LoopFuse Blog

Following up on my blog post last week, we are now up to third way marketing automation provides job security for marketers from 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers.  Below is the excerpt from the white paper:

“3. Identify which marketing channels, or combination of marketing channels, have the greatest impact on lead conversion and revenue.

With so many marketing channels, it’s difficult to tell which combination of channels to build into the marketing mix and how much budget to allocate to each of them.   By measuring customer acquisition across marketing channels, the CMO can determine which channels are more likely to impact top-line revenue and allocate budget more effectively based on tangible results.  Conversations with the CFO become much more meaningful when the cost per customer acquired can be linked to expected revenue targets and to the marketing spend.  It’s difficult for finance to reduce overall marketing budget without also reducing revenue targets when marketers can demonstrate the relationship between cost per acquisition and revenue.

The marketing mix can be analyzed based on the tangible impact specific marketing channels have on cultivating prospects.  This allows the CMO to make better decisions about where to allocate budget based on tangible metrics, not gut feel.  At the same time, marketing automation tools become a central database with marketing campaign information and sales information allowing organizations to calculate return on marketing investment by campaign, period, or marketing channel.

Job Security Scorecard:

• Justify marketing budget by demonstrating exactly which marketing channels drive the highest conversion rates.
• Calculate customer acquisition by marketing channel
• Forecast more accurately by linking customer acquisition rates to overall marketing budget.  “If we spend this much money in the following channels, history tells us we can achieve the following revenue.”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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Building off my last post, we are now on the second way marketing automation provides job security for marketers from 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers.  Below is the excerpt from the white paper:

“2. Automate the distribution of leads to sales and identify how many resulted in a closed sale:

One of the biggest challenges for B2B marketers is articulating marketing’s impact on closed deals.  Marketing automation gives the CMO visibility into the entire prospect pipeline from unqualified leads to each closed sale.  This allows both marketing and sales to run win-loss analysis by marketing mix, or campaign, for a coveted return-on-investment analysis.  Most marketing automation solutions tightly integrate with CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com to close the loop between marketing and sales.  This dispels the myth that field sales organizations are the sole source of new prospects, not marketing.  Both organizations can have a clear view of each lead, where it was generated and the close potential.

Marketing automation solutions also deliver a tangible impact on sales efficiency.  Sales can focus their finite time on real qualified opportunities (based on the internal sales definition of a qualified lead).  Marketing automation helps shift the burden of prospect nurturing and cultivation to marketing, which is where it should be.  Marketers and sales functions can collaborate in lockstep to optimize the entire lead lifecycle process with joint accountability and real tangible metrics to measure success.

Job Security Scorecard:

• Win-Loss analysis from one centralized tool

• Identify which marketing messages had the best influence on close rates

• Marketing becomes an advocate instead of an adversary to sales — delivering true “sales-ready” opportunities to the hands of sales reps

• Demonstrate exactly how many prospects engaged in a call-to action and how many of these converted on a periodic basis”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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Last week, we released 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers, and we have received very positive feedback from B2B marketers.  So, I’ve decided to share more sections of the white paper to help marketers be more effective within their organizations.  Here is an excerpt of the first way marketing automation provides job security for marketers:

“1. Track customer engagements and qualify the best leads for sales:

The process of engaging with customers and prospects across one or more channels is complex, and marketers simply can not realistically build relevant, timely, personalized relationships with every prospect unless they can automate this engagement. Marketers need to realize, it’s not about the quantity of leads, rather it’s about quality of leads.  Marketing automation can help marketers review their pipeline and find out the attributes of the best opportunities and then automate prospect nurturing so only the most qualified and educated prospects are passed to sales as “sales-ready” leads backed by qualified and verified data.

Marketing automation tools integrate email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation, and other marketing channels for a comprehensive account-by-account view of the customer engagement.  By tracking the number of “sales-ready” leads that are passed to sales over time, marketers can literally demonstrate how effective marketing collateral has been at converting prospects into qualified opportunities.  Marketers gain credibility with sales and executive stakeholders when they can demonstrate exactly how the marketing budget translated into top-line opportunities for the organization.

Job Security Scorecard:

• Identify the number of qualified opportunities that are passed from marketing to sales

• Real-time visibility into the sales pipeline for the C-suite, marketing, sales, finance, and operations”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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Today, we released the Loopfuse whitepaper, 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers, in an effort to help B2B marketers be more effective within their organizations.  In short, this is a must read for any B2B marketer that is curious about marketing automation, thinking about deploying a marketing automation platform or currently evaluating a marketing automation platform.  Below is the “about the whitepaper” section:

“Expectations for business-to-business (“B2B”) organizations to measure return on marketing investments and to justify marketing decisions have never been greater. New marketing channels, global competition, and rising internal expectations convolute budget allocation and make data driven marketing decisions more important than ever. It feels like the bar is constantly rising…and just out of reach for marketers. These pressures are causing B2B marketing leaders around the globe to evaluate software solutions that help measure marketing programs, validate and optimize budget decisions, and help them articulate the marketing performance to key stakeholders. This paper will review how marketing automation solutions can help B2B marketers automate marketing measurement and analytics to demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing programs and validate the pivotal role of marketing in the 21st century.”

I hope you enjoy it.

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Yammer is a secure Twitter (and more) for your internal organization. We have been trying it out and one feature I really like is the occasional email reminders letting me know the activity going on within our account and the gentle coaxing to participate. The emails are short and to the point and usually start off with “We haven’t heard from you lately.” Then it provides some ideas for posting and a link to login.

Although I’ll admit that the majority of the time I delete the emails, Yammer is persistent, yet doesn’t nag. Eventually, Yammer catches me between tasks and the reminder works as I’ll log in to catch up and the ideas for posting give me a quick starting point. I’m not a Yammer addict yet, but with respect to email reminders, they’ve certainly done a great job.

There are two interesting aspects of Yammer’s lead nurturing program here.  First, this program is a response to a lack of activity on an account.  This is a subtle, yet important, distinction.  The vast majority of nurturing programs are reactive; a user is enrolled into the program as a result of submitting a form, visiting a landing page, etc.  In essence, this program must be running continuously and must check for inactivity on an account.  The second interesting aspect of this nurturing program is that it must take into account activity data that it assumably stored in a separate application database (my next post will show you how to do this in LoopFuse OneView).

Does your organization automatically engage with users/prospects based on inactivity?

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Yelp, YouTube, FreindFeed, Slideshare, Flickr… it seems like every day another social media channel is launched. With ever dwindling resources, marketers must choose where to spend their time and effort. It’s tempting to just engage on the most recognized channels. But how many of us really know which of these channels is most effective for our particular audience?

Many of these services can offer metrics and statistics, but how easy is it to compare the efficiency of your LinkedIn question versus your blogpost, versus your tweets?  Marcus Tewksbury of “The Marketing Mojo” fame is hosting a webinar on this topic for Alterian on Thursday of this week. I’ve been reading The Marketing Mojo site for almost a year now and they have a good handle on both social media and general marketing.  I’m curious to see what Marcus has in store. Here’s a link to the webinar if you’re curious.

A recent Forrester report on Marketing Automation vendors places total marketing penetration somewhere between 2-5%. The report and its estimates point to several problems that contribute to lower adoption rates, including a lack of “innovation and easy-to-use features“. This is not something that has gone unnoticed by LoopFuse and other vendors in the industry; yet the vendor reponse to the problem is often worlds apart.

Other vendors try to answer the problem with difficult-to-configure/use/maintain products, yet back them with the promise of professional services designed to get you up-and-running quickly. This is a mirage that acts as a leech to your marketing budget, thus removing the incentive for the vendor to ever innovate. Certainly this Enterprise 1.0 way of conducting business (i.e. enslaving customers) is contributing to the slow pace of adoption during these lean times.

Our answer to the problem is simple - LoopFuse seeks to make adoption painless, by innovating on features and ease-of-use and NOT throwing a bus-load of $500/hr consultants your way. The choice could not be clearer in that LoopFuse OneView empowers marketing and sales with a full-featured simple-to-configure/use/maintain product that doesn’t require hand-holding or a monthly chunk of your marketing budget. We have the incentive the innovate as we have to win your business every month.

To simplify the on-boarding process for trial users and customers, our latest LoopFuse OneView 3.21 release included the easiest-to-configure SalesForce.com integration method in the industry. Our new SalesForce.com Integration wizard uses a 4-step process to integrate OneView bi-directionally with SFDC. The entire process takes you from establishing a connection between the two systems, to importing all of your Lead Records within minutes. That means, within a few minutes of signing-up for the free trial, you are ready to send an email campaign or build a nurturing program to all of your prospects/leads.

For more information on the SalesForce.com integration wizard, click here.

There is an interesting shift happening in corporate America at the moment with regards to performance evaluation of marketing departments.  While I suspect that this shift may be global in nature, I have only personally witnessed it in the states and will therefore limit myself from over-reaching generalizations (seems almost quaint in the blogosphere today).

About 7 months ago I was discussing marketing automation tools in general, and LoopFuse in particular of course, with a marketing SVP and highlighting the different value propositions for the sales department versus the marketing department.  Given his role, I focused my discussion primarily within the marketing side of the equation, but he repeatedly kept redirecting the conversation towards the benefits for sales.  Initially I thought he was simply trying to identify any reservations or concerns that the sales VP might have by asking all of these sales-oriented questions.  But as the conversation progressed I learned that this marketing SVP’s personal bonus was not tied to the traditional measures of marketing success (brand awareness, lead volume, events, etc.) but instead was based almost entirely on revenue.

At the time I considered his company’s personal performance measurement approach to be interesting, but not particularly relevant.  One outlier is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, three is a pattern, and four is a trend.  As of today I have encountered my fourth marketing executive who is primarily rewarded based on the success or failure of the sales department.  At first, this approach seemed unfair to the marketing department.  But as I see this trend growing I realize that almost everyone is rewarded based partially on the success or failure of others, especially at the executive levels.    In this case the CMO is actually carrying the company’s global quota just like the sales executive.  One potentially positive aspect of this approach is that your sales and marketing departments may find that there is significantly less friction between them because their respective leadership’s goals are now perfectly aligned.

Are you a marketing VP?  Is your bonus compensation driven almost exclusively through revenue quotas?  Tell us how it has impacted yourself, your team, and your organization.

I recently read a great post by Jep on LeadSloth entitled “Why Are  Marketing Automation Managers So Hard to Find?“.  Although it was a great read, the one thing that kept bothering me was  that the first job requirement for a Marketing Automation professional  was “Experience with Marketing Automation software”.

This is disturbing because of all the important skill sets a Marketing  Automation manager should possess, knowing how to use a particular Marketing Automation tool should be minuscule in comparison.  The  primary value they should be providing is their ability to craft effective campaigns for the business.  Execution of those campaigns should be trivial with the right tools.  Otherwise, if more time and  effort is spent on learning the tool set than execution, isn”t that ultimately taking away from the overall value?

In my opinion, learning how to use a new Marketing Automation tool  should be no more difficult than learning how to use Google Analytics.  For example, integration of LoopFuse with a user”s website is the same  basic process as with Google Analytics.  Another example is with our new  CRM Wizard, users can integrate their LoopFuse accounts with their  Salesforce.com accounts within minutes… without outside assistance.

Learning a new Marketing Automation tool should be easy.  If you have to  take a training course, then might be worth evaluating why.

Email marketing is an industry that survives based on the ability to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns.  This is accomplished through some technical wizardry that leverages two primary features of HTML-based email : images and hyperlinks.  In order to track if/when an individual email recipient actually opened the email campaign, the recipient’s email client must display images.  Unfortunately, having images enabled in your email client can result in embarrassing situations such as opening what looks like a legitimate email in a business meeting only to find that it is a spam containing pornographic images.  As a result, more and more email client programs (Outlook 2007, Gmail, AOL, Windows Live Mail) come with images disabled by default.  As more email client programs adopt this default setting, email marketers will see fewer and fewer “opens” in their campaign analytics and may even misinterpret the trend as a reflection of their campaign quality when it is simply a byproduct of technical evolution.

It’s all Relative

Does this mean that email marketers should ignore the open-rate statistic when evaluating their campaign performance?  No, but it does mean that the open-rate is only meaningful as a relative measurement of whether your email was compelling enough for people to open.  For example, it’s valid when doing A/B testing to compare whether email subject A or email subject B was more compelling (but, of course, only if the segmentation of groups A & B is completely random).  But it is not valid as a measurement of this year’s total email open-rates versus last year’s.

Nurturing Gone Awry

Another dangerous practice is using “email open” events as conditions inside of your lead nurturing programs (in LoopFuse we refer to these as leadflows).  I have had two new LoopFuse customers propose leadflows which take different paths depending on whether the recipient actually opens a particular email.  However, if the recipient has images disabled there is simply no way for the leadflow to determine the correct path.  This can create a confusing or even frustrating experience for their prospects as a result.  If you want to react to a prospect’s email interactions, a click-through is much more reliable.

In an era of analytics overload, it’s understand exactly what the data is telling you, not just what it says.