Sales Operations

It’s time to re-work Salesforce.com: fix the data, create a lead handover model, build a lead wat...

Do You Need Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the hottest thing to hit marketing since CRM. But, it’s very different from CRM and email-only platforms.

How would you like to:

Be able to create complete digital programs in record time
Deliver leads to sales who are more educated about your product/company and more likely to become an opportunity
Be able to deliver specific information to sales about why they are receiving a lead
Know how your programs assisted in or directly contributed to an opportunity and/or a win.

We can run your Marketing Automation system for you. Or we can provide expert ongoing support for your existing team.

When you have Marketing Automation, you have a powerful tool for problem solving. Our experience across platforms and with 60+ clients means we have seen and have solved many, many problems for clients.

Marketing Tools:

We’ll examine what you are doing today and how products like Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot can dramatically improve your marketing. There are common features across all platforms, but how you use them is very different.

We’ll walk you through your must-haves, your nice-to-haves, and your don’t-needs (you shouldn’t pay for something you won’t use). Then, we’ll show you the tools — but we’ll show you them based on how you want to improve from how you are currently operating. These are not canned demos. They are customized for you and your team. We’ll show you how each tool works for any scenario you can think of. Marketing folks come in different types. Some are technical, some are creative. It’s important for your team to “get it” so they’ll be productive and accurate users of Marketing Automation. We’ll cover this too.

Got some doubters? We’ll help you build a case for marketing automation in your organization.

When you are ready to buy, we’ll negotiate the contract for you. Then, we’ll do the install, the integration with your CRM, and the set-up. We’ll build your templates and integrate forms with your website. At the same time, we’ll build your first campaigns.

Database Development and
Management

Critical to your go-to-market plans is your data.
We can help you with:

Building a database. We work with leading data vendors to find you the best sources of suspects.
Maintaining your data. When was the last time you validated email addresses? We’ll build data washing machines to normalize and standardize data so it’s searchable and reportable. We most often see problems with Lead Sources, Lead Statuses, and geographic data. We also like to extract Roles and Levels from existing title information. If you are missing critical information, we can have it appended.
Segmentation. Once your existing data is clean and there are controls in place to manage new database additions, we can create segments that support your go-to-market plans and messaging strategy. Many times form fields only focus on basic demographic info. In order to power better nurturing programs and scoring, we’ll build out progressive forms for you. With Marketing Automation, there’s no need to ask for the same info every time someone visits a form. On repeat visits, let’s get some BANT questions answered.
Integrations and Synchronization. We’ll look at the systems that are talking to each other (like CRM and Marketing Automation) to make sure the data exchange is what and when you want it so no critical data is ever overwritten.

Day-to-Day Program Execution

Systems are in place – check. Data is cleaned and segmented – check. Now, you need to meet a marketing campaign schedule and start delivering leads to sales. We’ll plug right in to your campaign calendar and use your systems to execute. We do this all the time. Seriously, every day. Seven days a week! Send us your content or your bullet points, or your boss’ comments that begin with “We need to…” We’ll turn them in to fully developed campaigns and blast them out.

Raise-the-Bar

Once you start delivering leads (and justifying your Marketing Automation
investment, we’ll show you what’s next. And this stuff is very cool:

Channel Definitions: We’ll set up your Marketing Automation and CRM to keep track of how your prospects engage. For example: with Webinars, you’ll want to know who was invited, who registered, who attended, and who watched the recorded version.
Scoring:We’ll walk you through a scoring exercise that will score known prospects and anonymous suspects. This can include activity scores, demographic scores, recycle scoring accelerators, and predictive scoring. We’ll create “buckets” for your sales reps. The first (and we hope the biggest) is for prospects who have raised their hand (responded to an offer). The second, for prospects who have passed a score threshold. The third is for prospects who have rising scores. And the final bucket is for all the rest. This way, your reps will know how to prioritize their time and find the records they need to work on.
Nurturing:We’ve helped companies create all kinds of nurturing programs. From simple linear programs (everyone gets the same content in the same order) to complex, multiple path nurturing programs (these consider persona, buyer stage, and engagement level). We’ll apply the same process we use to create demand generation programs to create your nurture programs.
Lead Workflow / Lead Handover: We receive a lot on interest in this and we love working on this for our clients because it has such immense and immediate impact. We’ll take you through every step in a process to define a lead, name and define the qualifications steps, establish the rules for handing over a respondent (score, specific activity), to your qualification folks, put the rules in place for governing follow-up timing, and establish the workflow rules to keep track of where everything is (which qualification stage) and aging (how long it has been in that stage). Read
more about this service here.

Reporting: Once we fix your data, and set up validation rules and washing machines to keep new entering data clean, it’s time to build you the reports you’ve always wanted. Many times, this starts with a whiteboard session where we ask you to draw what you are looking for. Our clients love this because they get to put their wishes down right on to the X-axis and Y-axis. Then we go and build it. Other times, folks ask us what we recommend. We come prepared with a set or reporting packages. We have one for marketing. A different one for sales. And an executive-level one as well.
Training: We can help your existing team as well as new hires get up-to-speed, maintain skills, and expand their knowledge of your investment in CRM and marketing automation. Training can be ad-hoc (a specific team member is trying to solve a specific business challenge) or scheduled (you want to raise the skill level of your entire sales team with Salesforce.com or your marketing programs group needs to understand how to use more of your marketing automation system). These sessions can also be recorded for on-demand access.