Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Back in 2010, I wrote a post on how marketing automation can help promote that elusive marketing/sales alignment that we’re all trying so desperately to acheive.

Now, thanks to Forrester, we have the research to support my theory (although that theory was based on lots of anecdotal evidence!) In a recent article, Lori Wizdo says, “In our study, we found that companies who have implemented a marketing automation solution reported significantly higher levels of collaboration between sales and marketing, across a number of different dimensions.”

As Ms. Wizdo explains, implementing marketing automation software means that the company has a managed process in place for lead generation, lead nurturing, and defining lead readiness, in addition to providing sales with lead alerts.

One of the major areas where marketing automation helps avoid arguments is defining and executing field programs. As Ms. Wizdo points out, this is an obvious advantage of marketing automation. The ability to measure the ROI on any given program means that there’s no need to argue about what works and what doesn’t – marketing automation gives us the numbers, which makes it easy for both marketing and sales to identify the programs that should be kept alive vs. those that need to be killed.

Automation also helps us to get to know our leads better by capturing insight into their behavior. When we better understand our prospects, we as marketers can have better communication with them, tailored to their specific needs and sensitive to their responses. We can also better identify their sales readiness, and when we do transfer them to sales, sales can have better conversations with them and close deals faster.

Obviously, the very task of managing leads becomes much more streamlined when automated, and I would like to add here that apart from the obvious advantages of automating a big database over trying to manage it manually via Excel (which can lead to some serious marketing mistakes), again we see here a better opportunity for marketing and sales to collaborate when defining the criteria for lead scoring, and creating sales messaging that comes from sales but is in line with marketing’s general messaging.

The very fact that marketing automation creates a managed lead-to-revenue process helps with collaboration. In addition, built-in marketing automation tools such as lead scoring and lead nurturing help smooth the process out by providing marketing and sales with an incentive and an opportunity to agree on basic definitions prior to launching campaigns, and by measuring results to see what actually works.

Marketing automation takes at least three key ingredients to be successful: process, content and technology. But marketing automation cannot live up to its full potential without skilled marketing and sales people driving the process.

Last week, Software Advice advisory board member Justin Gray named six reasons marketing automation is particularly reliant on the skills of people. How your team uses this technology makes the biggest difference between marketing automation success and failure. I think these points are worth repeating, so I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing his main points below. You may read the full BLOG post at Software Advice.

1. Vision
Software can’t predict what your company goals are, or if your marketing program is staying aligned with those goals. It can’t think of a creative campaign. And it can’t come up with a fantastic new way to go after a hard-to-reach demographic. Before implementing any system, its important users set clear success benchmarks.

2. Targeting
Your audience will engage and respond to targeted and relevant campaigns. Marketing automation software doesn’t know how to target your demographic. Your marketing staff has to identify customer segments and behaviors and instruct the software how best to nurture them. And they’ll have to build personas for job functions, purchase history, website engagement and other factors that are important to reaching your audiences.

3. Content Creation
Marketing automation requires content to be effective. The people who create (and repurpose) content need a strong knowledge of the buyer and the ability to create materials (blogs, email blast text, website content, podcasts, ebooks, videos and webinars) that are relevant.

4. Definition
Marketing and sales must agree on what defines a lead, how those leads are nurtured, and when those leads are passed along. Your marketing automation software can provide the automation, but it can’t provide the guidance – that’s your job.

5. Initiative
Marketing is ever evolving, and your lead-generation efforts should be as well. It takes a team of people to continuously fine-tune your strategy and strive for better results.

6. Results
Generating reports and analyzing results are two different skills. Conclusions drawn from data must be analyzed in the context of your strategy, and new ideas and trends must be drawn from it. It takes people to determine if your marketing program is staying aligned with your goals.

The bottom line is that it’s important to recognize that skilled marketing (and sales) people are the key to marketing automation success.

Lots of buttons, features, capabilities! Lots of everything! This is how marketing automation started. In fact, this was what we all expected of technology in general, and it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe a decade or so.

Now, in the era of sleek, incredibly simple and user-friendly yet highly sophisticated products (think Apple), things have changed. We deal with so much technology every day, it’s become intertwined with our daily lives and as we handle all these dashboards, buttons and gadgets, all we really want it simple. Easy. Accessible.

Oh, and preferably, affordable too.

Marketing automation is no exception to this new desire for simplicity. When I’m asked what was the inspiration behind eTrigue Demand Center, I say “My own desire, as a marketer, to have a simple, accessible, affordable tool that would help me become a better marketer.”

When we started eTrigue, there were solutions out there, but we were unhappy with them. They were so expensive, so complex, so difficult to deploy and to use, that they either required dedicated staff to make any sense of them at all, or they ended up gathering dust on the shelf, never actually deployed!

What would make marketing automation better? We wondered. Of course the software needed robust capabilities – there was no doubt about that. Marketing database management, prospect activity tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing, real-time lead alerts, email marketing, reporting… we knew we had to include all of these and more in the software. But we wanted it to still be accessible, easy, the kind of marketing software that anyone could deploy and start using right away.

Simple, yet sophisticated. Filled with features, but accessible. And – just as important – affordable.

When experienced marketers create marketing software, you know that something good is going to come out of it. Armed with years of experience and a deep knowledge of what marketers need, we knew that we wanted a solution that once bought would be actually used. A solution that would work for small organizations as well as for larger ones.

That’s the story behind Marketing Automation for The Rest of Us. The idea, made into reality, that you can deliver effective demand generation marketing campaigns using your existing resources. That you can launch more marketing campaigns and generate more qualified leads while staying within your budget – even a tight one. That a robust marketing automation solution that has everything you need to effectively manage your demand generation campaigns can in fact be affordable.

Simple is the new sophisticated, and achieving a high, measurable marketing ROI and a very real revenue impact has never been easier, thanks to eTrigue Demand Center. Can you tell I’m proud?

Do your CEO and CFO still think of your marketing department as a cost center? In many companies, this is still the case, but it doesn’t have to be. Being perceived as a cost center means that the CFO will be determined to cut marketing costs as much as possible, even when marketing shows high performance and delivers great results. So our goal as marketers is to transform the marketing function from a perceived cost center to a vital revenue-generating engine for the enterprise.

The secret to making this happen? When you present your case to the CFO, whether asking for a bigger budget or for new software, always connect your marketing results to the company’s business metrics. Instead of talking about how you improved lead quality, or how you were able to cut costs per lead, talk about how your lead generation campaigns have increased revenue. Always focus on revenue, and on how your marketing activities drive growth and improve the company’s bottom line.

Of course, showing a direct link between marketing activities and revenue growth is notoriously difficult to do. This is where marketing automation can be extremely helpful.

Marketing automation improves marketing performance. It helps marketers create better, tighter campaigns; align marketing with sales and present sales reps with better leads; and make the most of each marketing dollar. But just as important, marketing automation enables marketers to prove their campaigns’ usefulness to the organization. It enables marketers to align marketing investment with enterprise objectives, and to clearly demonstrate its contribution to the organization’s success through clearly defined metrics and key performance indicators.

Today’s B2B marketers are rethinking the relationship between marketing and the rest of the organization. Their goal is to transform marketing from a cost center to a revenue center and to make their contribution to the organization visible and measurable. Marketing automation will not magically make this transformation happen, but once you have the right processes in place, it will enable you to measure, monitor and refine your marketing campaigns, to better judge the impact of your initiatives on revenue, and to clearly demonstrate that impact to the CFO.

While the current pressure on marketing to connect marketing activities to business results can be stressful, and the task of transforming marketing means a lot of hard work, you should view this as a great opportunity to prove that what you do can have a real impact on revenue and that, rather than consume the company’s resources, you play a critical part in the business’ overall success.

“Many of the top performers are now using their second marketing automation system because their first was too hard to use.”

I had to smile when I read this sentence, written by David Raab in a recent, excellent blog post.

I knew that companies were ditching complex, hard-to-use marketing automation systems and adopting user-friendly, intuitive ones, because eTrigue is one of the first marketing automation vendors companies approach when they look to simplify their marketing automation. When they come to us, they often tell me, “We bought this system that’s supposedly great, but once we did, we quickly realized that it was so complex, so non-intuitive and non-user-friendly, there was no way we were going to actually implement it. It simply required resources -in terms of staff, training, and continued investment – that we don’t have and can’t afford.”

So these expensive systems are gathering dust somewhere, while eTrigue is purchased, implemented and used in a matter of hours. How cool is that? It’s certainly one of the aspects of our product I’m most proud of – ours is a marketing automation system that companies find affordable, accessible, intuitive, and easy to use. As a result, they actually use it – and when they do, they start seeing results within a few months, because “easy” and “simple” does not mean it lacks power – on the contrary.

A simple marketing automation system can and should be very powerful. As evident by Raab’s blog post, marketing automation success is not measured by how many bells and whistles your system has. Rather, it is measured by the results it brings the marketing organization and the company as a whole – increased revenue, better leads, more leads, and improved marketing efficiency.

It is indeed interesting, as Raab points out, to see that experienced top performers are saying that training by itself can’t overcome a difficult system, while less-experienced companies tend to rely heavily on training – even though they may find, down the road, that it’s simply not enough.

It’s true that software – any software – is often non-user-friendly. A Technology Review article from 2002 said,”In an amazingly short time, software has become critical to almost every aspect of modern life. Yet all too often, code is bloated, ugly, inefficient and poorly designed; even when programs do function correctly, users find them too hard to understand. Groaning beneath the weight of bricklike manuals, bookstore shelves across the nation testify to the perduring dysfunctionality of software.”

Two years later, David Platt, in his brilliant book Why Software Sucks, added, “Every programmer thinks he knows exactly what users want. After all, he uses a computer all day every day, he ought to know. He says to himself, “If I design a user interface that I like, the users will love it.” WRONG! Unless he’s writing programs for the use of burned-out computer geeks, his user is not him.”

Back to marketing automation. Want marketing automation success? Don’t underestimate the importance of a user-friendly system, and don’t overestimate the value of training. After all, purchasing a marketing automation system is a long, complex process – I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be doing it again, a year from now, because the system you bought is impossible to use! Remember: easy is important, and simple, light, yet effective is the way to go.

The best marketing is done when we really, truly understand our customers – when we reach a level of familiarity and understanding that makes us not just aware of what they think, but actually think like them.

When you think like the customer (or prospect), that gap between you as a marketer and them as a consumer is eliminated. Eliminating this gap can make a big difference, because if you stop thinking like *you* and start thinking like *the customer* you will avoid familiar pitfalls such as preaching features instead of talking benefits.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, because, after all, you are you and they are they. But the best marketers around -not unlike actors – find a way to BE their customers. Then they can approach them in ways that are enormously more effective than when that familiar marketer/consumer gap exists.

So, how do you do that? How do you think like the customer? One way is to use marketing automation tools that gather detailed information about each lead arriving at your website. Then take the time to look at the information and analyze it. In most cases, you will get a clear understanding of the person’s pain point, of what he’s looking for.

I also like Stephen Davidson’s suggestion that we stop focusing so much on surveys, and instead of inviting customers over, ask them to host us for a day of shadowing. Imagine how much useful information you could get from such a day – even from just an hour or two!

The basic idea is that the focus must be shifted away from the marketer and onto the customer and/or the prospect. The more we can focus our attention on our audience, the better we will be at communicating with them, and getting them to do what we want them to do – become buyers or repeat buyers – not in a spammy way, but in a helpful way that respects the customer and their needs.

Demand generation isn’t as straightforward as one would think. When it comes to B2B buyers especially, the process of generating and maintaining interest in your products is a delicate dance. Make the wrong move, and you risk upsetting your dance partner. Here are two demand generation tactics that can backfire, and two tactics that work.

Demand generation: what doesn’t work

1.Generic emails, email blasts, and marketing pitches that aren’t directly relevant to your prospects’ needs. In the era of the Internet and of social media, B2B buyers are highly educated and very choosy. They expect a relationship and they expect value. They already gathered the basic info they need via the Internet. Treat them with respect, add value to their search process and address their pain points, and they’ll gradually come to respect you and trust you. Blast them with generic emails touting the features of your product, and they will simply opt out. Their inbox is already out of control. The last thing they need is another annoying sales pitch.

2. Cold calls. Cold calls used to work to some extent when sales people had all the info. The cold call would serve to educate the prospect about your product. Nowadays, the info is out there on the Internet. A cold call that introduces your product without adding value is downright irritating because it wastes your prospects’ time. Of course, it wastes your sales reps’ time too.

Demand generation: what works

1. Personalized emails that address your prospect’s specific concerns and add value in the form of targeted, relevant content. Your prospects obviously have a pain point (otherwise they wouldn’t be on the market looking for a solution) and will welcome quality information that addresses that pain point. But the information has to be current, relevant and add value beyond what’s available via search.

2. Real-time follow-up with qualified prospects. A prospect that clicked on a link in a recent email you sent them and just spent seven full minutes on your site reading about your product, downloading a white paper and perusing your FAQ section has just demonstrated a real interest in your solution. Having a sales rep contact them as soon as they leave your site, armed with the knowledge that they are indeed interested and that they have a specific solution they are looking for, is exactly what the sales organization is supposed to do: zero in on the most qualified prospects and contact them at the right time, with the right info.

NOT calling that prospect is a huge waste of opportunity and practically pushing them into the arms of your competitors.