Lors du dernier Usergroup de Slaesforce.com à Montréal, j’ai fait une présentation exposant comment il est possible d’aligne rles ventes et le marketing en implantant un processus simple de gestion des leads. Bien sur, le processus en question est configurer à l’aide du CRM Salesforce.com.

Voici donc la présentation:

Here is a typical scenario:
Marketing is sending email campaigns and some emails are bouncing back. Marketing would like to give visibility to sales on which of their leads bounced.

Why should sales care about invalid email addresses?
Most of the time, email addresses are bouncing because the person left the company. So knowing that suddenly one of your lead has left the company is a good opportunity to reengage with this account. Sales could call to find out who replace the person that left and and create a new lead.

On the other hand, for you clients, if suddenly your internal champion leaves the company, you want to make sure you reach out to the account to help them continue to use your product. The last thing you want is to loose an account because someone left the company and you were not aware…

Now you can do it easily using Marketo and Salesforce.com!
Watch this 4 minutes tutorial video to learn how to setup properly both Marketo and Salesforce.com.

*** For a larger view, click the small screen icon at the bottom right corner of the player ***

Last week Marketo held a great webinar with SiriusDecisions and the American Marketing Association (AMA) called “2010 Blueprint: Planning for B-to-B Marketing Success“. They exposed what marketers should be looking at for the next year. Here is some of the key points:

For Demand Creation:

• Move your dollars from initial demand generation program toward lead nurturing program
• Review processes between sales and marketing to better align them (make sure you don’t overload sales with too much data when handing off a lead)
• Put in place a Data quality program by 1st fixing point-of-entry and 2nd prioritize data quality projects based on relative targeting

For Reputation:

• Focus reputation program dollars on measurable activities
• Reallocate non-performing traditional media dollars to social media

Really worth watching if you are thinking about improving your marketing initiative in 2010…

Last week I read a great post by Jep Castelein from LeadSloth called “Why Are Marketing Automation Managers So Hard to Find?“. That article made me think about the different terms in the industry we are using to describe what we are doing. Some call it Demand generation, other will say marketing automation and other lead management or lead nurturing. All these terms can means different things depending on who you are talking to. In addition, if you add terminology that is related, like inbound marketing, it become even harder for new people to get familiarized with the space.

Why is there so many terms describing pretty much the same thing you may ask? Well I would say that it is most likely related to the fact that in new born industry, every vendor is an evangelist. They all want to spread the good news, but they all want to have an edge on other evangelist and they all create and brand their “own” terms to explain their specialization. For example, Brian Carroll, literally invented the terme Lead Nurturing, Eloqua strongly branded Demand Generation for the past 10 years and Marketo is talking about sales & marketing alignment in the revenue cycle.

New incomers  are now asking themselves questions like:

• What is it that I need to do? Demand Generation? Lead Nurturing? Inbound Marketing? Sales and Marketing alignment?
• Is inbound marketing part of Demand generation or vice-versa?
• Is lead nurturing part of lead management or demand generation?
• Is lead scoring part of my demand generation or lead nurturing programs, or both?

I think that now the space is becoming bigger, there are more people that is looking at us and we even see consulting groups focusing on that space, we should take the time to precisely define terminology. The more precise and uniform we get, the better the adoption will be by companies. They will find more easily information on the topic if we use the same terminology.

Here are my takes:

• Lead Management is the global term we should use to describe what a marketer need to do to align sales & marketing, to nurture is leads and to generate demand about is product.
• Marketing Automation is the set of tools you use in order to make your lead management process to work.
• Lead Nurturing or Demand Generation are specific program that you run in your lead management process with the help of marketing automation tools.
• Lead Scoring is the set of rule you use in your marketing automation tool to rank the lead you generate from your programs.
• Inbound Marketing is a marketing strategy that helps your business get found on the Internet by your best customers through blogging, social media, SEO. (As found on Hubspot…)

To recap in one sentence:

In order to have a successful Lead Management process, you need a good Marketing Automation tool that allow you to Nurture and Score the Leads Generated from your Inbound Marketing strategy. 

Learn how to cleanse and harmonize data across Marketo and Salesforce.com. Here are the notes I took from what Diana Lustenader, Marketing Specialist at Kapow technologies presented at the Marketo User Summit 2009.

Cause

• Lack of admin
• Multiple entry point
• Business process change
• User turnover
• Leads giving fall info
• Improper use
• List purchase
• M&A

Effect of Dirty Data

• Duplicates
• False or incomplete record
• Missed opportunities
• Missing business data
• Lower user adoption
• Misleading or incomplete reports
• Inconsistent formatting

Marketo can

• Prevent new duplicates
• Identify and merge existing dupes
• Capture more lead data
• Standard template for lead forms
• Increase visibility for sales and marketing
• Start to finish reporting

What’s left

• Existing false or incomplete records
• Improper use (missed business data)
• Turnover (missed opportunities)

On the same topic, the next Montreal Salesforce Usergroup on October 7th, 2009 will be covering the Data Quality Challenge.

Ok, finally I took the time to post my review of Marketo User Summit second day.

It started on a topic that everyone is trying to get the most out of it: Reporting, Analytics and ROI. Chris Newton, VP Marketing at Ketera explained how he is tracking the effectiveness of their program. On a weekly basis, he follows in Marketo standard email performance (click, open, unsubscribe) but he is mostly interested to track the improvement overtime of all KPIs including website traffic. In Salesforce.com he created custom formula fields to track some activities generated by Marketo (Ex: clicks). Lastly, he take a chart for Marketo activities, Website traffic and Opportunity created over the same period and align them 1 above the other. That helps him to correlate the results. On a side note, his main concern still that there is  no out of the box reports for all he needs. He always needs to return to Excel and it takes about 1 hour a week of his time to do so. I also heard some ask” Whay is it that the report your boss wants is never a prebuilt report and we always have to manipulate data to get it done?” Funny!

But that that can change soon… Jon Miller, VP Marketing and Co-Founder at Marketo present how Marketo was actually doing their analytics and reporting. They are tracking a lot of metrics with regards to the Sales SLA they have in place and based on their demand generation funnel, they are looking at:

• Number of prospect
• Number of leads
• Number of opportunity

Next I was in the data quality track and I really enjoyed from Diana Lustenader, Marketing Specialist at Kapow technologies. Here is her take on data quality.

In the afternoon, Marketo presented some new features from the new release in October. The vast majority of features is around the reporting and analytics module. Marketo was lagging a bit on that module and they are fixing it those new releases. Here is the list:

• Report leads by quarter:
• New report called “Lead by X”
• Report now have a chart and we can change the style
• Add and remove opportunity data
• Group reports by (ex: Original search phrase, owner, referrer, inferred city)
• Drill down capabilities that allow you to group by go deeper wit your data
• The possibility to add Smart list as column in reports
• Date of activity (AKA Time Frame)  is  new filter to specify a time frame of an activity
• Filter on Emails report + Total number at once
• Better email subscription and ability to attach the Excel file
• Reports keeps the order and sorting

They also took the time to review some exiting features, mainly related to usability, that people a maybe not aware like:

• Use Bookmark to have quick access to specific reports
• Use the Back button to navigate
• Open another module in a new tab or in a new window
• Unapproved old email to get them out of your views
• Use the Inferred Company to blacklist or ID competitors
• Use inferred State to assign leads
• Convert integer fields to score fields

After that, sponsors came to present. In a presentation called “Landing Pages: Where The Eyes Go“, I notice how Enquiro used there own to Eye tracking technology to validate their new Website redesign. They actually iterated the design 4 times to find the best one.

Also, Debbie Qaqish from Pedowitz Group was back again with a very useful list of the 10 best practices of lead scoring:

1. Do lead scoring WITH sales
2. Map out the Buying Process
3. Use the Workshop Approach
4. Use the Worksheet
5. Don’t be afraid to TRY!
6. Be ready to adjust based on data
7. Be ready to adjust based on feedback from sales
8. Include Demographic data = are they qualified?
9. Include behavior = are they ready?
10. Do lead scoring WITH Sales

Lastly, the day and the Summit ended by the Marketo Idol Showcase contest. 10 customers of Marketo climbed on stage to present some cool stuff they did with the product so far. I was among them and I presented “Website visit frequency – Lead scoring beyond basic behaviors”.

And the winner of the first Marketo Idol is…

Today I have the opportunity to present at the first Marketo User Summit. Marketo organized a cool friendly contest among Marketo power user so we can showcase our best story on something amazing we have accomplished using Marketo. Here is what I will be presenting.

EDIT: I actually finished 3rd with this “Idol” presentation.

Website visit frequency – Lead scoring beyond basic behaviors.

After scoring the basic behaviors, it is time to look at the frequency of these behaviors. Here a quick example of how to setup a scoring campaign for leads that are visiting back your website within a certain time frame.

What a conference! The day started with an inspiring keynote from Phil Fernandez, Marketo CEO and co-founder. He announced that they just closed their Series C of funding and that Wes Wasson, CMO of Citrix, will join Marketo board. He also talked about upcoming features in current Marketo products and road map for new product:

• Lead Management (Fall 2009 release to includes enhance reporting with charts and more custom metrics and Winter 2010 release to include Workgroup and enterprise role, event management & programs 2.0)
• Sales insight (Just released)
• Pipeline Analytics (Winter 2010 Pipeline conversion, campaign influence, Forecasting, Presentation – automated reporting)
• Dynamic content optimization (future date)
• Budget & planning optimization (future date)

The second presentation was given my Jon Miller, VP marketing and co-founder. As I tweeted about, the presentation “How Marketo uses Marketo” was all about amazing content that translate in real actionable setup for your nurturing and scoring campaign. Jon gave actual use case of what he implemented for scoring and lead management.

After the networking break, there were 2 tracks:

• Refresh Your Emails and Landing Pages
• Scoring Leads for Sales Intelligence

I assisted the second one about scoring leads. Jenny Coupe (@jennycoupe) from Nimsoft presented their scoring model after explaining their extensive vendor selection process. They went over 60 day’s audit of multiple vendors and kept 2 for proof-of-concept trial of 1 month.

Jason Stewart (@jasondemandbase) presented Demandbase scoring model by putting emphasis on behavior scoring rather than demographic scoring. He also explains how he got sales to participate in the scoring model. He actually ask them to rate on a scale from 1 to 100 was the value of different actions. That end-up being the base of his scoring model.

Afterward, 5 partners from the Marketo Customer Enablement Team presented their offering:
• SEO: Inside the Mind of the Searcher (Enquiro)
• Data Services Integration for Better Prospecting (Jigsaw & ReachForce)
• Getting Sales On Board (Pedowitz Group)
• Remarkable Content to Power Lead Nurturing (Tippit)

The majority of the content from partners was great but I believe it felt a bit long, especially after having real hands-on content from previous presentations.

The fuzziest word of the day belongs to Debbie Qaqish from Pedowitz Group when she described Sales and Marketing alignment as “Smarketing”. Her top 10 marketing and sales alignment tips also caught my attention:
1. Build a language of leads
2. Build a common lead management
3. Create a lead scoring program
4. Build Sales Champion for the lead management
5. Build field focus campaign
6. Create regular communication cycle & feedback loop
7. Institute service level agreements
8. Metrics that matters
9. Learn about sales
10. Educate, educate, educate

Off to bed now, more to come tomorrow for the 2nd day of the Marketo User Summit 2009. Where I’m actually presenting some scoring strategies in the “Marketo Idol Showcase”

Here is a quick hack that can allow you to generate Google Analytics Tagged URL straight from a Campaign in Salesforce.com (SFDC) instead of going back and forth from SFDC and Google Analytics URL builder. More over, it allows you to standardize your tags.

Follow those 2 easy steps:

1. Create a custom picklist field for each of the fields* you normally use to tag your URLs with Google URL builder.
2. Create a custom formula fields that will actually build the tagged URL for you. Use the following generic formula by replacing each ___ with the SFDC field name:
   “?utm_source=”+___+”&utm_medium=”+___+”&utm_term=”+___+”&utm_content=”+___+”&utm_campaign=”___

And Voilà! You now have a Tagged URL ready to be added at the end of your destination URL.

*Tag URLs allow you to use the following 5 fields (bold fields are mandatory):

• Campaign Source (utm_source)
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium)
• Campaign Term (utm_term)
• Campaign Content (utm_content)
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign)

Here is an example of how I did it for a customer:

I only used the 3 mandatory fields for Google URL tagging: Campaign Source, Campaign Medium and Campaign Name (See below screenshot).

1. I used the SFDC Campaign ID as the Campaign Name (but you could also use the Campaign Name)
2. I used the standard field “Type” for the Campaign Medium
3. I created a custom picklist field called “Source” for the Campaign Source”Source” in which I have listed all my differents ads sources.
4. I used the following formula*:
   “?utm_source=”+TEXT(Source__c) +”&utm_medium=”+TEXT(Type)+”&utm_campaign=”+ Id

* Don’t forget if you use a picklist fields to add the function “TEXT” in order to get the actual picklist value.

Here is the detail first step of your lead nurturing initiative as describe in my previous post: How to get started with lead nurturing.

Reviewing your lead to opportunity to customer is the primary activity you should plan, even before to start lead nurturing. After all, why would you put efforts nurturing leads if they are not properly managed when they become sales-ready? To make an analogy, simply think about the water pipe system in your house. Before opening the main valve, you need to make sure that no pipes are leaking.

To check the health of your process, simply ask every member of your team how do they rank or classified or work their leads. If you get a couple of different options, you know you need to review your processes.

First, make sure that you create a simple funnel where each stage of your revenue cycle are precisely define and understood by both your sales and marketing team. The following image represents a typical revenue cycle with the main stages. It is strongly inspire by Marketo Revenue Cycle.

Once marketing and sales have agreed on the complete Revenue Cycle, make sure to map your current lead and sales process to it. In order to do that, you will need to clearly define each Lead Status and Opportunity Stages required to follow up on leads and opportunities. You will want to have specific Lead Status for leads that are not sales-ready yet and are continuously nurtured by marketing as opposed to some specific Leads Status for leads that are sales-ready and only worked by sales.

Once the leads are becoming more ready to buy, your conversion of leads to opportunity needs to be as clear as previous processes. You will need to have a good definition of each stages required in order to win an opportunity. This will vary a lot from a company to another, but as long as it is clear internally and everyone sticks to it, you will be amazed by the results.

And if some leads handle by sales are finally not ready to buy, you need to have a clear process to return those leads to marketing so they can be recycled with further nurturing program.

The last piece of your process review is to make sure you know and understand from where all your leads are coming into your CRM. It is fairly easy to multiply the different sources where leads are captured, but if this is not managed properly, you will end up having leads that are not assign to the right person or are not even being touch by some others because they simply don’t see them in your CRM. Each source should have a precise process that everyone understands. Moreover, you will want to track each of them to determine what is working best for you in terms of marketing ROI.