Beyond deployment - DemandGen · and process to each stage, and fully adopting your Demand Funnel as a foundation for generating demand and following through on it. To successfully

Beyond

deployment

S O L U T I O N B R I E F

Key steps along

the marketing automation

journey

S O L U T I O N B R I E FBEYOND DEPLOYMENT: KEY STEPS ALONG THE MARKETING AUTOMATION JOURNEY 2

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Step 1 4 Establishing Your Demand Funnel

Step 2 5 Sales Efficiency through Lead Scoring

Step 3 6 Automating Marketing by Lead Nurturing

Step 4 7 Improve Your Data Hygiene

Step 5 8 Align Sales and Marketing

Step 6 9 Commit to Marketing Operations

Step 7 10Metrics Matter—Key Performance Indicators

What’s Next? 12

Notes 13


I N T R O D U C T I O N

Winning with marketing automation only starts with proper systems

integration and deployment. Long-term success and adoption ultimately

depends on your Marketing Team’s ability to fully leverage the

capabilities of your marketing automation system and drive effective

use of the system throughout your organization. Here’s a summary

of the key areas to focus on beyond deployment.

No doubt, you’ll need a high-level plan and the right internal and

external resources to take on these key initiatives. DemandGen has

helped hundreds of clients on the journey you’re about to take—

so rest assured there’s help if you want it.


S T E P 1: E S TA B L I S H I N G YO U R D E M A N D F U N N E L

Almost every marketer has heard negative feedback from Sales about the quality of leads handed to them. Sales typically considers a “lead” as someone who’s ready to talk to them, but Marketing is often guilty of using the term “lead” for someone who simply responded to a campaign. Expanding the language between Sales and Marketing will not only reduce friction, but also enable you to create a systematic process for categorizing prospects. Defining your Demand Funnel is an important early step in your marketing automation journey.

The Demand Funnel is both a language and a process model for how leads move from inquiry to customer. Defining its stages gives you the foundation for segmentation, scoring, routing, nurturing, and reporting, and creates a common language between Sales and Marketing.

This process is not just creating the stages and then stating “we have a funnel.” It’s about going through a detailed exercise to clearly assign meaning, ownership, and process to each stage, and fully adopting your Demand Funnel as a foundation for generating demand and following through on it.

To successfully establish and implement a Demand Funnel, you must:

1. Develop agreed-upon stage definitions and taxonomy

2. Define stage ownership and triggers for conversion between stages

3. Develop Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each stage

4. Map your marketing automation and CRM systems to support the funnel model

Inquiry

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Closed/Won


S T E P 2: L E A D S C O R I N G S Y S T E M

Lead scoring is a systematic way to assign a rating to each prospect that enters the funnel, so that when it is handed off to Sales it has a priority attached to it. The big payoff is the efficiency that is gained by the Sales team when they know how to prioritize their follow-ups. Sales can then manage their leads appropriately: focusing on the best prospects first, nurturing those that will have a longer sales cycle, recycling those that are not sales ready, and discarding bad ones so time and effort is not wasted on them.

To develop your scoring system, you’ll need to determine how to define leads to be ranked A, B, C and beyond. What qualification criteria should be used? What online behaviors should be used to measure someone’s interest?

The first key to successful lead scoring is agreement. The Sales and Marketing teams have to agree on the definitions of each scoring level or the system means nothing.

If you don’t put a lead scoring system in place, you’re missing one of the biggest payoffs with marketing automation—because there is no better way to measure lead quality and make Sales more efficient in a scalable way. At the very least, going through the exercise will get Sales and Marketing together to agree upon a definition for a qualified lead.


To give your scoring program the best chance at success, you must:

1. Determine two to four qualitative criteria to measure fit

2. Determine the online behaviors used to measure interest

3. Use both measurements to set a rank for each new inquiry

4. Ensure that the right scoring hand-off processes exist

5. Create a simple and effective way to show the scored leads in your CRM

6. Gather at least one quarter’s worth of scoring data and analyze scoring distribution through to closed/won opportunities

7. Implement a continuous feedback loop with sales to refine the model

S T E P 3: L E A D N U R T U R I N G

If your efforts at lead nurturing haven’t yet become automated, it’s time to apply some technology to the situation.

Nurturing isn’t just about dripping pieces of content to prospects. Nurturing should serve as a scripted conversation that allows you to efficiently automate and scale the buyer education process. Well designed nurtures will move potential buyers through the funnel (and beyond), and will capture those who are stuck or dead and re-nurture those that have been rejected out of the funnel. It also allows you to increase wallet share and customer loyalty and retention.

To leverage nurturing beyond qualifying Inquiries, you must:

1. First define your Demand Funnel

2. Prioritize areas of the funnel where nurturing will have the greatest impact, such as the top of the funnel

3. Develop clear, measurable objectives for each type of nurture

4. Develop a creative brief and flow diagram to plan out each nurture

5. Develop the right content that ideally aligns content to the prospect’s role and industry

6. Measure effectiveness and optimize regularly


S T E P 4: I M P R O V E YO U R D ATA H YG I E N E

For many marketers, the condition of your data looks like an episode of “Hoarders.” But you won’t be able to accomplish anything worthwhile without good data: “garbage in, garbage out” remains true.

Duplicate data is a major problem: it means that the marketing automation system and the CRM will become out of sync. It’s important to maintain a unique record set between these systems to ensure that activities and campaign attribution are reporting to the correct records. Non-standard data inhibits your ability to perform proper segmentation. Industries, roles, states—anything that can use a pick list—should be standardized, and the existing data record should be normalized to that list. Addressing this issue up-front will aid tremendously in your efforts toward segmentation, routing, and scoring.

In the old days of direct mail, the list was everything, and that’s really still true— it’s just that today the email address is the most commonly used piece of data, instead of mailing address. We’ve become sloppy about the hygiene of the other contact fields, but they’re still important: Marketing needs them to properly score, and Sales needs them to engage with the prospect by phone or email. Correcting missing data focuses around obtaining contact information and qualification data. Bad records with invalid data need to be thrown out, so that no one is wasting time and money on them.

You probably also have old leads that have been sitting untouched by Sales because they aren’t high enough in the queue for action, but haven’t been recycled back to Marketing for further nurturing. The best case scenario is to establish governance so that these records can be properly dispositioned. In the meantime, treat them as incomplete records and work toward obtaining current qualification data on them.

To ensure strong data governance, you must:

1. Cleanse your database—ideally, you did this before your marketing automation integration, but if not, now is the time to do it

2. Establish processes and create automated programs to maintain clean and standardized data

3. Enrich data through appending/progressive profiling to aid in segmentation and scoring

4. Focus on segmentation—determine personas, target buyers, appropriate content and subscription management


S T E P 5: M A R K E T I N G A N D S A L E S A L I G N M E N T

Integrating marketing automation with your CRM doesn’t automatically make Sales more effective. Getting Sales the right leads is important, but just as important is getting Sales to pick up right where and when Marketing hands off. And that requires good alignment between the two teams.

Integrated marketing automation/CRM systems today are able to do far more than just pass leads, so a good first step is to give Sales some insight into the rich body language of leads and customers that we now can access. A salesperson in a retail store can observe a shopper checking price tags, choosing one dress over another to try on, or holding two shirts up to compare their features. All those things have analogous behaviors in the online world; being able to identify and interpret those behaviors benefits both Sales and Marketing people.

Moreover, once the marketer understands the sales rep’s prospect profile, and the sales rep understands what the marketer can provide from a systems perspective, the two people can communicate in an entirely different—and more effective—way.

To build Marketing and Sales alignment, you must:

1. Get Marketing and Sales together in meetings to educate everyone on the capabilities of the CRM, now that marketing automation can add insight automatically

2. Identify the key online activities and campaign responses that would be useful for Sales to see on the lead views in real-time

3. Add these functions to the CRM and train Sales on how to interpret and leverage them

4. Create and meet regularly with a Sales and Marketing task force to measure adoption and identify further enhancements that can be made to the system


S T E P 6: C O M M I T TO M A R K E T I N G O P E R AT I O N S

Evolving into a metrics-driven marketing culture will take a commitment to assigning resources for defining those metrics and reporting them. Sales Operations is a role that has existed in sales organizations for some time. Applying it in a new way to the marketing organization provides the central focus that’s needed.

Historically, Sales Operations has included:

• Sales strategy—design, planning, execution

• Measurement of results—reporting, analytics and sales data

• Compensation, sales quota, policies

• Technology and tools, including CRM

• Training and sales communication

• Territory design and optimization

• Contests/spiffs

• Lead generation/sales programs

Building a Marketing Operations team establishes an internal staff responsible for developing and orchestrating the processes and systems required to enable efficient and effective marketing. More specifically, marketing operations staff members are responsible for developing and managing the processes to ensure smooth operation of strategic planning, financial management, marketing performance measurement (including dashboard development), marketing infrastructure and overall marketing excellence.

To develop effective marketing operations, you must:

1. Build a process around advanced planning/forecasting of lead generation and lead nurturing programs

2. Embrace content marketing and segmentation

3. Develop skills or dedicate resources in campaign management, data governance and sales enablement

4. If needed, look for opportunities to better align with international marketing and sales teams


S T E P 7: M E T R I C S M AT T E R — K E Y P E R F O R M A N C E I N D I C ATO R S

Without being able to apply financial rigor to marketing performance, there is absolutely no way to measure how effective marketing is and how much it contributes to revenue. Typically Marketing is viewed as a Sales support function, the people who do the tradeshows, and the source of logo pens. To get the respect we deserve as marketers, we need to show that we actively drive revenue and profits. It’s definitely to your advantage to define and deliver the right metrics to demonstrate the value of your marketing team—as well as to help you better target and refine your efforts.

Different metrics matter to different parts of the business:

• Executive KPIs measure marketing’s contribution to pipeline and revenue

• Operational KPIs measure your demand funnel: volume, velocity, and conversion

• Tactical KPIs measure campaign performance

Don’t exasperate your colleagues by giving them pages of data to wade through: of course you should measure the impact of all key activities, but keep all but a few very specific ones internal to Marketing.

The place to start is with interviews: the executive team, the head of Sales, other key stakeholders. Discuss what types of information they would like to see from Marketing. Executives really don’t care about open rates and page views. What data will be helpful to them?


When in doubt: leave it out. Don’t report on anything that is not directly relevant to organizational decision-making—although you may track it for internal Marketing purposes.

Consider that when the CFO reports to the Board of Directors, only a few key financial indicators are discussed: P&L, accounts receivable, EBITDA, balances. Clearly, they have vast amounts of information, but through experience the financial experts have determined these are the most important and relevant reports. As a marketer you need to take the same approach to define your own key performance indicators. These include Marketing’s total impact on revenue, and the contribution of each specific marketing program.

The key takeaway here? Emphasize financial outcomes over marketing activities, transforming the perception of Marketing from being a cost center to being a revenue center.

To develop an initial set of KPIs and prepare your team for them, you must:

1. Define KPIs for executive, operational and tactical levels

2. Create simple yet effective reports for presentation and analysis

3. Dedicate a resource who has experience with analytics to collect and report on them

4. Take the time to explain the KPIs and how to interpret them to those who will view them

5. Enhance your website, campaigns, and CRM for proper tracking of data that flows into your reports

6. Design your marketing programs from the start to be measurable


W H AT ’ S N E X T ?

Does all this sound like a lot to do? It is...but that’s the fun of it! Get yourself an experienced guide and a team that’s “been there, done that” hundreds of times.

Start with a Marketing Automation Assessment: helpful no matter how experienced you are or how far along in your implementation of marketing automation. This assessment will help you understand how you’ll accomplish each key area of the marketing automation journey—and will serve as your compass for setting future direction.

If you’re like most companies that are relatively new to marketing automation and want to get full value out of it, work with an experienced marketing automation consultancy to help you implement these programs using best practices. At DemandGen, we have not only deep marketing automation expertise and experience, but also the models, recipes, templates, tools, plans, and processes to guide you on the road to success quickly and effectively.

This is an exciting time to be a marketer! You finally have the tools to drive revenue and be a hero to the Sales team. DemandGen can help you every step of the way.

Take the first step by giving us a call at 925-678-2500, or email us at [email protected].


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© 2012 DemandGen Internat ional , Inc . A l l r ights reserved. 2/12

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A B O U T D E M A N D G E N

DemandGen is a global team

of marketing automation and

lead management experts,

with centers of excellence across

North America and Europe.

Best known for its award-winning

lead scoring and nurturing

methodologies, DemandGen

has helped hundreds of clients

establish best practices,

implement effective lead

management programs, and

produce measurable results.

www.demandgen.com

SOLUTION BRIEF

Documents

Beyond deployment - DemandGen · and process to each stage, and fully adopting your Demand Funnel as a foundation for generating demand and following through on it. To successfully