Continuing Our Conversation: Loopfuse CEO Chat, Part II

March 5, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Continuing my conversation with Sean Dwyer, CEO Loopfuse, here is part 2 of our Q&A dialog where Sean asked me to talk more about trends I see affecting B2B marketing today, the impact of lead management automation on these trends, and where I see B2B marketers heading in their shift from conventional to digital — and from outbound messaging to blending broadcasting and dialoguing. Here’s what we talked about:

Part II: Trends, Impacts, and Market Directions

Q4: What key trends drive adoption of Lead Management Automation (LMA) today?

Besides weathering the current economy and improving sales pipelines short term, I think B2b marketers need to invest in and use lead management automation to meet longer term needs. I would describe these as the need: 1) for greater accountability from marketing, 2) to produce not just more demand, but better-qualified demand, and 3) to scale the sales process more efficiently (in other words, to reduce the cost of customer acquisition).

Beyond this, there are other macro trends that will continue to drive widespread change in B2B marketing, and where I see automated demand management as a key response to these trends. For example, I expect marketers to adopt lead management automation to build customer dialogue and relationships much earlier in the purchase process and counteract issues like advertising avoidance, commoditization, and social computing (which creates unprecedented transparency and information sharing that is wonderful for buyers, but challenging for sellers).

Q5: What impact will a Lead Management Automation (LMA) system have on the typical marketing organization?

The impact of automation on a the marketing organization in a large firm can be quite different than the impact of adopting this technology in a small one. Both size firms experience different issues and challenges. Let me focus on the midmarket here and refer to back to the three trends I mentioned in the prior question to address you question about the impact of LMA:

1) Greater marketing accountability. Over the past 10 years, B2B marketers have witnessed an explosion in available marketing approaches, especially in the digital world. While this has made more channels available, many marketers struggle to execute tactics in an integrated fashion that engage B2B buyers during what is often a lengthy sales cycle. Racing from tactic to tactic, B2B marketers can fail to demonstrate marketing’s impact beyond campaign execution. Lead management automation helps marketers get a handle on the marketing mix and to learn which approaches work at which points in the buyer’s journey. LMA can also give marketers more flexibility to try new approaches and experiment with new techniques because the system lets them see, more directly, the impact between marketing activity and the volume and quality of leads that result.

2) Better qualified leads. Good sales organizations – and sales management — don’t really want more leads from marketing, but they do want better ones. Lead management automation helps marketing and sales get onto the same page and to answer the critical question “what makes a great lead?” Without automation to score leads across the purchase cycle, and the capability to nurture leads – start a conversation, educate, build dialogue, persuade – marketers will fail to put the best leads in front of sales and to help sales to convert pipeline into closed deals.

3) Scaling the sales process. Many executives think LMA helps marketing. In fact, it helps sales. And it helps the bottomline. Starting in the last decade, trends like software as a service, virtualization, and on-demand provisioning have changed how firms deliver high technology products. The services component of any solution has become more important. And IT buyers want to pay as they go. Long-term, on-premise, perpetual licenses will decline in favor of the on-demand model. This also means that long sales processes, backed by high-commission sales reps, must become less expensive. Companies can’t afford to spend time, money, and resources on customer acquisition like some did in the past.

Marketing will become key in this transition as buyers rely more on online channels – and communities of like-minded participants – to inform and validate purchase decisions. Lead management automation can help marketers connect with these buyers long before the first sales call and make selling more efficient as a result.

I think large, multinational firms can certainly achieve these results at the departmental level. However, the challenges associated with building a global brand, driving message consistency, and managing marketing interactions across geographies, regions, industries, and multiple product lines increases demand management complexity significantly.

Q6: Are you seeing a shift in focus from traditional outbound marketing activities to inbound marketing? If so, how can marketing leaders prepare themselves?

In 2009, we saw B2B marketers continue to shift from traditional to digital channels as marketing budgets got cut and as buyers became harder to engage. Social media popularity also kept the digital transformation going. However, much of what I see happening online in B2B – with social media in particular – I would characterize as “outbound marketing using new channels.” For example, firms put out a stream of press releases and marketing communications, and then tweet about them on Twitter. Little value is added and certainly not much happening there to make buyers want to strike up a conversation.

To truly move to inbound marketing, B2B marketers need to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about multi-step conversations. They need to efficiently reach buyers at a group or individual level. Mass marketing doesn’t work in B2B, relationship marketing does. This is where I can see LMA playing a key role because lets vertical industry, product management, or local marketers in the field have conversations with targeted groups of prospects – customer segments in the truest sense – using online tools and social media to fuel the dialogue. By tracking their behavior and interactions, marketers can then pass a rich set of “background” information – behavior, preferences, activity — to sales and help them close deals more efficiently. When this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t always, the LMA system can now give both marketing and sales quantitative, factual information about what they need to do differently.

 I know there are one, maybe two, more parts to this conversation, but let me know what questions you would ask about the Lead Management Automation market if you were Sean.  Feel free to submit your question via the comments function below.  I’m curious to see what you want to know about and will certainly answer the “best” ones.

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A Conversation With LoopFuse About The Marketing Automation Market

February 24, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Since publishing the market overview for the lead management automation space, I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of current and emerging vendors who got in touch wanting to talk further, learn more about my research, and (well, frankly) “influence” the analyst. (That’s why I’m here, after all.)  Since last fall, I’ve met 7Degrees, Leadforce1, Marketing Advocate, and SalesFUSION and talked more with eTrigue, Loopfuse, Manitcore, and Pardot. A common thread in these discussions is a desire to know more about what I think of this market and where I see it going in 2010.

Loopfuse CEO, Sean Dwyer, cornered me for a long conversation about this market when I was in Atlanta last month. He thought it would be fun to reprise our exchange in a Q&A format which Sean is publishing on the LoopFuse blog.  Here is Part I of our conversation with a little commentary and annotation on my part:

Part 1: Defining the Lead Management Automation Market

Q1. The term Marketing Automation is thrown around internally at companies and in the marketing media, how do you define Marketing Automation?

As part of Forrester’s research team that serves the marketing professional, I agree that the term Marketing Automation is bandied about ambiguously. To help marketers use technology to improve marketing effectiveness and efficiency, Forrester talks about the Marketing Technology Backbone. It’s a term we have used since 2004, defined as, “A technology infrastructure that supports an integrated approach to marketing strategy, development, delivery, and measurement across the marketing mix.” This definition helps to keep marketers focused on the entire discipline of marketing and not just on technology for executing tactics and campaigns. It also includes two important words, integrated and measurement, because I see B2B marketers worry too much about running campaigns and not enough time knitting marketing programs together and connecting the dots between marketing activity and bottomline business results.

Looking at the marketing technology landscape, Forrester sees marketing automation focus on six core applications: 1) campaign management; 2) customer analytics; 3) interaction management; 4) marketing resource management (MRM); 5) marketing asset management (MAM); and 6) lead management (see figure). Lead management plays a key role in the marketing automation space and in our view of what marketers need to put an effective marketing technology backbone in place.

Six Applications Dominate Today's Enterprise Marketing Platform

Q2. From a B2B perspective, when a direct salesforce is involved, what is the difference between Marketing Automation and Lead Management Automation?

In my research, I study and write about lead management automation specifically. My colleague, Suresh Vittal, writes about marketing automation generally. In B2B marketing, where a direct salesforce or channel partners sit in the driver’s seat for winning new deals and retaining existing customers, technology that manages demand is an essential part of the marketing technology backbone. Wikipedia has a solid definition of lead management that I used to develop a working definition in my research. In short, lead management is the tooling and processes that help firms generate new business opportunities, manage volumes of business inquiries, improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase, and increase alignment between marketing activity and sales results. Increasingly this process is becoming tech-centric, and lead management automation is the technology that helps marketers to manage this process. I would also point out, however, that technology alone is not sufficient and that automating ineffective, immature processes – especially those that lack a tight alignment between marketing and sales measured in the creation of more qualified opportunities and closed sales — will likely cause more problems than it solves.

Q3. Is Lead Management Automation (LMA) a term that is catching on in mainstream business?

I would like to see it catch on more than it has. The 2009 recession, which appears to be experiencing a slow recovery in 2010, forced many firms to concentrate on demand generation as business investment was deferred, delayed, or shrank. The down economy benefited lead management solution providers as marketers invested in LMA technology to get sales pipelines pumping again. Despite this trend, lead management automation is still an emerging industry category. Today, LMA has yet to emerge as a separate, distinct category from Marketing Automation. Based on our estimates, I see market penetration growing from 5% to 10% over the next 18 to 24 months – but there are many marketers out there who have yet to explore the value that lead management automation can bring to their organizations. This can be both a blessing and a burden to firms like Loopfuse who look to grow their share in this emerging space.

Stay tuned for Part II and further editions to this series.

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Get Organized For B2B Community Marketing

February 8, 2010 — Laura Ramos

After testing the social media waters through much of 2009, I see B2B marketers waking up to the fact that successful social execution requires more than setting up group pages on LinkedIn, opening a corporate Twitter account, or posting videos to YouTube. To have the greatest impact, marketers will need to focus social media marketing efforts at the tail end of the customer acquisition and selling process — at creating long-term, vibrant customer relationships — not on building brand or generating leads. To turn social opportunity into marketing advantage requires marketers to adopt a community (in contrast to broadcast, direct, or one-t0-one) marketing mindset. It also requires new organizational structure, roles, processes, and incentives to help your company “get smart” about how it interacts with prospects and customers online.

Unfortunately, B2B marketers treat social like yet another media channel, not as a fundamental change to how business gets done. 

Source: Forrester Report "Organizing For B2B Tech Community Marketing" February 3, 2010

In research I published last week, I explore recent Forrester survey results where we asked over 300 B2B marketers how they are gearing up for social interactions with customers. Most say that their social organizational structure and governance is ad hoc or managed by different business units with little oversight (see the figure).  

While decentralized and ad hoc are good adjectives to use when describing any approach to social activity, the lack of oversight and governance creates (real or potential) risk for those blazing new trails in the social landscape.

To execute social strategy in ways that build deeper customer relationships and foster more transparent communications — without panicking executives or legal overseers — requires firms to create more flexible, decentralized ways of engaging with buyers that shake up traditional reporting structures but give employees the tools they need to be successful. To help marketers think through these changes, in the research report, I advise:

1) Organize for flexibility, not bureaucracy. Getting organized means creating some form of central governing body chartered with establishing shared resources and fostering communication. It also means distributing social execution responsibility — and accountability for results — widely in business units or regions. Rather than commanding and controlling, the central team guides activity, spreads best practices, and monitors progress continuously while giving product teams and customer-facing functions leeway to manage social activity in a local, transparent, and relevant manner.

2) Align social objectives with business goals. To mature social processes from ad hoc activity to consistent disciplines, marketers must specify what they expect to result from engaging with customers socially, and then make the functional areas involved responsible for achieving those goals.  Easier said than done, but picking the right objective is a core tenant to the POST methodology I’ve use to help many client get social media marketing right. To make progress quickly, start with social plans where you can limit the impact to one or two functional areas. This keeps internal competition on external social channels to a minimum and compels departments to collaborate as they experiment with social activity in a coordinated manner.

3) Run initial social forays like a corporate program, not a campaign. Social transformation requires dedicated budget, change management, and cross-functional coordination on a scale similar to other major programs, like sustainability or outsourcing. Some firms need temporary executive assignments and staff to hit major social milestones, such as establishing a listening process, creating a thought-leadership agenda, or inviting customers to engage in new community activity. This core team should also validate the business case for each social ”program” undertaken.

4) Open boundaries to facilitate internal collaboration and external outreach. Social requires employees to step outside their functional comfort zones and work with outside partners and influencers. Rather than opening borders completely, top firms progressively allow more access to resources, opportunities to interact, and incentives to do so by establishing a community hub. The community hub (aka community portal, social networking site, forum, etc.) creates structure, but offers enough flexibility, to allow social interactions to evolve. Encourage employees to collaborate with each other first because this will foster the skills, norms, and creative thinking needed to make the transition to external interactions go faster and remain permanent. To see how one marketer is wrestling with this today, take a look at Paul Dunay’s blog post titled “Fire Your Director of Social Media!”

What does all of this mean?  That B2B marketers should advocate for a social core team, under their leadership, to foster new process, structure and — ultimately — culture that supports online interaction where it matters most — at the touchpoints that customers choose to use daily.  Take a look at the research and let me know what you think.

(P.S. I am backdating this post to more closely correspond with the publication date of the research. Hope you don’t mind!)

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Inside Sales And Telemarketing Help Boost B2B Brands: Really?

February 1, 2010 — Laura Ramos

First of all, I’d like to extend a big “Thank You” to my readers and followers who responded to an invitation last month to participate in the 2010 B2B Marketing Budgets and Mix survey that Forrester fielded together with MarketingProfs.  Without your responses, the research would not be as broad or relevant — so thank you again! 

After closing the survey and digesting some of the results, I was really surprised by one finding. After reviewing our process and validating the data, my researcher, Zack Reiss-Davis, and I believe that the result is not a technical problem with the survey instrument nor its execution. I decided to share what we found and get your thoughts on why B2B marketers may have answered the question as they did. 

In January 2010, we found that 65% of the 249 B2B marketers we surveyed at firms with 50 or more employees use inside sales/telesales as part of the marketing mix. This percentage is slightly greater, but not dissimilar, to what we found in early 2009 (62% said they use inside sales).

Of the 65% who use inside sales, 34% said they found it “highly effective” for driving brand awareness.   Brand awareness?   Really?!?  That’s on par with webcasts/webinars and the company Web site for effectively building brand, according to the same survey respondents.

I act incredulous because in prior years, many fewer marketers rated inside sales as highly effective for building brand.  In 2009, for example, only 21% (of the 62% who said they use inside sales) rated it highly effective for building brand.  They did rate it very effective for generating leads — which makes sense since inside sales is one of the “moments of truth” when buyers and sellers engage person to person. And personal selling is essential in B2B marketing.

But for building brand?  How does that work?

So I decided I should run this mystery by my readers/followers and hear what you think.  Which of the following possibilities would you pick as the most likely explanation for this result?:

1) It’s an anomaly. Either the respondents didn’t understand the question or interpreted it in some unexpected way and their answers are not consistent with actual practice.

2) It’s the economy.  Many firms slashed marketing program budgets last year.  To try to compensate, firms turned their inside sales teams into outbound, cold-calling machines tasked with reaching out to buyers to chat about products and services. Remarkably some buyers paid attention.

3) Inside sales begins to play a bigger role in lead incubation.  Respondents are starting to see inside sales/telemarketing play a larger role in educating, building relationships, and “keeping in touch” with prospects than simply just dialing for dollars.  New sales enablement tools help telesales see what “leads” look at when visiting the site, and can better inform subsequent conversations when used properly. Personally, I would call this “lead generation” but — because the activity may not produce qualified leads this quarter — marketers may see telesales helping to create a positive brand experience beyond building pipeline.

As I ponder this result, I have to admit that I’m favoring explanation #3 right now.  However, what I really wonder is “Am I missing something?”  Is there some new way — that I have yet to run across — where companies use inside sales to create awareness, answer buyer questions, or do something other than advance deals to close this quarter?

Let me know what you think.  Best answers get credit in my upcoming report.

If you would like to preview the results of our B2B marketing mix and budgets survey– and see where your B2B peers are heading in 2010 — please join me Tuesday, February 9, 2010 (11 am Eastern, 8 am Pacific) for my Forrester Teleconference where I will talk about our findings prior to the report publication.  Hope you can join me then!

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Pump Up Your Pipeline With Lead Management Automation

January 29, 2010 — Laura Ramos

 Will 2010 be the year the lead management automation market takes off? Early indications show that the automation market ended on a high note in Q4 2009 as marketers turned to technology to help generate and manage demand more effectively. While technology alone does not guarantee healthy pipelines, automation can help most firms hand better qualified leads over to sales. So when Silverpop engaged Forrester last year to research the top issues marketers face when generating demand and which approaches deliver the best results, I quickly agreed to take the lead on this project.

Lead Management Automation Helps To Plug Leaky Funnels

In the spirit of full disclosure, let me give a little background about the project. Silverpop hired Forrester to conduct research and write a whitepaper independently on the results. Forrester follows strict guidelines to ensure objectivity as a neutral third-party advisor. As a matter of policy, we don’t write whitepapers for hire, and the few we do must meet specific requirements, include primary research, and educate the market on a topic of broad  interest — regardless of the sponsor’s intent.  For example, we interviewed 15 Directors, VPs, or SVPs of marketing in midmarket firms of 100 to 5000 employees for the report. Some were Silverpop customers but the majority were not and Forrester made the call about who to include to achieve a full range of perspectives.  However, my company does not employ a team of consultants separate from the analyst ranks and, when a project like this comes along, analysts who cover the market or technology play a major role conducting the surveys and writing the report.

So what did we learn?  Well there are several ways you can find out. First, you can go to Silverpop’s Web site and register for a copy.  On January 26, Silverpop CEO, Bill Nussey, invited me to join him on a webinar to talk about the report findings and to offer a few case studies illustrating the tangible benefits of lead management automation. In addition, Amanda Ferrante, with DemandGen Report, wrote a very thorough and thoughtful review of the paper earlier this week and details many of the findings.

In summary, here’s what we found:

1) Mature lead management pays off in measurable impact on pipelines, marketing efficiency, and accountability. On average, one-half or more of the marketers we spoke with cite healthier pipelines, increased marketing proficiency, and more efficient resource/budget use as key outcomes when investing in lead management process and technology change.

2) Process development and sales collaboration are essential first steps. More than selecting the most innovative or feature-rich technology, top firms succeed when they approach lead management as a process change that requires close and continuous interaction with sales.

3) Four practices shorten the time from implementation to value. Lead management experts focus on customer profiling, lead scoring, content design, and nurturing to accelerate investment returns.

4) Successful lead management improves marketing’s standing and stature. Marketers that follow lead management best practices increase marketing execution efficiency, help sales optimize deal-closing activity, and turn customer relationships into valuable corporate assets.

5) Ability to share and instill best practices is key to selecting the right technology partner. Long term success depends on trading off flashy features, promised ease of use, and low price tags for proven expertise, a track-record of successful implementations, and a growing, vibrant community of like-minded users.

Bottomline: Lead management automation works and helps markters to close up leaky marketing funnels, put better qualified opportunities in front of sales, and help drive stronger topline revenue.  If you have had similar success, or suffered a few failures, with marketing automation, feel free to chime in her with your experiences.

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Best Practices For Marketing To Buyers “In The Cloud”

January 27, 2010 — Laura Ramos

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject to much debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include: lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike. While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud. 

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not.  Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization. Cloud computing can give marketers ready access to technology and services that can drive demand and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs without the burden of traditional technology implementation and management.

Cloud computing will also transform the way marketing gets done. In this Web 2.0 world, buyers spend more of time online searching for information, interacting with like-minded colleagues, and comparing offerings long before the first sales call occurs. Cloud-optimized marketing strategies such as social media, paid search, search results optimization, content syndication, and engaging with buyers on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter deliver brand building and customer engagement results.

To futher explore how social media marketing in the cloud can help to build deeper — and eventually more profitable — customer relationships, I joined Jon Miller (VP of Maketing at automation rising-star Marketo) and David Alston (social media guru who heads up both community and marketing at Radian6) on a webinar, which you can access here.  During the event, we looked at a number of different cloud-related topics including:

1) How to use Forrester’s Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

2)Forrester’s P-O-S-T methodology – Why starting with People, Objectives and Strategy first, then moving to Tactics and Technology is the best way to ensure success when using social media to engage with prospects and customers in the cloud.

3) How to use social media monitoring to engage prospects, build communities, service customers, uncover influencers, and listen for the point of need.

Over the next few months, I will join the the Marketing Cloud conversation to continue to explore how cloud-centric service and technology providers may be in a better position to serve the modern needs of B2B marketers who see social media not simply as a way to reach new audiences. More importantly, these marketers see social media as a tool to help them build communities of like-minded customers; customers who will remain loyal, buy more over time, and advocate to others on the marketer’s behalf to influence the standing and reputation his/her firm in a transparent, community-centric manner.  The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners in the B2B marketing categories demonstrate where this trend is heading.  But I would love to hear from you with examples of companies that you feel are doing an exceptional job of using social media to connect with business buyers who purchase high consideration products for on behalf of their firms.

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B2B Marketing Mix and Budget Trends Survey: Please Participate!

January 13, 2010 — Laura Ramos

For the third year, MarketingProfs and Forrester teamed up to author and field a survey that looks at business-to-business marketing mix and budget trends. With many parts of North America and Europe (my home state of California for one) still feeling the effects of last year’s economic downturn, I believe that this year’s survey will show some marked changes on which tactics marketers choose to spend their limited budget dollars.

Would you like to help me find out?  If so, please click here to take the survey.  The survey should take you approximately 15 minutes to complete, and I will share a copy of the report — due sometime in March — with those of you who complete the survey.

Taking a closer look at B2B marketing budgets in our 2008/2009 survey, we found:

1) Digital spending moved ahead but failed to shake up the status quo. While B2B marketers wrestle with a more complex marketing mix, digital channels have finally gained much needed mindshare. Web sites and email topped the list of the most popular marketing tactics, and search marketing moved up six percentage points since our last report. However, conventional approaches like trade shows, PR, direct mail, print advertising, sponsorships, and executive events still dominated the marketing mix in 2008. Will 2009 show even more dramatic changes? Tell us in the survey and find out.

2) Traditional tactics commanded the lion’s share of B2B budgets. Conventional marketing tactics continued to capture big chunks of B2B marketer budgets. In fact, traditional tactics had a tight grip on the five top spots in our list of the most expensive B2B tactics. Coming in sixth, the company Web site was the only digital tactic to scrape together a double-digit percentage of the budget.

3) Social media managed to make only a few budget inroads in 2008/early 09. Virtual trade shows, community sites, rich media (video, podcasts, etc.), blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools like RSS subscriptions, mashups, and widgets got the B2B budget scraps. Yet, while marketers try to work out social media’s place in the marketing mix, we were pleased to see, when taken together, these tactics accrued more than 10% of the marketing budget. I expect this year’s survey may show some surprising changes in this category.

I can hypothesize on my blog all day about how marketing tactic choices and budgets changed in 2009 relative to 2008 — and where B2B marketers expect them to go in 2010 — but the survey results will provide the real facts, not conjecture.  Please join me and take 15 minutes now to let me, and your B2B marketing colleagues, how your 2010 budget plans are shaping up.

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DMA Webinar: Tracking Online Buyer Behavior in B2B

January 8, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Next week I have the pleasure of speaking to several affiliate groups of the Direct Marketing Association about demand management. Please join me Wednesday, January 13, 2010, for a webinar-based panel discusison about: How to Track a Buyer’s Online Purchase Research Behavior: and then send appropriate messages to influence that buyer’s purchase.

As we see it, the Internet empowers buyers to research products and services long before engaging in a formal sales process — leaving marketers to guess when and how to engage with prospects. This almost guarantees that marketing messages will be sent to the wrong people at the wrong time — filling sales funnels with unqualified leads — a poor formula for permission marketing.

Smart marketers are harnessing digital technology to monitor and track buyer research behavior long before the formal sales process begins — to estimate buying stage — to predict buying intent — to evaluate buying influence — to send appropriate marketing messages to the right people at the right time — and to more accurately score leads for sales funnels. This yields a better formula for permission marketing.

The DMA invited two top industry experts (and yours truly) to help B2B marketers clearly understand how they can improve demand generation process by identifying, monitoring, and evaluating the online research behavior of prospective buyers.

Joining me are:

Steve Woods – Eloqua – Chief Technology Officer / Co-Founder. Author – Digital Body Language.

Debbie Qaqish – The Pedowitz Group – Chief Revenue Officer. Demand Generation Agency – Digital Buyer Behavior applications.

I hope you will visit the DMA Northern California site and join us for this educational, lively discussion!

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Customer Engagement: Deepen Relationships with Community Marketing

December 22, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last week, Forrester published my research about how to deepen engagement engagement with programs focused on your best, most active customers. I think social software and activity will play a huge role here in 2010.  Why?  Because engaging business customers requires contact. To date, these connections revolve around reference programs, advisory boards, executive meetings, and user conferences. As social activity between B2B buyers and sellers evolves, the need to transform online interactions from transactional to relational increases, particularly as marketers recognize that digital approaches can reinforce the intimacy and influence essential to building strong customer bonds. I see the shortest path to successful B2B community building starting with existing customers and focusing on community, not corporate, objectives.

To build upon this idea — and add some perspective on the research — I conducted an “email” interview with Bill Lee, President of the Customer Strategy Group.  Here is what we discussed:

Q. Forrester is showing increasing interest in community marketing, so let’s start with a definition: how do you define community marketing and how do you see the concept evolving?

A.  We see community marketing as the next frontier for B2B marketers to cross as we move from marketing practices focused mainly on broadcast messaging – a practice founded on years of outbound advertising and promotional activity — to a blend of traditional and digital, individual and group, prospect and customer marketing approaches.  Community marketing is about using marketing to engage prospects, current customers, industry insiders, and partners in dialog that transparently and collectively improves the probability of creating effective solutions to the most pressing business problems. It’s about bringing technology and services suppliers into customers’ adoption activities in support of better business outcomes. It’s how Web 2.0 technologies enable new ways to innovate, collaborate, and partner that create more productive business operations.

Q. What role do you see reference programs playing in Community Marketing efforts?

A. Customer references validate product claims and streamline the sales process, both vital activities in B2B marketing.  Reference programs play a vital role in Community Marketing because the community of a supplier’s current customers – not individual accounts — becomes the focal point for revenue generation activity.  In the near future, the customer community helps to attract, engage, persuade, support, and retain future buyers of a supplier’s products and services.  As business buyers embrace the social Web, reference management can play a breakout role in the transition from collecting testimony to building community adoption.

Q. Can reference programs add to the value that businesses must provide to attract customers into their community marketing efforts? If so, how?

A. Customer reference programs can play a vital role in executing a community-centered marketing strategy that not only attracts new customers, but also turns your best customers into advocates within the community. These programs transition from sales support to community build in 3 important ways:

1) Reference customers make community activity intimate and influential, not just interactive.  Involving references in online, social activities — like peer discussions, rating and voting on products, content contribution, and so on —helps create positive product experiences and increases the likelihood that buyers will, in turn, advocate to others.

2) Social referencing involves your best customers in community building. Tapping reference customers predisposed to sharing experiences and speaking on your firm’s behalf is the best way to attract a community following. In B2B marketing, social media value will come from using Web 2.0 tools  to deepen customer relationships after deals close and implementation challenges begin.

3) References deliver content that creates conversation — and value for — buyers. Success stories and insight are the currency needed to sustain ongoing community activity. Because they participate readily, reference customers double their value when they energize community activity and discuss best practices.

Q. You’ve attended a couple of our conferences. What do you see customer reference programs doing that is exciting? What can or should they do to get better, and play a more important role in their businesses?

A. Today, I think the most exciting achievements happen when marketers give back real value to reference customers. The biggest benefit of advocating on behalf of a vendor should be membership in an exclusive community of like-minded participants where interacting with each other, as well as prospects and the public, is part of the draw and reward.  To play a bigger role in business, customer reference managers need to take advantage of emerging social business behavior more. They need to move beyond the physical, group setting and let references engage outside the boundaries of the formal program. Less than 30% of respondents to our earlier survey of customer reference professionals enabled their references to build profile pages, guest blog, rate community-contributed content, or author wikis, activities that permit customers to strut their stuff in the online, virtual world and create broader connections without having to trip through the legal, communications, or approval cycles that plague the production of more formal testimonial or case studies.

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Sales Enablement Tools: All The Rage In 2009

December 11, 2009 — Laura Ramos

While attending Dreamforce last month, I took a walk around the show floor to see which firms were exhibiting. It wasn’t surprising to see a raft of new companies talking about sales-support additions to the AppExchange family with lead generation and pipeline health hot issues in this economy. I caught up with eTrigue, whom had briefed me October as they ramped up for the announcement of eTrigue SalesPro, still another sales enablement tool.  I have covered eTrigue in the Lead Management Automation market for a couple of years now.  In my market overview, I highlighted how they have a robust, continuous lead scoring and segmentation/list building capability, presented in an easy-to-use interface with a relatively low price. 

eTrigue SalesPro Lead Alert Provides Clean UI and Quick Overview

SalesPro takes this ability and translates it into a sales enablement tool that, unlike some of the competition, presents a fairly detailed view of potential leads that can result when prospects take multiple actions that increase their lead score and qualify them for a sales touch.

Rather than simply capturing Web site visitors, performing a reverse-IP look up, and passing this information onto sales, eTrigue SalesPro puts marketing at the head of this process. Sales and marketing agree on lead qualification and scoring criteria which SalesPro reflects in which alert messages sales reps receive through email. 

The key here: reps don’t get an email everytime a lead visits your Web site, but only when those leads meet a minimum threshold that you determine.  SalesPro presents the scores –  and the reasons behind the scores — along with account and buyer activity in an easy-to-read but information-rich format (see the Figure to check it out). 

Sales reps can quickly scan the information and, if they choose to pursue the lead, click into eTrigue to continue the conversation using email templates that nurture and track the activity. It’s a compact package that, for firms not yet ready to take the full lead management automation plunge, can create more alignment between marketing and sales efforts. 

The sales alerts provide a concise summary of lead potential that can help sales determine which opportunities to pursue while keeping marketing in the loop — an activity, in my mind, that requires some form of automation to achieve successfully, but for which automation alone is never  a complete solution. For firms without sophisticated lead management processes, eTrigue SalesPro can help you get started maturing those processes with an investment that can slide in under the CFO’s radar.

Take a look for yourself and let me know if you’ve used eTrigue, if you find it a low-effort, easy-entry to lead management automation, and how you would compare it to other sales enablement tools.  Feel free to let me know what you think, what I missed, and whether you see things similarly.

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