Never Ending Thoughts…

In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.

There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?

How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management

Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.

Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems

One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.

Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts

Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.

Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management

Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.

And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.

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I wish it were as easy as taking the best books in sales and
marketing, and just simply blend them together to come up
with something that would really get me the results.
--

What Smarketing Really Is?

Smarketing simply means a way to align your sales and marketing efforts in order to make them more effective. This term is relatively new in the Industry. So new that I thought I came up with it while writing this blog! Then I started looking up on the Internet and found that the guys at Hubspot say that it was actually coined by Dan Tyre in around 2007. However I couldn't find much material from Dan on this topic. Perhaps he shared the thoughts with Hubspot folks at some meetup. So I followed up with Dan himself and got this information from him: "Mike Volpe and I coined the term in 2007 to explain how sales & marketing departments are really archiac holdovers from an earlier age and how HubSpot would be different." Thank You Dan!

In a nutshell, this is what I think it is: Alignment of sales and marketing efforts in order to make them more effective. So let's carry on with that.

When Do You Know You Need Smarketing?

Well the answer really is that you need it almost every time. But still, let's take a few examples.

Let's take some real life examples. So you came up with a great email marketing campaign. You got the best template out there and you got the best content and images for your email campaign. But you forgot to put the "sign up" button within the email. Instead you asked users to go to some page and click there to sign up. Guess what, you just ran a perfect marketing campaign but then left the sales folks at the mercy of only those few who would go an extra mile reading all the steps to sign up in your email.

Let's take another real life example. Your marketing team came did a great job attracting lot of people at your booth at the conference that happened last week. But they did a terrible job filtering the leads they captured and now a list of 20,000 contacts is left over at the mercy of sales folks who end up taking a month following up with all those leads. As a result you end up loosing many potential buyers.

What's the learning in both cases? Sales and Marketing teams can't work in solace. They have to work in perfect coherence to be able to generate amazing results.

OK. I Get The Point. How Do I Start?

1. Break the walls between your marketing and sales team. Have them work together. Have marketing plans reviewed by sales and have sales targets reviewed by marketing. It sounds a lot of work and perhaps something that might slow down your progress; but the reality is that these necessary evils are actually going to help you come up with that perfect blend of sales and marketing that works for you. You won't know it until you try!

2. Use technology that simplifies communication and helps easy blending of both the teams in every aspect related to lead generation, lead nurture to customer relationships.

3. Create a culture of respect for each other. Often marketing is considered as coming up with Banner Ads and Catchy Lines while sales is frowned upon as the dirty job of cold calling. Break that culture and make it open enough for both teams to realize the value one provides to the other.

Is smarketing for you? What do you think?

This weekend I spent some time looking at some of the CRM solutions out there. We have personally used zoho and sales force, and while they are paid CRM solutions, and are really quite good, I wanted to try out some of the good open source and free CRM solutions that are available in the market. While there is nothing wrong with zoho and sales force and many other paid solutions out there, there’s something about open source and free solutions that attracts everyone (besides the fact that they are free). That is a) ability to have full control over the solution and customize it which ever way you’d want to; b) no fear of being locked in with a particular vendor or a particular proprietary technology; and c) in house deployment and thus not having to worry about and rely on a third party for the hosting needs.

So when there are so many benefits of an open source and free CRM solution, what makes them not so popular in this market where people are biting by the bit? I think the biggest problem is that most of the open source CRM solutions are written by highly technical folks. And most of the good ones like openCRX, sugarCRM are way too extensive for many people. The value that paid CRM solutions provide is first of they are extremely simple to use. For instance you can get going with zoho or sales force in literally 15 minutes. And if you don’t understand something, simply call up their 1-800 line and you will get the answer for whatever you’d be looking for within 10 minutes. Yes you have to pay for it; As they say “what you get is what you pay for”. In case of openCRX or sugarCRM, you will be at the mercy of 160 page Admin Guide and will be spending 2 days understanding the complex realm based security, multi-database connectivity and other things that you as a sales manager wouldn’t even want to worry about.

So where’s the holy grail then? I think the holy grail is really in coming up with the linux red hat kind of model. Let’s go back in time and see how linux was invented. The core linux operating system is still free and that’s how it was brought into the World. The idea was of a free and extensible operating system that almost anyone could use for almost anything they wanted to. And no doubt it’s a great idea and the Operating System in itself is great too. However, the fact that it was extremely tech centric, red hat spun a business concept around it and provided a full support based model and the concept of “enterprise version” of the linux operating system. Now, you had the liberty of still getting a free open source operating system, but at the same time you had a team of professional technical and business staff who were there to guide you in case you got stuck somewhere. Not even that, red hat went ahead and came up with their pre-packaged versions of the linux Operating System that businesses could simply use out the box.

I think something like this is still missing in the open source CRM solutions. Yes, sugarCRM has had good success coming up with a similar model, but there is still a huge market to conquer. And until the open source CRM providers follow the route that red hat followed years back, I believe companies like sales force, zoho and Microsoft will keep on enjoying the major chunk of the CRM market.

Have you tried any of the open source CRM solutions that you found were extremely simple and worth looking at? Share with us!

Lead Generation is the most talked about topic on any sales and marketing forum. And needless to say that it is the most hyped about too. There are lot of companies using different ways and techniques to generate leads. There is no “right” or “wrong” here. It all depends  on what kind of leads are you looking for, what kind of business you are in, and furthermore, what kind of market size you and your customers belong to. In this article we will cover some of the most common hidden costs that sales and marketing managers forget when thinking about lead generation.

1. Cost of Integration of Lead Generation System with the CRM System

Most lead generation systems out there work in their own confinement. The leads generated from these systems can’t easily be imported into any CRM system. Unfortunately many managers forget this aspect while evaluating the lead generation company and later realize how much time gets wasted by manually importing the leads into their CRM system. Costs of this effort can be staggering at times thereby making their lead generation system the most costly bottleneck in the whole lead generation cycle.

2. Cost of Filtering the generated leads

Once leads have been generated and entered into the CRM system, it really comes down to filtering the leads and figuring out which ones are really good ones. While at first most of the cost associated with this step can be cut down if the leads generated at first place are targeted enough. However, no matter how much targeted leads you generated from any kind of lead generation system, there will always be scope of introducing bad leads into the CRM system. You must take into account the cost associated with cleaning the leads you receive. Keep in mind that the lead generation system is not at fault all the times. Many times you do have marketing strategies that require you to blast emails and do direct marketing to large, extremely large group of people and so you can’t expect lot of responses back. So you need to be very careful figuring out how much time you’ll spend actually filtering the list. For example, if your lead generation is based on collecting business cards from a conference, try to collect as much information as possible and try to filter out the leads at that very first step itself. You don’t want to clutter your CRM system with contacts who were not even interested and didn’t seem a right fit. Yes, one could say “why not give it a shot”; And yes, you must “give it a shot” and leave no stone unturned; but do keep in mind to include the cost of such effort when calculating your over lead generation cost.

3. Cost of Lead Nurture and Lead Follow Up

Last but not the least is the cost to nurture and follow up leads. Most of the times this part has nothing to do with the quality of the lead generation. Bad quality leads must be filtered at the first filtration step itself. After that comes the long drawn process of lead nurture, lead followup and building trust and relationship. This can take anywhere from few days to sometimes even months based on how complex your product or service is and how big the contract is. Although, technically it doesn’t fall into the lead generation company’s court, it needs to be still accounted for by you as the sales/marketing manager of your company. At the end of the day, you need to figure out how much you are spending on lead follow ups and lead nurture. This cost must be included when it comes to figuring out how much are you actually spending on generating leads.

In the end, a company that not only provides quality leads but at the same time works side by side with their clients and helps them set up best practices to nurture leads is the one that you should work with. Take time and talk with the company’s representatives, ask for a pilot and carefully evaluate them from all angles. There are lot of good lead generation companies out there. Successful lead generation is just like a successful partnership between you and the lead generation company. What do you think?

One of the biggest hurdles with lead generation is being able to find the right product. The problem is not that there aren’t many good lead generation products; the problem is that most people don’t realize that there is no “one size fit’s all” solution when it comes to lead generation. The current market is filled with various companies of all sizes (big and small) trying to pitch in the lead generation space; Many of them have really good products. But does that mean that all of those products would generate fantastic results for you? No! The reason is that every business is different and needs special and customized attention when it comes to lead generation.

Having said that, there are still a few attributes that you as a customer must look into when evaluating any lead generation product. In this article we will cover just that.

1. Source(s) of Lead Generation

First off you must know how the leads are being generated. Are they merely coming from an opt-in database? Are they coming from a pitch page? Where is the pitch page hosted? What’s the reputation of the hosting vendor? Are the leads being picked up via Social Networking or from the Internet itself? All these questions are very important because you should pick a vendor whose method matches with your business and market. For example, if you are an online gaming company, you don’t want to buy leads that are essentially generated from regular mail flyers sent to various homes (that would probably work better for home plumbing company).

2. Quality of Leads Generated

Once you have boiled down with a list of providers that can generate the kind of leads you are looking for, the next question is quality. This can many times be determined by looking at the process by which leads are generated. Are they manually validated? Are they qualified? What guarantee does the lead provider give regarding correctness of the leads? You should also look at customer testimonials and do a little research on the pros and cons of the processes being used by the lead generation company.

3. Ability to Integrate with Your CRM

The next important aspect to keep in mind is how easily is the lead generation solution you are buying integrates with your existing CRM solution. There are many good lead generation systems out there but they totally lack the ability to seamlessly integrate with a CRM system. That makes lead management and lead nurturing close to impossible. Lead Management and Lead Nurturing is a very important part of converting leads into customers and the more easily your lead generation solution would be able to integrate with your CRM, the easier it will be to get better results.

4. The Team

Another important point to consider is the team. Get to know the team. Where is the lead generation company located? How many people do they have? How friendly they are? Talk with the support team in the initial steps of your engagement and during pre-sales. That will give you some idea about if they’ll be able to handle the kind of support you’d expect in future. As they say “first impression is the last impression” – the saying goes very well in this context.

5. The Cost

Last but not the least is the cost of lead generation. At the end of it all, you know about your profit margins better than anyone else. And so you know how much a lead should cost better than anyone else. If everything is perfect with the lead generation company that you selected but the cost per lead is never going to cover your operational costs then it’s going to be a bad deal. So cost is a very important consideration too.

Many companies fall into the trap of just taking cost as the factor or just CRM as the factor; the reality is that sooner or later you’ll end up evaluating your lead generation company all these 5 attributes. So why not start right?