Marketing Interactions

Constant Contact Really Knows Their Customers

I had the pleasure of speaking with the folks at Constant Contact last week about their new Event Marketing tool. It sounded pretty cool. So I tried to push them about how it could be useful to mid-size and larger companies whose marketers get stuck in the IT queue, waiting for their stuff to get posted. The timeline is horrific.

I pushed about customized templates, about integration, about a lot of ideas that occurred to me.

You know what they told me? That's not our market.

Bravo!

They then went on to share with me just how well they know who they are and who they serve.

"Constant Contact helps small businesses and organizations grow customer relationships and succeed by delivering professional, easy-to-use online services and coaching at a reasonable cost."

Because they stick to their guns, they successfully serve over 300,000 customers. And they do it by helping their customers (most with less than 10 employees) have access to professional tools and coaching that helps them look professional and be more successful without investing a lot of time. They know their customers really well.

Then they gave me a demo of their new Event Management tool (launched today) and I was suitably impressed. They've obviously put a lot of time into making it as "click and go" as they can. The interface is slick and the process intuitive. And the integration with PayPal makes it easy to launch paid-attendance events.

They told me that they do so well because they solicit feedback from their customers and then actually listen to it to drive product innovation.

I know - refreshing, huh!

So, why add Event Management to their already successful Email Marketing and Online Survey offerings? Because they learned that, "66% of their customers hold 6 events or more a year, with an average of 20 - 100 attendees at each event."

That's a pretty good reason. Built in demand from people they already have a high level of credibility with and loyalty from!

Their customers wanted:

• To convey a professional image
• Easy to use tool
• To be more productive with automated technology
• Consolidate their marketing efforts
• Great value with predictable pricing

So that's exactly what Constant Contact gave them with the new Event Marketing hosted solution that includes:

• registration form
• payment collection
• an event homepage
• public events calendar
• email invitations and notifications (with automated scheduling, confirmation emails, reminders, etc.)
• tracking and reporting
• $15 per month for up to 5 events (pricing per event, not per attendee)

I'd say that's exactly on target for their market.

I write a lot about the need for segmentation and for knowing your buyers as intimately as possible. What I usually hear is "we're okay with just using demographics" or that it's too hard to do more than that.

But, just look at what happens when it's not.

Go ask yourself if you've got your stake firmly planted in the ground when it comes to not just defining your markets, but knowing them.

I wish the best of luck to Constant Contact with their new product. I can't wait to see what they come up with next! Oh, and if you're in need of some cool tools as an SMB, go check them out.

Sales Executive Enablement Summit - Jeff Summers

Rounding out the week with my final post on SAVO Group's wonderfully inspiring Summit in Chicago. Jeff Summers, COO of SAVO Group, shared their vision for sales enablement. I have to say that every single SAVO employee I met (and there were a lot of them) was engaging and passionate about what's being accomplished today, and what's coming down the pike.

Sales enablement is really community enablement for improved productivity and business outcomes. Incorporating "social" into sales enablement platforms is the key to empowering salespeople to:

• Communicate (1-to-1 and 1-to-many)
• Connect
• Contribute
• Collaborate

Top salespeople are trying to connect everyday. They contribute and leverage the contributions of others. What companies need to realize is that salespeople contribute in different ways.

Therefore, the challenge of matching salespeople with productive social tools is three-fold:

1. Determine which capabilities are relevant and roll them up for integrated delivery out of the box.


2. Use the tools that enable you to control and govern those capabilities in step with your company's culture. Companies who are rigid will use the toolsets differently than companies who are open, for example.


3. The ability to change and evolve in step with needs.

I enjoyed Jeff's thoughts about adoption. There were lots of questions to the speakers over the two days about what it takes to get sales to adopt the platform. Jeff said:

People don't talk about adopting Facebook, they talk about addiction. Addiction is to information that the technology provided, not the technology. Key point!

The goal for companies is to get your salespeople addicted to your information. This makes total sense, but companies are still struggling to produce and provide content and information relevant to real-world situations.

From another perspective, consider that your top reps are too busy to purposely contribute. This said, they ask for stuff all the time, they rate stuff and they use stuff. Based on what they ask for, how they rate things and what they use, companies can get a clear idea of what they need by looking at those metrics, plus what they search for within the platform.

Asking questions is one key way to gather Tribal Knowledge - for every question a sales rep puts in the system, they get an auto response that tells them you're working on it. When the assigned subject matter expert answers, that answer is connected to the question within the platform. Even if the answer is sent directly to the rep through email.

This way, the system becomes a holistic source for the information sales reps really need to engage in effective dialogue with buyers. And subject matter reps aren't pestered to answer the same questions repeatedly. Questions drive participation and your content and insights transition that particiaption to the market.

Jeff says that information needs to be made available to salespeople where they live:

• Within a browser - search bar into system
• On the phone - deliver objection handling on the road, customer testimonials 
• Outlook - search the platform and attach docs to emails

To make all of this work, we need to eliminate the noise of all the info salespeople don't need to see. We need to customize content for customers (Yes!) and to the ways in which salespeople work. (Yes, again.)

There's a lot more, but what I should mention is that SAVO has features that address all of these premises coming hot out of development in the next month or a few. The keys moving into the future are:

• Relevant to ME (salesperson)
• Tribal Knowledge (gathering street info, questions and answers)
• Discoverability (help salespeople find stuff they didn't know existed)
• Visibility (interactive dashboard for drill down that ties assets to sales performance)
• Time to Value

I'd like to share a little story that Carla from SAVO told me during a demo. One client had a dismal 30% satisfaction rate by their salespeople on their sales portal content. They launched the platform and migrated that same content into it (due to time constraints). You'd think that the launch would be a dismal failure, right?

Exactly the opposite happened. Because they could display the content for contextual presentation and tag it so salespeople could find just what they needed, their satisfaction rating skyrocketed to 70%. Now, that should give you some food for thought.

Other Sales Executive Enablement Summit Posts:
John Aiello Introduces Fluency
Scott Santucci talks about scaling the sales conversation
From the Trenches - insights about sales portals in practice

Sales Executive Enablement Summit - From the Trenches

This week, I've been covering my learnings from the SAVO Group Summit.
You can also read my post on John Aiello's Introduction of Fluency and Scott Santucci's escalating the sales conversation.

Today, I'd like to share some insights from the trenches. The summit invited company representatives to share their experiences with sales enablement. They had interesting things to share, so here's my take:

Tom Chamberlain, Director of Sales Readiness for Aspect

Tom spoke candidly about the fact that salespeople will tell you about what they want, but to be very cognizant of the fact that they don't know how to tell you what they need. This means that initiating sales enablement requires the ability to jump into their perspective and read between the lines, helping them get to what's really important.

He also offered a few tips about things he's learned that are spot on:

1. Create a single point of truth for all channels (e.g. a sales portal). He also stated that this is best accomplished by using a standard solution with best practices, keeping content owners in charge of their content and ensuring the web pages are not static, but constantly updating with the freshest and most popular resources.


2. Start with social media tools to build collaboration. He didn't launch with the entire suite of social networking type functionality. He's still challenged by getting salespeople to share knowledge and says if he did this over, he'd launch with those tools to build participation in from the start.


3. Use the marketing trifecta. Tom lists marketing automation, CRM and the sales portal as the trifecta for sales and marketing enablement.

Pam Thomas, Director of Marketing Communications for LexisNexis

Pam started off her presentation by stating a Booz Hamilton statistic that indicates 85% of your brand is related to what your sales rep says to your buyers. That's a pretty sobering thought for marketers who spend so much time trying to position their companies in buyers' minds. But, it's also the key for helping salespeople to have conversations. If we teach them what they need to know to have meaningful conversations your buyers value, your reputation and credibility will be golden.

She also advises that companies should pay strict attention to segmentation and targeted content as applies to each sales rep, only displaying what's relevant to them. Yes, consider salespeople as marketing's buyer and act accordingly. Totally valid statement, but harder to make a reality.

Pam made the point that enablement isn't just for sales, it's also for marketing. Marketing must own the ability to push information as well as to let sales know what to expect coming down the pike. I'd add that goes both ways to be a push and pull kind of process.

Ken Powell, VP Sales Training and Performance, ADP

Ken created a technique called Salearning^SM that's about eliminating the divide between real world and training to leverage the expertise that exists everywhere.

He insists (and rightly so) that we need to eliminate the boring role plays, the dragged out fictional scenarios that don't represent reality. Instead, he suggests that companies assemble and operationalize what's going on in the field so that field resources can mentor new sales reps.

The move to using virtual, blended training models has saved ADP $3M over 3 years. That's a pretty nice return for using real-world scenarios. He also says that the mentoring program produces higher productivity due to faster on-boarding as well as reducing turnover.

Chris Ahearn, SVP, Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Oakwood Worldwide
Ken Revenaugh, VP Sales Operations, Oakwood Worldwide

First off, I have to applaud both of them for their skit on Red Hat, Blue Hat! That was a terrific way of getting down to the nitty gritty of defining your ideal prospects.

A few tips from the duo:

Engagement is the amount of effort salespeople will put out beyond the norm.

• Listening needs to go both ways between sales and marketing
• Just because your prospects look alike, doesn't mean they'll spend alike. (Great point!)
• Assign sales resources according to the way prospects like to buy (e.g. in person, virtually or over the phone)
• Pay attention to the fact that customers receive value in a variety of dimensions - economic, emotional and functional. You need to focus on all three.

Wendy Casey, Senior Marketing Communications Consultant, HealthPartners

Wendy gave a wonderful overview of how her company utilizes a sales portal. She indicated 3 areas to impact that improve the sales reps experience with the portal:

1. Taxonomy - help them find content based on words they use
2. Quick Links - get them to most used resources fast
3. Competitive Intel - highlight the new resources to keep reps up to date

She also shared that custom pages based on relevant topic areas shot up in usage right away. Her team used that indicator as a directive to display more resources in the custom page format to encourage continued use and adoption.

Tim Riesterer, CMO and SVP, Strategic Consulting, Corporate Visions
(and author of Customer Message Management)

Tim shared a story about when he asked a salesperson how many sales tools they had for a new product launch. The salesperson said 6 or 7. After listing them all out, they discovered there were actually 19 tools! A bit overwhelming, don't you think?

Companies need to define how sales will use each tool within the context of a day in the life of a sales rep and focus on the tools salespeople will use to get appointments.

Tim shared research that shows the information prospects need to make a decision doubles every 2 years. So, are you adding to the noise or helping to add value through simplifying what your prospects need to know?

He also shared some factors that impact brand choice:

• 9% of decisions are based on price
• 19% of decisions are based on product or service
• 19% of decisions are based on brand
• 53% of decisions are based on the sales conversation

To be effective in a sales conversation, the rep must be educated and empowered to share a point of view - not ask questions. I mean, let's face it, salespeople talk to a lot more people like their buyers than their buyers do. They can make a strong impact by sharing their perspective about what they're hearing on the street.

He also reminded us that methodology is driven by fuel (e.g. content)

As a wrap up on the insights from the trenches, I have just one thing to say...GAME ON!

Tomorrow, you'll get a look at the future of sales enablement, SAVO style...

Sales Executive Enablement Summit - John Aiello

Today was the kickoff for SAVO Group's Sales Executive Enablement Summit and Co-founder and CEO John Aiello kicked it off by sharing his thoughts about the reasons sales enablement is a REVOLUTION.

But first, some details on who's here:

190 Executives - 90% of whom are Directors, VPs and C-level
120 companies spanning 15 industries

No kidding, the room was literally standing room only.

According to John, ten years ago if you searched on the term "sales enablement" you'd get 3 measly returns. Today that number has jumped to 102,000. Likewise, 10 years ago there were only 4 companies working in the space - today there are at least 100.

Several reasons John attributes to the rise in demand for sales enablement include:

• CRM hasn't delivered
• One-size-fits-all content management solutions - which don't meet sales' needs
• Web 2.0 - your salespeople are getting eaten up, chewed on and spit out by buyers who are more demanding, smarter and may know more about your products and solutions than your sales reps.

Sales environments are harder than ever. He quoted the CSO Insights statistic that shows—for the first time ever—that less than half of salespeople are expected to make quota.

Another issue found by Sirius Decisions research shows that more than half of the buyers asked say meetings with sellers, [well], suck.

Essentially what's happened is that risk aversion has become personal. People are afraid that if they make the wrong decision it could cost them their jobs. So self preservation is playing a huge role in delaying and scrapping decisions being made at all.

The shift in the market also shows that tactical doesn't sell - strategic does. Buyers need to see ROI faster - think 90 days or less.

In order to overcome the current sales environment challenges, there's a Sales Enablement Revolution underway. Below are the tenets that John proposes are leading the way:

Differentiation: Sales people and subject matter experts are key.

Fluency: Smoothness is needed for conversations and dialogue. This fluency needs to go beyond vocabulary, buzzwords and setting salespeople up with ice breaker sentences. Exchanges must be interactive. Your salespeople need to know how to deliver value.

Competitive Information: Intelligence needs to be dynamic and active - not a static SWOT posting from 6 months ago. In most organizations intel is dated information that comes from the top down, vetted for message. Competitive intel needs to come from the street, in real time and in a way that enables your salespeople to make active responses.

When information comes from the street, it has "street cred" and is more accepted and used by salespeople.

John shared a story about how Savo Group's customer, Unum, is using their platform as a holistic showcase for competitive information. They named the portal FOX - Field Online Exchange. [Interesting that AFLAC is their leading competitor and foxes eat ducks, but that's another story.]

The point is that the discussion board and postings allow their salespeople to post what SAVO Group calls "Tribal Knowledge." They ask questions, share insights and work on handling objections collaboratively.

The reason this is important is because salespeople don't have a lot of time to make a great first impression and get to the next step. The question you need to answer for your salespeople is:

How does sales win a buyers' attention in a 3 minute conversation?

In order to do so, you need the ability to get your salespeople connected to the right subject matter experts to help them - be they architects, engineers, economists, etc. But, even better, you need a system that captures the information they share in response to one salesperson's questions so that it's shared across the entire team in a way that's easily findable and relevant to the situation at hand.

Think in terms of a Sales Playbook. Because salespeople don't know what they don't know, the information they need will be most usable if it's presented in context. This information can include:

• Related subject matter expert profiles, access and contributions
• Formal content
• Tribal knowledge
• PowerPoint Presentations
• And more...

Objection Handling: Companies need to understand that objections happen as a matter of course throughout the buying process, not just whenever you think they may appear. With the speed of change today, the nature of objections also changes frequently. Salespeople need active content to address objections in real time.

John also shared the idea that influencers aren't able to say "yes" to your salespeople, they don't have the authority. The scary part is that they can say "no."

Customer-Relevant Information and Data: Salespeople need to be able to "speak" customer data in a way that's relevant to the customer. We must be able to apply the intelligence we have and continuously gather about our customers in a way that's relevant to them. That means we need to use customer data to add value to conversations and to create outcomes.

Stay tuned. I'll have a post on Scott Santucci's workshop up next.

Sales 2.0 Conference: Creating a More Productive Sales Pipeline

Lee Levitt of IDC's Sales Advisory Practice presented the keynote making a case for a measurement framework for creating a winning sales pipeline based on ensuring every player participating in the sales process knows their role on the team to contribute effectively to increasing win rates.

Following on Gerhard Gschwandtner's opening remarks, Lee expands on the theme of the Internet turning selling upside down. He stated, "The 4th Quarter of 2009 is the most important quarter of the decade." Companies will either set themselves up to win in the future, or set themselves way behind by not proactively embracing the changes needed to stay in step with market changes.

Takeaways:

Increased Focus on Outcomes
Lee shared that companies who really get it are creating a new role to help: VP of Customer Outcomes. This person's responsibility is to ensure that the right things happen for customers--at all stages of their relationship with the company. The business objective is to increase overall shareholder value and this outcome is something that cannot be measured with CRM.

Do More Disqualifying
Companies need to get better at prioritizing the opportunities they spend time and money on selling. Every deal is not a fit for your company. By disqualifying and walking away from those prospects who aren't either likely to buy or a good fit your sales team can exponentially increase wins, revenues and sales effectiveness.

Sales Preparedness Needs Improvement
IDC Enterprise Panel research in January 2009 found that only 1 in 5 salespeople are extremely well prepared for an initial sales meeting. Fifty-seven percent were either NOT or only somewhat prepared.

Lee suggests that salespeople dump the PowerPoint decks and ask guided questions instead. However, in order to ask those questions, salespeople need to accumulate knowledge about their prospect's businesses. Examples include not only knowing how the supply chain works, but in also knowing where the hiccups are. By addressing real business needs, instead of asking your prospects to educate your reps, they'll be more likely to develop engaged customers who want to know how your company can help them be more successful.

Know the Words Your Customers Use
In a recent survey of buyers, the word "solution" didn't show up in the top 50 choices. This once again shows the disparity between how sellers sell and how buyers buy.

"A solution is a canned answer to a need that doesn't exist."

Reconstructing the Pipeline Approach
Lee insists that we need to restructure how sales and marketing work together to co-create a go-to-market approach focused on customers. When he asked the room how many of us defined a lead with input and agreement from both sales and marketing only several hands were raised.

5 Critical Factors for successful reconstruction:

1. Customer Intel
   
   • Profile activity and interactions
   • Learn the digital footprint
   • Define patterns and event triggers
   • Plan for every single call - yes, every one.
   • Ask Important questions:
     Why will the customer buy from us?
     What will happen if they don't?


2. Lead Management
   
   • Score your leads
   • Map lead flows
   • Manage leads based on quality and probability based on value
   • Evaluate cadence (frequency approach)
   • Evaluate marketing and sales on same metrics
   
   
3. Resource Optimization
   
   • Use the resource that fits the task - top sellers shouldn't be doing tasks lower cost resources could accomplish
   • Disqualify - early and often
   
   
4. Process Improvement
   
   • Evaluate activity and equate it to results
   • Identify and remove time sinks
   • Make decisions based on analytics, not gut
   • Sales reps get paid to talk - not dial
   
   
5. Sales & Marketing Alignment
   
   • Compensate sales and marketing on same metrics
   • Create joint goals

Lee also suggests that lead creation should be addressed prior to creating a lead scoring process. If the leads your company is generating aren't appropriate in the first place, scoring them is self-defeating.

The gist of Lee's keynote was that companies need to recreate how they're selling with a focus on sales enablement through customer knowledge that produces the sharing of the right information at the right time—conversationally—with the right leads.

At the end of Lee's Keynote, Gerhard asked the crowd if their salespeople were "chasing garbage trucks or BRINKS trucks?" Something to think about...

Sales 2.0 Conference: The Real-Time Economy

Gerhard Gschwandtner, (@gerhard20) the founder and CEO of Personal Selling Power, Inc. kicked off the Sales 2.0 conference to a full house with opening remarks focused on how much selling is changing.

He credited 7 trends for driving this shift in the way buyers choose to buy:

1. Conversation Economy - buyers want to talk to each other, not necessarily you.
2. Transactional Selling - will disappear and migrate to the web resulting in 2 - 3 million salespeople losing their jobs (Gerhard prediction).
3. Co-Creation - buyers want to be involved
4. Shifting Definition of Selling - Be what the customer wants you to be.
5. More Science - Total Quality Management: Gerhard questioned whether or not the science was taking over the art of selling.
6. Customers Create Companies - we need to learn more from our customers to shape our companies into those they want to do business with.
7. Sales 2.0 - Gerhard called this "chicken soup for the recessionary economy."

So what drives all this? Increasing access to real-time information and collaboration with people like them--none of which was pervasive just a few years ago.

People can buy songs instantly, get anywhere easily using GPS, and share their thoughts on Twitter. The danger for sales organizations is caused by the "dead ideas" that companies still embrace in their market approaches. Gerhard's list includes:

• cold calling
• relying on the traditional sales funnel methodology
• manual sequential calling
• lead response delays
• using sales pitches
• reinventing sales information
• relying on commission spreadsheets
• typing call reports
• waiting for signatures

David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com, (@david_genius) stepped up to talk about what defines Sales 2.0. In a nutshell, Sales 2.0 requires the shift to customer-focused processes, enabled by Web 2.0 productivity technology that work together to create and sustain customer-perceived value.

Sales 2.0 is about the alignment, collaboration and acceleration that results from embracing the buyer's perspective and needs in your company's go-to-market approach. "Timeliness is everything."

Sales organizations are in the midst of a metamorphosis that requires them to adjust and adopt to continuous change. Obviously, the old ways aren't producing the results needed to drive sustainable growth for most companies. Customers won't allow themselves to be boxed in to buying the way you want to sell. Instead, we must focus on breaking the box wide open to help customers choose to buy in the way that works for them.

Yes, easier said than done. This said, some companies are taking on the challenges of their evolving markets and they're reaping some pretty incredible results. To give you a taste of what's possible, some of the results presented in case studies include:

• 12% increase in pipeline with an ROI of 321% by using salesforce.com as a hub
• 75% of new income in 2009 associated with Connect & Sell campaign reciprocity
• Marketing assumes responsibility for 15% of sales quota
• 71% of pipeline attributed to marketing-generated leads

***

Coming up is my review of Lee Levitt's (IDC) Keynote...stay tuned

Maximize the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

Do you view your markets as unpredictable and volatile? If so, are you working harder to run herd on that chaos resulting in diverting focus away from your existing customers? It appears that this may indeed be what marketers are doing when you consider the results of CMO Council research that found:

• 76 percent of senior marketers believe they are not realizing the full revenue potential of current customers.


• 67 percent of have no formal program for re-activating dormant or lost accounts.


• Just 50 percent have a formal strategy for further penetrating or monetizing key accounts.


• Only 46.5 percent say they have good insights into retention rates, customer profitability and lifetime value.

This research is disconcerting given that your customers are actually people who should want to speak with you and be interested in how to reap even more benefit from the ways in which they use your products. In fact, according to Sirius Decisions research,

"If you look at the numbers, campaigns that reach out to existing customers can yield on average 30 percent more closed deals from half the number of contacts, compared to campaigns focused on new prospects."

Now, just imagine the rates of return possible when you employ predictive analytics to do an even more precise job of matching your offers to the customers that are most likely to act on them.

Predictive analytics can help you:

• Reduce customer churn by identifying likely defectors.
• Increase response by connecting need to value delivery.
• Help you maximize the lifetime value of your customers.

Attend this FREE Webinar on Sep. 9, 2009 to learn more about:

The Details:
Free Webinar: Putting Customer Value to Work: What Predictive Analytics Can Do for Your Bottom Line
Date: September 9, 2009
Time: 1PM Eastern, 10AM Pacific

Featured Speakers:
James Taylor, CEO, Decision Management
Korhan Yanak, Global CRM Business Analyst, Vodafone Group
Anne Miley, Sr. Dir. Technology Product Marketing, SAS
Mike Rote, Dir. of Teradata/SAS Center of Excellence

Register Now

Bonus Gift: All attendees of the webinar will receive this new white paper, from Teradata and SAS - "Unlock the business value of enterprise data with in-database analytics."

[disclosure - affiliate]

What will your customers do?

As marketers, we're all used to looking at historical data and trying to extrapolate that into an equivalent of future behavior. Well, there is a better way. Predictive analytics is the new black for marketing decisions.

You may be familiar with the concept in relation to scoring credit worthiness or even targeting demographics, but using analytics to forecast into the future—based on what's happened in the past—with predictive accuracy puts a new spin on getting that ROI we're all charged to deliver.

If you want to know the probability of a customer to:

• respond to a direct mail or email offer
• spend a certain amount on a specific purchase
• become an advocate for your product
• buy into the next level of your solution
• and more...

Then you should plan to attend this webinar:

The Details:
Free Webinar: Putting Customer Value to Work: What Predictive Analytics Can Do for Your Bottom Line
Date: September 9, 2009
Time: 1PM Eastern, 10AM Pacific

Featured Speakers:
James Taylor, CEO, Decision Management
Korhan Yanak, Global CRM Business Analyst, Vodafone Group
Anne Miley, Sr. Dir. Technology Product Marketing, SAS
Mike Rote, Dir. of Teradata/SAS Center of Excellence

Register Now

Marketing in this continuously changing environment based on intuition, alone, is not the wisest choice. If you have big-time ambitions to do business more competitively, predictive analytics can help you achieve sustainable growth.

Go register to learn how predictive analytics can take your marketing, customer acquisition and retention strategies to new levels of success. Delivering on business objectives means we all have to get smarter about how we go after achieving our company's business objectives.

[disclosure: affiliate]

When Does Content Count Most?

This is really not a trick question. The answer is when that content is the right information delivered at the right time and provides a recognizable takeaway your prospects value.

That's the subject of the free webinar I'm doing tomorrow at 10AM PDT with Matt West, Director of Marketing Programs at Genius.com.

It's part 2 of our 3 part series on using marketing automation and lead nurturing to improve your pipeline in 15 simple steps. In the last webinar, Felicity Wohltman and I provided 5 steps for developing a lead scoring process. You can view the archive here and download the accompanying guide in Genius.com's new Resource Center.

In tomorrow's webinar, also co-sponsored by NetProspex, we'll be giving you 5 Steps for developing content mapped to buying stages and assembling drip campaigns that engage your leads.

FREE Webinar: When Does Content Count Most?
Date: Wednesday, August 19
Time: 10:00 AM Pacific

With the answers to questions like these, marketers can launch drip campaigns that improve the health of sales pipelines...

• How can we create enough content with limited resources?
• How targeted does my content need to be?
• What can we learn from the content leads read?
• How do we determine a lead’s buying stage?
• What types of content create the highest levels of engagement?
  

Register Now - and see for yourself. You'll also receive a bonus gift of a how-to guide to help ensure you're prepared to create content designed for buying stages.

Putting Customer Value to Work - Free Webinar

Quantifying the results of marketing programs is a priority for many B2B marketers. On this blog I've spent a lot of time talking about marketing automation systems and what you can learn from monitoring the behavior of your prospects' online behavior. The better you are at deciphering that data, the better you will be able to craft content, offers and messaging that generate prospect engagement.

This said, getting the most out of analytics is not yet a usual marketer's expertise. So, when my friends at the Smart Data Collective asked me to help them promote their upcoming webinar to shed some light on best practices, I jumped at the chance.

The Details:
Free Webinar: Putting Customer Value to Work: What Predictive Analytics Can Do for Your Bottom Line
Date: September 9, 2009
Time: 1PM Eastern, 10AM Pacific

Featured Speakers:
James Taylor, CEO, Decision Management
Korhan Yanak, Global CRM Business Analyst, Vodafone Group
Anne Miley, Sr. Dir. Technology Product Marketing, SAS
Mike Rote, Dir. of Teradata/SAS Center of Excellence

Register Now

Why You Should Attend

Analytics are not just about prospecting. They're also extremely valuable for gaining insights to your customers that enable you to forecast similar behavior for others like them. It's one thing to gain visibility into prospect and customer behavior, but completely another to effectively mine that data to discern significant relationships between variables that may hold into the future. Not to mention that these insights provide a foundation for making the best decisions about how to position your marketing and retention programs for best outcomes.

Marketing automation and web analytics are the first steps. You must gather data to use it, after all. This said, where we all can use a boost in expertise is in being able to extract intelligence from that data and use it effectively to gain the outcomes we're charged to deliver.

Imagine the difference if you can actually predict the likelihood of response to an offer before you ever make it.

I've talked about segmentation a lot on this blog. Yes, it's a challenge for many of us. Predictive analytics will give us new ways to address and implement segmentation strategies, getting us down to the nitty-gritty level to drive relevance higher than ever.

And that means shorter sales cycles. Now who doesn't need that?

Here's an example of what you can expect to learn more about in the webinar:

“In contrast to a traditional mass marketing approach, building analytical capabilities on campaigns that target specific customers based on their segments and scores provides a wealth of benefits to businesses,” says Korhan Yunak,  Global CRM Business Analyst at Vodafone Group Services.   “By mining detailed usage patterns, operators can micro-segment their customer base into hundreds of relevant segments based on usage characteristics and target specific customer groups that are most likely to be buy.”

Go Register for this webinar.

Bonus Gift: All attendees of the webinar will receive this new white paper, from Teradata and SAS - "Unlock the business value of enterprise data with in-database analytics."

[disclosure - affiliate]