Customer World

How marketing automation software need to tag the quality of leads better.

Sharon Drew Morgan makes very interesting points in her article where she draws attention on how marketing automation software needs to add decision facilitation technology to their offerings.

She writes, any such marketing software like Marketo, Eloqua,  just help capture some names - email addresses, telephone nos etc. which is great but there is no way to understand at what stage is the prospect in the buying process. This is the precisely where such software must add value to any company's lead management process.

I agree with her, as "stage of buying/decision process" decides in the lead's mind, the kind of information they need & plays a huge role in evaluation & purchase decision. According to me, each person, who is a lead, could be in different stages in the buying/decision process:

1. Trigger stage - where the person is just evaluating the need
2. Consider stage - where the person is considering to buy or not
3. Search stage - where the person is actively looking at all choices before making the decision
4. Choose stage - where the person is close to making the decision & is in a compare mind-set
5. Buy Stage - Where the person looking at all offers/discounts and ready to pay the cheque

Marketing automation software need to "integrate" or "tag" this decision-based thinking that goes through a prospect's mind to ensure a precise method of tagging the lead. This will certainly have downstream effects on what information is shared at each stage with the prospect by both the sales  and the marketing team that can accelerate decision making or conversion.

Capturing the name alone is not good enough. Calling it Hot/Cold/Warm may be better but not good enough too. It is important for marketing automation softwares to "tag" the leads by the the stage in the decision cycle to truly value-add to the marketing automation process.

 

How do you define success for data-driven marketing programs?

I often have been wondering off-late how does one define success for data-driven marketing programs - the reason being tons of hours are spent in understanding data, organizing data, cleansing the data make it ready for analysis and then time taken for building insights by analysts, getting organization-wide buy-in into the insights and developing a roll-out plan, measuring them etc.

The opportunity I see with all this, is a need to clearly define how is a company benefitting with all of this is increasingly becoming critical. No amount of insights & discovery is worth its weight in gold till it becomes actionable and value is returned in dollars for them. Also, another important question is how do such programs get more investments to provide more value year after year? I also don't see this being driven from one corner or department while participation from senior management teams and other departments is critical for its success, adoption and growing investments.

Interestingly as I got thinking about it, I got something from my archives which had an interesting reference to how to define success by Pat LaPointe.

He has got a lovely definition of defining success. Here's the forumula according to him which may be worth looking at:

It is a simple summation of all experiences of transforming insights into action and the value it created divided by the number of resources consumed to get this value and this is raised to the power of perception!

From my experience, I agree with him that the hard part is transforming the insights into action in any company. Also, perception of quality plays a critical role as enterprise-wide buy-in is critical for such programs as they need collaboration from other departments like sales, customer service, IT, channels etc. So, continued success of such programs must be exponentially raised to the perception and alignment of metrics & hence the value each of them get from such initiatives.

Would love to hear any other method of measuring sucess of data-driven marketing programs.

It's time for companies to think of a Chief Marketing Technology officer!

When I talk and work with people and clients on many assignments, the challenge I find for enterprises to be customer-centric is, how to bring marketing & technology together. Increasingly, technology is getting adopted in many customer-centric channels like never before and marketing is getting more & more real time & thefore technology is becoming a nerve-centre for marketing. The future , I have always thought is the changing( or can I call it merging) role of marketing & technology folks and the need for them to work together.

I read an interesting article today, if there is a need for a CMTO ( Chief Marketing Technology Officer)! I thought this was quite interesting. Who  is a CMTO and what does he or she do?

" A chief marketing technology officer (CTMO) — use whatever label you prefer — is simply the lead marketing technologist, organizing and managing that team. He or she reports to the CMO, not the CIO. Again, this is ultimately a marketing responsibility. There should be collaboration with IT, of course, assuring that marketing fully leverages its infrastructure and complies with technical governance standards. But collaborating is better than being solely dependent."

I find this very thought provoking and I do feel this is doable. The role of the CMTO is to ensure the right technology - either already invested is leveraged across the enterprise or if to be invested is partnered and led by this role - to collaboratively ensure this is adopted enterprise-wide.

Finally, customers must see the benefit of technology in their interaction experience with any company. The role of the CMTO is to make this happen.

Marketing automation software - What do buyers look for?

I have been blogging a lot on marketing automation and the need for enterprises to make it a part of their marketing arsenal. Today, there is an increasing need for real-time marketing and only marketing automation software can provide them this agility. 

I came across a very interesting research by Lauren Carlson, a leading CRM Market Analyst on what do buyers look for, when they want to buy a marketing automation software. I liked her classifcation of content into market-level content & product-specific content.

Take a look at what buyers look for:

1. The most important market-level content that they look for is pricing information & product comparison. Many a times, software vendors don't do a comparison w.r.t competitors and it makes sense to have it benchmarked against top competitiors and use it effectively for buyers to take a decision.
2. The importance of online software demonstration is also extremely critical for these buyers.
3. In the product-specific content, buyers look for user ratings and I think this is an extremely important point which many buyers look for. Publishing user ratings can help the vendors gain the trust of the buyers.
4. User Reviews - is another facet that buyers want and getting business user reviews can certainly tilt the buying decision in their favour.

Before buyers take a decision on marketing software, the study shows what are the various content and information that must be addressed by marketing automation vendors. Read the full study here.

 

Exponential adoption not exponential growth is key in 2011 for marketing automation

I have been reading a lot of blogs, views of consultants & research reports over the last couple years on the growing need for marketing automation in companies to manage customers better.

This is an irony that has always suprised me - the companies that have made the marketing automation investments don't use them enough and the ones planning to invest don't really plan well on how to get enterprise-wide acceptance.

It was interesting for me read an article by Carlos Hidalgo

• “Less than 25% of organizations that have implemented a [marketing automation platform] fully currently utilize its potential.”
• According to a recent study, 78% of marketers state that generating high-quality leads is still their biggest challenge.
• Various reports have between 70-90% of leads still being ignored and going to waste.

This was quite relevant points that corraborated with what I have been observing over the last few years.

Here's what I would like to see in 2011 for exponential adoption first,  lest marketing automation will die its natural death:

1. Organizations must break-down silos and exponentially adopt marketing automation across various departments as customers don't do business with departments in companies!
2. Determine metrics that are relevant to each of the departments and all these must roll-up to an enterprise-level metrics on lead management( lead capture, lead nurturing & scoring),  lead fulfillment and post-sales customer management.
3. Practice byte-sized execution plans across mutliple customer-facing departments and clearly think multi-channel -  web,  mobile, call centre etc.
4. Create a marketing budget across customer acquisition and customer retention and look at the ROI across both these parameters.
5. Build a "marketing automation tree" across both acquisition & retention and determine when the grid-lock link breaks across various stages of customer interactions.
6. Build a test and control group for various marketing automation campaigns to clearly benchmark success &  incremental lifts - to enable other deparments see the benefits for quick adoption.

To be successful, there must be a sound foundation, definition of the business process across marketing, sales & customer care - alignment across these departments  is critical &  key to exponential adoption of marketing automation across companies.

The right way for marketing automation to grow is to now focus on exponential adoption as it will act as the much needed catalyst for growth in the coming few years.

 

 

Treat social media data as the new customer information

I often see a lot of digital marketing specialists treat social media data almost like traffic lights- a kind of sentiment monitor - Red, green and amber - here are the positive scores, negative scores etc. I wonder what marketing actionability does such visualization and presentation give to marketers. For the first few months, it may sound interesting to marketers, after that am 100% sure, they will get bored and start questioning the application and business impact of such data.

On the other hand, I see traditional direct marketers or database marketers or analytical professionals lost when it comes to social media. It is almost like finding their way in a maze and they often treat this as technology or a statistical problem that has no application in this medium. Also, they  have very little clue about this medium. There is  huge opportunity to apply  both powerful direct marketing principles, database marketing and analytical techniques to this social media data. In fact, digital marketing specialists too need learn from these  principles & techniques.

In fact here my view of how social media data is changing  all of this.

1. Direct marketing was always restricted because of lack of customer address, behavioural data and information - social media data changes all of that.
2. No more physical address is important. An address on the web, posts on social media sites can help identify the customer and their current behaviour, attitudes and concerns. Treat all of this as 'information for action'  rather than ' positive words or negative words of sentiment'. In fact sentiment on the web is dynamic. Action must be swift and dynamic to sentiments as they have a potential to make real-time impact.
3. Treat comments & posts data as response which can help build individual relationships and communities. This could have never been possible without social media.
4. Relationships in the past were based on only transactional data, today social media enables relationships based on individual behaviour - positive and negative emotions which can be deciphered. They need to managed as emotion-led customized campaigns with clear relationship metrics.

It was interesting see an article  by Bob Maclnnis & Sari Tamilio who also urges us to think similarly about social media data.

Do you agree? Would love to see your comments and thoughts on the same.

Marketing in a world when the door is already shut!

I am bombarded in a day with hundreds of emails and SMSs- many of them are promotional emails and SMSs. I simply ignore them.

I sit in front of the TV to watch my favorite program and I see a ticker running with messages.Just fails to grab my attention.

I am out to watch a movie and suddenly I realize there are "product placements" intelligently( supposed to be) weaved with the script. My mind shuts immediately as I realize I am being marketed at.

Many consumers like me are getting a lot a savvier than ever before and in one of my conversations with my clients, she was telling me how the hell do I market in a world where most of my best prospects and customers are in Do-No-Call or Do-Not-Disturb lists! 

How does one do marketing in a world when the door is already shut?!

Welcome to the world of relevance marketing. This is increasingly becoming important as many marketing messages are just being ignored or it's money wasted as the consumer is just indifferent. How does one practice the art of relevance marketing.

1. It starts with being genuine and authentic. Facebook fan club/Apps has become a fad. Soon it will lose its relevance after the initial hysteria is over. May be start a help desk page in Facebook for your brand to answer any queries or may be even have a click-to-call service as an app in your Facebook page,twitter or mobile which connects the customer with your already existing call centre.
2. Follow the customer learning journey   - It is important to understand at what stage is your customer or prospect at. It is important not lose the communication script & trigger at each stage. As the customer or prospect knows more about your brand, the intensity of her queries or help is different. It pays to focus your attention to this detail. 
3. Bring the data together for the dialog - Many a times the availability of multi-channel options creates fragmented knowledge across the company among customer facing executives. How can we identify repeat customers or  visitors and make them know enterprise wide, how can you fuse the data available at the call centre with web, how can your link service data with customer billing/purchase data? Start the data journey with small experiments and accelerate them with quick wins. Knowing this can help relevance marketing greatly.

My friend Sandra Zoratti has written an interesting article on this topic:

Step 1.Consumers want precision marketing. On the brand side, this process must begin by first deciding what problem, or pain point, you are seeking to address.

Step 2. Next, marketers need to evaluate and then leverage the data and campaigns currently in place.

Step 3. The next step is to synchronize your campaigns and determine the best message for the channel.

Step 4. Once a test campaign has been launched, the next step is to measure the results based on a wide range of criteria and, most importantly, bottom-line measures.

Step 5. After the initial test, it's time to refine and repeat the above steps to produce the same or different results.

Read more here

Multi-channel marketing poses new data challenges

The world of database marketing has changed since the time we knew it . There were only a few options as one knew it - lists - internal/ external, direct mail and telemarketing a decade or two ago. Today, for companies, customers come from different channels - social media, mobile, website leads thro' SEM or SEO etc. There is a need to track this customer data, organize them in a manner to know where they are coming from, is becoming increasingly critical. Before they know, many customers reach-out to companies from many channels available, in no time, which are available to them. This leads to multiple responses, follow-up and absolutely wasted marketing monies & more importantly a frustrated customer! Only when they organize and track this data across channels can companies do systematic campaigns & profiling of these customers. Not many companies are ready to handle this challenge. In my view, they are sometimes blisfully unaware of the problem and how to manage them!

It starts by building clear customer paths on how customers can potentially reach out to these companies, how they need to be tagged, scoring them by their interest and value, allocating them to an appropriate channel with clearly laid-out follow-up programs by channel. 

Deb Campbell of Clario Analytics has written a nice article on this topic:

Marketers still need to gather and keep the best data they can on their customers, understand them, segment them, track them over time, do some predictive modeling to market relevant to them and target new prospects most like them....Today, marketing channels are exploding all around us, not only with e-mail, search and display ads but also with all the social networking sites.

How does all this affect database marketing?

While the multiplication of channels can make tracking harder, and as a result make it more difficult to amend a database, you still need to know your customers’ needs and wants, and market to them one-to-one. Database marketing best practices haven’t changed as much as how you implement them.

You may have customers who are Internet-savvy and want messaging sent to them digitally. You have to target them, and those like them, in this way. Perhaps another customer segment prefers sales reps to contact them.Where database marketing pays here is that all this information can be captured.....

The solution is to keep your database as up-to-date as possible, with changes of addresses and e-mails, titles and positions. Track and segment your database at both levels, and target prospects with similar preferences and behaviors.

Is the future of customer management in hosted solutions?

Destination CRM has an interesting article this trend. The article highlights the following facts:

Recent research from Gartner analyst Michael Maoz predicts that by the year 2012, 30 percent of investments in CRM will be via software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Gartner research indicates that the increased deployment of SaaS initiatives might have underwhelming implications for consulting and professional services. Maoz explains that many companies view software-as-a-service applications as plug-and-play. The implementations lack process involvement and merely connect applications in the cloud, rather than looking at the bigger picture of business process management. "CRM is not just the technology," Maoz expels. "It's more an issue of ‘How do I interact with my customer?' Using some of these SaaS applications without changing the business process could be just enabling [organizations] to do bad things even worse." In other words, without a bottom-up approach, deploying new applications in the cloud is automating a tired or flawed process. "Using software-as-a-service is not going to help CRM," Maoz states. "We shouldn't be enamored by cloud computing instead of in lieu of process improvement."

My View: I can't agree more with Gartner on this trend. Increasingly, clients will prefer this as a hosted and managed service. In fact, the second part of the article seemed more important to me. It's not only important to have SaaS as a model in customer management but the ability to understand the process and business impact & action is a key need where I see is a huge gap that exists currently in such models.

I believe there must be 4 stages before implementing SaaS in a customer management environment:

Stage 1: Define your CaaS : Customer management as a strategy - How are customers or prospects being defined by current and prospective value, opportunity and segments?

Stage 2: Define your IPPM: Set-up a clear interaction planning and process mapping & migration  of your customers and prospects.

Stage 3 : Implement SaaS:  Once you have done the above 2 stages, then plan your SaaS roll out.

Stage 4: Plan the analytics,campaigns & metrics: SaaS is just the start but post customer management in SaaS is critical. The analytics around customers, campaigns around potentially valuable segments and tracking key metrics is often overlooked.

Getting IT to become customer-centric - Here's a 11 point plan to get started

Vince Kellen, a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium, a leading IT Advisory firm's 11 point plan to focus IT on customers resonated with me. I have been over the last couple of months writing about the need for IT to become customer-centric. In fact Forrester has been evangelizing the need for IT-marketing partnership. Here's his plan and they seem extremely perfect to me:

According to Kellen, once CIOs get their "trains running on time," they should build a multifaceted plan to reorient their IT shops around the real customer, the one that gives the firm money. The multifaceted plan can involve the following:

1.Establish a culture of customer service within IT.

2.Within IT, build intellectual capital of deeper customer issues, not just intellectual capital into technology architectures.

3.Bring this intellectual capital as a value-add service to the other parts of the firm, including marketing, sales, logistics, and service.

4.Start fostering innovation. Contribute to, if not lead, R&D in customer-centric IT.

5.Prioritize improvements in parts of the IT infrastructure that can address the technology or business process shortcomings, especially customer data quality and data integration.

6.Revamp IT processes that support the real customers and improve IT support service levels.

7.Help the firm identify gaps in the customer's experience and how IT can assist in closing those gaps.

8.Build an IT organization that is quick, flexible, adaptable, and reconfigurable so it can move fast on topical customer-facing initiatives.

9.Invest in the personnel and organizational development needed to make this happen.

10.Put into place strong usability and customer experience analysis methodologies that can uncover real issues with the customer experience and can develop real solutions.

11.Work with the other executives and ensure the IT plan is not only aligned with the business and customer strategies, but that the IT plan is actually challenging these plans and improving them.

 I have seen the benefits multiply with clients whom we work with in the last few years. It's time to get started now.