Silverpop Sets New Bar for B2B Campaign Design Tools

June 3, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Corporate and field marketers face a lot of challenges. Automation supposedly simplifies their lives. Yet one of the most demanding tasks they face is the design, execution, and management of marketing campaigns using a marketing automation application. 

Whether it be simple email campaigns aimed at attracting registrants for a Webinar, or a more complex, multi-channel affair launching a new product or service, capturing and managing all the steps – and logic rules – required to automate campaign steps can be tedious to build and tricky to debug. At best you end up with a Visio-like process chart covered in a mass of spaghetti links and flows; at worst campaign design becomes a series of impenetrable workflow wizard steps that defy editing and change. A lack of more usable and useful tools is, in my opinion, one of the key issues holding back widespread adoption of marketing automation.

But there is hope on the horizon.

Two days ago, Silverpop announced a new graphical user interface for their campaign design and management software — called Engage B2B (formerly known as Vtrenz) —  that I think could transform the way B2B marketers plan and manage campaigns. Rather than conventional workflow diagramming, Silverpop’s new GUI uses a horizontal storyline metaphor – commonly used in video or TV program editing – to help marketers layout steps in a simple, visual flow.

Silverpop's UI Simplifies B2B Online Campaign Design

Silverpop's UI Simplifies B2B Online Campaign Design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marketers can combine flows of simple tasks, like “register for an event” to create multi-track, multi-point campaigns that run over several weeks or months and help sort out the most engaged buyers from those merely kicking the tires. Silverpop designed the tool to handle the tasks marketing performs when designing campaigns that take action based on how prospects interact with marketing communications, messages, and offers and move leads through the sales pipeline. Visually, it’s clean without being overly simple.  I like it and I think you will too.

So today, my hat goes off to Bryan Brown and his Engage B2B design team. The new UI will certainly help marketers focus on managing demand, not simply generating it. It makes it easier for marketers to build practices that score leads numerically, route top-scoring leads to sales, nurture contacts not yet ready to buy, and use visual tools to engage with sales.  Practices, in our research, shown to not only improve marketing ROI but demonstrate more clearly marketing are impact on the pipeline.

Engage B2B customers, let me know what you think once you’ve had the chance to test drive the new UI. Would love to hear about your first hand experiences.

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B2B Marketing’s Job #1: Sales Enablement

May 26, 2009 — Laura Ramos

If you have never been confronted by a sales person over lead quality, you can stop reading this blog post now:

The primary source of tension between marketing and sales is this: Marketing wants to know what sales does with all the leads they generate. In response to the question, sales says, “What leads? Those leads were awful; send us better leads.” Sound familiar?

The basic problem is that marketing and sales don’t agree on what constitutes a lead. The deeper issue is that many marketers are still learning what it takes to develop truly qualified demand and pass the right information to sales in a way that helps sales to progress an opportunity quickly and consistently.

Resolving this situation takes a lot of work, but starts with getting marketing and sales to see that their mutual success increases when their activities – and feedback loops – align around common goals. It also requires understanding that the overall firm wins competitively, grows revenue, and builds market share more efficiently by applying lower-cost marketing resources to the front-end of this process and deeper customer insight to the backend hand-off between marketing and sales. While technology alone rarely fixes this, firms don’t get to top performance without marketing automation to help segment and target customers – and to focus sales on topics that resonate with buyers and create dialogue.

When marketing delivers a new batch of leads, sales wants to know quickly which have the most potential. In my research, I show how top marketers build practices that score leads numerically, route top-scoring leads to sales, and – more often – use visual tools to engage with sales. This is where many marketing automation vendors are heading and Eloqua has taken a major step in this direction with its announcement of Prospect Profiler today.

Sales-centric Dashboard Helps Track Digital Activity

Sales-centric Dashboard Helps Track Digital Activity

In short, this tool gives sales a graphical, one-stop interface that tracks a prospect’s digital footprints and summarizes buyer activity across Web content, online registration form (for various events), email, and online search touchpoints. If marketing says, “we think this is a hot lead,” Prospect Profiler shows visually why that is the case.

More importantly (although Eloqua doesn’t mention it in its press release), this tool helps extend marketing’s impact on the sales organization. Campaign and drip nurturing reports are useful, but giving sales a tool that helps individual reps know how involved one prospect is compared to another is a sure way of cementing marketing’s value for enabling smarter sales conversations.

Collaboration with and the sharing of content among salespeople are key themes I will explore next month in my blog posts and upcoming research on the Lead Management Automation market. Let me know what you think of Eloqua’s announcement and share your thoughts on which features you think are essential when investing in automation for B2B marketing.

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Eloqua Removes Start Up Barriers In Race To Capture Customers

May 12, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Yesterday, Eloqua announced a free implementation service. Clicking on the link to their services, however, may create a bit of confusion. The page describes four offerings: QuickStart, SmartStart, Advanced Implementations, and Global Solutions, but it doesn’t mention this “free” service.  So I called up Eloqua and asked “what gives?”  After chatting with Paul Teshima, Eloqua’s Senior Vice President of Customer Strategy and Success, the clouds parted.  Here are two details that may help clear things up for you as well:

1) Instead of “Eloqua Launches a Free Implementation Service,” the press release should have said, “Eloqua announces that our QuickStart services package is now free to new customers.”  My wording is not as newsworthy or eye-catching, but it gets the point across.

2) The services Web page should mention that QuickStart is now free.  The page should also say whether it is “free” for a limited time or forever. But something on the page should have changed to indicate QuickStart comes along with the subscription.

The main difference between QuickStart and SmartStart is that service partners perform QuickStart remotely and quickly, while they conduct SmartStart onsite and deliver more assessment, strategy, and planning for the money. If you need any of the following capabilities, you should pay for the SmartStart implementation instead of going with just the free offering:

  1. Email marketing customization. QuickStart provides a basic template and configuration, but if you want custom branding, formatting, and help setting up email assets, folder management, and segmentation, upgrade to SmartStart.
  2. Integration of an existing online Web form with Eloqua.
  3. Anything beyond basic integration of up to 30 fields with a supported SFA/CRM system.
  4. Any sort of in-depth training, strategy setting, or implementation of Lead Scoring or Lead Nurturing. This is key, by the way, for maximizing value from the investment.
  5. An assessment of your marketing practices with an eye toward how the lead management automation will help you to streamline and optimize campaign execution and closing the loop with sales.

Eloqua is making it easier and less costly to set up their product. This will help them overcome objections from buyers who look at competitors like Marketo and say, “they offered me a free set up service if I buy from them.”

But here’s the bigger picture: the press release looks defensive amid the land-grab happening in the Lead Management Automation space. With new competitors showing up daily – Genius Enterprise being one of the latest offerings to enter the ring – incumbents like Eloqua look for ways to lure new marketers into trying their service and balance on the thin like between demonstrating value and giving it away for free.

With a vast number of companies offering high-consideration products through a direct sales force, one would think the opportunity to sell automation to marketers in those firms would be limitless. Yet vendors fight it out on a daily basis, rather than work to expand the boundaries of the opportunity.

I’m going to look further into the dynamics of this market in research to be published this summer. If you have thoughts on the following questions, feel free to comment on this post:

  • Why is the lead management automation market so slow to take off?  Or why is the competition so fierce when the opportunity seems large?
  • What holds marketers back from investing in lead management automation? What’s soft about the value proposition here?
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Digital Body Language: Steve Wood’s On B2B Marketing

March 10, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Steven Woods is one of the first people I met as the new B2B analyst for Forrester.  I say “new” because I had been an analyst for 5 years before taking on this role. Steve and I met at our Cambridge office and, together with Thor Johnson, he told me about Eloqua, the company he helped found in 1999.  He’s been thinking about what it takes to get B2B marketing right for longer than those 10 years.  He’s also helped develop software to automate key processes that top-quality B2B marketing requires.

I was both pleased and delighted when he sent me an advanced copy of his new book to read. Recently, while on a couple of transcontinental flights, I finished “Digital Body Language” and found it a worthy read.  In particular:

1) The case studies are great. The book is full of case studies from Eloqua’s customers. Companies that buy and use lead management automation are ahead of the curve in my book. As the first firm to actively market software for managing demand, Eloqua has a deep history to draw upon. The Concur, Kadient, National Instruments (who also won a Groundswell award for their online community), Sybase, Terracotta, and VFA stories are particularly interesting and instructive.

2) “Getting Started Now” sidebars offer key tips. Sprinkled throughout are short, one-paragraph pointers that B2B marketers would do well to follow.  In the copy I have, I found the text in the paragraph on page 91 repeated on 93, but other than that the suggestions are concise and actionable.

3) Understanding digital body language is essential for B2B marketers. Sure Eloqua wants to associate the term “digital body language” with their brand, but call it body language, foot steps, or finger prints, knowing how prospects behave online is a crucial part of marketing data collection, profiling, and segmentation. Firms that qualify leads based solely on explicit information like company name, contact title, and expressed answers to qualification questions miss out on acquiring key information about whether a prospect is serious or only tire-kicking.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of lead management automation and firms like Eloqua that bring this technology to market. But looking beyond the technology — which Steve barely mentions in his book — business marketers need to focus more on customer profiling and data management, lead scoring, nurturing, and closing the loop with sales to upgrade marketing from the “make it pretty” department to an essential business operation based on customer insight and demand development. You can learn more about these topics by visiting Steve’s blog, where he recounts  many of the points made and expands on stories published in Digital Body Language.

Congratulations, Steve!  And thank you for helping to raise the marketing professionalism bar as you inspire B2B marketers to succeed.

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Working On A Webinar With DemandBase

February 1, 2009 — Laura Ramos

At the end of this month, Demandbase CEO, Chris Golec, invited me to join him on a Webinar to talk about best practices in creating and managing demand. Marketing and sales professionals are typically asked to do more with less, and the current economy makes matters worse. With budgets shrinking and expectations growing, it is important to hone demand management practices to keep potential prospects engaged in marketing-driven conversations.  Yep, there’s that lead management theme again.  Get used it; you’ll read about it a lot in this blog.

I find what Demandbase offers intriguing. I’ve talked about them before:

Demandbase: A New Twist In the Lead Management Automation Market — 8/26/08

In a recent survey of over 2100 IT professionals who buy or recommend telecom and networking solutions, we found buyers turn to peers and colleagues first, followed by vendor, industry trade, or professional Web sites, to inform their purchase decisions. In fact, 88% said Web sites were important in helping them decide what to buy. However, many tech buyers visit vendor Web sites many times to learn about and compare products, yet few register or leave evidence of their activity.

B2B marketers looking for ways to turn their Web sites into demand generation tools have some new solutions to consider.  Yesterday, Demandbase announced a new software suite to help marketers harvest passive traffic visiting Web sites. As part of a broader lead generation, on-demand platform, Demandbase offers a free, downloadable Web application built on Adobe AIR (one of 3 investors in an $8M round they also announced.) Demand Stream™ includes a Web widget that shows sales and marketing the names of companies visiting the Web site in near real-time.  Users can query this widget to find out more about these visitors and decide if they want to purchase full business contact information. I think the idea of an iTunes™ -like interface — and pay-as-you-go pricing structure — for viewing, sorting, and selecting B2B contacts is intriguing.  I worry that this tool only ends up helping sales pick out cold calls to make, and is not used by marketers enough to segment, collect, and improve their prospecting databases. The technology appears useful at both ends of this spectrum.

The lead management automation market, about which I blogged previously, continues to attract new players at a rapid rate. The main problems targeted are keeping the pipeline full of marketing-qualified leads and automating the process of nurturing demand not yet ready to buy.  One side of the supply helps firms generate demand — acquire leads in a sales-led “push” model, one that feels more focused on outbound communication. I would put Demandbase here along with firms like Active Conversion, Hubspot, iHance, Leadlander, Sales Genius, and Zoominfo. (I’m sure I forgot a few. Feel free to chime in if I did. Or disagree with the list…) 

On the other side, I see solutions more oriented toward marketing and enabling a “pull” model, one focused on letting prospects engage at their own pace.  I would put the lead management automation crop here: Eloqua, Loopfuse, Manticore Technologies, Market2Lead, Marketo, and Vtrenz.  I would also put another group — one more focused on helping marketing align with, support, and enable sales: firms like BrightMarket, einsof, Longwood Software, and Salesforce.com with their Saleforce Content offering, to name a few. 

When evaluating any technology to help manage demand, the short list of features should look something like:

1) Prospect data acquisition — helps with targeting, list building, list management, and data quality. Starting to see providers team up with data aggregators (Jigsaw’s name comes up here) to provide new sources of business contacts. Reverse IP look up appears to be the new thing here.

2) Online lead generation — provides or connects with email delivery, online advertising, search marketing adword tools, landing pages, registration/information capture, and offer testing. Among other stuff.

3) Online activity analytics — rather than examine overall site traffic and usage patterns like Omniture and WebTrends, these tools focus more on tracking what one individual or opportunity is doing.  Analytics include Web site visits, return visits, email opens, and click-throughs with an emphasis on letting marketing, insides sales, or account managers know when these activities happen.

4) Lead scoring — in a prior post, I make the case for quantitative scoring. And for including explicit (words) and implicit (deeds) information in the algorithm. I believe this is a key capability.

5) Routing/reporting — automation to help close the loop with sales and give marketing visibility into the sales pipeline. Must include some sort of dashboard for everyone to access internally.

6) SFA integration — ditto the above. Synchronizing prospect and opportunity databases is key. The data has to flow back and forth and not dirty up the pipeline with raw leads.

7) Lead nurturing —  automates follow up communication, is drip or event-triggered, and allows marketing to educate, persuade, and accelerate buyers as they move through the purchase process to the point where they become “sales ready.”

For those needing more capabilities to help with sales enablement or account-based communication, I would add:

8 ) Sales/marketing portal or workspace — includes account spaces/threaded discussions, sales call/activity prep, libraries for marketing content, task lists.

9) Collaboration — capabilities like wikis, sales-contributed content, voting and tagging.  Just makes it easier to manage all the stuff. Social networking stuff fits here too.

10) eLearning — checklists, directed sales tools, self-serve courses, quizzes, certifications, etc.  Stuff to help sales management get the new guys/gals up to speed.

Ok, that’s enough for now. I’m sure this post will generate its fair share of comments, outrage, and controversy. All thoughts are welcome!  I’m gearing up to write a market overview about this space, so hearing from you early in the process will help to shape that research.

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The Webinar called “Best Practices in B2B Marketing : Creating and Managing Demand will be held on February 25 at 9 am Pacific, noon Eastern.

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Looking Over The Lead Management Automation Market

February 1, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Despite the current economy, small firms in the lead management automation space continue to spring up.  Recently I spoke with founders and spokespeople from Neolane (not new, but not on my radar until now), eTrigue, LeadLife, and Kineticast.  These are but a few of the seemingly burgeoning ranks of companies who have found seed, angel, or VC money and now look to offer solutions that help marketers better manage demand when it comes in the door.

I will be writing more about this in my Forrester research next quarter, but if you have a question or comment about any of these firms in the meantime, let me know.  I also talked about this market space last year; here is what I said:

B2B Lead Management Market Heats Up — 3/30/2008

Since the start of this year, I’ve been receiving a boatload of briefing requests from companies wanting to show me their lead generation and management solutions.  Most recently, Marketo just announced their lead management solution. While honored, I also find reviewing these solutions confusing because there is a lot of variation in the product presentations and overlap between categories.  And it’s not clear to me if lead management automation deserves to be a separate category or to be subsumed as part of the broader marketing platform. (I know Suresh Vittal includes lead management as a component of his enterprise marketing platform. But does the B2B need the same platform components as B2C?) Here’s how I see it and I’d like to hear your views as well.

There are four primary buckets of technology solutions aimed at solving the “how do I make lead generation activities more effective?” problem:

1) Web analytics – typically the stronghold of companies like Coremetrics, Omniture, and WebTrends, the analytics area bleeds over into lead management as companies go online to generate demand.  Many of the marketing automation companies have added some fairly sophisticated analytics to monitor prospect’s online behavior and help marketers qualify and score them based on Web site visits, registrations, and downloads.

2) Database services – powerhouses like Dun&Bradstreet, Harte-Hanks, Acxiom, Equifax, infoUSA, and Merkle dominate this category, but B2B marketers tend to think of them more as list generators than providers of a broad spectrum of strategic data management to direct mail execution. My point: B2B marketers are looking elsewhere for help generating demand.

3) Marketing automation – lead by firms like Aprimo, Unica, Oracle/Siebel and SAS, this category is at the core of what Forrester calls the Marketing Technology Backbone.  The problem is: these platforms are heavy on campaign design, execution, and reporting and light on lead management.

4) “Pure play” lead management – this group is lead by Eloqua, but there are a LOT of firms throwing their hat into this ring including Vtrenz, Hubspot, Manticore, Market2Lead, Marketo, LoopFuse, einsof, iHance, Precience, among many others. (That I’m sure to hear about them since I know I’ve missed adding many to this list.)

Here’s the problem. There are at least 4 amorphous groups of solution providers also setting their sights on this space:

1) Lead generation services or tools – Because this category contains both service providers (that look more like agencies or telesales outsourcers) and software as a service vendors, there are probably more than I could possibly name.  Recently, I’ve heard from companies like Bulldog Solutions, InsideView, Jigsaw, netFactor, Reachforce, PointClear, Genius, Leads360, among others. Folks, at less than 20 employees, many of you look more like boutique agencies than true technology providers. Positioning yourselves as “lead management” does not help differentiate what you REALLY do.

2) Email services – Julie Katz at Forrester writes about this group.  The lead management vendors are developing one-to-one email capabilities that help sales people be more consistent and productive.  In B2B, it’s not about batch-and-blast acquisition as much as it is about using email to continue a conversation.

3) Search engine marketing services providers – Shar VanBoskirk covers this market, but I’ve found companies like Reprise Media, IMPAQT, iCrossing and iProspect doing a lot more to help B2B marketers understand how to turn search optimization or paid clicks into qualified leads. Tools that analyze who’s clicking – and help B2B marketers make heads or tails out of Google’s analytics – are bleeding over into the lead management space.

4) Online portals – I know, this is a broad category.  But I’m thinking about firms like Business.com, TechTarget, Buyerzone, and a ton of others who syndicate content, host catalogs, attract eyeballs, and offer to “sell” these leads.

Whew!  Lots of stuff, huh? So here’s the two big questions:  When do you use which? (or a combination of the choices?) And will the lead management market continue to grow in addition to – or despite – the plethora of offerings hovering around it?

My bet is on lead management growth because B2B marketers need to fully embrace online marketing as their primary way to engage and educate buyers. They need a platform that fits together with their CRM/SFA systems but separately helps them to identify and sort the best leads from the rest and to nurture those not yet ready to buy.  B2B marketers also need systems that help them align sales activity and marketing messages, monitor marketing’s impact on the pipeline, and close the loop on closed deals.  I think the lead management platforms hit directly on these problems and will shift marketing’s role from filling the pipeline to managing the customer lifecycle.

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Of course, the vendors had to weigh in on this post.  I suspect they will do the same when I publish the market overview later this year — stay tuned.

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