Marketing: Strategy to Solution Blue Print

How many Sales Opportunities credit Marketing Campaigns?

Less than 20% of Opportunities tracked in Sales force automation systems like Salesforce.com, on an average, credit campaigns. Marketing systems that rely on sales people tagging opportunities with campaigns for ROI calculation purposes are setting themselves up for failure. Here are a couple of reasons:

• Sales guys like to spend more time selling products and services rather than doing data entry in software systems. Typical data completeness metrics in Sales systems are very low compared with other business processes.

• Even for the opportunities that do get tagged with campaign information there is subjectivity around the appropriateness of the campaign that gets selected. Sales guys have minimal visibility into the effectiveness of a marketing campaign that a Prospect was targeted with prior to the prospect becoming a qualified Lead.

So, what options do we have? One option is to decipher the Campaign tracking information from associated entities. I am going to use salesforce.com as reference.

1. Every Opportunity is associated with an Account and/or multiple Contacts. 
2. If a Contact is associated with the Opportunity and tagged as the Primary Contact, we can select one or more Campaigns this Contact was targeted with for ROI calculations. We might still have the data completeness problem because the sales guy is expected to associate a Contact to the Opportunity.
3. If no Contact is associated to the Opportunity, we can select one of the Contacts that belong to the Account. We need to ensure that the owner of the Contact record is same as the owner of the Opportunity record.

This multi-step approach will significantly reduce/eliminate the problem with lack of data and the subjectivity around the data. The last thing one wants to do is have the objective of capturing a key Marketing metirc depend on flaky data.

Tips: How to reduce leakage between sales and marketing funnels?

I am sure we all have heard  the comment, "Sales don't follow up on all the leads sent by Marketing". There are multiple dimensions to this problem. Some of the typical reasons we hear are: The leads are not of high quality, the leads have not been properly qualified etc. Outside of the lead quality issues there are a few tactical system related issues that result in significant leakage too. One such reason is Marketing systems not respecting routing rules setup in Sales systems. For example, geo/territory based routing is a typical process used in sales systems like salesforce.com. Some of the sample rules are:

   a. If country in "United states, US, USA, United States of America" and state in "California, CA" route the lead to Bob.
  b. If country in "United states, US, USA, United States of America" and state in "Texas, TX" route the lead to John.

Interestingly, if we look at the lead capture processes like web response forms, events, trade shows, webinars etc. these rules are not enforced all the time. Let me take one channel - web forms. Here are some basic questions:

  1. Do all web response forms collect geo information (contact us forms, product eval forms, white paper download forms among others)?
  2. Are these questions mandatory on all the forms?
  3. Do the values set in the forms map to the values in the sales system?

We will be surprised that many marketing systems don't respect these basic rules. For example, a white paper download form might make email mandatory but geo information optional. What happens in this case? We might get a record with the following information:

First Name: Tim
Last Name: Symonds
Email: tim@acme.com
Company: acme
Whitepaper Download: Acme's path breaking solution and value justification

When this lead is published to an SFA system like salesforce.com who gets this lead? In most cases  quite a few leads end up in a wrong queue or get assigned to an admin queue and the hope is that the admin diligently routes the leads to the right rep. More often than not, the lead stays in the queue or is sent to the rep too late.

How can we fix this problem? One option is to capture key routing based information up front. Infoblox (www.infoblox.com), a utility- grade Core Network services company has an interesting solution to this problem. They have designed an interaction model that collects information from Leads over multiple interactions. If you visit their Resource Center and download a white paper or watch a pre-recorded webinar  you will experience this model. Here is a high level overview of what is collected:

Interaction 1: Name, email, company, geo-region information.

Interaction 2: Industry, Job Role,  Job Level

Interaction 3: Solution area of interest,  Current solutions

Interaction 4: Project timeframe, Project budget

With this model the system captures basic demographic information and geo information in the first interaction. With this model the Lead is asked for minimal information increasing the overall form completion rates and also ensuring proper routing in the SFA system.