A marketing automation infographic and a random Coca-Cola reference

5 reasons Good beats Perfect (almost) every time
The perfect is the enemy of the good. This wonderfully compact nugget of wisdom – commonly attributed to Voltaire, the French Enlightenment figure – is a fixture in the vernacular of modern business. My undergraduate French degree doesn’t qualify me to challenge Voltaire’s intellect. But hey, Voltaire hasn’t done a lick of work in over [Read more...]
The 3 Keys to Marketing Happiness
Here’s the deal: marketing is hard. If you think marketing is easy, you’re probably not a marketer. Or a human. Yes, you’re probably some kind of replicant who (that?) has been lucky enough to have the Google algorithm programmed into memory. Or you are, in fact, the Google algorithm, crawling this page right now. [In which [Read more...]
New white paper on Medical Device demand generation
Most of my readers may not work in the medical device field, but there are some nuggets in the piece that can be applied “horizontally.”
Are you a rainmaker or a meteorologist?
A CFO with whom I once worked shared with me the qualities he believed essential in a VP of Sales. As he worked up the list from bottom to top, I was certain that some variation of “consistently achieving revenue and gross margin quota” was going to occupy the #1 slot. But instead, he treated me to [Read more...]
Smart social media – 5 ways KLM gets it right
A friend in Amsterdam shared this video on Facebook today, and I was inspired to spin it here on the TLOTL blog. It struck me as a potential “beginning of the end” in the tedious debate of the question: is social media dead? I refuse to waste pixels issuing birth or death notices for social media (or [Read more...]

Why Leads Matter – Part 2 of 3

alternatives to focus groups, b2b marketing, b2b sales, buying process, considered purchase process, inside sales, marketing automation, product marketing, product planning, research, trust

Aug 172011

Yes, this is my dog (The Mighty Quinn) when he was a puppy. No, I didn't stage this pic. Please don't send PETA after me.

Part one of this series described the importance of minimizing friction and maximizing trust as you attract and manage leads.

Part two describes how these low-friction, high-trust* leads help you feed your beast.

* These adjectives are TLOTL equivalents of free-range, grass-fed, gluten-free, and no high fructose corn syrup.

Why Leads Matter, Reason #2: Leads have unique and valuable insights into how you can get more new business.

If you have an established business, you have customers, employees, vendors, shareholders, and tax authorities who need your attention. Every member of those groups has a commercial relationship with you. Those relationships come with obligations and expectations. Your reward for maintaining those relationships is… …you get to keep running your business. And truth be told, if you’re doing an AMAZING JOB of managing those relationships, you probably don’t need to worry too much about leads. They will seek you out and buy from you. And if they have to crawl through five miles of gravel just to join your exclusive club of happy customers, they will thank you for the privilege.

If you’ve reached this state of business bliss, leads are, understandably, an afterthought. If you’re a generous CEO, you might consider a kind gesture towards them. Perhaps free first aid kits.

But 99.9% percent of businesses don’t have these high-class problems. For those companies, existing commercial relationships consume nearly all their resources. Some growth occurs organically. But customers churn, prices flatten out, fixed costs stay fixed, while shareholders demand predictable, profitable growth.

This reality is why I’ve titled this series of posts, “Why Leads Matter.” If I ask a CEO how to define a lead, many will give a straight-forward answer like, “it’s the people who talk to Sales about buying our product.” That’s a good start, but it’s incomplete.

Like any living beast, your business must eat. You may have great hunters on your sales team. But they hunt leads. Leads feed your beast.

By definition, leads haven’t bought your product, yet. But they’re considering a purchase right now. And that makes them unique.

Your customers and past customers have already drunk your Kool-Aid. Focus group attendees will accept your $250 in exchange for two hours away from home and their opinion of your Kool-Aid in a simulated “I’m thirsty” scenario.

But your leads, right now, are accumulating a ton of information that is valuable to you.

How so? Well, they’re:

researching the overall market (analyst reports, research briefs, etc)
listening to consultants, resellers, and others knowledgeable in your category
talking to salespeople **
looking at web sites, advertisements, and promotional offers **
receiving email and direct mail, attending webinars, viewing infographics **
participating in social media conversations**

** yours and your competitors’

The wisdom of this crowd can’t be overestimated. You could easily pay someone $100K per year to know your market as well as your leads. Maybe you already do. If so, ask them to show you how your leads are being heard in your product, marketing, sales, and operations plans. Remember, these are people who have given you (some of) their attention. They deserve (some of) yours.

Yes, this is my dog (The Mighty Quinn) when he was a puppy. No, I didn't stage this pic. Please don't report me to PETA.

One more nice thing about leads: you’ve already paid for them. Whether you’ve spent $100 or $100 million to bring leads to your door, they’re here now.

Short-term revenue is an ideal way to exchange value with your leads. But it’s far from the only way.

Listen to your leads.

Then feed them to your beast.

A marketing automation infographic and a random Coca-Cola reference

b2b marketing, b2b sales, buying process, considered purchase process, inside sales, lead conversion, lead generation, lead scoring, marketing automation, sales effectiveness, sales process, web marketing

Jun 302011

My friends over at Focus asked me if I wouldn’t mind sharing an infographic they recently published on marketing automation. The infographic has some interesting metrics and data points from leading research and analyst firms covering the MA and CRM space. For anyone wanting a quick intro or an updated “lay of the land” in this category, it’s a good read.

[Attention all Federal Trade Commission hallway monitors: no money was exchanged and no other quid pro quo took place here, ok? Sheesh....]

Now, since this is a blog, I feel obliged to add some perspective on this topic. So, on top of the ones in the infographic, here’s two more metrics for you to consider. The good news: assuming you have some basic tracking tools like Google Analytics and/or a CRM system you can pretty easily apply these metrics to your business.

Metric #1: Your fresh leads who don’t buy. This is the basic “lead nurturing” scenario, and the subject of many marketing automation discussions. Let’s say you generate 100 leads per month and 8 of them end up buying your product. There’s up to 92 more leads that still need attention in some form. Sure they may have bought from your competitors. Or they may have shelved the project. Or they may have just been kicking tires in the first place. Marketing automation can help you stay connected to these 92 leads per month – that’s a run rate of 1104 leads per year for anyone who is counting — in a way that is cost-effective, scalable, and branded.

Metric #2: Your web site visitors who don’t become fresh leads. A lot of people don’t realize how marketing automation can help improve lead conversion. Here’s just one way: let’s assume those 100 leads per month above are derived from 15,000 unique visitors to your web site each month. Marketing automation can help you track and score those 15K “uniques” from the moment they reach your web site, which may occur well before the lucky 100 become known to your sales team. The benefits of this are two-fold:

a) Sales-effectiveness. Your sales people can better understand the prospect’s motivations and interests, as shown by the keywords used, and the pages/content viewed by that person before contacting your sales rep. This allows your sales team to use precious “talk time” more efficiently, presenting the benefits of your product or business that matter most to the prospect. And with the help of lead scoring (a point system that reflects the expected commercial value of a web visitor or lead), your sales team can further optimize talk time by calling out first to the highest scoring (hottest) leads.

b) Marketing effectiveness. Your marketing expert(s) can easily optimize landing pages, phone trees, email templates and other assets by analyzing the rich website and CRM data that are “married” to your leads and orders. And as powerful as Google Analytics is, most companies either don’t or can’t use it to answer important profit-related questions about your sales process. Questions like, “how do we attract, convert, and close more law firms with between 5 and 50 employees in major cities?” A smart implementation of a marketing automation process can answer questions like this.

Enjoy the infographic! (and click it to enlarge)

If you find the original post of this infographic on Focus.com, there’s some good banter in the comments section about marketing automation products being over-hyped and ultimately too hard to deploy (i.e., “shelfware.”). For the record, here’s my take:

Over-hyped = YES

Shelfware = NO, at least not with my clients.

Note: I’m hereby adopting a new policy on this blog. There will be a minimum of one self-promotional plug required in each post. There’s a limit to this all-you-need-is-love marketing, you know. Just ask the evil geniuses at Coca-Cola, who with one brilliant TV ad released about 40 years ago, heralded both the death of 60′s idealism and the birth of Gen-X cynicism.

But I non-sequitorize, or, something….

Anyway, most of the deployment issues with marketing automation occur when companies realize (typically, and unfortunately, post-purchase) that they lack the commitment required to do it right. There are other issues too. The products still need to mature, and the talent pool of implementors still needs to grow. There will be a shakeout in the marketplace for sure, and perhaps soon. But the basic building blocks of marketing automation are here to stay.