BMA “Unleash” 2011: Day 1

June 1, 2011 — Laura Ramos

I am thrilled to attend my first Business Marketing Association (BMA) national conference, here in Chicago this week.  I’ve known about BMA for a long time. Josh Bernoff, who gave an outstanding keynote talk about how empowered buyers require you to empower your employees to address their needs and treat them like a channel, told me about this organization two years ago. His exact words were “this is a group you should get to know.  Go call Gary Slack.” 

I procrastinated.  I left Forrester and went to Xerox.  Gary emailed me.  I ignored him.  Bad me. 

Lucky for me, Gary reached out again and invited me to speak on a panel in the afternoon, moderated by Accenture’s Executive Director of Advertising and Brand Management, Teresa Poggenpohl, and joined by Andrew Bosman, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Navigant Consulting, Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy and Development at IBM (who works for IBM VP of Corporate Marketing, John Kennedy), and Bob Pearson, Chief Technology and Media Officer at WCG and formerly with Dell.  We talked about “Unleash Your Content to Generate Meaningful Thought Leadership.”  I shared some examples of the content we produce at Xerox to demonstrate — and engage — though leaders, the best of which are our customers.

While our panel discussion was one of the highlights of the day, Roy Spence, Co-Founder and Chairman of GSD&M, and author, “It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For: Why Every Extraordinary Business Is Driven by Purpose” delivered a particularly inspiring set of observations and humorous quips.  You can find his key points at the hashtag #bmaunleash — or by following @BMANational – to see how purpose-inspired companies don’t build relationships based on selling,  but on helping their customers to be successful. I most liked his quip “Forget about all those other P’s you’ve heard about in marketing — Pricing, Promotion, Product — Purpose is the most important P that you need to have.”

So are you wondering what a race car has to do with a business-to-business marketing conference? Nothing more than an unabashed plug for Avnet, BMA and the No. 16 Ford at the Chicagoland Speedway NASCAR Race June 4, on the weekend.  Daytona 500 Winner Trevor Bayne will take the wheel.  I have to say, Al Maag, new national BMA chairman, and Chief Communications Officer for Avnet, did rock the racing suit he wore in his opening remarks rather well.

DM or follow me at @lauraramos on Twitter to see more about the show.

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Exploring Buyer Behavior With Santa Clara University MBA Students

April 28, 2011 — Laura Ramos

B2B marketing is about positioning products or services to companies that can help solve business problems, right?

Not entirely.  Good B2B marketing is about selling to people, not companies. People who run these companies have needs, wants, and motivations just like anybody does — and B2B marketers must understand, message, and cater to those motivations to engage buyers and develop qualified leads that feed the revenue generation engine of the company — sales, both direct and indirect.

Tonight I shared this insight, and a few others, with with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. We talked about business buyer behavior and why great marketers need to know their audience intimately. Previously, I put the slides on Slideshare - which you can find there with a few minor changes. From my perspective at the front of the room, here are some of the points that caught the class’s interest the most:

1) Unlike consumers, whose motivations can be fickle and subject to emotionally charged (and sometimes irrational) factors, B2B buyer motivations are more straight-forward. B2B buyers want to purchase products — or hire other companies — help them solve problems, make them appear competent to management, peers, and other executives, increase their prospects for future employment, and — ultimately — increase their wealth from this success. Sure there are other factors, like power and recognition, that factor into the B2B buyer psyche, but keeping the boss happy rates right at the top.

2) B2B buying is a group effort; there is never only one “persona” that you have to understand — and communicate to — in your marketing activity.  Figuring out these key personas and the role each plays in the buying process is difficult.  New advances in marketing analytics — and the emerging ability to mine social channels and profiles – makes this easier, but it’s still a lot of hard work to get buyer profiling right.

3) B2B marketers can get caught up in the execution treadmill and tend to focus more on tactics and metrics than audience and business outcome. Simple tools, like the POST methodology and behavioral modeling (like Forrester’s Social Technographics), can keep business marketers from losing sight of marketing’s real purpose — to help build demand ahead of the pipeline and help to scale the sales organization.

4) Current customers can help to inform buyer behavior as well as acquire and influence new buyers. Case studies, customer testimonial, and affinity marketing all help to demonstrate that B2B sellers understand customer needs, can help to solve key problems, and do so in as a business partner, not just as a supplier.

As I did in October, I asked the class to share their reactions to what I presented by commenting on this blog post.  (Professor Shanmugam offered extra credit if they complied with this request!) Compared to the last cohort, these students appeared to me to have more experience with sales and marketing. A couple mentioned that they currently work in sales. They asked great questions about whether segmentation applies in account-based sales management (it does!) and what I see as the key differences between the role of the CMO and the CSO (Chief Sales Officer) in revenue generation.  Please read the comments to see whether my views resonated with these future MBA graduates and how my talk reflected their own experiences.

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Summit on Customer Engagement 2011, Day Two

March 2, 2011 — Laura Ramos

What is “customer engagement”, exactly? I don’t think the term is one most business people would recognize as a common marketing function like PR, Marcom, field marketing, or product marketing. The best definition I’ve heard here at the Summit on Customer Engagement is:

“Customer Engagement includes the role, responsibilities, and activities around all the non-revenue value a company/organization receives from its clients and buyers.”

The concept continues to expand beyond customer reference management to include advisory councils, communities (non-developer), events (in particular virtual), and testimonial (written, digital, video, and in person.) You could argue other points, but this list encompasses about 90% of the content shared during this conference.

More generally, marketing should be all about customer engagement. The definition reminds us that: 1) Marketing’s job is to scale the opportunities our firms have too engage with prospects and customers and 2) it’s a two-way street and customers should benefit as much (if not more) than our companies do when customers engage with us.

My view today on customer engagement focused on how Xerox Services uses video to engage our customers.  The examples I shared in my presentation — available here on Slideshare – are by no means ground-breaking or completely innovative.  But the examples demonstrate how Xerox uses video to create a persistent, engaging experience centered on our customers and about how we serve them best.  Key take-aways about the connection between video and customer engagement are:

1) B2B marketers underuse video. In earlier studies I did at Forrester, just under 50% of B2B marketers said that they used online video in their marketing mix - a percentage far less than email and search marketing, but also trailing behind emerging tactics like social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools.

2) Of those who use it, 1 in 5 say video is effective in building awareness and about 1 in 10 say it works for generating demand.  Wow, that’s terrible — but why?

3) Because about 2/3 of those surveyed said they use video to demonstrate products or (worse) they don’t use it at all.

4) This is a shame because B2B marketers need to be reminded that we sell to other people, not just businesses. And, like us, those people are influenced by experiences that engage their needs, desires and emotions.  And video is one of the best ways to create that kind of experience.

5) New digital cameras, smart phones, and YouTube make video production MUCH LESS expensive than it was just 10 years ago. Production quality matters, but you can get creative on a small budget.

Luckily for me, Xerox Services marketing is overcoming these hurdles and using video to tell our customer stories. We do this by:

Most importantly, with the need to rebrand the company around our ACS acquisition, Xerox Corporate built an interactive environment called “Real Business Live” that includes both customer-centric and full production (affinity advertising that tells a customer story in a co-branded fashion) video to take interactions beyond building the “awareness” that Xerox offers more than copiers and printers to exploration of what those capabilities mean to the clients who partner with us for those services.  Of all the examples share, this one created the most interest.

This brings me back to my first point, engaging prospects and customers today needs to go beyond the purchase process. Regardless of the medium (which is video in this post today), centering on the customer, telling their story, and making sure the story presented is authentic and specific is what makes marketing more engaging.

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Hire Jonathan Kranz and Stamp Out Passive Voice

November 22, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Here is a bit of a grammar lesson and a bit of insight into my personality.  I hate passive voice. After writing research reports at Forrester for 9 years, I think I’ve become a bit fanatic about spotting passive writing and correcting it. For example, a notice posted on the door to my doctor’s office this week said, “Our office will be closed for Thanksgiving on Thursday and Friday of this week.” I crossed out “will be closed” and wrote “will close” above it. When I call my son’s cell phone, prior to connection I get a message that says, “Please enjoy the music while your party is reached.” I want to scream “while we reach your party.”  You get the picture?

I thought my colleagues at Forrester used passive voice a lot until I came to Xerox and read some of the documentation, collateral, and marketing communications written here. Passive language is unfortunate, but typical, in many high technology companies – firms that use a specialized vocabulary and lean on jargon to communicate. So I decided to get some help upgrading writing skills in the North American services marketing team. After scanning the Web, and talking with other marketers about their experiences with copy writing training, I came across Jonathan Kranz. 

Besides training marketers to be better copywriters, Jon is a freelance writer who develops advertising, direct marketing, and public relations materials for consumer and B2B clients in financial services, banking, insurance, high-tech, healthcare, and education. He is also the author of Writing Copy for Dummies. Talking with him on the phone, I liked his straightforward approach and passion for teaching others how to write to a specific, target audience and engage them with simple, clear prose. He also works with many high technology clients, so he understands the unique challenge marketers face when trying to convey the value in technically sophisticated products.

On November 16, we hired Jonathan to deliver a full day, onsite writing workshop.  Wow, am I glad we did. Using engaging lesson material and hands-on exercises, Jonathan helped our team boost its collective writing acumen and — my favorite — stamp out passive voice and jargon. Without giving away his entire syllabus, here are some highlights from the course Jon customized for our team:

1) Be a Mirror, not a Window: Write Copy to Reflect Your Customer’s Concerns — Much marketing writing focuses on the company and its products or services, not the customer. It’s inward-facing. Jonathan starts out with an exercise to help writers learn to how to acknowledge their target audience in writing and focus on them (not you) by demonstrating empathy with their priorities and by providing answers/solutions to their problems.

2) Use 3D Storytelling.  Next, Jonathan showed us how to use “3-Ds” to create an emotional connection to buyers using a memorable message and a logical flow to arguments. The “3-Ds” stand for Desire (what does your audience want?), Danger (what obstacle, challenge, or problem stands in the way?) and Drama (how can you help – what is it about your product/service/solution — that overcomes the obstacle and achieves the desired outcome?) You heighten drama when you provide proof to demonstrate that you can achieve what you promise.

3) Don’t “Let it Be” – Use Active Verbs: Review your copy (read it out loud to yourself or ask a colleague to read it for you) to find those places where you can transform passive into active construction. Don’t be afraid to use the word “you” in your writing and to think in terms of giving directions or advice, rather than indirect suggestions.

4) Search and Destroy: Jargon, Clichés, and Imprecise Language. Is your language exhausted, overused, and so broadly applied that it no longer has any tangible meaning to your audience?  Then change it by including specificity (numbers, measures, exact names, tangible details), statistics (data, facts, time periods, sources), direct quotes, news, and language that appeals to the senses.

The best part about Jonathan’s workshop was his energy, enthusiasm, and ability to think on his feet.  He kept a group of 30 marketers engaged throughout the day. If you would like to learn more, visit Jon’s Web site and let him know that you read about him on my blog.

Besides these few examples I shared today, what are some writing challenges you struggle with as a marketer?  Or that you would want your team to improve upon? I would be curious to know. Regardless, I think Jonathan could help you, so check him out on Twitter and Facebook.

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3 B2B Buyer Behavior Principles: Segmentation, Personas, and Profiling

October 20, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Business-to-business marketers have long struggled to reach decision makers and measure marketing results. Over 50% of the almost 570 respondents to my 2006 Forrester survey put these two issues at the top of their list of marketing challenges. It’s not branding, it’s not budget, it’s not competitive threats.  Finding the right prospects to engage, and demonstrating that marketing had an impact on this process, is what keeps B2B marketers awake at night.

I think B2B marketers, especially those in high tech firms, struggle because they don’t spend enough time understanding who their best customers are and what distinguishes those customers from the rest. Knowing your customers takes discipline – it’s simply not about conducting satisfaction surveys or publishing customer success stories.  B2B marketers need to analyze business buyer behavior and using the findings to inform their go-to-market approach. It’s about knowing and managing your Buyer’s Journey.

Tonight, I had the wonderful opportunity to share my insights and perspective with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. We talked about the fundamentals of business buyer behavior and how to “get to know” your audience. If you would like to see the slides, I put them on Slideshare.

At Xerox Services, we believe in customer segmentation, profiling, and analytics. We deliver professional managed print services as multi-year contracts worth several millions of dollars.  Not your typical corporate purchase: there are a select number of organizations who need (and can afford) what we offer. But the business value is clear: we save our clients more than they spend.  This means that account identification and profiling is very important since we orient around a sales-centric go-to-market model.

From an industry marketing perspective, we also know that “knowing” who your buyer is — what are the key issues that concern him/her and how Xerox Services can help — is also crucial to making those sales interactions meaningful and to building a lasting relationship. Drawing from this experience, I shared with the Marketing 551 class, the following principles behind B2B buyer behavior and analytics:

1) Segmentation.  Critical to helping marketing to focus on “who” in the market you want to engage with your messaging and offers. Based on your market definition, segmentation shows you where the best market opportunity for your products and services will be.

2) Personas. Once you know “who” to target, personas help you understand “what to say” to them. As a representation of a real market group (i.e. segment), personas help marketers crystallize their message and speak in the voice of the customer, not market-speak. The best marketers create personas based on attributes that are relevant to purchase decision-making — not on generalities like industry, buying role (decision maker, influencer, etc.), or functional area.

3) Profiling. While most marketers are very familiar with firmographic information, and how to use it, many have yet to understand the importance of profiling behavior. One example of behaviorial analytics is Forrester’s Social Technographics, which describes a buyer’s propensity to engage in online, social behavior.  In this always-connected world, business buyers are becoming more willing to take purchase cues from peers and “knowledgeable experts” than traditional, company-lead media and messages.

I’ve asked the class to share their reactions to what I presented by commenting on this blog post.  By and large, these students are employed full-time at top Silicon Valley firms. They also tend to have technical/engineering backgrounds or current responsibilities. Take a look at the comments to see whether my views resonated with these future MBA graduates from my alma mater.

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ITSMA: 5 Ways Services Marketers Can Enable Sales

September 21, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Selling high-involvement products through a direct sales force is hard.  Selling high-involvement services through a direct sales force is even harder. The job requires more focus on relationship creation, management, and maintenance in services than other industries — activities that good salespeople accomplish almost naturally and good marketers struggle to leverage across different audiences.  Those of us in high technology/IT services marketing are lucky, however, because we have ITSMA to help.

I love that there is an association exclusively for IT Services Marketing professionals – one that attracts true peers from other large, high technology companies who exchange experiences and learn from each other readily. ITSMA does a great job of providing thoughtful research and best practices focused specifically on those who must work with sales and delivery across a wide range of target markets, industries, geographies, and offerings.  The folks at ITMSA help to start — and keep — those conversations going.

For example, today I attended ITSMA’s Briefing on The Next Generation of Sales Enablement here in Santa Clara, CA. This is an important topic among services marketers because the culture in many professional services organizations revolves around sales and delivery. It can be common in this sector, when compared to others, to see executive sales management relegate marketing to the “Make me some pretty slides” department. This is a fate good sales enablement can help to avoid.

How Do Services Sales Spend Their Time?

ITSMA Study: How Do Services Sales Spend Their Time?

While I can’t share the entire presentation with you, I found one slide particularly informative. In an August survey of the membership, ITSMA found that almost 1/4 of salespeople’s time, on average, is spent on indirect selling activities like lead generation, lead tracking, account planning, account strategy, creating presentations, and customer research, among other things.

Wow, doesn’t that sound like many of the activities marketing should do — and could do more consistently and less expensively — to target prospects, educate them ahead of the sales process, and increase sales productivity? I think industry marketers must work harder to understand the typically long, extensive sales processes — that include assessments, proposal responses, oral presentations of the proposed contract terms, and negotiations — and determine “how can marketing help to find this business earlier, nurture it, and help move it through the pipeline?”  This requires more than a direct marketing approach because services firms must demonstrate a commitment to the client’s business that goes beyond messaging and presentations.

Using ITSMA’s framework, successful sales enablement in the services world requires close attention to 5 critical areas:

1) Marketing and sales alignment: do you share the same goals and objectives for 2011 as well as this quarter? Do you agree on what it is you have to sell, who you want to sell it to, and what’s needed to make that happen?

2) Sales processes: fundamentally how do you sell and what makes your best salespeople outdistance their peers? Even if marketing does not share this responsibility, they should know how the sales and negotiation process works to know how they can help accelerate deals in the pipeline.

3) Lead generation: to my mind this is most important for sales enablement.  If marketing can’t demonstrate a direct link between marketing activity and sales results, it’s time to get into another line of work.

4) Sales tools: knowing “how” salespeople sell helps determine which tools they need at each stage in the process. Where you have the most fall out from one step to the next is where marketing should focus the sales tool effort. Don’t fall in the trap of asking sales “what do you need?” Rather, find look at how they spend their time and ask, “how can we help you do that faster, better, more efficiently?”

5) Account/territory planning:  this one is huge in services firms because account assignment requires long term commitment, both at the account level and at the broader segment level.  Service marketers in particular want to chase “industry marketing” and proffer industry solutions.  That’s fine, but targeting fewer industries more deeply works better in the long run that spreading those precious, few field resources across a jumble of different segments.

To learn more, I invite you to check out the ITSMA website or to look into their annual conference in early November. I look forward to seeing you at an upcoming ITSMA event!

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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!

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2010 B2B Marketing Mix Effectiveness and Budget Trends

March 23, 2010 — Laura Ramos

I recently published two new reports on B2B marketing mix effectiveness — Rethinking The B2B Marketing Mix In The Digital Age – and B2B budget trends — B2B Marketers’ 2010 Budget Trends.

Great information here on what 249 B2B marketers say works for building brand and generating leads. Also where they expect to spend 2010 program budgets. Check it out further on my Forrester analyst blog (until April 1).

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Inside Sales And Telemarketing Help Boost B2B Brands: Really?

February 1, 2010 — Laura Ramos

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

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

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

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

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

But for building brand?  How does that work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pump Up Your Pipeline With Lead Management Automation

January 29, 2010 — Laura Ramos

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

Lead Management Automation Helps To Plug Leaky Funnels

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

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

In summary, here’s what we found:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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