Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

Great New B2B Marketing Resource

I tend to look at a lot of marketing blogs when I am trolling for interesting things around automated marketing systems to discuss in this blog. I came across the concept of topic hubs this week.  Specifically I found B2B Marketing Zone which is a collection of blog posts and articles all around B2B Marketing.  It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create a topic hub.  Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organize that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content.  So it is like an editor, that picks the best posts from a variety of related content sites.

In the case of the B2B Marketing Zone topic hub it focuses on B2B marketing! One of the very cool features is the keywords capability. It parses all the blogs for keyword richness, gives you a report in the left hand column, and then if you click on your favorite keyword or two it will take you to the best posts on those topics!  As a blogger I don't have to tag keywords anymore, and as a surfer of blogs I can find good stuff much faster here!

B2B Marketing Zone was launched earlier this month by Tony Karrer (BrowseMyStuff) and Tom Pick (WebMarketCentral). B2B Marketing Zone is designed to be a one-stop destination for B2B Marketing content, and I’m pleased to acknowledge that this blog is one of the participating contributors.

-Kevin

Definitions for marketing leads for use in lead generation

I just finished reading Brian Carroll’s erudite blog post on Five steps to help create your universal lead definition. In 10 years of working with firms on marketing automation and lead management there have been far too few that had this important definition agreed to by Marketing and Sales.

Marketing’s primary deliverable to Sales is the marketing qualified lead.  Not having a firm definition of this deliverable is unforgivable. How can marketing be held accountable if there is no definition for a good lead? Notwithstanding Brian’s advice on how to organize around arriving at a lead definition, here are a few items to consider in the lead definitions.

Marketing Lead Definitions

Most folks use the lead status field as a means to differentiate between leads of various qualities. Do not use this field as a call disposition field (‘left message’, ‘contact successful’ etc). Limit the number of Lead Status values to 10 or 12 at the most. Remember at some point you will be reporting on how many leads are in which state, and how long did they remain there. Consider this the marketing funnel report and you want to be able to demonstrate a steady flow through the various lead states!

• Raw – person identified as worth engaging, no relationship yet, probably a list import
• Open or Inquiry or New or Suspect– person has at least one incoming response, or otherwise expressed interest somehow
• Lead Qualification – person sent to lead qualification (telemarketing) for qualification
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – person that marketing feels is ready for Sales' attention
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) - a person that may represent a new opportunity. Once a lead is known to be associated with an existing account or a revenue opportunity, it becomes a sales qualified lead and is converted into a contact.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Use this as the final resting state of a lead that is converted into a contact by the Sales person in your Customer Relationship Management system!
• Disqualified – Someone who will never rise to the level of qualified and is not worth any future attention from marketing and sales.
• Junk – Bad data, "asdf@abc.com" and the like. It is useful to flag this separately from Disqualified because (a) you can later on determine which lead source is producing the most junk, and (b) at some point you may opt to delete all junk from your database but you will want to retain the Disqualified folks. "Disqualified "is still good information, and you never want to go through the process of qualifying them again!
• Re-Market – person sent back to marketing by sales because it was not ready to become a Sales Qualified Lead.

So in the meetings between Marketing and Sales you need to arrive at definitions for each of these lead status values. The most contentious one is the Marketing Qualified Lead. What information does Marketing have to know about a lead before handing it off to Sales.  I won’t repeat my blog post on BANT versus the SCOTSMAN but it is worth a read if you are interested in this topic.

Very few leads should remain in the Sales Accepted Lead state. When a lead is handed off to Sales they will have a limited period of time to either accept it (change it to a Sales Accepted Lead), Disqualify it, or return it to Marketing for further lead nurturing (change it to Re-Market).

There are some further twists on these definitions based on dealing with ISRs,  channel partners, and methods to fast track certain leads through the process. We will save that discussion for a future time. As always, comments welcome!

-Kevin

Data quality, Customer Data Integration, and the Hippocratic Oath

A few months after my dad died back in 1984 my mother received a letter from our bank addressed to “Dr. T.B. Joyce (deceased)”. Needless to say my mum was a little distraught.

In a similar case I learned recently that the sales people of a local company were putting the gender of the person in parenthesis after the person’s androgynous first name. Imagine getting a personalized email from that company:
Dear Terri (female), or Dear Pat (male)

In a post back in March I discussed the many ways that data goes bad. Excluding the slow natural decay of data (actually it has sped up in the recession), sales people are responsible for much of the bad data. In the past Marketing has also shared the blame but the marketing automation systems now have the ability to validate incoming data, do format checking, and generally minimize the likelihood that marketing is adding bad data to the CRM. To wit, it is time that Marketers took the Hippocratic Oath to vow to do no harm to the Customer Relationship Management database!

The Hippocratic Oath for Marketers
I SWEAR in the presence of the CRM Administrators and before my marketing peers that according to my ability and judgment I will keep this Oath and Stipulation.

I WILL CONTINUE with diligence to keep abreast of advances in marketing. I will import only valid, well formed data, with all required fields, into the marketing automation system, so long as the treatment of other data is not compromised thereby, and I will seek the counsel of particularly skilled IT dudes where indicated for the benefit of the database.

I WILL FOLLOW that method of data treatment which according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of the database and abstain from whatever is harmful or mischievous. I will neither prescribe nor administer a lethal dose of dubious updates to any database even if asked by my VP.

WITH PURITY, HOLINESS AND BENEFICENCE I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent CANSPAM violation, I will neither wholesale overwrite CRM data nor carry out any new field experiments on the database without the valid informed consent of the CRM administrator or the appropriate Sales Ops designee thereof, understanding that field insertion must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of the database. Into whatever database setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the data and will abstain from every voluntary act of data corruption and further from the addition of duplicates.

WHATEVER I MAY SEE in connection with Marketing driven CRM data changes which ought not be spoken abroad, I will immediately divulge, reckoning that all such should not be kept secret from Sales Operations.

WHILE I CONTINUE to keep this Oath unviolated may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art and science of marketing with the blessing of the CRM administrators and respected by my peers and society, but should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse by my lot.

My dad would be proud!  Got your own data horror story, send it my way!
-Kevin