July 14, 2009

Definitions for marketing leads for use in lead generation

I just finished reading Brian Carroll’s erudite blog post on Five steps to help create your universal lead definition. In 10 years of working with firms on marketing automation and lead management there have been far too few that had this important definition agreed to by Marketing and Sales.

Marketing’s primary deliverable to Sales is the marketing qualified lead.  Not having a firm definition of this deliverable is unforgivable. How can marketing be held accountable if there is no definition for a good lead? Notwithstanding Brian’s advice on how to organize around arriving at a lead definition, here are a few items to consider in the lead definitions.

Marketing Lead Definitions

Most folks use the lead status field as a means to differentiate between leads of various qualities. Do not use this field as a call disposition field (‘left message’, ‘contact successful’ etc). Limit the number of Lead Status values to 10 or 12 at the most. Remember at some point you will be reporting on how many leads are in which state, and how long did they remain there. Consider this the marketing funnel report and you want to be able to demonstrate a steady flow through the various lead states!

  • Raw – person identified as worth engaging, no relationship yet, probably a list import
  • Open or Inquiry or New or Suspect– person has at least one incoming response, or otherwise expressed interest somehow
  • Lead Qualification – person sent to lead qualification (telemarketing) for qualification
  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – person that marketing feels is ready for Sales' attention
  • Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) - a person that may represent a new opportunity. Once a lead is known to be associated with an existing account or a revenue opportunity, it becomes a sales qualified lead and is converted into a contact.
  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Use this as the final resting state of a lead that is converted into a contact by the Sales person in your Customer Relationship Management system!
  • Disqualified – Someone who will never rise to the level of qualified and is not worth any future attention from marketing and sales.
  • Junk – Bad data, "asdf@abc.com" and the like. It is useful to flag this separately from Disqualified because (a) you can later on determine which lead source is producing the most junk, and (b) at some point you may opt to delete all junk from your database but you will want to retain the Disqualified folks. "Disqualified "is still good information, and you never want to go through the process of qualifying them again!
  • Re-Market – person sent back to marketing by sales because it was not ready to become a Sales Qualified Lead.

So in the meetings between Marketing and Sales you need to arrive at definitions for each of these lead status values. The most contentious one is the Marketing Qualified Lead. What information does Marketing have to know about a lead before handing it off to Sales.  I won’t repeat my blog post on BANT versus the SCOTSMAN but it is worth a read if you are interested in this topic.

Very few leads should remain in the Sales Accepted Lead state. When a lead is handed off to Sales they will have a limited period of time to either accept it (change it to a Sales Accepted Lead), Disqualify it, or return it to Marketing for further lead nurturing (change it to Re-Market).

There are some further twists on these definitions based on dealing with ISRs,  channel partners, and methods to fast track certain leads through the process. We will save that discussion for a future time. As always, comments welcome!

-Kevin

July 02, 2009

Data quality, Customer Data Integration, and the Hippocratic Oath

A few months after my dad died back in 1984 my mother received a letter from our bank addressed to “Dr. T.B. Joyce (deceased)”. Needless to say my mum was a little distraught.

In a similar case I learned recently that the sales people of a local company were putting the gender of the person in parenthesis after the person’s androgynous first name. Imagine getting a personalized email from that company:
Dear Terri (female), or Dear Pat (male)

In a post back in March I discussed the many ways that data goes bad. Excluding the slow natural decay of data (actually it has sped up in the recession), sales people are responsible for much of the bad data. In the past Marketing has also shared the blame but the marketing automation systems now have the ability to validate incoming data, do format checking, and generally minimize the likelihood that marketing is adding bad data to the CRM. To wit, it is time that Marketers took the Hippocratic Oath to vow to do no harm to the Customer Relationship Management database!

The Hippocratic Oath for Marketers
I SWEAR in the presence of the CRM Administrators and before my marketing peers that according to my ability and judgment I will keep this Oath and Stipulation.

I WILL CONTINUE with diligence to keep abreast of advances in marketing. I will import only valid, well formed data, with all required fields, into the marketing automation system, so long as the treatment of other data is not compromised thereby, and I will seek the counsel of particularly skilled IT dudes where indicated for the benefit of the database.

I WILL FOLLOW that method of data treatment which according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of the database and abstain from whatever is harmful or mischievous. I will neither prescribe nor administer a lethal dose of dubious updates to any database even if asked by my VP.

WITH PURITY, HOLINESS AND BENEFICENCE I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent CANSPAM violation, I will neither wholesale overwrite CRM data nor carry out any new field experiments on the database without the valid informed consent of the CRM administrator or the appropriate Sales Ops designee thereof, understanding that field insertion must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of the database. Into whatever database setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the data and will abstain from every voluntary act of data corruption and further from the addition of duplicates.

WHATEVER I MAY SEE in connection with Marketing driven CRM data changes which ought not be spoken abroad, I will immediately divulge, reckoning that all such should not be kept secret from Sales Operations.

WHILE I CONTINUE to keep this Oath unviolated may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art and science of marketing with the blessing of the CRM administrators and respected by my peers and society, but should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse by my lot.

My dad would be proud!  Got your own data horror story, send it my way!
-Kevin

June 17, 2009

Lead Nurturing and Drip Campaign Timings

Those of us who work daily with lead nurturing campaigns will have noticed something: there are a lot of time related terms and decisions to be made. How often should I reach out to my prospects, how long do I wait for a response before acting, how much of their past behavior should I include (can be time limited)?

I would like to propose a brief standard vocabulary for nurturing campaigns related timings to help facilitate conversations on the topic:

  1. Schedule: How often your lead nurturing campaign wakes up and evaluates what it needs to do - example every Tuesday, and Wednesday at 8am
  2. Cadence: How much of a gap you would like to leave between outbound touches to your prospects as defined in a single campaign - example 21 days (my preference)
  3. Fatigue period: The period after the last outbound communique during which you really want to avoid hitting your prospect up with any other communication from any campaign - example 1 week. You can implement this for all campaigns by creating a dynamic exclusion list that includes anyone who received any communication from you in the past 7 days!
  4. Trigger Event Date: The date that the prospect last interacted in any way that the campaign could use as a "trigger" to do something else (in a condition step for instance).
  5. Trigger Period: The amount of time you allow after the program execution before you expect the condition to be fulfilled. Your trigger may be set to wait this entire period before running the condition, or it may run repeatedly "within" this period until the condition either turns true or the trigger period is used up and the result is false. Example: if prospect doesn't open email within 30 days, condition is true, etc...
  6. Program Target Date: The date that a given program targeted (and sent) the last outbound communication.
  7. Condition Execution Date: The date that a given condition rule executed. This is often the same date as the next program target date, but not always...
  8. Explicit Wait time: Sometimes you want to add an explicit wait period after a trigger event date, or even after the condition execution date!
  9. Recency: How far back do you want to look to include behavior in a condition. This is usually accompanied by a "Frequency" number - how many instances of that behavior in that time period. Example: if the prospect visited the website 3 times (frequency) in the past 7 days (recency).


 I welcome the discussion!

Lead nurturing campaign timings


-Kevin

June 02, 2009

Usability Vs. Ease Of Use

No, they are not the same! Usability is defined in ISO 9241, Part 11, as "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use." There are 5 key aspects to this sentence:

  1. Specified Users
  2. Effectiveness (doing the right things)
  3. Efficiency (doing things right)
  4. Satisfaction
  5. Specified context of use


As an example, a wheel barrow is remarkably easy to use; two handles and one wheel, what could be easier. But it is hardly usable if the context of use is to dig out the foundation to an office building. Similarly some Marketing Automation Software vendors that claim their product is easy to use, but in what specified context can they be considered to have high usability?  Very very simple environments.

Specified Users for automated marketing system
The users will be marketing programs managers primarily. Larger firms will have marketing operations folks using the system too. You are likely to see a mix of left brain and right brain people, so the software has to serve both. In some cases management will access dashboards and reports.

Effectiveness of software in driving effective campaigns
How well does the software do in helping you do the right thing? Does it have best practices built into the design wizards for programs? Does it do error checking for you to ensure you get the best results? Can the system independently arbitrate what is the next best offer to make to a prospect or do you have to proscribe every step?

Efficiency in building lead generation programs
Helping marketing teams execute more programs with fewer people has become increasingly important. Marketing Automation Software can make marketers more efficient if it allows easy re-use of assets and offers, forms, and templates; Full deep copy of programs; Re-use of import configurations. The average marketer should be able to build and deploy a multi-step lead nurturing program with segmented target lists, landing pages, forms, and offers, within an hour!

Satisfaction of marketers in generating Sales ready leads
Software by itself is not a demand generation system! That's like saying that a fishing rod is a "fish generating system". The function of the marketing automation software is to make marketers more efficient and more effective at generating demand for the companies products and services. This includes increasing demand in the installed base, facilitating cross-selling and up-selling, and generating new sales ready leads for the Sales channels. The automated marketing system must satisfy the needs of the marketing department in doing their job better.

Specified Context of Use
If you have just one or two marketers on your team, your context of use is vastly different than if you have 10 or 100+ marketers. As a small firm, perhaps all you need is a simple email response management tool, and as a consequence 1-2 hours of training is music to your ears. Two handles, one wheel, and you are moving sand around in no time at all!  Easy to use may be your mantra.

But if you have a larger organization and a more complex environment, perhaps you want to do contact data integration from multiple sources; or different nurturing programs for different product lines, or you feel keeping the data clean is important; in this situation your context of use will lead you to the products that are more usable for you. The larger definition of usability dominates the decision.

-Kevin

May 08, 2009

Marketing Automation and The End of Segmentation as You Know It

A few days ago I read Scott Brinker's interesting post about "Marketing Automation and Jurassic Park".
In his post Scott points out the irony that many Marketing Automation vendors claim to simplify marketing but he perceives that in fact this software can add to the complexity of marketing. Echoing Jurassic Park's Dr Malcolm but referring to Marketing Automation Scott suggests that "trying to force an overly simple management structure upon such a complex system is a recipe for disaster."

Analyzing Lead Nurturing campaigns with many offers
Coincidentally I spent an hour yesterday with Sundeep, our VP of client services here, poring over the analysis of a client's lead nurturing campaign results. The campaign has been running for over a year, has 15 programs (unique offers) in it, and more than half a million participants. Complexity is emergent!

Is Marketing Automation adding complexity?

The great thing about marketing automation is that it can help you accomplish things that are not otherwise feasible. But the software has to help you tame the complexity otherwise you are in Jurassic Park.  Here is an example.

Let's say you roll-out a marketing automation system and immediately build three nurturing campaigns. The on-ramps to the various nurturing campaigns are different activities. You have a nurturing campaign with 5 offers for people whom you met at a trade show, and another campaign for people who filled in a web form, and another for people who came in from a Pay-Per-Click ad. 

So what happens if I do two of these activities? Should the system allow me to enter more than one nurturing campaign? If you say "no" then how about cases where the prospect has a genuine interest in two different product lines and deserves to be in two separate nurturing tracks?  What happens if the prospect is in the middle of a campaign and then does some behavior that really makes them a better candidate for a different campaign, such as engaging the sales person with a $1m deal? Is there a way to move them to a different campaign immediately? 

Mature Marketing Automation Systems Can Handle the Complexity
One of the limitations of the simple marketing automation solutions is that they take a campaign centric approach. "I have a series of offers, let me build a list of likely people to dribble them out to over the coming months, come what may". As a result of being campaign centric the number of different paths through the campaign can be limited to a handful.  Most prospects will get exactly the same treatment.

The alternative is "person centric" campaign design. In this situation the system arbitrates what is the next best campaign, and what is the next best offer for each individual based on information that is completely current as the decision is made. For example our client with the 15 offers in one nurturing campaign has 2 to the power of 15 possible traversal paths through the campaign. ie 32768 people could go through this campaign differently!

This is not your father's List Segmentation

By allowing the system to arbitrate what the next best offer is to each individual, we have obliterated the traditional method of direct marketing by defining segments and sets, overlapping them and coming up with a final list. Instead you build rules into the system that allows it to build lists with as few as one person in them, and then direct offers their way. This Jurassic complexity has been tamed by the mature marketing automation vendors. So perhaps we have entered Cretaceous Park! The greater challenge is in analyzing data that shows 32768 possible traversal paths, so that firms can understand what is working and not working in their lead nurturing campaigns!

If you want to share your bad dinosaur puns or have novel ways of depicting 32000 traversal paths in a chart, send them my way!
-Kevin




April 24, 2009

The FunnelHolic Interview on Demand Generation

In the past few months Craig Rosenberg at The FunnelHolic has posted some informative interviews with executives of the leading Marketing Automation firms. This week yours truly got grilled with some great questions. Check it out:

Interview with Market2Lead on Marketing Automation

Craig's questions included:

  • What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?
  • What are the biggest challenges for 2009?
  • What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?
  • What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

-Kevin

April 22, 2009

Marketing Automation - A rose by any other name...

I just finished reading Larry Goldman's Blog post on the topic of Lead Management.  It reminded me that the industry is still very divided as to what to call the product category  that includes all the marketing automation vendors. My answer is of course: "Marketing Automation!" but there are vendors and industry analysts that have other names.

Industry analysts do not agree on a single name for Marketing Automation
The analysts have offered up several names including "Lead Management system"  - one I find particularly difficult to swallow because there is only a small amount of overlap. Not quite as bad but still understating the capabilities is "Campaign Management software". On the other hand Sirius Decisions calls it simply "Marketing Automation". Hurrah!

EMM vendors do not agree on a single name for Marketing Automation

Then we add to the mix of Enterprise Marketing Management vendors (EMM) who ostensibly offer Enterprise Resource Management (MRM) products and prone to creating new TLAs. They really don't want to change their primary messaging so it is more convenient for them to add some of the capabilities into their MRM, call it campaign management or MRM or EMM and be done with it! Admiting that there might be a new category of products on a peer level with MRM wouldn't look good!

A visual Taxonomy for Enterprise Marketing Management
I took a shot at a visual taxonomy of the EMM space, borrowing ideas from the analysts and vendors. Here is what I came up with, and I welcome your comments. I do show overlap because the lines are not rigid between sub-categories. For instance the Marketing Automation vendors are adding some asset management but not nearly to the level you find in MRM. Incidently, I left CMM (Content Management or Marketing Asset Management - MAM - or Digital Asset Management - DAM - I am not making this up) off the chart. It would over lap the production management and asset management portion of MRM.

Clipboard01


From my perspective Marketing Automation combines portions of 5 things:

  • Contact Data Integration (CRM integrations, and other marketing data integrations)
  • Marketing Business Intelligence (operational reports, data mining, web analytics)
  • Campaign Automation (Planning and executing out-going touches)
  • Response Management (Dealing with all the incoming responses)
  • Lead Management (Scoring, routing and distribution of leads)


A pitch to elevate the importance of Response Management
Breaking the functionality of a Marketing Automation system down into the 5 areas listed above simplifies things tremendously. Response Management for instance is one of those areas that has not received enough attention. When you consider  that the success of a campaign is predicated first and foremost on the quality of the data, which is fully dependent on how well your response management works wouldn't this be the most important part of the product?  But instead vendors seem to focus prospect attention on complex nurturing campaign workflows, or scoring alogrithims! GIGO people!  Response Management includes all the predictable functionality such as Microsites, forms, landing pages, resource centers etc. but it also deals with data de-duplication, standardization, and validation.

Marketing-automation-image

Why not call the category Lead Management?

So what is wrong with calling the category lead management?  A lot of the marketing activities are not related to leads, they are related to existing customers, or channel partners. Marketing Automation systems help you acquire and retain customers. Besides, at least half of the lead management functionality is in the SFA (Sales Force Automation) system where it belongs. Perhaps we should rename SFA systems to Lead Management systems...not.  A worthy Lead Management Process document might comprise of:

  • Definitions of all the lead types
  • A flow chart of the flow of leads from birth to death
  • Lead Scoring model
  • Role definitions for sales, marketing, and channel parters as it pertains to leads
  • Important lead meta data field definitions (lead source, lead type, lead status etc)
  • Routing rules drawn from the flow chart (macro level)
  • Lead Assignment rules down to the individual  (micro level)

Does a lead management document have any business discussing microsite construction, or data standardization, or progressive profiling of registrants? No. So Marketing Automation is some portion of the lead management and a lot of other stuff.

EMM, MRM, CMM, DAM, MA, SFA, CRM, CM, LM, BI, Montague and Capulet
The name "Marketing Automation" is simple, descriptive and unique. It also parallels "Sales Force Automation" rather nicely. Hmmm this rose smells sweeter already!
-Kevin

April 13, 2009

How to manage your Lead Nurture campaigns?

A very encouraging trend that we are observing within our installed base is an increasing number of Nurture campaigns being executed. Kudos to marketers (and our customers) for responding with the right tactics to the economic downturn and the constrained environments that they are working within. I plan to dedicate my next few posts to 'Lead Nurture' and share some tips about various aspects of Lead Nurture. 
In this post, I am going to share some techniques to measure the efficacy of nurture campaigns that are already in play. One of our recent customers launched a handful of nurture campaigns in the span of a few months. I was on the phone with this customer a few days back to review progress and was posed a question, "Sundeep, we launched quite a few nurture campaigns that have some interdependencies and now need some guidance on managing and measuring them". Here is a list of questions by category that you might want to ask yourself when analyzing your nurture campaigns. 

Lead_nurture_analysis
Contact level analysis: These questions are pertinent when you are trying to understand what is happening to a specific Contact that is being nurtured. 

  1. Where in a nurture campaign is a specific Contact?
  2. Why did a Contact get stuck at a specific step in a nurture campaign?
  3. Why did a Contact move to another nurture campaign?
  4. Why didn't a Contact get included in a nurture campaign?
  5. What is the average number of Responses from this Contact in this nurture flow?

Step level analysis: A step, as the name suggests, is a distinct tactic that you employ within your nurture campaign. The questions below are intended to help you think about different ways to analyze activities within each step. 

  1. How many people have been targeted so far in this step of the nurture flow?
  2. What are the statistics for the previous X runs of this step?
  3. What are the cumulative statistics for this step till date?
  4. If the next step in the nurture is conditional, what is the distribution of Contacts across the different options?
  5. What is the relative position of this step from the standpoint of overall response rate?

Campaign level analysis: Once we have analyzed each step we need to analyze the entire nurture campaign. Here are some questions that you might want to ask to better understand the campaign.

  1. How many people have been targeted for this nurture campaign so far?
  2. What is the current snapshot of this campaign and how many contacts are at what stage in the campaign?
  3. Show me statistics for the previous X runs of this nurture campaign?
  4. What are the most traversed paths in the nurture campaign up to a given date?
  5. What are the least traversed paths in the campaign up to a given date?
  6. What is the average time spent by a Contact in this nurture flow before he/she became a qualified Lead?
  7. What is the average number of steps that a Contact is included in within this nurture flow?
  8. What is the relative position of this nurture campaign across all nurture campaigns?

Analysis across lead nurture campaigns: The set of questions below will help you analyze the effectiveness of your overall lead nurturing strategy.

  1. How many people have been targeted up to a given date across all my nurture campaigns?
  2. How do my nurture campaigns stack rank relative to each other based on total number of qualified Leads generated?
  3. What is the full list of transitions across my nurture campaigns?
  4. What are the top 5 active transitions between nurture campaigns?
  5. What are the bottom 5 transitions between nurture campaigns?
  6. Show me the nurture campaigns with maximum/minimum touches by Contact.

Over the next few weeks I will share with you insights about such questions that you might be asking yourself when analyzing your nurture campaigns. How are you managing nurture campaigns within your organization?

-Sundeep

April 10, 2009

Do Marketing Program Managers Really Need New Skills?

Scott Brinker in his recent blog post “5 new skills for the future of marketing” suggests that marketers need to acquire some additional skills. Megan Heuer from Sirius Decisions suggests something similar in her recent blog post.  Do marketing program managers really need to become more analytical? I believe what my colleagues are saying is that the marketing organization needs to acquire additional skills, not simply that the individuals in marketing program management need to morph into something different. 

Marketing Automation will usher in the Marketing Operations function

We still want the Marketing Communications folks to have strong right brain creative talent. That mastery of transforming 1000 words into a single image! Knowing just how to distill complex messages down to a crisp sound bite!  No, I don’t want to change these people a bit. And it is not that marketing hasn’t had the analytical, data oriented skills, it has simply been in the other side of the house, over in product marketing and product management!  I believe what we are saying is that additional analytical skills need to be applied to the demand generation side of the house.

The best way to do this is not to replace creative people with analytical people (shudder), but rather to recognize that a new group is coalescing in marketing – the marketing operations group.  The advent of marketing automation systems such as Market2Lead’s most excellent SaaS put tremendous power in the hands of the marketing program manager. But if they are largely creative individuals, someone else may need to formulate the lead scoring, or analyze the lead nurturing tracks, or create the marketing dashboards and reports. Someone else may want to analyze the marketing data quality and devise data hygiene guidelines and standards.

Marketing Gets More Analytical

But this requirement for more analytical thinking on the demand side of the house is not new. B2C firms are very analytical when it comes to market segmentation and demand generation. And the advent of online lead generation inspired many budding marketing folks to start off in SEM analytics 10 years ago. Many firms outsourced the analytical work to agencies (or to IT), but unlike Interactive Agencies, Marketing Automation savvy demand generation agencies are few.  Rubicon Marketing is a good example of the latter.  As a result many firms will elect to in-source additional analytical marketing skills.

 It is time for Marketing Operations

Outsourcing analytical tasks to IT has its pros and cons. Many marketing departments have been frustrated at the loss of control that this outsourcing represents and as a result would rather outsource to agencies. But there is now a critical mass of analytical marketing skills required that many firms recognize can be unitized into an internal group.  It is more than a web team. They have responsibilities for marketing analytics, marketing automation, marketing tools, CMS, marketing data quality, and perhaps project management. 

So all you right brainers out there don’t have to go buying slide rules just yet. We just need to nudge management into recognizing that there are additional analytical skills required in marketing and maybe it would be ok if the next marketing new hire was a geek.

-Kevin

April 06, 2009

Top 10 Marketing Reports To Be Viewed Weekly

So if you only have time Monday morning to scan the top 10 reports from your marketing demand creation team, what would be on your list of things to view and why. Here is my take, in no particular order. Most of these reports should be weekly trend lines with 56 (sic) weeks of history if you have it so you can view year over year trends too.

  1. Form completion rates by unique form. One chart showing the weekly historical trend for all your major forms on the website (info request, newsletter sign-up, free trial, download, partner sign-up, PPC form, etc). Web leads can be very economical, and are usually a good indicator of interest. I find it fascinating that so many people focus so much attention on getting more visitors to the website and so little attention on the "last mile" - getting the visitors to complete a registration form. Form completion rates can vary depending on the offer, but in many cases it will be a lot easier to double the form completion rate than it is to double the number of visitors to a website!
  2. Form completion rates by offer name or offer type. This is a pretty good measure of the content, especially when the same form is used for many different offers.  It can be an early indicator of when content is getting stale, or which topics are hot.
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  3. Unknown visitor - company name from IP address. A report that lists all the companies that visited the website in the past week but the visitors were unknown to the Marketing Automation system. Sorted by highest number of visits first, and filtered to remove ISPs, this report can be very useful to ISRs (telemarketing).
  4. Total marketing leads added into the SFA. You can run this one from your SFA or from your Marketing Automation (MA) system. A VERY important measure of the output of the demand creation group. Notice that I said leads added into the SFA. By this I meant leads that have been handed off to the sales team. This weekly trend line should be moving up and to the right!
  5. Marketing lead conversion rate in the SFA. This report is simply the number marketing leads converted to contacts/accounts last week divided by the total new leads added by marketing that week. The leads converted may have been added 6 months ago, that doesn't matter. You are simply keeping track of the ongoing sales perceived quality of leads given to them by marketing. It should be used as an early warning indicator of declining lead quality if the number trends down over time. If the number trends up over time that could be perceived as a good thing (better quality leads) but it could also be viewed as marketing holding back too many leads for further nurturing. Sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own!
  6. Leads by Lead Source. A simple trend chart that shows the number of leads by lead source. If you have a defined lead management process, and set up your lead source optimally, it will have no more than 10 or 12 possible values (all the details go into another field - lead source details or specific lead source). As such it should be easy to plot out the numbers for these 10 different lead sources week after week.
  7. Marketing conversion rate by lead source. This one might produce results that will freak people out but it is very important. What is it we all want to do in hard economic times? Cut the 20% of marketing programs that are NOT working. It is usually easy to recognize the campaigns that are pulling their weight, harder to determine what is the bottom 20%. One way to really measure the efficacy of campaigns is to figure out the lead conversion rate by lead source. If you really want to go crazy on this, you can do the same for "specific lead source" or campaign name. Just remember that you will want to have a good handle on your average lead age before it converts, when you look at the results so that "young" campaigns don't get dinged simply because the leads haven't had time to mature to a conversion ready state. 
  8. Basic web statistics - weekly trend on visits, duration, bounce rates etc
  9. Out going marketing campaign statistics - weekly trendlines. All the usual quantity targeted, open rates, click throughs, card swipes from shows,  etc
  10. Responses by contact/lead type. Marketing spends a lot of the budget on generating out going touches, it is nice to be able to measure the incoming responses and codify them based on the type of person: Net new lead, existing lead in system, existing contact but not a customer yet, and lastly customers. By graphing the responses by contact type you have a rough idea of how much you are spending on marketing to your installed base (loyalty marketing), on nurturing, or on net new lead generation!

What are your favorite weekly reports?
-Kevin

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