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Welcome to the World of Marketing Automation. What Now?

By on July 31, 2014   /   Email Marketing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation   /   Leave a comment

So, you finally got the go-ahead to implement that new marketing automation platform (MA) you’ve been wanting. It took some convincing, sure: grand promises of metrics and forecasts. But your persistence paid off and you’re on the road to automation.

So where do you start?

To get the true benefits of marketing automation requires more than just transferring your existing email campaigns to the new system. Of course marketing automation excels at email campaigns. There is so much more to it, though!

At first glance, it can seem overwhelming. To get you started off right, here are two areas you should focus on with your new MA.

Lead Scoring. Hopefully, this is something you considered as you researched your MA options. If not, there’s no time like the present! Lead scoring requires strong information sharing between marketing and sales: both teams will have insight as to what criteria should be considered. Your first scoring model won’t be perfect, but don’t worry. Just get something in place. You will refine and adjust the model over time. Marketo has put together a great e-book on the topic – check out their Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring.

There are several advantages in establishing a lead scoring model early: it sets the stage for further collaboration between marketing and sales; it proves that marketing is working to deliver good leads; and you can better evaluate what makes a lead truly qualified (and then use that info to further refine your scoring).

Naming. Sure, it doesn’t sound very sexy. But if you want to be able to compile the amazing reports you have been promising, your data needs to be ordered and accessible. There is no one right way when it comes to naming conventions; consider the needs of your business and the way you plan to use marketing automation.

I like to use a convention like this:

EB 2013-09-16 Client Newsletter

EB indicates this is an email blast. The remainder is the send date and title. This clean, uncomplicated naming convention makes it easy to identify my programs and campaigns.

These two items will give you a solid foundation to build on as you develop your marketing automation expertise. Let me know how it goes!

Blog Written By: Bill Cozadd

Bill is an Associate Revenue Engineer at The Pedowitz Group. He is a Marketo Certified Consultant and has been with The Pedowitz Group since 2013. Bill loves to help clients leverage technology to achieve their marketing goals. 

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Marketo Release July 2014 – A Little Redecoration

By on July 28, 2014   /   Marketing Automation, Marketo   /   Leave a comment

Marketo users everywhere have probably logged in and been startled. Even though we knew the new UI was coming, it can be a bit abrupt to walk into your living room after a weekend away and realize that someone moved the furniture – and added a few new slip covers.

Slip covers first: The new interface has a flatter, boxier appearance. You may love it or hate it, but essentially the same elements are all there. Included is a bit more breathing room between elements. The pro is that they are more distinguishable. The con is that if you have a lot of flow steps, you’ll find yourself scrolling more.

The wallpaper changed a while ago and you’re probably already used to that, but now the color palette has been changed a bit – you’ll find a lot more of that teal blue – but the orange of triggers and green of filters remain the same.

Now the for the furniture:

You’ll notice that the tabs are gone, replaced by tiles with new icons when you first log in. “What’s New” has moved to the bottom right, but your history is still there in the upper left. No, you’re not missing your search, it’s simply slipped down to the lower left (and it’s a bit more unobtrusive there). If there are tiles in this screenshot you don’t see in your instance – that’s just because they’re not included in your particular subscription. No worries.

Once you’re into an area, which retain their usual names “Marketing Activities,” “Lead Database,” etc., the biggest question is going to be how you get to what used to be the tabs. The answer is what’s now called the “Power Ball” in the upper left. That circle with the Marketo logo is now a button that provides you with a drop down to select the area of Marketo you want to navigate to.

 

A few of the previous “treasure chest” items have been incorporated. When you’re in Marketing Activities, you’re now going to see the Campaign Inspector and Campaign Queue at the top. These are really handy tools and you’ll want to start using them if you haven’t been already.

The Campaign Inspector provides you with a look at the trigger campaigns that are active. If you just inherited an existing Marketo instance that is new to you, you’ll be able to start doing your forensic research here to see how your predecessor set up the instance.

You’ve also got the “Campaign Queue” to tell you which of your batch campaigns are launching soon and in which priority. This should help anyone juggling lots of programs and wondering about their processing. There’s more information about the campaign queue prioritization in the community.

Except for some appearance issues, you won’t find much difference in Design Studio, Lead Database, or Analytics.

If you’re an administrator, you’ll notice a bit of redecoration there as well. The list of areas for Admin was getting kind of long. Now the different admin areas have been split up into groups, allowing you to find what you’re looking for without scrolling:

They’re well organized, which should help any new administrators out there.

All in all, the new UI will take a bit of time to get used to – and if you’re a new user who was acclimating already, it might be a bit disorienting. But no one threw out your favorite chair, your new accessories, or your old bookcase from college – everything you used to have is still there. And you might find you like your chair even better over in the corner with the reading lamp than you did when it was blocking the path to the kitchen.

Blog Written By: Emily Salus

Emily Salus is the Marketo Team Leader and Director of Customer Success at the Pedowitz Group. She has over 20 years of experience in Marketing, PR and Sales. Emily is a certified Marketo technical consultant, providing revenue marketing services and strategy to enterprise clients and best practices and training to the SMB market.

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A Consumer’s View of List Purchasing

By on July 23, 2014   /   Data Management, Email Marketing, Lead Quantity and Quality   /   1 Comment

Cold Calling“Hello, this is Samantha with Acme Insurance, may I please speak with Ms. Downing?”

This is the 4th call in as many weeks that I’ve received from a random insurance company, regarding a request that I allegedly submitted for information on insurance that very morning. The previous month, I received a total of 6 calls from online education companies who insisted that I had requested to be contacted via a web form—which I definitely had not.

So I do what any Revenue Marketer™ would do: I begin asking questions. Initially the callers, (sometimes rather defiantly,) insist that I did submit a request to be contacted—perhaps I simply forgot about it. But when my politely confused questions begin to corner them down lines of inquiry regarding specific URLs and IP addresses from which these alleged form submissions had come, or how it is the information they have on me is either out-and-out wrong (I’ve never had an AOL email address) or more than a decade obsolete, they relent, explaining that my information had been purchased from a third party vendor. 

Ever the concerned consultant, I advise the now mortified callers to inform their management of the mediocrity of the lists they’ve spent hard-earned budget on, and suggest they demand a refund from their vendor, or sever ties entirely. In one particularly gratifying occasion, I pleasantly explained to the very embarrassed caller that I am already a customer and using the very product about which they were calling.

In this anecdote, we learn a few things:

  1. When it comes to leads, you get what you pay for. Purchase a list from a lesser quality vendor and you may end up with quite a few of your prospective customers thinking ill of your brand and verbally abusing your representatives. Procure a list from a reputable, industry-specific list distributor and you may be quite successful. Spend a couple months actively nurturing your database with carefully targeted messaging and offers, while being responsive to their digital body language, and you may have even more revenue-generating relationships.
  2. Once you get a customer, treat them like gold—know who they are in your database and treat them accordingly. All purchased lists should be scoured for existing customer information and de-duplicated against the rest of your database. This is important, not only to avoid pestering existing customers and embarrassing your brand, but also so that you can be sure you’re getting your money’s worth from your vendor, who will often refund or replace duplicate leads. These steps may vary in difficulty, depending on the quality of your data management processes, but it’s worth it to keep the people who are engaging in your services happy and thinking well of you.
  3. Don’t have your call script state that the caller is directly responding to a form submission from earlier that day when this is not the case. You never know when you’ll have a data nerd like me on the other end of the line who will grill your representatives for the IP address of the form submission. And, although I imagine it goes without saying, do not advise your representatives to suggest that the lead has forgotten that they submitted the request earlier that day. Consumers are not dumb.

I am by no means saying that purchasing lists is necessarily a poor business decision. Rather, I wish to highlight the fact that not all vendors are created equal. Marketing is about creating relationships between your brand and the people who might find it interesting or useful—not blasting leads. Purchasing a low-quality list means that you a) have no certainty that the people you’re spending money, time, and resources contacting will have any interest in your offer and b) that the information you’re using to contact them is accurate. Your objective as a marketer is to generate quality leads for your sales organization and to foster positive relationships with your brand. Shoddy lists will accomplish neither of these objectives.

PS: To list vendors out there—please stop selling inaccurate information about me. 

Blog Post Written By: Elizabeth Downing

Elizabeth is an Revenue Engineer for the Pedowitz Group working on the Revenue Engineering team. She is a Marketo Certified Consultant, working with Marketing Automation, content development, Inbound and Outbound.

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Marketo Tutorial – 4 Tips for Lead Scoring with Tokens

By on July 21, 2014   /   Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketo   /   Leave a comment

Warning: The following blog is intended for Marketo power users, a marketing automation platform. If you are not familiar with this platform, this will sound like Klingon. Click here for an overview of lead scoring best practices or click here to read why you should refresh your lead scoring program.

Lead scoring is an art and a science. This is not a “set it and forget it” process. As a Marketo user, you may find yourself changing lead scoring values as you refresh your lead scoring system. In fact, we hope you are gathering feedback from sales about your lead scoring system to continuously improve your system! In helping manage your ever-changing model, you can use local program tokens as a way to manage your lead scoring values. Local Tokens are Marketo tokens that are configured specifically for a Marketo program module.

Here is a high-level view of how to utilize local tokens to easily manage your lead scoring system:

  • Make sure your lead scoring Smart Campaigns are organized in a Marketo Program with an “Operational” channel. The Operational channel is not out of the box with Marketo, so you will need to create this channel in the Admin section.

Lead Scoring Smart Campaigns

  • Make sure you have two fields for lead scoring – one for demographic, and one for behavior. These fields are custom fields that need to be created in your CRM so the fields can be seen in your CRM and in Marketo.
  • Once your Marketo lead scoring program is created, go to the “My Tokens” tab of your program and create tokens to match every single lead score value for your system (It’s a really good idea to document your lead scoring program outside of Marketo for validation).

Marketo Tokens

  • On each of your Smart Campaign workflows, replace the number value with your token values. You will need to copy and paste the code for the local token into the value area, for example {{my.Clicks Link in Any Email}}.

Smart Campaign Workflow

With the use of local tokens, you are now able to change the values for lead scoring on the local tokens tab instead of each individual lead scoring smart campaign! Work smart and continue to improve your lead scoring.

Blog Written By: Majda Anwar

Majda Anwar is an Engagement Manager at the Pedowitz Group. She is a Marketo Certified Technical Consultant and has been working with The Pedowitz Group for 5 years. Majda has a passion for reporting and analytics, which allow her clients to show revenue contribution from their marketing activities.

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How To Measure Marketing Attribution: Revenue Marketers Rise To The Challenge

By on July 17, 2014   /   Analytics, Data Management, Deliver Revenue Results   /   Leave a comment
Jeff Pedowitz and Kevin Joyce

Jeff Pedowitz and Kevin Joyce, The Pedowitz Group

Blog post written by Jeff Pedowitz, President & CEO, and Kevin Joyce, VP of Marketing Strategy, The Pedowitz Group. Join Kevin Joyce and our partners at GoodData on Tuesday, July 29th at 2:00pm (EST) for a live one-hour webinar “Measuring Marketing’s Influence on Revenue with Attribution Models”.

In the latter part of the 19th century John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, is reputed to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  Imagine you could demonstrate and manage the impact of marketing on revenue? Imagine you knew which half of your budget was well spent?

For a B2B company with sales cycles of more than six months this may still not be easy. Notice we are not talking about a labor of Sisyphus, pursuing marketing ROI on a single marketing initiative.

Measuring the impact of marketing means being able to attribute revenues back to all marketing initiatives that helped accelerate and earn that revenue. Another alternative, tracking marketing lead sources, which is similar to “first touch attribution” and while easily implemented, is not a substitute for recording 100% of the marketing interactions with contacts during their buying journey.

To successfully attribute marketing to revenue requires marketers:

   1. Record all contact interactions with marketing initiatives.

   2. Associate known contacts with opportunities in your CRM.

   3. Weight the valued marketing interactions fairly.

In the past ten years there have been several developments on the marketing technology front that aid us in overcoming these challenges. Marketing automation records prospect interactions with marketing initiatives.

Since Wanamaker’s time we have been able to record the cost of our marketing outreach. The problem was we didn’t know which half of it was being effective unless they placed the order immediately because we could not see nor measure their interaction with our marketing initiatives.

In an age dominated by Digital Marketing,measuring and recording the prospect responses with Marketing Automation opens the door to demonstrating incremental movements in the buying cycle as a result of each marketing interaction.

A second important technology needed to overcome challenge #2 listed above is the Business Intelligence (BI) platform. For the most part, firms and sales people associate opportunities with accounts, and rarely attach contacts to the opportunity. In the majority of B2B sales five or more contacts may be associated with the purchase process and buying decision, yet only one or none of the contacts are listed on the opportunity.

The result is that the recorded marketing interactions with the 5+contacts are not directly associated with the opportunity or revenue. Enter the BI system. Connect it to your Marketing automation and your CRM platforms, give it some business rules for making the associations between contacts and opportunities, and you have overcome the second challenge.

Now you have arrived at challenge #3. Do you give equal weight to all marketing interactions with all contacts associated with the account, for all time prior to the opportunity closing? Probably not. You will probably need to weight the value of the interactions based on their recency and type. For example, you may choose to discount all website visits prior to 3 months before the opportunity was created, and you may choose to weight a webinar attendance five times greater than a Slideshare viewing.

In summary, your steps to getting started on Marketing Attribution include the following:

1. Integrate your marketing automation system and CRM to leverage the campaign object in the CRM when recording prospect behaviors. This will at least give you some basic reporting and show you some of the gaps.

2. Document and refine your lead management process so that pipeline reports on leads (not just opportunities) can accurately record marketing’s efforts.

3. Deploy a cloud based BI system that has pre-built connectors to your MA and CRM.

4. Define your business rules, configure your reports.

5. Train your staff to leverage reports in making better decisions every day and add measured KPIs into their variable compensation plans.

The knowledge, skills, processes and technologies are finally here to help all the John Wanamakers in the marketing world redirect the wasted marketing budget into initiatives that help sales people sell more. What are you waiting for?

For more insight into Marketing Attribution, please join our one-hour webinar with GoodData, Measuring Marketing’s Influence on Revenue with Attribution Models, on Tuesday, July 29th at 2:00pm (EST).

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6 Tips for Using Your Preference Center

By on July 15, 2014   /   Content, Demand Generation, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation   /   Leave a comment

16601901_sSo you have an unsubscribe link, think that’s enough? Think again. Many people think that an unsubscribe link and a website/landing page that confirms you have unsubscribed is enough, but from the standpoint of user experience and the desire to better engage with your audience, it is barely scratching the surface.

Why is it important to have a preference center? Beyond the obvious benefits of allowing you to segment your email based on what someone tells you they are actually interested in, it allows your audience to opt-down instead of opting-out of your emails. 

Here are some tips for creating your own preference center:

1. Be specific.  Offering choice in communications preferences isn’t enough. Be clear as to what those relevant communications will be and how they will be presented. Four key options to consider for opting-in:

            Content – News, products, offers, events

            Frequency – Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or alerts

            Channel – Email, direct mail, phone or SMS and smartphone

            Format – Text-only, HTML or mobile

2. Watch and listen. 

Utilizing progressive profiling, you can make informed decisions around the types of communications your audience members might prefer for those who have generically opted-in to all communications or who have not yet provided detail on the preference center. Remember, when you make those decisions use language in your email to show someone where they can manage their preferences to better tailor the communications to their needs and interests.

3. Only ask what you’re prepared to deliver. 

Using your preference center in hopes that one day you will offer some type of communications (for example, a newsletter that doesn’t exist today) will only create confusion. Add things to the preference center only as they come into being, not prior to. Don’t confuse preferences with market research; your preference center isn’t to gather data on what people might want to hear about.

4. Tell subscribers what to expect and why they should give up personal information.  

Just like #3 says, only do what you say you are going to do. Tell people what you are going to do to make it easy! Use hover-over text or descriptions of the types of communications so that people see the value in providing you their data and their permission to communicate with them.

5. Use welcome and thank-you communications to continue the conversation.

Now that someone has told you about themselves, use that information to begin the conversation the right way, with personalized content geared toward keeping them engaged. It’s easier to keep a contact engaged than to re-engage someone who has gone quiet.

6. Make your preference center an acquisition tool. 

Encourage social sharing – either after form completion in the preference center or in welcome emails. Use your preference center as a starting point for communications, not just a saving grace when someone wants out.

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. 

 

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6 Essentials for Putting the Q in QA

By on July 10, 2014   /   Eloqua, Email Marketing, Marketo, QA   /   Leave a comment

QA TipsWhen I tell my Marketo students that, in a perfect world, half their time for any digital marketing initiative should be spent designing and building and half testing and QA, they laugh at me. The world, alas, is sadly imperfect.

That doesn’t mean you can forget QA, though. I also tell my students it’s a lot easier to check first than to send an apology email later. Here are 6 areas that you must cover, to ensure quality QA:

1)   Copy Editing: Make sure you check the grammar, logical flow, and appearance of your content – and that includes emails, landing pages and form field labels. While an extra space between lines won’t kill you, and a misplaced capital letter is hardly a crime, it smacks of being unprofessional. Clean it up, people.

2)   Looks Matter: Ok, it reads well now, but do the links go where they’re supposed to? Does the email look right in several email clients? Mac and PC? How about the landing pages? Is the alignment ok on Mac and PC (and increasingly important, handheld devices)? Are the images working? How about in different browsers? What happens when you fill out the form? Does it go to the right page? Alt-tags? Meta tags?

3)   Program Set Up: If you’re using Marketo, make sure you’ve set up your costs and custom tags, and you’ve got the right steps for your program statuses (based on the channel). Every program should have at least one cost tag, even if it’s $0. It makes for better, cleaner reporting down the line.

4)   Program Statuses: Why? Every time I teach, someone asks me why they should bother with these…especially if they only have one email to send because they’re doing a pilot. Without them, you can’t learn about how far your leads progressed into your program and how effective it was. Reporting is essential. Don’t forget these easy, but required, smart campaign flow steps.

5)   Flow Testing: You have to send to a test list. Not just the test emails that you send, but really, to a list. Make sure the tokens are filling in correctly. That you get the right responses from auto-response campaigns under the right actions. That you’re removed from a campaign at the right place, if you’ve included that as a requirement. You’ll need at least one email address to check every possible variation through your campaign flow, so recruit colleagues and give them roles (you open, you ignore, you click after the first email, you click after the second email, etc.). Make sure you get the feedback from their experiences. This is where you can test that your program statuses (see step 4) are working correctly.

6)   The List: You absolutely MUST verify that you are sending to the right people. Make sure your list is the size you expect it to be, and spot check to make sure the right leads are showing up in your list. Error proof this one, because you can’t back out once you hit that send button!

While this is an overview, and there are lots of details for each of these areas, making sure you don’t skip any of the steps above will help get you on your way…until the world is perfect.

Blog Written By: Emily Salus

Emily Salus is the Marketo Team Leader and Director of Customer Success at the Pedowitz Group. She has over 20 years of experience in Marketing, PR and Sales. Emily is a certified Marketo technical consultant, providing revenue marketing services and strategy to enterprise clients and best practices and training to the SMB market.

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What Is the #1 Thing Marketing Automation Users Don’t Prioritize?

By on July 8, 2014   /   Eloqua, Marketing Automation, Marketo, The Pedowitz Group   /   Leave a comment

What is the #1 thing marketing automation users don't prioritizeOne of the key elements of being a consultant at The Pedowitz Group is being a team member. We all have strong opinions, but one of our great strengths is our diversity and willingness to share. A member of our team, Alyssa Hewitt, came up with the idea of a team blog and we ran with it. So here’s our first team blog, answering a key question.

Question: What is the #1 thing Marketing Automation (MA) users don’t prioritize that you, as a consultant, would strongly recommend they focus on? 

Alyssa Hewitt, Associate Revenue Engineer:

For those that are new to it, I think there is a giant misconception regarding what the term “marketing automation” means. The beauty of automation tools is not rooted in a “set-it-and-forget-it” mantra, rather, it’s that these tools give marketers the ability to know their target audience better, and use the information gathered to create more relevant campaigns that actually resonate with a buyer. These automation tools are not meant to churn out more campaigns to more people in a shorter amount of time – they are meant to help us lift the veil and see leads as individuals, each with their own unique needs, wants, and drivers. Marketing automation tools translate data into stories, and it is our job as marketers to understand, react, and adapt in real time to figure out what is it that a lead really needs; then deliver.

BeHai Ligas, Senior Revenue Engineer:

Get your house in order and make sure you’re inviting the right guests. I find a lot of marketing automation users get very excited about having such an incredible tool in their hands – BUT – they forget to do the prep work before getting their hands dirty. There’s a myriad of things you can do to take advantage of your secret weapon, but the biggest thing you should focus in on as your starting point is the cleanup of your data.

Start with what you have in your database before you start acquiring new leads. Make sure you have accurate data, make sure your duplicates are manageable, and above all, make sure you are targeting the right group of people for every campaign you plan out.

Bill Cozadd, Associate Revenue Engineer:

What many people don’t realize is that most marketing automation platforms come with out-of-the-box drone capability. That’s definitely the place to start. In all seriousness, though, I think lead scoring is an area where you will see a lot of bang for your buck. It’s easy to overlook with all the other shiny features and functionality available to you, but lead scoring can have a huge impact on how you look at leads and what it truly means for a lead to be qualified. Even the exercise of coming up with a scoring model is hugely beneficial, as it forces you to identify what demographics and behaviors are indicators of purchase readiness.

Melody Holcomb, Associate Revenue Engineer:

In my experience, I would say the most overlooked marketing automation thing would be between dirty data and stale content.

Since lead data is what MA uses to trigger and perform actions – the earlier you invest in keeping it clean, the better your MA performance will be. This includes before data enters your MA (or CRM, if the two are bi-directionally synced) and setting up data management to normalize fields, where possible, and keep your data clean over time.

To run a decent Engagement Program, you need a lot of good content. Without it, you will send sales pitch after sales pitch and ultimately irritate your leads and receive the dreaded “unsubscribe.” Get the people and process in place to create that high-quality content, in formats targeted at all levels of the funnel, and whether you’re B2B or B2C.

Emily Salus, Marketo Practice Director:

Most marketers are so busy working on the email they have to get out next week that they neglect long-term engagement planning. If you’re always focused on next week’s email, you’ll be on that treadmill, running in place, forever. Marketing automation users should take the time to think about how they want to communicate with their prospects and customers over an extended period of time and truly interact with them. While it’s hard to look at a long term plan, you have more content than you think. That white paper from 2 years ago probably has some good content that could be quickly reframed and broken up into 6 or 8 pieces, since no one really has time to read a long white paper, along with a blog or two and maybe an infographic. If you’re emailing once a week or every other week, you could get a couple months of nurturing emails out of those few items. And once you’ve got that started and are no longer thinking about next week’s email, you’ve got even more room to think about strategic engagement.

Elizabeth Downing, Associate Revenue Engineer:

Although often the mantra of people new to marketing automation, reporting is often left by the wayside, as marketers obsess over pretty content and scramble to keep on top of their marketing calendar. The brave new world of marketing automation lies in the ability to track the impact of marketing campaigns on the immediate audience we’re touching (opens, click throughs, conversions, etc.) compared to other programs over time, and on our bottom line (revenue generated, pipeline creation, acceleration of leads through the waterfall.)

Good reporting requires a) a clear vision of exactly what questions you want to answer and b) strong processes to ensure the data you want to report on is being captured. Reporting should come first: clearly define what questions you want your reports to answer, and then use them to create the processes to gather the answers. Any other approach leaves marketers scrambling to gather disparate data, guessing at data they haven’t collected and wondering where the “automation” has gone.

As you can tell, we all have different opinions, but they are all related. There are hidden strengths in exploring and exploiting a diversity of features of marketing automation – and always remembering that it is not simply a mail send tool. Leveraging any of the above responses can move you and your team forward in getting more ROI from marketing automation.

Blog Written By: Alyssa Hewitt, Associate Revenue Engineer, BeHai Ligas, Senior Revenue Engineer, Bill Cozadd, Associate Revenue Engineer, Melody Holcomb, Associate Revenue Engineer, Emily Salus, Marketo Practice Director and Elizabeth Downing, Associate Revenue Engineer at The Pedowitz Group.

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5 Hurdles to Revenue Marketing™ Transformation

By on June 25, 2014   /   Change Management, Revenue Marketing Journey   /   1 Comment

Revenue Marketing Journey

The current shift to customer-centric marketing and the transformation to a Revenue Marketing™ organization will take the average mid-sized to large corporation about two years. There are hurdles to overcome in driving this transformation and a Change Management (CM) team is vital to achieving success.

In addition, firms embarking on this Revenue Marketing Journey™ must acquire a series of new capabilities and skill sets, including:

  •        Campaign management
  •        Technology power user skills
  •        Funnel management
  •        Marketing reporting and analysis
  •        Lead nurturing
  •        Prospect engagement
  •        Inbound marketing
  •        Content marketing

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is a major shift in how marketing is done, and to use a well-worn metaphor, the marketing engine has to be swapped out while the car is still cruising around the track. Job descriptions, organizational structures, compensation plans must be changed and there are many people who simply don’t like that and will resist the change. As a result, this transformation requires a Change Management team with a plan to guide its success and overcome hurdles.

The CM team will report to an executive steering committee, but the team composition is best comprised largely of line manager staff, with perhaps one director. The primary task of the CM team is to help guide the organization towards realizing the vision, overcoming obstacles, and identifying and eliminating barriers to change.

There are five large hurdles to the transformation that the Change Management team will tackle most:

  1.        Marketing people continuing to do their old job - failing to embrace their new job description
  2.        Executives lack of understanding on why the change is important and urgent
  3.        Sales people lack of understanding of the new prospect information marketing is providing
  4.        Too much focus on activity metrics instead of results
  5.        Too much focus on the technology and not enough on evolving prospect engagement

The Revenue Marketing CM team has an obligation to keep their ears to the ground, but their eyes must remain on the vision of the future. They will drive the requirements for education, changing job descriptions, executive briefings, celebration of early wins, and institutionalizing change within the organization. They will need to drive the sense of urgency within the organization to change.

The winds of change are upon us in marketing. A good Change Management team will hoist their sails, and help ensure the transformation is smooth sailing.

Blog Written By: Kevin Joyce

Kevin is VP of Marketing Strategy for The Pedowitz Group . He has 25 years experience in marketing and sales, including roles as CMO, VP of Marketing, Director of Product Marketing, and Director of Sales.

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4 Marketo Reports Every User Should Utilize

By on June 23, 2014   /   Analytics, Marketo   /   Leave a comment


4 Marketo Reports to Measure Marketing’s Impact

Leads by Source

Marketo Reports – Leads by Source

Warning: The following blog is intended for Marketo power users, a marketing automation platform. If you are not familiar with this platform, this will sound like Klingon. Click here for an overview of marketing analytics best practices or download our white paper – Metrics That Matter.

To some, the Analytics tab in Marketo is a mystery. Most Marketo users that I work with have little to no knowledge of this part of the platform, however, as Revenue Marketers, we know how important reporting is to monitoring our path through the Revenue Marketing Journey.  While the Analytics tab is hands down the most underutilized feature in Marketo, there are key reports you can leverage today to measure your marketing impact. Look at these four Marketo reports to measure your marketing success. Keep in mind that these reports can utilize subscriptions to send to your sales and marketing leadership!

  • Leads by Source (Opportunity Information Columns) – This is a “Leads by X” report in Marketo that shows opportunity information for all leads created within a certain timeframe. To create this report, make sure to show the opportunity columns on the set up tab of your “Leads by Source: report to see which sources are bringing in the most revenue. Set the subscription to send on a weekly basis.
  • Web Activity Report (Known and Unknown) – This jewel of a report gives the ability for the recipient of the report to click through to see the lead’s Marketo activity record up to 30 days after the report is sent. This is the same link as the “Activity Log” your Marketo power users see on the lead record. This is a great tool for lead owners to see digital body language of their prospects and customers. Create two reports, one with known leads and one with anonymous leads. Send by lead owner on a daily basis.
  • Leads by Status By Owner (create custom columns by vertical) – With the assumption that your lead status field is a reflection of your lead definitions, this report shows you how many leads are assigned to the owner and at what stage they are in the revenue funnel. Is marketing sending over enough qualified leads for all sales reps? Do we see too many disqualified leads with a single sales owner? To create this report, clone the “Leads by Source” report and on the set up tab, group leads by “Status”. Send on a monthly basis. 
  • Program Performance Report (by channel and/or tags) – If your programs and events are set up and running properly within the Marketing Activities tab and you have cost tags on all of your programs, this is a great report to see how much you are paying for successful leads. Compare programs by channel or by tag. The report will show you key metrics such as cost per lead, cost per new lead, and cost per successful leads within each program. Compare costs and cut unsuccessful programs. Congratulations, you’ve found the marketing department more spending dollars for next year!

Blog Written By: Majda Anwar

Majda Anwar is an Engagement Manager at the Pedowitz Group. She is a Marketo Certified Technical Consultant and has been working with The Pedowitz Group for 5 years. Majda has a passion for reporting and analytics, which allow her clients to show revenue contribution from their marketing activities.

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