Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

Website tracking from Web Analytics vendors vs. Marketing Automation vendors

I get asked by many Prospects during the sales process about the difference between web tracking functionality offered by web analytics vendors like Google Analytics and Marketing Automation solutions like Market2Lead. There is a definitely an overlap between the two types of solutions, but at the same time there is a significant difference too. Let me elaborate.

Traditional Web Analytics tools like Google, Omniture or Coremetrics do a great job in tracking and reporting on overall traffic trends on the corporate website.

• You get to understand where traffic is coming from – Direct Traffic, Referring Sites or Search Engines
• You can track popularity of content on your site – page views per page, bounce rates
• Monitor overall metrics - Visits, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. time on site

Web Analytics vendors do a great job in helping you understand how your corporate website is contributing towards overall Marketing goals like awareness, brand building and demand generation.

You can get some of these metrics from the current generation Marketing Automation solutions that do offer website tracking as a feature (including Market2Lead). But this should not be the key criteria for you to evaluate MA solutions for this feature.

There are 2 key aspects that are unique to MA solutions. 

1.    Web tracking by user/company profile: Marketing Automation solutions give you the ability to track usage patterns by profile of your Contacts or the companies they work for. Marketing Automation systems are the record keeper of your house database and have rich profile information like Demographic, Firmographic, Needs Insights etc. Now, imagine the power you have at your disposal if you can combine a person’s information with his web activity information. You can conduct all sorts of interesting analysis like:

• What % of my traffic is executives/VPs/Directors/Managers/IT
• What % of my offers are being picked up by people with different roles and managing different functions within their companies
• What % of my content is appealing to SMB companies/Midsize companies/large enterprises
• Is my contact’s online behavior validating the interest he/she expressed in filling out a form

2.    Notifications to sales reps: You can now alert your sales staff based on key web activities that are recorded within your MA solution. Sales reps are always looking for the right reason to pick up the phone and call their Leads or Opportunities. Some of the scenarios where MA solutions can help are:

• A key opportunity that went dark during the negotiation phase is reviewing case studies on the website. Such information gives reps the assurance that the Opportunity is still active and is evaluating risk by looking for relevant case studies

• A Lead that stopped responding to phone calls was spotted on the website. This is a great opportunity for the rep to call the Lead and hope to connect with him/her while he/she is still at his/her desk

• Give reps a better qualified Lead that has not just filled a form but has demonstrated interest by invested an appropriate amount of time reading relevant content

• Assist Leads who are trying to understand your value proposition by sending them follow up offers based on what they are reading on your website

In my opinion, web tracking functionality from Marketing Automation solution is complimentary to web tracking from the standard Web analytics tools.

-Sundeep

The SCOTSMAN vs. BANT for Effective Lead Management

In his recent Blog post on Sales and Marketing Alignment Brian Carroll alluded to sales and marketing collaborating on the definition of a "Sales Ready Lead". This is a really important topic as it is the basis of good lead management. I used to work for a Scotsman named John McAdam (he is now CEO of F5 in Seattle), and perhaps not coincidentally Marketing and Sales at the firm had an agreement called the SCOTSMAN. It is a mnemonic, along the lines of BANT but better. I believe every company needs to come up with their own equivalent of the SCOTSMAN as the basis for agreement between marketing and sales.

We used the Scotsman as a deal qualification sheet. The sales person wasn't going to get help from executives and marketing if they didn't have their Scotsman filled out! And you thought I was going to refer to a document dictating what info marketing had to provide to Sales on a qualified lead? Well it turns out that the Scotsman has something to offer in that department too, so bear with me.

SCOTSMAN Mnemonic

• Solution = Does the firm have the right solution?

• Competition = Who is the competition and can we beat them in this situation?

• Originality = Does the firm have a unique solution and has the prospect bought into it?

• Timescale = What is the timing for the desired solution?

• Size = How large is the opportunity?  Is the desired solution list price of sufficient for our needs?

• Money = Does the client have the money in the budget?

• Authority = Is the sales person talking to the people who have decision/purchase authority

• Need = What does the prospect really need (business problem)

The problem with BANT

When you think about it, the BANT criteria are all in the SCOTSMAN: Budget, Need, Authority and Timeframe but there are 4 additional items!   Solution, Competition, Originality, and Size.

How is marketing supposed to determine any of these things? Isn't that something better done by an ISR or "Outside" Sales Rep?  In my experience Marketing does a poor job of getting BANT. How many forms have you seen filled in with:

• Budget:         0 or other or don't know
• Authority:      Other
• Need:            Don't know
• Timeframe:    >1 year

Putting these questions in a form to propects who is just in the research phase at the time is ineffective. You may as well ask:"Would you like me to set a Sales Rep on your tail like a rottweiler looking for a steak?"

In this situation a large number of people will prevaricate (that sounds so much better than lie) to keep the sales reps at bay. As a marketer I would rather have no data than junk data. And to compound matters some marketers base lead scores off this BANT data. Caveat Venditor.  Putting poor quality data into your database by asking questions which encourage prospects to mislead you is a mistake.

Determining your own SCOTSMAN

As marketers we know that the sales folks want a lead with huge budget, senior role and a clearly defined urgent need for our unique product/service capabilities. Just because that is what they want doesn't make it a good basis for an agreement between Sales and Marketing. If we wait until we find those types of leads, they would be few and far between. Add to that the difficulty in getting honest answers to BANT like questions without using human interaction and you have a recipe for many disgruntled sales people. 

But, short of moving ISRs into marketing (which is the solution many people opt for) there are some ways that marketing can solicit data from prospects that is reasonable and stands a good chance of being accurate. Perhaps you can craft your own SCOTSMAN from these suggestions:

1. Use progressive profiling with dynamic forms - i.e ask one or two incremental questions each time the prospect engages with you, instead of the 40 question form on the first visit.
2. Ask business need related questions - in a pick list - which is most important to your firm, a,b,c, or d  (people are more likely to talk honestly about their firm then they are themselves)
3. Ask them their job function in a pick list but give them the option to say "I don't want to share at this time"
4. Inquire to the number of employees in the firm or division or department - this could be a better indicator of budget
5. Inquire about the likely frequency of usage of your product or service - this will give you an indicator of how much it is worth to them
6. Inquire about how many people work in an area where this product could be used - a roundabout way of getting to potential number of users
7. Inquire if they own or have owned or used other products or services like this - could mean a lot less education required for the sales person
8. Ask them their past experience if the answer to 7 was true - good, bad, indifferent - try to determine if they are a supporter of this class of product or service
9. Ask them if their research is in support of a company or department goal
10. Try to determine their role in the purchase by examining which documents, web pages and offers they pick up on - business vs technical, evaluator, influencer or interested party
11. Try and find out where they are at in the process in a nice way. Are they researching, just curious, looking at all the vendors products so they can educate themselves but it isn't even a project yet, narrowing down the list? Just don't ask the banal timeframe question so bluntly! They don't usually know.
12. Find out if they have a communications preference, are they more visual, or auditory, or do they learn from whitepapers. Do they want snapshots or books?
13. Do they want to feel inspired, protected, relieved, or fulfilled
14. Offer them help in their education/research work, would they like more materials, would they like a template RFP, do they need help selling their bosses on this idea, would they like an ROI model?

When you are done you may have your own mnemonic in marketing for the data needed to certify a lead as Marketing Qualified. Perhaps something like:

• Influence = Is this person in favor of a product or service like this, neutral, or oppose?
• Repeat buyer = Do they have prior experience with this product or service from competitors?
• Interaction = Paint a picture of their interaction level, how much have they educated themselves?
• Stage = Where are they at in their purchase process - what stage?
• Help = How can we help them through this phase - What have they asked us for?
• Money = Does the client have the money in the budget and how much?

• Authority = What level of authority does this person have?

• Need = What does the prospect really need (business problem), how are they going to use it?

Now what sort of mnemonic is that?

-Kevin

The Future of Marketing Automation and CRM 2.0

I just finished reading Paul Greenberg's excellent blog article on CRM 2.0 and it got me thinking!

In an odd way it ties in with the conversation Jep Castelein is having on Sales-Marketing 2.0.

Will the social media explosion affect future CRM systems? Deep down in my engineering roots there lurks a fundamental belief in entropy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that in a closed system everything tends towards disorder! Will monolithic CRM systems absorb the functions of client services, sales force automation, marketing automation etc? No. In the evolution of many technologies we have seen precisely the opposite - increasing entropy! They evolve to an increasing number of target audience specific applications with defined interfaces to permit sharing of information.

CRM 2.0 will be virtual
CRM 2.0 will be a virtual system comprised of technologies from many firms who each build a specific piece that serves their target market best. So Marketing Automation firms will rule the roost in serving marketing, Sales Force Automation systems will serve sales and Customer Service organizations, and finance will utilize their own finely honed technologies. However "this too shall pass." In turn each of these systems will divide into even more target specific applications.

Imagine the marketing automation systems dividing up into those that serve B2C best and those that serve B2B, or those dedicated to social media interaction monitoring. You might have a chat system, and a blog system, and a user portal. The idea of physically getting all of these as a holistic solution from one vendor is like buying your entire stereo in one physical box. Yes it can be done, but will you want to do this five or ten years hence? In my stereo the HDMI plugs make buying the specialized pieces and connecting them together easy and the performance is so much better than any single box solution.  CRM 1.0 failed because it tried to serve too many target audiences (sales and marketing and service) with a single box approach. We don't need to physically co-locate the bits and bytes. They don't need to reside in the same database. That is an IT control driven centralization approach that under-serves organizations. What we need is a virtual CRM.

Shift the Conversation to Interfaces and Data Quality
The conversation needs to shift to what the interfaces look like between these systems? How will the web analytics giants like Google, Omniture and WebTrends, who deal in the performance of online assets, connect to the Marketing Automation giants who deal in the activities of named contacts? Who are the future giants in PPC, Blog watching, chat monitoring, and reputation watching? What will their interfaces look like? Will PR have the ability (finally) to report on which 'eyeballs' have read their press releases and articles through various social media services and link it back into the virtual CRM?

What is the future lingua franca of marketing systems?  Is Informatica the gold standard of data integration?  Marketing and Sales combined will not be well served by any single monolithic system so I don't expect a Smarketing 2.0! I want to see plug and play just like my stereo components so I can quickly assemble my virtual system, replace components with newer components easily, and know that I have perfect data fidelity. We know from CRM 1.0 that just ammassing all the data on a single set of platters didn't resolve the data integrity issues as it once promised. Having multiple marketing and sales systems interconnected does however heighten our awareness of the need to scrutinize all data entering the system for validity and completeness before adding it to the virtual CRM. So whilst I may see entropy as inevitable in the software systems for sales and marketing, I shudder to think that my data could suffer the same fate! 

-Kevin "Fighting Data Entropy Everyday" Joyce

Tweet this post

How did my data quality get so bad?

As a general rule in marketing we believe that static data decays in quality at the rate of 1% per week.

Why is this important? Consider the CANSPAM laws. Your Salesforce.com account allows you to have multiple copies of the same person based on their email. Your Inside Sales Rep flags one of the copies as an “unsubscribe” at the request of the individual. Are you sure that is the same contact record your email vendor is using? Or consider the budget you are wasting by marketing to a database that you know is riddled with data problems, duplicates, invalid data, and then you get nailed for having lower open rates and click-through rates than the industry average! It’s the old 60:20:20 rule. 60% of the success of a marketing campaign is on the quality of the list, 20% on the quality of the offer, and 20% on the packaging. Good data is the keystone of successful marketing campaigns that bridge the gap between you and your prospect.

Good information quality will allow you to get the right data, to the right people, in the right place, at the right time, in the right form, at the right cost, so they can make the best business decisions. There is one thing worse than a lack of information, and that is bad information, because the latter can lead to bad decisions, whereas the former will generally stimulate more consideration before making a decision. Marketing Automation Systems can certainly help ensure that the data flowing into the system is much higher quality and does no more harm. But there are multiple ways that data can decline in accuracy and result in poor information quality. The following examples will help explain:

• Information quality decay (gradual loss of accuracy, loss of consistency)
  • People and companies change their email, addresses, phone numbers, names
  • Fortunes change, peoples titles change, and corporation sizes vary with time
  • Someone renames a campaign, or changes filters in a report and the trend data no longer has a common referential basis
• Data that becomes ‘corrupted’ by being overwritten with incorrect data (loss of integrity)
  • Marketing fills in a demographic field, followed by a sales person revising with improved data, followed by Client Services changing it back to original value
  • User with incorrect permissions accidentally changes a record
• Data that is a duplicate and is therefore double counted in reports (loss of cleanliness)
  • Sales rep adds new account or contact because they didn’t find it in the system
  • Marketing imports leads from show and accidentally adds duplicates
  • Prospect uses two different email addresses
  • Syndicated content provider uses Salesforce.com Web2Lead interface and introduces duplicates
• New data added that is just plain wrong  (loss of accuracy, lack of completeness)
  • Leads entered directly by Sales may not go through the field validation rules that marketing has access to with the Market2Lead Marketing Automation System
  • Auto-spammers fill in forms on website (increasing problem)
  • Prospect mistypes their own email address
  • Incomplete fields (the absence of some required members of a data set)
  • No common defined referential set for data exchange between ERP system and Salesforce.com  results in data being uploaded to the wrong field.
  • Person entering the data gets lazy and picks random values from pick lists for things like industry and role
  • Form attempts to collect BANT data far too early in the relationship with a prospect and as a result the prospect enters bogus data.

Over the coming months I plan to blog more about ways to tackle the data quality issue, especially if you have Salesforce.com.  Dealing with bad data requires a mix of process, people and technology. The activities can be divided into those that prevent data decay, and those that detect data quality issues and subsequently help remediate those issues.  The Market2Lead Marketing Automation Technology has a terrific response management engine that validates addresses, rejects junk like asdf.com, suppresses public domain email addresses, normalizes data, and ensures all required fields have data in the required format. But you still need to work on the People and Process to get really get a handle on data quality because your Sales Reps and Client Services folks still get to put data directly into Salesforce.com and  Garbage In means Garbage Out (GIGO).

That's all for now, more on detection and remediation later, Kevin