1.  You can’t have revenue without ROI.  If you can’t connect your efforts to the dependent variable of revenue then you aren’t really talking about ROI.

2.  Connecting to revenue is dependent on the ability to connect social data to other internal operational systems.  Creating these bridges requires a basic understanding of data modeling.

3.  Making these connections can also draw quite a bit from classic survey research.  Specifically around coding.  The ability to tag a data point with a quantitative, relatable dimension is what brings structure to the unstructured qualitative data.

This line of thinking arose out of a recent workshop I put together for the AMA on measuring social media ROI.  I hope to crank out a couple page piece on it this week, but… I’ve been saying that for a couple of weeks!

Marketing automation is not campaign management and campaign management is still not marketing automation.  While the gap certainly narrowed in 2010 these two tools were born and bred to do different things.  If you see an Eloqua or Marketo in the room with a Unica or Alterian, someone is in the wrong room.

Understanding the differences begins with an understanding of the tools heritages.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation was born out of the need to help marketers more tightly integrate their activity across email, website, and CRM (SFA really) channels.  More specifically, however, these tools also focused specifically on marketers chasing the considered purchase, usually B2B, where an individual sale is worth hundred, thousands, or even millions.

Campaign Management

In contrast, campaign management came into being to help mass direct marketers manage and more finely tune their segmentation strategies.  Here the focus is really on list generation and using customer data as branching forks in an effort to get the right number of bodies into a specific bucket.

Common Ground

Where there is overlap between the two, which is a significant commonality – like Presbyterian to Lutheran, rather than Christian to Muslim, is that both are built around the concept of the customer.  With any tool worth its salt, you’d expect to find the customer at the core with campaigns and channels building out.

Key Differences

From there though, the differences mount:

Industry

Which tool you should pick is a function of what you are trying to accomplish.  Really, if these two tools show up together, someone is in the wrong room.

A lead is a seemingly simple concept.  Yet it is one that causes much consternation between sales and marketers.  There seems to be a constant sliding scale between quantity and quality and most organizations seem to struggle with nailing down what they consider to be a quality lead.  Coming up with a common definition that works for both parties is the first step in addressing this issue.

In this interview, we will hear the thoughts of Greg Malpass, CEO and president of Traction Sales & Marketing, on the right approach to leads.  Greg has a particular point of view on lead management that has helped 100’s of companies to re-energize their demand generation efforts.

Marcus: Greg, as a starting point, can you tell us about how you define a lead?

Greg: At Traction we define a “lead” as an expression of interest at a point in time.  While of course there is going to be a person as part of that lead, and likely they’ll work at an organization, really what we’re most interested in is that particular interest of what they’re looking for at that point in time, and the question of course will be, “Will that result in an opportunity?”

Marcus: I’ve always been of the belief people don’t buy things, they buy solutions.  I love the focus on motivation. It’s not just the person, but what’s motivating them.  Do you find that to be a hard concept to preach or present inside the marketing organization?

Greg: No, in most cases the organizations we work with really embrace the concept.  It removes a lot of the grey lines and it also brings a lot of clarity in terms of what is the role of marketing versus sales.

Marketing’s role is to solicit the interest and serve it to the sales organization for review.  Where the sales organization will review it and qualify it into either an opportunity and convert it through into an existing account with no further action, or in some cases reject that, giving marketing an indicator that it is not a worthy prospect and should be pursuing it further.

Marcus: In this model, who is responsible for lead qualification?  Can it be automated, or does it require the human touch?

Greg: It depends on the organization. It depends on the volume of leads coming in, the resources that are available, and even the complexity of the sale.

To start, sales and marketing need to be involved.  And as some point the lead will be qualified by human times.  At some point that interest will hit a threshold where it’s worth making a phone call or arranging a meeting with that prospect who is showing that interest.  In the field, we are seeing many more situations like this.  Organizations are using an inside sales qualification team to validate that interest and then pass it over to the sales organization.

What’s really important, however, is who creates the opportunity.  It’s extremely important that lead qualifiers not have that capability.  You want someone within the sales organization, someone who carries a bag to be associated with the opportunity.  It also serves as an effective check and balance.

Marcus: Then you would argue that the qualification team should fall in marketing?

Greg: Very interesting question.  I think the right role of the qualification team should be aligned to the sales organization.  This, however, is a departure from status quo.  Today, the team usually lands in marketing.  Historically, when sales weren’t picking up the phone marketing took the responsibility to do what they thought was right for the company and started building up these organizations.  That’s why we also saw a movement to outsource.  Now, however, we’re starting to see this trend reverse itself.  As organizations start bringing these skills back in-house they are being hired by sales.

A big part of the lead qualification function is also having an HR resource strategy.  Where will these reps go in the organization and what is their development plan?  I think we both would agree that a great lead qualification rep will eventually mature into a great sales rep.

Marcus: That makes sense.  Developing the diagnostic process of engaging with the client and getting to the pain makes a good qualification rep and is a critical skill for a sales rep.  Who said people were rational though?  Just because it makes sense doesn’t mean people will easily accept it.  Do you run into resistance?

Greg: Not really.  We emphasize the system – the process.  What we are really talking about is a through-put system.  A system where traffic comes in, interest is passed to a qualifier, which is in terms pushes through to an opportunity evaluation.  Just like we see in a manufacturing system, we see bottlenecks.

So what this system does is it brings pure visibility and accountability to processing leads.  What we’re trying to do is take the grey out and clear the water so we have a clear path and determine who is channeling and funneling their leads through, where we’re maybe over-productive in producing leads, or where we might need to start splitting territories.  So the biggest reluctance or resistance from the sales team is a laser focus on one thing, which is processing interest into opportunities.  Some reps feel the art of the sale is compromised, but really I don’t think that’s a justifiable response.

Marcus: I agree.  And at the end of the day we’re in a volume business, and if you’re going to push more revenue through you have to push through more leads and activities.  It’s a pretty simple proposition.

Greg: Right, it does all end up in the pipeline.  As a good sales rep, I basically know after my first conversation with the prospect whether there is an opportunity there.  Even if I create it as a very early stage opportunity, maybe $0 and 0% to close, I’m going to id it and start working it.  If not, I’m going to pass them through as a contact, not create the opportunity, and put that person back in marketing’s capable hands, until they generate or demonstrate further interest.

Marcus: So… a “lead” is an expression of interest at a specific point in time.  Focus on the need, not the person.  Well said Greg!  That’s all our time for today.  Thank you all for joining us today and hope you can join us for our next episode.

SEMRush.com (recommended)
Compete.com
Alexa.com

and

SEOBook.com

1. Define leads
2. Begin qualification program
3. Nurture early stage leads (I would argue thèse are not
4. Define handoffs between sales and marketing

Nice touch. Stop using thé term “lead”, replace with “future customer”.

Another gréât nugget. Acid test for content. Do you provide content that is valuable even if they don’t buy from you?

- Email someone a question. Take the response, publish on blog
- Go through your outbox / inbox – look for relevant material – publish on blog
- Interview folks, record conversation and get transcrippted. (particulalry for execs)
- Target people internally who have ego’s – and stroke them

Widgets
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/oggchat-live-chat-software/ (interesting thought – probably should discuss before implementing)

Sidebar
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wickett-twitter-widget/ (Twitter Feed)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-social-widgets/ (Facebook Widgets – will have to run a Like campaign to friends and family)

Social Share
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-social-sharing-widgets-icons/screenshots/ (bottom of post share bar)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fblikebutton/screenshots/ (if FB Like doesn’t come through the above)

Publicize
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ezinearticles-wordpress-plugin/screenshots/ (ezine)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/network-publisher/ (all in one share)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/socialite/ (all in one share – if above doesn’t work out)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-publisher/ (twitter only share, but has some interesting points around GA integration I haven’t seen before)

Backoffice
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/ (add tags to images to help with image search performance)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scribe/ (useful for implenting SEO plan)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/ (in case there is something wrong with the above)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/ (broken links bad for SEO)

Analytics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagerank-tools/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/ (adds a lot of meta data beyond the basic footer script)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statsurfer (see GA in WP dash.  Similar functionality, maybe slightly easier to use – fall back to above)

Right now I’m looking at splitting reporting into two camps.  The first being direct attribution via tagged URL’s.  Basically, through tagging you can track and attribute sale data.  The approach here is basically exactly like traditional direct or email marketing.

The other approach, which I think more folks struggle with is the indirect.  Here I’ve been looking at adapting various financial models (like you can find at http://www.intangiblebusiness.com/) for valuing intangible assets.  One of the principal approaches focus on revenue generation.  While I don’t have the details behind how they came up with their model, I’ve found some promising work over at Eventbrite.  Really like their thinking.

First off, it breaks you out of psyche of concentrating on your own “message”.  By and by people don’t give a hoot about your message.  Everyday our minds are occupied with the solving the problems the world or our work have set out in front of us.  If you aren’t offering something that helps me solve my problem I have no interest in what you have to say.

The most common metaphor associated with this process is the sales funnel.  Really, this is a pretty good one.  Getting its start way back in 1898, the first attributed version goes to St. Elmo Lewis and his four stage AIDA model.

1. AWARENESS of the existence of a product or service;
2. INTEREST in paying attention to the product’s benefits;
3. DESIRE for the product.
4. ACTION netting a purchase.

Since those days the concept of the funnel has been iterated many times over.  It’s been interpreted from the customer side (lifecycle spin), and expanded and refined to include lead methodology and changes in purchasing behaviors.

While certainly there is value in the incremental thought applied to the base AIDA model, I still favor the simple, classic four steps.  To me, anything more is over-engineering.  Regardless of how we try as we might to describe the psychology of the buying process, there is no way to systematically define such an ambiguous, human process.  Any additional layers or added detail, therefore, simply adds additional overhead that won’t deliver commensurate results.  Maybe AIDA in its raw form isn’t a good fit, but try to keep it simple (KISS – not Gene Simmon’s tongue).

From a content perspective, why AIDA is so important is because it provides a progression for deepening your understanding of the customer.  After all the time spent investigating their needs an issues, this starts the process of crossing over and trying to think about a day walking in their shoes.  What is the problem faced?  How do they encounter it?  Then begin the journey of building knowledge and ultimately solving it?

If you can answer questions like these your likelihood of producing content that is relevant and valuable to the person living in those circumstances is dramatically improved.

Takeaways

• Everyone goes through multiple stages when making a decision
• Craft your own funnel, but keep it simple.
• Live a day in your customers shoes.  Feel, smell, and experience the issues they face as you work to solve a problem.
• Forget about your “message” and focus on them and their interests