Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Anyone who’s ever served in any marketing capacity is painfully aware of how marketing is perceived in many organizations across the country. The CFO might view “marketing budget” as a dark, bottomless pit. Sales reps often accuse marketing folks of being clueless and completely unhelpful, sending them low-quality leads. Traditionally, marketing has often been viewed as a necessary evil, something an organization has to put up with, even though it’s difficult to justify.

But things are changing, and marketers today, at the age of quality content, exact metrics and elaborate reporting, can finally be proud of what they do. Here are a few ways you can be that awesome marketer that people inside and outside the organization respect.

1. Respect the customer. This is true in every market, and especially in the B2B space. Your customers are smart. They are internet-savvy, well-researched, and by the time they show up on your website (by registering to download a demo, for example), rest assured they already have a fairly intimate knowledge of your company and your products. Don’t insult them by trying to spoon-feed them the basic stuff. Use your marketing automation software to find out who they are, what they’ve been doing up until now on your website, and what exactly they need – then address those specific needs.

2. Respect the sales organization. Of course you’re aware of the need to work closely with Sales to determine correct messaging and what constitutes a quality lead. We’re all aware of the importance of marketing-sales alignment. But to be a truly awesome marketer, one that’s respected by Sales, you need to respect sales too. Sales reps, certainly the best ones in your organizations, know a lot. They have intimate knowledge of your customers and their needs, of what works and what doesn’t. Rather than ignoring this knowledge or fight it, listen to it. Working together will serve both your interests as it will culminate in more sales, and now that we are able to measure marketing campaigns’ impact on sales, you will be the hero too.

3. Be useful. Content marketing is important of course, but in the era of the internet, not any content will do. The content you churn out must be extremely useful. It needs to be the kind of content that people enjoy reading – the kind of material that they would want to share. Never worry about giving content for free. Quality content will attract business, generate repeat business, will establish you as a thought-leader, and will very likely translate into better sales numbers.

4. Be social. Are you using social media? I hope you do, because everyone else is, including your customers, your prospective customers, influencers in your space and your competitors. You needs to identify the social media channels most appropriate for your space (Twitter and LinkedIn work great for most B2B companies, while Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram are quite suitable for consumer-facing organizations); then, make sure you’re being truly social. Resist the temptation to only churn out content – this is fine of course, but you should also be listening to others, and responding to them. Social media is about having conversations, not about shouting out your messages to whomever might be listening, and those conversations can actually teach you quite a bit about your space and especially your prospects and their needs.

5. Be accountable. I could be biased, but I happen to think that marketing automation is one of the best things that ever happened to marketers, not just because it’s made our lives easier, but mainly because it finally gave us the tools to measure campaigns and become accountable. Traditionally a bottomless pit, the marketing organization can now defend itself and its budget by drawing a fairly clear line between marketing campaigns and their results. In addition, measuring helps you fine-tune your efforts, weed out the failing campaigns and focus on successful ones.

6. Be efficient. Never do manually something that you can automate. Some tasks are just too error-prone when done manually, and managing a complex marketing campaign is certainly one of them. You have marketing automation software, right? Then use it. And if it’s too complex to use, consider investing in a simple, straightforward, affordable marketing automation system that you’ll actually end up using.

Want to be an awesome marketer? I have five words for you: respect, usefulness, sociability, accountability and efficiency. Oh, and two more that can link all of these together and make your life much, much easier: marketing automation.

It’s not rocket science and really, it makes perfect sense – poor marketing records lead to less-than-successful email campaigns, and to fewer resulting inquiries.

But in the B2B space, where records become outdated quickly as people change titles and jobs, and where people often give false information intentionally to avoid a sales follow-up, keeping a clean marketing database seems like a daunting – not to say impossible – task.

It’s a task worth undertaking however, especially if you use marketing automation technology and want to make the most out of it. After all, one of the biggest advantages that marketing automation offers is segmenting your database, thus enabling you to better tailor your communications according to parameters such as title and industry. Needless to say, this will work much better if the database actually reflects the reality. But how do you go about it? We’ve compiled a list of nine easy steps for cleaning up your marketing database.

Nine steps for cleaning up your marketing database:

1. Align your marketing database with your marketing goals. Who do you want to target? Who do you NOT want to target? Don’t go too wide (“Everybody is my customer!” can really backfire), but don’t define your market too narrowly either – obviously, this would result in missed opportunities.

2. Find the right balance of decision makers to influencers. Typically, you want to have more decision makers and fewer influencers in your marketing database. A 5:1 ratio usually works well.

3. Remove duplicate records. Most CRM systems can identify duplicate email addresses, but they won’t necessarily flag a common B2B situation where the same person appears with several different email addresses. This can result in the same person receiving the same communication from you more than once, which will obviously be annoying to her and might cause her to opt out. To remove these duplicates, sort your database by name, not just by email address.

4. Deal with database erosion. Natural and unavoidable workplace dynamics such as job changes, title changes and relocations mean that in just one year, over a third of your marketing database can become outdated. This means you need to regularly refresh your database – every quarter is a good idea. Use email pinging services to identify email addresses that are no longer valid.

5. Acquiring databases. It’s best to acquire rather than rent. Optimize the scope of the email database, making sure that it covers the markets and industries you’re interested in. You should also optimize the depth – the list you acquire should give you access to as many decision makers as possible. To get an optimized list, you’ll likely need to acquire several different databases.

6. Append data to your organic leads. Your web forms probably ask very little of visitors in terms of identifying information, to avoid scaring them off. This means that your organic data, collected on your website, is incomplete, which makes segmenting difficult. The best way to deal with this issue is to append data from other sources to your organic leads.

7. Minimizing opt-outs. Opt-outs are bad, and the best way to avoid them is to send relevant messaging, enabled by segmenting. So, for example, you would want to send your influencers a general message, but the decision makers should receive a more specific message. We already know that you need 7 touches with prospects to get them engaged, but send them at a frequency that does not become a turnoff. Always monitor the response to each of your messages to ensure that you do not become annoying.

8. Sort your database titles. Once you’ve acquired a database, identify the titles you’re interested in by applying a positive search algorithm (“Assistant Vice President”) and filter out the titles you’re not interested in with a negative algorithm (“assistant to the Vice President”).

9. Build custom sales databases. Field Sales may approach you with a list of companies they would love to do business with, asking you to populate the list with names, email addresses etc. It may seem impossible, but in fact, with automation, you can populate 30-40% of such a list. With a combination of on-shore automation and off-shore manual lookup, you can even get to an exciting 80% population.

Keep in mind that several of the tools needed to manage your marketing database are built into marketing automation: removing duplicates; moving from titles to job functions when segmenting; dynamic progressive forms as a tool to append more information to the organic list; CRM integration (make sure it removes duplicates); tracking opt-outs; and email deliverability status.

Think you’re the one qualifying your leads? Think again. As Scott Gillum recently observed, it is more likely that they are the ones qualifying you, as they browse through your website, compare your offering to your competitors’, and use social media to ask for advice.

So what can you do? Obviously, if prospects are qualifying you based on the content you put out there, you should make sure that content is top-notch. Your website, and more importantly your blog and social media channels, must convey that you know your stuff. If your website is outdated, your last blog post was published six months ago and your Twitter account is dormant, prospects will move on to vendors who actually appear to be on top of their virtual game.

This is not to say that you should divulge everything via free online content. I do agree with Mr. Gillum – good, high-quality content must be published to show you know what you’re doing, but that content should be viewed, for lack of a better word, as bait – used to catch prospects’ attention, earn their respect, and entice them to fill out that web form so that they can get more content from sales (and while you’re at it, use intelligent web forms to reduce web form abandonment).

I also agree that as business decision-makers continue to drive their buyer process deeper into the sales process, relevant content will continue to escalate in value, and that sales will need to move from pushing products to providing insight.

This is actually good news to us marketing automation vendors, because in the new sales process, prospects no longer need generic, mass-manufactured-and-emailed content. What they need is content tailored to their needs, delivered in a timely manner in response to their actions or inquiries, and there’s no better tool to achieve that intimate knowledge on a prospect than a marketing automation system that captures everything they do on your site, including what they did while still anonymous.

The traditional sales process is indeed obsolete, but there’s no need to feel worried. The new process provides exciting opportunities for vendors that are on top of their game to build a convincing online profile and to deliver great content, at the right time to the right prospects. In many ways, the new rules emphasize quality, which is always a good thing – to vendors and to buyers.

Web form abandonment is a big problem for B2B websites, which typically achieve a depressing 10% form completion rate. Since form completion rates are closely related to revenue growth, it’s important to improve these numbers.

Our solution? Dynamic Progressive Forms (DPF), a new kind of dynamic, easy-to-implement web form building technology that comes with eTrigue DemandCenter Marketing Automation and dramatically reduces form abandonment.

The technology intelligently requests information from website visitors, enabling marketers to build logic-based forms and ask website visitors questions based on their specific visit history, activity or demographic information, eliminating stupid, irrelevant or redundant questions and improving completion rates. Using dynamic progressive forms allows you to ask smarter questions and makes it easier to attract and hold interested prospects over time.

On average, customers using eTrigue DPF see a doubling in form completions, and a significant increase in the quality of data collected. By gathering bits of prospect information over time rather than all at once, the reluctance of prospects to complete long forms to gain access to premium web site content is reduced. Geared primarily for B2B lead generation efforts, Dynamic Progressive Forms greatly reduces form abandonment, delivers higher conversion rates, and better aligns marketing and sales efforts.

So how does it work? Contextual logic presents questions that are applicable to the individual prospect, and skips irrelevant questions. But more than just preventing redundant questions, eTrigue DPF poses questions based upon known demographic or firmographic data such as prospect role and responsibility. For example, IT prospects may be shown IT-related questions, while marketing prospects may see marketing-related questions. This only makes sense – after all, why ask an IT person about sales issues, or ask a person with a sales title about an IT issue? And why ask a question if you already have the answer in your prospect database?

In other words, eTrigue DPF helps you to make sure your forms are always appropriate and prevent stupid, inappropriate or plain annoying questions. The result is significantly reduced form abandonment.

eTrigue DPF works for all types of forms. Whether you want a simple form for collecting name and email, or a multi-step campaign that collects information over time, eTrigue’s DPF builder makes it easy, and provides unparalleled flexibility, including the ability to change your forms mid-campaign. No other marketing automation system gives you the same level of flexibility and control.

Stop annoying website visitors with long, tedious forms and increase completions! Higher conversion rates with more qualified opportunities entering the pipeline are possible. Use Dynamic Progressive Forms to ask shorter, smarter questions, and make it easy for your prospects to respond while attracting and holding interested prospects over time. To learn more about eTrigue DemandCenter Dynamic Progressive Forms, visit our website today.

I enjoyed reading Andrea Johnson’s recent article, discussing the importance of research by sales reps. While the entire article is very well-written, today I’d like to focus on one sentence that really caught my attention: “In one meeting, that [sales] rep launched himself from a vendor to a business resource.”

It’s a great sentence, because it beautifully captures what B2B marketing and B2B sales are all about. Of course we are vendors, trying to sell something to prospects. It’s the irony of the modern B2B sales cycle though, that as long as we are perceived as “vendors,” we will have a hard time selling anything to anyone. But if we can launch ourselves from “a vendor” to “a resource,” that changes everything.

B2B buyers are smart. They have access to plenty of info, and as Ms. Johnson says, they use that info and research their options. The last thing they need is a vendor telling them how awesome his product is. What they do need is someone that gets them and their issues and can offer quick, affordable ways to solve those issues.

This also goes back to the age-old marketing lesson of always highlighting benefits rather than features. Your prospect will be bored beyond belief if you attempt to speak at length about your product’s features – those features mean a lot to you but very little to her. What she does want to hear about is how your product is going to benefit *her* company, solve her particular issues.

So how does one get to a place where they are a valuable resource to a potential buyer rather than an annoying vendor? Ms. Johnson discusses several ways to become familiar with a specific company’s needs, the first quite simple – online research. Being the marketing automation geek that I am, I can’t help but add that marketing automation is a wonderful tool for getting a feel for a specific prospect and getting to know them better.

The very ability to closely monitor a potential buyer’s behavior on your website, his responses to your emails, the actions he takes, the pages he browses – this can provide you with very intimate insight into what that person is looking for, and – just as importantly – what he is not looking for (which you can learn from, say, his lack of response to a certain email campaign).

With great tools available to you such as prospect activity tracking, online research and – as Ms. Johnson suggests – inside information from within the company, there truly are no more excuses for ever making a cold call again. Get to know your prospects before talking with them, and you’ll elevate yourself from a “vendor” to a “resource.”

The best way to figure out how to make marketing automation work for your B2B company is to learn from top performers, companies that have adopted marketing automation technology and have seen marked improvements in per-lead costs, customer acquisition rates, and return on marketing investments.

When looking at these top performers, as was done in this fascinating Gleanster Research study, we can learn three important tips for implementing marketing automation in a B2B company:

1. Focus on Better Leads. Of course you want more leads – don’t we all – but your focus should be on lead quality, and this is where marketing automation shines. A good marketing automation system can help you sort through the flow of prospects from Internet-based marketing activities and determine who is real, where they are in the buying process, and whether they are ready for interaction from your sales team. eTrigue’s 3-D lead scoring, for example, helps you automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile, and timing.

2. Use Marketing Automation for Customer Retention. Customer turnover can be costly. Having a strong customer retention program is a must for holding onto customers and increasing return on marketing investment. One of the most effective ways to retain important existing customers is to use marketing automation to identify and segment customers based on demographics and purchasing behavior, to determine which customers are the most valuable. Once you’ve identified your most valuable customers – and the ones most at risk of leaving – you can generate and measure customer retention campaigns, including newsletters and special offers.

3. Be Smarter About Your Marketing Spend. You shouldn’t necessarily expect to cut marketing costs after implementing marketing automation – but you should definitely expect a better return on your marketing investment, now that you’re armed with so much more information about your prospects and customers. Marketing automation increases top-line revenue not because it cuts marketing costs, but because it helps you get more bang for each marketing buck, by creating cost-effective lead generation, helping with existing customer retention, creating better conversion rates with lead nurturing, and helping your sales force be more efficient by giving them sales-ready leads.

A few months after I became familiar with the concept of marketing automation, it dawned on me that at its very essence, marketing automation is about relationships and making them better.

The Vendor-Buyer Relationship

Marketing automation is about improving the vendor-buyer relationship and helping the vendor avoid annoying the buyer. There are so many ways a vendor can annoy a prospect!
-A vendor can send the prospect too many emails.
-A vendor can send the buyer emails that are too generic and don’t address the buyer’s specific pain points.
-A vendor can force the buyer to fill out a web form even when that buyer has already visited the vendor’s site and has already filled out the form.

Marketing automation can help vendors avoid these mistakes by giving them important information about the buyer’s activity on their website, and her response – or lack of response – to emails, so that vendors can craft subsequent messages accordingly, and send them at the right time.

Marketing automation can also identify returning visitors to a vendor’s website and make sure those visitors are NOT presented with a pop-up form that they have already filled out.

The marketing-sales relationship

Just as important as improving the vendor-buyer relationship is improving the relationship within the company between marketing and sales. Companies whose marketing and sales departments are aligned show better performance in all important business parameters, including qualified leads, conversions, acquisitions, retention, average billing per customer and revenue.

Marketing automation facilitates marketing-sales collaboration by enabling important data to flow between the two departments, including information about leads. It also enables and encourages both departments to agree on what constitutes a qualified lead, and to keep communication with leads consistent with the company’s general marketing messaging while allowing sales reps to personalize their messages to prospects.

Of course, marketing automation cannot force marketing and sales to play well together, and it won’t write quality content for you. But it can help you identify, and connect with, high-quality leads, even if your marketing budget is limited. It can help you find real buyers, reach out to them with appropriate messages, and time those messages so that they are sent at the very best time. This improved relationship between you and the buyer, and between sales and marketing, can have a significant impact on your company’s bottom line.