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The Marketing Vp’s Guide to achieving results with Marketing automation

How to Know Your Value and Make the Customer Connection

CDC MarketFirst | Business Paper �

The Ability to Listen Everyone is a customer of something. We’ve all been hit with promotions for irrelevant products, pitches that are poorly timed, and empty promises.

The challenge for today’s marketers is to get through to customers again with fewer resources and smaller budgets than ever before.

It’s a question of rebuilding relevance.

As a marketer, you need to make sure that a promotion that leaves your company doesn’t appear as a promotion to the customer. Instead, it should appear as a helpful, smart, and timely offer that provides direct value to them. Every piece of marketing you release into your customer and prospect base demonstrates how well you understand the needs and preferences of each individual recipient. When the communication is inapplicable, too generic, or wastes the recipient’s time, your company doesn’t just lose an opportunity. It loses credibility.

The customer exhaustion we all recognize is driven by marketing that just isn’t targeted. As a customer, imagine how different you’d feel if every promotion you saw was exactly what you needed at that moment.

When customers begin to dis-engage, many marketers tend to try to solve the problem by doing more of what’s causing the problem. They increase communications in an attempt to rebuild relevance.

But customer re-engagement does not start by looking outward—it starts by looking inward. Rather than re-assessing the delivery and positioning of your corporate messages, assess the distinct messages your customers are trying to deliver to you.

What they’re telling you is priceless. If you act on it, it will make the difference between blindly promoting to your customers in a way that exhausts them—or reaching out to them in a way they appreciate.

The Ability to SeeToday, nearly everybody inside a company collects customer data to some degree. But few have a complete picture of the customer as a human being. And even fewer are able to recognize patterns and trends and segment behaviors among the customer base effectively.

Without this level of visibility, marketing demonstrates "soft" value to the company. You know you are successful with a portion of your marketing initiatives—you just don’t know which portion.

In this reality, ROI is almost impossible to prove, making it a challenge to make the case to increase or even justify existing budgets.

With effective marketing automation tools, marketing can demonstrate hard value. Campaign results can be illustrated with charts and graphs that connect directly to the sales pipeline.

Think about the messages your customers are trying to send to you. And consider how you would adapt and sharpen your approach if you heard those messages loud and clear.

Does this individual customer prefer to access service over the Internet, after dinner? Do our executive-level customers tend to lean towards a particular product line? Does this customer have expansion plans or business issues that would be solved by a new product they may not be aware of?

By integrating highly functional marketing automation tools as part of your CRM strategy, customer needs and preferences are assessed with depth, context, and richness. Greater patterns and trends within the customer and prospect base are uncovered, providing invaluable insight into the strategies necessary in the future to stay on track and improve customer share.

Lead Management: Making the ConnectionWe know that CRM’s contribution to marketing is visibility—visibility into how to approach customers and how to measure marketing ROI. But perhaps the most critical kind of visibility is that which shows how the leads your team creates transform into opportunities, and then into closed deals.

Marketing value is not calculated in the number of leads you send to Sales. True value is reflected in how many of those leads turn into revenue. Only a good lead with the right prospect at the right time and with the right follow-up and support can turn into a profitable, closed deal.

Companies have long been satisfied with bringing in a high number of leads, reasoning that sufficient volume would drive adequate sales growth. But in today’s competitive business environment, most realize that simply obtaining lists of prospects is not enough.

It’s time to streamline lead management—the process of qualifying, managing, nurturing, and tracking leads from initial contact to closure, and beyond. The result will be

Marketing is under the microscope: Show us the revenue. Justify your budget. Do you have the right tools to do it?

CDC MarketFirst | Business Paper �

a true reflection of marketing ROI, or a straight line drawn between the activities of your team and revenue.

Businesses typically allocate large budgets to customer acquisition activities, only to forfeit the value of this investment when 80 percent of the leads fall through the cracks. With improved lead management, an organization that captures even 5 percent of these lost leads and converts them to customers will increase revenues substantially.

By managing the customer as a prospect throughout that customer’s lifecycle, businesses can continue to deliver ROI on the sales and marketing investment well after an initial sale.

The challenges of effective lead management—and its rewards—apply across broad sectors of business. Any situation in which a customer inquiry is followed up with contact from a sales representative, telemarketing person, or channel partner can be improved with more effective lead management.

Lead Management Process

Step #1: Identify the Lead SourceSales and marketing must work together much more closely than they have traditionally in order to implement an effective lead management system.

Lead management entails qualifying A-level leads, distributing them to sales promptly, nurturing the remaining leads through closure, and tracking the results.

For best results across an enterprise, this deceptively simple process must coordinate multiple business processes at various stages:

Identify hot leads and automatically route to direct sales or channel partners

Actively engage the remaining leads and nurture them through the pipeline to eventual sale

Track leads to closure and evaluate the ROI of marketing campaigns

Integrate the external channel, including value added resellers (VARs), other resellers, and strategic partners

Integrate offline qualification resources such as call centers

The success of a lead management program will require open communication and active participation from both the marketing and sales teams.

Therefore it is imperative that marketing and sales meet in the initial stages to jointly review the existing corporate lead management processes, and develop new business processes to meet the needs of both teams. Involving

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both teams at this initial stage will prove invaluable, sparing considerable time and effort later, especially in the qualification process.

These initial discussions should focus on defining typical lead process points, including:

Qualification questions and process

Distribution rules

Lead scoring: specific definitions of A, B, and C-level leads

Components and duration of the sales cycle

Managing atypical leads or out-of-profile leads

Ownership of each stage of the process

Most companies receive leads from multiple sources resulting from both online and offline marketing activities, including trade shows, direct mail, e-marketing campaigns, newsletter subscriptions, website, referrals, print and online advertising, call centers, partners, and telemarketing.

Source tracking standards are established during the initial design process to identify the lead source by channel, media, or campaign.

Identifying the lead source and tracking outcomes allows businesses to qualify leads more effectively and provide sales with better ammunition to target prospects with more relevant information.

It also enables marketing to assess the value of its activities and re-direct efforts and expenditures based on response and conversion rates.

Step #�: Identify Your Best LeadsIn a typical scenario, the most promising A-level leads are not qualified adequately, and as a result, they are not acted on by sales teams promptly. Hot leads, representing about 10 or �0 percent of the total leads, often aren’t distinguished from others and may languish unattended or be passed to sales too late, once the lead has cooled.

Sales teams are often frustrated at receiving too many leads, or too few good leads. The first challenge of an effective lead management system then is to accurately identify the most promising leads, get them to the appropriate sales representative quickly and with sufficient context to give sales the confidence to act.

Lead qualification is the process by which an existing or new lead is scored by engaging the prospect in a series of transactions designed to better understand their readiness for cross-sell or up-sell opportunities, or the readiness of a new lead to purchase for the first

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CDC MarketFirst | Business Paper �

time. Defining a standard set of lead scoring/qualification questions with the collaboration of sales and marketing, and ensuring that prospects answer questions accurately will provide sales with enough confidence in the system to act promptly on leads identified as hot. This can all be accomplished through a robust marketing automation system that can pass the leads either direct to the sales force or, though CRM integration, into the CRM database.

Typical questions that vendors pose during the lead qualification process include:

Are you currently evaluating a solution such as ours?

What are your reasons for evaluating a solution such as ours?

What is your time frame for the purchase of this solution?

What is your role in the purchase of this solution?

Is there an approved budget for this project?

Based on the prospect’s answers, leads may be scored as A, B, C, or D-level leads, depending on their readiness to purchase.

Qualifying customers is an ongoing and complicated process. Sales and marketing teams will want the flexibility to define and change business rules in real time as they learn more about their customers, prospects, and the marketplace for product offerings.

Most companies sell through multiple channels, comprising direct and indirect channels and partners and various customer touchpoints, including call centers, events, direct marketing, print, and online ads. An online, automated lead management system can coordinate information from disparate sources, by integrating offline lead generation and qualification processes.

Once you have identified a prospect with a marketing automation solution, a process called progressive profiling can be utilized to increase the information known about a lead.

Progressive profiling is the process of asking one or two target questions per transaction. This further qualification occurs over time—offers, invitations, surveys—and information which is desired, and still not known, is asked at each subsequent transaction.

Deeper qualification can be achieved with offline qualification resources such as inside sales or a call center. By distributing the initially qualified lead to a telemarketing team, a great deal of information can be gathered in a ten-minute phone call to further qualify the lead. From there the lead can be distributed to an account executive or VAR or sent back into the marketing automation solution for additional nurturing.

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Fred Krazeise, Director of Strategic Marketing at Sharp Electronics LCD Products Group, uses a lead management system to integrate his group’s online and offline marketing efforts and drive and manage more leads into the sales channel.

According to Krazeise, “We have improved our success with dealers and resellers significantly. In less than three weeks of using our lead management solution, we generated, qualified, and distributed 96 percent of the entire previous year’s leads to our top dealers and resellers. We have also achieved a 100 percent follow-up on those leads. Thanks to this solution, we are now experiencing an unprecedented lead conversion rate, which means more business for everyone involved.”

Step #�: The Right Lead to the Right Person, Right NowOnce a lead has been qualified and scored, the next step is to quickly distribute the lead to the resource most likely to close it, such as internal sales representatives or external channel partners. Automated lead distribution ensures that leads are rapidly routed, driven by business rules defined by the sales and marketing teams and implemented through the marketing automation system.

Leads can be routed by region, product, account, or any other criteria or combination of criteria. For example, A-level leads may be sent to the direct sales teams, B-level leads may be passed to channel partners, and C-level leads may remain with the marketing team for further nurturing and development. D-level leads might not be sales leads, but influential parties in the industry such as press, analysts, or consultants.

A critical aspect of real-time distribution within an automated lead management system is the ability to easily modify routing rules to reflect territory or assignment changes. When the system and possibly an offline resource have identified a hot prospect, you don’t want leads being routed to an account executive who is on vacation or sick.

sharing Leads with Channel partnersNow that the hot leads are making it to the internal sales team, how about channel partners?

Companies that want to foster better customer relationships and increase sales over the customer lifecycle are discovering the benefits of integrating and supporting the activities of indirect channel partners with a centralized lead management system.

Whatever the source, qualified leads can be automatically distributed to VARs or other channel partners and tracked through a lead management system that automatically alerts the call center to ensure that the lead was acted

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upon. Leads aren’t permitted to fall through the cracks or to cool before a customer contact is made.

Coordinating internal and external efforts in a shared system makes it far easier for businesses to measure results and make adjustments quickly. Using a portal or web interface, channel partners can check for new prospects and enter status updates in real time. With more visibility into resellers' activities, companies can identify their best VARs and reward them with more leads ; in addition, they can better forecast sales and anticipate inventory needs.

Lead nurturingLeads that don’t initially qualify as A- or B-level leads—the vast majority—can be actively engaged with various marketing initiatives to keep them engaged and informed, and to keep the brand in front of them as they move through their purchase process. This keeps the sales team focused on closing the hot prospects. The sales and marketing team can define nurturing campaigns to shepherd C-level leads forward in their buying process.

These campaigns can include webinars, white paper offers, conference invitations, new product news, and focused e-newsletters.

These campaigns can be designed to continue to monitor the prospect’s interest level until such time as they are ready to purchase.

At a certain point, these campaigns will capture a lead's increased readiness to buy, and the lead management system will take over again from there.

More sophisticated lead management systems closely track these nurturing activities, identify the most effective possible combination of marketing campaigns, and build automated systems to warm cold leads into the sales pipeline.

Combining lead management with nurturing makes it possible to convert over 5 percent of cold leads. Considering that cold leads represent over 80 percent of all leads acquired, this number can be very substantial.

Step #�: Track Leads to Closure & Evaluate ROIAn effective lead management system will make it easy for sales to convey the results of their efforts to marketing. This enables marketing to make adjustments to campaigns in real time and, in the longer term, evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns and quantify the ROI of campaigns in relation to increased sales and revenues.

Tracking leads and evaluating ROI are most effective when the marketing automation and lead management system is integrated with the company's SFA or CRM suite. This way, marketing can track the lead all the way to the sale to understand how long a prospect takes to go through each phase of their purchase process. Additionally, deal disposition information can be sent directly back to marketing from the SFA system. From there, marketing will know exactly which activities drove the prospect in the most effective and efficient way through their buying process.

The bottom line is that a marketing automation and lead management system should result in improved lead conversion rates and increased sales.

Carefully tracking all customer contacts in a centralized system accelerates the sales cycle, increases conversion rates, identifies cross-sell/up-sell opportunities, and fosters better relationships with customers across the entire customer lifecycle—solidifying a leadership brand.

Marketing and Sales Automation: A Necessary PartnershipMarketing automation systems with integrated lead management are the ideal complement to a sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Hoping to improve lead and customer management processes, many companies made significant investments in CRM and SFA systems. However, these systems were not designed for sophisticated lead management and do not address the current challenges involved in lead qualification and certainly not in prospect nurturing. Few provide best-of-breed marketing automation and lead management capabilities.

Typically, the information fed into SFA systems hasn’t been properly qualified and leads are passed to sales teams without scoring or context. Sales teams learn quickly that they cannot rely on the information provided in the system, resulting in lack of regular use.

SFA systems were intended for opportunity management, and serve well as productivity tools for the sales organization. An effective lead management system will complement SFA systems by augmenting the lead-qualification process to deliver better-qualified leads to sales.

Once a prospect has been engaged and entered into the lead management system, the lead can progress into an SFA system for ongoing opportunity management,

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while leads that need further nurturing remain in the lead management system.

When these systems are seamlessly integrated, sales and marketing gain dramatically improved visibility into the prospect pipeline, and the corporation optimizes its investment in the CRM or SFA system.

RecapEffective lead management can completely change the way an enterprise approaches and manages prospect and customer communication, as well as the way it measures marketing success.

In this paper, you’ve learned that a marketing automation and lead management system simply gets the best prospects to the right resources quickly to close the sale.

It supports multi-channel sales efforts, especially when paired with a sales automation system.

Improved lead management closes the loop, providing lead analysis that helps to identify the most effective sales and marketing activities.

In the long term, organizations will systemically improve lead conversion rates and boost revenue throughout the entire customer lifecycle.