This coming weekend (Dec 18th), we will be releasing LoopFuse OneView v3.29. The coming release focuses on adding Conversion Analytics to our existing Lead Capture Forms, and Inbound Marketing / Search Engine Marketing functionality. These new features enable marketers to analyze which referring sites, search engines, and keywords are leading to the highest level of lead capture form conversions.
Archive for the ‘Lead Management’ Category
Looking Forward: LoopFuse OneView 3.29
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010The role of Business Directories in Marketing Automation
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010Web analytics data provides B2B Marketing executives a wealth of information regarding their outbound and inbound marketing initiatives. A critical and passively-collected component in a website visitor’s profile, is the distinct company or ISP used by a prospect while browsing your website. Visiting company information collected from site visitors provides marketers with indicators on just how broadly and deeply marketing efforts have penetrated a company. However, making that information actionable by marketing and sales alike is made easier with a consolidated marketing toolset, as found with most marketing automation software.
Although much of the information collected by web analytics software is collected passively (by resolving IP addresses to a Company’s name), the enriching of that data with third-party business directories such as Hoovers, Jigsaw, and LinkedIn is where the value lies for marketing and sales.
The value of business directory data is lost if it is kept in a silo, because the data is only valuable when it is joined with other behavior data from a prospect which may be composed of web analytics, email marketing, and CRM information.
Now armed with a complete view of a prospect along with business directory information, an organization can:
- Target a visiting company with focused campaigns.
- Identify and contact key personnel and decision makers.
- Effectively segment a lead database, ie. company size, revenue amount, industry, etc…
Although much of the value contained within business directories is nothing new to marketers and sales reps, as you can see, the real value is in making it actionable. Making information actionable is only possible when you have a clear picture of a particular prospect or company within one database (or marketing dashboard), such as those found in marketing automation solutions. Subscribing to business directory services without a plan on how that information will be used in your marketing campaigns will rarely if ever show fruit. Likewise, services such as Leadlander, that simply track users and display company information remain an island of unactionable information and don’t solve the problem faced by marketers today: How do I leverage all of my different databases of information for my marketing strategies? The answer is in selecting a marketing automation vendor that focuses on aggregating of all the random bits of information for you, in one place, so you can leverage it in your marketing initiatives.
4Cs of B2B Marketing: Campaign, Customer, Channel, Content
Monday, November 1st, 2010When I originally had the idea to write this post, I decided to focus on our new marketing automation platform release and how the menu system had changed. I soon realized that the real story was not product-specific, but the underlying reason for the change; To align a menu system with how business-leaders today think about online marketing and sales.
So how is it that today’s B2B Marketing professionals think? Enter the 4Cs:
A Lead: An Expression of Interest
Monday, October 4th, 2010One of the largest and most frequent problems that plague the sales and marketing relationship is the quality and quantity of leads. Tomes have been dedicated to the subject and some very smart consultants make a lot of coin advising on it. Yet, the results are still very hit or miss. The problem is that people have been trying to solve the wrong problem.
The real issue isn’t what defines a “qualified” lead, but rather what defines a lead itself. Nearly everyone defines a lead as a person. It’s someone you’ve just met who you hope will mature into a customer. A lead can linger on in your database for months if not years. If this is how you define a lead, let me stop you right there to say you’ve got it wrong!
A lead isn’t a person. A lead is an expression of interest at a specific point in time. Think about what that means. We are all complex people and engage with brands every day. Our motivations for engaging at any point of time can shift and vary. It’s these motivations that drive what and why we buy. Remember, people buy things to solve problems. The same is true in our personal as in our professional lives. It’s key, therefore, for brands to hone in on what’s motivating the engagement and seize on the immediate, relevant pain.
Defining a lead in this manner addresses the sales and marketing relationship in two ways. First, it gets marketing thinking like sales. Injecting this notion of an “expression of interest” gets marketing focusing on the things important to the customer, and why they will buy as opposed to a raw count of bodies. Second, it brings standardization and repetition to the qualification process. Never confuse the inside sales team with highly paid, external sales professionals. Reducing their scope and funneling the outcomes will drive consistency and performance.
Step one in getting your lead generation process moving in the right direction; therefore, must begin with the right definition of a lead.
Takeaways:
– A lead is NOT a person
– A lead IS an expression of interest in time
http://www.tractionsm.com
Nurturing your prospects with automated leadflows
Friday, August 13th, 2010Marketing automation tools are very cool. Instead of purchasing 4 or 5 different products to run your marketing programs you only need one – that is pretty powerful. What is even cooler is that LoopFuse is giving someone all this functionality for FREE. I know, where am I going with this – I am supposed to be showing you different use cases, right. I am just setting up the scenario. With the announcement of FreeView we are getting a huge influx of signups. As a software vendor, giving away something for free definitely drives the traffic – we knew this from our previous offering of a free trial. With such a high volume of leads coming in – we needed to build a leadflow that would nurture these leads throughout the “getting started” process.
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Webinar: “Search and Rescue” for your lead database: How to find lost leads and turn them into opportunities
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Live Webinar: Wednesday August 4th, 2010, 11am PDT/ 2pm EDT
Where did all our webinar leads go? Did any of the 250 whitepaper downloads turn into sales opportunities? Did we get our money’s worth when we paid $40 per lead in a lead gen program? This 45-minute webinar will teach you how to save those leads and turn them into revenue for your company.
You will learn how to:
• Create workflows so no lead is left behind
• Improve your data quality by segmentation and nurturing
• Nurture your leads with relevant information
• Convert qualified prospects into paying customers
Join us and get useful tips on how to help save your drowning leads and bring them to the surface so you can start generating revenue NOW! Jep Castelein of LeadSloth, a long-time marketer and thought leader in the area of lead management and marketing automation, will demonstrate the simplicity by which you can automatically start to better nurture and qualify your leads today.
RECORDING AVAILABLE: if you can’t make it, you can still register so you’ll receive the recording afterwards
Click here to register for the webinar.
Freemium and OpenSource Funnels
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010In my last blogpost titled “Why Free? Why Now?” I provided some background on the impetus and the reasoning behind LoopFuse’s move to provide a free marketing automation offering. It has been only three weeks since our launch of FreeView, but the response has already been overwhelming. One of the most interesting changes that comes with a move into a freemium model is the shape of the funnel. Over the past several years I’ve studied the funnels of dozens of companies and I’ve noticed that those companies based on freemium models (including opensource) show some very distinctive and interesting patterns.
The Mouth of the Funnel
The first distinctive feature of a freemium-based funnel is obviously that the funnel’s mouth becomes extremely large. Providing anything of significant value for free will attract a large number of people. The number of people attracted is directly related to the amount of value provided for free and inversely related to the “friction” in obtaining that value. For example, when Ben and Jerry’s offers a free ice-cream cone a line will form. But as the line grows the “friction” to obtain the free ice-cream becomes a disincentive for people who realize that waiting an hour in line for a $3 cone may not be worth the effort. However, if the free item were an iPhone instead of an ice-cream cone then the length of the line would naturally extend much farther as people weighed the value of their time against the inconvenience.
Freemium companies must not only ensure that their free offering provides significant value, but also that the “friction” required to obtain that value is minimized. For example what information must the prospect divulge about him/herself and/or his/her organization to access the free offering? What setup and configuration tasks must be completed? How aggressive is the push to migrate from the free offering to the paid upgrade? The value of the free offering minus the total friction required to obtain that value will directly drive the relative size of the earliest stages of the funnel. Of course, in order for people to consider a free offering they must be aware of it. While word-of-mouth is a key component of the freemium marketing strategy, there is still a very important role for traditional marketing to drive awareness.
Behavior-Driven Funnel Definition
The second distinctive feature of a freemium-based funnel is the segmentation of the funnel based on behavior. Traditionally the progression of a lead through the segments of the funnel has been based on external indicators such as registration, download of collateral, participation in webinars, product trial download, contacting sales for assistance, etc. However, due to the volume of leads being managed inside the funnel, a freemium model must provide a hyper-efficient means of measuring the progression of a lead towards purchase and must maintain a level of accuracy in that measurement to ensure that we are not overwhelming the sales team with unqualified leads. Therefore, the segments of the funnel may need to become more specialized based on data being collected directly from the usage statistics of the free offering. For example, in our own funnel, LoopFuse knows exactly how many users, leads, forms, lists, nurturing programs, reports, and campaigns are in use by every single FreeView user. These statistics are key criteria for the promotion of a lead inside of our own funnel segments. This type of integration is usually much easier with SaaS freemium models than with pure opensource models because the usage statistics are more readily available.
The Patient Sales Model
The third distinctive feature of a freemium-based funnel is the lack of momentum in the early stages of the funnel. In a former life I worked at an opensource company and we used to discuss the concept of the “patient sales model”. The concept was based on our observations that it often took YEARS before a free user was ready to purchase a premium upgrade. A user would download the software, become familiar with it’s capabilities and limitations, and it would become part of his/her default toolkit. At some point in the future he/she would pull out that software and would run into a limitation that could only be overcome by upgrading into a premium version. At this point the value proposition is clear to the purchaser, the friction of adoption is zero, and the prospect is usually ready to pay for the value they are receiving. However, there is no magic formula that will predict when this circumstance will present itself. Freemium models front-load the funnel with lots of users on the basis that eventually they will run into this situation. Also, traditional metrics such as days-to-close can become misleading in freemium models unless you start the clock at the point of opportunity creation rather than lead creation.
While the LoopFuse freemium offering (FreeView) is only a few weeks old, we can already see the momentum impact at the front of the funnel. We have already revised our internal funnel segmentation to better utilize the FreeView behavioral data to more accurately identify those prospects who are gaining the most value and are therefore more likely to pay. I am fascinated by the funnels of freemium and opensource companies and look forward to watching the evolution of our own funnel and the subtle patterns and idiosynchrasies we identify along the way. For a great in depth article on the “Fundamentals of a Volume Market Engine” I highly recommend reading Fred Holahan’s article on OpenSource Business Resource.
Q&A with Laura Ramos – Part 3: Implementation & Keys to Success
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010Following up on the interview with Laura Ramos, I am releasing the third and final part of my interview:
7. Dwyer: Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?
Ramos: Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems in the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure and the “what’s needed” to make marketing automation work.
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Q&A with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research – Part 2: Market Momentum
Thursday, March 4th, 2010Following up on my post last week, I am releasing the second part of my interview with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research (blog).
Part 2: Market Momentum
4. Dwyer: What key trends drive adoption of Lead Management Automation (LMA) today?
Ramos: Besides the economy and the need to improve sales pipelines short term, I think there are 3 more systemic changes driving lead management automation investment and use. These are: 1) the need for greater marketing accountability, 2) the need to produce not just more demand, but better qualified demand, and 3) the need to scale the sales process more efficiently (another way of putting this is reducing the cost of customer acquisition). There are a number of macro trends driving widespread change in B2B marketing, where I see automated demand management as a key response to these trends. In short, I expect marketers to adopt lead management automation to build customer dialogue and relationships much earlier in the purchase process and counteract issues like advertising avoidance, commoditization, and social computing (which creates unprecedented transparency and information sharing that is wonderful for buyers, but challenging for sellers).
5. Dwyer: What impact will a Lead Management Automation (LMA) system have on the typical marketing organization?
Ramos: I think the impact of automation on a large marketing organization can be quite different than the impact for a small one. Both experience different issues and challenges. Let me focus on the midmarket here and refer to the three trends I mentioned in the prior question to address the question of impact:
1) Greater marketing accountability. Over the past 10 years, B2B marketers have witnessed an explosion in available marketing approaches, especially in the digital world. While this has made more channels available, many marketers struggle to execute tactics in an integrated fashion that engage B2B buyers during what is often a lengthy sales cycle. Running from tactic to tactic, B2B marketers can also fail to demonstrate marketing’s impact beyond the point of campaign execution. Lead management automation helps marketers get a handle on the marketing mix and to learn which approaches work at which points in the buyer’s journey. LMA can also give marketers more flexibility to try new approaches and experiment with new techniques because the system lets them see, more directly, the impact between marketing activity and the volume and quality of leads that result.
2) Better qualified leads. Sales doesn’t really want more leads from marketing, but they do want better ones. Lead management automation helps marketing and sales get onto the same page and to answer the critical question “what makes a great lead?” Without automation to score leads across the purchase cycle, and the capability to nurture leads – start a conversation, educate, build dialogue, persuade – marketers will fail to put the best leads in front of sales and to help sales to convert pipeline into closed deals.
3) Scaling the sales process. Many executives think LMA helps marketing. In fact, it helps sales. And it helps the bottomline. Starting in the last decade, trends like software as a service, virtualization, and on-demand provisioning have changed how firms deliver high technology products. The services component of any solution has become more important. And IT buyers want to pay as they go. Long-term, on-premise, perpetual licenses will decline in favor of the on-demand model. This also means that long sales processes, backed by high-commission sales reps, must become less expensive. Marketing will become key in this transition as buyers rely more on online channels – and communities of like-minded participants – to inform and validate purchase decisions. Lead management automation can help marketers connect with these buyers long before the first sales call and make selling more efficient as a result.
I think large, multinational firms can certainly achieve these results at the departmental level. However, the challenges associated with building a global brand, driving message consistency, and managing marketing interactions across geographies, regions, industries, and multiple product lines increases demand management complexity significantly.
6. Dwyer: Are you seeing a shift in focus from traditional outbound marketing activities to inbound marketing? If so, how can marketing leaders prepare themselves?
Ramos: In 2009, we saw B2B marketers shift from traditional to digital channels in a big way as marketing budgets got the ax and as buyers became harder to engage. Social media popularity also accelerated the digital transformation. However, much of what I see happening online in B2B – with social media in particular – I would characterize as “outbound marketing using new channels.” For example, firms put out a stream of press releases and marketing communications, and then tweet about them on Twitter. Little value is added and certainly not much happening there to make buyers want to strike up a conversation.
To truly move to inbound marketing, B2B marketers need to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about multi-step conversations. They need to efficiently reach buyers at a group or individual level. Mass marketing doesn’t work in B2B, relationship marketing does. This is where I can see LMA playing a key role because lets vertical industry, product management, or local marketers in the field have conversations with targeted groups of prospects – customer segments in the truest sense – using online tools and social media to fuel the dialogue. By tracking their behavior and interactions, marketers can then pass a rich set of “background” information – behavior, preferences, activity — to sales and help them close deals more efficiently. When this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t always, the LMA system can now give both marketing and sales quantitative, factual information about what they need to do differently.
Next up, Part 3: Implementation & Keys to Success
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Q&A with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research – Part 1: Defining the Market
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Without question, Laura Ramos of Forrester Research (blog) is an expert in the marketing automation space with a specific focus on the best practices in lead management. While I did not actually meet Laura in person until late 2009, I have certainly known that she is a thought leader in the industry. I have enjoyed getting to know her over the past few months and I think Laura has become more familiar with what Loopfuse has to offer B2B marketers, especially in the product releases that Loopfuse has made in late 2009.
As Laura and I recently discussed, one of the challenges to Lead Management Automation adoption is education in the marketplace. So I asked Laura if she would be willing to answer a handful of questions for me about the market and talk about what she sees happening in 2010. So I sat down with Laura a few weeks ago for a quick chat and today we are releasing the first part of our interview:
Part 1: “Defining the Market”
1. Dwyer: The term Marketing Automation is thrown around internally at companies and in the marketing media, how do you define Marketing Automation?
Ramos: As part of Forrester’s research team that serves the marketing professional, I agree that the term Marketing Automation is bandied about ambiguously. To help marketers use technology to improve marketing effectiveness and efficiency, Forrester writes about the Marketing Technology Backbone. It’s a term we have used since 2004, defined as, “A technology infrastructure that supports an integrated, quantitative approach to marketing strategy, development, delivery, and measurement — across the marketing mix.” This definition helps to keep marketers focused on the entire discipline of marketing and not just on technology for executing tactics and campaigns. It also includes two important words, integrated and quantitative, because I see B2B marketers worry too much about running programs and not enough time connecting the dots between marketing activity and bottomline business results.
Looking at the marketing technology landscape, Forrester sees marketing automation focus on six core applications: 1) campaign management; 2) customer analytics; 3) interaction management; 4) marketing resource management (MRM); 5) marketing asset management (MAM); and 6) lead management. Lead management plays a key role in the marketing automation space and in our view of what marketers need to put an effective marketing technology backbone in place.
2. Dwyer: From a B2B perspective, when a direct salesforce is involved, what is the difference between Marketing Automation and Lead Management Automation?
Ramos: In my research, I study and write about lead management automation specifically. My counterpart, Suresh Vittal, writes about marketing automation generally. In B2B marketing, where a direct salesforce or channel partners sit in the driver’s seat for winning new deals and retaining existing customers, technology that manages demand is an essential part of the marketing technology backbone. Wikipedia has a solid definition of lead management that I used to develop a working definition in my research. In short, lead management is the tooling and processes that help firms generate new business opportunities, manage volumes of business inquiries, improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase, and increase alignment between marketing activity and sales results. Increasingly this process is becoming tech-centric, and lead management automation is the technology that helps marketers to manage this process. I would also point out, however, that technology alone is not sufficient and that automating ineffective, immature processes – especially those that lack a tight alignment between marketing and sales measured in the creation of more qualified opportunities and closed sales — will likely cause more problems than it solves.
3. Dwyer: Is Lead Management Automation (LMA) a term that is catching on in mainstream business?
Ramos: I would like to see it catch on more than it has. The 2009 recession, which appears to be experiencing a slow recovery in 2010, forced many firms to concentrate on demand generation as business investment was deferred, delayed, or shrank. The down economy benefited lead management solution providers as marketers invested in LMA technology to get sales pipelines pumping again. Despite this trend, lead management automation is still an emerging industry category. Today, LMA has yet to emerge as a separate, distinct category from Marketing Automation. Based on our estimates, I see market penetration growing from 5% to 10% over the next 18 to 24 months – but there are many marketers out there who have yet to explore the value that lead management automation can bring to their organizations. This can be both a blessing and a burden to firms like Loopfuse who look to grow their share in this emerging space.
Stay tuned for Part 2: “Market Momentum” coming soon
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