Marketing Automation Best Practices

Marketo just wrapped up its Rockstar Fall 2011 event, a marketing automation best practices tour. The event highlighted best practices and marketing automation strategies that have made Marketo a success. This post covers some of the expert advice that came out of the Rockstar tour.

Please note: While this post focuses on the best practices of Marketo, there are many marketing automation software vendors that can help you engineer your revenue cycle. Lead Lizard offers marketing automation consulting for a number of vendors.

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #1: Choose the Right Tool

Josh Krasnegor, VP of Marketing at Fusionstorm, went through a lengthy process to choose the right marketing automation tool for his company, including discussing vendors with his peers, reviewing marketing automation software with vendors and researching best practices.

Choosing the right marketing automation software ultimately comes down to what part of the funnel you’re trying to improve, what features you need, the size of your organization, your budget and the resources you have in-house to fulfill the promise of marketing automation.

If you’re looking for a marketing automation vendor, here are some resources:

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #2: Nurture, Nurture, Nurture

One of the core features of marketing automation is lead nurturing, the process of moving leads that aren’t sales-ready into nurturing tracks. Marketers automate one-to-one email messages to these leads, qualifying them and delivering the warm leads to sales.

Here are some best practices for lead nurturing:

  • Keep it personal. It’s important to remember that lead nurturing shouldn’t be a series of one-off emails, but rather a conversation over a series of email touches. To do this, make sure that each step in the conversation flows naturally to the next, and make sure to avoid offering the same content twice in a lead nurturing flow.
  • Follow up. Lead nurturing shouldn’t stop when a prospect is sent to sales, but it should change. Now that you have a prospect who has shown enough interest to get a sales follow-up, lead nurturing should come from your inside sales or sales qualification person. However, marketing (with help from sales) should build the templates and segmentation rules for these people.
  • Accelerate, recycle and reconstitute. Other kinds of lead nurturing include: accelerators (which move prospects faster through the funnel with relevant “nudges”), recycling campaigns (to reassign and track leads that aren’t being pursued by sales) and reconstitution campaigns (to creatively wake those leads that were left for dead).

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #3: Fix your Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is an integral part of a successful B2B marketing strategy, allowing sales & marketing to determine a prospect’s level of interest in your solution as well as how well a prospect aligns with your ideal customer demographic.

Some fascinating statistics Paul Albright, Chief Revenue Officer for Marketo, pointed to as major hurdles to success between the sales & marketing teams:

  • 52% of sales reps do not achieve their sales goals
  • 94% of marketing qualified leads will never close
  • 60% of companies rate their lead generation as subpar
  • 10% of sales people view their marketing as “sales savvy”

And finally the coup de grace:  45% of sales’ time is wasted trying to figure out where to spend their time. If it’s left to every sales person, they’re going to waste their time, which is why it’s so important to score and qualify leads.

Here are some basic elements you should consider in your scoring mix:

  • Lead Score. The lead score is the sum of the individual scores for each activity your prospect has acted upon.
  • Company Score: A best practice for companies is to increase the score of individuals within that organization if you receive multiple leads from the same company.
  • Product Score: It’s a best practice to maintain individual scores for each product line.
  • Score Decay: If a prospect is idle for weeks or months you’ll want to automatically deduct points.
  • Recycle: After sales follows up with a prospect, the lead may not be sales-ready. Return these prospects back to marketing for additional nurturing.

Visit my lead scoring post for more information on lead scoring and lead qualification.

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #4: Don’t Forget your Forms

Marketo offers a number of best practices for B2B companies when using forms on their sites:

  • Wait for trust. According to marketo, in the first stage of your online marketing efforts it’s best to focus on thought leadership and brand awareness. Only after trust is created should you offer forms to capture lead information (using lead generation content as an incentive).
  • Create short forms. Short forms (of 5 fields) outperform long forms (of 9 fields) by 34% according to a Marketo study. This will significantly affect your cost-per-lead and total conversion rate. If you do need a longer form, just be sure to make every field count, since each additional field causes a roughly 1% drop-off rate.
  • Use progressive profiling. Progressive profiling is a type of webform that asks series of questions over a series of offers, with the most important questions tendered first. Progressive Profiling eases your prospects into a deeper relationship with your company, and allows you to know more about them over a series of interactions, giving you the opportunity to personalize your sales & marketing efforts.

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #5: Focus on Marketing

Paul Albright, Chief Revenue Officer for Marketo, began the event with a step back from marketing automation—focusing instead on what makes companies great. According to Albright, there are three requirements for greatness:

  • Killer sales & marketing
  • Amazing products
  • Insanely passionate people

Killer marketing is especially relevant to Albright, who sees a profound shift across all industries toward more of a marketing focus. Take, for example how a car is purchased. It used to be that a customer’s main point of contact with an automotive brand was the dealer at a lot. “Ten years ago, if you thought about buying a car, you would block out a Saturday and go from dealership to dealership,” said Albright. Now, because of research consumers are doing on the internet, 95% of the sales process is completed by marketing before a customer even sets foot on the lot.

At marketo, 90 cents is spent on marketing for every dollar that is spent on sales. Just remember:  with budget comes accountability.

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #6: Measure your Impact

Of all these best practices, learning from your marketing automation campaigns and optimizing performance is probably the most valuable step. Here are the best practices for measuring the impact of your marketing efforts:

  • Choose the right metrics. Avoid using what Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo, calls “vanity metrics.” These are metrics that sound good and impress people, but don’t measure impact on revenue or profitability. Examples of this include Twitter followers, impressions on a press release and anything that doesn’t necessarily correlate to an increase in revenue. Instead of vanity metrics, use performance metrics & KPIs (How did we do?), diagnostics (What is working? How can we do better?) and leading indicators (How will we be doing?).
  • Have a goal. It’s important to launch campaigns with ROI estimates for every program. Jon Miller of Marketo explains that he won’t sign a PO if there isn’t a business case and an expected return for every bit of marketing output.
  • Design programs to be measureable. This requires forethought, since it’s often impossible to go back through a poorly designed campaign to measure the impact. If analytics and tracking aren’t set up prior to a campaign, determining success can be difficult.
  • Make frequent changes. After assessing multiple programs, shift resources to the most productive investments. As campaigns are refined these will change, and the reallocation will evolve.

 

Marketing Automation Best Practice #7: No Lead Left Behind

If your company is a B2B organization where marketing qualifies leads and passes them on to sales, then you’ll probably agree that the marketing-to-sales handoff is the trickiest part of the entire lead management process. With this in mind, many B2B companies have instituted a group that facilitated this process by pre-qualifying leads for sales. The benefits of this position are numerous, and can include faster follow-up on leads, better value (since this position usually costs less than a sales rep), better data, and the ability to create a talent pool for development into a full sales role.

Best practices for following up with a lead include:

  • Build a service level agreement. An agreement between sales & marketing will establish a process for how leads are transferred from marketing to sales, and set the ground rules for how they’re handled. If marketing wants to be sure their leads aren’t falling through the cracks, an SLA is a first and crucial step.
  • Shorten response times. Establish benchmarks for how quickly your sales team is following up on leads. From there set goals to shorten this timeframe. According to a (slightly outdated) MIT study  “the odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times.”  The closer sales can get to this 5 minute mark, the more likely they are to convert a lead to sale.
  • Move it up the chain. If a sales rep doesn’t contact a rep within 24 hours, forward an automated reminder to the rep and cc the sales director. If the lead is still untouched after another 24 hours, send the same automated message with the VP of sales included. If the lead is still untouched 24 hours after that point, send an automated email to the same people, with the CEO included. This process will guarantee a much speedier response.

 

Other Marketing Automation Best Practices

  • Use one marketing funnel for sales and marketing. There’s no need for two funnels: sales & marketing have a continuous process from “awareness” all the way through “customer.”
  • Content is king. Marketing automation is based on content. You want to be a thought leader. You want people to come to your website and learn from you. You need great content. See our lead generation content page for more.
  • Define the process. Make sure you’ve created and documented standardized definitions and processes. Build a service level agreement between sales and marketing.
  • Test and optimize. Your marketing automation processes should be ever-evolving. Test, refine, optimize and repeat.

If you need additional marketing automation best practice advice, send me an email. I’m happy to chat and would love to learn more about how I can help your company.

 

Marketing Automation Resources

 

Marketing Automation Consulting

Best practices are one thing, but sometimes you need a little more help. If your company is thinking about purchasing marketing automation software or looking to improve usage of current marketing automation software please send me an email. I live and breathe marketing automation (it’s not as sad as it sounds) and will ensure that your marketing processes and lead management are everything you need them to be!