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The ROI of Marketing Automation

January 27, 2016 By Josh Hill

In recent posts, I have discussed that the ROI of marketing automation, and martech in general, boils down to time savings. Most vendors, however, rarely discuss the time saved through automation itself. Most vendors discuss the revenue increases, conversion rate increases, and opportunities you will obtain. Marketing automation (MAP) vendors particularly enjoy talking about the internal sales-marketing alignment improvements and “predictable revenue” reports.

In the Marketing Tech Maturity Model, I posited that it is rare for any firm to obtain the revenue and predictive ROI levels in less than 2 years. The expectation of executives, however, is that ROI can be obtained in under one year.

The other day, a reader asked me about the ROI issue and I decided to scour the internet for data and concepts. Surprisingly, vendor data and case studies supported my view that there are three main drivers of martech ROI and they do not come all at once to the buyer.

There are three purposes to this discussion:

First, understand the logic of ROI of martech for your business so you can have the right conversation with leadership as well as show the right ROI over time as planned.
Second, resist the “correlation is causation” claims of vendors; instead ask for better data or at least understand that the tool and your strategy are intertwined.
Third, understand what your need is and articulate it before searching for a solution. The need for “more leads” is different than the need for “transparency.”

The Three ROI Drivers of Marketing Technology

To me, there appears to be much confusion about what ROI on martech really is. I recall that in the 1950s and 1960s, IBM pushed mainframes on companies as a way to gain financial control over the scale of the back-office. In a similar way, martech lets you do more with less, or at least that is what can happen. The reality is more nuanced and many firms find that they need an entire Marketing Operations team to build and operate marketing technology so the campaign and content managers can deploy properly. The IT department grew in a similar fashion.

Thus, it helps if everyone understands where to leverage martech and how ROI works for martech:

Time Saved on process execution through moving manual processes to automatic rule based systems. Reduced time can come in several forms: rethinking of business processes, automation of processes, and faster deployment of campaigns (cloning, etc).

The Mindset Shift is the one that most vendors rely on for case studies and sales pitches. This is the idea that the software forces a change in marketing at the firm and therefore is responsible for tremendous ROI. The shift in marketing thinking occurs because the software’s model forces the buyer to more rigidly adhere to a way of marketing. And because the buyer is paying for this mode of marketing, they feel obligated to try it. Simply focusing effort on blogging and systematizing lead collection and email segmentation will improve results, regardless of the tool.

Transparency into the sales funnel and marketing activities that allow better decisions on allocation of resources. The tool simply permits better data collection and better reporting that marketers have wanted for years. Vendors press on this point when they discuss “revenue” and “predictive” concepts. What they really mean is, for the first time, you can see what impact you have and make a faster decision to incrementally improve or rapidly iterate.

Time Saved

When I first purchased Marketo back in 2010, I had a lot of goals for the system, but ultimately my highest desire was to stop spending 2-3 days a month (or more) routing leads, ranking leads, and deduping. And this wasn’t just for me, it was for my colleagues as well. Once I had Marketo fully operational, it was on track to save up to 1832 man-hours/year (1 FTE!) of time.

I do not buy because a MAP “increases conversion rates.” It just does not. What it does do is help me automate the AB testing and incremental improvements that will help increase conversion rates over time. An Email Service Provider (ESP) can offer similar AB testing tools, as can a web only provider like Optimizely. Each provides the tool to increase conversions through “simpler” testing. The ROI is initially in time, and then eventually in higher conversion rates from the tests you perform.

You do these things. The platform helps you do them faster.

The vendors are right, but their logic skips to the conclusion. The same goes for the claims that a MAP will provide 4x increase in leads generated or 400% increase in Sales Ready Leads. This logic skip results in leadership becoming unhappy when they realize the investment required to reach the Transparency ROI.

Marketo’s 2012 survey had several case studies illustrating this point.

“Using marketing automation, ShipServ is able to eliminate manual processes, automate demand generation and lead management…’A significant reduction in manual processes has allowed the marketing team to focus on more strategic and creative initiatives…’”

Yet, the call out quote for John Watton, VP of Marketing is “…[W]e now drive significantly more sales opportunities with the same budget…” When in fact, he is able to achieve that because his team saved huge amounts of time to focus on his real mission. Similarly, Cloud9 is “doing more with less” and “Codesion is able to fully automate its Free Trials Program.”

Thus, the first major ROI for marketing technology is time savings that allows you to focus on the high impact campaigns or customer focused touches to drive pipeline. Of course, you probably think I missed the point of marketing here! No one buys inherently because of cost or time savings. What CMOs wanted in 2008 and today is a way to prove Marketing drives revenue! In a classic sell the sizzle moment, the messaging moved away from simple, boring automation to phrases with “revenue” in them: revenue performance management, revenue engines, etc.

Selling Time isn’t sexy if you aren’t an airline.

There is nothing wrong with selling the tools on the vision of revenue enhancement (that is our real goal, right?), but many buyers of martech get confused because they expect the revenue and vision in the first six months because that is what they were sold.

Several industry surveys seem to support the view that the real ROI is in time savings:

Redeye reported 36% of respondents said the main benefit was “Taking repetitive tasks out of marketers hands, allowing focus on new/more exciting projects.”
Adestra reported that 74% of respondents said the biggest benefit was saving time vs. 58% “increased opportunities.”
B2bmarketing and Circle Research claim “Only 8% of companies see increased revenues within 6 months of adopting marketing automation. After one year of MA use, 32% claim to see increased revenue…two years the figure is 40%” (via EmailMonday).

Of course, there are many surveys indicating the benefits are in revenue or pipeline or lead generation. In your first year of MAP use, and even into the future, time savings is the main benefit and driver of any return.

The Mindset Shift

The concept here is that adopting a martech solution for any part of the funnel or for a particular channel (adtech, event tech), is that the tool itself does nothing until you tell it to do something. As Scott Brinker pointed out in 2010, our marketing is the software we use, in much the same way that Code is Law, martech is marketing strategy.

Tools like martech can be a catalyst for business change and even mindset changes in how you and your team approach marketing. Vendors have spent millions on shifting our mindset from marketing as a cost, to marketing as a revenue center because of Transparency. In reality, this propaganda serves the mindset return on investment.

Going back to my first Marketo implementation—and this is true for everyone—we had already made the mindset shift over the previous 3 years of work:

Obtained close marketing-sales alignment through regular meetings, read lead SLAs, and lengthy reviews of buyer personas. Was this perfect? No. Was it far enough along that the lead process was more about automation, yes!
Content marketing as the base. My team had led the charge, proven that content-based events and webinars worked, and established processes for demand generation programs. Once this went global, all we had to do was automate it.
Audience building and free-registration content. This occurred during the RFP process and the high response rate meant Marketo was vital. We had a pressing need and the team was prepared for automation.

When Marketo was deployed, did I see ROI because we implemented demand generation? No. We did that already. We saw ROI because the automation saved time for creative long-term campaigns, lead processing speed, and reporting.

This is really the question for many teams that are still at Stage 0 or Stage 1 of their martech maturity cycle. Purchasing a system becomes the catalyst for undertaking the internal process changes, sales alignment work, and marketing strategy changes that the software demands of your team.

Do you see an ROI on the investment in a MAP because you can automate your nurturing, or because you can finally do nurturing at scale? Will you even conduct the level of nurturing your MAP can enable? If HubSpot has an easy to use blogging tool and your small business has barely done anything like this, then it is very easy to show a 4x increase in leads simply through blogging on any platform.

In a 2014 survey, Marketo found that 84% of long-term Marketo users (4 or more years) were using multi-channel marketing, while only 54% of new users did so. There is a clear progression of skill with a MAP and the use of its features to implement a strategy. A MAP is a catalyst as well as a marketing structure to be learned and you must build your expectations around that learning curve.

Thus, if you can follow the Martech Maturity Model and undertake the Stage 0 work first, you will naturally find the best tool for you to automate and scale your strategy.

Transparency

The final ROI is in transparency. I say this is “final” because it is most likely the last phase of return you can expect over time. Expect transparency to occur in Stages 4-6 of the Martech Maturity Model.

Sadly, this is the same ROI that your CMO and CEO expect happens three days after the initial CRM sync. Please do not let the vendor or your business case give this impression. If you do, your project will be cancelled before your contract renewal date, or worse, you will switch to a new vendor and have the same issues and have to learn an entirely new system.

Transparency is composed of two critical areas that may occur at different times during the Maturity Cycle.

First, transparency is about enabling better data collection on the Sales Funnel, Lead Behaviors, and Marketing Attribution. This data collection can occur even before the reporting tools are fully available.
Second, transparency is about collating that data into meaningful, easy to read reports where a decision can be made to re-allocate budget to activities with clearly higher performance for the Goal at hand.

That Goal can be higher CTR or more marketing sourced Opportunities. Ideally, these Goals are chosen ahead of time and the charts clearly explain previous history. At this point, a Predictive Tool can provide insight on the best leads before they reach Sales. Other predictive and reporting tools can then show the likely pipeline scenarios.

It is only at this final Stage 6 that the promise of the vendors is fulfilled with “predictable revenue.” Any attempt to reach this point by skipping stages or expecting this ROI too early will result in actual failure, or the perception of failure.

If we look at some of the surveys conducted in the past few years, we can see some of these issues play out.

In 2013, Gleanster reported that, “79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years.” (via Email Monday) Are they top performing because of their skill with the system, or were they already ahead of everyone else?

VentureBeat reported that 29% of marketing automation users “had no issues or delays in getting results.” This statistic suggests to me that 71% of those respondents were unprepared to implement or had unrealistic expectations for their MAP.

VentureBeat conducted a survey showing a 27.8% return from a MAP. Of the respondents, 83% claimed a positive ROI, while only 48% thought it was worth it. While the survey was incomplete at the time, I suspect the respondents felt it wasn’t worth it because they had to purchase consulting time and hire new staff. If those respondents examined the total cost of implementation (people, time, consultants), their ROI might still be negative after two years.

In a 2013 survey, Salesforce claimed that marketing automation users had a 53% higher conversion rate to MQL and a 9.3% higher rate of quota-rep achievement vs. non-users. Is this because marketing automation forced the firms to put together a proper process? Is this because marketing automation enabled better processes?

Lenskold’s 2013 study with The Pedowitz Group indicated highly effective teams thought their MAPs improved revenue contribution (78% vs. 54%) and improved “reliable measurements” (44% vs. 25%), while those same teams thought their content marketing performed well. I’d be curious if the high performing teams were also those using their MAPs for an extended period.

Similarly, many surveys claim that automation, which enables Lead Nurturing at scale, causes things like “20% increase in sales opportunities” (SFDC), or “28% of respondents reported an increase in average deal size” (Lenskold via Autopilot HQ, 2012) thanks to nurturing. Is it possible to construct nurturing with a basic ESP instead, and achieve similar results?

Is automated nurturing a time saver or a revenue generator? Perhaps as your team builds enough content, nurturing will be a revenue generator. In my experience, few firms have a solid nurturing program setup in their marketing automation system.

It appears that firms that do not take advantage of nurturing are the ones unhappy with the ROI of marketing automation. Their teams lack the time or skillset to build out the content required for a massive nurturing journey that would impact pipeline or revenue. When it comes time to look at the ROI of the system, executives then immediately feel betrayed by the vendor, thinking they were overpromised. In fact, the executives failed to plan out the implementation and expectations. Is that the vendor’s fault, or the buyer’s?

One of the key transparency ROIs is to achieve visibility into marketing attribution and marketing influence on pipeline and revenue. This can and does happen, with investment. An excellent presentation from 2014 discusses how to justify reporting investment before you have all the pieces in place to prove marketing generates revenue.

The ROI of Conclusions

I suspect that most readers are not convinced to buy a tool because of a simplistic claim from a vendor. Rather, most teams do go through an RFP process or a bake-off between two vendors. The team discusses the merits of the tools as well as the feelings they get from the salespeople and technical salespeople. Then a choice is made.

From my work with over 35 teams, I can tell you that in-spite of the “account based purchasing” that is done, buyers still have outsized expectations of what martech will do for them in the first year, or even in the second year. Please take the time to think through the Martech Maturity Stages to make your business case as a long-term project with ROI over time. Show the ROI like your CFO would and do not let the vendor’s claims dominate your deck.

Vendor salespeople are supposed to sell you the Vision, that’s their job. Remember, sifting through the claims and building a business case is your job as the buyer.

Special Note – if you are a marketing expert, marketing operations expert, or otherwise amazing Marketo User, you are welcome to submit guest posts. Email me at hello [at] marketingrockstarguides.com.

How to Troubleshoot in Marketo

January 12, 2016 By Josh Hill

Troubleshooting in Marketo can be more of an art, than a science. The data you need is often scattered around several screens and what you need to figure out may take time to track down. Is it a workflow error? Sync error? Manual error? Troubleshooting is not just for testing: you can also use it to learn why a lead’s data changed or why they received a certain email.

The most common scenarios you will encounter as a new Marketo user are:

Lead received two of the same email.
Lead went to the wrong Salesperson.

It is worth searching the Marketo Nation Forums for solutions, but you will learn much more if you use the techniques below to attempt a solution first. And I do strongly recommend attempting to understand what happened before asking the Nation or Support. Both will appreciate the detailed account that can help them help you.

Here are the places where you can find information for troubleshooting.

Campaign Member List

You can find this by clicking on the count of Members on the Campaign Summary tab, or you can click Schedule > Campaign Members or Results > Campaign Members.

Which leads actually qualified?
Count of Leads that became qualified and are Members
Use the View tab to look at more data.

Campaign Run History (Batch)

If you click on the Campaign and then look at either the Run History Tab or click on the list of Runs at the bottom, you can see how many qualified each time the batch ran. This is a vital troubleshooting tool when you have recurring batches that manage data flows. I’ve often come across troubled systems and been able to uncover when something happened to then uncover why there was a change in volume.

If you know how many qualified on a certain date, you should be able to track back what occurred, or even select leads during that time period and Member of Campaign.

Campaign Results Tab

This is the log of executed flow steps per Lead. You can filter this by Type of Activity in the same way you do for the Lead View>Activity Log. This is a great way to see if a flow step failed or if certain leads went through at a certain time. Remember that some activities such as Data Value Was Changed, Visited Web Page will be archived after 90 days and not visible here.

Members by Week: Campaign Summary Tab

See chart of qualified leads by week – are more or less people entering over time?

This is particularly helpful when troubleshooting certain data change flows or lead routing flows when something may have inadvertently pushed too few/many leads.

Member Trend Tab

This is less used, but you can get an idea of the differences over the past three months. Like Members by Week, this will show you abnormalities.

Program Summary Tab

This is where you can view the key tactical metrics for each program or offer. I come here often to check on Program Membership counts, Channel Type, and if the Program is synced to an SFDC Campaign.

Total Members
Total leads Acquired By
Total leads Acquired by Social
Total Successes
Leads by [Status]

Remember that you can also adjust the view depending on the Channel Type. Most Default Programs show a Member chart, Calendar View, and Used by. Special Programs like Engagement and Email Send will also show the Program Dashboard.

Program Member Tab

This area shows you

Count of Members
Count of Members by Each Status
Potentially other data if you change the View.

Program Dashboard (Engagements)

These Channels have special Dashboards. For Engagements, we can see the overall

Engagement Score
Unsubscribe Rate for the Program
Days to Next Cast
Chart of count of leads and Cast Count until Exhausted
Engagement Scores for each email.

Program Dashboard (Email Send)

The Email Send Program also has a Dashboard that works a bit differently.

Delivered
Opens
Open Rate
Click Rate
Unsubscribe Rate
Engagement Score

Program Summary (Email Send)

This Program uses the Tile setup method, which is really just a different view into a smart campaign. Check here for stats like:

Lead Qualification Count
Leads Blocked
Schedule

Lead Detail View

There are several ways to reach a Lead’s data:

Lead Database > Search
Smart List > Click on Lead ID
Static List > Click on Lead ID
Campaign Results > Click on Lead ID
Campaign Members/Qualified Members > Lead ID
Program > Program Member > Lead ID

Once you open up the Lead’s view, you have access to modify most fields directly. Sometimes this is a useful method for testing. More importantly, you can view key data like:

Lead Activity Log (more on that soon)
Custom Tab – just a special view.
SFDC Data and Custom Fields
Marketo Data Fields and timestamps.
Lists of Segmentation Membership

Lead Detail > Lead Activity Log

This is arguably the most important tool for testing and troubleshooting. Marketo added filters to let you narrow down the types of behaviors or changes to work with this faster.

Key use cases include:

Why did that campaign trigger?
Why did that campaign not trigger yet?
Why is the score X?
Why did that data change?

Notifications Log

Most of you should be able to see the Notifications button at the top of the screen. If you click on it, you will see a list of alerts and errors Marketo encountered. Administrators should monitor this weekly or even daily (if a large system) for major issues.

Marketo tells you what is wrong, but you often have to hit the campaign or lead detail to find out more. Key issues include:

Exhaustion of Nurturing content
Broken campaigns
Failed campaigns
Failed syncs to SFDC – if you click, you can get a smart list, but this is the only way to see this kind of data.

Troubleshooting with Smart Lists

Another tool you have is to use Smart Lists to pull groups of leads and then use Custom Views to look at certain fields.

The best use case is when you want to see Email Deliverability fields (and I always have a View with these fields). This View exposes the Email Bounced Reason in a clear way. You can sort it or even build a new smart list to narrow down these issues.

Campaign Queue

The Campaign Queue helps you see which campaigns are running or slated to run soon. Some types of campaigns take precedence over others. In addition, you can try to spot race conditions or blockages like a large batch run that will slow down execution of other campaigns. There may not be a resolution, but at least you will know what is going on.

Campaign Inspector

If you are not certain where a flow step is occurring, then you can search all campaigns for filters and flow steps, among others. This can help narrow down problems or help you understand how the system is setup. If you do not have access to this, you may need to go to Admin > Treasure Chest to turn it on.

Note that you must be at the Top Level of the Workspace you wish to view for Inspector and Queue.

Let’s Talk About Things You Can Break

I do not want you to break things. Here is a checklist of things you can break or miss easily if you are moving too quickly in Marketo. Typos in Marketo (or Marketo Language) can bring things to a halt or worse.

Operators (Any, All, etc.)

Choosing the wrong operator is easy to do because you went too fast. I often come across mistakes (and have made them), where IN vs. NOT IN did not stick because the mouse moved too quickly…or someone forgot.

Logic Steps

I see people ruin smart lists and Lifecycles because they didn’t consider the right parentheses or groupings of filters. See logic for marketers.

Flow Steps

Are they in the right order? Is that wait step correct? For example, the SFDC Sync may push lead data to SFDC instantly, however, SFDC may take as long as 20 minutes to process the lead on its end, which means your next logic steps should wait.

Choice Steps

Only the first qualifying step works! You may want certain steps to always take precedence if more than one condition applies.

Filters (Smart Lists)

Using the right filters is, of course, crucial to most parts of the system. There is a big difference between Was Sent Email and Not Was Sent Email. Understand when to use each.

Triggers

Remember, triggers are OR between them, then the logic on green filters.

Schedule and Qualification Rules

Sometimes you need to set it to Once, Once Every X, or Every Time. This is a common problem that is easily fixed, especially if you are testing a flow.

Race Conditions

The Race Condition deserves an entire post because it is a critical problem and there are very few ways to handle it. Solving the race condition is hard, but you’ll know you have one when your Activity Log doesn’t seem to update as quickly as you’d expect.

Let’s say you have 10 sync flows. One syncs the lead to SFDC, but the others all change data values, then sync. They are all triggered on Lead is Created, but you only want the last nine to work after the initial sync. This is not going to happen that way. All 10 campaigns will trigger “at once,” but not all at the exact same moment, and not all the data values will change when you want them to.

Look at the Log for affected leads and you’ll see that some executed around the same time, while others waited. You will need to use wait steps to control the execution of the flow. For a good set of examples and solution for Marketo, see Ed Unthank’s Marketo Summit presentation.

Batch vs. Trigger

Sometimes your choice of Filters vs. Triggers does make a difference, especially if you set up similar flows – trigger to capture now, and a batch to capture misfires. If you aren’t careful, you might include people in the Batch who already went through the Trigger, so exclude with Member of Campaign NOT IN.

There are many use cases for each of the techniques above and I recommend using one or more for each situation.

Troubleshooting in Marketo is fairly easy, if you know where to look. And once you rule out the obvious, you can then call Support to help root out back-end issues.

HubSpot Marketing – Updated Review

December 23, 2015 By Josh Hill

In May 2014, I posted a review on HubSpot’s Marketing platform. The review was the culmination of several months of testing and discussions with HubSpot staff. Since I approached it as a competitor to Marketo, my recommendation was to stick with Marketo if that’s what you were using. [Updated June 26, 2016 with new links].

I stand by that recommendation.

In the past 18 months, HubSpot has shifted to become a Sales and Marketing platform firm for very-small businesses to SMBs. This change indicates that HubSpot is less interested in the SMB-Enterprise segments where Marketo and Eloqua are dominant.

In this updated review on HubSpot’s Marketing platform, I will go over a few of the things that have changed and which type of firms may benefit.

Design Manager is Updated

One of my gripes with the last version of HubSpot was the interface, especially the lack of a good user interface for files and Campaigns/Workflows. While the Campaign interface still lacks good visibility, the Design Manager is much improved.

File Manager – now you can easily upload files and manage domains if you post files for download. You can even archive older files without losing data.

Tabs – this new feature seems like a way to view and manage multiple templates.

CSS Files – this is a much improved method of controlling one or more layouts. Marketo could definitely use this.

Template Creator – akin to Marketo’s Guided Page Templates, HubSpot offers an easy to use Landing Page Template creator.

Workflows Beta

I came across the new Workflow system. In HubSpot, Workflows are distinguished from Campaigns, even though they are similar in function. The changes appear to be mostly at the Smart List level, allowing the user to more easily select groups of leads on a behavior basis. There are also more Flow Actions available. In many ways, it does make sense to differentiate workflows from campaigns, however, I tend to think of a workflow as any set of steps from an email to a data change…but that’s just how Marketo works too.

As of today, the Beta Workflows are available to Professional or Enterprise customers or members of the Beta Program.

Native Salesforce Sync Support

In my original review of 2014, HubSpot had API capabilities, but few native connectors. In fact, Salesforce syncing was limited and not native at all, in contrast to major competitors. At the end of May 2015, HubSpot announced a new partnership with Salesforce to continue their work together, despite competing in the lower end of the MAP space. It turns out that only 20% of HB customers use SFDC and many more use no CRM at all. (Clearly a reason to build HubSpot CRM, no?).

A native SFDC connector was not high on the priority list until this year. The good news it does exist now. What does HubSpot’s SFDC connector have and how does it work?

Bi-directional sync, which Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua users enjoyed for years. You will note that the HubSpot interaction area, akin to Marketo Sales Insight, looks just like the native HubSpot Timeline seen in the MAP and CRM tools. To me, this is a real visual leg up on the competiton for Sales.
Field Support – it appears the sync covers all of the data fields you would expect.
API Call Limit – HubSpot estimates 4 per lead-day.
Sandbox support.
Behavioral Activity Sync – yes, just like in Marketo, although it only covers Form and Email Opens.
Account and Opp syncing.
Sync Control – you can use a smart list to select leads at a Lifecycle Stage or just sync everyone. This is interesting because it is a part of the setup process instead of the usual Lifecycle system setup in other tools.
Integration Test – the wizard even encourages a test and final sync.

From the docs, it appears to be a solid SFDC integration process. Marketo users will find a couple of interesting differences, including clear Sandbox support and clearer Account and Opportunity sync, although I am not clear how bi-directional those objects are.

Updated Integrations

Other integrations are now native and easily accessible in the control panel, including:

Wistia
GoToWebinar
SurveyMonkey
Zapier
Google Calendar
Eventbrite
UberConference

HubSpot has a strong marketplace as well for other integration needs as you build your stack.

How does HubSpot Compare to Other Tools?

It is harder to compare each MAP firm as most now target certain size companies and have evolved to solve slightly different sets of marketing problems. Sirius Decisions did a quick summary in 2014 that may be helpful as well.

Pardot and the SFDC Marketing Cloud

Since I have yet to personally experience the latest SFDC offers here, I can only compare on feature sets. My expectation is that Pardot’s capabilities are aimed at the lower end of SFDC’s customer base while they figure out how to compete with Eloqua and Marketo on something other than price. I continue to hear SFDC pressuring smaller firms to switch to Pardot, using package pricing as the key lever. Should a HubSpot user switch to Pardot? I would say no, because of the loss of features and the cost of switching.

HubSpot may experience competition in that 20% of their base that uses SFDC and any customers that grow to a point that SFDC is an option for them. Firms that rely heavily on SEO will want to stay with HubSpot. Firms that are looking for more automation and reporting will lean toward Salesforce or Marketo.

InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft has emerged as a powerful automation platform for Pro-Bloggers and certain small businesses. The system is designed to support ecommerce, such as web businesses selling products or information products, InfusionSoft has a lot to offer. I do not see HubSpot competing directly with InfusionSoft except with firms still in the education phase of what they need.

Maropost

I recently came across this firm and found their platform covers many of the key MAP features. This may be an alternative to HubSpot and Marketo for smaller firms. Curious if anyone has experience with Maropost, let us know below.

Act-On

Act-On’s feature list reads like a list of complaints about Marketo. Indeed, the G2Crowd rating now is neck-and-neck with Marketo. While I haven’t used the system in a long time, the site indicates to me that the tool has much improved in capabilities. I would say Act-On claims a spot somewhere between HubSpot and Marketo and competes more directly with Pardot. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has used Act-On and HubSpot and/or Marketo.

Update (Dec 29): I had a brief demo of the latest Act-On system. While they made the same claims about being up and running in 45 minutes, they did admit that the Time to Value is about 90 days. What did impress me is the tool covers key workflow issues out of the box as features, instead of asking the marketer to figure it out. For instance, RSS-to-Email and Subscription Management are listed features and easy to customize. Scoring is also a customizable walk-through instead of something to build. Act-On claims this is the result of trying to help marketers focus on the big goals instead of complex operations setup. Even the lead detail view is a clean view of touches (although not quite a timeline) rather than a database listing. The toolkit also lets marketers focus on Outbound vs. Inbound issues along with asset building. For marketers at smaller to medium firms lacking a marketing operations function (or skillset), Act-On could be a good entry point vs. Marketo or Pardot. The development team has clearly improved since 2012.

Marketo

I continue to hear about firms moving from HubSpot to Marketo or Pardot to Marketo once they reach a certain size, or maturity level, in the use of their MAP. Marketo lacks a few things HubSpot has: integrated SEO and Keyword suggestions; CTA module; robust interface for dynamic content; a timeline tool; and the asset builder.

Marketo, however, is far more robust on workflow; marketing attribution, organization of the system; and lead nurturing. It is more purely a MAP than HubSpot, since HubSpot has added sales and CRM tools to meet their smaller sized customer base. Thus, for SMBs through Enterprise, Marketo will continue to be the best choice for building a constellation martech stack.

Is that bad for HubSpot? No. Now that HubSpot has fully embraced smaller firms, their system will reflect those needs more and likely shy away from being a platform rather than an all-in-one solution for small business. If one of their customers is successful and grows into a medium firm or enterprise, I would expect them to migrate to a different martech stack altogether.

If you are looking for a new vendor or making a case to switch (or stay put), take a look at my Marketing Automation RFP and SBI’s Vendor Scorecard. Sirius Decisions’ latest overview may also help.

Things that work better in HubSpot

First, the updates to HubSpot make the system a more complete small business marketing platform, especially with the integrations to other CRMs as well as HubSpot CRM. The workflow and guided template tools are welcome upgrades. HubSpot’s asset builder continues to outperform every other product out there. Marketo has Guided Templates now, but HubSpot has truly created a system to build templates, rather than just install them. For a VSB, this ability is likely a major difference and time savings instead of hiring expensive designers. Should HubSpot spend a lot of time on that area? Hard to say for sure, but I suspect their targets love it.

There are several tools in HubSpot that, while good on their own, are not organizationally well integrated with the rest of the platform:

Calls to Action – this module shows you exactly which CTAs exist, how they are doing, and where they live. This is just not possible in other systems because the CTA is part of the asset (Email, Page, etc) instead of a separate asset like it is in HubSpot.
SEO – this tool has been central to HubSpot’s story and inbound methodology. It is true that other MAPs do not provide direct, in workflow advice on keywords, nor do they natively report on such data. Is this a replacement for a massive 150MM page site and the power tools for it? No. Is it amazing for a VSB or SMB who rarely looked at SEO before? Yes.

ROI of HubSpot and Marketing Automation

I’ve said before that the ROI of marketing automation is in time saved, especially in the first year. I’ve also said as your use of the MAP improves, the next ROI is in transparency, because you can now improve allocation of resources across the funnel.

HubSpot now has an ROI page on its site. The challenge with ROI of any tool is correlation vs. causation.

Is using HubSpot (or another MAP) actually encouraging you to do more simply because you now have a daily control panel for your marketing? Could that actually be the source of the increase? Do marketers do more because they feel they have to justify the thousands of dollars they are spending, and thus create the ROI themselves?

HubSpot and MIT Sloan claim “72% of customers saw an increase in sales revenue within one year” and the average increase in list volume was 4.77x in one year. While I have no reason to challenge the data, I wonder how much of the change is caused by a mindset vs. the actual software?

Each application, and especially MAPs, have a worldview that forces the marketer to adopt that model of the sales funnel for their daily activities. If you adopted the inbound-funnel mindset without HubSpot, would you see similar results? If you chose Marketo and Pardot’s demand generation approach, would you see similar results, or different ones? At one firm, I doubled blog visits in 3 months with regular content, but I did not need HubSpot to achieve that.

The OverGo Studio Report

Using 14 of his clients, Rick Kranz analyzed the results of HubSpot users vs. non-users. The control group used just about anything other than HubSpot. Key results:

Organic Traffic Growth in 1 year – 590% vs. 170%.
B2B Lead Generation – 125% more leads with HubSpot.
Conversion Rate (B2B) – 43% more.

While the numbers sound impressive, this is a flawed study. The sample was 14, which can never be statistically valid given that HubSpot has over 10,000 customers. As I mentioned earlier, is it the tool or the fact that the marketers could do more or were “forced” to do more because they had this tool? Neither this study, nor the MIT Sloan study explain this correlation question.

Either way, HubSpot and MAPs do have an ROI. The MAP itself does not generate anything – it’s always up to you. Most firms fail when they do not prepare their business process to match the tool, or vice versa.

Conclusions

HubSpot will continue to dominate the smaller firm segments, while Marketo and Eloqua continue to dominate the larger firm sized segments of the market. While Marketo Spark and HubSpot compete, I suspect that is happening only with firms at 5,000 to 30,000 contacts or high growth startups. In other words, if you are using Marketo today, stay there. If you are a VSB, you will likely find HubSpot to be a good fit, or possibly Pardot. As HubSpot becomes a VSB revenue platform, the bifurcation of the marketplace will be more obvious, leaving an interesting gap for competitors.

Disclosure: I had a free trial to HubSpot Marketing, CRM, and Sidekick. I was not asked by HubSpot to provide this review.

Lead Routing with Marketo

December 15, 2015 By Steven Moody

This is a guest post from Steven Moody at Beachhead.io, a marketing technology consultancy. Steven’s weekly newsletter is a great read for marketing, technology, and deep thinking.

We recently worked with a high-growth technology startup to reengineer their lead routing program in Marketo. They wanted to quickly route leads but also lay the foundation to scale. This was important to them because they receive a high number of inbound leads that are not ready to buy, and they plan to grow from 3 to 30 sales reps quickly, so they need something that works now and also in a year.

We worked with them to understand their present and future requirements, discussed some of the tradeoffs they would need to make for scaling, and implemented a lead routing program that matched their needs.

Ultimately, this saved about 20 hours per week (960 man-hours/year) for their sales manager, who had spent much of his time just manually sorting through leads.

Below are the technical details that we hope can help other companies considering a lead routing program in Marketo.

The client wanted a program that would be easy to adjust and scale as they plan to grow from three to 30 sales reps within 2 years.

The Client Request

Initially, the client asked for a lead routing program that split up US States with Annual Revenue and buying intent as criteria.

In a discovery workshop, we determined this routing was too complicated for their needs, and suggested a simpler program. First, they did not want to collect the data for location, beyond State and Country. Second, they did not see a large difference in buying behavior or average contract value between large companies and smaller companies. This discovery led to a much simpler routing system.

Questions you should ask when defining your territories:

Do you have the data you need to make this lead routing program effective?
If your primary sales are by phone, does location matter more than industry and company size?
Are you prematurely optimizing territories through micro-splits of the territories?
How will your lead distribution change, and will this make the territories unfair?

After reviewing the above questions, we settled on a revised lead routing that looked like the following:

US Territory Map Example — BDR= Business Development Rep (inside sales?) AE=Account Executive

Territory Rules:

ACME’s objective is to successfully route leads according to two different criteria: Location, Interaction.
ACME has 6 different sales reps covering the US, they divided the country into 3 different territories, Western, Central, Eastern.
ACME has 2 sales reps per territory, a Business Development Rep (BDR) and an Account Executive (AE).
The BDR will receive all new leads.
The AE will only receive leads who made a Sales Contact Request (SCR).
The 6 sales reps are West_BDR, West_AE, Central_BDR, Central_AE, East_BDR, East_AE.

Planning the Lead Routing System in Marketo

This routing program is decentralized (can start from multiple entry points). When a program is designed in this way, careful attention must be paid to ensure the entry points don’t overlap, or leads will be subject to a race condition. Here, the distinction is set between SCR and !SCR (Not SCR). The blue is the area we selected.

Here is the process chart for a new lead given the above conditions. We can end up in 6 outcomes depending on how the Lead acts.

Implementing the Lead Routing System in Marketo

Create a Program “Lead Routing”, then create three smart campaigns as shown.

Route New Leads – this listens for any new lead and then calls either Not SCR or SCR depending.
Route Leads Not SCR – if the Lead did not fill out an SCR form, then it will be routed to the BDR based on the territory.
Route Leads SCR – if the Lead did fill out the SCR form, it is fast tracked to the Account Executive based on the territory.

Routing New Leads Campaign

Route Leads Who Did Fill Out a Contact Form (SCR)

Let’s handle the leads who fill out a SCR form. This may happen to a lead who already exists in the database, so we also need to use Fills Out Form as a trigger.

The lead is selected if he fill out the form “Contact Us” or is added to the list “Lead Routing…” AND his Lead Owner is not (already) one of the Account Executives.

These filters create the distinction between the SCR and Not SCR requirement for the routing system.

Then assign the lead to an Account Executive according to the value in the field “State”.

This time we set up a limit for the lead to run this Smart Campaign. Once a lead is assigned to an Account Executive by the routing campaign, he should only be assigned to a different person manually so the AE concerned is aware of the change and can pass on useful informations. This is why we set up the limit to “once” in the Schedule, so the lead will be assigned to an AE the first time one of the trigger is activated and will not run through the campaign if he matches the trigger criteria one more time.

Route Leads Who Did Not Fill Out a Contact Form (Not SCR)

Then, we want to take care of the leads who do not fill a SCR form.

The Lead may only continue if it is true that the lead never filled a “Contact Us” form, even when the Campaign is Requested.

It is possible to use different triggers such as Lead is Created to route the Lead immediately when it is created.

In this case, the lead will be assigned to a User in SFDC depending on their State value. We can also include choices based on the location detection by Marketo (Inferred State) in the same way that we did with State.

Within the flow steps, it’s important to note the first choice applies. To avoid a race condition here, careful consideration must be paid to the order of the choices. For example, there will be leads who declare their State as California, but have an inferred State of Texas due to a VPN. Should they be routed to the territory for California or Texas? The same applies to the Country and Inferred Country fields.

The Schedule defines how many times the lead will run through this Smart Campaign. In this case it will only happen one time since the lead can only be created one time (the system will alert that the email address already exists).

Testing the Routing System

Before launching your lead routing program, you should test it thoroughly to make sure leads go where you expect. Marketo typically doesn’t provide a sandbox environment like Salesforce, so these steps will enable you to test all scenarios before activating the new program. A fairly simple routing system will require a few key tests. For our more complex system, it is worth following the testing scenarios.

Step 1: Create a spreadsheet of example leads with every scenario that matters.

We built 2 lists of 52 leads each. One group of leads are for Lead Routing Not SCR and the other for Lead Routing SCR.

The columns for your CSV will look a lot like this.

An ID Number for each lead. This is just for your needs, do not upload this column!
A name describing the example, here State_Territory_Status. Which gives us Lead_CA_w_NotSCR for a lead from California who did not fill an Sales Contact Request.
Same procedure with the email address: team+7_CA_w_NotSCR@beachhead.io so with only the email address you’re able to judge the accuracy of the results. Note that you can use “+” sign to create a new virtual email that goes to the same box.
Country does not influence our routing, but is a part of the location and may be important in global routing.
State is the key element to route leads by territory. You can see the first to leads as example of edge cases we want to monitor to make sure our routing is flawless.
And finally your expected Lead Assignment. In your CSV, add a column to define who you expect your Lead to route to. This will make it easier to review later.

Step 2: Notify Sales that they may see these test leads.

Remember to make their names and Titles as clear as possible, but avoiding triggering any other “Test Suppression Lists” that might cause a sync to be missed because Title=Test. The reason is you want the flow to work fully so you can see the results in the CRM too.

Step 3: Add a Brake to the Campaign Flows to ensure only your leads go through right now.

Later you will remove this brake to fully activate the system.

Step 4: Verify the results next to each Lead, row by row.

Step 5: Fix any Errors

Step 6: Confirm with Sales if needed.

Step 7: Confirm with Sales when the routing will go live.

Step 8: Delete the Leads from the system.

Migrating to the New System

Once you’ve validated your new lead routing works as expected, here are the general steps to replace an old routing program with your new routing program:

Plan the change for the weekend, if possible. Even with testing, things can go wrong, and you’ll be better able to handle updates if the volume of new leads is lower
Set aside 1-2 hours of uninterrupted time to make the changes, just in case.
Create reports for potential bugs. For example, if you have five sales reps and ten total salesforce users, your smartlist might be all new leads assigned to someone who isn’t a sales rep. If you require a 2-digit state value for leads to route, then create a report of new leads this week by state. These reports will make it easier to spot issues as the routing goes live.
Deactivate the current routing campaigns (5 minutes)
Activate the new routing campaigns (5 minutes)
Notify the stakeholders of the updates and share instructions to submit bugs.
Monitor the reports for issues. We recommend checking at least once the first two hours, then the first two business days, then once per week for the first two weeks.

Create a report to get people who are assigned to someone who’s not a sales rep:

Here’s a report to see leads who don’t have a State information matching one of the 50 US states.

We can Setup to view daily, weekly, monthly etc. You can start daily for the first week and if everything is working well, then move on to weekly.

Triage Lead Routing Bugs

When bugs happen, we’ve found most clients want to share a Salesforce link to the lead record. You will also need the lead’s email address and expected Lead Owner. Be sure that you also have Lead Owner history turned on in the Lead/Contact record history, otherwise it will be hard to see how things unfolded.

Most routing errors are due to Sales not informing Marketing Ops of territory and people changes. Occasionally an error may be cause on Marketo’s end because a smart list used CONTAINS instead of IS, or OR instead of AND. So be careful during setup!

Beachhead.io invites you to download the complete guide.

Achieving Sales-Marketing Alignment with Automation

December 1, 2015 By Josh Hill

Marketo and HubSpot and other marketing automation vendors have written a lot about the idea of “sales-marketing alignment” the last few years. So many people are discussing this that Google has 1.65 million results. HubSpot also call this approach “smarketing,” and while I don’t hear that term much, it has a comparable page count.

Much has been made of how important this alignment is for increasing pipeline and revenue, often up to 40%, according to Aberdeen. This Marketo chart emphasizes that Marketing is now responsible for a longer portion of the funnel, taking over the “farming” some salespeople used to do.

For those of us tasked with implementing such alignment using tools like Marketo, what is the best way to go about that? What can a marketing automation administrator do about sales-marketing alignment?

Marketing automation rockstars must facilitate sales and marketing alignment. It is very important to have alignment and that alignment has to be facilitated by someone, ideally you because you are going to implement the actual workflows. Even if your manager is tasked with helping to align the teams, you should offer your services and be clear about how you and your systems can help.

Of course, achieving this alignment is a team effort with your team, your manager, and sales leaders.

First, understand what Sales needs from Marketing. Ask them how you can make their lives better. Perhaps it is more and better data tools to append qualification fields. Perhaps Sales needs a ranking system that reflects their thinking and experiences. Or maybe the timing for notifications needs to change.

Second, help Sales understand how Marketing operates. Which systems do you have? What happens when a salesperson selects a certain option in the workflow? Why is that field so important? You may discover Sales is very happy to help if you can streamline that data collection.

Early wins are often at the lead hand-off process. For instance, rejecting a Lead could involve these steps:

Set Lead Status = Recycled
Set Recycled Reason = X
Change Owner to Recycling Queue
Set Lifecycle Stage = Recycled
Set Task = Recycled

That is a lot of clicking a salesperson doesn’t like. Is it possible to automate or streamline this data collection? Yes it is! Marketo and Salesforce would work hand-in-hand to do this work for you and for Sales:

Action in Marketo	Action in SFDC	Person
		Lead Status= Recycled
	Dependent Field: Recycled Reason	Choose Recycled Reason
On Lead Status=Recycled Set Lifecycle Stage=Recycled Change Owner to Recycled Queue	(Optional: Lead Owner changes in SFDC, not Marketo – this might be better for the Sales users’ experience).

This example is a simple one to automate and a good example of how you can ask Sales to help you uncover ways to reduce their workload while still achieving your goals. Other process areas to explore include:

When and how to create Opportunities.
How to manage Accounts and Contacts.
How to process renewals.
How to process cancellations.
How to process new sales faster (salespeople love this one).

Thus, you can use your systems process chart as your guide to optimization of both the systems as well as the people.

Providing the Right Leads at the Right Time

This will not be a lesson on lead scoring, I promise. There is a process to understanding how your particular sales team thinks about bad leads, good leads, and great leads. It is your job to operationalize that knowledge. Ranking leads can take a few different approaches, which I discussed in how to build a lead scoring system.

Survey the sales team on which behaviors and titles matter to them.
Have a focus group to discuss (this is the most common).
Track behaviors against Closed Won opportunities and work backwards. (Most scientific).

When Sales participates in this process, they are more likely to use it and be friendly about changes. Remember to setup a quarterly meeting with Sales to discuss the hand-off process and lead scoring.

Full Business Operational Alignment

Just doing sales and marketing alignment is not enough. Sales-marketing alignment is just one part of the puzzle. You should also seek discussions with other departments to make their projects become stellar with marketing automation. You have to go beyond the basics because the Web team, the Tech team, Communications, Finance, Customer Enablement, and Product Marketing are all impacted by the capabilities of Marketo.

If your company doesn’t have all of those teams, that’s fine. If your company has different names for them, that’s fine. Regardless, you will find the people, the team leaders that matter and show them the positive and negative impacts, your solutions, and how their work lives will be amazing after marketing automation.

When you go to these teams you need to sell them on the value of participating. Even if the other departments do not want you to directly access their data, be sure they are aware of what you are doing so they can warn you if their work impacts yours.

You will also need to assess each team’s situation:

Do they want to be involved?
What big initiatives are they undertaking that might affect Marketo?
What should we automate first?
Where are humans still required?
Which team or activity should be helped first?
What does the team need to know about Marketo?
What do I need to know about their systems and processes?
Does the team need training on Marketo?

Help everybody understand why you’re doing this and how it’s going to help their team or everyday work. Everybody loves what’s in it for them.

Possible areas to explore and add to your Marketing Automation Implementation Roadmap (MAIR) include:

In product triggers
Trial triggers and nurture
Renewal triggers
Cancellation triggers

All of which may require new Salesforce pieces and redevelopment of related content that Sales used to type out themselves. Just be careful that anything customer facing is written with their needs in mind, not your company’s needs.

Managing Alignment is a Regular Process

Alignment between sales and marketing is not a one-time meeting. It is a process with regular feedback sessions on things like workflow, scoring, and quality of leads. To facilitate those discussions, you will use your marketing automation and CRM to generate reports on the agreed metrics. You might look at:

Marketing contribution to pipeline
Revenue cycle conversion rates
Leads read by Sales.
Opportunities created this month
Net new leads this month.

A lot of relationships are quickly ruined with an automatic “no.” When changes to a nurturing campaign or process are requested, it is always good to first find out why the request is being made. Always work toward a solution with the requestor to ensure alignment. Make sure that, as guardian of the system, you ask people to think through the consequences of the change.

Aligning Marketing Automation to Business Process and Strategy Takes Time

This alignment will not happen all at once. It will happen as you add new teams to the mix and as you move along the Marketing Automation Maturity Model. Since the customer is the core of your business, it is absolutely vital that you consider the impact on the customer. Automation is fantastic for saving the company time and money, but is it designed to help the client in some way? Will automation of certain outbound emails be the best thing for the customer?

For example, if you have a nurturing campaign triggered by a subscription cancellation you should think about how the customer will react to this. If they were angry and cancelled in a pique, then sending out survey questions five minutes later is not going to be a good idea. Your nurturing flows must think like a salesperson who is “farming” the lead. Not too much and not too little communication is best for obtaining that meeting.

In some way, you could think of your marketing automation tool as an “automated sales farmer,” improving yields much the way combines did for actual farmers. Farmers are also known for their patience and this is what you must exercise when working with multiple teams to achieve your goals.

What else are you doing to achieve alignment with your marketing automation platform?

Image Credit: Flickr-alex012; Perkuto