Aujourd’hui je présente le cas d’Acquisio à la journée Big Bang du Forum Commercialisation pour les TIC à Montréal. Il s’agit de montrer comment Acquisio réussi à générer suffisament de leads grâce à ses activités de marketing et aussi grâce à son processus de gestion des leads.

Voici donc ma présentation:

I’m currently trying to crack down Reporting on my campaigns using Salesforce and Marketo.

The goal is (seems to be!) quite simple: I need to know, on a monthly basis:
A) How many Sales-Ready Leads each of my campaigns are generating.
B) How much revenue each of my campaigns are generating.

(See below for the description of a typical scenario.)

Challenge 1: Multiple “level” of leads
We have different “level” of leads, so no I cannot simply use the number of lead member a campaign have.  We have “Prospect” & “Sales-Ready Leads”. Sales-Ready Leads are the one that have been qualified by our Triage team and assigned to sales rep. We differentiate the 2 level using the Lead Status in Salesforce. So my need is to report only the Sales-Ready Leads

Challenge 2: Campaign attribution
Most of our leads are touched by multiple campaigns and I don’t believe that I should only attribute the last or the first campaign.

With the current way Members to Campaigns relationship works in Salesforce, when I report on multiple campaigns, I get a higher total number of leads & revenue than the reality. For example,
- Lead is member of Campaign A & Campaign B.
- Lead is converted with an opportunity
- The opportunity close at 100$

The Campaign reports will show me:
- Campaign A generate 1 lead and 100$
- Campaign B generated 1 lead and 100$

So if I report to the board that each campaign generated 100$ and the total revenue of the company is actually 100$, my CEO will fire me on the spot!

Maybe the solution is outside Salesforce?
We also have a deep integration with Marketo, our Marketing automation platform. So if I can find a way to get that kind of reporting in Marketo instead of Salesforce, I would be as satisfied!

I don’t mind having to do some manual work to get the numbers, but I certainly do not want to start building complex Spreadsheets and CSV files manipulation to report on my campaigns.

Description of a typical scenario:
We sponsor a Webinar: 1,000 people registered, 50 request a demo and qualify right after the event. In the following 2 weeks another 50 leads become qualified Sales-Ready Leads by visiting our website and completing a demo request form. 2 Leads purchase a widget for $10,000. The following month, thanks to nurturing program, an additional 50 prospects become Sales-Ready Leads and 5 more leads purchased a widget for $10,000.

What I would like to know at the end of the month is:
After Month 1: Campaign Webinar generated 100 leads & $20,000.
After Month 2: Campaign Webinar generated 150 leads & $70,000.

Update: I posted it on Salesforce Community Website as well.

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:

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. 

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.

Ok, the topic is getting hot in your company and everybody is saying “We need to nurture our leads!”, but as the marketing manager, you ask yourself: “Where should I start?”.

Before getting started, you will want to read on the topic. I recommend Marketo B2B Tools & Resources & Brian Caroll B2B Lead Generation Blog.

Get started with lead nurturing in 6 steps:

Step 1: Review your current lead to opportunity to customer process. Make sure that you have a clear understanding of how your leads are moving from one stage to the next one and what is their source.

Step 2: Make sure you have a lead scoring model in place in order to help you determine if leads are ready to engage with sales or remain in nurturing.

Step 3: Determine how many touch point you will have in your nurturing program. You may want to have different programs for new leads or recycled leads.

Step 4: Create useful content for your leads adapted to each stage of their buy cycle.

Step 5: Implement your content in your sales & marketing automation tool.

Step 6: Track results and optimize.

Of course each of these steps will require different level of implication depending on the complexity of your organization, but a good lead nurturing implementation should go through each of these steps.

Online Marketing the weapon to generate leads. But when it come down to generate actual sales, nothing can beat a phone call in the lead nurturing process.  Here a B2C example that worked:

I was having a beer with friends on a Friday happy hour when I suddenly receive a call from a Mexx clothing store. The person told me that a super 50% sale on everything was starting today. The person made me feel unique by telling me that this offer was for selected clients. I asked her what “Selected” mean and she says that because I had already purchased at their store, my name was in their database and they were contacting all of their customers.

Never the less, the day after, I went to the store, which is a 30 minutes drive from my home and I bought for 280$ of shirts and pants. On my way back, I drove by another Mexx store, literally 5 minute walk away from my home in Montreal and I realized that the super 50% sales was actually in every Mexx stores.

That made me wonder why I went so far when I could have go there at the first place. Furthermore, why did I actually buy some cloths? I was absolutely not planning any clothing purchase…

And because I’m a marketer and like this kind of situation, I dug a little deeper. I looked in my emails (I’m a subscriber to Mexx newsletter) and realized that I also received an email announcing about the 50% sales few days prior.

But neither the email nor the closest store made me think about purchasing cloths. The only driver is the phone call. Sure the 50% offer is very compelling, but I was exposed to it on other channel and it did not trigger the desire to buy.

I drove 30 minutes to spent 280$ simply because I got nurtured by phone. Period.

Lead Nurturing + Right Channel + Right Messaging or Compelling Offer = Sales

And Yes the phone is a strong channel when properly used…

About 2 weeks before Christmas, my girlfriend and I were walking on the Street by a cold December day. Suddenly, a girl in front of a chocolate store offered us a free hot chocolate. No obligation. All we had to do was to walk in the store to pick it up. On our way in, we noticed all their Christmas shape chocolate. It was like fine art! We picked up our drinks and left without buying anything.

One week later, my girlfriend was still looking for last minute gifts and she suddenly remembered the Chocolate Store. She went back and actually bought for more than 40$ of chocolate gifts.

The initial offer was pleasant enough so we remembered it very well. If the offer would have been something like “Get a free Hot chocolate with a 10$ purchase” for example, we would have not even walk in the first time…

Marketing is all about creating a relation with customers. Not generating immediate revenues. I know it is kind of obvious, but I though a simple day-to-day life experience was cool to remind all of us!

For us who work in technology, we sometimes don’t really appreciate how new technology can evolve some of the basics because we are constantly looking for the new thing that will come out. But today, I witness how simple things came become way better with a little help of technology.

I went to the dentist for my annual cleaning. They updated my file by taking pictures of my teeth. Yes, they took about 12 pictures inside my mouth and saved them in my file. Now next time I will come they will be able to compare the evolution and everything a dentist would like to check.

Ok, no big deal, no revolution. But I just realized how technology can create brand new businesses. Camera and PC are taken for granted now, but with the quality of image that improve all the time, the fact that cameras are now small enough to fit in a phone, all you need is to find a new way to use them. The camera look like a tooth brush with a larger handle and when a picture is taken, a couple a small LED light up and Click… Your teeth are on the PC.

You bundle that with easy to use software to manage picture for each client and you have just created a brand new business that sells a very powerful product that every Dentist in the world will want to use. No need to invent new technology, just sit back and look where new technology can be use and you may find the next holy Graal!

Now the next step for that industry is marketing! Can someone tell me why I do still need to take a piece of paper to note my next appointment and that the receptionist will call me the day before? Please send my appointment to my calendar (Google…), remind me by email and why not sending me 2-3 offerings during the year… Now we are talking CRM… Apply what I just mention above and you might be on the edge to create brand new SAAS for Dentist Appointment Management based on Salesforce. No technology development, just packaging and commercialization…

Anyone?