Marketing Interactions

B2B Marketers Need Every-Click Attribution

One of the beautiful things about digital B2B marketing is the ability to attribute behavior and engagement for prospects across a variety of channels that may be included in our marketing mix. Where things get a bit sticky is determining how attribution figures into revenue generation. For a simple transactional sale, this may be easier as sales cycles are shorter and less clicks are usually required. But, for a complex sale, attribution becomes a bigger challenge.

The mandate for B2B marketers today is to prove that their online marketing programs are contributing to downstream revenues. Determining how attribution is used can vary those results by quite a bit.

Take the example that Adobe uncovered in their recent report, Why Marketers Aren't Giving Social the Recognition it Deserves. [PDF] The difference for retail companies that applied first-click attribution over last-click attribution is 88% higher using fist-click. The report contends that social media is used earlier in the buy cycle to generate awareness and engagement and that applying the credit to whatever the shopper clicks on last, right before purchase, discounts the role social media plays in driving revenues.

This is a great example to start with. Sure, retail is more transactional in the example, but if you think about the number of clicks involved in a complex B2B marketing-to-sales process, using either first or last click to determine ROI will definitely reduce the value of a lot of elements in play during the buyer's journey.

This is why a content marketing strategy is so important. It's also why technology and analytics are so darn valuable.

Think about your marketing mix for a minute. Let's say you are using the following geared to address the priorities of a specific target market (persona):

• Twitter
• Blog
• Webinars
• Nurturing programs (series of emails with links to content assets mapped to stages of the buy cycle)
• White papers
• Demo
• ROI Calculator

If the prevailing trend is for a buyer to either visit the demo or the calculator prior to initiating contact with sales, it may be that tools like those get more credit than they deserve when reporting on ROI.

Or, because registrations for webinars are directly attributable, it may be thought that they payoff handsomely for lead generation when the reality could be that without your Twitter promotion, your webinar registration would have been 40% lower.

What's needed is to consider all of the conversion or transition points for your marketing programs and measure ROI based on what they are designed to accomplish in concert.

Every content asset and marketing mix element needs to have a goal for a conversion within the buying journey that contributes to the overall revenue generation process. The ability to string these conversions together and show how each contributed to achieving the end result determines the ROI of the strategy, not each individual component as a standalone tactic.

Getting to this type of ROI analysis takes hard work, focus and technology. But it's what makes the world of eMarketing and digital strategy so dang compelling.

It all starts with shifting the way we've always thought about and done it in the past.

Are Shorter Sales Cycles a Wake-up Call for Marketers?

Marketing Sherpa's chart of the week shows the answer to this question.

Q. Please select the time period closest to the length of your organization's entire sales cycle, from first lead inquiry to purchase.

In the commentary, Jen Doyle states that these results showing shorter sales cycles correlate to the lower deal prices Marketing Sherpa's annual benchmark survey also discovered.

But I think there's more at stake here than lower prices. Everyone has been talking about how much time buyers spend self-educating and researching prior to identifying themselves to vendors. Buyers have even said that they may not request contact with a vendor until they have selected their short lists. Some estimates gauge the time buyers spend outside of vendor-defined sales cycles to include up to or beyond half of the buying process for a B2B complex purchase.

So, could this chart actually be reflecting that the period of time that buyers spend with a vendor is shorter, but not truly reflect the length of the actual buy cycle? I think it's very possible.

And, if so, then it validates the imperative for marketers to get their content found by the right audience, rather than waiting for them to enter their databases so they can nurture them formally. If your company's ideas and expertise aren't helping them decide how to solve the problem, then why would you think your company would make their short list when the time comes?

What do you think?

Redefining Gratification for B2B Marketers

Personalized experiences, relevant content and instant gratification are what we all hope for when we visit our favorite search engine and type in a query. Marketers are people, too, so they also expect these results. But, during a complex B2B buying process, as marketers, we need to redefine what gratification means in the context of our marketing programs.

ROI and accountability are the watch words for today's marketers. We need to prove the impact our marketing programs are having on business objectives.

As a brief aside, I"ll never forget a statement David Meerman Scott made during a presentation on this subject when he asked, "What's the ROI of the landscaping around your building?" If my memory isn't failing me, David said this in response to a statement made by an executive he spoke with who insisted that every initiative marketers undertake produce ROI. Kind of adds some context, don't you think?

Before you start scrolling down to the comments to tell me that ROI is important, I got that. What I want you to think about is how we're defining ROI, AKA gratification. Otherwise it's likely that you'll be highly frustrated during 2012 - and that's not much fun.

Gratification is not:

• Instant - at least in regards to sales.


• Always measurable in a meaningful way - but the feedback from customers and prospects can be awesome! Are you using it?


• Always related to your expectations - ever had something you thought "so-so" go viral? Or the reverse?


• Based on perfection - or you'll never publish or launch anything. Test and refine, always.

Redefine Gratification based on the following (in no particular order):

• Relevance - how does the response vary from one segment to another? What can you modify?


• Engagement - does the audience find it compelling enough to pay for with their attention?


• Multipliers - how many different ways can you spin an idea to produce a variety of contagious content based on what you'd invest in time and money for just one asset?


• Conversations - can you sustain them beyond a single Tweet?


• Conversions - focus on one objective; perfect getting the desired outcome from each call to action, not offering a laundry list and praying for something to happen.


• Testing - prove your theories and distance yourself from arbitrary decisions based on gut instinct.


• Transitions - if you have #X contacts this month, how many become prospects next month? Measure the changes to each bucket/stage across the buying process.


• Share of committee - Instead of marketing to a "decision maker," how many people on the buying committee do you influence? If your prospects' average buying committee is 7 and you have the mindshare of one of them, you need to expand your reach.


• Experience - Are all the marketing channels within your marketing mix working well together? Are prospects and customers gaining a higher quality experience when they interact across channels, or is there a disconnect that diminishes interest?


• Revenue - Are your marketing initiatives tracking to closed deals? Is the deal size higher?


• Timing - Is the buying cycle shorter for prospectswho have engaged with your marketing programs?


• Sales Enablement - are salespeople using resources provided by marketing to create more value during interactions with buying committees? 

Sure, the holy grail for marketers is quantifying contribution to revenues. But with a complex sale, you can't wait for 9 or 12 months to pass to report on your progress.

There are many ways that marketing programs can provide gratification to your company based on business objectives. Concentrate on incremental gratification that will roll up to the ultimate end result. All of these factors will work together to help you get there.

Relying on clicks and lead volume doesn't get to the depth of insight you need to keep refining and improving the ways in which your content marketing programs drive pipeline momentum. Get creative and consider how you can use each of these definitions to evaluate the impact of "landscaping" for your company. Everything we do as a company should be designed to impact business objectives. How are your marketing strategies and initiatives contributing to the end goals?

Content Marketers' Great Expectations

With the advance of content marketing as a mainstay strategy for B2B marketers comes the inevitability of great expectations. But, I often encounter B2B marketers who are recounting their experiences with content marketing as not living up to expectations.

I hear things such as:

"Other email campaigns generate much higher click through and open rates than our lead nurturing program is achieving. It's just not working."

To which I inquire: What kind of email campaigns are you comparing with your nurturing program results?

The answer is usually related to eNewsletters or sales discount offers. These are two very different vehicles.

• An eNewsletter will generally have multiple offers and links with a variety of information. The recipient list can include both customers and prospects. I'd expect response rates to be different.


• A sales discount offer is one of urgency with a deadline/expiration date. Sure more people will click and look - just to be sure they're not missing out on anything. Or perhaps because they've been waiting for a sale to buy.

Nurturing programs are based on soft-sell, educational and thought leadership content - hopefully matched with stage in the buying process. They are also designed to engage over the long haul of a B2B buying process.

In other words, are you really suprised that early stage leads aren't replying to ask for a demo or submitting an inquiry on your website? Seriously?

One of the things that continues to confound me is the obsession with quantity. Based only on the number of what's considered a low-volume response, many marketers will equate that to an unsuccessful campaign.

Here's a challenge to marketers who think that way - or those under pressure to produce quantity based on ill-perceived corporate expectations:

How many of those leads or "opt ins" are actually ideal prospective customers?

How many of them actually close?

If your campaign produces 150 leads, but only 20 are quality matches to your ideal customer profile, is it better than a program that produces a solid 20 high-quality leads?

Here's a hint: Everyone is NOT your customer.

When your programs produce higher quality leads, you're actually providing better service and enablement to your sales team based on higher marketing effectiveness.

Some of the benefits include:

• Sales spends less time sifting and filtering to find the "good" leads.
• Sales begins to believe in and rely on marketing to provide leads worthy of pursuit.
• Marketing can track cleaner ROI from initial contact to close - not to mention higher levels of sales accepted leads.
• Your marketing database stays nice and clean and is more effective for segementation and analysis.
• You can determine just where the best leads are coming from/found.
• Marketing can start to identify patterns in how your ideal customers buy, such as the frequency of messaging they respond to best, the types of information they prefer, which information is needed when (think mapping content to buying process), etc.

The upshot is that content marketing expectations must be calibrated differently than some traditional marketing tactics, batch and blast email campaigns, and sales-focused "marketing" campaigns.

Where the expectation really needs to refocus is from quantity to quality. I'd rather have 10 great leads any day of the week than 1,000 that I have to sift through to find the 10% that are actually viable.

If marketers can define, attract and concentrate on leads that have the highest potential to become customers, then the results they create for their company will not only contribute to downstream revenues, but become repeatable and consistent in delivering that impact.

If, instead, marketers continue to go after getting clicks from as many people as possible, regardless of who they are, they'll have to work twice as hard to identify patterns, determine frequency preferences and convince sales to follow-up.

I mean, it's got to feel good to tell your boss that you generated a gazillion leads from your last manifesto download offer. But what happens when you actually need to equate those gazillion leads to customer acquisition and revenue contribution? What do your percentages look like now? How are those numbers perceived by your boss and company? Impressive?

How do you think marketers' expectations from content marketing need to change to help better prove the value it can deliver for B2B companies?

Revenue Generation is Not a Trend

I'm hearing a lot of hype about revenue generation in B2B marketing. Color me strange, but I thought that revenue generation was always the goal, however indirectly. The increasing emphasis on accountability from marketing has put the responsibility to prove contribution to revenue on the table. And it's about time.

Some major changes shining the spotlight include:

• Marketing automation technology - marketers now have access to the technology they need to gain the visibility into buying behavior that can be used to pinpoint areas for improvement and levels of interest.


• Buyers taking control of how they want to buy - if we don't accommodate what buyers want and need, we're giving our competitors who do an advantage. Oh, and they all talk to each other now, too. They're no longer reliant on you as the main source of information about solving their problems.


• Information availability leading to overwhelm and friction - just producing content is no longer enough. Our content has to rise above the noise by providing recognizable value in the places where our prospects spend their time.


• Less salespeople making quota - another indication that we need to get to know our buyers better, but also that their buying experience must be fluid from one end to the other to get to purchase.


• Longer buying cycles - uncertainty and constant change, less people tasked with doing more and lower confidence that solutions to problems will actually work requires more effort on our part.


• More people involved in the decision - and every single one of them has to be convinced of the merit of your solution based on what's important to each of them. A tall order for many companies. Most of these people cannot sign the deal, but they can stall and/or derail it by saying no.


• An increasing number of channels - email is not enough. The monthly newsletter won't cut the revenue mustard. Marketers must become proficient at bloging, article development, community participation, micro-blogging, eBooks, infographics, video, search, and more. But it's not just about delivery, we need to integrate these channels strategically and fill them with great content to drive intent to purchase.


• The economy - nuff said.

The biggest shift putting marketers in the hot seat is the delay in buyers engaging with salespeople. If marketers are now interacting with buyers throughout 2/3 of the buying process, this is a major game changer. It means that rather than focusing on brand awareness and lead generation, marketers need to take on management of that middle zone of the pipeline that can go on for months in a complex sale before buyers invite salespeople into the conversation.

With all of these changes, marketers now have the opportunity to elevate the work they do way above all the fluff of the past and into the realm of business necessity by proving that what they do contributes to company growth.

Revenue generation is not a trend. Never has been. It's just that now marketers can prove the contributions their lead management programs make across the buying process with the tools that help them manage and measure that contribution.

4 Areas of Challenge in B2B Marketing

Browsing my LinkedIn Groups today, I came across a discussion started by Holger Schulze on the B2B Technology Marketing Community that got me thinking. Holger asked:

Can you use ONE WORD to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B Marketing today?

Holger always asks these fantastic, insightful questions. At the time I checked, the question had received 85 one-word responses. Considering them in combination, I was intrigued so of course I entered them all into a spreadsheet and started doing a bit of armchair analysis. Here's what I came up with.

The responses (from my perspective) fall into four distinct areas of challenge for B2B marketers:

• Management
• Execution
• Mindset
• Market

Even more interesting, when counting up the number of responses after I'd divied them up, management, execution and mindset each received 22. Market received 15.

The distribution makes me wonder if marketers are still overly focused on internal stuff rather than markets? However you look at it, the answers point to some clear indications of a few things that need to be ironed out.

Here's my interpretation of each of the four areas of challenge:

[*Note some words submitted by more than one person.]

Management:

The overall standouts in what I've labeled management fall into several clusters:

• Accountability, Measurement, Revenue, Sales
• Budget, Profitability, Credit
• Goals, Effectiveness, Success
• Professionalism, People, Time, Collaboration
• Automation, Integration, Overcomplicated
• Branding, Communication

Proving ROI and the alignment of marketing spend with results have risen as imperatives for marketers and are obviously proving challenging. This can also be tied to technology challenges as well as the overall integration of marketing programs across the enterprise. Talent, time and teamwork are proving difficult to solve for marketing departments with limited resources and an ever-widening scope of responsibilities.

Execution:

The words attributed to execution are evidence of difficulty in matching marketing programs to the challenges of management as well as to market receptiveness.

• Attention, Awareness, Proposition, Relevance
• Engagement, Follow-up, Relationship
• Clarity, Consistency, Disconnect
• Leads, Target
• Content

Relevance received the highest number of responses across the board. That only one person responded with content suprised me a bit, although a number of these could be reflective of the quality of content that's being produced. Importantly, what becomes obvious is that all stages across the entirety of the funnel appear to be challenging—from beginning to end.

Mindset:

This area shows evidence that marketing is changing so quickly and comprehensively that we need to do some work to help marketers adapt in order to equip them to resolve the other areas of challenge.

• Competence, Confidence, Creativity, Focus, Flexibility
• Dullness, Differenetiation, Saturation
• Insightfulness, Listening, Ill-defined
• Fear, Obsolescence, Uncertainty

Marketers cannot be at their most effective when they lack confidence in what they are doing or realize that their skillsets don't prepare them to address today's markets. If you look at the third bullet, it's obvious that there's still work to be done to get to know our markets so damn well that the programs we create for them [not for us] will help us to overcome many of the challenges identified by Holger's question.

Market:

It's important to remember that these challenges were voiced by marketers and apply to their perceptions of what they think their target audiences think. Or even how they perceive the marketplace.

• Clutter, Hype, Noise
• Choices, Commoditization, Fragmentation
• Skepticism, Trust, Value, Loyalty

The ease of publishing has definitely made it a world of too much information. Audiences have changed and fragmented and the ability to gain more insight into vendors without ever speaking to them allows perceptions to form that may or may not be realistic. But, it's what it is and we've got to rise above it to do our jobs effectively and answer the challenges of the other three areas.

When you evaluate management, execution, mindset and marketing, you can see how one feeds into another. The best part of this analysis is that you can also start seeing paths to resolution.

The one-word challenges play off one another so that if you solve one cluster, it's highly likely that another will diminish. This said, I also find it interesting that personas or buyer knowledge didn't make the list. If that's resolved and applied, a lot of these words might vanish from the list.

It's also important to note that 4 marketers said their answer was a definitive NO. That there was not one word to define the biggest challenge to B2B marketing today. I agree with them.

What do you think?

Would you have arranged the one-word responses differently?

If I can add my own word (beyond NO) - I think it would be Interaction - but you probably could have guessed that!

Marketing Automation Provides Tactic Validation

I was just reading a post by Mac McConnell, You've Got Marketing Automation. Now What?, and one of the points Mac made really resonated with me. He was talking about what could be referred to as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

One of the things that marketers must get better at is the ability to measure the effectiveness of every element of their marketing mix. In the scenario that Mac shared, his client had stopped doing tradeshows because they didn't think they were as effective as other tactics.

According to Adobe's 2010 Analytics Survey, 44% of 1,000 marketers surveyed said they could not allocate sales and costs to marketing campaigns. Given this, it's not really surprising that 76% of marketers cannot measure full marketing ROI.

Which is why many marketers are still playing the intuition game.

So, back to Mac's story. What his client did once they had marketing automation to track lead disposition was to divide their spend equally across 3 demand generation initiatives:

• list rental
• content syndication
• one trade show

Guess which one is driving 2.3X more pipeline than the others after 6 months of tracking and measuring activity and results?

Yes, that would be the trade show the company had eliminated from their marketing plan because they thought the event wasn't successful.

There are a lot of new marketing technologies, processes and tactics available [read shiny new toys]. But this doesn't mean that the more traditional tactics aren't effective - well at least some of the time. The important thing is to gain insights to deeper data that can prove how close your intuition is to the truth.

Mac's post also provided a great chart showing the difference between engagement with content that prospects find valuable and that ridiculous "look at me" content that many companies are still cranking out.

The difference is striking - click over to Mac's post and see it for yourself.

Although I have to say that the customer story statistic surprised me. The questions I'd have for Mac would be during which stage of the buying process was the customer story used? And, was it a valuable story that showcased the problem-to-solution process or a glorified 2-page brochure that touted brand and product names without any meat on its bones?

Measure the Value Prospects Assign to Your Marketing Content

Pageviews and clicks are good metrics to know about but with the overwhelming amount of information available online, it's more important to focus on how much value your prospects ascribe to your marketing content.

There's a lot of talk about measures and metrics. I thought I'd share a few ways that I've found it useful to interpret prospect response. We've really got to start looking beyond traditional metrics if we want insights that help us build better relationships with our prospects.

Here are 7 factors to consider using to do just that:

• Time – Are prospects viewing one article for 5 seconds or spending the time necessary to read the entire piece? Do you even know how much time it takes to read the piece on average? Do your prospects stay for the entire Webinar or leave after the first 15 minutes?
  
  
• Depth – Do prospects read one page and leave your website, or do they tend to click on links to related information and travel more deeply within the site to explore that content more fully? Can you discern patterns that indicate where they are in their buying process? Viewing one content asset won't verify that. Viewing multiple related pieces will help you do so and help you create relevant ways to extend the dialogue.
  
  
• Storyline – Is it evident that prospects follow a directed path through your content or do they click around aimlessly on unrelated pages without settling on any of them long enough to learn anything? Are they intrigued enough to ask questions at the end of your webinar? Even better, do they sign up for another webinar on a related subject?
  
  
• Interaction – In addition to how many registrants your webinars get, measure the difference between unique attendees and total attendees—those who attended plus those who viewed the recorded version. A higher number of total attendees over time can be an indication that your content is considered important enough to revisit and view again, or that it’s been passed along and shared with others—hopefully those involved in the buying decision. Even better, how many questions or chats were posted during and post-event?
  
  
• Social – How many of your prospects and customers are sharing your Webinars, white papers and other content with their social networks via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or mentions in their blog posts? How many establish a dialogue with you, share something you share, follow you or subscribe to your RSS feeds?
  
  
• Opt In – What percentage of prospects who visit your landing pages are opting in for your gated offers? This includes Webinar registrations, newsletter subscriptions, online demos and other content offers. Opt in is permission and keeping it is directly related to their assessment of your credibility based on the value they've assigned to your marketing content. If this diminishes, they'll unsubscribe or relegate your communications to junk mail.
  
  
• Referrals – Are your prospects only visiting your website when prompted by an email? Or are they coming to you via social media, search returns or peer recommendations or on their own? Being findable is the new “black” for marketing. The more accessible your content is—regardless of where your prospects happen to encounter it online—the higher it's value. And this goes beyond removing forms to how much effort it takes to engage with it. How easy is it for them to understand and how quickly is that made clear?

All content is not equal in relevance or usefulness to your prospects. The overwhelming amount of content available online generates a lot of clutter and noise that your prospects must sort through to find useful information that addresses their needs. Let's face it, there's a lot of surface-skimming, repetitive content out there that adds nothing to the dialogue. The uniqueness of the ideas you share counts.

Their assessment of your content’s value is expressed through the combination of the factors shown above. Content perceived as valuable delivers immediate takeaways that leave lasting impressions, helping to motivate a higher willingness to trade their attention for your content whenever they see it.

Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics Power Strategy

Yesterday afternoon I caught up with Jon Miller and Maria Pergolino to get an inside view of their new Revenue Cycle Analytics (RCA) as well as what's coming up. I have to say that I'm really impressed. RCA provides some serious strategic visibility enabling B2B marketers to prove the value their marketing programs drive for their organizations.

One of the often heard arguments for short-term focus vs. long-term focus of marketing programs is the nature of corporate budgets and achievement reviews. Quarterly is the construct that dictates the focus of most organizations.

However, as our buyers change and take control over how they buy, B2B marketers dealing with longer buying cycles face a quandry. Since they have to report results at the end of the quarter, they believe they must align their campaigns in line with this 3-month parameter so they can debrief and cull the results to prove value driven during the period.

Well, thankfully, that's no longer true. Paraphrasing Jon Miller about using Marketo's RCA for his own company's marketing programs, "I went from being the arts and crafts guy to the revenue guy with my executive team."

As more B2B marketers have implemented marketing automation systems, what's become clear is that the technology must be used to enable the execution of a strategic process. Without that foundation, an organization will only have a glorified email system, at best.

But, even with a defined pipeline funnel, content mapped to buying stages based on personas and marketing automation, it's still been a challenge to understand what's happening across the entirety of the buying process during each stage. Additional challenges include discovering points of stall and more accurate pipeline forecasting.

With Marketo RCA, now you'll know.

You see, the thing about buyers is that they're dynamic. They ebb and flow throughout the process you've defined. In other words, their buying process may be different than your sales process. Instead of looking at statistics as static numbers, we need a more holistic way to measure movement across the entirety of the process.

Revenue Cycle Modeler: (click to enlarge)

This tool enables marketers to create a diagram view of their revenue cycle (funnel) within the Marketo platform. It's flexible enough so that marketers can label each step with their own terms. The arrows indicate triggers for movement that are individually rules driven. But, what I really like is the ability to diagram all the side trips a prospect might take during the process. There's also an inventory view that enables you to see which prospects are in which stage of the cycle.

One of the things I really like is that the model can also reflect SLAs between marketing and sales. For example, in Marketo's model, once a prospect becomes a lead, sales has 7 days to move it forward or the lead will return to nurturing. This is one way that marketers can ensure that prospects don't leak or become dormant within the process.

Revenue Cycle Explorer is what I call stage-by-stage metrics and is one of the coolest tools I've seen for strategically managing nurturing programs and prospect momentum across the entirety of the buying process.

You'll want to click to enlarge this one and take a look at the buttons on the left more closely. These metrics can not only show you how your leads are moving, but how each stage of your cycle (or bucket) is filling and emptying.

Marketers can now gain clarity about buying stage transitions, how their lead generation and nurturing programs are impacting the pipeline along with a graph of what that looks like over time. This statistics on the left side include:

• Balance - how many leads in each stage/bucket
• In Flow - how many added this month
• Out Flow - how many moved forward, back or out
• Conversion - percentage of transition
• Time - average days spend in stage/bucket

Marketers can also use these metrics to show the impact of their programs based on timing and goals. The best part is that you've now got the tools to better forecast how many net new prospects need to be generated and where momentum needs to be refined to ensure that the stages are delivering the appropriate flow to your sales force. Not to mention identify areas for refinement. Instead of making an educated guess, now you'll know just where to apply your efforts to improve marketing programs during execution instead of having to wait until after the fact to identify areas for improvement.

Ad Hoc Reports give marketers the ability to create custom reports by dragging and dropping fields onto the canvas for real-time reporting.

With this tool, you'll be able to slice and dice your data to gain insights that match up to whatever your executive team needs to know. You'll be able to prove the revenue results tied to specific sources and programs as well as improve your budgeting allocation based on truth, not assumption.

Revenue Planning and Forecasting (Coming Soon, Can't Wait!)

Because marketers execute programs at different times, the results are all evaluated equally if, for example, your reporting must represent achievements earned within the quarter. Where one program may look better than another, this can be deceiving based on when the program was executed and the length of time for your revenue cycle. It's quite possible that, given more time, the program that looks less successful could possibly be the more successful revenue generator.

Because the Marketo system continually analyzes all the information collected by your revenue model, it can intelligently forecast or project results for programs over time.

One of the things that marketing technology has created is tons of data that marketers never had access to before. Most marketers are not trained data analysts. What I really like about Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics is that you don't have to be. They've culled the data that can be used most effectively to inform your marketing strategy as a real-time visibility component from your execution platform.

Learn more about Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics

Watch this 20 minute video demo on RCA

Download the RCA Whitepaper (brief registration required)

The folks at Marketo spent some time really thinking through what marketers need to manage revenue performance. The interactive tools they've developed to enable marketers to build the accountability and respect that shifts executive perspective from viewing marketing as a cost center to seeing it as a valuable revenue driver are impressive.

Their customers must agree as retention hovers in the mid 90% range.

Are B2B Marketers Missing the Point?

Marketing Sherpa released this chart today about the processes B2B marketers are using to manage prospects across their buying cycles. What concerns me is the percentage of marketers who've labeled these processes as non-priority items and assigned them to purgatory.

In my opinion, these marketers may well be the next to experience purgatory.

Let's take a look at why a few priorities need to shift:

• Collaborate with Sales to define sales-ready leads.
  This one always leaves me a bit perplexed. In essence, one of marketing's most important jobs is to generate and qualify leads worthy of sales pursuit. Yet they don't seem to care what sales people consider to be a qualified lead. Thankfully, 20% are planning to change this but 35% don't seem to think it matters enough to make it a priority. I'm sorry, I just don't get it.


• Measure lead generation contribution to revenue.
  In the age of increased demand for marketing accountability, it makes zero sense not to be able to account for marketing program contribution to revenues. Nada, zilch. For all the marketers out there whining about your budgets, start measuring this metric. If marketing is wants to be considered a contributor to driving the strategic direction of the company, they need to start learning how to prove their impact to business objectives.


• Have system for rating "qualified" and "warm" leads.
  If you want to keep that divide between marketing and sales nice and healthy then keep tossing contacts over the wall to sales. As it is now, salespeople spend more time on administrative tasks and research than they do on selling. This is not the best use of their time. And yes, marketers, this one's on you. Salespeople need help prioritizing leads so that their selling time can be maximized for best results. Spinning their wheels trying to talk to prospects not ready to talk with them isn't productive and it just irritates your prospects.


• Have a process for nurturing leads not sales ready.
  Considering that only about 20% of leads generated are ready for a sales conversation—if you're lucky—this means that 38% of marketers are fine with wasting 80% of their lead generation budgets. That just does not make good business sense. With buyers in control of their buying process, the growth in self-education opportunities and the increasing complexity of the problems they're charged with solving, the need for nurturing has never been higher. But, never fear, if you don't do it, your competitors will be glad to take those future buyers off your hands.


• Closed-loop tracking from source to conclusion.
  This one goes back to measuring lead generation contribution to revenues. But, beyond that, it also means discovering which sources provide the highest quality leads and which you should eliminate due to poor quality leads that don't convert. Given that 43% of marketers say this is not a priority added to the 31% that said they don't track lead gen to revenues, 74% of marketers don't think that monitoring what happens over the entire course of the buying process is important. Considering how much farther across the buying process marketers must now reach to get sales people in the game, this could be one of the biggest mistakes being made today.


• Have a process for handing leads back to marketing.
  The fact that 53% of marketers think that once they toss leads to sales they have been absolved of any further responsibility in the buying process is just frightening. If you tie this result with the 38% of marketers who don't have a nurturing process for leads not sales ready, it gets to be a really scary statistic of 91% of marketers who are not engaged in facilitating the entirety of the buying process.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see a disconnect here between what should be priorities given today's business environment and what marketers think is not important?