Hey all,

Just want to let you know that we have a new team that provides marketing automation to large enterprises.

This move is meant to continue to build on our specialization in marketing automation. What we found in our work with smaller companies is that even large enterprises often have a need for marketing automation – which makes sense as only about 10% of companies use marketing automation. These larger enterprises (in the $100 million to 1 billion range) have very specialized needs and are best served by the creation of an appropriate specialist team.

If you happen to be one of these companies, drop me a line and I will match you with the appropriate team:
rajiv [at] chaistartup [dot] com

There are 5 primary ways that marketing automation helps companies grow.

1. Leads are better qualified so your salesforce can be 20% more productive – Marketing automation provides a complex scoring system similar to credit scoring, called lead scoring. Using lead scoring, only the prospects that are really sales-ready make it to sales (traditionally sales would handle all prospects).

2. Your sales team has more information so they can close 10% more deals – They can see if a prospect visited a certain web page, clicked on a link, downloaded a whitepaper, filled out a form – all in one place. With all this information the sales person is better equipped to judge a prospect.

3. Your marketing database is 30% more productive with automated lead nurturing – Automated lead nurturing means you are consistently communicating will prospects in your database. The system can respond to individual prospect behaviors and send that person a communication at the right time.

4. Your marketing campaigns are 15% more effective because you can blend channels – when you build your campaigns using marketing automation, your trigger for a prospect response can be the appropriate channel (email, outbound call, etc.).

5. Online campaigns are 15% more effective with separate web pages for each campaign – Marketing automation brings control of web page creation to your marketing team. They can quickly create web pages for each campaign without relying on the IT folks.

We are in the process of launching a new product that includes sales (via a sales person I am partnered with) and automated marketing. I think clients will like it because it includes the pounding-the-pavement, as well as heavy-duty marketing automation to get sales-qualified leads to the sales person.

The best way that I have seen to grow businesses is for marketing and sales to generate sales transactions together using an efficient mix of technology and human intervention. And with my most recent client work I even have proof of this that I can demonstrate. Many companies that I find are missing the marketing piece, the sales piece or just can’t get the two to work together so getting access to a complete working system will be hard to beat.

Last week I was appointed to the Conservation Advisory Council (CAC) for my area, a part-time volunteer role that I am excited about. I joined 4 others and our team is tasked with recommending ways to conserve the environment in our area.

A brief intervention that can change your trajectory for the whole year. I take a look at your current activities and recommend the best courses of action going forward. I will give you concrete strategy and tactics that make sense for you, based on your situation. You can then execute with your team if you want. If you need help I will recommend partners to help you out (there are 7 approved partners I work with). The project typically takes 2 weeks. Then I move on to the next company. Therefore I share everything I can with you in 2 weeks so you can be successful.

This includes:
- Audit of your technical marketing architecture (you need to get this right)
- Audit of significant sales and marketing spend (this alone should pay for the whole project)
- Audit of your search engine marketing (including third-party SEO audit)
- Audit of sales and marketing process (including your lead scoring if you have it)
- Audit of email marketing (includes a portfolio of campaign samples)
- Marketing automation analysis (this is a core component of your infrastructure like CRM)
- Audit of tools
- Information dump for your team
- Vendor recommendations
- Comparable recommendations (what others are doing that works)
- Starting point for lead scoring model (will need to be refined)
- Strategy document
- Tactical specifications (so your people know exactly what to execute)

Contact me if you are interested.

By now most technology marketers realize that activities should produce a return, however, I think in many cases company leadership is not good at valuing marketing assets.

So let’s say you are a business owner and you hire someone so sell a new line of business. You hire a person to make sales and this person generates all the leads by outbound calls and emails. I will assume here that they are selling into a new market to keep it simple. Your thinking might be:

Cost better be <= value created

So you take the cost of the activity and measure it against the sales made in the period.

The problem with this approach is that you are not counting other assets that may have been created.

So for example let’s say that you had the following activities:

3,000 outbound contacts made
800 people added to house email list
50 face-to-face visits
12 trials
1 deal signed

Using traditional logic you might look at the single signed deal and say that is not enough.

In this case the cost of the activity was $30,000 and the deal was worth $25,000

Cost = 30k vs. value created of 25k

There has been value created in addition to the sales made. So how do you value those assets?

I would argue that the value of each asset is directly proportional to its correlation to the final sale. OK this is a mouthful but what I mean by this is:

If a deal is worth $25,000

And 10% of (a certain type of) lead converts to deals

Then those leads are worth $2,500

Using the same logic a proposal might be worth $12,500 (50% will convert to a deal so it is worth half a deal)

Maybe a member of your house email list is worth $7. (Deal value generated by list divided by list size and discounted for time)

Let’s say you created a whitepaper that increases your conversions by 3%, the whitepaper is worth $75,000 if it will be part of 100 deals.

So when you run a marketing activity, my belief is that you should look at increases in all assets generated by the activity to get a better idea of the real value created.

So in our example here:

800 people added to house list = $5,600
50 face-to face visits = $10,000
12 trials = $30,000
1 deal closed = $25,000

If you add all this up the total value created far exceeds the cost of the activity of 25k. So now it is a worthwhile pursuit vs. not being worthwhile if you only look at deals closed.

Important note: Please note a few assumptions that allow this all to be true:
- This assumes that the activity will be ongoing. If you will terminate the activity then the values will drop to zero because you will not reap the value in the assets you created.
- Also please note that the assets will degrade over time. Anything more than a few months and you should start discounting asset values.

Let me know if I missed something, let me know if this helps and let me know what you think!

Sincerely,
Rajiv

Allow me to explain this chicken scratch. The channels on the left can be added one-by-one. However, there are key components of a b2b architecture that should be in place. Most companies that have a sales force use a CRM like Salesforce.com. Once you have assets like thousands of potential clients on a list and/or a good number of leads being generated by the channels then there are other key components of your architecture like inside sales and marketing automation. Many of the components on your strategy will work together and reinforce each other.

The bottom of the chart lists all the skills you will need to make this all happen. Functions with an “o” next to them can be easily outsourced so you can decide which skills you want to keep in-house and which you want to outsource.

If you want to discuss any of this drop me a line!

Marketing automation can be a key component of a b2b marketing strategy. What I am realizing is that very few companies are getting past basic use of marketing automation tools – which is not really marketing automation at all. Advanced marketing automation is where the value is. Here is a presentation which talks about the differences between basic and advanced marketing automation.

It is too easy to get access to a list, create some content that you THINK is good and blast it out there creating pain and suffering for others. This process will ensure that you don’t send garbage out there.

Step 1 – Create the campaign and send it to yourself until you are happy with it

Step 2 – Send the campaign to other relevant team members to get their reactions

Step 3 – Send it to a small portion of your audience (say 10%)

Step 4 – Talk to that audience and see if they have anything to say about it

Step 5 – If the feedback is positive, roll it out to the rest of the audience
(and if the feedback is not good go back to step 1)

This ensures that only 10% of your audience are exposed to bad ideas and the best ideas reach everyone.

Let me know if this makes sense to you.

“The top 10 things to look for in a startup marketer”

1. Do they favor efficient channels? - Do they rely on the most efficient channels like SEO, email marketing and business development? The best candidates will recognize that channels can be ranked by effectiveness and they will always start with the most efficient channels and work their way down the rankings.

2. Are they aware of best-practice metrics? - Look to Dave McClure for best-practice startup metrics. It is always a challenge to establish and track the right metrics. Dave has an awesome presentation on this on his site at: http://500hats.typepad.com/

3. Do they follow best-practice lead generation? - The best lead generation talent comes with a direct marketing or interactive marketing background. There is no better way to learn lead generation than to try hundreds of campaigns and see what people respond to (it is not what you might think!). For more information on lead generation see my site at: http://www.chaistartup.com/

4. Do they practice customer development? - Customer development means soliciting ongoing feedback from the marketplace to define the product and the positioning. There is a movement out west on this subject. Steve Blank first wrote about this concept in his book “4 Steps to the Epiphany.” Sean Ellis also has a blog on the subject: http://startup-marketing.com/

5. Do they understand new segmentation techniques that include behavioral segmentation - In the old days you would segment by demographics like title, company size, location etc. Now you can segment in much more exciting ways like who visited what web page, who clicked where, and who downloaded what and when. This way you can have a real 2-way communication versus a broadcast relationship.

6. Do they understand marketing automation (for b2b)? - Marketing automation provides a ton of benefits like a. Sophisticated lead scoring to get the right leads to the sales team at the right time b. Lead nurturing with automated campaigns vs. one-off campaigns c. A repository for the history of interactions vs. no memory of past interactions. Vendors in this space include Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop.

7. Can they aggressively manage third-party vendors? - If you know their business you will get more out of them.

8. Are they systematic bold and creative? - The methodology needs to be systematic and at the same time the offers and incentives need to be creative because the same-old same-old will not perform well (because there is a psychological element to response).

9.Have they done it before? - People that have worked with venture funded startup companies or startup companies in general will have a better feel for building out capabilities that are more efficient. Large company marketers often rely on expensive tools and vendors because they tend to have less of a feel for what will result from a given activity.

10. Do they pass tests you throw at them?- Let them present their plan. Then if you hire them you already know what they will work on!