“Moneyball for Marketing”: Why Automation Matters

August 10, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Source: October 4, 2006, “Improving B2B Lead Management” Forrester report.

Remember this picture?   As a Forrester Research analyst, I published a report called “Improving B2B Lead Management” in October 2006 where this image first saw the light of day. 

Since then, it’s become popular with every marketing automation technology provider who uses to help explain a fundamental problem: how potentially good leads leak out of the demand generation process and how marketers must then spend more time, effort, and money recapturing them and putting these opportunities back in the sales pipeline. Which begs the question, “What am I really getting for my marketing dollar if some portion of the demand generation activity gets wasted?”

A CMO study sponsored by IBM last year found that, by 2015, most marketing departments will measure success using return on investment (ROI) as the primary metric. Most CMOs, however, struggle to demonstrate marketing’s ROI in a reliable way. Why? Because we haven’t instilled measurement discipline in marketing — or the technology, process, and automation to back it up. Since John Wannamaker turned his famous phrase about advertising, marketers have taken the easy way out by assuming much of marketing can’t be measured in a meaningful way.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (ISBN 0-393-05765-8) by Michael Lewis (2003)

But is the idea of measuring what matters in marketing that unattainable?  Recently, I joined Bonnie Crater, CEO of Full Circle CRM (a start up firm I advise), in a conversation about why it’s important to plug a leaky demand generation process. Bonnie drew a great analogy to the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, which details Oakland Athletic general manager, Billy Beane’s focus on an analytical, evidence-based approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland’s disadvantaged revenue situation.

Like putting together a championship sports program, marketing teams must run a broad range of programs from advertising, public relations, and social media campaigns to lead nurturing and customer engagement programs. And they must do all of this with shrinking budgets and resources, against competitors who seemingly always have more (like the New York Yankees who brought in 3X the revenue when compared to the A’s).  Showing how each of these programs contributes to the business requires a way to track every marketing generated response without overstating or distorting the results.

Using a response-based solution to automate this process helps level the playing field by allowing marketers to track, differentiate and report on the ROI of each program — and to connect multiple program touches to the people in the account where opportunities are developing. With response-centric intelligence, marketing executives can better optimize their portfolio and drive demand more efficiently. Automation allows marketers to be more like Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, where you can use statistics and evidence to figure out which marketing tactics to ”draft” and how best to put the lineup together.

Check out Bonnie and my conversation about what it takes to move to response-based marketing and see why marketing automation can help you get there.

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A Revenue Marketer’s Journey

February 21, 2012 — Laura Ramos

You busy this February 23, at 1 pm ET?  I hope you can spare a few and join me for my first (and hopefully not only) appearance on WRMR – Revenue Marketer Radio.

What is WRMR? 

Debbie Qaqish Host Revenue Marketer Radio

It’s the call letters for a virtual radio station.  Actually, it an online radio show sponsored by friends of mine at the Pedowitz Group – one of the up and coming demand generation agencies that help marketers build lead generation and nurturing programs that convert a larger number of prospects to opportunities and turn more qualified leads into sales pipeline.

I’ve know Jeff Pedowitz for about as long as I’ve been active in the lead management automation field. We met when he ran professional services at Eloqua. His business partner, Debbie Qagish, I’ve come to know since and found her to be one of the most dynamic and outspoken advocates for professionally generating and managing demand as a core marketing function. Together they have built a fast-growing, thriving business and live in the world of demand management daily.

Debbie invited me to join her for a little tête-à-tête on how I came to be a Revenue Marketer.  Or at least how I found myself on the journey to become one. 

And it is a journey.  A long one.

According to Debbie, the journey to Revenue Marketing nirvana begins by recognizing that marketing activity – outreach to prospective clients with educational and informational offers coupled with good inbound visibility and relevant content delivery — helps to speed the sales process along.  Just like with any problem, recognizing that you have one is the first stage.

The second part of the journey she calls Lead Generation where marketers begin to devise programs — and use some type of technology, typically an email service provider or ESP system — to help generate leads and deliver them to sales. Qualified leads, not just those fished out of a bowl at a tradeshow.  In the Lead Generation stage, marketers measure progress in terms like open rates, click through rates, and registrations – simple activities that correlate loosely to buyer interest.

It’s a big jump from Lead Generation to the next phase: Demand Generation.

Marketers in the Demand Generation phase graduate to higher levels of automation and campaign sophistication.  They use marketing automation tools integrated together with a CRM system. (This also implies some rigorous use of the CRM system by sales and sales management for the purpose of managing accounts and tracking pipeline progress. — More on this if you come listen to the show.) They learn to measure marketing impact in terms like Marketing Qualified Leads, lead-to-acceptance rates, and pipeline value generated. In this stage, the marketer can begin to demonstrate a direct impact on revenue without getting laughed out of the room by sales.

The ultimate stage defines the whole process – Revenue Marketing.  In this phase marketing programs, processes and results earn the RPS seal of approval, where RPS stands for Repeatable, Predictable, and Sustainable. (Sounds a lot like the words my buddy Sean Geehan uses in his B2B Executive Handbook. But I digress.)

On Thursday, I’ll share some of my hard-won insights into what it takes to get started on the journey to becoming a revenue marketer at a large, multi-billion dollar enterprise with a highly-recognizable brand and a long history of sales management best practices. I plan to share a bit about my role in industry marketing and how this led to the start of my revenue marketing journey.  How my team and I adopted marketing technology to drive revenue. And what makes Revenue Marketing at a large, global, diverse enterprise — with many long-standing sales traditions — different than RM at smaller, younger firms.

The goal of our talk show segment is to help pave the way on your road to becoming an elite Revenue Marketer and to make your journey smoother — with less bumps and potholes.  If you can’t make this date and time, don’t worry, BlogTalkRadio records the session for you to access on demand.  Check it out when you can.  Or you can download them from iTunes.

(Full disclosure: This post is not an ad for the Pedowitz Group. I am appearing on the show as a favor to Debbie and to boost my personal brand on this topic.  I receive no compensation.  Although she did buy me a drink a couple of times…)

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Three Views on Marketing Automation – Focus Experts and MAI

October 13, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Unquestionably there are many ideas and theories on marketing automation and the automation industry. Today the Marketing Automation Institute sponsored a Focus roundtable discussion that examined three views of marketing automation through the eyes of an analyst, a customer and a vendor.  And I got to be the customer instead of the analyst this time!

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of the Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute, asked me to join some folks I haven’t spoken with in a while — Jeff Erramouspe, President of Manticore Technologies sand David Raab, long-time marketing automation technology and market analyst — for a conversation about the marketing automation industry, where it’s heading, how companies use lead management technology, and what to do to get more value from value from automation.

You can find the full recording and Twitter stream here.

Some of the questions we tackled — well, that I tackled – include:

1) Moving from analyst to practioner, what do I see at Xerox as some of the driving factors behind the push for automation?
(A growing profusion of marketing approaches and little consensus about what really works to drive demand. Therefore, the need to measure and automate marketing to better demonstrate its impact on the business.)

2) What are some of the ways an organization can use automation to reach buyers besides using it as an email engine? 
(I think it’s all about finding new ways to reach buyers outside of email — syndication of content to industry and association Web sites that link back to a landing page, publishing YouTube videos, starting a Facebook fan page, developing a community destination outside of your Web site are but a few examples.)

3) Of people, process and content, which one trumps the others — or all they all equally important — when it comes to successful automation? (Depends on where you are in the adoption lifecycle. Marketers starting out talk more about technology and skills their key needs. But more mature practioners point to content development as the gating item to success.)

Want to hear more?  Visit the site.  Listen to the recording. And share your views
UPDATE! — To hear the Sales’ view of marketing automation — sign up now for the November 10 Focus/MAI Roundtable.

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Maturing Your Lead Generation and Marketing Automation

October 11, 2011 — Laura Ramos

  Today I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with the Corporate Financial Group about maturing lead generation and lead management automation. This association of commercial banking marketing professionals offers the latest, industry-relevant insight into business-to-business marketing trends, practices and people in the financial industry.  I first met this group, spearheaded by the effervescent Pat Scanlon, over 4 years ago when I was a Forrester analyst and just starting out in the B2B marketing arena.

Pat connected with me, probably through LinkedIn, a few months ago and asked if I would be interested in speaking to the group, who was planning to meet in San Francisco this year.  When we last met in Chicago, I found CFG members to be at the cutting edge of both industry and marketing trends for large enterprise/business banking. That day we talked a lot about lead management, marketing automation, why both are important, and the four stages that B2B marketers progress through as they adopt lead management best practices. Their comments were both insightful and challenging.

So naturally I accepted Pat’s invitation to speak to this group again. We talked about the problem of lead generation in B2B marketing and the promise of automation in solving challenges like:

  • Getting alignment between marketing and sales around how you go to market
  • Market segmentation, understanding the buyer’s journey, and profiling buyer behavior.
  • How to deliver relevant, inspiring content — and how “thought leadership” helps marketers do that.
  • Integrating marketing tactics that attract and engage prospects.
  • Creating advocacy among customers – in particular through social media.
  • Enabling sales – and get credit for doing so.
  • Shifting the marketing discipline from creative to operational — from right brain to left brain.

If you would like to see a summary set of the slides I presented to this group, take a look at this link on Slideshare. 

Key takeaways for this group concerned where to focus their time, money and investment in lead management:

  1. Beg, borrow or buy talent in three key areas: journalist-quality writing talent, business/data analyst (who also has a segmentation specialty), and an operations techie with HTML experience.  Buying a tool is not enough – you need tech, content and analytics talent to make it work. On the content side, you can get some of this from your agency.  You need a partner in IT to help with the rest.
  2. Be prepared to build a marketing database and to perform regular data quality management. Also, you must plan to invest in a library of content that covers issues, roles and industries for the target buyers you approach.
  3. Start with a “Quick win” project that shows how marketing scales sales, but make sure your lead management efforts reward marketers and sales for using it and “doing the right thing” – these rewards provide the change management and cultural cues that signal the importance of this new way of going to market to all the players involved.

Take a look at the slides and let me know if you have any comments or questions.

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Lead Generation: How Some Marketing SW Vendors Stretch the Truth

September 13, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Caveat emptor.  That applies to B2B marketing executives considering lead generation/demand management solutions. Here’s why:

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email wanting to show me “how 5000 customers increased leads by 420%.”  Reading further, the sender said an “independent MIT study” backed up the claim. Former Forrester analyst that I am, I had to think “This sounds too good to be true.”

So I downloaded and read the report. It’s actually quite good — far better than other research, whitepapers, and such I’ve seen.  But what bothered me was how the vendor-sponsor exaggerated the results to a degree that I felt was unnecessary. From my experience, I’d like to point out common faults in how the sponsor conveyed they findings. These faults and exaggerations can confuse readers and make the results appear suspect. Which is too bad, because the findings are relevant and speak to the power of lead management automation.

When you read similar reports, always ask the following to keep from falling into the (sometimes obvious) traps vendors can set:

1) What’s the base? Knowing how many people, companies, etc. represented in the research is crucial. You should also know whether the sample represents a demographic similar or different from you. This research hedges here. A lot.

The headline to the email says “5000 customers” — the report states “214 respondents” to the survey (page 24) and is unclear about how many participants made up the sample used for Web site analysis of visitors and leads. Upon further inspection, you find that 93% of the sample include companies with 200 employees or fewer, with almost 75% having 25 employees or fewer.  If you work at a big company like I do, then these results don’t apply as much as the results would if you were at a small start-up.

2) How do the overall findings hold up when you scrutinize the data? You need to compare the “headline” findings to the details to see if the research substantiates the claims.  Or to see if there is something unique about the data that influences the results.

In this research, small numbers have a big effect on percentages and multipliers. Basically, if your Web site starts out gaining two leads in the first month, using the vendor’s technology will help to generate 80+ leads about 1 year later (see Figure 5).  While not stated clearly in the report, the email author probably gets to the “4.2 times more leads” number using this calculation. As you can see, the claim leaves out important details.

Which is unfortunate because the survey results (page 12) show that 83% of 214 respondents said they saw an increase in leads since implementing the “inbound marketing software” and 32% of those said they saw their leads increase by 50%. Again, it would be good to know the demographics of those respondents and how long it took them to achieve those results. The report explores neither of those factors to my satisfaction.

3) How credible is the source/authors? Beyond looking at whether the methodology holds water, it’s important to understand who wrote the research, who sponsored it, and how the project might have come about in the first place.

While the email claims “independent MIT study” the reality is that two MBA graduate degree candidates probably did this work for a class project. I don’t mean any disrespect to Mr. Paisner and Ms. Derosiers. They appear to be excellent students judging by the clear, concise layout of the report. Both deserve an “A” grade from their respective professors at MIT and Babson. But linking the MIT brand to this report in this manner is a bit of a stretch.  

If I were to guess, I would say that the two have some personal connection to Hubspot – maybe working there as interns. The source of the project was likely more casual than a formal solicitation of research from MBA graduate programs by Hubspot. This is the type of skepticism you should apply when questioning the origin of research you read.

What’s the bottom line? I think the lead generation/automation market remains very competitive.  Too competitive for the growing opportunity it still represents. Wanting to catch the eye of busy marketing executives, the vendors find it very tempting to “highlight” customer results and show that their technology can substantially improve marketing’s impact on the business.  But don’t believe everything you read. Marketing automation success depends on hard work, getting your processes right, and on steady, effective content production. The technology choice is a distant fourth on the list.

I would be interested in hearing about your experience.  Feel free to post a comment here sharing examples of how you’ve seen vendors stretch the truth — a little or a lot.

(Full disclosure: While I was an analyst at Forrester, I reviewed Hubspot’s technology — among others — for my Lead Management Automation market overview. I also know Brian Halligan - he spoke at one of my B2B marketing seminars a few years ago. I think Hubspot has an excellent software product well-suited for the small business market. I also think their company performance continues to meet and exceed market expectations.)

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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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Making Your B2B Marketing Work — Better!

September 1, 2009 — Laura Ramos

A worldwide recession and social media have swept up B2B marketers in a perfect storm, tossed between tighter budgets and the demand to do more online without guideposts or established benefits. Opportunities and challenges abound for marketers targeting other businesses through a direct sales force or channel partners. Before 2010 planning — and the push to pump up the pipeline to make year-end revenue goals — hit full stride, now is an excellent time to step outside your daily routine, tune up B2B marketing strategy, and learn new best practices.

Sound intriguing? If so, have I got a deal for you!  (Oh, c’mon, you suspected a pitch was coming, now didn’t you?)

On September 17, 2009 (Thursday) I am leading a full-day workshop in Cambridge, MA on “Making B2B Marketing Work”. This workshop brings B2B marketing peers together to explore and discuss how marketing has changed in light of the digital/social media shift and the pressures imposed by the current economy. It will help you think through a number of issues — how to stretch budget dollars by better integrating digital and physical tactics, tap into social media, drive healthier pipelines, target and qualify your best customers, and create a marketing technology infrastructure that increases efficiency through automation – just to name a few of the top takeaways. You will also gain hands-on experience assessing your integrated marketing accumen and lead management maturity while hearing “tricks of the trade” from our expert panel (who join us at the end of the day.)

You may want to check out Forrester’s site for further workshop details if you need answers to the following questions:

  • How do I optimize my marketing mix in 2010?
  • What are the best practices for generating, and managing, demand?
  • How do I better integrate digital and social media into my campaigns?
  • How do I improve marketing’s working relationship with sales?
  • How do I make my Web site generate better leads?
  • What are the best social media tactics to use?
  • What technology investments should I make in 2010?

In my rather “un-humble” opinion, I’ve found participants feel that the two best features of this workshop are:

1) Networking and interpersonal interaction. The workshop is intimate (typically between 7 adn 15 participants) which gives you the opportunity to spend time with peers (and the analyst, of course!) talking about what matters to you and how you have been making B2B marketing work. Participants from Tech and non-Tech industries share experiences and learn from each others’ successes and mistakes.

2) Talking with the panel of experts.  Plan to stick around to enjoy the wine/cheese reception for further networking and to meet with our expert panel. I’m gathering the invitees now, but past participants included experts in search marketing, community development, demand generation, and marketing automation. The discussion is lively and really gets to the heart of “what should you do in practice to make B2B marketing work?”

Will you join me?  Hope to see you there!

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B2B Email Worst Practices: Assuming Opt-In or Requiring Opt-Out

March 17, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last fall I met Rebekah “Red” Donaldson, founder of Business Communications Group, LLC, a Sacramento-based marketing consulting firm specializing in B2B. Red’s a seasoned marketing practitioner so I invited her to join me on a Forrester teleconference last October where we talked about the factors threatening B2B marketing with obsolescence and the steps marketers should take to avoid this fate. More recently, we were chatting about email practices when Red pointed me to a recent post that generated a lot of commentary sparked by an email from lead management automation vendor, Marketo, that presumed opt-in on Red’s part.

Given the current economy, I see how marketers feel extra pressure to create new sales pipeline and may aggressively pursue email as a lead generation option. Email is the channel of choice among lead management automators who regularly promote nurturing programs to engage prospects and turn “warm” respondents into “hot” leads.  Two things bothered me about the Marketo email:  it sounded like it came from sales (not marketing) and it did very little to engender trust or build relationship.

I asked resident email guru, analyst Julie Katz, about best practices and she replied emphatically, “Use opt-in”. She told me many B2B marketers she interviews and surveys lean on opt-out. Yet marketers get a stronger list of prospects who are truly interested in receiving more information when you use opt-in.  In Julie’s research, “Break Free From Bad Email“, she advises marketers to take a longer term perspective and adopt a more intentional approach to email, that Julie defines as “A holistic email marketing strategy aimed at increasing the long-term return from email subscribers.”  She offers sage advice that I paraphrase for B2B marketers to follow:

1) Make customer value your primary email metric. When balancing user needs with business goals, email programs can increase customer value by deepening subscriber engagement. However, most marketers obsess over opens and clicks instead of building relationships. Instead, use traditional database marketing to mine customer data and build lifetime value (LTV) models to better understand the impact email has on building trust and relationships. 

2) Integrate email with other channels. Coordinating email with traditional and digital channels is worth the headache. Merge email, Web analytics, and sales pipeline data to increase conversion. Jump-start integration efforts by setting up data feeds between system marketing/sales databases  and your email system that contain only the modest number of data points needed to build basic email conversations.

3) Map out a long-term customer contact strategy. Instead of using email to wheedle out a standalone purchase, B2B marketers should take a long-term view toward how email marketing can nurture a customer. This starts with replacing ad hoc email campaigns with conversations — series of messages that work collectively to graduate a customer through different stages of the purchase process from awareness to consideration.  Email conversations should be forward-looking and deepen a customer’s relationship over time, not just try to get them to buy this quarter.

I believe inbound marketing is an essential discipline today that many marketers should improve. Email is the best way to continue conversations with those prospects who come looking for you. If you’d like more information about email best practices, check out Julie’s research or consider attending Forrester’s email best practices workshop coming up in May.

I would also welcome pointers from you about email best practices you use or links to email advice you’ve found particularly helpful.

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Numeric Scoring Targets Hot Leads the Best

January 30, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Many marketers use a simple rubric — “hot”, “warm” and “cold”  — to define lead quality.  But getting to consensus with sales on the question “what is a qualified lead?” requires a lot more work and ongoing dialog.  Rather than use arbitrary categories like hot, warm and cold or A-lead, B-lead, C-lead, I believe that numeric scoring provide two additional benefits:

  1. It defines lead quality using a precise definition, yet flexible enough to accommodate many situations.
  2. Allows B2B marketers to weight the value of various demand generation activities differently.

I wrote about this previously on the Forrester Interactive Marketing blog, which is reproduced here for your reading pleasure:

Numeric Scoring: The Key To Lead Management Success — April 16, 2008

Recently I saw a preview of Eloqua’s spring release and it got me thinking about the role lead scoring plays in determining campaign effectiveness.  I hadn’t seen the product in a while and was impressed with the UI improvements the Eloqua team has produced. They have added new capabilities for delivering highly personalized direct mail, SMS/voice reminders, and on-demand fax and RSS delivery – interesting stuff that, while I’d need to talk to a client or two to be convinced of their specific usefulness, show that Eloqua is delivering a broader range of lead nurturing, drip marketing capabilities. Lastly, new campaign design UI will help shorten the time it takes to get first campaigns up and running.

With these changes, I see Eloqua – like many of the other firms I mentioned in my prior post – moving the B2B marketing conversation ahead in an important direction. The key to getting a campaign up and running quickly is not to make it easier to launch more campaigns but instead to focus marketing attention on the results – well qualified leads. And this is where I think the marketing rubber hits the sales road.

As an analyst who has written about lead management extensively – I am still amazed at how many marketers feel challenged to produce leads that sales appreciate. The bickering between marketers (who feel sales doesn’t follow up on the great leads they generate) and sales (who feel the quality of said leads is subject to debate) seems to continue unabated. The few marketers who end the arguing figure out early that quantifying lead quality is essential.

In my view, these marketers live by four best practices. They:
1) Sit with sales, talk about leads, and come to an agreement about what is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). What are the characteristics of a lead that make it worth working from sales perspective?  And they are prepared to have this conversation every quarter.

2) Assign numeric scores to the different criteria – both explicit (size, industry, title, budget, etc.) and implicit (behavior, activity, interest, etc.) – that both sales and marketing believe distinguish hot leads from the rest. Specific criteria carry specific point values, like +5 for downloading a white paper and +15 for attending a webinar.

3) Use these criteria and weights to score raw leads (contacts, inquiries, replies, etc.), and set a numeric threshold that leads must attain before they earn the MQL status and get passed to sales. They also adjust scores downward as contacts go inactive or age.

4) Rescore contacts place in nurturing, education, or development campaigns. They work to understand what optimum scores are for each category of lead type.  This score can vary by product line or geography or other company-specific factors, so they don’t assume that one size fits all. Again, scores change with activity levels and age.

Is this all there is to demonstrating campaign effectiveness?  No, but it’s a start. Using numerical, quantifiable scores to grade leads turns the art of marketing into a science and marketers who use this approach tell me numeric scoring is one of the biggest factors in raising marketing’s value to the sales organization. But like most good science, it takes time and effort to perfect.  So I commend Eloqua on their next generation of marketing software and their efforts dedicated to the process of making marketing more accountable.

I would like to hear about your scoring approaches and what you have done to achieve a common definition of qualified leads with sales. ——————————–

Readers replied with some interesting comments to this post, check them out.

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Lead Management Matters In B2B Marketing

January 28, 2009 — Laura Ramos

In my Forrester research — and in contributing to the Interactive Marketer blog — I talk a lot about why B2B marketer need to worry more about managing demand once marketing campaigns and inbound activity brings new, unqualified leads through the door.  I find too many B2B marketers spend a lot of time, money, and energy buying lists for direct and email marketing.  As part of maturing lead management activities, shifting this perspective from list generation to building a prospect data base and numerically, quantitatively qualifying responses is essential.

Here’s what I had to say about it on Forrester:

I Dig Databases And Marketing Qualified Leads – July 22, 2008

I dug Dave Taber’s latest newsletter edition about “The Life of a Lead”.  I mean, I really “Dugg It”.  The article includes a link to digg.com, so I clicked it, registered, and voted for his document. Not simply because I like his ideas, but because I want to experience the “wisdom of crowds” firsthand and see how communal voting might apply to B2B marketing.

Let me back up. Dave and I worked together at Sybase too many years ago to mention. He’s been heading up Taber & Associates for over 10 years now. His Web site leaves something to be desired and he’s not blogging (yet), but I continue to get great insight from his newsletters. He’s a very smart man. From this latest letter, it looks like Dave is writing a book on Salesforce.com best practices.

There are three things Dave points out in this letter that I’d like to underline as concerns B2B marketers should tackle:

1) Terminology and nomenclature – when it comes to demand management, no one uses terms consistently, and we need to.  Dave’s list is a great start.  Rather than just “qualified leads,” I would create a distinciton between marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads. I’ll get back to this in a second.

2) Create a marketing database separately from what you keep in the sales automation application. Read what he says; makes perfect sense. Dave Frankland and I wrote about “Database Marketing Fundamentals For B2B Marketers” in June, if you want to delve into the subject further. Bottomline: a marketing database keeps the messiness of demand generation away from sales.

3) Recognize the value of lead nurturing – what Dave calls cultivation. It works, but your programs need to be written down and automated.  Dave makes a great point about why you should turn nurturing into a process and how this makes it easier to use telesales outsourcing services.

I would separate qualified leads into two categories: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).  (I’m not the first to talk about this, but I can’t find the source. If you know, please point me there.)  Why? Tracking MQLs lets marketing measure their contribution to the pipeline — and understand how sales acts on the demand they develop. Moving a lead from MQL to SQL signals that sales agrees the lead is worthy of forecasting, of adding to the pipeline. It also provides a way for sales to return leads to marketing for further nurturing if they get cold. Depending on need, firms can divide MQLs or SQL into subcategories or stages, depending on your size and process, but I think having the distinction is important. MQLs/SQLs let marketing learn more about what sales, individually and as a whole, really considers important in generating quality leads — and vice versa.

Which leads me back to the wisdom of crowds. I believe social mechanisms offer excellent ways to get information. So, I plan to spend more time blogging, microblogging, tagging, and voting to inform my research with firsthand experience, to get “leads” on what matters in B2B marketing, and learn from those who have been involved with social media longer.  I’m @lauraramos on Twitter now.  Follow me, vote for my research on Forrester, Digg my research, and let me know what you think the impact of social activity in B2B business buying will be.

–The same final request now applies to this blog and to the ongoing conversation we will have here. Hope you will join me!

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