Why Funnel is Good for you

Without a formal lead funnel model in place, marketing might think they are serving quality leads to sales, yet sales thinks the leads generally stink.

Recent B2B trends in lead management have sparked an updated funnel model from our friends at SirusDecisions. Watch as we dissect the new model and evaluate how and why a formal lead funnel model can bring your sales and marketing teams even closer together.

To watch the video, click here.

Steve Kellogg

Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

 http://crowds2crowds.com

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We All Want It and We All Want It Now!

 

 You’ve labored for months, maybe even years, working at a large enterprise company in finally securing budget to purchase your Marketing Automation Tool. 

Despite all the internal challenges, approval hoops, endless committee meetings and ROI calculators, it is finally, finally a reality. Not only is it approved but the shiny new tool is now installed! It’s been a long, long road but it’s time to celebrate!

But wait.  Even before the champagne stops bubbling it starts. Word gets out. Suddenly C-Level wants it, sales divisions all want it, every marketing division and business unit wants it, APAC wants it, Latin America wants it, EMEA wants it, partners, distributors and resellers all want it…in short, now everyone wants it. And they all want it NOW. In fact everyone is suddenly desperate to start using it.

SCENARIO 1:

You start by kindly saying NO. You explain that you need time to formulate new processes, provide training, manage the change. But no one takes NO for an answer.

“These are desperate times and we NEED it NOW!”, is the mantra from above and below. So after constant bombardment and pressure, you finally give in and (gulp) release it to the world. You are everyone’s best friend.

Fast forward 1 year later…

The data apocalypse takes up permanent residency, making a huge mess. Bad data is overwriting good data. Data is deleted. CRM integration is full of errors and unresolved failures. Divisions upload bad lead lists because they can no longer nurture and grow their own. Hard bounce rates go through the roof. Deliverability is down the drain. Files are all over the place, with new folder structures appearing daily.  What’s left of the good database is being bombarded with multiple emails from multiple divisions offering multiple deals. Subscription management is nonexistent as no one could ever agree on the right process. Unsubscribes are rampant. No one knows where to allocate budget. Sales and marketing no longer have confidence in the tools they used to use. Sales must revert back to the old days of mostly cold calling, prospecting for leads. A global Marketing Automation “Do-Over” is eminent. You have moved on.

SCENARIO 2:

You somehow manage to hold your ground. No means NO. You launch the tool systematically one division at a time. You work out the kinks. You fully vet the scoring and nurturing programs. You evaluate the CRM integration for effectiveness. You wait until sales enablement tools are up and providing value. Only 1 division is best friends with you.

Fast Forward 1 year later…

Data is standardized globally. Checklists and processes are consistent. Dynamic content is maximized. Training is routine. The global marketing calendar is monitored, measured and analyzed to constantly improve message relevance and value. Sales and Marketing adore each other. Revenue goals are exceeded. Budget allocations are a no-brainer. You are everyone’s best friend (and hero). Three other companies want to hire you.

Summary:

Trust your instincts. Don’t give in and don’t give up. Ask anyone who has lived through Scenario 1. They will usually start the conversation by saying…”if there was one thing I should have done differently…”

Steve Kellogg
Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

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2 Great Examples of Custom Email Subscription Centers

How do you provide email subscription choices without overwhelming users with a huge list of options? I walk you thru 3 great examples of custom email subscription preference pages.

Watch the video here: http://www.crowds2crowds.com/marketing-operations.html

Learn more about Marketing Operations

By Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia

-Eloqua Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

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Revenue Attribution Demystified

http://crowds2crowds.com/romi.html
Why is revenue attribution so painful? Because it's complicated! Learn successful methodologies, what other B2B companies are doing, gotchas and best practices in this short but very informative video.

Learn more about Marketing ROI

By Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia

-Eloqua Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

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B2B Form Submitter BILL OF RIGHTS

Forms are arguably a necessary evil in the world of B2B marketing. Sure you can give your assets away, but that's a conversation for another day.

For now, let's assume you do want a form. Watch this quick 60-second video and learn the Top 5 B2B Form Submitter BILL OF RIGHTS. Its funny, but true!

Visit my brand new website and learn more about form optimization.

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia

-Eloqua Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

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Creating Content for the Buying Committee

 

Creating Content for the Buying Committee

Most B2B sales are not decided upon by just one person. Often a committee of folks is involved, both during the initial decision process and further down the buyer journey, during the purchase process. As many as 8 or more participants weigh in internally before a final “Let’s do it” is heard.

As frustrating as this is for sales, it’s even more frustrating for marketers trying to:

1. Identify these committee members and 
2. Serve them relevant content

Unfortunately we usually only get access to just one committee member, the person who is raising their hand. He or she has clicked thru one of our emails, filled out a form, attended a webinar, etc. and made themselves known.   

Let’s call this person the Champion.

Sirius Decisions has identified a total of 4 committee member types:

• The Champion
• The Influencer
• The Negotiator
• The Ratifer

So how do you send relevant content to these people, at the correct time they need to see it, without even knowing who they are?

You can’t. Not unless they raise their hand too. Sorry.

So, we are left with 2 approaches to ensuring relevant content is sent to the right person at the right time:

1. Enable the Champion as our “Content Distributor”
2. Populate Social Media, as well as your own website, with easy to find answers to likely questions from the Influencer, the Negotiator and the Ratifier.

Creating the Personas

The first step is to create personas for each of the 4 committee member types. Ask sales what keeps each one up at night? What do they want answers to? What content tools can you provide that will help answer the question, “What’s in it for them?” Once we know what list of concerns each committee member type has, we can create specific content to address each one of their concerns.

Converting the Champion to “Content Distributor”

Once the Champion has initially raised their hand, the next step is to add them to a nurturing/scoring program that feeds content, directed at them initially. This is typically Thought Leadership content. It’s never about you at this stage, it’s always about what you can do for the Champion. The goal is to provide enough credibility that your company makes it to the short list of evaluated vendors.

Focus on content that is appropriate not only for the Champion, but for the Influencer as well. The goal is to get the Champion to pass your Thought Leadership along to the Influencer. 

Don’t forget, the Influencer is searching on their own, so make this content easy to find on your website as well, along with targeted Social Media, just in case you haven’t converted your Champion to “Content Distributor” just yet.

Content that makes the Champion look like a hero will get forwarded more often than “non-hero” content. So what the heck is Hero Content? “Hero Content” has to be good enough to warrant a “Hey Influencer,  look what I found” reaction from the Champion.

Assuming the Champion progresses through the buyer journey and is engaged with your nurturing content, at some point the lead’s internal Decision Process shifts to a Purchase Process. The trouble is you may not know when this actually occurs. The Champion may have scored very high at this point, but the Purchase Process committee members may not have even weighed in yet.

Based on what you and your sales team know about your own sales cycle, you can send a Purchase Process trial balloon email to the Champion when the time feels about right and see what the response is. Did the Champion click thru to the ROI calculator? Did it appear as if they may have forwarded the email?

If so, now is the time to leverage your Champion to distribute content relevant to the Purchase Decision group. ROI calculators, ROI Case Studies, Financial risk aversion content. It’s all about the money. 

Once again, this group is searching on their own as well. Make sure this type of content is easy to find, not only on your website but on targeted Social Media as well. Hero content works best here too.

Summary

Just because we don’t always know who the committee members are, we can use this strategy to convert the Champion to our “Distributor of Content” to those behind the curtain. Content creation should therefore be focused on serving the following committee member types:

The Decision Process

·       The Champion

·       The Influencer

The Purchase Process

·       The Negotiator

·       The Ratifier

This will help define the What. Leverage MA to define the When.

Visit mybrand new website and learn more about marketing segmentation best practices.

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia

-Eloqua Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

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Social Media: Tracking What Others Say About You

With better Social Media reporting tools coming on line, we’re starting to get a much better picture of the extent Social Media plays in converting leads into buyers.

These tools provide insight into the whole other universe of inbound conversations occurring before, during and after our own outbound marketing communications.

And while the traditional funnel model continues to work for our outbound marketing efforts, alas - it no longer fits with the overall buyer journey.

Instead, the buyer journey now looks like a grid, with seemingly disjointed inbound and outbound touch points all playing a role in converting leads into buyers.

Welcome to The Grid

Here is a visual example of how a buyer journey might progress from beginning to end.

Black squares are Inbound touches and Red squares are outbound touches. We see this person bouncing all over the place, but ultimately ending up a buyer.

If we try and convert this buyer journey example into a linear roadmap, it would look like this:

We can track all the outbound activities just fine, the disconnect continues to tie in the value of all the inbound activities into one holistic view that can be leveraged for reporting.

Our colleagues in Germany will have an even tougher time, as Germany has recently banned the business use of FaceBook Fan pages and Facebook "Like" social plugins because the data collection infringes on Germany’s data protection laws.

So, while we can’t road map the collective social media activities of a single individual yet, we can definitely track how and where our products and brands are being perceived within the social media framework.

Recommendations:

• Get insight into the overall sentiment of your brand as well as those of  your products/services within the social media universe. Overall, is the conversation mostly positive? Mostly negative? Mostly neutral?

o   Use this to focus on keeping your +/- ratio extremely high for each product and each brand.

·      

• How does this sentiment compare to your competitors? Where is your company in the “love-fest” pecking order within your industry?

o   Use this as a benchmark in elevating and keeping your overall +/- ratio higher than your competitors.

·       

•  How much share of overall “voice” is your company receiving within your industry compared to your competitors? In other words, how much buzz is about you vs. the competition. (This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether the sentiment is mostly positive or mostly negative).

o   Use this as a benchmark in increasing and keeping dominance in your overall share of voice within your industry.

·      

• Which “megaphones” are people using to communicate? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs? Forums?

o   Use this to help identify where resources should be focusing their social media efforts.

·        

• Where specifically are the most influential conversations coming from? Are there particular blogs, forums or groups that are being particularly influential?

o   Efforts can then be made to encourage the positive and repair the negative.

So how do you track and measure all this?

One of the better tools I’ve used that can provide these insights and more is Radian6 which was recently purchased by SFDC.

If you only care about Twitter, they just announced Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites.

If you want insight into ALL of the recommendations above, Astadia is offering a complimentary Social Media Assessment Summary, for a limited time.

All you need is:
1. Your Company Name
2. The name of the Competitor you want to compare your share of voice to
3. The name of the product or service you want to get sentiment on

Click here to request this complimentary Assessment Summary

Controlling what content is received along with when a lead receives it through outbound marketing is easy. Controlling where leads go to find useful information and what they read about us from others during the sales process is next to impossible to control.

We can still influence the outcome however by (1) incorporating the whole grid in our marketing efforts and (2) by beginning to incorporate the insights listed above.

Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia

-Eloqua Certified Marketing Automation Best Practices Consultant

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