, Last Name, Address 1, City, Zip

In my experience a company is doing a pretty good job if they keep the dupe counts to less than 5%. 

2. Data normalization checks: There are certain key fields like State, Country, Job Level, Industry, Company Size etc. that are used in key marketing functions like segmentation, scoring, automation etc. Again, since data comes into the system from multiple sources it is extremely difficult to systematize data normalization. The biggest culprit is file imports from third party sources like content syndication vendors, partners, tele-marketing vendors among others. How many times have we seen segmentation rules like -

        "Country contains united states, usa, u.s.a,"
        "Job level contains vice president, v.p"

The minute I see such rules I picture a Program Manager crossing his fingers and hoping that the system pulls all the records that should be included in the campaign.

3. Opt-in checks: It is extremely critical to ensure that permission fields like email opt-out are in sync between your Marketing database and sales database since emails are not always sent from the Marketing system. Sales people send emails directly from sales systems like salesforce.com.

4. Qualified Lead profile checks: I see almost every company having a spec of a qualified Lead. But, the real story we get from running database profiling queries is, more often than not, quite different. It is very rare that customer's have information beyond the basic Demographic fields filled in more than 50% of the time. The reasons for this problem could be process related and sometimes it could be due to  lack of appropriate technology to populate the contact profile.

5. Database trending: It is always a good idea to trend key metrics like:
    a. Database size - How rapidly is the marketing database growing?
    b. Unsubscribe rate - Checks to verify the overall unsubscribe percentage is a good indicator of issues      like content relevance, touch frequency among others
    c. Contact info availability - It's good to get a trending of availability of contact fields like email,             phone and postal address.
    d. Profile trending - How is the overall profile richness growing?

Market2Lead will be announcing a series of new services in the coming weeks to address some of the operational issues we typically see our customers run into. Stay tuned.

Sales Accountability to Marketing - Myth vs. Reality

One of the discussion points in the "Sales and Marketing alignment" topic is the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between Marketing and Sales for the Leads generated by Marketing. Clarity and monitoring of this SLA is critical because it drives one of the key metrics that we want to measure in Marketing - Conversion rate from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Accepted Leads (SAL).

A typical SLA could be:

• Sales needs to follow up on all A Leads within one business day or 8 business hours.
• Sales needs to follow up on all B Leads within two business days or 16 business hours.
• Sales can (optionally) follow up on C Leads within a week of receiving them.

Now, let's look at how this process can be implemented and automated using Marketing Automation solutions (like Market2Lead) and Sales Force Automation solutions (like Salesforce.com). One of the key fields on the Lead object in Salesforce.com that can be used to track sales feedback on Leads is Lead Status. A sample set of values for Lead Status are:

• New: Status when a Lead is first published into the sales process.
• Attempting to Contact: Status when sales initiates follow-up on the Leads. Based on the SLA times this is one of the immediate next states that a Lead needs to be moved to.
• Invalid Information: Status when sales determines that the contact information is invalid and the Lead cannot be reached.
• Contacted: Status when a sales person successfully contacted the Individual (either by phone or by email).
• Not a Lead: After initial Contact the sales person determines that the Prospect is not looking for a solution for his business problem in the foreseeable future or if there is no fit between what the sales person is selling and what the Lead is looking for.
• Demo Request: One logical next step (in high tech especially) is either a demo request or a follow up meeting.

   

Now, from an SLA standpoint, a Marketing Automation solution needs to be able to track 2 metrics:

1. Transition of a Lead from New state to either Attempting to Contact, Invalid Information or Contacted state.
2. Time taken for the Lead Status to change from New to any of the stages mentioned in the previous point.

If these two metrics can be measured and tracked, Marketing users can automate measurement of:

1. Conversion rate from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Accepted Leads (SAL). This can be done by comparing state changes from New to Attempting to Contact or Contacted.
2. SLA compliance by Sales. Marketing managers can compute the Average Time for sales follow up by Lead Score by computing the time taken for a change in status of a Lead from New to any of the states mentioned in the previous point.

I welcome comments and suggestions on this topic.

Sirius Decisions Summit 2008

I was at the Sirius Decisions Summit 2008 last week. The event was held at Henderson, Vegas. I would highly recommend this event for B2B marketers looking to learn about Marketing & Sales alignment and also best practices in this space.

Some of the topics that were discussed at the event are:

1. Marketing & Sales Integration Models
2. Marketing Measurements becomes Reality
3. Addressing the Sales Bandwidth Challenge
4. Extracting value from Social Media
5. Marketing Programs - A Global Approach
6. Reputations real link to Demand Generation
7. Sales Readiness from Concept to Critical
8. The Demand Eco-system - Progress and Problems

There were also customer case studies and presentations from:

1. Symantec
2. Cognos
3. Computer Associates
4. newScale
5. SAP AG

One of the topics that I really enjoyed was Marketing Measurements by John Neeson. This presentation was a great validation for our decision early on to invest in an integrated on-demand Business Intelligence solution to complement the execution engine of the overall solution. Some of the takeaways from the presentation are:

1. Alignment: Implementing effective Marketing Dashboards is an involved process and takes time to put in place. The exercise starts with an an intiative to bring cross functional alignment within an organization to agree on *WHAT* needs to be tracked and measured.

2. Selection: A clear definition of KPIs and Metrics that need to be tracked by an organization and also an understanding of the difference between KPIs and Metrics. John talks about how some organizations don't differentiate between KPIs and Metrics. It's been my observation too that business users tend to use these two terms interchangeably. I like the explanation of a KPI in a book called "The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators" by Eric T. Peterson. Eric describes a KPI as a metric that drives action. This is the polite way of saying, “Any KPI that, when it changes suddenly and unexpectedly does not inspire someone to send an email, pick up the phone or take a quick walk to find help, is not a KPI worth reporting.”

3. Design: A fully engaged Marketing Operations team to drive the implementation of the dashboards. One of the key challenges that a Marketing team needs to be aware of before embarking on this project is Data Quality. Dashboards are only as effective as the quality of the data that powers them. Some of the Data Quality issues that need to be looked into are  Data completeness, Data Accuracy and Data Standardization,

4. Adoption: A well thought out and thorough plan to drive adoption. One of the key drivers for adoption is relevancy. We need to make sure that the underlying technology supports setup of role based Dashboards. Role specific KPIs & Metrics, Visualization Schemes and Overall Layouts are the key ingrediants to ensure relevancy and in turn drive adoption.

I would like to hear from our readers on their success with Marketing Dashboards.

Numeric Scoring Pros and Cons

I recently read a blog post by Laura Ramos from Forrester on the subject of Lead Scoring methodologies. In the article Laura outlines the key benefits of a "Numeric Scoring Model". I agree with Laura about the need for Marketers to remove the subjectivity about the quality of a Lead. I also agree with her about some of the best practices to help Marketing and Sales bring more clarity to this topic.

1. Sales & Marketing should have quarterly meetings to review the scoring model and tune it based on results from the previous quarter.

2. Implement a scoring scheme that is easy to understand and manage. One of the methods is to use Numeric scoring. In this method a Marketer would assign points to each key Contact attribute and a weight (both self reported data and behavioral data) and compute a weighted sum of the points to arrive at  the overall Score of a Contact. This method has its pros and cons. Laura already outlined the benefits of the Numeric model that I don't want to repeat here. Here are 2 challenges with this method that I have seen:

a. Chances of sending False Positives to Sales: With a scoring model that does not support a rules engine Marketers don't have the capability to check for data completeness and authenticity for key pieces of information without which a Lead is of little value to Sales. Let's look at a sample scoring scheme (to keep this example simple I have not added any weights to each attribute):

Here is a sample Lead based on this model:

In the above example  Bob gets a score of 95, which is a very high score, and needs immediate follow up from sales. But, from the data it is fairly obvious that the phone number is bogus and we have a hotmail address. Let's take an extreme case where  Bob's  information comes into the system without an email or a phone number. In this case the Lead will still have a score of 80 points (I subtracted 5 points for email and 10 points for phone number from the original score of 95 points). In both these cases the scoring model instantly loses credibility with the sales team and we all know what happens next. 

b. How is the Lead with a score of '68' different from a Lead with a score of '77'? We all know that sales people like to spend their time selling and not learning and understanding internal processes. The last thing we want to do with a sales guy is to open a spreadsheet with 100 items and a complex formula that spits out a number. The critical thing for Marketing is to prioritize the Leads for sales and set some thresholds for follow up. For example, Leads with 80 points and more need to be followed up within 4 hours; Leads with a score between 60 and 80 points need to be followed up within 8 hours and so on. A tiered scoring method (A, B, C, D) serves the same purpose.

In my view the scoring scheme (either points based or tiered) needs to be augmented with a robust data completeness and data validation process to ensure that sales gets to work on Leads that have a high chance of conversion.  One way to augment the scoring process is to add 2 pre-processing stages:

1. Data validity check: In this step we need to check for common junk data that people enter like 'test', 'aaa', 'asdf' etc. for Name, '111-1111', '1234567890' for phone numbers, 'a@a.com' for emails etc.

2. Data Suppression: Sometimes there are legitimate Leads that are generated from Marketing campaigns that are not necessarily sales Leads. We need to suppress such Leads. For example, emails have a '.edu' extension, the Lead belongs to a partner organization or an analyst firm etc.

I would love to hear your comments.

Marketing Automation Solutions vs. Direct Marketing Solutions

What is the key difference between a Marketing Automation solution and a Direct Marketing Solution. I was having lunch with a colleague of mine and we were discussing why Market2Lead's (the company I work for) solution is different from other direct Marketing solutions. The one difference that stood out from our conversation is Marketing Automation solutions are Contact/Prospect centric whereas Direct Marketing solutions are Campaign centric.

If we take an Email Marketing solution for example, launching a campaign typically begins with importing a list. The next Campaign needs another List. It is very possible that the system can have more than one record for the same Prospect in the database. The Prospect's responses to different Campaigns are spread across these records defeating the purpose of "Nurturing the Lead" over time.

Marketing Automation solutions, on the other hand, support a Contact database that can be used to consolidate all Prospect interactions into one record. This includes ability to merge and consolidate Activities and Responses from both online and offline campaigns.

"Sales Ready Leads": Where does this definition live?

I was watching Brian Carroll's webinar, "A Multimodal Approach to Lead Nurturing for Comples Sales". One of the key points that Brian made on the webinar is the need for Sales and Marketing to agree on the definition of a "Sales ready lead". This got me thinking, "Where does this definition live? Most Marketing organizations I have worked with use a mix of technologies to manage their Marketing campaigns and end up bringing Leads from these different systems directly into their SFA system. For example, web inquiries, attendees from online and offline events are directly brought into SFA systems like salesforce.com.

The key is to have a Lead Management solution that sits between Marketing and Sales systems and holds the definition of the "Sales ready leads".