In my last post, I introduced our Imperatives for the Marketeing Revolution.  I'm taking each of these and proviing a B2B perspective. So, here's the second imperative - The CMO Must be the Change Agent.

For the past few decades B2B Marketing has largely played the role of support to sales. They tend to be largely task-oriented and focused on providing sales tools and feeding the sales pipeline to an ever-changing quality standard defined by the sales organization. However, B2B marketing can’t look to sales to change what they demand from the marketing department. Marketing, and in particular, the CMO has to drive this change. The objective isn’t to finally get out from under the rule of sales. Rather, the goal is to step up next to sales and jointly define a combined marketing and sales process that will align from the marketing messaging through the sales messaging delivered to qualified prospects. The change associated with this will permeate the organization and require strong leadership and joint visioning with sales leadership. This level of change and leadership needs to come from your CMO. 

I had the pleasure of meeting with a former boss today to talk about the ins-and-outs of B2B data management, including off- and on-line information.  I've never met another person quite like Mike (I'll call him Mike here) who gets really giddy about addresses, or more specifically, the processes used to improve their accuracy and quality:

• convert and parse
• standardize components
• correct
• enhance
• update

The improvements in the address data, in turn, lead to improvements in merge-purge - that dedupe process that consolidates all the sources of information about an individual to produce a 360-degree customer (or prospect view) for marketing.  

Maybe you're thinking... but most B2B marketing is online, why do I need address processing anymore?Yes, the majority of B2B communications are digital, but without address information you will struggle to:

• append firmographic information from industry files
• match to industry master lists to tie parent and child records together
• link individuals at the same company site
• match to industry data assets to standardize company name
• assign Sales reps by geography (unless you require Zip Code at the time of registration) 
• link revenue to marketing efforts

Most importantly, however, is the importance of quality address data to create the single customer and/or customer view, which remains a huge challenge for many B2B marketers.  And the challenge is only getting bigger with the continued expansion of data available for use.  Everything B2B marketers do is better when the data are accurate -- campaign segmentations, interactive email dialogs, lead management and results analysis.

It's been a while since I've been in the B2C and B2B data management trenches like Mike, and they've made some real strides in helping B2B organizations improve the quality of their marketing data.  

Here's another little advancement:  Linking home address to work address.  It's not out of reach!  With home address, the data available to you about the individual grows exponentially.  Isn't it an exciting time to be in B2B marketing!? 

Let me know what your biggest data management challenges are.  I guess I get a little giddy about address data, too.  I learned from the best.  (Thanks, Mike.)

cg

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.

Note:  Few people know this, but Aprimo offers an excellent Lead Management system as part of its Multichannel Campaign Management capabilities.  I have personal experience implementing it for a few happy B-to-B marketing customers.  Aprimo Lead Management functionality includes a lead portal to view and screen leads, an integration with Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications like Salesforce.com, territory lead assignment rules to assign leads to sales, a method to score leads, and a process flow designer to define how leads are managed and routed.  It is designed for marketers to collect prospect information and generate leads for the sales team.  This blog discusses one element of Aprimo Lead Management: lead scoring and lead quality.  Now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry . . .

Anytime marketing delivers leads to sales, there seems to be an age old conflict where sales complains that the marketing leads are not good enough and marketing says sales is not working the marketing leads hard enough, or at all.  In sales' defense, and I hate defending sales, marketing does collect a lot of leads, often from any response to a web form, and throws the leads over the wall to sales.  In marketing's defense, marketing is often incented and measured based on the quantity of leads generated - not quality.  This troubled relationship may be a product of out-of-sync objectives and performance metrics.  Aren't we all really just working within our little mazes to find the fastest and easiest way to the cheese?  That was a rhetorical question, and the answer is yes.

Lead scoring is considered a way to remedy this issue - at least a way for marketing to generate better quality leads.  The lead score is a numeric value built from a couple of types of information - profile and historical activity information.  Profile information is information about the contact or the company like title (VP, CEO, CFO, Manager) and industry vertical (technology, financial services, healthcare, etc.) and company size (greater than 1000 employees).   Historical activity information includes the contacts past web form responses and even past web site page visits.  The historical activity score can increment higher based on each web site visit to a product page or a past request for a white paper or even a specific response to a set of qualifying questions on a web form.  When the lead score goes beyond a specified threshold, based on both profile information (best fit) and history (most interest), a lead is generated for the product category of interest.

In theory and in practice if the score is built well, the higher the score then the better qualified the lead.  The contacts from the best verticals and departments with the best titles will be scored higher then the contacts from poor verticals, unrelated departments, and with inappropriate titles.  Also, the contacts that have answered qualifying questions favorably will be given higher scores then those who did not.  Contact that have recently attended a webinar or downloaded a whitepapers, filled out a form, and/or browsed the corporate web site will be score higher than someone whe just filled out a web form.


Challenges to consider when implementing lead scoring

The number of leads generated will initially go down.  I will let you in on a little secret regarding scoring leads that my clients are often surprised about when it actually happens.  If you currently send most all your marketing responses out as leads to sales, after you implement a lead scoring system the number of leads will go down.  It will go down because you went from little to no qualifying criteria to a set of more stringent qualifying rules to build the lead score that must be met before the prospect can qualify.  Lead volumes can return to the previous levels if your marketing activity increases to compensate for the tougher qualification. 

A previous client was unsuccessful implementing a lead scoring system, but not lead management, because of this issue concerning lead volume decrease.  This marketing organization was measured and incented on generating a specific number of leads per campaign and generating a specific volume of leads per quarter.  The lead scoring system started to drop these volumes.  Because of this drop, the marketing department quickly abandoned the lead scoring system because it did not allow them to meet their metrics for the number of leads generated in a campaign or quarter.  Even the sales organization was part to blame here, because sales had become dependent on these higher lead volumes and was staffed to handle a flood of leads.  They were also incented, trained, and accustomed to churning quickly through a bunch of suspect leads.  So, any drop in lead volumes with an improvement in quality would also mean that sales would have to alter their staffing plans and how their sales team works leads.

How can you manage this?  Prepare the organization for the quality of leads to go up and the quantity of leads to go down.  Revise target metrics for marketing leads generated down while increasing the quality metric targets up like percent qualified, contacted, interested, opportunities generated, and closed sales.  Manage change within the sales organization to start working leads differently to work every lead, spend more time on each lead with more contact attempts and time invested per lead, and provide better notes or information on each lead.  Also, make up for the smaller volumes of better qualified leads with sales follow-up calls for marketing campaigns and seminar and event drives.

Lead generation qualification will become more complex.  If you are an organization that offers a wide rage of products across numerous categories, lead scoring may be more complex for you to implement.  The reason for this is around how you score historical activity.  If prospect "Mr. A" downloads a white paper for product Z in category M and then fills out a form expressing an interest in product X in category O, then what will "Mr. A's" lead score be and will a lead be generated for product Z and or category M or for product X and or category O?  There is no right answer here - so it depends on your rules.  That is what makes lead scoring complex.

To remedy this, generate marketing leads specific to a product or product category, then you will want to track activity like white papers downloaded, demos downloaded, webinars attended to a specific to a product or product category and lead score.  In a nutshell, you would not want to generate a lead for sprockets because that was the last web form the prospect filled out after they have been researching widgets for 3 months.  They should be contacted regarding widgets.

How can you manage this?  If you have a small number of products or product categories, then you can probably build separate historical activity component of the lead score by product or product category.  If you have lots of products and a few product categories, then create a few historical activity lead scores by product category.  In situations where there is way too many products or product categories, then consider building the historical activity component of the lead score on demand.  For example, Mr. A responds to a marketing campaign for product Z.  Build the score from Mr. A's profile, from his current web form responses plus add a query to look at historical activity for the same product or product category in the last 30 - 90 days.  The historical activity component increases with the amount of recent activity for the same type of product.

Another prositive effect of the ad hoc building of the historical activity score is that the lead is created in the context of a campaign and for a specific product or effort.  Lead scoring is often divorced from any specific campaign, because a lead could be generated from activities or responses across many campaigns.  This is challenging when you want to report which campaign generates more leads than another.  The ad hoc building of the score per campaign still tightly associates the campaign with the response and subsequently the lead while allowing the marketer the capability to impute interest based on past responses for the same or similar products.

Other things you can try first to improve lead quality to sales
First, reduce duplicate leads for the same contact.  Aprimo automatically merges duplicates. but many systems treat each response as a separate lead and contact.  Buy Aprimo or add a merge and duplicate reduction system to your prospect to lead processing.

Second, make sure all leads have the minimum required contact information.  Any leads passed to sales should have some minimum required information like name, email address, and phone number.  There is a trade off here, the more information that you require then the lower the response.  But the more information that you require, the higher the quality except for bogus entries like Mickey Mouse.  At least look at the amount of information provided as an element of the lead score (quality score) with the score going higher as the profile information is fully populated.  If you can ask for name and address information and validate the address - that is an even better indicator of quality.

Third, create and use your qualifying questions and definitely score the qualifying questions. If someone says that they have a budget and he or she has to make a decision in 30 days make sure you score this so that these leads are immediately sent to sales.  Talk to sales and let them tell you what qualifying question responses should be sent to sales immediately and which ones should be nurtured.  Also, when someone says that they are making a decision in 9 months or a year, then send them an email 3 months before that time to see if they would like to talk with a sales professional or change their level of interest.

This last point is going to seem obvious, but hey doesn't most everything I write about here seem obvious after you read it.   Fourth, do not create a lead for a prospect's first response.  Duh.  Unless the individual answers a qualifying question high enough on their first web form, do not send them immediately to sales to become a lead.  Look for some minimal level of activity over the last 30 - 90 days.  So, make sure the individual has demonstrated a pattern of activity over time that shows they are really interested before creating a lead for that person.

In closing
I can't promise you that if you implement lead scoring or any of the above steps to improve lead quality that the sales people will start inviting you out to their summer homes or boats.  However, marketing should take steps to improve lead quality and take the emphasis off of lead quantity.  Also, you might be wondering what do you do with all those other prospects that responded but did not qualify to become a lead.  Well, these known prospects have provided you with product preference information and contact information for marketing to keep nurturing them until they are ready to talk with sales.  Aprimo is designed to maintain these prospects and maintain a dialogue with them until the prospect self-qualifies as a lead.  Good hunting.

Not that we needed any more data points, but Adobe's planned purchase of Omniture is further validation of the alignment of web analytics in the marketing process.  Interactive marketers already know that web analytics is a key technology to understand prospect and customer behavior and ultimately tie conversion events (lead quality, sales) back to the underlying acquisition and engagement strategies that drove the results.  Yes, the holy grail of closed-loop ROI reporting...

Aprimo Marketing Studio leverages the power of best-of-breed web analytics tools to fully integrate web analytics into the campaign planning and execution process.   Aprimo Marketing Studio can integrate into all web analytics tool but has a deep, API level integration with Omniture.

Omniture's web analytics system (Site Catalyst) and search marketing software (Search Center) are accessible directly from the Marketing Studio interface giving users access to the full functionality of these industry-leading online optimization technologies. 

Wow.  I just read this great article on the effectiveness of Social Media specifically Facebook and it made me realize the vast possibilities for my organization. Take a minute to read Facebook's frighteningly impressive ad potential and see what I mean.  I realize this article is geared more for the B2C then the B2B but I think that is changing even as we speak. 

Yes, social media marketing is one piece of the pie, yet tying it to specific offline activity is key.  As a marketer responsible for Lead Generation, it is one thing to get alot of leads but it is quite another to actually have the majority of those leads be highly qualified. My goal is to create a healthy sales funnel and consequent sales pipeline.   Now, with lead scoring every lead you receive can be a high quality lead.  So, when will we initiate trigger marketing based on where someone goes on our Facebook or website?  Now is the answer!

What is cool is the ability to send a person a highly personal communique which then links out to a specific microsite or purl.  They get to then be engaged with marketing content relevant to them and all the while we are scoring them on thier behavior and determining our next line of communication.  Kind of like predicitive modeling.  Yes, digital marketing has taken on a whole new life and it is time to join the fun but don't just jump in, be deliberate, methodical and open to change.  Make sure your technology for karketing is the best... meaning use a robust, easy to use marketing software tool.  We use Aprimo Marketing Studio and love it.  What do you use?

I was recently harvesting vegetables from my backyard garden and got to thinking about how my physical plant nurturing is a little like lead management.  With the right effort expended, I could produce both quality and quantity of the "things" that I desired.  In the case of my garden, I want a lot of high quality, fresh vegetables to eat and share with my family and neighbors.  For marketing, I want to drive as many qualified leads as I can for Sales.  Of course, I want to do all of this efficiently -- i.e., keep costs low and production high!

I am certainly wise enough to know that a gardener's tools are not going to work well in lead management! Kidding aside, we can confidently say that both need tools, and importantly, they each need the right tool for the right purpose.  Just as a gardener would not use a bulb dibber to weed, a B2B marketer would not (or would he/she?) use a SFA (sales force automation) application to execute continuously running interactive lead nurturing and scoring campaigns, which require defined business rules to run against dimensional data (i.e., historical depth within and across individual records) sourced from both off- and online behaviors.  Crazy, isn't it? 

I know.  I know.  But you'd be surprised to know how many B2B firms first try to plan, execute, and measure centralized or corporate marketing campaigns from their SFA system, only to find -- quickly, I might add, that they cannot easily (if at all) create,, manage, and measure the effectiveness of the marketing content they need (e.g., dynamic, highly personalized email messages, pre-populated inbound response forms, and microsites).   And, although I've encountered many companies trying this approach, I have not seen the "reverse."  In other words, I haven't seen many trying to use a multichannel marketing and lead management solution to support their sales process. 

Instead, what I have seen and continue to see is companies that want marketing campaign and lead management solutions to integrate with their SFA tool of choice.  The integration combines the functional strengths of each to make a whole marketing and sales solution that is greater than the sum of its parts!  (Is that anything like hybrid vegetables where the best traits of each are combined to make a "whole" that is better?  I'll have to ask my sister, the Biology and Chem teacher who worked summers at a national seed company who did some of that plant mingling...)

Funny thing is... firms have been trying to do everything with their SFA applications for years, and there's probably many who do it and are content with their results [that which they can measure].  Even so, for every one of them, there is a factor of X more that submit RFIs and RFPs each year to marketing campaign and lead management companies looking for solutions that "easily integrate" to other applications, namely SFA systems. 

Well, it's been fun thinking and talking about the similarities between my hobby and my work.  Is it any wonder why I love both, as the yield can be great -- quality and quantity -- when approached with the right tools for the right purpose!  Must go pick some tomatoes...

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?
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