The Marketing Consortium

B2B Benchmarks

Why do you need B2B marketing benchmark data and how would you put it to work? 

Laura Ramos started this discussion on the Forrester blog.  Join the discussion and read my comments for her post titled:  Desperately Seeking B2B Benchmarks.

A Few Advanced Lead Management Techniques

It's not quite at the level of Web 2.0, but Lead Management news seems to fill my inbox daily. I just finished listening to the AMA's "Achieve a Closed-Loop System for Sales Lead Generation and Management" webcast; Forrester's Laura Ramos recently wrote a series of notes on the topic; Sirius Decisions published "Effective Lead Management: SAL to SQL" earlier in the year; Aberdeen just published Optimizing Leads: Mid-to-Large Enterprise Affinity for Best-in-Class Practices; and blog articles abound.

In these articles and notes you'll find best practices, frameworks, tips on sales and marketing collaboration, volumes on the importance of reporting obsessively, and peer survey data.

In general, I view a lead management solution in part as a configurable set of business rules which managers can leverage to modify sales and channel behavior to increase close rates. While different rules work for different firms, lines of business within a firm, or even individual departments, some of the more advanced or unusual techniques include:

• Routing leads based on part on the performance of the individual sales rep or channel partner with better performers getting better leads. In other words, it's the "Glengarry Glen Ross" approach.
• If you're ready to route a lead to a rep who's at capacity, nurture the lead in marketing a while longer until capacity frees up.
• Automatically warns reps when one of their leads has not been acted upon quickly enough. If that doesn't work send an automatic notification to the rep's sales manager.  Still having issues? Pull the lead from the rep and reassign to another rep or another channel with capacity.
• Consider leveraging your business rules to enable your channel managers to create service leads on behalf of channel partners. While not technically a lead, this gives you a nice way to ensure partner needs are being met and to actively and accurately track service requests.
• Allow sales reps and channel partners to opt into how they are notified of new leads whether it be by email, mobile phone, or an automated voicemail.

These are just a few techniques to try. What's working in your organization?

A Whiteboard and Brown Marker

Last week's ANA B2B Brand conference included a very cool brand building/integrated campaign presentation by UPS and the Martin Agency.

Titled "Conquering the Complex Through Simplicity: The UPS Approach to B-to-B Branding", UPS's Betsy Wilson and The Martin Agency's Andy Azula redefined multi-media.  In addition to slideware, ad replays, and YouTube videos, Andy just happens to be "the whiteboard guy" in the UPS TV ads, a few of which were part of their presentation. 

Now we've all watched the UPS "what can Brown do for you" and whiteboard TV ads, I've seen their ads on NPR's web site, in the Wall Street Journal, and on Yahoo; I know the ad theme music is from a band called (not coincidentally) The Postal Service; I've watch my beloved Buffalo Bills deconstructed on the ESPN UPS whiteboard; and it's an truly integrated multi-channel campaign that includes email and direct mail demand generation activities.

I didn't realize, though, I could send 'Andy-generated' whiteboard messages from the UPS whiteboard site.  According to Betsy and Andy, more than 75,000 whiteboards have been created to date. 75,000!  Next time you need to remind or pester friends, family, or colleagues, give it a try. 

Their results?  According to Business Week's Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard, UPS is ranked 28th in the world -- in front of firms like Nike, Starbucks, and Apple.

I touched on a few of aspects of the UPS presentation.  If you were at the conference and have comments on the UPS presentation or any of the conference topics, please share.

The ANA B2B Brand Conference Report, Part 1

I just got back from yesterday's ANA conference. Some great panels and presentations with a solid mix of corporate marketers, agencies, consulting firms, and an academic.  Some of the highlights:

• A particularly good case study on how to build an integrated marketing campaign with just a whiteboard and a brown marketer. I might blog on this in more detail next week. 
• I randomly sat next to Robert DellaCamera, KLA-Tencor's Senior Corporate Communications Manager, at breakfast.  He's coincidentally a satisfied user of MarketingCentral, an on-demand Marketing Resource Management vendor that Unica purchased last month.
• Paraphrasing some practical account-based marketing advice courtesy of Rick Segal of HSR Business to Business: Obviously 'account-based marketing works better than spray and pray...but it's the politics, not technology, that gets in the way' of success.
• Some interesting stats as it relates to new media courtesy of Guideline Research:  while the average estimated 2007 increase in new media spending is 11.5%, inability to prove ROI (ever hear that one before?) and lack of experience are the main barriers to adoption.
• While we're talking about ROI, there were a few challenges for marketers to measure results more holistically -- "you don't pull up a plant to measure each root to see if your plant is growing".
• Lastly, Ellis Booker helped remind us all we're getting older.  To combat lack of experience with new media he strongly suggests today's B2B CMO hire a really, really young person to understand what's possible with new media platforms like Second Life.

I touched on a just a few of the highlights, so if you were there, please take a few moments and share your thoughts.

Multichannel B2B Marketing: Retro as Part of Your Marketing Mix

Hello blogosphere!  And thanks to last month’s Marketer’s Consortium blogger, Akin Arikan, who’s on-line/offline postings are a great segue into this month’s first post.  Check out Akin’s blog at:  http://multichanneltimes.com/.

I’m in complete agreement with recent research from Forrester’s Laura Ramos that “B2B marketers should take the plunge and use online ads, microsites, blogs, and video as part of an integrated marketing mix”, yet don’t forget to use a portion of your demand gen efforts to go retro where it makes sense. Highly targeted direct mail may seem ancient, but it can still be a vital component of your multi-channel mix.

According to Sirius Decision’s Jonathan Block “about 9% of the B2B demand gen budget is spent on direct mail, yet it can be highly effective.”  While I’m lucky enough to get to understand marketing challenges, strategies, and successes from a variety of Unica clients, very rarely do I get to see their granular demand gen results, so I’ll use a recent Unica campaign to illustrate my point.  We recently ran a highly targeted new product cross-sell campaign with multi-dimensional direct mail as a good part of the mix.  The number of leads generated was about 5X higher than similar multi-touch on-line campaigns.

To close, what types of multi-channel campaigns are working best for you?  Any insights into what's working best with new tools like blogs and video?  Please share your thoughts and experiences!

Passing the blogging torch to B.J. Morgan now

Wow, the month has gone by fast! And the time has come to pass the blogging torch to my colleague B.J. Morgan. Throughout the hot month of July, we discussed a topic that should be near and dear to all of us, namely integrated marketing across online and offline channels. While reviewing various books and breeding over various ideas we were joined by two book authors who kindly shared their experience.

The first was Kevin Hillstrom whose blog MineThatData comes highly recommended. Kevin shares his whitepaper on Multichannel Forensics freely from his site. Short and to the point, this paper offers a unique and brilliant perspective for understanding the current state of a multi-channel business and forecasting its future. The paper wets our appetite for his upcoming book, Database Marketing, A Master's Complete Method for Success.

The second author who contributed thoughts from his experience was James (Jim) Lenskold who is the principal of the Lenskold Group, a strategic marketing firm. His book Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer, And Corporate Profitability was nominated one of five finalists for best marketing book in 2004. For the web analytics practitioner community that is my primary hang out, this book has must read information. In our web analytics industry we have so many fuzzy and wrong definitions of ROI that we are in danger of making ill informed marketing budget allocations. This book opened my eyes to that fact. Let it open yours too!

Even though my stint as moderator has come to an end, if you still want to talk internet marketing, you can check out my blog: http://multichanneltimes.com/ (now moved to http://multichannelmetrics.com) or you can certainly email me at: [email protected]. I hand the reigns over to my colleague, B.J. Morgan, director, B2B & financial services segments, Unica Corporation. As B2B marketer’s challenges have increased tenfold and targeting customers has become more challenging while focusing on marketing accountability continues to increase, B.J. will discuss a number of successful B2B demand generation strategies and tactics throughout the month of August.

Thank you for reading! Much obliged.

Akin