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"Score your leads, nurture them and convert them to customers automatically.
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B2B (formerly Vtrenz) is the leading on-demand marketing automation solution forB2B marketers."
Source : Vtrenz Inc
B2B Demand Generation: How Successful Companies Are Improving Sales and Marketing Results
Demand Generation is also known as :
Lead Generation,
Sales Lead Generation,
Generation Marketing,
Demand Generation Systems,
Demand Generation Software,
New Demand Generation,
Demand Generation Vendors,
Easy Demand Generation,
Demand Generation Power,
Technology Demand Generation,
Demand Generation Budget,
Demand Generation Capabilities,
Demand Generation Programs,
Demand Generation Revolution,
Demand Generation Platform,
Demand Generation Plan,
Demand Generation Specialist,
Demand Generation Service,
Demand Generation Best Practices.
For decades, solution selling and marketing methodologies have utilized the principle of identifying pains or challenges associated with
business processes, and utilized those pains to create urgency and demand for products and services. With the foundational premise
that marketers need to drive more revenue while optimizing marketing investments, (and the fact that organizations who are excelling
at lead generation optimization have a higher percentage of their sales force making quota, convert more leads into real opportunities,
and have more wins with fewer no decisions1) successful business-to-business (B2B) companies have focused on four critical pillars needed
to optimize the lead-to-sale process.
Making PROFITABLE Lead Generation Investments
It may seem obvious that investments in marketing initiatives need to be proitable-but it is still not easy for many organizations to
understand the true impact of their marketing investments. According to Accenture, 68% of marketers say they are challenged by the
inability to measure the return of their marketing investments2. Measuring results is the key to proitable marketing so marketers not only
need to easily report on the traditional marketing metrics such as campaign response rates, but also need to have a clear and accurate
picture of how those efforts impact sales through the tight integration of marketing and sales data.
AUTOMATING Marketing Planning, Execution and Analysis
The internet has provided consumers new levels of control at all stages of the purchase process, changing the role of sales representatives
from facilitators of the sales cycle to supporters of the buying cycle. With this paradigm shift, marketing strategies have evolved from
push strategies, where marketers send information based on project timelines, to pull strategies, where prospects and customers receive
the information they want when they request it. Coupled with an organizations need to keep resources lean, the change in execution
strategy has necessitated the need for automation of every aspect of the marketing process including planning, execution and analysis.
INTEGRATING Communication Channels
With the ROI for email marketing reportedly $57.25 for each dollar spent3, it is tempting to implement a single channel marketing
strategy. However, a marketing plan built solely around email marketing, or any other individual communication channel, is as risky as
betting a retirement investment on a single stock. A well balanced marketing portfolio leverages a mix of online and ofline marketing
mediums and requires a single marketing platform for managing the different marketing tactics in order to maximize synergy amongst
the deployments. In addition to improved productivity, utilizing a single marketing platform integrated with a customer relationship
management (CRM) or sales force automation (SFA) solution will provide better visibility into both marketing and sales touch points and
interactions with prospects and customers. This enables a more customer-centric verses channel-centric approach to communication.
NURTURING Throughout the Prospect and Customer Lifecycle
Of inquiries generated by marketing, on average 70% are never acted on because they do not reach the right person or organization
at the right time4. With productivity of sales professionals declining, marketing is faced with the challenge of inding new ways to mine
inquiries in order to keep sales resources focused on those leads that are truly sales-ready, while cultivating and building relationships
with prospects with longer buying cycles. According to SiriusDecisions, signiicant work by marketing and inside sales is needed to create
a 'ield-ready' lead in today's environment. Therefore, top performing demand creators are lead developers, not lead generators.
While B2B demand generation strategies may have been dificult to implement in the past, organizations are now deploying marketing
automation technology in order to facilitate proitable, automated and integrated nurture programs resulting in an optimized lead generation
process. This report examines the six most common sales and marketing pains of businesses, and looks at the how to alleviate and address
these process challenges and business opportunities. As a supplement to this report, an interactive marketing campaign is available at
http://results.vtrenz.com/PAINCampaign, providing readers the opportunity to experience multi-channel B2B demand generation irst hand.
PAIN #1: Multiple Communication Challenges
Marketing PAIN
While marketing budgets have grown roughly 5.5% year-over-year since 20016, marketing executives are
pressured to maximize the results achieved with every marketing dollar spent. This corporate level pressure
creates the operational need to improve campaign response rates and optimize every marketing touch
point. Additionally, environmental factors including media fragmentation and the growth of clutter created
by competing information continue to work in opposition to the marketers' business objectives.
Marketing Recommendations
To cut through the clutter and optimize marketing budgets, marketing executives are looking to deploy
multi-channel marketing campaigns. With online and ofline communications tightly tied together and
choreographed to align with the buying cycle, organizations are increasing campaign results and converting
more inquiries to closed sales. In fact, according to the Winterberry Group6, 65% of organizations report
better ROI through the use of multi-channel campaigns; and companies deploying multi-channel campaigns
experience a 7-34% sales life.
Top integration strategies include:
- Introducing variable data direct mail pieces into event-triggered campaigns previously delivered via
email only.
- Driving responses from traditional marketing communications, such as trade publication ads and direct
mail, to campaign and prospect-speciic online landing pages.
- Leveraging web tracking information such as web page visits to trigger email, direct mail or call center
touch points.
- Deploying surveys with email campaigns in order increase customer insight.
When deploying a multi-channel marketing campaign, marketers should start simple, test and evolve the
campaign over time. When new communications and new channels are introduced into a campaign, key
metrics should be monitored and points of diminishing returns should be identiied. And while marketers
may have different skills sets, aligning the responsibilities of marketers by communication channels should
be avoided. Instead, marketers should be aligned by customer segments to ensure they are customercentric
programs instead of channel-centric programs.
Marketing Technology Requirements
While many marketing executives understand the value of deploying multi-channel marketing campaigns,
they do not have the technology or time needed to deploy and maximize results of multi-channel campaigns.
When evaluating solutions for managing multi-channel marketing campaigns, organizations should look
for a marketing automation platform that includes a centralized marketing database and an integrated
marketing toolset providing the capability to manage email, direct mail, surveys, landing pages and
web tracking. Utilizing a single platform in place of several point solutions will reduce overall technology
expenditures, increase productivity by minimizing the shufle of data between systems, and provide better
visibility into touch points with prospects and customers.
Web Analytics
Integrated with Email
Marketing Improves
Performance
The use of web analytics
to target email campaigns
improves revenue by nine
times more than the use of
broadcast mailings and
as much as 32 times more
improvement in net proit
over undifferentiated
broadcast campaigns.
PAIN #2: Managing and Segmenting Data
Marketing PAIN
While real-time multi-touch, multi-channel marketing strategies improve campaign response rates, business
buyers and consumers see nearly 30008 marketing messages every day. This is causing buyers to take
greater control over the buying cycle by demanding more relevant touch points that address their speciic
and individual needs, or exercising their right to not only tune-out, but opt-out of future communications.
Buyers are also more sophisticated with expectations they will be able to pull information in real-time and
access resources historically provided by sales representatives during the sales cycle.
Marketing Recommendations
Gone are the days when product-focused batch-and-blast communications could serve as the staple in
marketing communications plans. In order to earn and retain the privilege to communicate with constituents,
organizations have to shift their focus to include real-time customized communications based on customer
insight. These communications must not only be one-to-one relationship focused, but must be accessible at
the convenience of the audience versus the traditional delivery based on a marketer's planned project
timeline.
When looking to deine key audience segments, behavior information and proile information, such as
actions, need to be considered. Historically segmentations have been based on basic proile data, such as
company size, industry and geography; however, leveraging customer knowledge such as prospect needs,
actions, preferences and past behavior can have a signiicant impact on campaign and corporate level
results.
Marketing Technology Requirements
To facilitate real-time, relevant communications, marketing executives require sophisticated rules-based
marketing automation capabilities. This technology must be built around a centralized marketing database
and have the capability to store both proile data and marketing activity history, such as clicks within
emails, website page visits, and survey submissions. Beyond capturing the data, marketers need the ability
to easily segment data in order to build the business logic needed to trigger communications and deploy
dynamic and conditional content blocks based on information stored in the database. Traditionally data
segmentation has been a function performed by information technology professionals but marketing
automation tools provide intuitive list building capabilities that can be used by the typical line of business
marketing manager.
When evaluating rules-based marketing automation capabilities, organizations should look for a
marketing automation platform that is multi-channel, multi-track and multi-touch, giving marketers the
ability to complement online messaging with ofline messages delivered via direct mail, a call center or
sales representative. These systems are also known for their single touches. Instead, organizations need to
automate multiple touch points throughout the irst 30 to 60 days after capturing contact information, in
order to increase brand recall and the likelihood of engaging prospects early in the buying cycle.
Despite Additional
Campaign Costs,
Relevant Campaigns
can Increase Net
Proits
Crafting highly relevant
email messages can
generate nine times more
improvement in revenue
and as much as 32 times
more improvement in net
proit over undifferentiated
broadcast campaigns.
PAIN #3: Demand Genera
Marketing PAIN
While business objectives may vary across industries and size of organization, two objectives for marketing
executives tend to be consistent. First, marketing executives are challenged with the strategic initiative of
identifying new and growing existing revenue streams. And second, marketing executives are charged with
solidifying marketing position and ultimately growing market share. Resulting from these two objectives is
the number one challenge for business success-generating qualified leads.
Marketers strive to meet business objectives by generating more leads, but with sales productivity at an
all time low. Sales representatives are required to make more calls to set an appointment, participate in
more meetings to close a deal, and can manage less client meetings in a day. Therefore, the approach of
generating more leads has been replaced by the challenge of improving lead quality.
Marketing Recommendations
While all stages of the lead-to-sale funnel likely have room for improvement. The area proven to have
the greatest impact is the top of the sales funnel. Therefore, organizations looking to increase customer
acquisition need to focus on optimizing demand generation processes.
The most recommended strategy has been coined as 'precision marketing'. As deined by the Aberdeen
Group, precision marketing is driving continuous performance improvement through the use of
personalization, segmentation, analytics, rules-based interactions, customer proitability scoring, decisiontrees
and/or closed-loop marketing planning and execution processes. By deploying best in class precision
marketing techniques, organizations enjoy annual performance rates that are signiicantly higher than
other benchmarked groups not only in customer acquisition, but also customer retention.
The top precision marketing strategies practiced by best in class organizations include:
- Integration and alignment of sales and marketing goals and objectives
- Automation of sales and marketing processes, closing the gap between the two groups
- Analysis of marketing and sales performance, providing complete ROI reporting
Marketing Technology Requirements
By improving demand generation processes, organizations can produce more qualiied leads. Marketing
automation solutions facilitate this process by providing a full suite of marketing functionality in one toolset. In
addition to a centralized marketing database and integrated toolset for building and deploying campaign
resources across multiple mediums, marketing automation solutions provide the rules-based marketing
capabilities, automated lead scoring, dynamic lead routing and real-time analytics necessary to optimize
demand creation and qualiication efforts. While there are several marketing automation solutions on the
market today, ranging from enterprise marketing management applications to those designed for small
and mid-sized organizations, ease of use, speed of deployment, best practice expertise of professional
services and total cost of ownership are key requirements for a technology solution in which speed to
beneit are important.
Superior Lead
Generation Practices
Increase Response
Rates
According to
SiriusDecisions,
organizations with
superior lead generation
results achieve an
average response rate
to marketing campaigns
of 4.87%, nearly 58
percent higher than other
organizations.
PAIN #4:Lead Routing
Marketing PAIN
The saga of struggles between sales and marketing has been well documented. However, chief marketing
oficers continue to receive downward pressure from senior executives and horizontal pressure for chief sales
oficers to more effectively meet the needs of the sales organizations. With sales productivity declining,
marketers need to take on greater levels of accountability throughout the entire sales cycle, whereas
in the past the role was simply to generate inquiries. In addition to taking on greater accountability,
chief marketing executives are challenged with making sure sales-ready leads are in the hands of sales
representatives quickly.
Marketing Recommendations
When sales professionals wait too long to call a prospect, the ire related to the problem they were trying
to solve has been put out-at least for the time being. Organizations looking to improve sales numbers
need to ensure sales-ready leads are automatically routed to the right sales representative for follow-up.
To accomplish this, a common set of business logic needs to be applied to deine sales-ready, all parties
need to agree on the deinition, lead routing rules need to be standardized, and processes need to be
automated.
Many organizations use budget, authority, needs, timeframe for purchase and size of opportunity (BANTS)
to determine lead qualiication criteria and the follow-up methodology. But BANTS does not necessarily
consider prospect behavior, which is often a much stronger predictor of qualiication status. For example,
someone visiting a company website three times in the last week is probably more interested than someone
with the title of CEO downloading a whitepaper. Therefore, leverage prospect needs, preferences and
behavior in addition to BANTS as criteria for deining sales-ready.
To fully maximize results, marketing needs visibility into sales interaction with leads and vice versa. By
integrating a demand generation system with your existing CRM framework, qualiied leads can easily be
passed to sales, complete with information needed to start a meaningful dialog based on their marketing
interactions. In addition, the disposition of opportunities can also be tracked so marketing can send relevant
messaging based on the stage of the buying cycle. Companies that have achieved marketing and sales
alignment are growing 5.4% faster, closing 38% more proposals, and churning 36% fewer customers.
Marketing Technology Requirements
There are four requirements of a marketing automation solution necessary to ensure sales-ready leads
are eficiently passed to the sales team for timely follow-up. First, in order to determine if the lead is
sales-ready, the solution needs a rules-engine in which business logic can be stored to ilter prospects
based on proile or behavior data. Second, using that business logic, the solution needs to be able to
dynamically route leads to the right sales representative at a deined frequency. Third, if a CRM solution is
used, integration between the two solutions can help to maximize productivity of the sales representative.
And inally, with integration, marketing activity history including web site visits, interactions with emails,
microsites and surveys and other campaign participation information needs to be shared.
Closed-Loop
Marketing Processes
Increase Revenues
Companies that adopt a
life-cycle, 'closed-loop'
marketing practice are three
times more likely to see
greater than 50% ROMI.
PAIN #5:Prospect Nurturing
Marketing PAIN
Marketing executives are frequently frustrated with the lack of disciplined lead follow-up applied by sales
teams. In order to develop a repeatable and reliable sales process, sales executives need to continually
educate sales team members to improve performance and productivity. At the same time marketing
executives need to take a hard look at their approach to lead generation and distribution. With scrutiny
from c-level executives to close more sales generated by marketing initiatives, marketing executives must
take on additional responsibility and accountability throughout the lead-to-sale process. Therefore, the
marketer's role is shifting from pure lead generation to one of lead development.
Marketing Recommendations
In order to eliminate the lead waste created by sales and maximize the number of closed sales tied
directly to marketing campaigns, marketing needs to work closely with sales to deine sales-ready and set
expectations on the roles each party will play throughout the prospects' buying cycle.
Once the lead qualiication rules are deined, sales can effectively manage the relationship with qualiied
leads while marketers take on the task of nurturing warm leads with segmented communications until they
meet the qualiication rules at a later point in time.
At key points in the relationship, such as when an inquiry is irst captured, nurturing can be done with rulesbased
marketing strategies derived from customer intelligence. At other points in the relationship, periodic
communications such as newsletters with dynamic content may be more cost-effective to deploy.
Marketing Technology Requirements
In order to maximize the return on marketing investment through lead cultivation initiatives, automation
of processes is critical. This starts with the ability to automate the process of scoring leads and routing
qualiied leads to the right sales representative for follow-up, as well as the ability to automatically
place warm leads into rules-based marketing campaigns. Therefore a multi-channel, multi-track, multitouch
rules-based engine is needed to facilitate the nurture campaigns without placing a daily burden on
the marketing team. Because organizations need the lexibility to deploy, modify or ine tune cultivation
campaigns, solutions need to be both easy for the line of business marketing manager to use, but also need
to be cost effective to deploy.
Aligning
Communications with
Buying Decisions
Increases Relevance,
Response and
Revenue
According to Forrester
Research, increasing
relevance, response, and
revenue can all be achieved
by aligning the content
and timing of marketing
messages with customer
needs and buying decisions.
A key to success is program
automation.
PAIN #6:Measuring and Analyzing Marketing Initiative
Marketing PAIN
Chief marketing executives have struggled to secure the same level of credibility at the executive round
table as others within the organization because the numbers to justify their decisions and investments have
been dificult to provide. Part of the problem, according to Accenture2, is that marketing has traditionally
been dependent on other functions to do its job. It relies largely on the information technology (IT)
department to manage and manipulate customer data, and on the sales and customer service functions
to provide feedback on how well a particular program worked. As a result, marketing often inds that
while it can indicate how much a particular campaign cost, it cannot accurately account for the revenue
generated by the campaign-which makes determining the effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) of
the campaign virtually impossible.
In order to gain credibility and secure budget and resources, both when sales are hot and when sales
are slow, marketing executives need to demonstrate accountability by implementing the resources and
technology needed to produce a repeatable and measurable marketing process. Delivering reports is
the starting point for illustrating value, but marketing professionals also require proof that resources and
budgets are optimally allocated in order to drive the best return on their marketing investments.
Marketing Recommendations
According to MarketingProfs, measuring marketing effectiveness through quantiiable, insightful and useful
benchmarks, gives marketers the information needed to focus efforts and resources on what best builds the
business and improves ROI.18 To illustrate accountability, marketing executives need to implement marketing
automation technology that provides a spectrum of analysis options ranging from individual campaign
reports to overall marketing ROI. The basis of proving results begins with campaign-level reporting, but
must go beyond traditional marketing metrics like impressions and response rates. Marketers need to
monitor the disposition of leads at each stage of the marketing and sales process in order to deliver true
ROI reporting so intelligent decisions can be made regarding what messages and marketing programs are
most effective, so they can be expanded, and which are not, so they can be modiied or cancelled.
Marketing executives also need to deine and track corporate level metrics such as customer acquisition
rates, customer retention rates, average customer lifetime value and average customer proitability. In
addition, the impact that marketing has on company revenue needs to be tracked, in an effort to justify
budget and resources.
Marketing Technology Requirements
To effectively measure and analyze marketing initiatives, marketing automation solutions need to provide
real-time, campaign-level reporting with drill down capabilities to the individual record level. In addition
to the campaign reporting provided directly within the marketing automation solution, integration with a
CRM or SFA solution provides a complete spectrum of campaign reporting capabilities. With marketing
automation tied to the CRM system, campaign effectiveness can be measured at each step in the buying
cycle helping to identify where improvements need to be made.
Marketing Analytics
Transforms Direct
Marketing from
Blind Acquisition to
Intelligent Retention
The advantage of
marketing analytics is
that it allows companies
to focus their spending
on the areas of greatest
return and fundamentally
shifts the direct marketing
industry away from
"blind" acquisition toward
"intelligent" retention and
value expansion.19
Demand Generation Campaign Overview
As a supplement to this report, an interactive marketing campaign is available at http://results.vtrenz.com/PAINCampaign, providing
readers the opportunity to experience B2B demand generation marketing irst hand. As illustrated in the diagram below, participants will
be requested to identify their biggest marketing pain, and will receive nurture communications via different communication channels over
the period of 14 days. The campaign is fully automated utilizing the Vtrenz iMarketing Automation platform.
Demand Generation Technology Requirements
- Centralized Marketing Database - aggregating data with the ability to
integrate with CRM systems
- Rule-Based Marketing Engine - driving subsequent communications based on
previous interactions
- Lead Scoring with Dynamic Routing - automatically delivering qualiied leads
to the appropriate sales professional
- Integrated Marketing Toolset - manage email, direct mail, web tracking,
telesales, landing pages and survey forms with one tool
- Marketing and Sales Reporting - measuring the progress of leads, ROI and
effectiveness of the marketing mix
- Ease of Use - balancing business requirements with pragmatic feature sets that
can be managed by a line of business user
- Demonstrated Value - combining a low total cost of ownership with proven
return on investment
- Marketing Expertise - supporting subject matter expertise and best practices
illustrated at all levels of vendor contact
- Speed to Beneit - managing cost and time of solution deployment in order to
gain a quick return on investment
- CRM Integration - create a 360 degree view of the customer by sharing data
across the organization
About Vtrenz', Inc.
Vtrenz, the leading provider of on-demand marketing automation solutions, empowers organizations of all sizes to generate demand for their
products and services, close more sales and measure the impact of their marketing activities. Vtrenz' integrated marketing automation platform,
iMarketing Automation, allows marketers to create, execute and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns, score and route qualiied leads
to sales professionals and analyze marketing results through robust campaign analytics. Customers have access to additional services including
world-class support, guidance from experienced marketing consultants, and live online training classes. For additional information on Vtrenz, go
to www.vtrenz.com.
References
- "Optimizing Lead Generation: What's the Payback," CSO Insights, 2006
- "Insight Driven Marketing," Accenture, 2001
- "DMA's Power of Direct Economic-Impact Study," Direct Marketing Association, 2006
- "Re-engineering Lead Management," Gartner, 2002
- "Best Practices in Strategic Lead Development and Nurturing," SiriusDecisions, April 2006
- "Tracking the Trends, A comparison of Above-the-Line & Below-the-Line Expenditure Trends," Winterberry Group, 2006
- "The ROI of Email Relevance," Jupiter Research, 2005
- "Statistical Fact Book 2000", Direct Marketing Association, 2000
- "Segmentation Versus Personas: Where Should B2B Marketers Start," Forrester Research, 2006
- "The ROI of E-mail Relevance," Jupiter Research, May 2005
- "The Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing", John Coe, 2003
- "Best Practices in Strategic Lead Development and Nurturing," Sirius Decision, 2006
- "Precision Marketing Benchmark Report," Aberdeen Group, 2006
- "Precision Marketing Benchmark Report," Aberdeen Group, 2006
- "Marketing ROI in 2007-Moving Into the New Era of Marketing." MarketingProfs, 2006
- "The CMO's Strategic Agenda Series: Creating a Customer-Centric Marketing Orgainziation," Aberdeen Group, 2006
- "Best Practices: Case Studies in Event Triggered Marketing," Forrester Research, 2005
- "Five Fundamentals for Useful Marketing Metrics", MarketingProfs, 2004
- "Marketing Analytics to the Rescue: The Next Big Thing?", DM Direct Special Report, 2003
contents
- Introduction
- Multiple Communication Challenges
- Managing and Segmenting Data
- Demand Generation
- Lead Routing
- Prospect Nurturing
- Measuring and Analyzing
- Conclusion
- References