Marketing Lead Management

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.

Thanks to Joel and James for a thought-provoking event on Wednesday - Pull Marketing, Social CRM and Influencer Marketing - Twitter Tag #b2b21c

Stephen Mills from O2 advised that you only have 4 seconds to capture interest so RELEVANCY is key if you want to drive campaign results.

Given the volume of communications that we are all trying to manage, you can see why Marketing Management Technology is so popular right now.

Will Schnabel explored the shift of power from vendor to buyer in the sales process - the hunted become the hunters and use multiple channels to inform themselves (Tom Chapman advised that 1 in 5 tweets mentions a brand, product or service). With 70% of leads not being "ready now", event trigger marketing and lead automation are no longer optional tools for the B2B marketer.

Katie and Pamela from Volume informed us that 69% B2B decision makers use social networks and 90% participate in video - thanks for sharing the Oracle case study on Enterprise Performance Management TV.

David Beard re-enforced the message that Sage don't just do finance software! They are doing a great job "keeping the conversation going" around their CRM solutions and interacting with any interest they observe.

"Too much noise" was the message from James Hanson. Every prospect you are speaking to is likely to have at least 5 influencers. Empathy is key - understand what drives the influencers and adapt your marketing plans accordingly. Thanks to Drew Nicholson for sharing the influencer experience at Cisco Webex.

Great energy from Prof Merlin Stone. Are we approaching a tipping point similar to the explosion of telephone marketing 20 years ago? Web 2 has given the customer parity with the supplier this time. Hyper-competition makes planning very difficult - best to be guided by how you would like your customers to talk about you.

A stimulating debate, led by Scot Mckee from Birddog and Steve Kemish from Cyance, forced us to consider whether traditional forms of B2B marketing were dead and that we all need to migrate to digital. Despite protestations from Joel, the panel - and audience - migrated to the middle ground and the much maligned word "Integration".

Guess I'll have to be careful about how much I reference the ability to integrate all your marketing efforts in Aprimo Marketing Studio!

During a recession you not only have to compete against your regular competitors, you must also fight the most dreaded enemy of all—no decision! During tough economic times the only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have to work twice as hard to close the same amount of business as before. Therefore, you must ramp up your campaign management efforts accordingly.

RFM and data mining help you find a subset of your customers that are most likely to react/respond to your marketing campaigns (personalized emails/microsites, direct mails, call center, etc.).  By targeting ONLY those likely to respond, you achieve about the same response/sales at a fraction of the cost.


Aprimo's Multichannel Campaign Management and Data Miner solutions provide the tools you need to survive and even flourish in the current economy.  No data miners on staff? Simple RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) can help you increase response rates and overall campaign performance.  The notion is those that bought most recently, purchase more frequently, and have spent the most, are your best prospects for future marketing campaigns.

If you're a B2B marketer, Aprimo Lead Manager (LM) can automate the nuturing and scoring of your prospects until they qualify for "Lead" status.  At that point, LM can automatically assign and route the leads to the appropriate sales person.  With Aprimo, no leads escape your sales funnel.  More to come on all of these topics soon!
 

Let’s face it -- we’ve all gone to website pages that take forever to load.  Sometimes, the load times are so long, I just close the window or hit return and hope a competitor’s webpage loads faster.  So, what’s the culprit here?  Typically it’s a large Flash file or just a page with one or more images that have not been optimized for the web.  Non-optimized images and long page load times adversly affect conversion rates and marketing campaign results.  Whether you’re building a simple webpage, a marketing oriented microsite or an email, images must be optimized for the web. 

Optimizing images for email and microsite pages is the act of finding the sweet spot between a great looking image that takes too long to download and a grainy image that downloads in a second at dial-up speeds of 56kps.  The idea is to modify the image to retain a nice rendering while decreasing the overall file size.  Optimization becomes more and more critical as we add more and more images to any microsite page.

There are a number of software packages out there that allow you to resize images – Photoshop, Fireworks and Paint Shop are a few of the most popular.  By resizing, I mean changing the absolute size in pixels, as well as the file size itself.  Changing file size refers to changing the amount of data compression used for an image.  The most common image files used for the web are JPEG, GIF and PNG.  The difference in JPEG, GIF and PNG is the way they compress data.  GIF and PNG compression work almost exactly the same, but PNG often produces slightly smaller files.  JPEG compression is designed to optimize images with fine gradiations of color, while GIF and PNG are better at compressing images with large areas of color, such as illustrations.  The more you compress JPEG files, the more artifacts you see.  This is because you are actually removing “data” from the file.  Here are a few JPEG examples I created using Fireworks.



Look at the captions below each of the images.  The original uncompressed image on the left is 96K and would take 15 seconds to download if you were using a dial-up connection.  The image on the right manitains almost the same overall quality but has been compressed to less than 25% of the original file size, resulting in only a three second download.  Now imagine that there are four images on this page that are these sizes.  A webpage using non-optimized images would take 60 seconds to fully render, while a webpage using optimized images will only take 12 seconds.  This is the difference between losing and gaining customers that visit your web and microsites.  As you can see, "size" really does matter!

While GIF and PNG compressions do not actually lose “data” like JPEG compression, they do lose color fidelity.  GIF and PNG files are limited to 256 colors or less.  When compressing these files, we typically move to 32, 24 or 8 colors.  Here are a couple of examples of compression using PNG files.



The above images are virtually identical in appearance.  However, by looking at the captions, you can see that the 16 color, 8-bit image on the right is only about a third of the size of the original.  

Many companies today are adopting marketing management technology that allows marketers to easily create their own marketing campaigns, emails and microsites.  This is great, but companies need to also put safeguards in place to protect their brand.  This is where marketing asset management comes into play. That is, the notion of creating assets like logos and other images that have been optimized and approved for use in marketing campaigns.  Please feel free to visit our blogs on Brand Asset Management to learn more.

This blog may sound like a blatant pitch for investing in enterprise marketing management software, a category that encompasses both multichannel marketing and marketing resource management software.  I cannot pretend that this is a completely "fair and balanced" view given my employer (Aprimo).  However, the concept for this blog came from my marketing clients and prospective clients.  It is not an artificial idea.  It was organically grown.  Read it and see if it resonates with you.

The New Economy gives way to the NO Economy
Remember the New Economy.  It promised that globalization and the rapid movement of ideas, technology, resources, manufacturing, and financing through the power of the Internet was going to fundamentally change the way we live, do business, and market.  It was going to improve everyone's lives. 

Well, the new economy has been foreclosed on, though its structure is still there.  The New Economy is empty, has growing weeds, contains some broken windows, and needs some attention.  What we are left with now is a NEW economy that actually resembles the old economy of the frugal and considerate consumer.  I will call this the New Old (NO) Economy.  The NO Economy is not built on instant financing with no money down, creative investment vehicles, outsourcing everything, and ponzi schemes.  It is an economy based on a frugal, responsible, and value conscious consumer - the NO Consumer.

Marketing in the NO Economy to the NO Consumer
This NO Economy and NO Consumer has changed how company's market as well.  The days of if you build it, the customers will come are gone.  Or, if you offer it, the customers will respond.  Even in this recovering economy, the NO Consumers are more skeptical and less impulsive.  You can see this consumer behavior effecting most every industry - automobiles, hotels, gaming, software, airlines, media, manufacturing, etc.  Economists are seeing this as a fundamental change in the consumer.  This consumer behavior makes it much more difficult to get your prospects and customers to respond to your offers, no matter what you spend in marketing.  In addition, in order to deliver more value to acquire consumers, companies are compressing prices or delivering more for the same price.  This is putting pressure on margins and in turn reducing marketing budgets.  The marketing department is under siege both internally (budgets slashed) and externally (customers not responding).

It is time to invest in your marketing department
In periods of growth, when consumers were spending as fast as they could refinance their property, your marketing could be as targeted as a shotgun blast and as inefficient as a giant SUV.  It really didn't matter what marketing did, because the consumer was unstoppable.

It is time to invest in your marketing department to change with these leaner times and equip it to better manage this consumer behavior.  Investing in marketing does not mean giving marketing more money to hire more coordinators to send out more marketing messages, more emails, spend more on advertising. etc.  Investing in marketing means putting in the marketing systems, technology, and process improvements that will create a more efficient marketing department.  A good place to start would be an Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) system.  This investment could be in a complete or even a partial EMM system.  Small incremental improvement with a partial system is better than standing still and doing nothing. 

An EMM system can help your marketing department produce targeted messages more quickly with fewer review cycles.  It can allow marketing to control and track marketing costs for those messages and deliver them to the right customer in the most cost efficient manner (personalized email, mail, web microsite, point of sale, etc.).  EMM systems combine marketing planning, financial and production management along with campaign, offer, and emarketing management all in one platform.  EMM allows you to reduce costs to improve your bottom line while also improving your top line revenue generation with more effective targeting and automated, personalized communication.  An EMM system will allow your marketing to be focused, more efficient, and more persistent to pry the NO Consumer out of his or her anti-spending cocoon. 

Why now?
Well before your marketing department was too busy generating revenue to implement a new marketing system.  Why not use this downturn in the economy to retool your marketing department.  This will allow your organization to survive in this bad NO Economy.  Then later, when the economy steams back, which economies always do, your company will be ready to take full advantage of the opportunities the next new economy will bring.

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.

The weather is changing...the chill is in the air.  The scenery is changing...autumn leaves are falling.  Marketing is changing...social media is rockin'.  Are you blogging?  Are you tweeting?  Is your Facebook updated?  Does social media fit comfortably into your everyday vocabulary? 

I've spoken with lots of people recently who say they aren't into social media yet and don't foresee that in their company's future.  And that's okay.  Aprimo has marketing automation software to manage whatever it is you are doing in marketing....financial management, project management, campaign management, digital assets, lead management. 

How are your current processes working?  Do you feel like you are working for the processes or are the processes working for you?  What is slowing you down or creating bottle necks?  Let us know where your weaknesses are.  We can help you.  Give us a call at 317 803-4300 or visit us at www.aprimo.com.  We are happy to help whether you tweet or not.

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?

As a company, Aprimo spent many years in a software category (marketing resource management) that most marketers knew little about.  This category focused on the "back office" of marketing, helping the marketer manage their projects, their budget, and their marketing assets.  However, most marketing organizations 10 years ago did this with spreadsheets and file systems (and many of them still do today!  p.s. we still would like to talk to you!).

When you live in a category for a long time that does not have general awareness, you get addicted to outbound marketing.  This is because you are constantly having to "reach out" to educate someone about what you do, why it is important, and why they should care.

Times have changed at Aprimo, and now we are serving many markets that have ready, willing buyers looking to solve the problems they have today with software we offer.  However, it is interesting that our marketing was slow to change.  We became addicted to outbound.  Even though there are many marketers now looking to solve problems like email marketing, search engine marketing, campaign management, and more, we have built an engine that tries to "call everyone" asking if they want to solve the problem vs. putting up a sign saying "we solve this" and letting them find us.

Ok, a sign is a simplistic example.  However, effective PPC campaigns are just not something we think first about.  For instance, there were 700,000 people looking for "email marketing software" this month.  However, we never seriously tried to win that search term.  Instead, we will place millions into channels calling people about email marketing hoping they happen to be one of the 700,000 that already told us they were looking via search.

Times are changing at Aprimo and so is our marketing approach.  In the coming months, we are going to be investing more and more on inbound channels.  However, habits are hard to break and this change does not come easily.  I imagine we are not the only company struggling to break such habits!

 

Kim Collins, Managing Vice President at Gartner Research, a leading industry analyst firm, will speak about marketing process to a lunch crowd of 30 on October, 6, 2009, in Rosemont, Illinois. Aprimo is excited to showcase Kim's market expertise to this group of marketing and IT professionals who are looking for ways to increase revenue and reduce costs in a challenging economic environment. And these professionals are excited, too! They will learn how to increase ROI in marketing from one of the country’s leading marketing analysts. Kim will discuss:

• The top three tips for marketing process management to drive revenue through enhanced customer communication.
• The top three tips for marketing process management to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and eliminate waste.
• How can companies assess technologies and derive value from marketing process management?

Gartner recently featured Aprimo in the "Visionaries Quadrant" of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing Management (July 2009). We're not just tooting our own horn here!

If you could sit down with Kim Collins, what would you discuss? What problems are you trying to solve? They might be related to marketing process management, or more specific to lead nurturing or marketing financial management.

Recently, someone came to us saying they were looking for a tool with a "dashboard" that would give them visibility into their marketing operations.  They particularly specified a dashboard and further explained that their operations are global and so they needed visibility into all of their marketing operations, globally.  I shared with her how our Aprimo Marketing Automation Software handles that and more.

Whatever your marketing management needs are and wherever your organization may be located on the map, we can help. We can assist you in streamlining your marketing operations while giving you visibility into those processes, globally.  And we can do so much more!

Call us at 317-803-4300 or visit us at www.aprimo.com.  We would love to speak with you about your marketing needs and discuss how Aprimo can help.

It's football season!  I love football and have my favorite teams from high school, and college, up to pro.  We've had many great years and some not so great.  The teams work hard to achieve their winning seasons.

I spoke with a gentleman recently who asked where we are headquartered and when he learned we're in Indianapolis he asked if I was a Colts fan.  Of course I am!  He spoke about the team effort it takes to win a Super Bowl and likened it to marketing efforts.  I wondered where he was headed with the comparison.  He said the team must communicate well, they must be physically fit, have great play books, great offense, great defense, great special teams, not to mention the coaches, etc.  

His marketing team needs to first be physically fit and get rid of the baggage that is weighing them down.  He wants to switch from spreadsheets and sticky notes to marketing automation software.  His team needs visibility into their marketing efforts to communicate well - be it their financial management, project management/workflow, online marketing, reviews and approvals, etc.  They need a great play book and have everyone on the same page...a marketing events calendar.  It takes campaigns to drive prospects to them... offense.  It takes lead management to handle the leads and convert them to sales... defense back to offense.  It takes great special teams...creative marketing, database marketers, etc. and posting numbers on the scoreboard all comes down to ROI in marketing.

I had not thought of marketing as a football team, but they do need to be a well-oiled machine to get the job done and win the sales that their company is looking to capture.  If you need some coaching on how your team can increase your top line revenue, let us know.  Aprimo software manages all aspects of marketing.  Let us know how we can help.  We would love to huddle! Oh!....and go Colts!

This week I spoke with a company CMO looking for a magic button to solve the chaos going on with his marketing budget.  He was exasperated with the many attempts they've made to manage it themselves and was looking for something to help him not only manage his marketing finances, forecasts, and expenses, but also their reviews and approval processes - all marketing operations wrapped into one simple package. 

We discussed how Aprimo's marketing management software can do just that.  It enables marketing management to view and control their budget based on their own marketing structure and incorporate their business rules.  Within just a few minutes, he determined he wanted to learn more about our software and its other functions and said he would like to see a demonstration with additional team members present.

Where are your marketing dollars going?  If you don't really know, let Aprimo help!  Visit us at Aprimo.com and let me know how we can help.

This week I had an interesting conversation with a lady I first met on Live Chat.  She told me she was looking to learn more about how our marketing software can help her company with their online marketing efforts.  She liked our Live Chat feature yet early in the chat she was a bit hesitant.  I asked if she would prefer I call her and immediately received her telephone number on the screen.  I called and we discussed her needs. 

In the discussion, she said that while she is the Project Manager leading the effort to find a marketing automation solution, she was not comfortable typing through a conversation.  She also mentioned she was not one to "text" either.  :)  After some discussion around her needs with offers, microsites and landing pages, I was able to direct her to the District Manager in her area to assist her further. 

If you are not comfortable typing through a conversation on Live Chat, you can always ask us to call you.  You may also call our company at 317 803-4300, email us at info@aprimo.com, or fill out a form online at aprimo.com.  Just let us know how to reach you so we can assist you with your marketing management needs. 

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 have a big confession to make. I am completely un-American. I say this because unlike majority of the population - I have absolutely NO interest in car shopping....not only do I have no interest, I pretty much hate it. I want a car that runs and gets me from A to B and sure - I have preferences on style, make and model, but I have no real interest in actually shopping for it. I would prefer someone take my money and go purchase me a car and say, "Here you go...drive this for the next ten years and then I will come back and shop for you again." Perfect!

I see this in companies that I work with all of the time. They are not in the driver's seat when it comes to marketing. They have no desire to do it and yet, they know that A. they need it and B. that they have a preference on how it gets done, just little interest in implementing it. These companies view marketing as a chore - enter marketing technology. Enter Aprimo Marketing Studio.

Our job here is complete those chores - be the Tylenol for the CMO. Marketers are pushed further and faster, to deliver more, in a time of budget cuts and department downsizing. You have to be effective and efficient and you can't do it all. I will be the first to say that we can't do it ALL, but our marketing software is a robust engine- it can help with social media management, web analytics solutions, microsites, and marketing lead management.

Consider it the dashboard that holds the keys to your marketing success and can drive your marketing engine.

So...let's go for a drive....

AAA0 stands for 'anytime, anywhere, anyhow, bar nothing.'  My high school swim coach used this motto to rally our team to a state championship.  Lots of good memories!  

I sometimes feel like companies take this same mindset and approach when marketing to me as a customer.  It happens to all of us.  AAA0 marketing is a bit bothersome, but what's getting all the attention these days is the pervasiveness of behavioral profiling in the digital age.  Many perfectly normal people are saying "don't trespass on my digital real estate unless I've invited you to do so."
 
As interactive marketers, we face this challenge every day!  The problem is we haven't had the interactive marketing software we need to manage the holistic experience of every interaction with our customers, starting with understanding their anonymous digital profile all the way through the point(s) of conversion, and most importantly - respecting their preferences along the way. 
 

Fortunately, this is changing.  Today's available marketing management software, such as Aprimo's Marketing Studio, allows us to perform AAAP marketing - anytime, anywhere, anyhow, but with an understanding of one's preferences and with their permission.

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...

Knowing how to best complete a chore is often the hardest part of the task. For example, take the monumental task of bringing new life to old wood floors on the cheap. For me, a purist, I find the newest ways of doing things aren't always the best. 

Take for example, rehabbing old houses, which could a be a torture tactic. One of the staples of rehabbing is refinishing hardwood floors. You could sand, sand, sand, sand and then sand some more. Get some really toxic chemicals, wear a respirator, carefully yet quickly spread the polyurethane and not walk on the floors for a couple of days.  Or, you could just get some good old-fashioned floor wax, play some old tunes from Frank Sinatra and have a good day. Less mess, no fuss.

How does polishing up old wood floors have anything to do with web analytics solutions or post campaign analysis, you ask?  You are in the right place!
 
Technology for marketing, like polishing old wood floors, can take on any number of different guises. Take for example measuring online marketing efforts with the time tested CID command. It is a simple and quick way to measure any URL, and the beauty of it all is that anyone, from event managers to marketing communicators, can use this simple but nifty tool anytime with no assistance from interactive marketers, like us.

So, next time you are asked to track a campaign or Web page, give the requester the power to utilize their own marketing management technology tools. Tell them to add ?CID=(tracking name) to any URL. Your web analytics solutions like Omniture or Google Analytics, will be able to report the data needed. 

Well I have to admit, the notion of putting my thoughts into the open world did seem a little daunting to me. I am the technical marketing manager for Aprimo, a marketing automation software company. Seems like the word marketing is used a lot in my title and role :). A few years ago, the words technical and marketing together would have seemed strange, but its amazing just how much marketing is reliant on technology these days, especially in my world. Now, technical marketing is not a role unique to Aprimo, but it just so happens that we are a marketing software automation company.

Interactive Marketing, Direct Marketing, Digital Assets, Lead Management, Social Media - to name a few, are arenas we play in every day and all are completely online. Every day we are solving problems for marketers, andthrough the use of our software. 

I dare to think where we would be without the Internet, email or social media (I wouldn't be writing this post for one). The direct mail trend is dropping while interactive and email channels are growing exponentially. Every email sent, opened and clicked can be tracked. This is all valuable information, which is then used to further engage and target each prospect or customer. This information is gold to a marketer and its all using technology, our technology in this case. As you may have guessed I am a technology junkie and I am lucky to be involved in one of the hottest growing industries in the world. 

I believe we have only scratched the surface of what we can do with technology and marketing, and I am so excited to be part of this exciting industry. 

Being my first blog, I seemed to have waffled a bit. As you can see my passion is technology and how we can use it to solve marketers problems. If this is something that interests you then watch this space, well this blog anyway.

Before I go, I leave you with with this story that really tickled me. Sometimes I think we are not as advanced as we think.

More to come next time....