Those of you who read my blog know that I'm passionate about marketing automation. Last week, I was privileged to see a preview of Marketo's 2nd product, Sales Insight, released today. I liked what I saw and think this extension to Marketo Lead Management software can help marketing and sales begin closing that alignment gap.
Why? Well, because Sales Insights eliminates a lot of the guesswork about lead value. And, it's a native Salesforce.com application they've really tried to make intuitive to remove the barrier to adoption companies would have if they threw yet another tool at the sales team.
But the reason I really like it is because it enables sales to work more collaboratively with marketing in a natural and real-time manner.
Here are a few examples:
Interesting Moments: Marketing and Sales can work together to define interesting moments that help sales stay focused on lead behavior that indicates higher levels of interest. Let's face it, not all lead activity merits sales intervention.
With interesting moments, escalating amounts of data are distilled down to key factors that makes a difference by helping sales know just when to reach out and who to reach out to. They won't be wasting their time on leads who aren't displaying buying intentions.
I think this is a key to sales effectiveness. The better companies can distill the interesting moments into actionable intelligence, the more on-target their sales team will be. This will take effort over time as patterns are noted and the importance of those "moments" meanings defined. Nuance will be the factor of the future that helps us better serve our buyers and customers.
Best Bets: Best Bets are those "owned" by a sales rep. The stars indicate lead score and the flames indicate the rate of change of that score. The whole point is that we're now able to gather so much information that it can be overwhelming.
The flames and stars work together to help salespeople focus on what's important. And, they helped you create your lead scoring process, right? Best Bets helps them use that outcome more effectively without requiring them to dig through reams of data.
Actions: Salespeople now have the ability to take actions in regards to leads to work in concert with marketing to generate timely pipeline progression. They can assign a lead to a specific nurturing campaign, view it from the marketing side, add it to their watch list (leads they're interested in following but aren't yet assigned to them) and send them a trackable Marketo email, perhaps to invite a lead to attend a webinar on a subject they've shown interest in.
And all of this is instantly updated for both the marketing and sales sides. Sales can also suspend marketing for a couple of weeks to eliminate cross messaging while they determine the lead's buying horizon.
The other tool that I think can become extremely beneficial for both sales and marketing is the Anonymous Web Activity tracker. Considering that the leads companies know about, who've opted in, are only a fraction of your website's visitors, this can be killer. Now you can see which companies are visiting your website and how many pages they've viewed. But what makes this helpful is the integration with Jigsaw, DemandBase and LinkedIn. Click any of those buttons to learn more about the contacts within that company you may be able to engage.
What's fascinating to me as a marketer is the potential for uncovering new market opportunities that might not be on a company's radar, as well as expanding lead generation efforts toward companies who've at least shown some interest in what you've got to offer already.
Marketo Sales Insights is sold on a per-seat basis as an extension to Marketo Lead Management software. I'd say it's definitely worth checking out. There's quite a bit more than what I've covered here.
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