Marketing Automation — CRM Guidebooks

CRM Lead Management – a two horse race?

June 21, 2012 By leighton Leave a Comment

This morning we received notifications from both Marketo and Eloqua promoting the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant on CRM Lead Management. Not surprisingly, they both do very well in the latest release, in fact they are the only two vendors in the “Leaders” quadrant.

Marketers are constantly under pressure to prove value by bringing in leads for sales. In their definition Gartner outlines the scope as:

Lead management integrates business process and technology to close the loop between marketing and direct or indirect sales channels, and to drive higher-value opportunities through improved demand creation, execution and opportunity management.

The key words here are “higher-value opportunities”. Lead Management stops marketers casting a wide net in hopes of bringing in as many hand-raisers as possible – that don’t turn out to be quality leads.

Certainly at the enterprise level, a more targeted accounts-based approach is in vogue, which means creating content and messaging to support the many buyers and influencers throughout the buying process—especially C-suite. The holy grail of marketing is to get to the influencers— the C-suite—who have the ultimate say in how an organisation invests its dollars.

In most cases it may be more effective to focus on producing relevant content across a buyer’s journey than spending 100 percent of your effort on trying to reach the C-level. Lead Management in CRM is a tool to ensure that you are:

Aiming at the right target companies
Are engaged with the right people across the targets
Deliver the right content based upon their role and their stage within the buyers journey
Handing over the lead to sales at the right time

For the full Gartner paper register by following the links from Eloqua or Marketo. For more on Marketing Automation tools like Eloqua and Marketo download our Marketing Automation Guidebook.

Tell us what you think by commenting below.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: eloqua, Gartner, Lead Management, Magic Quadrant, Marketing Automation, marketo

How to drive new leads into your CRM

April 16, 2012 By leighton 1 Comment

Building a CRM system and farming your customers and prospects is a somewhat ‘old’ strategy. Its much more important to find new customers and leads. Inbound marketing is one of the means by which you find new customers, and when 93% of new buying cycles starts with online search – its a discipline that every marketer needs to excel at.

The software that drives this is called Marketing Automation – and this Guidebook helps you understand it. One of the main players is Marketo and below is one of their great Infographics on Inbound Marketing and why its important to the CMO and the CRM project.

Drive leads to CRM

Filed Under: CRM News and Views, CRM Papers Tagged With: Inbound Marketing, lead generation, Marketing Automation, marketo

Integrated Sales & Marketing

August 10, 2011 By leighton Leave a Comment

Getting end to end Marketing funnel to Sales pipeline is getting harder to deliver:

CRM never quite finished delivering
Sales & Marketing don’t quite agree on joint objectives
The tools and channels that marketing has to manage have exploded eg Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn
Marketing Automation has been treated as a CRM ‘bolt-on’

The investments by Oracle as demonstrated in this video may address many of the issues and provide a single database style solution. They have invested in Market2lead for Automation, ATG for web data and content management, and now InQuira for analytics and Knowledge Management.

Add this to your CRM Checklist if its important to your business.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views, CRM Videos Tagged With: Marketing, Marketing Automation, Oracle, Sales

What features should I look for in CRM Marketing Automation?

July 7, 2011 By leighton 2 Comments

In a recent LinkedIn discussion group there was a range of views about what functionality is provided by Marketing Automation. It ranged from sophisticated email platforms to marketing automation suites.

A list of the features and functions that could be included:

Email marketing – including decision-based email (drip, trigger, nurture) on a Buyers journey
Multi-step campaign Set-up
Landing pages, lead capture forms, surveys
Support various asset types e.g. White Papers, Brochures, Video
Closed-loop Web analytics and website visitor tracking
Lead management – lead scoring, lead nurturing, lead routing, lead activity alerts
Event registrations for seminars/webinars
Campaign management – parent/child relationship between campaigns/activities
List and segmentation management
Reporting and standard reports for common marketing metrics
ROI reporting e.g. Google Adwords
Social Media tracking and measurement e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
Multi-channel (non email) campaign support (PPC, SEO, Direct Mail, Tele)
Channel Partner support
Integration with CRM (for B2B markets)
A standalone contact/account database or inbuilt CRM
Multi-lingual support
Address & Phone Number Validation

We’ll expand upon these in a new Guidebook under development.

Read more about Marketing Automation or Download our CRM Checklist and add these functions to your evaluation list.

Filed Under: CRM Commentary, CRM News and Views Tagged With: Marketing, Marketing Automation

Trends in CRM – Marketing Automation – Systems of Action

February 14, 2011 By leighton Leave a Comment

The 3 key future trends for CRM are:

Marketing Automation
Business Intelligence and Analytics
Content

This article looks at Marketing Automation, a previous on BI looked at that area and another will come on content soon. If these areas are important to you, ensure that they are ranked highly in your CRM checklist – here is one we developed to save you time.

I read a recent article by Geoffrey Moore that described CRM and ERP systems as “Systems of Record” and that get extended by Marketing Automationsoftware to deliver “Systems of Engagement” . It summarised how trends and products like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook would work with highly mobile workforces.

Marketing Automation in my mind are about action:

If a person reads a brochure —> the system delivers them the next logical brochure/survey
If a person looks at your pricing page —> a telesales representative calls them with an offer
If a person answers an email survey in a particular way —> then system automatically takes them to the ‘right place’ on the website

There is clarity within your business on how your customer buys. This is called the “Buyers Journey” and is the set of steps and stages that a customer goes through in their buying process. ( I should note that most of the Marketing Automation systems are today used in B2B companies – although huge benefits could be gained by B2C companies if they moved from mass marketing to 1to1 marketing). The interesting thing is that:

An individual at a customer site has his own Buyers Journey
Each individual at a customer will go through the journey at a different speed
The journey may stop due to other priorities and then speed up

What Marketing Automation system do is manage each of these journeys and co-ordinate them. As an example, if you had 1,000 companies you are targeting, and have 5 individuals in each company, you wanted them to receive two paper downloads and to answer a survey before you made a phone call based on your key criteria. At this point you need to send at least 10,000 emails, handle 5,000 surveys and then prioritise the call list. Done using a CRM system and spreadsheets, this could be a tough assignment. A Marketing Automation system would handle this easily – even putting the contact records into the call centre queues at the right time.

What Marketing Automation need to fly is content and analytics. The analytics helps you understand who these people are and what they content they need to be delivered. These systems will be the remit of the Chief Marketing Officer(CMO). Marketing Automation is often delivered as SaaS & Cloud applications and there is a move in that direction for BI too( and you can argue that CRM has already moved.

Geoffrey Moore famously wrote “Crossing the Chasm” – a bible for the hi-tech marketer about the strategy of marketing in the IT&T market.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: BI, Marketing, Marketing Automation

Marketing for Revenue Generation

December 21, 2010 By leighton Leave a Comment

This is a presentation available both as a video and also slideshare. Read more about CRM for Marketing.

It comes from a recent salesforce conference called “Dreamforce”. Looks at Marketing as a Revenue Generation department, rather than a cost only department.

Its about an hour long, so grab some lunch and watch.