Blog

10 Commandments for Lead Nurturing Success

By on April 17, 2014   /   Demand Generation, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation   /   Leave a comment

The importance of lead nurturing can’t be overstated. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads, at 33% lower cost.

Lead nurturing benefits your sales and Revenue Marketing™ efforts by leveraging content to build relationships with qualified prospects and accelerate their journey through the buy cycle.

Best practices learned from my experience at The Pedowitz Group have led to my 10 Commandments for Lead Nurturing Success:

  1. Freshen up old content – You have a lot more content than you think. The most efficient way to get started with lead nurturing is to think about how you can freshen up old content (emails, blogs, articles, and sales presentations) and turn it into educational assets for use in demand generation campaigns.
  2. Work closely with the sales team – Lead nurturing simply won’t work without an agreed upon understanding of goals, timelines, and processes between sales and marketing. Sit down to discuss and define the definition of a “sales ready” lead. A best practice is to create service level agreements (SLAs) with sales defining a sales-ready lead, lead routing, timeframe for follow up, and consequences when the process is broken.
  3. Create compelling content - Be sure to keep all prospect communication brief, relevant and unique. Include industry news, educational resources, and helpful tips to show your thought leadership. If your content isn’t compelling, targeted, and delivered at the right time, you’re likely to be overlooked when buying decisions are made.
  4. Map content to buy cycle – Not all content is created equal. Not all leads have the same needs. Therefore, you need to map your content to the prospect buy cycle. As potential customers interact with your campaigns, the content needs to drive them towards an action.
  5. Don’t underestimate subject lines – A great subject line can make all the difference!. The more people who open your emails, the more chance you have to influence your prospects. Think about how A/B testing can help determine the best subject lines. Think about how to optimize subject lines to increase email deliverability. All are important factors in lead nurturing.
  6. QA, QA, QA  – This is the part of lead nurturing, and campaign management in general, that is most often neglected. If you don’t do anything else, please be sure to establish a QA process for all outbound communications. Make sure you check the grammar, logical flow, and appearance of your content. Make sure you’re sending to the right people. If you’ve using Marketing Automation, make sure you’ve set up your tokens custom tags, and the right steps for your program statuses.
  7. Establish lead scoring – It’s surprising to hear that 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring (Source: MarketingSherpa). Lead scoring is vital to sending better-qualified leads to sales. Start by working with sales to develop a common scoring system. Decide which interactions and demographic information should be scored, and how much each is worth. Be flexible, as your scoring criteria may change over time.
  8. Follow data management best practices - Without clean data, you’re doomed from day one. Too many marketers ignore this aspect of lead nurturing. Take the time to clean up your data. As a result, both marketing and sales will spend less time researching lead information and more time engaging and qualifying new leads.
  9. Report the correct metrics – Take a keen interest in measures that show lead nurturing’s contribution to the sales pipeline and revenue. Track the number of qualified leads marketing sent to sales. Measure conversion rates along the buy cycle. Gauge whether there is an increase or decrease in deal size, sales cycle, and campaign return on investment. What you track will change as your Revenue Marketing practice matures, so focus only on those key metrics and trends that help drive your business in a meaningful way.
  10. Re-nurture leads – Not every lead is ready to buy after the initial phone call. To avoid lead leakage, be sure to re-nurture leads that don’t convert right away. Create an agreement with sales and make it easy to re-route leads back into a nurture program.

Contact The Pedowitz Group to learn how to effectively create successful Revenue Marketing lead management programs that attract new leads, drive prospects through the buy cycle and improve conversion rates.

Blog Post Written By: Toyin Adon-Abel Jr.

Toyin is Marketing Operations Manager at The Pedowitz Group. As a certified Revenue Marketer and Marketo Expert, Toyin is passionate about generating positive outcomes from Marketing programs. 

Back to Top

A Guide to the New Eloqua Support

By on April 4, 2014   /   Eloqua   /   Leave a comment
A helpful guide to navigating the transition of Eloqua Support to My Oracle Support

It’s been a couple of weeks since Eloqua Support migrated to the Oracle Support platform and we’re all still wincing. It’s true, we were spoiled. It’s true, we hate change. But, it’s also true that this is a change we’re all going to have to get used to. In an effort to ease the pain of change, I’ve pulled together some information that I hope you find helpful.

There are a few things that you need to complete prior to logging into My Oracle Support (MOS) for the first time.

Pre-Work

  1. Find the letter that Oracle sent with your Support Identifier. You must have this. If you don’t, you will have to call support. Here’s a link to the appropriate numbers: Support for Eloqua Products.
  2. If you don’t already have an Oracle Account, you will need to create one: Oracle | Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together.
  3. Join the Support Group: Therapy Group for Eloquans New to My Oracle Support (MOS). 
  4. Access the recording of the My Oracle Support Training Session: https://oraclecse.webex.com/oraclecse/ldr.php?RCID=b774fb4b1f13dd7340b39a29d7f3d179.

So, you’ve created your My Oracle Support (MOS) Account and you have a problem. Now what?

  1. Once you’ve logged into the MOS, you will automatically be taken to your dashboard. Instead of “Logging a Case” as you did under the Eloqua Support Model, you will now be asked “Create a Service Request”. Click on the Service Requests Tab. You have two options, “Ask in Community” and “Create SR”. You want to “Create SR”. At present, the “Ask in Community” button does not include an option to go directly to Topliners.eloqua marketing support
  2. Click Create SR.

Provide a Problem Summary and Problem Description.


Type Oracle into the service type section and Oracle Marketing Cloud will populate. Your support identifier will also populate. There is only one Problem Type option and that is “Product Question”.

  1. Click Next in the upper right corner.

 

  1. This will take you to the Solutions page, which is very similar to what you have seen previously when logging a case. Oracle provides content related to your request in an effort to help you solve your problem independent of support (Example below). Click Next.

 

  1. You are then routed to the “More Details” section, which allows you to provide more context around your issue. Complete this section with relevant information and attachments. Click Next.

 

  1. You will be directed to the Severity / Contact Screen. This is your opportunity to indicate the severity of your issue. Select the most appropriate option.
  2. Provide Contact info. This is pre-populated. Change as necessary. You’ll also note that there is an option to add an alternate contact. Once this information is complete. Click Submit.

  3. You will then be redirected to the Services Request Home. Shortly thereafter, you should receive an email confirmation with your SR# in the subject line of the email. Next comes the hard part. Be Patient. Give it time. If you don’t receive feedback or response in a reasonable amount of time, by all means pick up the phone and call support. The good news is you’ll be armed with a ticket number, which will help in terms of routing you to the right person to assist in solving your support problem.

 

Good luck!

Blog Post Written By: Margaret Angell

Margaret Angell is a Revenue Engineer at the Pedowitz Group. A certified Revenue Marketer, Margaret is also Eloqua 10 Partner certified. She has been working with The Pedowitz Group for about a year.. Margaret has more than 20 years experience in Marketing and is passionate about the relationship between Marketing and Sales.

Back to Top

Marketing: Tapping Data to Win

By on April 3, 2014   /   Analytics, Data Management   /   Leave a comment

Horse racing is an especially opportune metaphor for what’s going on in the fast-evolving worlds of Revenue Marketing™, attribution modeling, predictive and advanced marketing analytics, and bringing Big Data to the enterprise. Seconds can mean the difference between success and failure.

Marketing Analytics MetaphorHave you ever heard of Zenyatta? You might have seen her on “60 Minutes” or the cover of W Magazine, but she’s a horse – not just any horse. With her towering stature and trademark “dance” she runs faster than any mare I’ve ever seen and owns a stunning career record, winning 19-consecutive races in a 20-race career. She is the first horse to ever win two different Breeder’s Cup races, and she’s so appropriately nicknamed, “Queen of Racing.” I think every organization’s marketing mix should model that kind of behavior.

Today, marketing organizations are in a race to adopt and deploy the best analytics to help them with optimally allocating budgets, and quickly applying test-and-learn techniques to use-case scenarios. Marketers not only have the tools to do this more effectively in real-time, but are able to quantify what they’re doing in a way that was unthinkable before.

The horse racing community has long employed a form of analytics of its own. They collect “handicapping data”, which in some cases can be tens of thousands of combinations of variables to predict which horse has the best chance of winning. This data includes attributes such as post-position, race length, track surface, weather conditions, and horse and jockey records.

Is this starting to sound familiar to marketers that are gathering and analyzing endless amounts of data about their prospects and existing customers, both online and offline? It’s the intersection of data and human behavior. The data that is attached to leads and prospects provides the leverage needed to trigger the audience with relevant content and encourages buying behavior.

Today, marketing is increasingly driving the business and playing a leadership role. Organizations with sophisticated marketing tools are rapidly taking hold in a highly dynamic environment. Those only taking small steps – or worse, none at all - will fall quickly behind. This is a highly competitive race for scale and tapping data to win.

Blog Written By: Melody Holcomb

Melody Holcomb is an Associate Revenue Engineer at the Pedowitz Group. She is a Marketo Certified Expert and has a passion for marketing analytics, which allows marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives by measuring performance. 

Back to Top

6 Tips to Move You from “Doing Social” to Social Revenue Marketing

By on March 31, 2014   /   Inbound Marketing, Social Media for Demand Generation   /   Leave a comment

Social Revenue Marketing

Everyone is “doing social”, and it’s important to add this to your marketing mix – for many reasons. It adds to your search rankings, it helps to syndicate your content, it promotes your brand awareness, and can find you new leads. I typically see companies falling into 3 major categories when they are doing social or getting ready to do social.

  1. The Social “Nike” Plan: These are the companies that follow the Nike slogan all the way to social. “Just Do It”. These companies just go for it. They start posting, blogging, tweeting, re-tweeting and sharing without a plan, or perhaps a very small one. A pro of this: These companies are out there being heard! They are in the space. A con: What are they doing? What is their plan? Is this you? If so, what are you doing? Do you even know?
  2. The Timid Toe Stepper: These are the companies that want to get engaged in social, but are afraid (I see this largely with enterprise). They see the value of using social media, but the risk of the negative is too scary to dive in. Is this you? What is holding you back? You’re missing out!
  3. The Perfecters: These are the companies that are doing social, and doing social with a plan. This is where everyone really wants to be. Very few companies are here.

How to perfect your social plan? You need to consider these 6 points.

  1. Alignment: Do all your social channels align to your business goals and objectives?
  2. Management: It is important to consider the available resources to effectively manage these channels.
  3. Point of View: A social media influencer has a personality and a point of view. What is yours?
  4. Audience: Confirm that there are sufficient prospects or audience in each channel you select to make it a success.
  5. Content: Have a clear, cohesive content plan for each channel.
  6. Objective: Every channel has a clear, primary marketing objective. Make sure you know how it pertains to your business.

We all want to be the best at social media for many reasons. It’s typically less expensive, we know that this is where the majority of our prospects are, and it has an element of fun. Just make sure you take the time to consider and plan, before you just “do it”. Be sure to reevaluate. As a Revenue Marketer™, you should always evaluate your results and tactics, learn from them and improve on them. Your social media plan should be fluid, just like social media itself.

Blog Written By: Caitlin Culbert

Caitlin is a Revenue Engineer for the Pedowitz Group working on the Integrated Revenue Marketing services team. She is a Marketo Certified Expert, Marketo Certified Instructor, Certified Salesforce Admin and HubSpot Full Funnel Certified, working with Best Practices in Marketing Automation, Social Media, Inbound and Outbound campaigns.

Back to Top

Five Ways to Ensure Your Sales Team is Not Aligned with Marketing

By on March 26, 2014   /   Align Sales and Marketing, Sales, Solve Lead Challenges   /   Leave a comment

Sales and Marketing Strategy
It might sound funny, but it’s amazing how many times the following scenarios play out in marketing departments. It isn’t due to bad intentions by the marketing team, but rather due to a team that is just running fast doing what they are doing, and not taking the time to stop and think about the value they are providing to the sales team.

I used to be one of those marketers myself. But when you get a chance to take a step back and look at these behaviors, it becomes quite obvious how much of a rift they are causing in marketing and sales alignment.

Take a look and see if you recognize any of these in your own team.

  1. Define leads without getting sales input. I agree it is so much quicker to just do the legwork on your own. It can be hard to get the attention of the sales team. But how are they going to be aligned with the leads you send if they don’t buy into the definition of a lead?
  2. Don’t provide anything other than demographic information when you send a lead to sales. Where do you draw the line between what marketing should do and what sales should do? Sales seems to want to control all of the communication, but yet they also need to work more efficiently to meet their quotas. The answer is that marketing should provide as much information as possible to sales to make their conversations and next steps more efficient.
  3. Send the sales team all of the information about your campaigns before the campaign goes out and then get annoyed when they don’t know what the campaign is about. I’ve been so guilty of this in the past. It’s frustrating when you feel like you’ve said it ten times and no one is listening.  But when you put yourself in your salesperson’s shoes, you can see that their main focus day-to-day is trying to make sales and make their quota. Your campaign is one little piece that doesn’t affect them until they get a lead from that campaign. They need just-in-time information.
  4. Jump every time they ask for a brochure to support their sales efforts. Your sales team may love your marketing team because they are so responsive at creating stuff on demand. But just like if your kids ask for candy all the time, it’s not what they really need to make them successful. Taking the time to plan out content carefully that will support your prospects’ buy cycles will actually be more helpful to sales in the long run, even if they don’t like being told no in the short run.
  5. Create your campaigns without sales input. Just like #1 above – it can slow your process when you need to get more input.  But who actually has the best information about your customers and prospects? Who talks to them every day? And who needs to follow up on leads from the campaign?  Those are the people who should have input.

Blog Written By: Angela Sanders 

Angela Sanders is the Director of Consulting Operations at The Pedowitz Group. She has over 15 years of experience in helping marketing organizations grow from traditional marketing to robust Revenue Marketing. Prior to joining TPG, she worked for Aon Risk Services where she tracked over $25M annually to marketing efforts. She has worked with companies of all sizes across various industries.

Back to Top

Data Visualization 101 For The Revenue Marketer: What Graphs To Use and When

By on March 20, 2014   /   Analytics, Data Management, The Revenue Marketer   /   Leave a comment

Reporting Graphs
The power of Revenue Marketing™ Analytics is its ability to take disparate data from myriad different sources, identify key performance indicators (KPI’s) and most relevant, actionable measures and metrics and – perhaps the most important part – present them in simple, easy to understand data visualizations.

Revenue Marketing Analytics™ paints pretty pictures from very messy, sometimes even ugly data. It takes complex, sophisticated analysis that tells a simple story.

There are a number of data visualization tools in the Revenue Marketer’s toolbox.

Graphs are perhaps the most common and useful tool. But how do you know which graph to use with which type of data? Do you understand the common pitfalls of different graph types? 

Data analytics is a fundamental skill of the Revenue Marketer. She needs to tell the story of her success with data visualizations. And, as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Let’s review some common, and some not so common, data graphing tools and best practices for using each type. 

Bar Graphs

Bar graphs, or column graphs, can be used to measure different categories. The order of the columns on the x-axis can be in any order: largest to smallest, alphabetically or any order that makes sense.

Bar graphs generally are a better choice than pie charts to present snapshot distributions.

In the pie chart immediately below, it is difficult to tell whether there is more revenue from Content (blue slice) or Event (gold slice). It can be done, but it takes extra effort. Plus, there is no scale to help you gauge what dollar figure to attach to each slice without adding data labels that might clutter up the visualization. 

First-Touch Revenue Attribution

 Marketing Reporting Pie Chart

In the bar graph visualization of the same data, shown below, it is immediately clear there is more revenue from Event than Content. Plus, the values on the y-axis (vertical axis) make clear the nominal figure of the revenue, in a visually obvious way.  

First-Touch Revenue Attribution

Marketing Reporting Bar Graph

It is easier for our eyes to compare the height of the columns than it is for our eyes to gauge the relative size of the slices of a pie.

Bar graphs are also commonly used to compare things that change over time (as broadly as years, months or weeks). The increments are usually spaced equally apart, visualizing the data in a time-series.

Sales per month, visualized below, is a typical use of a bar graph. 

Sales reporting bar graph

Major gridlines every 50 units make it easy to get a basic understanding of the sales each month and how the sales in each month compare to sales in other months.

Strictly speaking, a histogram should be used in this instance, but visually a column chart with a gap between each increment works well to present this kind of data.

Stacked Bar Graphs

Stacked bar graphs are a great way to add an extra level of detail to the metric in each increment. Stacked bar graphs are used to display multiple series of data together and make it easy to compare across categories. They have the dual benefit of displaying totals for each period in addition to visualizing comparisons within each period and across periods.

The stacked bar graph below displays two things: (1) total Northwest Sales in each month of the year and (2) total Northwest Sales by each Sales Associate in each month of the year.

Stacked bar graph         

Stacked bar graphs work best if the segmentation isn’t too detailed. If there are too many segments in each column, the breakdown becomes difficult to understand. 

Side-By-Side Bar Graphs

Side-by-side bar graphs can be used to compare two related categories in the same metric over the same period. The example below compares the percent of U.S. population that are never married, by gender, over a twenty-year time frame. 

Side by Side bar graph          

Side by side bar graphs work best when there are less than half a dozen or so elements being compared in each period. 

Smart Tip: Bar Graphs versus Histograms

Histograms are often confused with bar graphs but histograms visualize continuous data, as in a time-series, or data that’s in a continuous distribution. Histograms don’t have gaps between the columns. 

Marketing Reporting Histogram             

Histograms are a good choice to use when presenting distributions along a single metric of continuous data. In the example above, the data (the number of tests) is grouped into bins of ten-point ranges. 

Bullet Graphs

Bullet graphs are a modification of bar graphs, invented by Stephen Few to replace the circular gauges and meters commonly used on dashboards with a graph that visualizes a richer data display, using much less space. 

Bullet Graphs      

Bullet graphs have several key components. In the bullet graph above, the teal bar graph indicates the performance measure of marketing-sourced revenue during the period. The short gold vertical bar displays the revenue goal target measure. The sub-head in red indicates the percentage of the goal achieved.

Stacked bars are an important part of bullet graphs, with different shades of background fill that encode qualitative measures like bad, satisfactory and good.    

The bullet graph above contains a stacked bar graph. The dark gray bar indicates 80% of the goal while the light gray bar indicates 120% of the goal.

The technical specification for bullet graphs, written by Stephen Few, is here: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Bullet_Graph_Design_Spec.pdf

Scatter Plots

Scatter Plots are used to show the relationship between two variables. One variable is plotted on the x-axis and another is plotted on the y-axis. X-Y scatter plots can be used to graphically suggest whether there is a cause and effect relationship based on how strong the correlation is. 

In the scatter plot above, it is clear that there are many more Level 1 Support tickets than other types since the blue dot is far to the right (the high end) on the horizontal axis. At the same time, average time required to reply to Level 1 Support tickets is relatively low, as indicated by its plotting at the low end of the vertical axis. There are relatively few Marketing and Job Application tickets and their response times are much longer than other types of tickets.

Interactive Graphs and Mouse Overs

Additional information can be embedded in graphs only a mouse-over away. The color differences between some of the data points plotted above is subtle. Mouse over each data point, however, and Meta data information can be revealed, as in the example below. 

If every data point displayed its label simultaneously, the visualization would be very busy and cluttered. Indeed, the location of many data points plotted on the graph would be concealed, defeating the purpose of the scatter plot itself! So user driven interactivity really improves the visualization of the data.

Another example of great usability is to make the legend interactive. Mouse over each item in the legend and the other ticket types are grayed out. This makes the particular ticket type under the pointer rise into the foreground.

Notice how the other data points in the plot are also minimized via increased transparency. This makes it easy to quickly identify the particular location in the plot of each item you mouse over in the legend.

Scatter plots are also great tools for determining whether you should conduct a cluster analysis. If groups of data points are in different clusters in several different areas of the plot, a cluster analysis can help you understand what attributes are common to each group of data points and which combination of attributes are relatively unique to each particular cluster. This can be a great aid in classifying and targeting sales prospects, to cite one common usage. 

Blog Written By: Ed Gallagher

Ed Gallagher is a Revenue Marketing Analytics Engineer with The Pedowitz Group based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Ed has been working with leading direct response marketing organizations and agencies since 1996. He has conducted more database marketing campaigns than he can count. He’s a staunch advocate of data visualization best practices and a champion of Learning Plans based on database marketing analytics. Follow Ed on Twitter @DataVizWhiz. 

Back to Top

4 Steps for Effectively Managing Change

By on March 19, 2014   /   Change Management, Revenue Marketing Journey   /   Leave a comment

Change Management Strategy

Recently, I’ve been working with a client who is 18 months into their Revenue Marketing Journey™. The road has been a long one, with its fair share of challenges and barriers, but they have made tremendous progress. I conducted an environmental analysis to help them highlight the accomplishments of the last year and a half, and identify opportunities to optimize their existing processes, content, and campaigns. What I found was truly remarkable.

Better than any organization I’ve worked with, this client managed change exceptionally well. As a consultant, I often feel like I’m standing on a mountain top yelling at the top of my lungs about how imperative it is to incorporate change management plans into a marketing automation rollout, or the Revenue Marketing Journey itself. With it, an organization can roll fluidly from one stage of the journey to the next. Without it, an organization will stumble and fall repeatedly. Unfortunately, having such a plan in place is overlooked by so many organizations.

1. Define Success

The good news is that it doesn’t matter how far along you are in your journey, you can always implement a plan to manage change. The first step to doing so is to define what success looks like to you. What do you want to be able to say you’ve accomplished in a year? How will you measure success? Having a clear, well-defined goal is critical to helping people understand WHY they are making this journey.

2. Identify Skills

Once you have a clear objective and measurement plan outlined, you’ll want to identify the skills that you need to have in order to execute against your goals. What skills and competencies will you need? How will you acquire those skills? Who will receive training? Something that often scares people about change is that they are intimidated by knowing that they don’t know what they need to in order to get the job done. You can put their mind at ease by reassuring the team that there are plans in place to up-skill everyone involved.

3. Assign Accountability

Closely tied to acquiring new skills is accountability. At the HR firm that I worked for most of my career, we used to say that ‘joint accountability is no accountability.’ A clear execution plan with assigned owners is paramount to executing change. How will you hold those people accountable? Will it be reflected in their performance plans? Will it be reflected in their compensation structure? Assigning accountability for each task allows everyone to know who is supposed to do what, and eliminates ambiguity around ownership.

4. Communication Plan

Finally, and in my opinion the most important element to driving change, is communication. Open dialogue about what is changing, why it is going to change, how it is going to change, what is the expected outcome is imperative. If people don’t understand what is happening and why it is happening, they will resist even the simplest change. I encourage you to develop a communication plan with regular touch-points to keep everyone in the loop on progress and challenges.

Managing change is often considered to be a difficult task. However, you can do it fairly easily be keeping these few pointers top of mind.

Blog Written By: Colby Fazio

Colby Fazio is an Engagement Manager at the Pedowitz Group. Colby consults with global organizations to redefine marketing strategies, drive organizational change, educate on Revenue Marketing processes, and optimize the marketing discipline overall. Previously, she worked for one of the worlds’s premier HR consulting firms for nearly a decade, where she developed her expertise in change management and global marketing strategy. 

Back to Top

Eloqua Winter Release – Top Features

By on March 14, 2014   /   Eloqua, Featured   /   Leave a comment

oracle eloqua logo

It’s that time of year again, the Eloqua Winter 2014 release is upon us. There are some exciting updates coming in the Winter ’14 release, here are a few of our favorites:

1. Incorporate your display advertising directly into your campaigns. This was previously known as Adfocus/Bizo and was accomplished via a cloud connector. It’s not being rolled out as an add-on feature for basic users and a standard feature for standard and enterprise users. We’ve done a few implementations of the cloud connector for clients and think the power contained by incorporating your display ads into your Eloqua campaigns is immense!  We look forward to seeing the great results that this feature will continue to drive for customers.

2. Enhanced revenue dashboards – really who doesn’t love better analytics! With the advent of Insight and Analyzer licenses Eloqua put the power in their users hands, with this release you can look forward to some great new reports on campaign velocity, campaign value and reach as well as ROI. If you don’t have closed-loop reporting you’ll miss out on these great reports, but it’s yet another reason why moving towards that closed-loop generates such value for your business.

3. Advances in security and management will allow you to grant permissions to images, shared content and shared filters. No more worrying about whether or not the right teams have access to the right images (or do not have access to out of date images), you can now restrict access to things much more granularly than before.

4. A unique beta feature will allow you to store contact records without an email address. While you’ll have to seek access to the beta through support or your Eloqua/Oracle Account Manager, it will finally provide an answer to how to keep lists for direct gmail, social, mobile or advertising efforts that lack an email address.

5. For all the process oriented people in the audience, another beta to watch is campaign review and approvals. Another one of those bucket-list features we’ve all wanted – the ability to approve, review and manage the process of campaign creation. To read more about the campaign approvals beta, check out: http://topliners.eloqua.com/docs/DOC-5836

6.  The last feature set we’re eagerly awaiting are the new admin tools for Profiler and Engage. Both answer many open questions from Eloqua users around configuration and enablement. On the Profiler side, you will gain the ability to customize the data being displayed inside your CRM. On the Engage side, you gain the ability to restrict batch sizes, add attachments to emails, and make personal templates private. Lots more detail is available on Topliners: http://topliners.eloqua.com/docs/DOC-5385

Which features are you most excited about?

Blog Written By: Lauren Kincke

Lauren is a Revenue Engineer for the Pedowitz Group. She is an Eloqua Partner Certified Consultant, Certified Salesforce.com Administrator, and has a wide range of experience with various marketing and email automation platforms.

Back to Top

How the Revenue Marketing Journey™ and Parenthood Are Alike

By on March 13, 2014   /   Revenue Marketing Journey, The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketer   /   Leave a comment

Baby metaphor with Revenue Marketing Journey

Do you know what’s so great about my life? I get to wake up in the most incredibly rewarding and heart-warming way every morning: to the smile of my beautiful baby daughter. My nights can sometimes be filled with battles of mom vs. baby, unexplained crying fits, the use of mom as a Kleenex, and laps on our worn-down bedroom carpet. No matter how tiring those nightly battles can get sometimes, it always worth the fight to wake up to that big toothless grin beaming through the crib.

Sharing in the Revenue Marketing Journey™ with my clients is a little like that: an exciting journey with plenty of learning steps along the way, but ultimately ending in a rewarding handoff as they graduate to the next stage.

Every engagement is exciting to me, no matter how small or large. It gives me the chance to meet new people and help guide them to where they want to go in their Revenue Marketing journey. I approach clients just like I did meeting my daughter for the first time. I prepared as much as I could and read up on everything I could get my hands on about parenting. I expect surprises and challenges to arise along the way. But the preparation, whether for my clients or my daughter, allows me to stay grounded and calm.

If there was a know-all book out there on parenting (and that has been proven to work by ALL parents), than that author would be a millionaire. Just as if there was a know-all book on how to go from Traditional Marketing to Revenue Marketing in in 5 steps, I could possibly be a millionaire (but I will leave that for Debbie Qaqish). Alas, parenting and becoming Revenue Marketers takes time and a lot of work. Fortunately for me, I am but a humble Revenue Engineer (RE) and mom to one beautiful (and rambunctious) little baby girl that will use all the resources that I have to make myself a great mom and an even better RE.

Sometimes you don’t need a know-all book to be successful; you just need to have to the desire and passion to be a better person, to be successful in all you do, and to find those answers to guide you along the journey. I will continue to do that as a mom and as the Revenue Marketing concierge for my clients.

Blog Written By: BeHai Ligas

BeHai Ligas is a Senior Revenue Engineer at the Pedowitz Group. She is a Marketo Certified Technical Consultant and trainer has been working with The Pedowitz Group for 3 years. BeHai has a passion for training and building very sophisticated programs on the Marketo platform. 

Back to Top

Building Forms with Purpose – 3 Questions to Ask

By on March 10, 2014   /   Forms, Inbound Marketing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation   /   Leave a comment

Inbound Marketing Form

As marketing automation platforms become more popular, marketing departments have the ability to build forms for all occasions. In my role, I am usually focused on the technical aspects of a form. I try to determine what UX techniques will meet the requirements and ensure that data is being collected in the proper format for any downstream integrations. Data concerns include any custom validation that needs to be addressed.

After participating in many of these discussions, I realized that building forms is more than simply adding fields to collect data. Forms should have purpose. Building forms should start with a series of questions that are different from the ones I’m used to asking. The answers to these questions can help define the true requirements for the form.

Start with three basic questions:

1. Who will this form serve?
2. For lead capture forms, what is the purpose of the form?
3. Can the user experience be optimal, while still capturing detailed information where necessary?

This helps us break the form into one of several categories.

General inquiry forms should allow users to identify themselves. It should also allow a user to indicate his/her reason for completing the form and offer several options for providing contact information and a preference.

Lead capture forms are vastly different since the goal is often high conversions. These forms may serve to either provide additional qualification information or to simply acquire leads. If the form is gating a high-value asset, the nature of the fields is likely to ask more detailed questions.  A more basic asset may have a low number of questions where the fields are general. In summary, early-stage lead forms will contain the minimum fields required to create a lead, where late-stage lead forms contain qualifier fields.

Asking the right qualifier fields can be a challenge. This is a great opportunity to outline another consideration for forms. Identify any technology or custom coding which can be used in the form to dynamically present fields. For instance, the form may contain one field that triggers a specific series of fields based on the selected value.

Lastly, consider any hidden fields or tracking fields which can be used to provide inferred data. If a person requests to view a video related to a particular solution through a gated form, the form may include an inferred product interest.

Building effective forms with purpose helps provide accurate lead routing. It can also manage the balance between conversion rates and lead qualification or quality data. Begin building your forms with a specific purpose in mind and the rest will fall into place.

Blog Written By: Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson is a Solution Engineer at the Pedowitz Group. Brian has been with the Pedowitz Group for over 3 years now and has been involved in web application development more than 10 years. His ingenuity combined with his technical background enables Brian to offer solutions for all types of business requirements related to Revenue Marketing.

 

Back to Top
Next Page »

Results

1,000 Clients and Counting
Case Studies
Testimonials
Client Awards
Client Comments 

© 2012 The Pedowitz Group LLC. is a trademark of The Pedowitz Group. Revenue Marketer is a registered trademark of The Pedowitz Group. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

Contact

810 Mayfield Road
Milton, GA 30009
Phone: 855-REV-MKTG

ASK US A QUESTION