A 200+ million dollar industry1, with more than 20 players2 competing for market share, definitely deserves the attention of all the stakeholders who stand to benefit from it and especially that of it's consumers (in this case, all companies involved in any transaction of B2B nature). Some of the major B2B companies have already taken notice and have engaged different marketing automation vendors. However a difference of opinion still exists across the board, on two of the basic questions that any industry should answer.
- What are the goals for (and key benefits expected from) “Marketing Automation” implementation?
- What are the key parameters to evaluate a “Marketing Automation” vendor?
This blog post is an attempt to examine and answer these questions.
Marketing Automation Implementation – Goals & KPIs
Key goals & objectives of any marketing automation implementation should be, increase in
- Volume of total leads eligible for nurturing
- Percentage of leads progressing from one stage of funnel to next
- Velocity at which leads progress from one stage of funnel to next
- Value ($) of opportunity associated with each lead
- Marketing – Sales Alignment and Sales Enablement
Increasing Volume of Leads
A marketing automation vendor should be able to increase total no. of leads in various stages of your funnel by
- Bringing in anonymous visits (i.e. visitors who haven’t yet completed a formfill or contacted you, but yet interested in what your company has to offer) under the radar of lead nurturing.
- Identifying decision makers engaged in relevant social conversations across various social networks.
- Optimizing and scaling up various lead generation campaigns.
- Bringing in Lost Opportunities and Sales Rejected Leads under the radar of lead nurturing, to convert them into Opportunities at a later time.
In case of bringing in anonymous leads into the system, a marketing automation vendor should be evaluated based on
- Accuracy in identifying company name of an anonymous visitor.
- Volume of relevant contacts available.
- Ease of accessing these contact details.
- Flexibility and scalability in data (contacts & demographics) aggregation and correction.
In case of identifying decision makers engaged in relevant social conversations, a marketing automation vendor should be evaluated based on
- Accuracy in identifying individuals engaged in social conversations that are relevant (based on both topic of discussion and individual’s disposition towards the topic).
- Ability to identify decision makers (leads) among these individuals and fetch relevant details like company name, title, contact details etc.
- Ability to aggregate relevant social conversations at individual decision maker level.
- Ease of accessing the above details.
In case of supporting optimization and scale-up of campaigns, a marketing automation vendor should be able to
- Provide intuitive dashboards and reports that make tracking performance of different inbound and outbound campaigns a cake walk.
- Let users drill-down deep enough to find out the quality of leads each of these marketing campaigns has generated, either directly or by assisting.
- Provide a platform for quick and easy launch of lead-gen campaigns of different kinds (SEO, social media etc).
- Provide tools that augment data from external resources, providing inputs and insights that increase the ROI from these campaigns.
A marketing automation vendor should also be able to automate the routing of Sales-Rejected-Leads and Lost Opportunities. Sales-Rejected-Leads and Lost Opportunities may need custom nurturing (with greater co-ordination between Marketing and Sales teams) and a marketing automation system should be able to support a co-ordination and customization of such level.
Increasing percentage of Leads progressing from one stage of funnel to next
Increasing the % of Leads progressing from one stage of funnel to the next is only possible through “Lead Nurturing” (or custom engagement). The role of a marketing automation platform in this process involves
- Lead/Contact List segmentation based on various demographic, behavioural, psychographic and other relevant (like geography) parameters.
- Ease of launching complex, precisely targeted drip marketing campaigns.
- Maximizing deliverability and ensuring desired user experience.
- Campaign tracking (based on (a) Lead Score improvement across different scoring parameters (b) performance against campaign objectives) and optimization.
- Re-usability and scalability of campaigns (i.e. email templates, content, landing pages, segmentation etc) based on performance, resulting in desired ROI.
The size of a segment, no. of segments and parameters for segmentation could be driven by many internal variables as well as external variables (specific to leads). While the guidelines and best practices specific to a company may evolve with time, a marketing automation platform should be evaluated based on the degree to which it facilitates the segmentation i.e.
- No. of demographic, behavioural, psychographic and other similar parameters based on which different leads, companies and contacts can be segmented.
- No. of features or modules in a marketing automation platform that support segmentation.
- Degree to which segments created for one module can be re-used in others.
Most of the marketing automation vendors have successfully addressed the need to launch complex email workflows (from their platform) that involve multi-step precise targeting. The parameters that could differentiate one vendor from another are
- No. of high performing email and landing page templates (across use-cases) that the vendor identifies and provides for perusal of clients.
- Ease of launching and managing other inbound, outbound nurturing campaigns like Social Media Campaigns etc.
- Ease of exporting campaign information and insights from one section/module of the platform to another, thus facilitating multi-channel engagement.
While deliverability and user experience involve multiple aspects, the parameters for evaluating marketing vendors could be
- Partners they collaborate with, to ensure maximum deliverability.
- Audit process they follow to ensure email security compliance.
- Processes and best practices followed to ensure that the emails are not treated as spam by either email service providers or email recipients.
- Ability to preview campaigns (emails) as they appear at prospect touch-points (i.e. their inbox).
The role of marketing platform in campaign tracking (& optimization) and the parameters based on which it should be evaluated were discussed earlier. Specifically in case of “Lead Nurturing” campaign, a marketing automation vendor will be able to add value through the guidelines, best practices and metrics that should be followed for
- Setting up objectives for campaigns and translating these objectives into "score" on different scoring parameters.
- Inter-campaign optimization to ensure highest ROI across campaigns.
The soundness of these guidelines can act as an indicator during further evaluation.
Increasing velocity at which Leads progress from one stage of funnel to the next
Increasing velocity of lead transition is achieved through
- Identifying and tracking fast moving leads and creating custom nurturing (email/call) programs for them to facilitate quick closure.
- Reducing overheads in “Lead Transition” across different stages of funnels.
- Reducing overheads in campaign/contact management and thus ensuring prompt nurturing campaigns that can help in quicker response.
- Identifying bottlenecks in lead processing and supporting the bottlenecks with necessary resources and practices.
A marketing automation vendor should be able to identify fast moving leads and leads that need prompt engagement. So the platform should be evaluated based on this ability to identify and on how this information (along with behavioural data pertaining to these leads) is made available at the frontend (in the UI).
Identifying fast moving leads and reducing overheads in “Lead Transition” is primarily taken care through “Scoring” and “Labelling”. Hence, the strong indicators based on which a marketing automation vendor can be evaluated in this context are
- Depth and breadth of scoring algorithm.
- Depth and breadth of labelling algorithm.
- Alerts and user interface customization at role level, to draw attention towards leads, that a specific user is expected to act on.
A marketing automation platform should be able to reduce the overheads in campaign and contact management through
- A single window campaign launch for users across multiple systems (like CRM, Marketing Automation Provider etc) that ensures that campaign data and reports are shared/populated across the users (those with necessary permissions) with no additional efforts.
- A single window contact aggregation/management system for contacts fetched from a multitude of sources (ranging from form-fills to list-buys) that ensures data consistency and accuracy across the system, while facilitating data usability across multiple CRM and marketing automation modules.
- Generating dynamic, rule based mailing lists for email campaigns.
- Collateral and mailing list management for quick re-use across campaigns.
The ways in which marketing automation reduces bottlenecks, by improving the productivity of different teams involved in “Lead Processing” has been discussed already. Even with increased productivity, it is likely that bottlenecks still exist and have to be supported with additional resources or better practices. In case of identifying “Bottle Necks” in lead processing, a marketing automation vendor will be able to add value through the guidelines, best practices and metrics that should be followed for such identification and hence should be evaluated on the same.
Increasing value ($) of opportunity associated with each Lead or Existing Customer
The value of opportunity associated with each Sales Ready Lead can be increased by identifying all the solutions/services that the Lead has shown interest in, since the time they were either contacted or traced on the website. A marketing automation vendor will be able to provide this information based on
- Pages visited or phrases searched for, during inbound visits (anonymous company visit or identified decision maker visit).
- Response to various outbound campaigns pertaining to different related solutions/services.
A marketing automation vendor should be evaluated based on
- Ease of aggregating and accessing these details pertaining to cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
- Re-usability of this information across other modules and tasks (through labelling or similar mechanism).
Marketing – Sales Alignment and Sales Enablement
Marketing Automation platforms help Marketing – Sales alignment by a) integration that allows both the teams to consume data in their preferred form and format b) tracking and reporting Marketing – Sales Handoff interactions and thus helping in improvement of the same. Key aspects of Marketing – Sales alignment are
- Data Integration between Marketing Automation & Sales Automation Systems (i.e. CRMs in most cases).
- Tracking the acceptability of leads generated by Marketing Team and thus helping in improvement of lead quality for Sales Team.
- Tracking the promptness of Sales Team in attending these leads and thus helping Marketing Team in improving ROI from their efforts.
CRM integration involves numerous use-cases and to evaluate a Marketing Automation vendor on the same, you may have to talk to them for necessary details. Beyond that, they can also be evaluated based on the extent to which, the vendor embraces the ideology of your CRM vendor in terms of routing and adding value to your leads, prospects, accounts and opportunities.
Evaluating a Marketing Automation vendor on tracking Marketing – Sales Handoff interactions should be based on their definitions, tracking and reporting simplicity for these interactions.
Marketing Automation vendors have already realized that it is very important to make it convenient for Sales Team. to use the data emanating from Marketing Automation platform. To ensure that, they have included tools like alert tickers, mobile reports etc in their system. They have also included elements like signatures, sales pages etc to win the approval of Sales Team. Individual Marketing Automation vendors may have to be contacted to know more about specific tools present in their platform and have to be evaluated on the same.
Note
- Many relevant marketing and sales funnels (even hourglasses: http://marketingautomationtimes.com/2011/04/24/move-from-the-marketing-funnel-to-the-marketing-hourglass/) are recommended by different consultants. I have created the ones that reflect my understanding of these recommendations and provide the simplicity that helps me make my point.
- The parameters for comparison between marketing automation vendors, mentioned in this post are specific to the marketing automation industry. Other generic parameters like performance, usability, aesthetics etc that are relevant for any SaaS/software application are not discussed in this post.
References
