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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Successes and Shortfalls of Marketing Technology: As Shared with the Milwaukee BMA

November 14, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Xerox Document Services - Example of Thought Leadership on Sustainability

From social media to sales enablement, I have found new marketing technologies are abundant, often replacing established tools in the marketing programs and operations toolbox.  In my relatively brief time here at Xerox Document Services, we’ve enjoyed the opportunity — and challenge — of adopting a variety of new technologies with a mix of successes and shortfalls.

On November 10, I had the honor of delivering the keynote presentation to the Milwaukee chapter of the BMA. (The BMA is an organization I shamelessly plug to all B2B marketers.) I shared a few lessons that we’ve learned rolling out social media, lead management automation, and guided selling tools in our professional services organization where sales coverage runs the gamut from geography to industry.

It was a frank recounting of the challenges and problems many marketers face with new technology adoption across a range of programs, campaigns, and operations. It was the ”practical experience” view to the perspective  that Debbie Qaquish, Chief Revenue Officer of the Pedowitz Group, shared on how revenue marketers are changing the landscape of the industry through lead management automation. 

You can find the presentation on the Milwaukee BMA site, scroll to the bottom as the presentation is the last one featured on this page.  In it I talk about:

1) The state of B2B marketing and how the explosion of online tactics has made it harder for marketing to escape the execution treadmill and demonstrate its true value to the business.

2) How Xerox Document Services uses an online destination and social media to share thought leading perspectives from some of our key executives.  On this site, we talk about sustainability, change management, transforming enterprise marketing, innovation, and the future of documents.  Topics completely unrelated to copiers and printing.

3) Demand generation and lead management: how we use industry experts and clear, specific targeting to develop a perspective on key issues — like the future of the insurance industry — and share these with current clients and prospects. And how we keep the conversation going.

4) A cautionary note about guided selling and sales enablement and how the most exciting new technologies may be a bit much for your sales people to digest in one swallow.  Instead start with something they know (powerpoint slides) and give them a tool that enhances their effectiveness and professionalism when presenting in front of clients.

I also shared the following lessons with the 40 or so BMA members and guests who joined us for dinner and the evening presentation:

  • We are never finished.  Technology makes many new marketing approaches possible, but you have to keep feeding the machine.
  • Choose carefully, understand impact/risks of the new technology approaches you want to try.
  • Get inside your business financials to select metrics. If your programs and technology don’t show results in the language of business, you will fail to gain support.
  • Partner with sales, but gain senior management support. If the “big boss” doesn’t demonstrate both interest in and commitment to your implementations, then the road to success will be long and difficult.
  • Focus on audience and objectives first, the rest will follow. This is the POST principle.
  • People, process, and change management are more important than technology. Technology for technology’s sake is never a good thing.
  • Content generation is biggest success factor and hurdle. Figure out how to keep the content coming.
  • Use reporting to improve marketing, not just “prove” it.
  • Don’t be afraid to fail.

If you can relate to the contents in the presentation, let me know how.  Also, join your local chapter of the BMA. It’s a wonderful organization that I know helps to improve the business marketing profession.

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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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Join Me at the Marketing Technology Summit in Phoenix Next Week

August 16, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Ah, Phoenix Arizona in the summer.   It’s hot.  Really hot.  The weather reports say it will be 107 degrees Fahrenheit when I’m there next Thursday.  Well, at least it’s a dry heat… So does that mean I’ll turn into a raisin rather than wilt like a flower?

Dry heat, or not, is no excuse to overlook the Marketing Technology Summit, co-sponsored by the Phoenix chapter of the BMA and the Arizona Technology Council, if you happen to be in the area.  If you follow my blog, you know that I’ve become a fan of the BMA.  The Phoenix chapter appears to be particularly active. Avnet’s world headquarters is located in Phoenix, making this location home to the national chairman for the BMA, Al Maag. This probably has something to do with the popularity of this event among the BMA crowd.

Good publicity also comes from the Phoenix Business Journal, which describes next week’s event by saying:

“The goal of the 3-year-old program is to shed light on different technology aspects available for marketing. It is aimed at businesses throughout the Southwest. Next week’s conference will be a half-day format, featuring panel discussions on mobile and automated marketing as well as a small trade show with the event’s sponsors.”

Check out the agenda  to learn more; activities kick off around 12:30 pm.

I’m looking forward to speaking with Bob Rinderle (of GE Healthcare) and Christina “CK” Kerley (mobile marketing specialist) on the panel. Although I hope the discussion trends toward “all things digital” rather than “all things mobile” as the PBJ advertised. Outsourced services buyers make lengthy relationship decisions when deciding whether to turn document-based business processes over to Xerox. We’ve yet to find how sending these decision makers and influencers information in mobile format helps to advance the sale.  But I might be overlooking something, so I’m eager to learn along with the rest of the audience. I know I will also pick up great information from IBM’s Kevin Kennedy and the marketing automation panel with Eloqua CMO, Brian Kardon, and Infusionsoft CMO, Greg Head.

Will I see you there?  I hope so!  Send me some tips on keeping cool while in the dry Arizona desert before then.

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Increasing The Life Expectancy Of CMOs

August 16, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Early in my new adventure here at Xerox, I met Susan Kelly, VP of Enterprise Marketing Services and found a kindred spirit.  Susan is a forward-looking direct marketer and came to Xerox from K/P Corporation, a marketing services provider that develops integrated data-driven marketing solutions, where she was president and CEO. She’s also spent time as an executive at RR Donnelley and RRD Direct.

Today, she runs the services division within Xerox focused on helping marketers make the transition from analogue systems to digital marketing while automating relationship management. Like me, she wants to encourage marketers to embrace marketing automation as a means of gaining the transparency and control we need to better connect with customers, support sales activity, and deliver top-line growth. So naturally, I was thrilled when she invited me to contribute a few thoughts as a foreword to her new whitepaper.   Here’s what I wrote:

During the past four years, I had the privilege of studying and writing about business-to-business (B2B) marketing best practices at Forrester Research. I surveyed and spoke with thousands of B2B marketers about their processes and best practices. Through this work, it became clear to me that marketing’s influence is declining as business buyers go online to research purchase decisions using peer insights and independentexperts. Years of being the department with hard-to-quantify outcomes make it difficult for marketing to specifically and concisely demonstrate its true impact on the business. New campaigns, clever advertising, and delving into social media mask over problems and won’t spur the profound changes required to avoid what may seem like an inevitable slide toward obsolescence.

To remain viable, marketers must invest in technical capability that lets them work smarter and run leaner. Specifically, top marketers I know set up marketing-specific data management systems to improve insight, automate lead development and cultivation,integrate digital and traditional channels, embrace social media, and continuously measure and quantify the results.

However, technology investment without the proper skills, planning, change management and execution rarely succeeds. Most marketers must also rely on key marketing services partners to advise – and outsource – the needed process change. I hope, as you read the following white paper, you will come to share my view that marketing stands on the verge of a major transformation. But that needed change comes through rigorous, data-driven assessments, expertise in new process design, workflow optimization inside and outside the firm, modern marketing automation capabilities, marketing logistical management and customized tracking tools that validate marketing’s forward progress.

In this paper, Susan outlines some of the key challenges she sees CMOs face today and how marketing automation provides a clear way forward. Key among her insights are the “Four Cs” of marketing automation:

  • Collection: Cataloging, cleaning, and centralizing the management of customer data and digital assets is the first step. This work and investment, while difficult, wil pay off later as it provides a solid foundation for business intelligence that can benefit marketing, sales, and the entire enterprise.
  • Collaboration: Getting your assets and data in order makes it easier to collaborate with agencies, marketing automation vendors, database marketing services providers, and other internal marketing groups.
  • Convergence: Is really about the integration of traditional and online channels that allow marketers to target , connect, and dialogue with customers and prospects wherever they may be.
  • Connectivity: Combining creative development and demand management with shared access to data and digital assets, marketes can now integrate marketing on an enterprise-wide basis. This access lets you not only improve customer acquisition and lead management but also develop more effective customer retention and loyalty programs.

To read the full whitepaper, and learn more about Susan and her perspectives on the landscape, future, and opportunities for marketers, visit her Thought Leadership site.  And I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on the paper — feel free to post a comment to let us know what you think.

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Continuing Our Conversation: Loopfuse CEO Chat, Part II

March 5, 2010 — Laura Ramos

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

Part II: Trends, Impacts, and Market Directions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Conversation With LoopFuse About The Marketing Automation Market

February 24, 2010 — Laura Ramos

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

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

Part 1: Defining the Lead Management Automation Market

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

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

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

Six Applications Dominate Today's Enterprise Marketing Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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Pump Up Your Pipeline With Lead Management Automation

January 29, 2010 — Laura Ramos

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

Lead Management Automation Helps To Plug Leaky Funnels

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

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

In summary, here’s what we found:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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