Demand Generation

B2B demand generation professional are being encouraged to drive nurturing programs to develop prospects with initial interest to the point where they are ready to begin a buying process.  By automating this aspect of demand generation, sales is in the position of working higher qualified leads.  But getting started with this process has more complexity than just defining a nurture campaign and turning it on.  If you are in a position where you are not yet using lead nurturing (you should know that you have a lot of company so don't feel like you are behind), you are probably in one of two general categories for handling leads today

1. You may have an inside sales or telemarketing group that is pre-qualifying inbound leads and setting appointments for your sales team.

2. You may be routing inbound leads directly to your sales team or distribution channel.

In either case, your sales channel is used to a certain quality and volume of leads driving their activity.  If you use Option 1, you likely send a reasonable volume of leads to your sales team and find that a fair number of people are taking appointments to placate your telemarketing team but the deals don't go anywhere so you have a quality problem.  If you are using Option 2, your sales team has gotten used to sifting through your leads and is probably picking out the apparent good leads and ignoring the rest. 

Lead nurturing will clearly help either scenario but it will also disrupt the current volume and quality that sales is handling. So, you need to get your sales team ready for this change and find a way to redirect their effort due to less leads from marketing.

Turning all of these knobs along with defining your nurture campaigns (define the buying stages, aligning content to these stages, defining your different buyers, etc.) is not a simple process.  One thing that might help is a logical way to get started with lead nurturing to help you get started and understand the impact.  Here's one idea...look for more soon.

Revive Nurture - One type of nurturing is used to find lost gems in your current list. This is a great place to start as it doesn't disrupt your current lead gen processes.  It simply finds some lost opportunities and drives some increased volume for your sales teams.  You can run this nurture campaign by identifying contacts that have not interacted with you or responded to any of your outbound activity for a prolonged period (e.g. consider a period equal to your typical buying cycle).  Contact these people to see if they are still interested in hearing from you and offer them some information.  Obviously, you probably won't get a big response but you will likely drum up some opportunities.

Aprimo, like many of our customers, lives inside a crazy business.  Unfortunately, many practices in our industry are counterproductive and end up hurting the customers and markets we serve.  The latest glaring example of this is what is happening in the B2B demand generation space.  Vendor after vendor is trying to "one up" the other guy by promising more and more success with fewer and fewer services.  The latest, most glaring example, is the claim of total system success in just 5 days by one of our competitors.  Frankly, we are headed to the bottom when it comes to customer service in this space.

I have been serving the marketing community for over 12 years with our software.  I have met every type of organization, from small Midwestern hospitals to large global consumer brands.  The one thing they all had in common was the people in marketing within these organizations shared hectic jobs.  Marketing is a crazy profession with many of its' practitioners bouncing off the walls just to keep up.

The one thing I know a marketer and a marketing organization needs to be successful is great service from its' suppliers.  Frankly, they have no time for vendors that assume they, as marketers, have the time to become experts in the vendor’s field in just 5 days.   I laughed when I saw this claim.  Most marketing organizations cannot organize a meaningful meeting in 5 days less deploy an entire integrated marketing solution.  To me, it was the equivalent offer of:

- Learn to fly the latest fighter jets in just 5 days! 

(NOTE: instructor will not be willing to fly with you after 5 days, they value their life)

What is up with the lack of service in B2B?  How does the customer "win" by providing such little assistance to be successful?  Who believes this stuff?  Heck, there are some really nice pens that take me 5 days to get comfortable with, how does that work with an integrated software product that is suppose to transform the way you market your company?

The strange thing is, some people actually do believe these claims.  Some vendors actually dilute themselves into believing them as well.  That is where this gets dangerous for our industry because failure after failure hurts everyone, not just the vendors that raced to the bottom to make a quick sale.  They set marketers up to fail with technology, promoting the impression that technology "is the problem" rather than the solution.  In the meantime, the poor project teams that signed up to make this happen are slaughtered under the weight of non-success, embarrassing over budget requests to "recover", and the stigma of being duped.  This makes it all the harder for the next project to get started.

I hope the B2B space wakes up and realizes, as an industry, we need to solve some serious problems within marketing that requires serious software and active, real service to make it happen.  If we believe the technology that will propel marketing forward in B2B takes the equivalent of a new copier to fully understand, deploy, and be successful with, we are all in trouble.  If we reward vendors that flood the market with failure by allowing them to "sell" a total lack of service as a benefit, the industry as a whole suffers.

I hate to see an industry race to the bottom.  However, we face that reality in B2B demand generation unless some experienced people inside the customer community and inside the industry begin to stand up and say "enough is enough".  B2B needs service.  We are not selling and deploying mouse pads here.

 

Customers have “contact rights!” Unfortunately, not all marketers respect them, let alone optimize them for mutual benefit to brand and individual. Why not? I’m glad you asked, and I’ll start my answer with a very light definition of contact optimization.

 

Contact Optimization: A 1:1 marketer’s use of industry software to centralize business rules, constraints, and priorities and customer preferences that they can apply during a campaign segmentation to ensure the final target audience comprises only the individuals for whom that campaign represents the optimal mix of message, offer, time, and channel to meet current business objectives.

 

Answer: As optimized campaigns typically produce better results, I am somewhat perplexed as to why   we still have industry colleagues who do not use these tools in concert with their campaign management solutions. Here’s my thoughts about why I think they should use contact optimization solutions -- for reasons that benefit the professional, the company, the customer as well as industry peers:

 

•       Relevance: Show you know and listen to your customers, or you may pay the price. Yesterday’s overlooked marketing messages are today’s annoyance, as consumer apathy turns to anger and hostility.   Emerging communication venues like social networks can turn a “private” matter public in just a few minutes, weaving and leaving a wrath of brand bashing that will need to be silenced and reversed.

•       Accountability: Unwanted messages are, simply put, marketing resource waste. With increasing pressure to cut cost and grow revenue for maximum ROI, we have our marching orders. Management’s accountability mandate gives us license to optimize and an opportunity to move away from defending spend to championing and promoting its value. 

•       Responsibility: Keep the industry self-regulated.   We have had only a handful of regulations and restrictions imposed on us over the many decades of 1:1 marketing.   Key to a future with marketing freedom that mirrors our past is an ability to pro-actively adjust and align marketing strategies and tactics for mutual relationship benefit, as the customer perceives it. 

•       Reach: Prevent the creation of an email “postage stamp.” The big expense associated with off-line marketing tactics like direct mail and the complexities of a multi-channel marketing may have heavily influenced historical optimization solution use.   As more of us have shifted our emphasis to online communications, a low cost channel, we may not see the “benefits.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, as the email glut continually causes ISPs to develop new ways to filter and block emails. Perhaps they may even begin charging “postage” to reach the inbox.

•       B2B marketers are in need, too. As more B2B marketing organizations build marketing automation solutions with field enablement functionality, these firms will need to centralize contact rules and priorities to ensure that Sales and Marketing teams with access to the same pool of prospect and leads are aligned in their messages, offers, and treatments. With their focus on the integration of their demand generation and lead nurturing solution with their SFA tool, most B2B firms overlook the importance of establishing and automating contact management processes.

  

We have the means to not only respect customers’ marketing “rights,” but we have the duty to do so!  I can incorporate easily and efficiently the customers’ “rights” in my marketing strategies and tactics without compromising business performance. So can you! 

That question popped into my head today, as I read over online media stats about the number of individuals with access to the web, Facebook users, Linkedin accounts, YouTube visitors, and other data points on social and community networks.  I've worked in advertising so I started to think about the similarities (as well as differences) between the seemingly ubiquitous online media channel and one of its venerable well-known mass media counterparts like TV.  I wondered what the online "reach" equivalent would be to TV's Gross Rating Points and Total Rating Points (GRPs and TRPs, respectively), and in particular, how the online metric could be calculated with an increasingly fragmented audience with dimensional behaviors that include commerical email message forwarding, member site comments and/or content creation, viewing, sharing, etc.  

To succeed today, marketers must master the new "mass media" channel.  Why and how?

To the first question of why:  It is a question worth answering -- or trying to answer because companies are increasingly focused on it and ramping up their online spend.  That means 1:1 Marketers, like me, need new ways to break through the online clutter to get noticed and engaged with individuals to attain our goals.  

As to how: We need marketing automation solutions that support a more holistic multi-channel campaign management approach that includes additional online communication vehicles and tactics, some of which support 1:1 interactions and some that do not [directly, that is].   Here's my wish list for a multi-channel campaign management solution that gives me more end-to-end functionality, with the ability to better harness the power and value of the online channel.  This is just a start and not all-inclusive: (Of note, it will never be all inclusive, because the market continues to evolve, and so must my tools!)

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

With applications that enable and empower marketers to use a mix of 1:1 communications and online tactics marketers can execute and measure campaigns improve customer loyalty, increase your brand awareness, and accelerate time to inquiry or brand preference (e.g., visits to your web site, content downloads, agree to live chat, etc).  So...no, the internet is not truly a "mass media" channel, but it is the channel-of-choice so marketers need to expand their toolbox to include more than the traditional 1:1 tools.  Probably should think about an expandable toolbox...

As a child, I loved those wonderful childhood dot-to-dot books with pictures of puppies and other cute animals that kept me wondering what I'd end up with when I connected all the dots with my crayons?  Oh the anticipation...and the delight...when I guessed the animal before finishing the dots!  I'd finish and move onto painting it with watercolors!  But, alas, what happens when the dots are not correct, and do not connect properly?  I'll tell you -- aside from childhood disappointment, the watercolors leak out of the puppy image, as the gap in crayon that is supposed to contain it isn't there!  I've gotten over that.  It's a skill that plays well in B2B marketing...(you think it's stretch, but read on)
 
There's a lot of leaky sales pipelines that needs to be plugged!!  That is, their "dots" need to connected!  Puppy pictures are one thing, but missed revenue from lost leads is quite another!

I, like many Marketers, use lead management automation (LMA) platforms to nurture and qualify leads, which includes the use of demand generation and interactive marketing campaigns with "built in" lead scoring routines.  Marketers need to connect these "dots!"  Many still don't!  I know that there are many sources of "missed dot connections," but two stand out in my mind:

1) Multichannel Campaign Management solutions + SFA tools = LMA.  This seems to the "norm," as it takes advantage of the inherent functional strengths of each.  Too many firms underestimate or simply struggle with how best to integrate them to achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Data- or application-level integration?  It takes time and careful planning to define and develop a solution that meets the needs of the user and stakeholder communities while minimizing compromises that could eventually lead to leaks.

2) Lead Scoring.  There are still many B2B marketing organizations that focus heavily on demand generation and very little time on lead nurturing or scoring.  They still use blast email tactics, and hope they have a few nibbles (i.e., responses) for follow-up.  Problem here is that a lead score or historical information (e.g., past promotions, responses, and behaviors) is not factored into a current campaign.  So... it may not be picked up for a new campaign, or simply gets lost in the audience and does not advance because of misaligned messaging or offers.  Leaky lead qualification processes.

Is your LMA complete, like mine?  Or, are your lead nurturing picture missing some "dot" connections?  What can you do to fix it?

Let's face it, a lot of us feel we are pretty smart and that we can pick up new tools on our own.  That search engine managment tool cannot be that different from Excel right?  Just point us in the right direction and we will figure it out.  I will admit to falling into this trap more than once.  Have you?

Need a hint?  Do you never read the manuals on our home appliances/electronics because you can figure it out by yourself.

But then a friend comes over one day and picks up the remote for your DVR, pushes a couple buttons and makes something happen you did not know was possible.  You are amazed and ask "How did you do that !?!" and your friend replies "I read about it in the manual."

Beware! I have seen how this bit of "ego" can cause real harm when it comes to using demand generation or marketing resource management software applications.  Especially in the more functionally rich features like email and microsite builders, web analytics tools, collateral customization, or marketing project management.

We all want to assume that once we are taught the basics, we can figure out the rest on our own.  So, rather than attend real training or read the help manual, we poke around on our own and see what we can figure out.  The real risk with this is that you probably will "figure out" how to make that content block in an email be a "rules based" dynamic content block. You feel pretty good and give yourself a pat on the back.  What you do not realize  is that there were four other ways to have approached that same problem and three of them were much simpler or better than the way you "figured out" how to do it. 

Even worse, you are proud of what you learned so you share it with others in your company.  Over time, these bad practices get passed on from one user to another and pretty soon your whole team is doing things inefficiently or even just plain wrong without realizing it.  Everyone thinks that is just the way you have to do it. 

Over the years, I have had many instances where a customer complained to me about how difficult it was do something in our software only to find out they doing it completely wrong and were unaware of the other much simpler options.

Enthusiam and a positive attitude are wonderful when working with software applications but you must be open to asking questions and getting help from the experts when its needed.

 

As CMO, Arthur combines her expertise in CRM Applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) and customer-driven marketing with Aprimo’s leadership in Marketing Software. 

Aprimo® Inc., a leading global provider of on-demand marketing software solutions, announced that it is enhancing its management team with the addition of Chief Marketing Officer, Lisa Arthur.

"Lisa is an outstanding addition to our Aprimo team,” said co-founder and CEO Bill Godfrey. “Lisa is laser focused on customers and market-driven strategies to drive value and growth. This, combined with her expertise in branding, on-demand strategy and demand generation, is a great complement to Aprimo and our intense focus on helping marketers improve their effectiveness, efficiencies and their shareholder value. We are excited to have Lisa join the Aprimo team.”

Arthur has over 25 years of global leadership experience, achieving high marketing metrics for large technology companies including Oracle & Akamai Technologies. As the VP of Global CRM- Marketing for Oracle, Arthur was able to carve the company's entry into the CRM market in the late 90s, and grow Oracle to become a leading applications provider. Arthur also led Oracle's Services Marketing group, and was responsible for re-positioning and driving triple digit growth in the Software as a Service market. Arthus then joined Akamai as CMO, steering market strategies and positioning, invigorating the brand and helping Akamai grow from $160 million to over $300 million in annual revenue. 

Most recently, in a quest to improve the traction of marketing within high-tech companies, Arthur co-founded Cinterim, a San Francisco-based company offering Interim Chief Marketing Officer Services to small to mid-sized companies. In that role, she helped drive market creation, positioning and strategies for several start-ups and Fortune 20 companies.

As CMO for Aprimo, Arthur assumes immediate responsibility for its overall market strategy, branding, demand generation, and Marketing ROI optimization.

 “Aprimo is the best kept secret in Marketing and I'm thrilled to be on the executive team of the world's best marketing software company. I will be working globally with our customers to better understand how they are leveraging Aprimo to run some of the most sophisticated and innovative marketing programs on the planet,” said Arthur. “And then my goal will be to share with the world how the best marketers capitalize on the power and capabilities of Aprimo.”

Arthur is a seasoned key note speaker on topics including, but not limited to Web 2.0, CRM strategies, SEO optimization, new product strategy, and brand identity. Subscribe to Lisa's blog to read more about her and her marketing thought leadership.

 

Ok, so my core compentency is NOT marketing.   It's sales.  And I have never, ever worked in any other capacity for a marketing professional software company until now.  In my opinion marketing has always been behind the car, not  the wheel, when it comes to generating quality leads for sales people.  Can I get an Amen on that?  

My dad had always said that the best way to ensure getting the job done right is doing it yourself and when it comes to finding viable opportunities in the market place I have always depended on....yours truly.  However, with the onslaught of new technologies and forms of communication getting more and more fragmented, (text me....google me...find me on facebook...you know all the social media tools out there!) I have had to retool my strategy of finding great leads by adding in the mix one of my old true blue favorites....the phone.

Yes, at Aprimo, we are a fully integrated marketing powerhouse. At the end of the day, the one-on-one relationship over the phone is what often times drives our understanding of what kind of information we need to present and when we need to present it to our prospects, online.

The key to success in the B2B lead/demand generation sphere is knowing who you are trying to reach - meaning that their job title is not necessarily an indicator of what they do and there are many sources to assist you in doing a quick search....which I will go into later.  Most importantly, when you reach out to someone via the phone, make your message a quick and succinct touchpoint that gives them a compelling reason to either speak to you then or return your call if you have to leave a voicemail.

The great part about using the phone is that based on the dialog you can quickly collect information that can be used in your CRM to market back to your prospects and most importantly you can gain their permission to stay in touch.  By the way, does your company demand it's sales reps to use the CRM? Ours doesn't, and it seems to really affect how we deal with our prospects.

Creating excitement for your website and having people download whitepapers, case studies, podcasts or webinars is great. What further compliments the online experience is the personal interaction that provides you a better understanding of your prospect -through tone and inflection - this affords you insights into their interests relative to your offerings. 

So, what do you use to compel your prospects to continue to stay in touch with your organization?
....

It's the same old story we have been telling every week:
Your resources are shrinking every day, yet Sales is asking for more and better prospects in the sales funnel.  You're trying to stretch your collateral out to last through the end of the year, and you're trying desperately to show ROI in marketing post campaign. 
You have one more event this year, and are getting a lot of pressure to cancel, since ROI is so difficult to measure. 
So, do you go to the event, deplete your tiny budget even more, taking the chance that nothing good will come of it but the stories from Sales about late night escapades???

Turn to Aprimo Marketing Studio, silly!!

Stick a banner ad on the conference website, and watch the click-throughs to your landing page.  Push out those emails to the pre-conference attendee list, and watch them show up in real time to your site.  And, manage your conference activities and expenditures down to the penny by utilizing online management software.

Go ahead, go to the event.  Just be sure to manage your activities, your collateral, your campaigns and your demand generation efforts online, then go Twitter about it!!!