Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

About a year ago, we asked, “Is 2009 the year of Marketing Automation?” and observed that despite the bad economy, and maybe even because of it, marketing organizations will find that automating their email campaigns is a must.

The need to demonstrate efficiency and measurable results, combined with tighter budgets, have indeed placed more emphasis than ever on pipeline health, on nurturing leads and on retaining customers, all of which require automation to be done properly.

2009 was great!

As we predicted, 2009 was a great year for marketing automation – the year that established marketing automation as a necessity rather than a luxury. As a result, we had an amazing fourth quarter where we saw a 35% increase in sales.

Which is why we were not at all surprised to read a recent article on Demand Gen Report, which said that “the fourth quarter sales growth reported by several vendors, combined with a significant uptick in pipeline activity during the first few weeks of the New Year, point to 2010 emerging as a breakout year for the category.”

2010 will be even better

2009 was a good year for marketing automation, and we expect 2010 to be even better. But we are also aware that the economy is still shaky, and that organizations are still being very careful with their budgets, which is why we have developed eTrigue SalesPro.

Sales enablement tools will be especially successful

eTrigue SalesPro is a sales enablement tool that works for companies with tight budgets because it’s very affordable yet still provides all of the “sales” benefits of a marketing automation platform (unlimited emails, tracking, real time alerts) without requiring users to implement a more costly full marketing automation solution.

Focusing on sales acceleration makes sense for companies who are still on tight budget, who want to automate important aspects of their pipeline management but are unable to invest in full marketing automation right now. These companies will likely upgrade to a full system later on, when the economy fully recovers, but for now, if they have to choose between full automation or no automation, they would have to choose “no automation” and stay behind the competition. eTrigue SaledPro solves the dilemma and enables these businesses to improve their sales operations and align marketing and sales, while sticking with their budgets.

Marketing automation a must

We completely agree with Lewis of Demand Gen International: Over the next 5 years, every corporate marketing team will adopt marketing automation in some fashion. It’s like the early 90’s when marketing teams were realizing that a website was not just a nice thing to have but an absolute must. The same thing is going to happen with social media – and with marketing automation.

We have to agree with Laura Ramos of Forrester: sales enablement tools became all the rage in 2009. The recession, which forced marketing organizations to attempt to become efficient and accountable, highlighted the importance of monitoring pipeline health and of efficient, targeted lead generation processes. What’s more, it has become obvious that marketing and sales need to work together if lead generation is ever going to become a truly efficient process.

Why do other Sales Enablement tools force you to buy the kitchen sink?

Not all sales enablement tools are created equal, of course. Most tools on the market are add-ons to existing marketing automation suites. This means that companies are forced to invest in an expensive, full marketing automation solution before they can add on the sales enablement tool.

But what if you don’t have the budget to fully automate your marketing? These systems are expensive, and with the economy still in recovery, many businesses that desperately need to automate their lead scoring, monitoring and nurturing simply cannot afford to spend so much.

SalesPro: an affordable stand-alone Sales Enablement tool

eTrigue SalesPro was created to address this need for highly targeted yet affordable sales automation. This sales enablement application is unique because it is a stand-alone tool that does not force you to spend on a full marketing automation system. Yet, despite its affordability, it presents sales teams with a very detailed view of potential leads.

In addition to eTrigue SalesPro , eTrigue also offers a marketing automation platform – eTrigue Professional. eTrigue Professional and eTrigue SalesPro can either work solo, or combined. Unlike our competitors, you don’t have to deploy a full-blown Marketing Automation platform to use the sales enablement application. But when you are ready, both eTrigue SalesPro and eTrigue Professional work together seamlessly within minutes.

Encouraging marketing and sales alignment

Unlike other Sales Enablement tools on the market, eTrigue SalesPro doesn’t just capture Web site visitors, then email their info to Sales. SalesPro can score and qualify leads, then send out email alerts to sales reps when a lead meets a minimum threshold that was previously determined by marketing and sales.

Which brings us to another reason companies love eTrigue SalesPro: it enables and encourages (maybe even forces!) alignment between marketing and sales efforts, an important key to true marketing efficiency.

Enabling Sales to make informed decisions

We said it before: the last thing sales reps need is to waste their time calling cold prospects. That’s why eTrigue SalesPro does so much more than send short email alerts whenever a lead visits the site.

eTrigue SalesPro automatically creates lead routing rules to provide real-time lead alerts based on identified prospects and their activities. It can also be set to send alerts based on prospect scoring and on specific campaign activity, so that sales reps receive alerts when a lead has met certain scores. The alerts are chock full of useful information: they present the scores and the reasons behind them, along with account and buyer activity. All this information is presented in an easy-to-read format, enabling the sales rep to make an informed decision.

If the sales rep chooses to pursue the lead, she can continue communicating with the lead from within Salesforce.com, using email templates that were prepared and approved by Marketing (did we say alignment?) and that nurture and track the activity.

eTrigue SalesPro is a compact, affordable package, perfect for firms that while not yet ready for full marketing automation solutions, are looking to encourage alignment between marketing and sales efforts, and to improve their pipeline health and their lead nurturing process. It also works beautifully for companies who are already running eTrigue Professional marketing automation solution, but want to implement eTrigue SalesPro to empower their sales team to customize, personalize, and take control of separate initiatives while ensuring that marketing has control of the message.

She lands on your site, browses through a few pages, then leaves. She’s VP Marketing in a young startup – your ideal customer. You have her email address in your database now. But is she ready to make a buying decision? Should you ask your sales rep to contact her or would he be wasting his time?

Surveys show that in the vast majority of cases, your website visitors are not ready to make a purchase – yet. This is not to say that they will never buy from you. If they bothered to visit your site and browse for a while, they likely have a pain that your solution might be able to solve – but the buying process itself may take some time.

Life would certainly be easier if corporate buying decisions were made instantly. But the reality is, corporate buying decisions are becoming gradually more, and not less, complex. More people in the organization than ever before are now involved in each decision, and the process – which used to be passive and led by your marketing team, is now active and involved. Organizations are researching their options online, often for several months, before they are ready to buy.

Obviously, you don’t want to drop these prospects. They may not be ready to buy right now, and some of them will never buy, but the majority of them WILL make a purchase at some point (there is a pain to be solved after all) – and you want them to buy from you, not from your competitors.

So in the meantime, you nurture these leads. Lead nurturing is the process of building and maintaining a relationship with prospects that are not yet ready to buy, via timely and targeted delivery of engaging, relevant educational materials such as White Papers, eBooks, tutorials, demos and more.

Ideally, you want to nurture your leads with the content and at the rate that are appropriate to their readiness level. Segmenting prospects becomes a crucial part of lead nurturing – you send more emails to “warm” prospects who are opening your emails and clicking on your links, and you send them content that is relevant to their specific issues, as determined by their browsing patterns on your site.

Needless to say, lead nurturing is an extremely complex process. Nurturing your leads manually is so costly and time-consuming, it’s nearly impossible. This is why B2B companies are turning to Marketing Automation solutions to speed up the sales process and reduce their costs by automating all aspects of the marketing process, including lead nurturing and lead scoring.

The best part? When the prospect is sales-ready, the system emails a real-time lead alert to your sales rep, enabling him to contact the prospect immediately, with the confidence that can only come from knowing that the person is interested and is ready to buy.

The B2B buying process has changed dramatically over the last decade. Whereas marketers used to be in control, blasting prospects with emails and getting a fairly high response rate, corporate buyers today are far less passive and take an active role when searching for solutions for their organizations. Today’s customers begin to research potential vendors online long before they buy. They are forming an opinion much earlier in their decision-making process and based on independent research. As a result, companies have to do a much better job of timing their messaging to fit this new sales cycle.

Research shows that a whopping 85 percent of buyers research product options online before ever contacting potential vendors. These prospects are visiting your website, gathering information, then moving on to your competitors’ websites to gather information on their solutions prior to deciding whom to contact.

How can you as an organization reclaim a more active role in the marketing process? The best way to do that is by tracking those website visitors, nurturing them, and following up with them when they are ready to buy. It is absolutely crucial to enter all qualified, not-quite-sales-ready-yet leads into your database and keep tracking them and nurturing them until you identify – via their behavior on your website – that they are ready to be contacted by a sales rep.

Of course, tracking a large number of web visitors,  properly segmenting them and nurturing them over what can easily be many months is nearly impossible to do manually, which is why Marketing Automation tools have become an essential part of modern marketing campaigns. Marketing Automation solutions enable companies to track web visitors, analyze their behavior, segment them and nurture them according to readiness levels, and eventually contact them at the right moment, with the right information that turns your sales rep’s call into anything but a cold call.

Doing all of this manually is not just difficult, time-consuming and expensive in terms of the manpower needed (can you really do this with a database that contains ten thousand, fifty thousand, three hundreds thousand leads?) but is also prone to costly marketing mistakes that could result in turning off a large number of viable customers and essentially sending them directly to the competition.

In today’s market, Marketing Automation is not a luxury. It is a necessary tool that saves you time and money, creates measurable, highly efficient marketing campaigns and accelerates the sales process.