This is the third in my series of how the Imperatives of the Marketing Revoloution apply toBusiness-to-Business (B2B) marketing.  This imperative is titled "Let Go, Customers Control Your Brand." 

It could be said that this has been the case all along.  In reality, the customer's opinion of your company is always what has driven your brand.  The major difference is the level of communication from customer to customer versus vendor to customer has changed the game.  In the past, a strong marketing organization to influence the opinion of the market regarding their brand by controlling the message and the references and testimonials.  That is no longer the case...social marketing has ended any aspect of control by a vendor.  Now all of your references and realities are out there for the market to learn and understand.

So, how do you respond as a B2B Marketer?  The same way you need to respond to anything these days - with the truth.  What is important for you to do is make sure that the truth is good news.  So, what is important is for you to listen to prospects and customers needs and provide a solution with vision that addresses those needs.  Customers and prospects can articulate their issues and challenges (it's the rare customer that can provide feedback to the design of a product, however).  You need to apply creativity and innovation to addressing those issues and challenges.

The market will buy on message for a while.  There's a groundswell of evidence that many current b2b marketers are not realizing the vision of nurture marketing and lead scoring.  Customers are still buying but expect some lash back in the lead management arena soon.  Customers cannot keep up with the volume of content required for lead nurturing and this is preventing them from realizing the value that vendors have promised. I think it's similar to adding automation at the end of a manufacturing process but not setting up your materials and purchasing.   You can ramp marketing volume without setting up your whole marketing process to support the volume...but I digress. 

So, let's test this theory.  Will customers start to speak up about these issues (it means admitting struggles publicly so that part will be interesting)?  Will any of the "hot" lead management brands start to suffer from this lack of success? 

Here's a link to the previous posts -

1. Marketing Must be Accountable
2. The CMO as a Change Agent

 

If you have the data, there’s tremendous value in segmenting. In fact, a recent JupiterResearch study found that engaging your audiences in more relevant communications increases net profits by an average of 18 times more than broadcast mailings. Any bit of segmenting from your data will help. You may have gleaned customer information directly from online forms; or you’re collecting behavioral data from PPC search activity or through your website analytics platform by visiting trending data. Whatever the case, it’s invaluable to the success of your communications – whether it’s your monthly newsletter or an on-going nurture campaign.

Start by making each email count by implementing email marketing best practices. Here are 3 primary steps you can take to increase your email’s ROI:

1.  Be relevant and personal. The basics here are tried and true: Talk to your customers the way they want to be talked to; know their purchase history and timing. 1 to 1 Media’s 2009 Direct Marketing Survey found that Relevancy improved click-thrus by 53%. And for Pete’s sake, don’t annoy by over-emailing.
2.  Try advanced segmentation. While the basics help a lot, try something beyond your comfort zone to see if you can score major lifts. Things to try: gender, location, hobbies, type of company (for b2b). Keep splitting your lists. There are plenty of tools out there to help with this.
3.  Engage new customers. Sounds obvious but many marketers miss this crucial step. You have a very small window of opportunity with new visitors; make sure you give them your best, and most welcoming, shot. Find something that new visitors value – research, analyst reports, intriguing white papers, case studies with real data for example.

Once you’ve started, take segmentation as far as your data allows.  One motorcycle company used segmentation to create new lists based on riding styles, then further divided those segments into lists based on purchase history and email behaviors. Their new, highly targeted email campaign achieved DOUBLE the open rates (38.6%, up from 18.5%), and TRIPLE the clickthroughs. (20.6% from 6.2%.)

Not only does segmentation allow you to drive a more personalized message that leads to higher performance, by segmenting on previous response history you can reduce your actual email sending costs simply by sending to the smaller, more qualified list.

 A customer who is communicated to in just the right way earns your trust. And that’s the ultimate success. So start being smart about using your data to really relate to your customer. As an added bonus, you’re sure to reduce your costs and increase your ROI.
 

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.

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there in marketing land, the real world from my technology vendor land, about how to get the best return from your Multichannel Campaign Management (MCM) system.  Just to be clear, this MCM super category includes list selection, eMarketing,  email marketing, and lead management functionality.

Insanity
They say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.  This is the same with MCM.  If you market the same way after implementing MCM as you did before implementing it, you are not going to get significantly improved results just because you have a system now.

Your marketing has to change to take advantage of the strengths of the MCM system.  For example, a marketing department that performs a lot of small ad hoc or one off campaigns and then continues to perform a lot of ad hoc and one off campaigns after the implementation will not enjoy any significant efficiency gains from MCM.  The marketing department  will just be doing the same marketing in a new system.  Sure, the marketing department will be more organized and eventually gain some productivity improvements, but not the double digit percentage improvement that was projected in the business case.


How can you get more value from your MCM implementation?

1. Automate.  Start thinking about what marketing programs can run unattended or automated.   MCM is your never tiring, unrelenting, marketing cyborg that will keep chugging until the chip is ripped from its server.   Leverage this capability as much as possible.  Good candidates for automation include - New Customer programs, eShopping Cart abandonment programs, automated information request, eFulfillment of white papers and newsletters, eSurvey marketing programs, lapsed customer programs, lead nurturing or research, alerts, renewals, new product notices, etc. 

2. Communicate.  Stop thinking about marketing in increments of a single email or touch point and automate the entire communication plan across all marketing channels.  The overhead of lots of one off emails or mailing pieces makes these small campaigns inefficient.  Also, your marketing can improve if you change from singleton efforts to having an ongoing conversation with your customers.  This multi-touch communication process through repetition makes your target customers gradually more aware of your company and more comfortable with your marketing.  They retain your message better, and it gives them more opportunities to respond.  This all adds up to improved response at lower cost.  Many MCM systems are designed to run these types of multi-touch programs.

3.  Consolidate and Integrate.  In with the new and out with the old.  If you want immediate efficiency gains for your marketing team, think of the many diverse systems with which your team interacts daily or weekly that can be eliminated and replaced with one marketing platform (cough, like Aprimo).  This is simple math, each redundant system eliminated also eliminates the costs of supporting the systems - licensing, support and maintenance, and administration costs. 

Also, look at systems that your marketing team must update that often require manual effort or double entry.  These systems are great candidates for integration.  Think of the time that could be saved by eliminating the double entry of invoices, the manual uploading of leads in the SFA system, the manual loading of lists into a campaign from other internal marketing data sources and/or the manual uploading of offers into your customer service system.  With a few targeted integration projects, you can make your team more efficient.  MCM systems, those based on a marketing platform, can become your integrated marketing information hub.  Hah!  You can't do that in a spreadsheet.

4. Personalize-ate.  Okay, I could not think of another word ending in ate.  MCM systems provide marketing greater access to your data and it is designed to deliver more personalized content.  I am not talking about just being able to slap a first or last name in the email text or put in a different picture in an email based on the customer's demographic.  That personalization is very cool and powerful.  The personalization that I am talking about is more about getting personal with your customers. 

MCM offers you greater access to your customer data, especially transaction data like purchases or web visits.  Use it to answer questions about your customers.  What products or product categories does your customer purchase most often?  What did they purchase last year during the Christmas season? When do they purchase?  Did they stop purchasing?  What do they view on your web site most often?  Did they move or change titles recently?  Answer these questions and others to better target your customers with the right message and offers.  Also, build models and scores using tools like SPSS/IBM Modeler to mine for hard to find patterns in your data.  Access this wealth of customer behavior with your MCM system to deliver more personal and relevant messages to your customers.


Don't Procrastinate.  These headings are getting a little silly.  Good news.  This is the last one.  Start planning now for how your future multichannel campaign management system will allow you to do more and make more.  Or, if you already have an MCM system, think of ways to further leverage its capabilities to your company's benefit.  There are so many opportunities to gain value from an MCM system, now just do it.

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?

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?

How are you handling your leads currently?  Is your lead managment process working well for you?  Are your leads winning the battle or are you winning the leads?

Marketing professionals reach out to us asking to hear more about our Lead Automation Management functionality, saying they are swamped and overwhelmed with leads and are trying to find a best practice to address them. 

We have prospects - who are now our customers - that have come to us with just that one business concern.  They didn't need anything huge......they simply needed to solve their problem....What to do with all those leads?  They might have leads from events, leads from their websites, leads from lists, and more.  I've heard questions like:  How do I determine which ones to handle first?  How do I keep from having duplicates?  How do I know if I'm passing out duplicates to my sales team?  How do I best organize them so they are manageable?  How do I track them?  How do I score them?

Aprimo has marketing management software to make you the unquestionable winner in the Lead Management arena.  Let us know if you are overwhelmed in your current processes of trying to manage your leads and lead scoring.  We would love to help. 

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...

As I cruise along at 24,000 feet on my way to the Gartner CRM event I can’t help but appreciate the complexity of air travel.  Cram 130 people into a metal cylinder and fling them from Indianapolis to Phoenix.  Repeat thousands and thousands of time around the world every day. How do they make this a successful and repeatable process?  One key is automation.

For example, autopilot allows the intelligence of the airplane systems to automatically perform operations so the pilot doesn't have to.  Autopilot lets systems and software take care of the ‘normal’ activities a pilot would go through to fly along at cruising altitude.  I’m sure autopilot was complicated to program and test but the result of that effort is hugely beneficial.  

Many companies have no autopilot equivalent for any facet of marketing.  “Marketing needs to be high touch” or “Outbound Marketing is too complex to automate” they might say.    My guess is that if we found a way to automate the intricacies of keeping a plane aloft at 30,000 feet we can probably automate some of the processes marketing is doing manually today.

One significant autopilot capability for Marketing is triggered dialogs.  Triggered dialogs give marketing the ability to pre-define a series to steps to take for a given person that matches a certain criteria.  Here are some real-world customer examples of utilizing triggered dialogs:

• Automatically respond to a website whitepaper request with the selected content.
• Automatically follow-up with a prospect two-weeks after a sales call.
• Automatically send reminders to attendees of an upcoming webinar.
• Automatically route leads against lead score thresholds to the appropriate team

The real power of triggered dialogs comes in the ability to chain steps together into a full customer communication workflow.  Do this, then do this, then check this and if this...do this, or else do this.  Marketing can pre-determine responses, time intervals, and actions but it’s the customer or the prospect then driving the process based on their actions, their timeline, and their data.

Triggered dialogs help marketing automate regular, recurring, standard processes which improves efficiency AND improves the customer experience.  Now the system can respond as soon as a event is identified.  These ‘dialogs’ can be simple one step automated responses or sophisticated lead nurturing campaigns that walk a prospect through dozens of steps over a period of months.

Just as a plane autopilot hasn't (yet?) replaced the human pilots, triggered dialogs don’t eliminate the need for marketers to truly understand and adjust to their prospect and customer interactions.  But software, like the triggered dialog functionality of Aprimo Marketing Studio, can help marketers automate many of those interactions.   Marketers can focus on the important campaign planning take-offs and landings and let the system automate the work at cruising altitude.

So, nice move Kanye.  Take the only moment a young kid, Taylor Swift, has to be truly thankful, make a huge assumption that Beyonce' was overlooked for an award at the MTV Awards and make yourself a PR nightmare.  My dad has always said, "Go Big or Go Home."  Well, Kanye, you went big, and you went Splat!

I have got to tell you though, this is how I think marketers treat us, as consumers on the Internet. They think they have this whole 'Internet Marketing thing' figured out. They can make wide sweeping, huge behavior assumptions about us based on some random response history we have provided and TADA, we get hit with tons of online marketing and social media marketing.  

The good news is, there are companies that are great at predictive behavior modeling through multichannel marketing.  I love that software companies can help marketers quickly identify the keywords their market is using and then apply Pay Per Click (PPC) Management and lead scoring to determine those in market. 

No need to make assumptions any more, huh?  Geez, Kanye...just think...if you had to do things over again, would you do them differently?  

Yes, working for Aprimo, a fully integrated marketing powerhouse, one would think we have it all figured out but the truth is, we don't!  Now, why is that you might ask.  Well, for starters, this thing called "Interactive" is continually changing and that means that the bullseye is on the move. I can tell you that we are closer and closer to the mark these days regardless of where it moves because using our own product that has given us the ability to 'predict' where the market will go.

Wow, I said it, but it's true.  I love, love, love coming to work in the morning and looking at our site traffic through our web analytics software and seeing where our traffic is coming from and what prospects are looking at on our site.  I can even tie the activity directly back to person, too!  Now, that's cool. 

Remember what I said about the phone in a previous blog?  Well, take it a step further and confirm your prospects needs around the activity you saw and for me that is mostly around Pay Per Click Management, Search Engine Advertising and Microsite Building tools.  This sort of insight makes it so much easier for me to strike up a conversation and make the appointment.  

What my prospects really dig is the fact that I call into their department and know exactly where thier interests lie because I am simply confirming their activity.  They love it!! 

Even our Net Promoter scores go up for existing clients, too.  Hey, do you guys use this tactic in your lead generation efforts?