Join The “Marketing Challenge!” At Business-to-Business Forum 2010

May 3, 2010 — Laura Ramos

I am attending the Business-to-Business Forum 2010 conference, sponsored by MarketingProfs, on Tuesday, May 4.  In the afternoon (starting at 3:30 pm Eastern) I am hosting a session titled, “Marketing Challenge! Lead Management Automation Systems” which will explore the factors that make marketing automation pay off in higher quality leads and better sales relationships.

Joining me are four executives from some of the top lead management automation providers:
Brian Kardon, Chief Marketing Officer, Eloqua
Jon Miller, Vice President, Marketing, Marketo
Kristin Hambelton, Sr. Director of Marketing, Neolane Inc.
Parker Trewin, Director of Marketing Communications, Genius.com

This discussion will not follow the typical panel discussion format. Instead, I will “challenge” my four colleagues to show how their customers address B2B marketing scenarios in innovative ways. In this format, I will pose common demand management situations to each panelist and invite him or her to describe how — using real-life examples — they see customers handle each challenge.

To be fair, I admit that we gave each panelist one scenario to ponder ahead of time.  For those attending, I thought it would be fun to preview the scenarios with you in this blog post.  Each panelist must answer one of the following, and, I think you will agree, some of these challenges are really challenging.  All are based, in part (and disguised to shield the innocent), on client interactions I experienced during my years at Forrester Research.  Here are the challenge situations I will present to each panelist — and they have only 5 minutes to answer! I won’t tell you who will answer which challenge; you’ll have to join me at the forum to find out the assignments:

Challenge 1: A large business services firm uses territory-based sales pursuit – supported by events, sponsorships, and hospitality — as its primary go-to-market strategy. This multibillion-dollar business generates almost half of revenues from several hundred of its many thousands of accounts. Contracts are multi-year, multi-million dollar and account-based marketing has been key to achieving past success. As offshore and conventional competition increases price pressure, what can your marketing automation solution offer the CMO of this firm to enable sales to increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities and to reinforce the value of maintaining an ongoing services relationship with this firm? In particular, how does your technology help the CMO identify opportunities within accounts that can include as many as a dozen decision makers?

Challenge 2: The wealth-management division of a large, national bank offers investment and equity management services through professional advisors and independent brokers. Historically, these advisors establish personal relationships with clients maintained through person-to-person contact. With the rise of electronic banking and trading, many advisors – especially independent ones — want more branding and demand generation support from the bank but worry that the bank’s electronic presence creates too much of an intermediary presence in these relationships. What can your marketing automation software offer the head of Wealth Management to empower these brokers to pursue new business more efficiently while keeping their personal relationship and brand relevant?

Challenge 3: The CMO of a high tech, 500+ person firm enjoys a collaborative working relationship with sales and strong demand for current product offerings. As a Salesforce.com user and enthusiast, he is satisfied with the firm’s current sales management tools – having made a recent investment in a custom sales portal, specialized reports, and integration with the firm’s separate telesupport system. As the economy turns around, he is feeling greater pressure to pump up the sales pipeline but is unconvinced that a marketing automation investment makes sense. What can you show this reluctant CMO to convince him that your marketing automation solution will deliver real returns on this investment, and will win converts among the sales organization?

Challenge 4: The VP of Marketing for the SMB division of a global high-tech company with offices in more than 20 countries has been using an email services provider (ESP) for many years to send out emails. The firm has extensive investment in sales automation, Web analytics, Web content management, and business analytics. They also have a multi-million record customer database stitched together through several acquisitions and legacy systems. What can your marketing automation system offer to help deliver more targeted messages to SMB prospects, develop the resulting demand, and right-channel qualified leads, all while reinforcing relationships with current business buyers to markedly reduce churn?

After answering thse four challenges, I’ll open the panel up to the audience and see if the attendees can stump the panelists further. This will be a fun, engaging, and lively session full of information to help B2B marketers understand what lead management systems can do for their business and which solution might best fit their needs.  Hope you can make it!

Please feel free to comment on this post with your ideas for other challenges — who knows, I may use the best on on Tuesday during the Q&A section!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 3 Comments »

Concluding Our Conversation: Loopfuse CEO Chat, Part III

April 18, 2010 — Laura Ramos

To finish up on the conversation I started with Sean Dwyer in February, I’d like to share a few final thoughts about the ways I’ve seen top marketers implement lead management automation successfully.  In this final installment of our Q&A series, Sean and I explore who are the core stakeholders to involve in lead management automation, what are the key success factors, and the ultimate prize — how lead management automation helps deliver healthier sales pipelines. 

Part III: Implementation and Key Success Factors

Q7: Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but they will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems into the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure to make marketing automation work.

I emphasize that marketing and sales must share joint responsibility – an idea that many marketing folks may bristle over. But, let’s face it, unlike other marketing automation decisions; lead management automation delivers direct tangible benefits to quota-carrying salespeople like greater visibility into the type of leads coming down the pipeline. It can also expose which specific characteristics, profiles, search history, marketing interactions, online behavior, and such differentiate higher scoring leads from those with lower scores.

Many lead management vendors include what I call “sales enablement” features in their offerings today – tools that help track a prospect’s digital footprints and summarize their presales buying behavior. For most reps, these features create a window into the customer’s psyche formerly hidden from view. Sales management and key account managers need to understand how lead management automation benefits the sales rank-and-file, so involving them in early discussions about “What is a well-qualified lead? How can automation help our firm generate more qualified demand? And what do we need this system to do to get there?” will improve sales’ willingness to work with the new technology, make it part of the sales process, and give marketing the feedback needed to improve customer acquisition and insight processes.

I think it is important to include all customer-facing functions to the implementation and training process, even if only for an introductory look at what the platform can do. Customer service, technical support, professional services, and even human resources can benefit from the purchase insights lead management automation delivers.

Q8: What are the most important factors for successfully implementing a Lead Management Automation platform?

I know the following may sound simplistic, but – through dozens of interviews and conversations with marketers who have used lead management successfully for more than a year – I’ve found that the keys to success include:

1) Gear up for process change; don’t rely simply on technology. Looking to pump up lackluster sales pipelines, many marketers turn to technology and overlook the systematic process, people, and internal behavioral change successful automation requires. Most veteran marketers said focusing on process, and not technology, was the factor that most affected their success with lead management.

2) Stock up on the content. Surprisingly, many marketers under-estimate the amount of content they need to have on-hand or produce to keep the lead management engine running. Because marketers think classically in terms of white papers, brochures, and datasheet – all which require high production investment – they quickly feel overwhelmed by the prospect of feeding a constant flow of content into a lead nurturing program. The trick is to focus on quantity –take long white papers and break them into several smaller parts, cut up data sheets into tables and bulleted lists, enlist subject matter experts in developing blog posts, videos or podcasts, or syndicate partner content – without sacrificing relevance.

3) Market the marketing automation. Don’t expect everyone in marketing and sales to embrace the lead management automation platform with gusto. We all have tendencies to resist change to a greater or lesser degree. Embrace the enthusiasts, elevate their early successes to management, and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. Treat the rollout of the lead management system like a product launch; announce it, train on it, and certify sales and marketing on their proficiency with the platform. Ask “Have they got the message? Do they repeat it reliably? Do they practice what they preach?” When you can say “yes” to these questions, then you know you’re on your way to success.

Q9: How should Sales and Marketing leverage the Lead Management Automation platform to help drive the pipeline?

Lead management automation is all about driving the pipeline. It’s like a DVR or a mobile phone, once you own one you can’t understand how you lived without it. But getting things to run smoothly at first can be challenging. Stick with it because the payoffs are significant and tangible. Consistently, marketers who use this technology over an extended period of time report measurable increases in lead quality, opportunity-to-pipeline conversion, and deal velocity—all factors that directly impact sales pipeline health and revenues. It’s not uncommon to hear stories about how marketers improved inbound demo requests, early stage pipeline dollar-values, and appointment-to-opportunity conversion by factors of 2 or more.

Achieving this level of success requires focusing on the four key areas: scoring/profiling, routing leads to sales, nurturing leads not yet ready to buy, and monitoring lead progress (i.e. closing the loop with sales). If you make sure the lead management platform delivers on all four of those process stages, then your ability to drive pipeline heath and execute more effective campaigns will improve.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, please check out a whitepaper that Silverpop offers titled“How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline. ” In this report commissioned by Silverpop, Forrester (meaning yours truly, when I worked there prior to Xerox) surveyed 15 senior-level marketers to gauge their experiences in using lead management automation.  Yes, Silverpop is somewhat of a competitor to Loopfuse. However, if you look beyond this to see that we are all trying to raise awareness and educate marketers about the value of this technology, I think you will find some of the insights shared in this report both insightful and useful.

I wanted to thank Sean for offering me this opportunity to share our conversation with all of you.  Let me know what other questions you might like to see asked and answered in the future.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »

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.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

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.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

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.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

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!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

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.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments »

Sharing Lead Management Market Insights with the DemandGen Report

October 16, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last week, the DemandGen Report published an article that highlighted my Lead Management Automation market overview report. As part of their recap, assistant editor, Amanda Ferrante, asked me a few questions that honed in on aspects of the market that I did not make central to my two main themes, namely: 1) that the market is far from mature and subject to change that represent some risk to B2B marketers and 2) therefore, B2B marketers should pick partners that can help mature their processes, as well as come up with innovation and easy-to-use features.

The interview questions and my answers look at:

1) My projections for future growth, and the shape of the growth curve, in this market.
2) Whether I think lead management automation will achieve popularity/penetration similar to the saleforce automation (SFA) market.
3) When I see consolidation occuring, and what is the likely form that will take.
4) Why lead scoring and profiling features are critical and to what degree these capabilities should influence the solution a company chooses.
5) Best practices I recommend for those adopting lead managment automation.
6) What is the best way to achieve alignment between sales and marketing, and how can LMA help achieve this goal.
7) Factors to prioritize when selecting vendors.

Here is the transcript/text with DemandGen’s questions and my corrresponding answers.  Let me know what you think:

1.The report highlights low adoption rate for lead management solutions (2-5%), do you feel this number will take off in the coming years? What kind of growth curve would you project?

I think the growth curve will rise gradually over the next one or two years until the early adopters of this technology become an early majority, then growth will take off. B2B marketers adopt the technology, but there isn’t a wealth of best practices — for lead scoring, customer profiling, and lead nurturing programs – for them to draw upon, and this holds adoption back more than a lack of technical capability.

The real risk to growth is market consolidation. Right now it seems the vendors are more concerned with taking business away from each other than building a vibrant, social community of B2B lead management professionals who use their technology creatively to boost pipelines and raise marketing’s stature as a major part of the business.

2.Will marketing automation become as prevalent as SFA, where it is really a must have for BtoB firms?

I think lead management automation will become part of a broader marketing automation platform that includes campaign design and execution, budgeting/planning, analytics, demand management, and monitoring/reporting. B2B and B2C will require separate, specific features due to the fundamental differences in how business buyers and consumers purchase.

I don’t know that marketing automation will become as prevalent as SFA until marketing automation providers figure out a way to price their systems based on the value the systems deliver. SFA has the advantage of user-based pricing – the more salespeople you have, the more you pay per person. It’s easy to charge and discount on a user model. Marketing automation doesn’t deliver value on a per user basis, but on a programmatic one. But every marketing program is different – or uses different tactics/approaches – so how do you build repeatability into that kind of model?

3.The report also points to the fact that vendor consolidation in this space is likely as it is currently cluttered with so many different options? When do you see that consolidation starting and how will it ultimately shape the landsape?

I see it starting now. Look at Adobe’s recent acquisition of Ominiture.

I think it’s hard to predict how the landscape will shape up because Forrester’s research shows that marketers want a consolidated, enterprise marketing platform, but one has yet to emerge. Much of marketing automation gets overshadowed by the SFA and CRM/customer support markets. When taken as a whole – enterprise, consumer, field, international, demand generation, branding, product definition, sales support, etc. – marketing is a very broad discipline is very difficult to automate entirely.

4.One of the key areas the report focuses on is around Lead capture, profiling and scoring. Can you expand on why these features are so critical and also if they should influence the solution a company chooses?

You can’t manage demand if you don’t have a way of measuring the impact marketing has on leads and pipeline. Profiling automates your ability to observe changes in buyer behavior and the impact marketing activity has on demand long before sales forecasts these opportunities in the pipeline. Lead scoring adds more precision to decisions about which leads to pursue and which to nurture. Both help marketing understand whether their messaging and programs have the desired effect on the audiences they want to reach and whether this audience is getting engaged in the sales process.

Absolutely should influence the solution a company chooses: these are essential features of lead management automation.

5.The report talks about the importance of dialogue tools that nurture leads that are NOT ready to purchase. As BtoB companies adopt lead nurturing, what are some of the best practices you recommend and again should this consideration influence the solution they adopt?

Nurturing is the most underdeveloped part of lead management. It can take on many forms from simple “stay in touch” campaigns to programs that accelerate buyers through the purchase process based offer response or event triggers.

Knowing your how your target buyers buy, what influences their purchase decisions, and how to build online dialog around the buyers journey are key best practices that few marketers have deep experience or track records of accomplishing successfully.

Again, absolutely should influence the solution a company chooses: these are essential features of lead management automation.

6.One of the ever-present challenges is how to get sales and marketing on the same page. What are some of the best ways to do achieve this alignment and how can some of the existing solutions help achieve this goal?

Start by working on the definition of a qualified lead. If marketing and sales can get on the same page on this subject, the battle is half over. Determining which criteria – and the relative importance of these criteria – are part of building a solid lead scoring model. But this model is very difficult to get correct the first time, so sales and marketing must work together to iterate on the model. This process creates better alignment between marketing and sales because it turns subjective arguments about lead quality into objective measures and factors that sales can critique, and marketing can adjust, without resorting to interdepartmental fighting.

7.Considering the crowded field of solution providers and the resulting confusion among buyers, what are some of the factors to consider when choosing a vendor?

Most B2B marketing buyers see vendors as tool providers only. They don’t see vendors invest in their future success, although I think this is happening as the market matures. Marketers who make it through their second year of lead management automation tell me that getting the right implementation and best practices support from their vendor is key to their success. Relatively speaking, few people know how to really make lead management work well, and getting your marketing team access to your vendor’s top experts should be a major consideration when selecting a technology provider.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

PeopleMap: A Real Tool for Sales Enablement?

October 5, 2009 — Laura Ramos

It’s no secret: I am not a fan of the emerging class of “Sales 2.0″ tools that let reps follow online visitors or peer into their browsing habits. In a prior post, I admitted that I did not see how chasing anonymous Web traffic helps reps manage assigned accounts or follow up on well-qualified leads delivered by marketing. I believe marketing should strive to put sales out of the business of cold calling.  So I am quick to dismiss these tools in my research and advice.

Until last week when I discovered a new software application that helps reps do what they need to do: build and mine relationships with prospects. Kevin D’Souza, long-time colleague and friend from my Stratify days (where I worked prior to joining the analyst ranks), introduced me to 7 Degrees, a very small tech firm where he’s handling sales and business development today. 7 Degrees is the team behind PeopleMaps — a tools that lets you leverage personal and professional networks to let you see how you connect with other people, especially those inside of companies (see the screenshot where I used PeopleMaps to see how I am connected to Gord Hotchkiss, co-founder of Enquiro, a search engine marketing agency, and author of a new book about the BuyerSphere — a topic for a future blog post. Not surprisingly, most roads to Gord lead through SEMPO,  the search engine marketing professional organization that he chairs).

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

The tool, which takes 10 minutes at most to install, runs in a browser, uses an intuitive Java/Javascript-based UI, imports connections from applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Outlook (contacts), and maps out the social graph between people you know and people with professional, public profiles that you may want to know. It combines data from the networking tools you use daily with commercially available data licensed from companies like D&B/Hoovers, Thomson Reuters, and ZoomInfo. (Which specific data sources is information that 7 Degrees doesn’t explicitly share on its Web site yet, but should. I will chalk this slip up to an early-stage-firm oversight that I hope they correct soon.) So nothing I am showing in the picture above is private or gained through non-publicly available means.

Why does this tool appeal to me as a B2B marketer?  Because it helps sales folks make first contact AFTER the lead management process delivers a qualified prospect to their SFA inbox. It helps salespeople prioritize which hot leads to pursue. It helps mine relationships that can make warm introductions to prospective buyers. Combining PeopleMaps with lead management information culled from an Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop, or any of the other vendor’s I’ve mentioned in my market overview gets sales closer to that fabled “360 degree view” of the client. 

Marketing lead management gives sales the qualification information — demographics, contact history, interaction insights, and buyer behavior cues — and PeopleMaps then shows sales how they connect to the prospect through a social graph of personal contacts and relationships. Sales isn’t making cold calls; their building off of existing relationships to form new ones.  And isn’t that what sales does best?

Check out PeopleMaps for yourself and let me know what you think.  I would also be interested in hearing from you about similar tools you have seen or experienced. For example, I think technologies from companies like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo show who is who and that connections exist, while PeopleMaps shows how these connections occur.

Bottomline: If marketing wants to enable sales and leverage technology to do so, then providing tools that help sales foster relationships, and continue the dialog marketing starts, will be key to achieving a real closed-loop process between marketing teams (who develop the market) and sales (who sell to it.)

Note: In light of recent FCC rulings, I am disclosing that Kevin did pay for lunch last week.  Not that it really should matter , but that’s my disclosure of a “material connection” to Kevin and 7 Degrees.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 14 Comments »

Lead Management Market Overview Published!

September 22, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Lead management automation requires a degree of process maturity many B2B firms don’t possess.  The result? In the market overview report about this market, published today, I found underachievement by vendors and users alike. While the benefits of adopting lead management automation are clear — successful implementations enjoy more predictable deal conversions, faster sales cycles, and real alignment between marketing activity and sales results — market penetration is low. We estimate that only 2% to 5% of B2B firms have invested in full LMA functionality to date. 

It’s not for a lack of capability.  In fact, the current recession makes technical solutions for pumping up the sales pipeline even more attractive. I see software and services vendors from various backgrounds elbowing their way into this space to snatch a share of the demand. As you can see in the figure, complementary technology offerings surround and dwarf the LMA space, and make it difficult for emergent competitors to grow beyond their foothold in departmental or SMB installations when many customers believe they already get LMA features from a current vendor.

Similar-sounding claims can confuse potential B2B buyers.

Similar-sounding claims can confuse potential B2B buyers.

To make lead management efforts succeed, look for capability that strikes a balance between ease of use and proven implementation. Keep these three steps in mind as well:

1) Assess your lead management maturity. Resist the temptation to buy technology first. Instead, map out current lead management processes and assess gaps. Assessing and documenting current lead management processes let marketers focus on the capabilities needed and avoid being overwhelmed by demo’ed features.

2) Create a marketing technology strategy. Lead management affects both marketing and sales. Create an automation blueprint that accounts for the business, process, organizational, and technology changes needed to deliver better-qualified demand to sales and close the loop between marketing campaigns and sales wins.

3) Prioritize expertise over usability and simplicity. While speedy implementation and attractive user interfaces are important, select automation technology that will evolve your best practices over time. Pick solutions backed by proven vendor expertise, a vibrant community of marketing peers, and demonstrated know-how. Expertise, not features, helps you to solve complex issues related to campaign execution, results diagnosis, and audience segmentation.

Stay tuned for more on this market overview in later blog posts…

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 9 Comments »
« Older posts
Newer posts »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.