Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

Naming Standards in Marketing Automation systems

I spent some time with a prospect yesterday and the topic of the importance of naming campaigns arose;   a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…unless of course it was the name of a campaign, program, list, form, template, folder, offer, import configuration, custom field, report, or dashboard in your new Marketing Automation system.  Didn’t realize that there was so much stuff to name? And if you let your marketing automation users make up any name they want to, and save everything  in the top level folders, you will have a mess on your hands in a year.

When you roll out your new marketing automation system, be sure to roll out a standards document on naming conventions. Here are some tips taken from our client services lead management and lead nurturing best practices documents at Market2lead.

• Unless otherwise specified name everything with the following format

  • <Object-Type>_<Date>_<Tactic  Code>_<Target_Segment>_<Description>
  • Webinar Example: WBN_2008_Nurture_NA_Healthcare_in-house
  • Newsletter Example: NLS_1108_Communications_NA_Federal
  • Use Acronyms where possible. They are hard to enforce initially but help in conserving UI real estate and standardization.
  • Years are shown as yyyy as in 2008
  • Month/year is shown as mmyy as in 0308
  • Quarters are shown QNYY as in Q308
  • Year, month, date as yyyymmdd as in 20080731
  • Not all items will have a region and market segment
  • Many Marketing Automation Systems will let you sort assets alphabetically so think about what that first word should be!
  • Capitalize the first letter of each unique word
  • Never use spaces – use underscore to separate items
  • Campaign type should match the CRM picklist for “lead source” exactly

• Try to name related items the same way. For instance a single marketing campaign may have multiple programs related to it that all should have similar names. A single webinar campaign might have:

1. A webinar registration form, email invitation, email reminder

2. Email sorry we missed you, email thank you for attending
3. A follow up survey, and several unique  invitation lists (production, seed, test)

• For campaigns organize folders by geography first. Within these folders organize content by year first and then by campaign type under that.

• For lists the top level folder should be the list type (production, seed, test, exclusion etc
  • The next level down is ideally the program or campaign type

• For forms make the top level folder the form type – inquiry, download, free trial, PPC, etc

• For custom fields added to contact or account records put a suffix on the name that tells you instantly if that field is one that syncs over to your CRM.
• Name reports in a way that captures some of the business rules inherent in creating the report
  • NA_Free_Trial-_Registration_Q308_Box_Cutter_Software 
• Create archive folders for assets and programs that are no longer active

If you create and enforce the standards, it will be a whole lot easier to find things a year from now!

-Kevin

Lead Source - A Blessing or A Curse?

Some marketing folks get very hung up on identifying the best lead source. I would much rather know the sequence of all the marketing touches and responses, to all of the contacts, at an account where an opportunity closed won. Be that as it may, I want to discuss the connection of lead source to opportunities in a CRM such as Salesforce.com. The marketing automation system can certainly help this process but since many leads are entered by Sales (CSO Insights figures it is up to 52% in 2008) into the SFA/CRM, the Lead Management process has to be defined in such a way that it plugs the holes and helps marketing get credit for opportunity dollars they helped put in the funnel.

So what is the problem you may be wondering? Lead comes in to website, registers for something; hot lead that marketing passes to Sales as a marketing qualified lead, sales likes it, moves it to sales accepted lead status, and later on after a few calls they become a sales qualified lead (Using the Sirius Decisions vernacular here as it seems to be getting wide acceptance). At this point the lead has been converted into a contact, and the lead source value passed along to the contact object in your SFA. IF you do not choose to force the creation of an opportunity at the time of conversion because you recognize that although the person is qualified (they and their company could represent an opportunity at some future time) but isn't actively in their buying cycle, then you have no guarantee that your lovely lead source value will ever get attached to the opportunity at some future date. The sales guys goes out to the account meets 5 more people, enters them into the SFA with a lead source of "sales prospecting" and when the opportunity comes along 6 months from now the chances are 5/6 that she will pick one of those 5 as the primary contact for the opportunity - that is if you are lucky enough to have them attach at least one person to the opportunity. As a result the opportunity lead source = "Sales Prospecting". Marketing gets no credit for bringing in the new account!

Yes, you tell me, 'that is why my company insists that an opportunity has to be created when you convert a lead to a contact/account. QED problem solved. Kevin, get a life.' Not so fast...What you have now done is forced Sales folks to put crap data into the system. Most of the time when they are excited enough to convert the lead (because contacts/accounts are simply easier to handle than leads) they really don't know enough to put anything intelligent in about opportunities. So you end up with Sales folks putting in very small opportunity values so management won't look over their shoulders, and pushing the expected close dates way out into the future. Your opportunity funnel will fill up with junk that seems to take forever to close - strange that, and you'll notice that the deals that do close are the ones that have only been in the system a short while.  You'll look at your opportunity funnel for the quarter and say, 'wow we have 3x our required revenues for the quarter in here, are we in good shape or what', and then wonder why 90% of them are fossils that didn't close this quarter...either.

And what happens when the first opportunity is closed lost but there is a second and a third opportunity added? How do those get connected back to marketing investments?  Forcing the creation of an opportunity during conversion can work in some situations but you still need to think this through in your lead management process... that is if you still believe knowing the original lead source is important. At market2lead our Client Services chaps have come up with some novel ways to help solve this issue and give marketing credit when it is due, but we are always interested in hearing more if you care to share.
-Kevin

What is a lead?

I enjoyed the conversation yesterday on Jep Castelein's blog on demand generation, wherein several of us debated the issues with labeling marketing automation systems as just "lead management" systems as some analysts are wont to do. It begs the question, what is a lead?

For many of us a lead is a person who may or may not represent an opportunity and who may or may not be deemed qualified during some future vetting process. As such this person is considered unique, and deduped in the marketing database, probably on the basis of their email address or some combo of last name,address etc.

On the other hand there are those firms out there who feel that a lead is an early glimmer of an opportunity for a specific product or service. As a result a single person, who may even be an existing customer, could be in your system multiple times as multiple leads for multiple products. Now I can see that this approach is a very sales driven approach. They want to believe that every human contact has immediate dollar signs behind it. Even the SFA systems, salesforce.com and MS CRM will permit multiple copies of the same person (based on email). There is a horrible downside (IMHO) to this approach - lots of dupes in the system - just whom are we marketing to? How do you track and ensure canspam compliance? Many of the marketing automation vendors won't allow you to have the same email in their system twice. Does anyone know of an upside to thinking of leads as imminent opportunities - it would be great to hear from you.
-Kevin