Marketing Automation: From Lead Generation to Sales Management

B2B selling organizations today rely on marketers to generate the leads necessary to start their efforts, and marketing organizations rely more and more on technology to generate those leads. But it's time now to connect the dots between marketing and sales.

The technologies marketers use include behavioral analysis tools (tied to dynamic site content), mass emailing engines, campaign management workflow and lead scoring dashboards. The next step is bringing together these technologies with those used by sales organization to ensure end-to-end sales and customer management.

Moving Outside of Email

“You gotta get out of email. It's getting less and less effective,” said Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua in a recent interview with Direct Marketing News. Eloqua is one of the leading providers of marketing automation software and a vocal advocate for alignment of marketing and sales organizations.

Most marketing automation vendors today have a strong focus on email marketing. And while email isn’t going away, neither is the frustration with campaign generated email, legitimate or spam. When marketing departments send out large “blasts,” they typically have no relevance or context to individual sales cycles being nurtured by sales. Those blasts could be responsible for “channel conflict” and be delaying sales success.

Time for Sales and Marketing to Meet

Sales people don’t live in the marketing world and most wouldn’t know how to. And marketing people don’t live in sales and usually don’t want to.

This disconnect has been resolved by a few vendors. Eloqua offers integration with Salesforce.com (SFDC), Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle/Siebel CRM On Demand. Partdot, recently acquired by ExactTarget, integrates with SFDC. So, what do these platforms do that sales can see?

Pardot scores contacts and leads in SFDC. It also shows marketing activity for contacts directly inside contact records. Even more impressive though is how Pardot campaigns can be managed directly from within SFDC. Most CRM applications are weak in this area, even a heavyweight such as SFDC. Of course for such magic to occur, users of SFDC must install a Pardot AppExchange app and this is where eyes start to glaze over for all but the most sophisticated companies.

Marketing automation vendors seem aware they are lacking in sales integration. Eloqua focuses on campaigns based on sales pipeline stage. It’s either build or buy and buying seems to be a way beyond email. Recently, ExactTarget acquired Pardot. And Teradata scooped up German firm eCircle.

Perhaps the real sign that marketing automation is seriously transforming will be its step into sales technologies.

Image courtesy of Vaju Ariel (Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: To read more by Steve, check out The Need for a Simpler Enterprise CMS Sharing Interface

About the Author

Steve Youngblood is the CEO of Salestrakr, a SaaS based CRM application focused on small to medium businesses. Steve is also a regular contributor to CMSWire. Steve has been a founding member of a number of software companies and has launched new applications across the world. Steve's expertise is in product creation and sales and has deep interests in user experience, social crm and web collaboration.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Keeping Your Marketing Customer-Centric #rdm12

As the world moves from a product-centric economy to a customer-centric economy, marketers must move in tandem to ensure the customer experience is always at the heart of their efforts. Tim Gilbert, Chief Marketing Officer of Campus Management, a provider of enterprise software for the higher education industry, addressed this issue during a session at today’s Revenue-Driven Marketing Summit
held by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

Appropriate for a presentation involving college, Gilbert took the stage to the strains of hard rock superstars AC/DC and began his explanation of customer-centric marketing by using Apple as an example. “Apple used to be a product category for graphic designers in the art department,” he said. “Now I don’t know an executive who doesn’t check their iPhone regularly.”

Gilbert said Apple made this marketing breakthrough with an iterative process that kept the needs of customers at its core, developing services such as iTunes as well as devices such as the iPhone to provide a complete branded experience.

Marketing in the Age of Self-Advocacy

In the customer-centric economy, Gilbert said the entire experience from seller to buyer has changed. “There must be a meaningful interaction,” he advised. “We’re in an age of self-advocacy. Complaints go on Facebook. And our customers must compel college students. It’s a strange relationship where the customer pays a lot of money, gets judged every term, and incurs a lot of debt when they’re done. Colleges are having trouble maintaining that relationship.” (also read: Customer Experience: Serving the Customer, Building the Brand)

To help higher education clients place their customers (students and parents who often foot part or all of the bill), Gilbert said Campus Management helps them create a single, unified view of a student across all channels of interaction. In addition, since rejecting applicants is not good for the school’s brand (although necessary), Gilbert said Campus Management software helps colleges locate, attract and maintain relationships with the “right” students who possess the “right” qualifications, such as SAT scores in a specific range.

In a specific example of how colleges can put the customer at the center of their marketing efforts, Gilbert said the University of Ottawa collects testimonials from current students in the local area of a prospective student and compiles them in a personalized e-book.

CRM Case Study: Ball State University

Gilbert concluded his remarks by reviewing the CRM objectives of Campus Management client Ball State University in Indiana, perhaps best known as the alma mater of late night talk show host David Letterman:

• Enhance recruitment/admissions efficiency by X, Y and Z within 12 months.
• Improve student experience by A,B,C.
• Train and empower non-IT users to do segmenting, prospecting and targeting of prospective students via automated and integrated marketing communications programs.

“Job number one is buy-in from C-level executives,” stated Gilbert. “Dream big, then write it, When you budget it, get real. Know the risks and prepare for the ‘domino effect.’ Use small steps rather than a ‘Big Bang’ approach. Set milestones and celebrate success. And always be transparent, whether good, bad or ugly."

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Bill Nye the Science Guy Would Monitor Social Media

There is a scientific method that can be applied to monitoring social media. Businesses must first learn about their efforts and then fine tune them to prove their time and money is well spent.

Determining how much of an investment social media is worth is a topic that comes up again and again. I wrote recently about how, in my view, calculating social media ROI is missing much of the point of social media. I realize that not everyone agrees with my opinion that social media is more about engagement, customer service and developing brand loyalty.

I also realize that some people who invest in social media, or who must answer to a CEO or CFO about social media efforts, need certain proof that their time and money are well spent. There are companies that can do this (including Radian 6 and Eloqua), but for those who don’t have access to analytics, beyond what can be gleaned from something like Facebook Insights, YouTube or Twitter’s analytics tool (available to business accounts) I have a challenge for you: try using the scientific method — or a version of it — to see first what you can learn about your efforts and then how you might fine tune them.

Here’s my abbreviated version of the scientific method, amended for social media. I think Bill Nye the Science Guy would approve.

1. Establish a Baseline, aka a “Control”

This should be easy. What are your numbers today? How many Likes do you have on Facebook? How many do you average per day and per month? How many followers on Twitter? How many new followers do you average per day versus per month? How many subscribers to your newsletter? How long has it taken you to get to these numbers? How many hours and/or money do you spend on social media? How long did it take you to get to these numbers — or are you starting from scratch?

Set up a Google Docs spreadsheet or simply jot the numbers down on a piece of paper, and note the date. One of your goals with social media should be to increase daily numbers and reduce the amount of time it takes you to reach specific numbers.

2. Create a Hypothesis

Let’s say your gut feeling is that when you post humorous content you get the best engagement and Likes or followers go up. Your hypothesis would be, “I believe that my audience likes humor.” Or maybe you sense that your audience likes tips or other informational content. In this case your hypothesis would be, “I believe that my audience likes ‘How To’ content.”

This is sort of tangential, but when you are creating content, think outside the box. For humor, don’t just tell knock-knock jokes. If you’re a company that makes fitness or sports gear, look at what GoPro does: post funny crash videos (where no one gets hurt, of course). If you’re a bakery, post footage of kitchen disasters — and ask your users to send you theirs while you’re at it. If you’re a dentist, perhaps some dental disasters that you’ve fixed? A car dealer might post photos of cars that should be traded in. You get the idea.

3. Test

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com