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.

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…

Late September, I participate to the first Marketo User Summit. The event was a gathering of many Marketo customers exchanging ideas best practices for better demand generation and lead management. I covered the Summit with 2 posts for Day 1 and Day 2.

I was also invited to participate in the inaugural Marketo Idol Showcase awards program. The Marketo Idol Showcase awards recognize B2B marketers that have demonstrated excellence, innovation and ingenuity in their use of Marketo Lead Management and Marketo Sales Insight to drive revenue growth and accelerated time-to-value from their demand generation campaigns and marketing and sales activities.

And last week, Marketo published the official press release announcing the winners. Congratulations to Scott Ciccone, Director of Marketing at Sierra Atlantic, who won the Marketo Idol Showcase award.And also congratulations to all other participants.

Yours truly finished 3rd in the contest by presenting an advance lead scoring campaign.

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”

This morning, Marketo announced the online availability of The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, a comprehensive Marketo workbook that delivers the practical advice and do-it-yourself guidance required to turn lead nurturing theory into practice. This is definitely a must read guide for anyone interested about lead nurturing.

The news is spread all over Twitter, which is good. But what really caught my attention is Marketo’s landing page execution. They really did a great job at capturing leads. The sequence is made of 3 pages and here are my observations for each one.

Marketo Landing Page 1

Landing page 1: Complete guide offer

The page has a quick description of the offer and why it is valuable. The guide is divided in 4 parts. The first part is given without registering (see red arrow on the left).

The second, third and fourth part will also be given but at a future date (see 3 red arrows on the right). Now that is the reason why the lead should complete the form. The compelling offer here is to register to get the full guide now. They are giving the lead a powerful incentive to register: get it now!

Second point, the form to capture information is located at the top right of the page. That make sure it is easy for the lead to see it and complete it to get the full version of the guide.

Third point: the most important content is above the fold (green line on the screenshot).

Lastly, they added trusted source to endorse the guide and gives a lot of credibility on the value of the content.

Quick comment about the menus: It is recommended that you strip any menus on your landing pages to make sure leads only go where you want them to go. But I would only recommend that if lead are coming from your website and already know you. In this case, the page is promoted in PR and is retweeted a lot. So a lot of visitors don’t know Marketo yet and this is why is better to leave all menus.

Marketo landing page 2

Landing page 2: Webinar offer

Instead of being redirected to a classical Thank you page after completing the form, the lead is taken to a second offer. This offer is directly related to the first one, in fact, it is a Webinar about the guide that the lead just downloaded. If the lead is interested to the guide, he will most probably be interested in the Webinar about the guide.

The cool thing about the landing page flow is that Marketo is using progressive profiling. Progressive profiling is the technique use to ask new questions to a lead when he come back.  Now on this second form, Marketo ask for State, # Employees, Industry.  This is a very good way to build leads profile without annoying them with all the same question again and again.

Note that now the header has change and there is no menus available. The lead now knows Marketo and is pushed in the direction where Marketo wants it.

Marketo landing page 3

Landing page 3: Thank you + blog subscription offer

Now that the lead has register to get the complete guide and to attend the Webinar, it is the time to thank the lead. But instead of leaving it there, Marketo just added a little extra, which does not require registering with them. They simply offer a quick RSS subscription to their blog, very little engagement from the lead but very valuable for Marketo to increase their blog subscription base.

I’m looking to implement Lead Scoring in conjunction with our Lead Nurturing program. Typically, any lead that comes in goes in our 12 touch points nurturing program. We have exception for specific sources (ex: Trial request) in which case, the lead goes automatically to Sales without entering nurturing.

During the nurturing program, leads are score based on their behavior (open, click, page visit, etc…). Once a lead reaches the score threshold, it is transfer to Sales. Sales are reviewing the lead and have 3 choices:
a) Create an opportunity
b) Archive the lead (not a good fit or no interest)
c) Send back the lead to marketing for more nurturing

Couple of question to discuss:

1- When Sales are sending a lead back to marketing:
a. How do you affect the score? Do you reset it to “0” or reduce it by a certain amount of points?
b. How do you identify where the lead was in the nurturing program to continue at the same place once the lead is sent back to marketing?

2- If a lead reaches the threshold after 10 touch points and Sales send it back to marketing, the nurturing program continue but there is only 2 touch points left, if you diminish the score, it is most likely that this lead will never hit back the threshold… right? What are you doing to improve that?

3- We have planned our nurturing program with content to move the lead up in the revenue cycle. The first 4 touch points are for early stage, 5-8 are for mid stage and 9-12 are for late stage. If Sales are sending a lead that is mid stage back to marketing, how do you make sure this lead start the nurturing with the mid stage content instead of getting the first 4 touch points?

4- For reports purpose, after being sent back to marketing by Sales, if a lead reaches again the threshold, do you calculate these leads as “new leads” generated by marketing? If so, how do you tag them differently in your CRM?

5- If a lead never reaches the threshold after the 12 touch points, do you archive the lead as non-responsive and ultimately delete it?

Please feel free to leave your thoughts!