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How to Learn Demand Generation in the Real Time Era

January 9, 2013 By Josh Hill

studying-english106-flickrWhen I first went from Sales to Marketing in 2008, demand generation was still a phrase limited to forward thinkers.  We were just beginning the journey into crossing the sales-marketing divide and automation systems were only just leaving the early adopter phase in the SMB space. So I had to learn demand generation for B2B firms from my colleagues and the bloggers leading the charge.

I found few free resources initially and thought it would be great to have a textbook for B2B marketing and demand generation, since none of my marketing courses prepared me for reality. Sure, we spoke about the 4Ps and innovation processes, but never about AB testing, content marketing, or differences between B2B and B2C. Then I saw Marketing Sherpa largely owned that space, clearly filling much of the gap—for a fee. Anne Holland saw the same gap in information I did. After a few years, I still believe we lack a comprehensive, practical guide to B2B marketing.

Eventually I came across Marketo, Eloqua, and David Meerman Scott’s blogs and writings. I found helpful guides, musings, case studies, and ideas for taking content I already had and making it work harder so I didn’t have to. From Marketo and Eloqua, I learned of the systems I had dreamed of and how I could learn more about my leads before anyone even called them. From David Meerman Scott, I learned what content marketing really meant, how I could use it, and what was possible with a real time mindset. Putting this into practice is my job.

The Real Time Marketing World is Your School

There is no textbook, course, or review of these topics. Sure, marketing is rapidly changing, so there shouldn’t be a central authority because that goes against the real time, decentralized nature of the tools we now have. I get that. But how about a near real time, curated course which is updated every 4-6 months? Such a program would allow those new to B2B marketing to establish a foundation in the field before representing your company? Either way, to learn demand generation, you need to treat the world as your school.

Learn demand generation and marketing automation from practitioners, not a textbook. – Click to Tweet.

To that end, I complied a list of possible materials, many of which can be had for free at the library or online.

1. HubSpot’s Blog

I may not use HubSpot’s system, but I do use their blog. Their torrent of useful content is my go to source for understanding how to use the latest sharing tools or even learning SEO/SEM. Because of their close relationship with Google, they are the best place to find out about new features or changes I can make use of.

The other reason to subscribe to the RSS and their Twitter is to stay aware of their analyses of real time marketing. HubSpot will detail aggregate information on email subject lines, twitter, SEO, and landing pages from their 6,000 customers. Their in-house wizard, Dan Zarella, monitors social network data with the best insights—and it’s all free of charge.

2. David Meerman Scott’s Blog

I’ve been reading David’s blog since 2010 and wish I had found it earlier. His insight is real and he actively practices what he preaches. I had the pleasure of meeting David after the release of Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which nicely encapsulated their open source philosophy for the 21st Century.

3. Harvard Business Review’s Blog Feed

Sometimes I love this feed, sometimes I hate it. You have to monitor it for what’s relevant to you and it’s not always easy to filter out the wheat from the chaff. The blog is a bit different because you can glean summaries of key articles or hear from non-HBS thought leaders who often share unique insights here instead of their own blogs.

4. Real Time Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott

David continues his analysis and case studies of how to use the internet to act immediately—and appropriately—to customers, prospects, and media.

5. Newsjacking by David Meerman Scott

David goes into detail of how to take advantage of the 24 hour news cycle in the best way possible.

6. Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics & Analytics

For those new to marketing metrics, this is a helpful guide to understanding what can be measured and how it can be measured.

7. Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring

Despite my recent anti-lead scoring post, I believe Marketo’s Guide to be the best explanation for developing your own model. If only they also told you how to program lead scoring in Marketo, but I took care of that.

8. InsideSales/MIT Lead Timing Survey 2011

This critical survey confirmed what great sales people already know: the best time to call a lead back is immediately. If I were running a sales team, I would run it like Marketo or HubSpot—you call someone back in under 1 hour or the Service Level Agreement warning bells start to go off. Any sales person who believes it is ok to wait until tomorrow or until they are “less busy” should be fired immediately.

My own success in sales came from being responsive to clients and prospects, returning emails and calls immediately, even if just to acknowledge the receipt. I won a $150,000 deal with almost no work because I called a prospect 5 minutes after he sent an inquiry email. It works. Do it.

9. HubSpot’s Science of Timing (Dan Zarella)

Dan puts on this webinar periodically to analyze email time of day and day of week data from HubSpot’s customers. (Adestra also did a similar study). This is helpful information to use when starting out because he demolishes myths about the Tues-Thursday and morning-afternoon dilemma. Ultimately, you have to do your own analysis for your own audience.

10. HubSpot’s Guides

HubSpot publishes Guides to social media, email, landing pages, SEO, and SEM to help their clients, as well as establish their brand on the internet. They taught me many things about the practical nature of marketing in the real time era, and they can help you too.

11. Buyer Persona Institute

You can always learn about Personas from HubSpot, David Meerman Scott, or a host of other marketers, but Adele Revella is the leader of this facet of marketing. I see very few firms successfully implementing a Persona program and I am ashamed to admit I haven’t done much work on it for my own business. It’s worth it and it does simplify marketing so you can churn out relevant content faster.

12. The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

Chris writes about small entrepreneurs who started with a very small investment, took action, and were successful. Many of the case studies talk about the practical nature of operating an internet business.

13. Tribes by Seth Godin

A great book on how to find and lead a community of likeminded people now that you can find them on the internet.

14. Poke the Box by Seth Godin

Another provocative book to get you moving out of the doldrums of the comfort zone where “That’s the way it’s been done,” is banished.

15. Which Test Won by Anne Holland

A fun daily site for landing page AB tests with over 300 case studies and other detailed help for marketers. The full service is relatively low cost, although I often head to HubSpot for ideas instead.

16. Marketing Sherpa

The company Anne Holland founded and sold is still a leading source of B2B benchmarking data by industry. Marketing Sherpa offers a limited selection of free content and a wealth of practical information.

With the rapid pace of business and stream of new tools, a comprehensive guide to demand generation would certainly be out of date in a short period, unless it were a blog–a guide continually updated each day. Starting with the content above should give anyone a good foundation to get started in B2B marketing.

Do you have your favorite blogs or books you would add to this? Tell us below!

And remember to sign up for blog updates via email.

Image: English106, flickr

Filed Under: Demand Generation

A Marketo Filter and Flow Actions Text Notation Method

January 7, 2013 By Josh Hill

Marketo Flow Step Notation

One thing I noticed on the Marketo Community is how hard it is to explain how to write out a Smart List using filters just using alphanumerics. Images explain what is going on so much better because Marketo is such a visual tool. Yet, there is no agreed notation method for writing out a Flow Step or Smart List Filter using just text.

Here’s what I suggest we do.

Filters or Triggers are written in Title Case: (if possible use Courier or Preformatted to show this just like a snippet of code).

Fills Out Form
Filled Out Form
Data Value Changes

Smart List Trigger Notation

Operators are shown in ALL CAPS such as IN, OR, AND, IS NOT EMPTY.

Filter Values are shown in double quotes “” to make it clear these are variables to adjust.

Filled Out Form IS NOT "Unsubscribe"
Visits Web Page CONTAINS "Careers; Career; Job" AT LEAST "2" times
Member of Smart List IN "Personal Email Domains"

Note the use of the semi-colon to denote the use of multiple values for a filter instead of OR since this is how Marketo shows it on the workspace.

Marketo Visits Web Page Notation

A Trigger like Data Value Changes requires an Attribute (field) before further filtering. This would be denoted by a colon after the Trigger Name and “with” to start the additional Constraints. You could also use this for similar Flow Steps.

Data Value Changes: Email Invalid with New Value IS "True"

Choices in Flow Steps can be denoted in a similar fashion, adding “then” between the condition and the change you want to make.

Change Data Value:
Choice 1: If Email Invalid IS "True" then New Value IS "False"
Choice 2: If Member of Smart List IN "Personal Email Domain" then New Value IS "False"
Default Choice: Do Nothing

Marketo Flow Step Notation

Showing Smart List Rule Logic such as ALL, ANY, or Advanced can be accomplished by using those operators before the Smart List or showing the order like Marketo does, using “1, 2, 3…” before each filter, then showing the logic as

(1 or 2) and (3 or 4)

Finally, an entire Smart Campaign should be written as:

Campaign: Email Revalidate
If Data Value Changes: Email Invalid with New Value IS "True"
Then Change Data Value: Email Invalid to New Value IS "False"
Schedule: Qualification Rule=Every Time and Recurrence: Daily at 10:00 AM

I like this method because it is clear how to go back to Marketo to select the matching Trigger, Filter, Constraints, Operators, and Values. I use a similar format in the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo with the use of font changes. The chief advantage of the method in this post is you can use it on the Marketo Community, an Email, or anywhere else without the need for fancy text editors.

 

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

My Big Problem with Lead Scoring

January 2, 2013 By Josh Hill

Happy New Year to my Marketo friends!

Unsubscribe Lead Scoring TriggerSince I released my Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Lead Scoring, I have received great comments from the community. Thank you. But something’s been eating at me about Lead Scoring. In the past month, I have worked with a few of you on lead scoring issues. Most of the work stems from scoring models which just don’t seem to work. Initially it seemed that the audience or Sales had changed. Now I think it is the model was wrong from the beginning and it only became clear as it broke down. In fact, I believe Lead Scoring is entirely misleading to salespeople and to marketers.

Lead Scoring Does Not Prioritize Leads Well

Lead Scoring is touted as a way to help Sales prioritize leads, but is often used by Marketing to pre-qualify leads with the assumption that higher scores equals higher priority. I do not think that is logical because the sales process is more complex than that. Each salesperson has his own prioritization system based on his approach to entering an Account. Sure, it’s roughly the same: find champions, supporters, and decision makers. Sometimes it’s better to build up support before speaking to the decision maker; sometimes it’s the decision maker’s call from the start. Marketing can’t know this in advance. As Sirius Decisions pointed out, most people score C-suite at +20 (or higher), but how often does your salesperson work directly with CXOs? Are you sure the busiest person is a priority on the first call?

Marketing’s role is to find leads who are in the target audience and who have indicated some level of interest in the service. In the past few years, vendors and consultants have told marketers that we need to figure out the buying stage and offer content at the right times to leads who poke around our site looking for possible solutions to their problems. That seems like a good set of activities to keep us employed. As a marketer you then track those interactions to determine when a salesperson should call. Call too early and you risk irritating the lead and the sales person who will forget about the lead until it is too late; call too late, and the opportunity is missed.

What a salesperson wants is a pre-packaged deal ready to sign by the end of the day without leaving their home office. Yeah, not happening these days.

What can happen is placing the right leads in front of the salesperson at the right time. The right lead may be a Supporter, Champion, or Decision Maker. But you should let the salesperson decide which one they need to get in touch with and when. Thus, assigning points to titles like “CEO” or “Vice President of Research” is not going to tell the salesperson if that lead is “sales ready” or even the right person to call today. You should show Sales leads who are possible Supporters, Champions, or Decision Makers. Those are people in your Target Audience and who have certain behaviors. That is your group of MQLs. The priority to call is up to the sales person.

Lead Scoring is Unnecessary for Marketing Qualification

Imagine a scoring system where the threshold is 30 points. A Form Fill Out is +10, a Visited Page is +1 and +5 for Multiple Web Page Visits, and a Clicks Link in Email is +2. So it’s pretty easy to hit 30 points after just 1 email CTA since it often sparks a series of actions.

+10 for Form
+2 for Click
+1 +1 for Visits 2 pages
+5 for Multiple pages (a lead will invariably hit up other pages)

Usually two of these are enough to reach a threshold. This problem began to expose itself with Lead Nurturing where we found out it did take 1 or 2 emails to trigger the threshold and then reassign a lead to a sales person.

To me, advancing a lead after two Fill Outs seems too soon unless it is a specific Form, such as Call Me Now. Do we know from the point value or from 2 forms that this person is ready for a sales call? I doubt it. The difficulty with Scoring is it masks the actions taken by a Lead with numbers, abstracting it away from the real intent behind those behaviors. The same is true for the demographic score: if you already know the target audience and have the Smart Lists, why waste time scoring? They are in the audience or they are not! You probably set your MQL flow to say something like

If Lead Score > 30 AND Member of Smart List IN "Target Audience"
Then Sync to SFDC with "Auto-Assignment Rules"

So you are already filtering by Demographics, therefore, don’t duplicate your efforts by adding Lead Scores here.

Replace Behavior Scoring with Behavior Qualification

You can also forget behavioral scoring. It’s pointless. Why abstract the actions with numbers? Use Behavior Qualification instead. This method helps you select the behaviors most likely to get the sales person to call the Lead. If you can, go one step further to select behaviors most associated with a Closed/Won Opportunity.

Let’s examine a possible scenario: If it takes roughly 2 Form Fill Outs for a lead to be worthy of a sales person, then just set a campaign to say:

Fills Out Form IS NOT "Unsubscribe" AT LEAST 2 Times AND Member of List IN "Target Audience"

This Smart List achieves the same thing as scoring each Form Fill Out at +15 and 5 Visits Web Page at +1 or any rough combination of other scores. The flow is also clear and honest about what it does.

Your trigger list could go deeper to specific page and form combinations, specific web visits, and email clicks. You are already doing this with scoring, with a secondary layer of unneeded logic which will tend to mask the behaviors you want to see from the Lead.

What about negative behaviors?

If you look carefully at many firms’ negative behavior list, the only truly negative “behavior” is to be a Competitor or a Student. Those people get excluded immediately through demographics. The next behavior is to Unsubscribe, yet I rarely see a system which strongly deprecates this behavior. And Unsubscribing may not even be all that bad as long as the lead takes other actions you want. Instead, create a Smart List to segment out Unsubscribers and Career Page Visitors from your MQL if you prefer. You still don’t need points here.

There is a better way to handle Marketing Qualification: Behavior Qualification

The better way is to take what you learned from your Sales Survey to establish a series of Smart Lists or a set of triggers around the buying process. This new method is called Behavior Qualification. Once you’ve set clear MQL thresholds based on the Target Audience Smart List and behaviors, you might go even further into the buying process stages, refining that list of behaviors to better time that call from Sales.

If you’ve gone through a Lead Scoring Survey process as I wrote about in the Lead Scoring Chapter of the Guide, then you are ready to implement Behavior and Demographic Qualification for your MQL process.

Marketo Sales Insight StartMarketo Sales Insight Flame for steep increases in Lead scoringYou can still implement Lead Scoring to drive Marketo Sales Insight’s Stars and Flams, but my experience has been Sales teams often ignore these visual cues.

Is anyone using a system like this, without scores? Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Images: Josh Hill and Marketo

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

Naming and Organization in Marketo

December 18, 2012 By Josh Hill

Marketo Program Numbering
Marketo Program Numbering
A step by step naming scheme

Great, you purchased a Marketo License! Now you are on your way toward becoming a Rockstar.

Rockstars, believe it or not, are organized. They leave nothing to chance and they practice disciplined rocking, er, Marketing. Setting up Marketo to function well should be one of your first actions before using the system for your big marketing push.

A few minutes of thought and careful setup will save you hours and days later.

Key Tip: Choose a Consistent Naming Formula

One of the first things Marketo suggests to new users is to devise a naming scheme for your various programs and assets. I agree. I have seen several options over the years and recommend a few systems depending on your need or area of Marketo. Learn more about naming and organizing Marketo with my full guide.

Rule 1: Keep the name clear and memorable so if you ever leave the firm, others can start where you left off.

Rule 2: Number steps in a program so it is easy to see how leads should progress.

Naming is also important because it can help you find assets while you set up filters or triggers. In particular, the creation of Smart List reports and Reports becomes much easier when you can use a filter like

Visited Web Page Web Page CONTAINS “webinar”

instead of finding every single webinar you want to include. While Marketo does allow searching of names of assets, the functionality is limited because it works best on the first few letters or numbers (which is why dates are so important). You can use dates like

YYYY MM DD My Big Event Program
YYYYMMDD My Campaign Name

Warning! Avoid Use of Underscores

I’ve found underscores unnecessary. Underscores also confuse the Marketo search function such that My_Program_Name cannot be found unless you actually type in “My_” at a minimum, instead of “My.”

More Best Practices

  • The Marketo Expert’s Guide to Advance Program Templates
  • Responsive Marketo Landing Page Template

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

DKIM, SPF, and CNAME Setup for Marketo

December 12, 2012 By Josh Hill

DNS Zone Editor

DNS Zone EditorI’d like to help all the new Marketo customers with a critical step during the implementation phase: DKIM, SPF, and CNAME setup. It’s simple to do – if you know what it is you need to do.

Contact your IT, Web Team, or Network Admin to do these steps!

Email Reputation and Authentication: Why you need DKIM and SPF

As explained in the Email Reputation Chapter, DKIM and SPF are two DNS authentication methods used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and hosts of other email providers as a first check for spam or spoofed email senders. Emails which fail SPF or DKIM checks are more likely to end up in the Spam box.

Why?

All DKIM and SPF records do is tell the internet (and the target email server) that you said it is ok for Marketo to send email on your behalf. It’s like a proxy on your Outlook Calendar. If this permission is missing from an email Marketo sends on your behalf, other servers will be skeptical it’s really from you.

CNAME and SubDomains Also Help Trust

When you first discussed marketing automation, you probably found out you could host your own landing pages on the new system. Your demo probably included a landing page demo where you saw “http://go.mydemo.com/page.html” and said “Wow, let’s have our own URL like that!”

And you can. In the instructions below, I go through how to select a sub-domain for your business as well as how to choose a Tracking Sub-Domain so your email links don’t look sketchy.

Detailed Instructions on Setup of DKIM, SPF, and CNAME for Marketers

What can you do right now? Take a look at these instructions to do it yourself or pass these to the IT guys to take care of it for you. It’s fast, easy, and builds trust with your audience.

Sub-Domain and Email DNS Setup in Marketo

Stay in touch and keep up with the Marketo Guide! Sign up for email updates.

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

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