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Your Leads Are People

By Emily Salus on March 6, 2014 / Email Marketing, Lead Quantity and Quality, Pipeline: Manage the Funnel / Leave a comment

We constantly talk about leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities. What we forget in using these terms is that those are all associated with individuals, like you and me. And there are societal norms for how we treat others in our community:

1) We do not blast emails.

Imagine if, instead of saying I was going to “send my mother an email,” I said I was going to “blast my mother”. How rude! For me, Blast is the “b-word” and, as such, profanity. Treat your leads like you would a friend or relative and before you hit that “send” button, have a little respect.

2) We do not drop leads into our sales funnel.

So you’re at the park with your nephew and you’re playing on the jungle gym. You don’t drop your nephew. Similarly, you don’t drop leads into your funnel, because that would be painful for them. You nurture them along, encourage them, educate them, and wait until they’re ready to go to the next rung. People are not water balloons.

3) Gravity has nothing to do with it.

Another reason we don’t “drop” leads into our sales funnel is that gravity has nothing to do with it. Leads don’t naturally move from stage to stage or closer to a sale unless they have the information they need and the impetus to do so. You’re the tour guide…but that doesn’t mean your leads won’t wander off on their own unless you’re interesting.

4) We do not push leads along the funnel.

Sure, go ahead. Shove them around. See where that gets you. Resentment, I’d bet. Instead, act like you would as host of a party, and introduce leads to your sales reps when you think they might be interested in talking to each other. Think matchmaker, not playing sardines.

Even if you’re selling to buying committees or large institutions, you’re dealing with people. Treat them with the respect and courtesy they deserve.

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.

The FAQs of Revenue Marketing™

By Evan Whitenight on March 4, 2014 / Revenue Marketing Journey, The Revenue Marketer / Leave a comment

Starting to draft this, I began to look over the last five years of my career, first as a marketer, running a world wide marketing and demand generation team, and most recently as a marketing consultant. While looking back over that time, I asked myself, “what is the #1 most frequently asked question” that came to me or was asked by my clients? It has been, and continues to be, “how do I implement Revenue Marketing™ and affect change?”

Many of us have seen the tectonic shift in marketing and have begun to ride the wave of Revenue Marketing. Those who have not are racing to get on before the wave comes crashing down.

ALL of US ask ourselves how we can embrace this shift from running our marketing departments like a cost center to running them like a revenue producing machine. The answer that I came to, which I give on a weekly basis to my customers, is to look at this shift as a change management project. Too often, I see my peers and even myself early on, looking to technology, mainly marketing automation, as the ‘end all, be all’ that will solve and deliver this nirvana. I’ve come to realize, as have my peers, that technology is only the beginning of the Revenue Marketing Journey™.

Without looking at this as a change management journey and realizing that your goals will impact the entire organization, you WILL fail. Once I learned this valuable lesson and turned my attention to running my journey within a change management framework, things began to shift for me.

I won’t go into all of the details of running a Revenue Marketing Transformation™ as a change management process, as that is a book unto itself. Instead, I’ll cover one area of the process that I learned from my days working in operations and product marketing.

While working in those areas, I learned one of the greatest skills of my career, which is to employ steering committees. These committees, I came to learn, are great vehicles for change. They bring together passionate, diverse members of the organization who have a set goal and bring buy-in to influence overall transformation of the business. I share this lesson all of the time when asked how to implement the principals of Revenue Marketing. It is a great pathway to open minds within the organization about the change that is coming.

The steering committees that I recommend usually consist of small, cross-functional teams that are rotated on a quarterly or bi-annual basis. This brings a fresh new set of eyes to the project and keeps it moving along. I implore marketers to take a page out of the IT department and use steering committees to facilitate change as you implement Revenue Marketing.

Let me know your feedback and comments. I’d love to hear what works for you and keep this thread going. I’ll continue monthly discussions to share best practices to help you on your Revenue Marketing Journey.

Blog Written By: Evan Whitenight

Evan Whitenight is the Director of Revenue Engineering Services with The Pedowitz Group and is responsible for leading the senior technical services delivery team. He combines his deep understanding of marketing and sales technologies, contact data management skills, and best-practice demand generation experience to deliver outstanding results for our clients. With 20 years of experience in high tech, holding various positions in sales, marketing, product marketing, and sales and marketing leadership, he has been a strong social advocate in and around marketing automaton and sales and marketing best practices.

4 Keys to Creating and Maintaining a Sound Lead Scoring Model

By Raul Mancha on February 25, 2014 / Lead Scoring, Sales, Solve Lead Challenges / Leave a comment

Lead scoring is typically one of the first items an organization wants to implement when purchasing a marketing automation suite. However, lead scoring is much more than a tool. It can serve as the life-blood between your sales and marketing organizations.

Having worked with dozens of marketing teams, I’ve consistently found that marketing complains that sales does not follow up on their leads, and sales complains that marketing’s leads are of poor quality. This dynamic can cause a rift between the departments and lead to a lack of trust when lead scoring is not executed properly. Ask yourself these questions…

How do I gain sales buy-in?
How do I deliver quality MQLs (marketing qualified leads)?
How do I keep my scoring model up to date?

Over my 10+ years working with marketing organizations, I’ve identified these 4 Keys to Creating and Maintaining a Sound Lead Scoring Model:

1. Have a Plan

This sounds elementary, but creating a long-term strategy with milestones will put your organization in the best position to succeed. Document goals such as MQLs, SALs (sales accepted leads), sales pipeline and won deals. You only have one chance for a first impression, so don’t ruin your opportunity by launching a model that has not been well thought through.

2. Attain Sales Buy-in

This is the most critical component of creating a lead scoring model and I’ve yet to see a model be truly effective without sales buy-in. Gather key marketing members and a small group of successful sales members with whom you have a strong relationship and utilize their expertise and experiences to build the foundation of the model. Come to the discussion prepared with content examples and demographic information that you think they will find meaningful, but be sure to validate each item with sales and open the floor to discuss which combination of activities truly mean a buying signal. This can scare off many sales teams, so map out your lead management process and consider an SLA (service level agreement) to ensure MQLs are followed up in a timely manner.

3. Content is King

You can have a pristine model in place, but you’ve also got to have the content to drive activity. Think of content as the fuel for your Revenue Marketing™ vehicle. This isn’t to say that your content must be perfect prior to launching your lead scoring model. However, it will be difficult to create a repeatable, predictable and scalable program without it. Map your content to your prospect and customer pain points in a fashion that can be quickly and easily consumed.

4. Iteration, iteration, iteration

Now that you’ve met with Sales, vetted the model, built, tested and launched, you can move on to your next project, right? Wrong. The work has just begun. Many factors can influence your model, including industry shifts, organization focus, solution strengths, and government standards. Meet with a couple sales members one to two weeks after launch, gather their feedback and make necessary updates to the model. After this initial session, I find that a quarterly review with a few key sales members is effective.

A sound lead scoring model is a key component for marketing to transition from cost center to revenue center.

Blog Written By: Raul Mancha

Raul Mancha is a Revenue Marketing Strategist with The Pedowitz Group based in Houston, Texas. Raul began his work in Marketing in 2004 and has worked with many of the premier CRM and Marketing Automation to enhance lead management processes, execute revenue generating campaigns and attribute revenue to marketing initiatives. Prior to joining TPG, Raul held roles in product development, retention and demand generation with a specialty in outbound marketing.

Do You Have the Right Sales Team for Your Revenue Marketing Efforts?

By Dan Pecoraro on February 21, 2014 / Align Sales and Marketing, Revenue Marketing Journey, Sales / Leave a comment

It’s a badly kept secret that salespeople do a lot of things that aren’t very productive. Not because they are lazy or too busy working on their “short game”, but because many sales organizations still have the philosophy that cold calling is the way that new leads are generated. In fact, just a decade ago, sales people were often tasked to pick a page in the phone book and start dialing!

As your marketing organization transforms into Revenue Marketers™ by embracing engagement marketing, producing compelling content and having useful (automated) conversations with prospects, the role of the sales team will change. It will elevate them into late-stage buying partners instead of early-stage qualifiers. After all, the goal of Revenue Marketing™ is not necessarily to create MORE leads, but to create and pass BETTER leads to sales, with a higher likelihood of closing as “won”.

As your marketing team progresses through the Revenue Marketing Journey™ from Traditional to Lead Generation, Demand Generation and ultimately Revenue Marketing, here are some questions you might ask about your sales team – if you’ve got the guts!

Size – Since the Revenue Marketing paradigm is smaller, you may actually need fewer sales people to close the same amount of revenue. Each sales person will be more productive, working on actually closing deals rather than product consultations or passing out data sheets. Much of the lower value activities will be moved to the marketing team and its toolbox of automated programs. Is your sales team the right size to correspond to the workload?
Skills – “Closers” have a different skill set than those working on early-stage leads. Is your sales team prepared to focus on closing deals and leave the nurturing and qualifying to marketing? Do they understand the buying cycle well enough to be value-added consultants on it? Are they competent storytellers of customer success?
Knowledge – Salespeople working with Revenue Marketers need to be experts on their subject. They need to always have the latest news and follow best practices. You want them to be the “go-to” person that your prospects call when they want to talk about your company’s products and services.
Structure – It’s worth taking a hard look at the kinds of activities your team does. More than likely, they’re doing a lot of tasks not worth paying at a $100/hour+ (a rough estimate) rate. For example, if they’re surfing around looking for new names, perhaps paying a list provider or another source would be far more cost effective. Are they writing emails to promote an event? That should be done by marketing. Is your team structured to partner high-cost resources with high-value activities?
Compensation – Is your comp plan adjusted for a higher quality, lower volume lead flow? Can great sales people still make a good living at your company? How is revenue marketing likely to affect the sales team’s compensation, especially the top performers?

Embracing Revenue Marketing requires a powerful change in the marketing organization, as well as the sales organization. Make sure you’re always working in conjunction with sales and ask questions as you make the transformation – it affects them just as much as it affects the marketing team!

Blog Written By: Dan Pecoraro

Dan Pecoraro is a Strategic Account Manager with The Pedowitz Group based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dan began his adventures in CRM and Marketing Automation in 1999 and has worked extensively with many of the premier CRM and MA platforms in implementation, project management and sales capacities. Prior to joining TPG, Dan held roles at two top consulting firms, a major marketing automation provider, and companies ranging from small startups to some of the largest conglomerates in the world.

B2B and Consumer Marketing Strategies to Build Better Quality Data…and How to Know if it’s Working.

By Rebecca Hendrie on February 19, 2014 / Analytics, Data Management / Leave a comment

In my last post, I wrote about the implicit Value of Marketing Data. What are some ways that you can improve the quality of your marketing data? There are endless tactics and complexities to write about on this subject, but I thought I’d simplify to give you three tips that every marketer can use to build a better quality database.

Develop a Customer Profile. Start with a list of everything you would like to know about prospects and customers in your target market. Don’t be constrained by what you believe you have available or what you think is possible. Use those data points to create a Customer Profile for your marketing database.

Configure your database with a relational model in order to enable the integration of additional, future sources of data, such as order tracking systems and other external databases. Evaluate the % complete of various data components and discovery where you can possibly use data appending strategies or campaigns to gather additional data points.

Pursue data relentlessly. As you compile response data from marketing programs, evaluate the quality and completeness of the records and make decisions on data enrichment leveraging outside sources (discussed, in short, below) or through progressive profiling techniques.

Consumer database marketing strategies often address target markets of tens of millions. Marketers should become familiar with the commercially available pre-configured profile clustering systems, such as those from Nielsen or Experian, as they will save you quite a lot of work.

These systems allow you to develop market segments based on criteria such as demographic, lifestyle and behavioral data. They also provide options for a mechanism to reach those consumers.

B2B marketers face similar challenges, albeit on a smaller scale. There are generally two major types of data sources. There are the traditional marketing databases, such as Dunn & Bradstreet and Hoovers, that offer rich company information but limited contact data such as email and phone records. There are the newer marketing data platforms like ReachForce and NetProspex, to name just two of the many, which offer a range of services including opt-in services and database analysis services. While the cost per record is much higher on those services, they often prove cost effective as they allow marketers to purchase only the data they really need. There are specialty platforms developed for industry specific targeting such as tech and healthcare.

Understand the lifecycle of your data. Marketing Data maintenance is a critical component to maintaining the viability of your database, and the effectiveness of your marketing database. The average B2B marketing database has a decay rate of 3% per month. It’s important that every marketer be aware of their own data decay rate, and take steps to refresh their data. Campaign deliverability and call connect rates are key measures that every marketer should closely monitor to ensure that data is performing at peak. Inbound marketing strategy, data enrichment and appends, as well as progressive profiling in campaign strategy can ensure that your data stays fresh and remains a valuable weapon in your marketing arsenal.

Next in my blog series on the value of your Marketing Database:

How Multi-Channel Marketing Grows your Database Faster

Blog Written By: Rebecca Hendrie

Rebecca is a Revenue Marketing Strategist with The Pedowitz Group, primarily focused on large enterprise clients. She has 15 years of Sales and Marketing Leadership experience, including working with startups to running 3-million-emails-a-month consumer marketing programs. Rebecca brings results to clients by leveraging a foundation of Demand Generation technologies and Revenue Marketing best practices. Based in New York, when she’s not thinking about marketing strategy or campaign results for TPG customers, Rebecca is focused on spiritual pursuits and study, as well as a passion for art.

7 Signs of Revenue Marketing Transformation in the Enterprise

By Claire Rhoads on February 14, 2014 / Deliver Revenue Results, Revenue Marketing Journey, The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketer / Leave a comment

Revenue Marketing™ in the Enterprise does not happen overnight. I know, I know… I burst your bubble, right? Many companies expect instant global revenue impact by simply purchasing a marketing automation platform.

The problem is, driving and measuring change in the Enterprise is like finding meaning in a Will Ferrell movie – it’s a challenge!

Here at The Pedowitz Group, we maintain that for a global Enterprise, a mature Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence takes several years (at least) to establish. And while the #1 metric for Revenue Marketing is and always will be revenue impact, there are vital “signs of transformation” along the way that are important to measure and celebrate.

How do you know if your company is transforming into a global Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence?

Below are 7 Signs of RM Transformation:

1. Executive Sponsorship and Support for Revenue Marketing

True change happens from the top down. Any efforts at implementing Revenue Marketing strategies at a large company will hit a ceiling if there is not buy-in, commitment and joint vision at the executive level. The most successful global RM transformations we see here at TPG are those where the change is driven by the executives, who have the “Revenue Marketing Fever” and use it to drive their teams’ annual goals and direction. Even better is the guiding power of an Executive Revenue Marketing Coalition.

2. Key Marketing Metrics and Goals are Revenue-Focused

How an organization measures success (and therefore sets goals) is extremely important. Before you are able to identify actual marketing impact on revenue and forecast it, changes to the type of metrics you measure are crucial. Most enterprise organizations measure marketing impact by number of raw leads handed to sales, click throughs, open rates, etc. The problem here is that these metrics all have zero connection with revenue – they’re all activity-based. A traditionally “successful” marketing organization could technically generate thousands of leads a year, yet have sales accept none of them because they are not actually qualified (I see this often, sadly). If your company is setting marketing goals and success metrics by lead-to-opportunity and lead-to-booked, you’re on the right track. If your company is compensating marketers based on their actual sales contributions, you’re ahead of the game.

3. Key Business Processes Remapped Around Revenue Marketing Strategy

Process and planning drive effective activity. Often, enterprise companies forget this and, as a result, find their hard work at Revenue Marketing confounded by broken processes. As we always say – a new methodology or tool will just make bad processes worse! I once had a client who spent many months planning an amazing multi-step nurture campaign. However, they refused to re-map how leads are handed off to sales and then measured (i.e. the full lifecycle of the lead). After the campaign had run its full course, and had successfully rendered many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales, they realized that none were followed up on and no one could report on “what happened.” So, if your company is re-mapping key business processes (lead flow, sales acceptance/feedback, etc.) and operationalizing standard inter-departmental interactions (Marketing Programs, Design, Marcom, Product, Sales) around Revenue Marketing, you are laying the foundation for success.

4. Technology Platforms Adapted to Revenue Marketing

Let’s get real here – in most enterprises, technology platforms are a source of pain. Often, they are owned by departments completely removed from the business unit they support (insert IT/Marketing clash here). A vital mark of transformation is if Revenue Marketing processes are being reflected in platform configurations. This could be global assignment rules and reporting changes in the CRM, an expanded global instance of the marketing automation platform, or RM-optimized websites. If your organization has overcome this hurdle, you should pop the bubbly.

5. Hiring Around Revenue Marketing

Adding permanent team resources (like VP Revenue Marketing, Content Developers, Strategic Campaign Managers, Marketing Automation Power Users, etc.) to execute and measure your growing Revenue Marketing efforts signifies an organizational commitment to building a Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence. So, if you’ve aligned your headcount strategy around key Revenue Marketing skills and functions, you can be sure transformation is taking place.

6. Increased Revenue Marketing Budget

Budgets tell all. The percentage of budget allocated to specific departments and initiatives in the Enterprise directly reflects an organization’s commitment to that area. If your organization is increasing or reallocating its marketing and sales dollars around Revenue Marketing initiatives, you are transforming into a Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence. If your sales VP is going to bat for marketing budget increases, then congratulations – you’ve really arrived.

7. Adoption of Revenue Marketing “Speak”

Juicy words spread in any work environment. But if you find marketing employees hanging around the water cooler talking about “revenue marketing,“ “customer-led buying processes,” or “MQL-to-Closed/Won conversion rates,” it’s a sign that Revenue Marketing concepts and culture are going viral in your organization. The other day, I was sitting across a conference room table from the SVP of Demand Generation at a large Silicon Valley enterprise. He shared with my team that he keeps getting emails from leaders all over the global organization titled “Revenue Marketing?”… the Revenue Marketing fever is spreading there!

Have you seen any of these signs in your Revenue Marketing Journey?

Blog Written By: Claire Rhoads

Claire is a Senior Strategist at the Pedowitz Group, where she helps her clients to achieve revenue results through effective campaign strategy, delivery and analysis. She is passionate about designing marketing content that captivates and converts audiences instead of putting them to sleep.

All Metrics Are Not Created Equal

By Majda Anwar on February 12, 2014 / Analytics, Data Management, Deliver Revenue Results / Leave a comment

Implementing a marketing automation system is great, but showing ROI is the goal. Depending on the technology available to you and the processes you have in place, this may be a challenge. One of the things I see my clients struggle with is the ability to produce reports that definitively show marketing’s impact on revenue. If you are just starting your journey to Revenue Marketing™, keep in mind that all metrics are not created equal. In fact, there are layers of reporting that need to be created and utilized in order for you to show marketing’s contribution to revenue for your organization.

While the number of KPIs and metrics can be overwhelming depending on the industry resources you’ve reviewed, we at The Pedowitz Group have identified three levels of metrics every marketer should utilize:

Activity metrics – these metrics encompass your campaign performance reports, email performance reports, and web analytics reports. These reports are for your campaign and product managers to view on a daily basis and are NOT for the VP of Marketing or your executive team. Here are some examples of activity metrics:
1. Email opens
2. Email clicks
3. Email delivery rates
4. Web visits (anonymous and known visitors)
Funnel metrics – these metrics look at how marketing is supplying leads for the revenue funnel and the velocity at which leads are progressing. The head of the marketing department will be interested in these. Examples of funnel metrics are:
1. Leads per funnel stage (inflow to each stage)
2. Funnel conversion rates by month
3. Funnel conversion by lead source by month
4. Funnel conversion by most recent lead source by month
5. # Of Marketing Qualified Leads sent to Sales
6. # Of Sales Accepted Leads
Revenue Metrics – these metrics encompass marketing contribution to revenue, total revenue, and return on marketing investment. These reports should align to marketing’s key performance indicators. This is what your CMO and C-level executives want to see, in an easy-to-read format. Examples of revenue metrics are:
1. # of marketing influenced opportunities, by month or quarter
2. # of marketing created opportunities, by month or quarter
3. Total value of marketing influenced opportunities, by month or quarter
4. Total value of marketing created opportunities, by month or quarter
5. Total value of marketing influenced or created opportunities, as compared to sales opportunities, by month or quarter
6. Return on marketing investment (ROMI) by channel, by month or quarter

To prove marketing’s contribution and ROMI, marketers should strive to give funnel and revenue metrics that show ACTIONABLE insights to the leadership team. Sometimes, this does require education at the executive level. Your CMO shouldn’t want to review email statistics. Give them the reports that show marketing’s contribution to revenue.

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.

Storytelling Through Analytics

By Lauren Kincke on February 6, 2014 / Analytics, Data Management, Deliver Revenue Results / Leave a comment

What's your story?

It’s almost Friday, so you are probably busy pulling together another “Weekly Report” – lots of charts, stats and a few graphs that show (hopefully) that your campaigns are generating interest and, more importantly, revenue. Think your job is done, right? Not quite. As the harbinger of useful information, your job isn’t just to make sure the information gets into someone else’s hands, but also to make sure they know what they are seeing.

A few weeks ago, my colleague, Scott Rankin, wrote a great post on how to effectively design dashboards. It’s a very easy-to-read, actionable list of key things to think about as you build your reports. Things like, only include information that is relevant to your audience, that provides strategic information and clear insight. Sounds easy, right?

It’s our job (in the analyst/marketing operations roles) to tell the story. I know that I was naturally drawn to more operational roles because I don’t consider myself a content person. But part of personal growth is finding those limitations and working toward fixing them. People remember stories, not necessarily data points. What about your charts and graphs tells a good story and how is that relevant to the people getting an inbox full of charts and graphs?

First, let’s think back to elementary school, when you would write a story that had a beginning, a middle and an end. You didn’t just throw a character on the page and have a final outcome, you had to develop the story a little bit. Start off by giving key highlights, tell a good story with the data, don’t just show the data. The marketing operations guru who can tell the narrative of the campaign, its execution and final results in an engaging way will help drive home the important message instead of just cramming data into an inbox.

Stories have a cause-and-effect relationship. In the book, “Elements of Persuasion,” Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman define the elements of a good story as:

The passion with which the story is told
A hero to drive the action
An obstacle or an antagonist to challenge the hero
A moment of awareness where the hero realizes how he can overcome the obstacle
A transformation in the hero and the world around him

It is definitely not simple to take the elements of your dashboard and find a compelling story to deliver every time. Don’t think of this as a weekly exercise, but more a monthly or quarterly one. It important to show the passion behind the work that you and your teammates do. Instilling passion in your story will illustrate the consequences to the events described and show your executives the relevance of what is being done. Illustrate how the tactics being used overcome a challenge for the company and what surpassing that challenge means for the whole. Remember to ask yourself, what is the story here? Do this every time you prepare reports and decks so you aren’t creating Death by Powerpoint for the poor soul who has to read what you are creating.

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.

Measuring Value of Your Marketing Database and Understanding Database Quality

By Rebecca Hendrie on January 24, 2014 / Data Management, Email Marketing / Leave a comment

Many marketers overlook the value of their marketing database itself. There are two key measures of database health that can set you ahead for this year: Database Quality and Database Value.

Database quality is a topic that can be taken to very granular measures. However, many digital marketers don’t know where to begin. Rather than get into quadratic equations, let’s talk about three simple metrics you need to get started: Bounce rates, Unsubscribe rates and SPAM Complaints. Track these three simple database quality metrics daily and overlay campaign source or segment activity to help you understand danger zones or well-performing data.

Database value is another interesting measure. Most of us can talk to the average lifetime value of a customer or the cost of acquisition of a customer, but can you tell me: What is the value of a single marketable contact in your database?

The average company grows its marketing data at about 40% per year. But it is not just growth that matters. The quality of your marketing database impacts your success as a marketer and needs to keep pace. Bad data costs the average company over $180,000 per year and cost one major retailer as much as $3 million in one year.

So what can you do immediately to make sure that this isn’t your 2014 story?

Follow three simple steps:

Start tracking database quality and looking for trends over time.
Analyze email subscriber value (ESV) and understand what is the value of contact records in your database.
Look for ways to drive activity that steadily improves the two metrics mentioned above while feeding the funnel (more on that next time…)

Coming up next in our blog series on the Value of Your Marketing Database:

B2B and consumer marketing strategies to build a better quality data… and how to know if they are working.
How multi-channel marketing grows your database faster.

Blog Written By: Rebecca Hendrie

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know About Revenue Marketing™ – Are You Willing To Learn?

By Art Roberts on January 22, 2014 / Revenue Marketing Journey, REVTalks, The Revenue Marketer / Leave a comment

“You don’t know what you don’t know about Revenue Marketing™”

I’ve heard that said many times by Debbie Qaqish, Chief Strategy Officer at The Pedowitz Group. It is amazing how many marketers don’t know about Revenue Marketing™, but at the same time, don’t want to learn more. Are they afraid of their jobs and that their higher ups might look elsewhere to find people who can turn their marketing departments from content providers into revenue producers?

Recently, I was in a Florida hotel business center and met a sales representative from an energy company who was gathering information on potential customers in the area. I found out during a chat that he worked with one other rep and covered the country. He asked what I did at The Pedowitz Group. I told him briefly and directed him to our website for further information. He went directly to the website and then asked us to present a marketing plan to the company executives.

I mentioned a complimentary phone meeting in which we could gather information and then present a plan for his company to consider. He felt that his company would probably agree, but if a plan were to be implemented, he was afraid that both he and his partner would no longer be needed and that any monies allocated for their positions would then be spent on marketing. I told him that, in fact, he would probably be recognized by his company for thinking of new ways to drive business and that he would be an even more valuable asset moving forward.

This gentleman represents what many people are afraid of – fear of the unknown.

President Roosevelt once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We fear the unknown and what it may bring. How will change affect me? If the company is doing business now, why do we need new marketing technology or programs (i.e., marketing automation, CRM, or the use of social media)? Many marketers fear that someone will recognize they don’t have the capability to do something better or handle something new. They fear that there will be more knowledgeable people around. They fear what they don’t know.

As marketers, are you willing to put that fear aside and do what it takes to become a winner in this new world?

Marketers should find out how they can become better and more valuable to their companies. They should take every opportunity to learn and improve. If they were in the engineering field, they would have to keep learning, since it is often said that what an engineer learns now will be obsolete in 10 years. With modern technology, engineers need to learn more and much sooner, so why not marketers?

Marketing has changed. There was a time, before the new age of communication devices, when people actually spoke to one another. Phone calls and emails were returned and people acknowledged whether they were interested or not. We all get calls and too many emails each day, and many get ignored. Some are more important than others, but if you set aside a time each day to respond, you may gain information and knowledge to help you do a better job. Take time to learn about Revenue Marketing™ and how it will help marketing achieve a greater ROI, faster. So set aside that fear and secure your future!

Join us January 27^th, in San Francisco, for the first ever REVTalks. Marketing executives will speak about issues affecting Revenue Marketing™ today and share lessons learned in a Ted Talks format. This is a great opportunity to learn what you don’t know, and find ways to change that into what you do know. Learn how to become a Revenue Marketer™.

It’s up to you to take this small step, but giant leap into Revenue Marketing™. Visit our website for details on REVTalks. Make this your New Year’s Resolution and begin your journey.

Blog Written By: Art Roberts

Art Roberts is the Director of Customer Relations and Acquisition at The Pedowitz Group. He is a certified Revenue Marketer and has been working with The Pedowitz Group for over 5 years. Art has a passion for understanding the needs of people, which allows him to explain how revenue contribution may occur from their marketing activities.