Recent B2B blog posts have been discussing the topic of how aggressive should a salesperson be in their response when they see a lead is visiting their site. Mike Damphoux's post in Smashmouth Marketing on Web leads (Pounce, Pause, Nurture, or Wait) highlighted a unique difference in selling tactics and approaches for the modern marketer. The blog posed the question of how quickly a salesperson should pounce when they see a lead is visiting their site. With modern marketing automation solutions, getting alerted when someone is on your site, and having sales have access to easy-to-digest prospect insight information is now fairly easy (including a nice little widget Engage B2B has called "Who's Online," in case you want to sit and watch the activity of your sales prospects in real-time).

However, the question of what is the best response is definitely up for debate. Mike asks a number of industry experts which of the four responses they believe are best:

Pounce - Call immediately
Pause - Give it 15-30 minutes, then call
Nurture - Let the visitor keep educating themselves, educate them softly if you can identify them
Wait - Wait a day or two, then casually call

A number of people have jumped into the debate, including a strong opinion by Craig Rosenberg on the Funnelholic in favor of "The Pounce." Craig makes a very compelling argument and highlights key points as to why pouncing delivers results. As you can imagine, most of the nurture marketers (myself included) leaned to a more wait and call/nurture approach. I think many of us use our own experiences as a reference point, and loathe the suggestion that we want someone calling us uninvited. That being said, I believe some basic lead management principles that should be considered before we turn sales loose on those weary web visitors.

You can Kiss a Lot of Frogs:

One of the main tenants of modern lead management is that you can prioritize and lead score incoming inquiries. Remember, not all leads are created equal. If sales sits and watches as inbound leads come to their site, they are just falling into the same typical cherry picking mode as when marketing sends each and every lead directly to sales. Without having a scoring or worth assigned to which leads are better than others, they could spend a lot of valuable time tracking down people who are not ready to engage in a buying cycle. Think tire kickers, researchers, and people just trying to self educate. And even if they get a few "wins," they are missing the opportunity to work with really qualified leads and may have harmed a future potential relationship.

Of course, if the lead is visiting the site, is a good target fit for the company, and your scoring threshold dictates a sales call, then by all means alert sales. In addition, it is now easy to include a "chat now" or "may I help you" function on your site for those people that want instant answers. Otherwise, a well defined nurture program can be more cost effective while still proving a timely response to someone while your company is top of mind.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Through these special blog postings, our goal is to offer advice and insights from top B2B marketers. If you're not familiar with him already, it is my pleasure to introduce you to M. H. (Mac) McIntosh. He is considered to be one of North America's top experts on the subject of B2B sales leads.

For more information about Mac and the services he provides, or to request a free subscription to Sales lead Report, please visit his website at www.sales-lead-experts.com or e-mail him at mcintosh@sales-lead-experts.com. Enjoy!

1. How did you get your start in B2B marketing?

I was happily working in the B2C marketing industry when I was recruited to be VP of sales and marketing for the largest lead-management firm in the country at the time. We were providing inbound lead handling, outbound lead generation, lead nurturing and qualification services. We used database-driven direct marketing, and we provided sophisticated reporting on sales lead-program activity, results and ROI.

Research we did showed a clear need for consulting about optimizing B2B sales lead programs. I decided to start my own sales lead-consulting company and have been successfully consulting with B2B companies ever since, helping them to generate more qualified sales leads, turn more of those leads into sales, track and measure results, and prove to senior management that sales lead investments are paying off.

2. What strategies have you seen work the best for connecting sales and marketing teams?

I recommend that every marketer listen in on sales calls or ride along on a couple of sales visits each month, to better understand sales' issues and needs. I also recommend that sales, marketing and lead-generation teams meet weekly to align goals, discuss progress and resolve issues.

A recent research study we did, the 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark study, showed that companies where marketing, lead generation and sales teams met more often converted more leads to sales and got better sales results overall.

I also believe that marketers need to have their own compensation tied at least partially to sales revenue goals. Reward them for helping sales meet quota, and they will focus more of their marketing investments and resources on helping sales sell.

3. If you were going to do only one thing, what part of a B2B lead-management program would you implement (demand generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing, ROI measurement)?

The best answer is "all of the above." However, if I were forced to focus on one thing, it would be lead nurturing. Why? Because research shows that three out of four sales come from the longer-term leads that are not yet sales-ready. In other words, nurturing your leads can result in up to 300 percent more sales-ready opportunities for your salespeople or channel partners to turn into sales.

4. Which business practices are working best in B2B lead generation today?

What's working best falls into two general categories: 1) direct marketing, including email, telemarketing and, yes, direct mail, especially for those whom you can't reach by email, and 2) Web sites that are optimized for search AND optimized for the people who visit your site. Marketers who want ideas on how to accomplish this should help themselves to my free B2B Web Site Checklist.

5. What's your advice to marketers working with execs who view marketing as a discretionary budget item during a recession?

Marketers need to start marketing marketing! There is plenty of research out there proving that when companies continue to market during a recession, they get more sales both now and later.

Marketers need to spoon-feed this kind of information to those who control their budgets, keeping the message "marketing = sales" in front of them until they believe it.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The buzz around social media is everywhere. Unless you're living under a rock in the far corners of Siberia (and who knows, Twitter might be alive and well there on the frigid ice fields as well), you're faced with social media outlets every day in both your personal and professional lives.

Recently, Silverpop has been involved with the Online Marketing Summit, crisscrossing the country as part of a multistate road show tour. If you're an online marketer, I highly recommend looking for a show in your area.

The topic of social media and its application in marketing has been a prevailing theme on the tour. One particular question really stood out to me and has been in my head ever since I heard it, so I'm looking to the larger Silverpop audience to hear your thoughts.

An audience participant stated, "I struggle with whether or not I should have both a corporate and a private persona in the social media space or if it's OK to have one that applies to both."

I struggled with this same question myself. My Facebook profile existed purely for personal purposes. But then the lines started to blur when my professional contacts began to send Friend requests to my Facebook account. I really had to pause for a moment. It's not like I had incriminating keg stand photos in my profile pictures, but did I really want my co-workers and professional connections to read a status update about a moment with my family?

The result (for those who are burning to know) is that I concluded it was OK to blur the lines to a degree. For me personally, considering how heavily embraced social media is with the majority of my professional network, it was an opportunity to really humanize and bring personality into the work equation. For others this might not be the right approach. I did take steps to create separate Friend lists that can only see certain aspects of my profile, but for the most part I opted to stay transparent.

So as social media increasingly plays into the everyday moments of today's B2B marketers, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Strictly separate professional and personal, or is there opportunity to bring the two together?

Posted by Sarah Lander at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With this latest blog post, I want to introduce Adam Needles, a new member to our team, who we announced in a press release today. Adam is an experienced B2B marketer who is passionate about the intersection of marketing strategy and new innovation and technology. In his new role, he will serve both as an advocate for B2B marketers and also as an evangelist for Silverpop's Engage B2B marketing automation platform. I'd like to welcome him to the team and share his first blog post with you. ~Will Schnabel

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Many of you have followed my ongoing research and writing via my Propelling Brands blog. You also know I'm passionate about my mission, both in writing that blog and also via my ongoing work in this space, to be a resource for marketers on issues of marketing strategy and also to provide marketers with insights into innovation and technology that have the potential to help them change their game.

I've had the good fortune throughout my career to connect with the best and brightest thinkers and leaders in the marketing technology space, and it has truly inspired me. In fact, I've been searching recently for a 'platform' that would enable me to better accomplish my mission, to be an advocate for marketers and to stay on top of the state of marketing innovation and technology. So I was excited by the opportunity to join Silverpop. What I've found is an organization with goals, aspirations and beliefs that align with my own. It is an online marketing solutions company with a clear vision of its goal to empower marketers through intelligent solutions and strategies that ultimately help marketers be more successful. I like that.

The company has asked me to take on a role where I will be able to work closely with front-line marketers - as a listener and as a coach - talking to marketers, relaying their insights back to the people who develop the company's B2B marketing platform and also delivering cutting-edge insights into new strategies, innovation and best practices back to the marketing community.

I'm also excited about the company's thinking around the state of marketing strategy and its concept of improving 'engagement marketing.' It's a topic I won't dig into more today, per se, but look forward to talking about over the coming weeks. But that topic does bring me to what I wanted to address today.


What does it mean to be an 'engaged' marketer?

As I've been ramping up here at Silverpop, a thought came to mind. It's certainly critical as a marketer to improve one's engagement with the customer, but what does that look like from the marketer's end? What does this look like from a strategic and operational perspective? What does it mean to be an 'engaged' ... and, ultimately, successful ... marketer? Here are a few ideas I came up with:

> Focusing on the bottom line and measuring success against this: For most B2B marketers, success is directly related to managing successful programs that develop qualified leads for the business and that support the conversion of these leads into customers. It's pretty straightforward and intimately intertwined with the sales process, but maintaining this lens as we review and prioritize opportunities and activities can definitely get muddled. It becomes particularly complicated navigating how we leverage the numerous communication channels - from traditional snail mail to e-mail to new mediums such as Twitter - that seem to be exploding around us. We might be tempted to allow our marketing measurement basis to reflect progress purely in terms of the medium; however, it is still critical to map this back to ultimate lead generation, conversion and sales success - keeping our eye on the prize.

I've recently been reading a great marketing book by Akin Arikan, titled Multichannel Marketing. In it, he makes some great points about maintaining focus and control in a multi-channel marketing environment. "[I]t is one thing to interact through multiple channels in parallel," comments Arikan. "It is quite another to fuse those activities together in an intelligent way to maximize response and conversion rates." Akin goes on to point out that today "[b]uyers are multichannel beings. Buying cycles are cross-channel." Thus, it is incumbent upon us as marketers to focus only on leveraging and measuring a channel to the extent that it has a clearly-definable role in our customer's buying process.

> Building processes and systems: Once you have a clear sense of what you're trying to accomplish, it's critical that as a marketer you put processes and systems in place to be consistent in achieving this goal. Throughout my career I've certainly been reminded that B2B marketing is a dynamic activity that requires agile techniques, including listening closely to your sales counterparts. Yet I'm also increasingly convinced that there is an operational aspect to marketing that when recognized and managed via definable processes and systems, enable marketers to get control over their environments and actually increase net agility.

Gary Katz, a thought leader in the discipline of marketing operations and founder of consulting firm Marketing Operations Partners, commented on this in a recent blog post:

Especially in complex organizations, [marketing operations] is integral to bridging strategy to execution, and aligning marketing with the C-suite and other stakeholders throughout the enterprise (such as sales, finance, IT, customer experience). Most organizations are missing the opportunity to change the 'MO' (sic) of marketing by fully embracing [marketing operations]. This is a shame because [marketing operations] done right can...impact an enterprise's business intelligence, sales enablement, pipeline velocity, scalability, brand governance, customer experience, ability to demonstrate marketing ROI, and agility to navigate the winds of change.

> Being transparent and accountable: Marketing has entered a new era. Truly. The same Internet that has brought us rapid and direct access to customers and that has sped our sales cycles has also changed the game when it comes to expectations for measurement and the ability to demonstrate the net present value (NPV) of marketing investments both to sales and to the C-suite. Couple this with an undisputable global movement toward greater corporate responsibility and accuracy in reporting, and as a marketer you've got your hands full.

Marketing ROI guru Jim Lenskold demonstrated in his firm's recent "2009 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study" that there is a very high correlation between firms he identifies as 'highly effective and efficient' and their transparency and accountability. He notes, by a factor of nearly two-to-one, that more-effective/more-efficient firms calculate and share ROI, NPV and 'other profitability metrics' for marketing investments. Clearly marketers can see a real upside from investing to achieve greater levels of transparency and accountability with sales and the C-suite. It also is increasingly not an option. In fact, today "[a]lmost two-thirds (65%) of firms report that their CEO/CFOs are making greater demands than last year to show ROI as part of securing budgetary resources for marketing efforts," according to Lenskold in this report.

Industry analyst David Raab adds to this point, in his recent book, The Marketing performance Measurement Toolkit, that marketing metrics should be aligned with business metrics via a balanced scorecard approach - ensuring marketing metrics also live in appropriate business context.

> Leveraging technology and innovation strategically and aggressively: No longer a merely tactical element, technology and innovation are, today, a critical element of success as a strategic marketer. Given a diversity of communication channels and a deluge of data, no marketer can be expected to stay on top of his/her game simply with Excel spreadsheets. Closed-loop marketing systems - including demand generation and marketing automation platforms - which enable marketers to both manage, monitor and evaluate the success of marketing investments and also tune the effectiveness of tactical programs and activities, are critical to effective management of scale marketing programs.
There is growing evidence that technology systems - now a critical element of other parts of the enterprise via, ERP and other strategic IT frameworks - are becoming an increasingly pervasive element of the role of the CMO. In fact, I tackled this topic in a past Propelling Brands blog piece that addressed "A CMO's Dual Imperatives - Driving Organizational and Technological Change."

What is challenging, though, is that the need to leverage technology and innovation is something that marketers recognize but all too often remain 'stymied' by. In my own recent research, I found 40% of marketers surveyed rated their organizations deployment of marketing technology as 'not aggressive' - the lowest level on a five-point-rating scale - and ratings rapidly declined from there. Only 7% of marketers, on the other end of the spectrum, rated their organizations as 'very aggressive.' Clearly we have a way to go as marketers, but that's why it's critical that we tackle these challenges today ... and head-on ... which brings me to my final point.

> Embracing an ethic of constant improvement: Perhaps the most telling aspect of our new era in marketing is the pace at which change is occurring. The bar is constantly being raised for marketers. It's not sufficient to merely be on top of one's game; successful marketers today must be ahead of the game. The points above are all critical factors, but they are the starting point. Once achieved, the impetus must be on improving against this baseline and on constantly tuning the marketing engine so that it is both agile enough to handle the diversity of market challenges and opportunities and also efficient enough to deliver profitability and growth.

Posted by Adam Needles at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

B2B marketers face numerous challenges, not the least of which is in the building and maintaining of the automated campaigns required by today's lead management processes. Consequently, there has been a heavy focus around the usability of marketing automation tools, and I'll have to agree that it is a very important part of making the solutions successful.

As I've written about before (It takes more than technology), other factors come into play as we consider the strategy, process, people, and technology involved in lead management. But accordingly, usability can have a dramatic impact on the ability of the technology to support the business needs, but also in ensuring user adoption and acceptance of the solution. A usable solution allows B2B marketers to focus more on planning, execution, and measurement, rather than having to deal with an increasingly steep learning curve. This is especially true as our marketing organizations are constantly changing with new personnel.

With regards to product usability, David Raab has begun some nice work in trying to differentiate the true nuances of usability in the different marketing automation solutions. Usability can mean many things to different people, but as the core use in lead management, it generally is thought of with regards to the ability for the user to easily create, update, and maintain the lead management workflows and nurture campaigns. These campaigns, which are the heart and soul of modern lead management, provide for triggered and timed marketing responses to prospect online behaviors. These automated campaigns, including sophisticated segmentation and scoring, are what make marketing automation so powerful.

Simple or Complex

So how do you make campaign building as easy as possible for the user, but still provide the dynamics necessary to support sophisticated programs? Well, generally there have been two main approaches, and analysts of marketing automation have tried to bucket solutions into either simple or complex. Simple implies a straightforward way to build a multi-stage campaign; think of a three step drip campaign as part of the planning around a tradeshow. Complex implies allowing for numerous interactions and zig-zagging of flows between segments, products, and market segments. For those of us having sketched out a fully functioning lead nurture program, you can understand the incredible spaghetti diagrams that result.

So what's a user to do? Either use a simple solution that gives a 1-2-3 campaign building approach with its inherent limitations, or use a Visio-like program that tries (but many times fails) to represent the spaghetti diagram, hoping that you'll never have to go back and make changes due to the complexity. It can be a difficult decision

Until Now:

As one of the pioneers in developing multi-track, multi-step automation solutions, Silverpop Engage B2B has always strived hard to balance ease-of-use with needs of sophisticated programs. To that end, we have just launched a new paradigm in campaign building.

The Best of Both Worlds

Merging Visio "process flow" concepts with horizontal video-editing-style features which many digital marketers are familiar, Silverpop is now providing a new model for digital campaign building. With this new visual approach, I believe Silverpop is again raising the bar for ease-of-use by offering its solution to allow for both styles of campaign creation...our highly flexible 1-2-3 track/step building approach, and a new drag-and-drop, visual approach. And the best part; each approach can be used interchangeably, allowing for rapid creation and reuse of campaigns and campaign elements.

Just to give you glimpse, I've included a shot below of the visual campaign builder, or check out a quick sneak-peak video.

As you can tell, I am very proud of this achievement by the Silverpop design team, and am eager to hear feedback from the industry at large. But more importantly, I'm looking forward to hearing from our customers. They continue to be the greatest source of our ideas and inspiration. This new GUI was launched recently at our annual U.S. Client Summit, and initial response was overwhelming. Laura Ramos from Forrester Research was also given a preview and expressed in a recent blog post that Silverpop "Sets New Bar for B2B Campaign Design Tools."

But for those of you who know our product innovation leader, Bryan Brown, he will never, ever be fully satisfied. Silverpop will continue to push the envelope on usable, innovative features to help B2B marketers solve their unique and evolving challenges.

So maybe you can really have it all.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)