I’m at the SiriusDecisions Summit this week and feeling really energized about all of the great ideas I’m planning to implement when I get back home. Of all of the great presentations today, Tony Jaros (of SiriusDecisions) presentation, ‘The Demand Ecosystem: Progress and Problems’ really stood out, so I thought I’d share. These ideas could have stood out to me because they really reinforced our beliefs at ReachForce. It was nice to hear someone else validate what we’ve been saying all along. If you’re not a ReachForce customer, feel free to call us after reading below. We can help.

• “The Power of your database is what you OWN, not what you RENT.” We at ReachForce couldn’t agree more. We believe B2B marketers are tired of the poor results rented lists deliver. Where did all of these names come from anyway? And how long ago were they collected? ReachForce contact databases are built custom for your business and are yours to keep for continued marketing.
• “Targeting is a function of probability, not possibility.” If we do our homework on the front end by identifying the right companies and the right buying roles within these companies we are increasing the response probability. By not targeting, we are only able to say there is a possibility we may get some responses. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t bet my job on possibilities.
• If you are marketing to the CXOs, you are more than likely not targeting the right people. “Typically CXOs enter the buying process at the end of the sales process.” Everyone knows that the possibility of getting a CXO to actually respond to a marketing program or pick up the phone to talk to sales guy (they’ve never heard of) is very slim, right?

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Attention Conservation Notice: This article discusses using Sales Win analysis to be able to create a profile of best customer accounts enabling you to identify matching companies that you are not currently marketing to. By narrowing the target market, lead generation programs can speak specifically to the buying audience, increasing response rates and ultimately ROI.

By laser targeting a narrow group of prospects, Marketers are able to deliver a message that resonates with their target audience and creates better leads for Sales. Spraying a large list of contacts with a generic message and praying that message will reach the right people has led to average response rates of less than 3%.

Instead of spraying and praying, consider building a database of targeted prospects based on where you are winning customers today. Identify these companies with customer wins analysis. Once you’ve identified this winning profile, start the search for other businesses that match that profile.

A good starting point is your in-house database of current customers and prospects. Find the companies that match your wining profile and start there.

Narrowing the focus allows Marketers to deliver a targeted message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience. Instead of cleansing an out-of-date, in-house database, review your sales pipeline and customer win data and to identify your top market segments and determine key qualifying characteristics. Look at the size of the open and closed deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline to answer the following questions:

• In which market segments am I closing the most deals?
• In which market segments are deals closing the fastest?
• What are the common characteristics of companies in those market segments?
• What other market segments share those common characteristics?

Relevancy is key here. The more relevant the data used to feed Marketing Programs or Automation systems (like Eloqua, Marketo, Loopfuse, Vtrenz, Aprimo, Market2Lead, Manticore, etc.) the better and more powerful the results will be.

With Sales wins analysis, you can also build a profile of your best customer accounts to develop qualifying criteria. Do you close more deals with Fortune 1000-size enterprises or are you moving more deals with Small and Medium-size businesses? Is the number of employees of an organization a critical success factor or is a global, distributed environment more important? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product?

Now that you’ve documented your top markets and qualifying criteria, you can use this information to discover other target accounts. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services.

Next, complete an enterprise buying profile to identify the roles of buyers involved in the buying process. Just as you identified the profile for targeting new companies, you need to have an understanding of the role and responsibilities of the buyer within those companies. You’ll want to understand their role both in the buying cycle and within the organization. It is vital to be aware of the responsibilities for each of your buyers and which organizational role typically corresponds with the role in the buying cycle. With this information, you will be able to refine your augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted Marketing Programs.

Creating your wins analysis can be done with a low-tech approach using a business analyst and a spreadsheet, but you may find that business analytics tools such as ReachForce Insight can save time and money and provide insight into pipeline changes in real-time. Once you see the results of wins analysis in action, you’ll want to monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities so it’s best to automate if possible.

Sales wins analysis is providing a new breed of B2B marketers with a more effective way to continue to build databases of accurate, consistent, and comprehensive role-based data used for multi-modal, segmented Marketing campaigns. By using sales wins analysis to understand best target markets and profiling their common characteristics, similar prospects can be identified in the same market segment, as well as additional market segments in which there are a higher propensity to sell more, faster.

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I just read a great post by Robert Rosenthal on his Freaking Marketing blog titled It’s the Data, Stupid. In his post, Robert says:

But there’s really just one variable that consistently makes or breaks direct marketing campaigns, and that’s data.

When I was a kid in this business, a mentor shared this maxim: send a so-so presentation to a great list and you may turn a profit, but send a great presentation to a shit list and you’re automatically dead.

Someone else gets it! I have been saying this for years. I don’t know how many millions of dollars I have seen (and also have myself) wasted on brilliant marketing campaigns that saw abysmal results because no one spent any time on the data. As we have gotten more sophisticated with the delivery of our marketing messages from direct mail to email and now through integrated marketing campaigns, the data has never been more important.

If marketers are out there wondering why their expensive marketing automation tool has not delivered increased response rates, it is because they are still pouring in garbage data. Garbage in, garbage out. Targeting is key – more customers in segments where you are winning is as key as the person you are trying to reach. 100% accurate contact data for the RIGHT person is money! If these automation tools are your marketing engine (ones like Marketo, Vtrenz, Eloqua, LoopFuse, Vertical Response, Exact Target, Constant Contact, Aprimo, etc. to name a few) then you need to fuel it with high-octane data, not sludge.

We started ReachForce to solve this very problem. I hope more marketers will realize that with quality contacts at the top of the funnel, truly targeted lead generation is possible, ultimately resulting in increased revenue. I applaud salesforce.com for driving the SFA (sales force automation) aspect of it as it has created a greater awareness on measurement – now it’s time for us B2B marketers to do the same, starting with the data.

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As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World - List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

1. The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
2. Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
3. Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
4. Custom database development is what people want with more precision
5. E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
6. Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
7. Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend - stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.

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It is interesting that we continue to see a proliferation of “marketing automation tools and technologies” emerge every month. Marketers have their choice from Eloqua, Aprimo, Marketo, Vtrenz, Market2Lead, Manticore and the open source option, Loopfuse. And while each has great benefits, I can’t help but think that no matter how much the engine (Marketing Automation System) is perfected, it will not run well if the fuel (the DATA) is sewage.

Are we still, in 2008, renting “sewage lists” and them pumping them though these marketing automation processes? Most list vendors sell or rent title-based B2B contact lists. The problem is that a person’s title is only an appellation of rank, it has very little to do with the person’s roles and responsibilities in an organization. Say the buyer of your product is typically a Director of IT. Someone comes to your site and accurately fills out a form that they are the Director of IT. Hooray, you got ‘em. But wait, at IBM there could be 150 directors of IT; how do you know this is the one responsible for network security and has budget authority?

Just yesterday, I was on a call with the VP of Marketing who had been at a few of the Marketing Automation vendors and she could not believe what ReachForce is doing. At several past positions she set up her own inside telemarketing team to do contact discovery because she knew that title-based lists produces abysmal response rates. While this tactic had success, it was cost prohibitive to scale, manage and build. In her case, she thought that there was no option but to do that as she did not want to use the sewage and be in 99% inaccuracy land.

Marketing Automation is a necessary tool for all marketers, but any one of these tools is only as good as the data put into it.

My point is that marketing automation is important but getting quality data or fuel to put into it is PRICELESS!!

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Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a strategy for leveraging market research and a role-based database build to reduce costs and jumpstart expansion into new territories.

Expanding into new territories is always a challenge because it involves a slow and painful ramp up investment. First, you have to understand the unique needs of buyers in foreign territory and then you also need to build a presence. You won’t know what works and what doesn’t until you’ve jumped in and tested a few techniques and this takes time. Will Google Adwords pull in buyers or do you need to rely more heavily on face-to-face events?

Another issue, in recent months, has been the economy. With the decline of the US dollar, lead generation and promotional campaigns cost more than ever before. I was recently quoted a staggering $145 per lead from a white paper syndication service in the UK. Who knows how much those same leads are today, just a few months later.

So, what’s a B2B Marketer on a budget to do? With both time and money at stake, we chose to invest in a little upfront research and role-based database building. By investigating the pain points and decision drivers of the UK market and building out a complete role-based database of all of our target companies in that country, we were able to quickly provide a list of prospects for our in-country inside sales professionals.

With this database in hand, we were able to experiment with Google Adwords and other promotional activities to find the right mix. What worked? Well, calling on the new database, and exhibiting at live events worked best in 2007. Google AdWords helped us secure a few introductions. And, direct mail and email marketing did not yield much.

What has worked best for you in Europe or Asia-Pac?

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Just read that a study by John Coe and the Sales & Marketing Institute showed that “70.8% of business people changed one or more elements on their business cards each year.” According to a new study conducted by research firm NFO WorldGroup, “31% of email addresses change annually.”

If you are buying a list from a trade publication and basing your direct marketing on that list, you are in effect paying good money for old business cards and then basing your expensive campaigns on those cards. Ouch. What a waste of money and time. And, imagine what your campaign results will be!

Perhaps it’s time to take a different approach to database marketing?

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Apparently dirty data and 2% response rates are global problems. New survey results from UK-based marketing communications agency Godfrey show business-to-business Marketers have ‘plenty of room for improvement’ when it comes to using customer and prospect databases for direct marketing purposes. The research offers new evidence that direct marketing campaigns could be more effective if B2B Marketers would clean up their data and use a systematic direct marketing program based on database marketing fundamentals.

Lynne DeMers, strategic direct marketing team leader at Godfrey, is quoted as saying: ” Direct marketing is not about sending 20,000 mailers to a rented list and hoping for a two per cent return.” Wow, where have we heard that before? Maybe in our Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook?

She also makes a great point about effective direct marketing: “It is about creating a programme and a system of messages, offers, information capture, measurement and refinement.”

The survey also found that:

• Only 60 per cent of Marketers use their customer database for targeted direct marketing, and only 40 per cent regularly update customers with new offers.
• While mass direct marketing techniques typically yield response rates ranging from 0.5 to two per cent, targeted direct marketing technologies are considerably more effective, according to Godfrey.
• B2B marketers can realize 40 per cent open rates, 10 to 20 per cent click rates and opt-out rates of less than one per cent with segmented email marketing and e-newsletter campaigns.

Sounds like it’s time for drastic change and there are many good lessons in how to make those changes in the complimentary Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook offered on this site.

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Every B2B Marketer has struggled with the problem of bad data. As it turns out, even companies in the business of selling database technology have the same issues. One such company’s Marketing Programs group attempted a direct mail database cleanup project using the old Return to Sender trick. They were quickly inundated with stacks of returned direct mailers. In fact, they had so many returned that they had to hire a team of temps to remove all of the bad records from their marketing database. They even found one stamped “Recipient Deceased”.

Talk about hitting the wrong target market.

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An April 2007 MarketingSherpa survey of 3,000 B2B Marketers and technology and business professionals puts the spotlight on the downside of white paper downloads. While they continue to be a favorite offering for technology buyers, only about 50% of them say they give a valid name, email address, industry, job title and company name when they register. And less than 40% provide accurate phone numbers. That means that nearly half of the data you are paying for is inaccurate and a huge waste of time for Inside Sales and Sales! So make sure you are phone verifying and appending these records before introducing them to your funnel so that they aren’t ignored of slowing down the velocity of your funnel.

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