I’ve walked you through creating the perfect lead nurturing email to recoup lost revenue for BtoC companies and BtoB companies. I’ve described in detail when, and how often, to contact leads. And I’ve talked about how to successfully create a long-term strategy.

Now that you know exactly how a top-notch lead nurturing strategy is constructed, I thought it would be interesting to share the results of a survey that InsideSales.com did in conjunction with Omniture.

InsideSales.com set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies — representative of the market — several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and compared them to the strategies I’ve outlined in recent weeks, to see how they stacked up.

How did they do?

• Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
  *Optimum response time should be within the first hour

• Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
  *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many companies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Out of the 700 companies, there was an average of just 3.3 contacts per company. Only 4.6 percent used a strategy involving both phone and email, and less than 5 percent called within 24 hours.

When you consider that a successful long-term lead response strategy begins with a phone call and email within the first 24 hours, that there should be an attempt to contact leads up to 26 times until you reach them in the first two weeks, that there should be at least one email a month — followed by a phone call — on an ongoing basis thereafter, these companies fell far, far short of the ideal.

Simply stated, companies across the board are desperately lacking in nurturing those important and hard-to-come-by prospects. Your competitors are dropping the ball, leaving an opportunity wide open for you to step up to the plate. By implementing a lead nurturing strategy now, you can be miles ahead of your competition.

I challenge you, today, to begin. Step up your efforts to reach a lead in the days following their first contact with you. See if you can attempt to contact prospects up to 26 times until you reach them (this can be done using technology from companies like InsideSales.com that can mask caller ID so it doesn’t look like you’re being a pest).

So try it. I guarantee your sales will improve — even as your competitors’ stagnate.

Maintain a Conversation
Remember, the goal of a long-term lead nurturing strategy is not to sell, sell, sell with every communication. Rather, it is to maintain a relevant conversation with the prospect. That way, when they’re ready to buy — and they will buy: the analyst firm Sirius Decisions shows that 80% of prospects who show an interest in your product/service will end up buying from you or a competitor within two years — they’ll think of you.

So, staying in touch a relevant way is critical.

How?
Maintaining a conversation is as simple as being in continued contact, offering content that is not sales-y but is rather relevant and personalized.

Your goal is to have prospects perceive you as a trusted advisor, someone they look to for valuable information.

There are three top ways to stay in touch:

Email
These should be automated, personalized and relevant (if you missed the post on creating the perfect lead-nurturing email, check it out here. You might offer relevant analyst reports, tips, guides, or best practices. And within that content, you can intersperse soft-sell messages that explain how your products will help the lead achieve their goals.

Phone
Emails should be followed up by telephone. The purpose of the phone call is to support the email, to say, in essence, “Hey, did you get the email? I wanted to know if I could get you any more information that’s relevant. Let me know at any time if you’re interested in meeting…”

This is where the sales person can really shine, putting out their best effort to get that meeting. The best sales people I’ve ever spoken to are not pushy but give me lots of information and heighten a need that they can fulfill. They paint a picture of a gap, a sense that I don’t have something that they have, something that fulfills a need that I wasn’t even aware of.

Direct mail
Direct mail pieces should then be sent to reinforce what you’ve talked about on the phone. This process can be automated using a service like Eloqua, which offers it natively, or Vtrends, which offers an integration with a third party. The key with these postcards is to make them personalized and relevant (are you beginning to see a trend here?).

Use personalized URLs on the postcard, such as www.omniture.com/mikelchertudi. The landing page should be indicative of the lead’s vertical, and should have some indication of their role at the company. It should also continue the flow of relevance possibly touching on potential product interests.

How Often?
Emails, followed by phone calls and direct mail, should be sent once a month. Calls should go out within an hour or two of when the email is sent. If the lead cannot be reached, the sales person should leave a message.

For How Long?
You can use this long-term strategy practically forever. I still get emails from a company from back over five years ago when I bought online media. They’re personalized and relevant, they offer me great stats on media buying, and if I was still in that field, I’d certainly be in touch with them.

So there’s a quick summary of what a long-term lead nurturing strategy might look like. Next time I’ll share with you the results of a survey InsideSales.com conducted - in conjunction with Omniture - that shows just how few companies are nurturing their leads in a proactive way. So check back soon to see how other companies are doing, and to discover just how much ground you stand to gain by improving your own lead nurturing strategy.

In recent weeks I have outlined steps for a successful lead nurturing strategy, including the elements of strong communication and examples of top-notch B2B and B2C lead generation emails.

Today, I’ll go through some specific tactics on knowing when, and how often, to call leads.

Before I do, though, let me say that if you find it difficult, if not downright painful, to know the “right” strategy for when to contact a lead, you’re not alone. Most companies that I have talked with tend not to contact leads in any structured manner. Part of the failure is a lack of good information.

Tactic #1. Call within 5 minutes of initial contact
A study from InsideSales.com shows that the odds of contacting a lead by phone drops by 100x in the first 30 minutes.

In a B2B scenario, when a company is selling something that is a considered purchase, it is most effective to follow up by phone within 5 minutes of the initial contact.

In other words, if a prospect comes to your site and fills out a form, you should get that info into the hands of the sales team immediately.

Think about it: someone’s at their desk and they’ve just downloaded a white paper. The more time that goes by, the less likely they are to remember the interaction with your website. An hour later, and they’re in another meeting. Two days later, and they may have downloaded multiple other things from other sites. If you wait, you’re likely to have to remind them of what they were doing on your website in the first place.

Of course, it helps if you have a way to score the lead, so that you’re spending time calling only the good ones. That way, you don’t waste your time or theirs.

Tactic #2. Call early or late
The best time to call (according to the study) is between 8:00 and 10:00 in the morning, or between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon.

It makes sense: when people arrive at work, they tend to take an hour or two to get organized and think through their day before they begin scheduling meetings. That’s a good time to catch them at their desks.

It’s the same for consumers: early, they tend to be at home getting ready for their day. By 10:00 or so, they’re out running errands, they’re getting kids to soccer games, and they’re less accessible.

Likewise, meetings tend not to be planned for late in the day, and you’re more likely to catch people at their desks, or at home.

Lunchtime is the worst time to reach people. In fact, calling between 4:00 and 5:00 gives you a 114% better chance of reaching a contact than calling between 11:00 and 12:00, according to InsideSales.com.

Tactic #3. Call on Wednesday or Thursday
Wednesdays and Thursdays tend to be the best days to contact a lead. The study shows that calling on a Thursday is 49.7 percent better than calling on Tuesday.

Tactic #4. Call up to four times (until you reach them), and send one email, in the first 24 hours.

Your CRM system needs a customized flag or field to remove the email automation so as to prevent the email being sent if you do reach them on the phone.
Companies that call at least four times within the first 24 hours, and who email at least once, have the best chance of successfully reaching prospects, according to the study.

Calls should be spaced every 2 to 3 hours (for B2B) and every 4 to 6 hours (B2C).

Tactic #5. Test these tactics
Bear in mind that these tactics should not be taken as a given. There may be different results for different companies, depending upon their prospects. Rather, use these suggestions as the beginning of a conversation within your company. Begin investigating to see when the most effective times and days are for your industry.

And remember, companies like InsideSales.com have auto-calibrating technology that will automatically optimize dialing, to find the best time and day to call. The technology begins to “learn” when connection rates are higher and when the sales rep is more likely to have a conversation lasting 20 seconds or more. Such tools can be enormously helpful in creating a successful lead nurturing strategy.

In future posts, I’ll share with you the results of a survey we did that looked at 500 companies to see how they did in terms of a response strategy for qualified leads. (The survey is likely to be representative of all of you reading this blog today.) We’ll also dive into best practices of lead scoring.

Next, I’ll share a long-term nurturing strategy, one which shows how often to contact a lead over several weeks.

Last time I outlined some important elements necessary for a strong lead nurturing program — communications should be personalized, relevant, well-timed, thorough and automated –and I offered an example of a successful B2C lead generation email.

B2B companies, both those that close the sale offline (the majority of B2B have field sales teams) as well as B2B e-commerce, can use the same relatively simple elements to improve conversions from leads, as well. Yet so many B2B companies send follow-up emails that are nothing short of awful.

The images are broken, the formatting is weird, text is centered… in fact, with a great majority of follow-up emails that I see, it would be far better to send nothing than to send something that represents the company so poorly.

But it’s not at all difficult to put together a strong email that encourages a lead to move further through the sales funnel.

For example, below is an email Omniture might send to a potential customer, Jason Smith, who had downloaded a white paper on lead generation. Notice how simple the email is: it isn’t over-designed; it isn’t blatantly in-your-face; and it’s brief and to-the-point.  And it encompasses a number of the elements of a successful lead-nurturing strategy:

Well-timed

The email is sent within 15 minutes of the prospect downloading the white paper.

Personalized

The “To” line includes the prospect’s actual name, and the greeting uses his name again: “Hi, Jason.”

Personalizing the email lets the prospect know that you are sending something specific to him and only to him (ecommerce and many b2c companies have been doing this for a while – it’s about time that the rest of the B2B world catch up).  It hints that the content of the email will include information of special interest to him.

The signature reassures the prospect that a real person — “Jim Redmond, Omniture” — is behind the communication.  I want to be clear that this lead nurturing and marketing automation shouldn’t replace human interaction, but rather reinforce it so that if the prospect hits “reply” in the email, it does in fact go to Jim Redmond and can initiate a meaningful conversation.

Relevant

The email is immediately relevant to the prospect: it acknowledges that Jason downloaded a guide to lead generation, and it offers something of intrinsic value — a useful Forrester report on lead generation, as well. Note: The first paragraph does not give a sales pitch.

Because Jason was required to give a certain amount of information when he first downloaded the lead generation report, Omniture is able to customize the email even further, pointing out in the second paragraph that other “high-tech marketing companies” similar to Jason’s company, Software Inc., have learned how to improve lead generation through Omniture Test & Target. The second paragraph offers a soft pitch, rather than a hard sell.

The third paragraph sets an expectation, offering to continue to send useful information surrounding the topic of lead generation (more relevance): “If you don’t mind, as I periodically come across relevant information to assist you in your job, I’ll send it to you.”

Automated

Email responses such as the example above can easily be automated using marketing automation (specifically lead nurturing/drip marketing) software.  Several example companies include:  Aprimo, Eloqua, Market2Lead, Market Bright, Marketo, Neolane, Vtrenz, etc.

Certain areas of the communication are pre-populated automatically by the tool, based on the information the prospect has given when he downloaded the white paper. For example, his name is automatically entered in the “To” line and the salutation. The title of the white paper he downloaded is included. In the second paragraph, the industry Jason is in — high tech marketing — is pre-populated, as is the name of his company. His company name is again inserted in the third paragraph.

Consider pre-writing all of your emails, for each industry you cater to (this can also be done by product/solution or other important segments beyond industry). Then, your lead nurturing program simply populates the fields that you specify based on the information the prospect has given within the lead gen form on the website (landing pages), and sends the email within 15 minutes of contact with the prospect.

Of course, the exact format of the email will differ widely from one company to another, which is why each company can and should run tests as they explore a lead nurturing strategy. At Omniture, we have found, for example, that the quantity of fields required in the lead form provides us with valuable information that we can use to relevantly remarket to prospects. The extra fields required in the lead form mildly decrease conversion; however, the additional info gathered for remarketing offsets any conversion decreases.  Another company may have totally different results.

By giving prospects something useful to them (a free report-call it complimentary) – and no hard sales pitches , companies can significantly improve conversions from leads to actual customers and simultaneously decrease prospects from unsubscribing.

Again, this type of automation can be accomplished by tying together CRM with marketing automation and enhanced with Website analytics for detailed analysis and reporting to continually optimize testing.

Next time, I’ll talk about when, and how often, you should be contacting your prospects.

• personalized
• relevant
• well-timed
• thorough
• automated

Automated emails are one of the first, and one of the easiest, areas of communication to implement.

Imagine someone goes online to shop for Father’s Day.  He logs in to his favorite electronics site and sees an audio system (i.e. Phillips 5.1) that looks good and is the right price.  He clicks on the product detail page for a closer look.  He finds that it has a high user rating, and he decides to take the plunge — he adds it to his shopping cart.

Then, as he begins the checkout process, his kids begin screaming.  One is falling down the stairs, while the other is about to pull a pot of boiling water off the stove.  He leaves the computer, accidentally closing the browser.

“Oh, well,” he thinks.” Maybe I’ll get Dad something less expensive.”

So, what does a smart company do?

With an automated leads nurturing system, it is very easy to send a timely, personalized email that will draw him back into the purchase cycle and recoup that lost revenue.

You already have the shopper’s email address, because he logged onto the site at the beginning of his session.  Remember, communications should be personalized, so include his actual name in the “to” line.  In the subject line, you might write, “Save 20% — Complete Your Philips 5.1 Purchase Today.”

Then you might include the shopping cart exactly as it was when he dropped out of the order process, so he can complete his order (see example, below).

These types of personalized remarketing initiatives should be tested to optimize both relevance to the customer as well as revenue to your business.  For example, another option is to show the item he was considering, along with two others; another test may include price discounts or free shipping (the standard e-commerce testing variables).

You’ll also want to monitor closely whether the product was already purchased by the prospect – this can be accomplished by real-time linking between your CRM, your web analytics, and your email system so that programmatically, your system is intelligent enough to trigger this type of personalized remarketing promotion.   If you offer a discount to someone who has already paid full price, he will likely have negative feelings about the purchase.  When you get started with your personalized remarketing system, and to be on the safe side, you can include a sentence like, “If you already purchased this and we weren’t aware of it, please take 20 percent off your next purchase….”
To bring personalization to its optimal level, you’ll want the email to go back to a real person, should the prospect hit “reply.”  And you’ll want to include a phone number with a real person answering it.

The communication should be timely — send it five to 10 minutes after the shopping cart was abandoned, not three hours later.

With the right system, you can automate all these details so that, any time a shopping cart is abandoned, a personalized, timely, relevant email is sent to the prospect, hugely increasing the odds that the prospect will complete his purchase.

Consider the “ROI of Email Relevance” study from Jupiter:

• Of consumers who received an email that contained a product they were already considering, 60 percent became immediate purchasers, and 59 percent became deferred purchasers
• Of consumers who received an email that featured a sale price, 73 percent became immediate purchasers, while 76 percent became deferred purchasers.

Imagine how much incremental revenue a retailer can generate simply by implementing an automated strategy of timely, personalized, relevant, and thorough communications.

Next time, we’ll focus on B2B by drilling down into a strong lead nurturing email, with examples and tactics.

Despite the above statistic, most companies today don’t have a lead nurturing strategy in place — or if they do, they are not making the most of their efforts: B2B marketers have low contact rates, ending their efforts to contact a potentially interested prospect after just three to five attempts and having reached only 20 percent to 50 percent of their leads. The leads are often not highly qualified, and they are all treated the same, no matter what level of qualification they have.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Over the course of the next month, I will be outlining in detail an automated response and lead nurturing program over five to six posts that companies can implement themselves in order to increase the number of closed sales that are generated from leads. I’ll give specific tactics on how to increase relevance and conversion through personalization and profile-based content. I’ll also give you plenty of examples of what to do — and what not to do.

You’ll learn to better connect with your customers, based on their behavior and their needs. You’ll learn to use what you know about their demographics in order to better target your communications. And you’ll learn how to integrate different types of communication - including automated telephony, email, and direct mail - into your strategy.

Strategy for lead nurturing and response

So first, let’s talk about an overall strategy. Bear in mind that this strategy is equally useful for B2B marketers as well as B2C marketers, especially for those whose B2C sale is a more expensive considered purchase (a car or a plasma TV) rather than an impulse purchase.

At its heart, a strategy for lead nurturing and response is simple, and it’s based on five elements. Lead nurturing communications must be:

1. Personalized
2. Relevant
3. Well-Timed
4. Thorough
5. Automated

1. Personalized — the message comes from a specific person and goes to a specific person

A lot of companies use the impersonal “Eddie Bauer” or “Costco” or “CDW” as the signature and “from” address in their emails instead of a named person. At Omniture, we have tested personalized signatures, and have discovered that when emails come from an actual person, conversion rates are better – now we don’t do this 100% of the time, only if the lead score achieves a specific threshold so as to not inundate our sales teams with volumes of leads that may not be qualified.

Whenever possible, you also want there to be a phone number on the email that goes to the person whose signature is on the email.

At a previous B2C company, the marketing department went so far as to actually test using imaginary people — the name “Sally” vs. “Susan,” for example — and found that conversion rates can be higher depending on which name you choose. Of course, you have to balance that with the fact that you’re being somewhat disingenuous by using fake people.

2. Relevant — it is based on a particular behavior, or on your profile of the lead

It’s easy to monitor behavior online: if a consumer enters into the checkout process to purchase a stereo system, and then bails from the shopping cart process before completion, you can re-market to them based on your knowledge of that individual’s behvior.

You might, for example, send an email asking the customer to return to complete the purchase for the same stereo, and offer a 20 percent discount.

If you work for a B2B company, your visitors might fill out lead-generation forms on the Web site and answer questions about their interests. You can then choose to communicate with them based on the answers to those questions. For example, if someone comes to the Omniture site and says that they’re a retail consumer site, it wouldn’t make sense for me to remarket to them offering B2B-specific guides. I would message to them specifically about online retail marketing and possibly send them reports on how to increase shopping cart conversion rates, etc.

You can also ask more questions to further qualify the leads, which will help in future communications with them.

If they’ve registered with the site, you know their name, perhaps some demographic information, perhaps the types of products that interest them by what they’ve clicked on or have previously purchased. From that information, you can offer relevant communications.

3. Well-timed — communication comes quickly following a particular behavior or event (after achieving a lead score threshold), and it is well-spaced thereafter

In a B2B scenario, how often is your inside sales team able to communicate with a lead who had expressed an interest at a specific point in time? If they wait more than five minutes from the initial point of interest, chances are they are generally not very successful in reaching the lead. The same goes for B2C examples where leads are generated and then followed up by a call center. We did a straw poll and found that out of 10 leads, less than 1 was able to be contacted, even if the leads were followed up within 48 hours.

Research shows that the first contact attempt should come within five minutes. (let’s link to the specific study here if possible.) Let’s think about this intuitively, if you’re at work and download some information or fill out a web inquiry form, chances are that you’re in a meeting or focused on your next project within an hour. Your download or request form information after an hour is now out of your mind. When I receive calls from someone following up with me within two to three days and I actually take them, I have to go through a “remind me” ritual for them to even connect they’re reason for calling with my previous behavior. We’re most likely to reach a person within 5 minutes while they’re still at their desk in a B2B example or at home in a B2C example and upon reaching them, I guarantee they’ll remember what their behavior was to possibly elicit a call.

During the “response” period (the first two weeks after you get an online lead), it is most effective to have attempted to call up to 5 times within the first 24 hours, and to have left one voice mail message.

If no contact is made after one to three hours, an email should be sent, with three or four more sent throughout the first two weeks (that may be too many; these are things you’ll want to test).

Throughout the first two weeks, a good follow-up strategy includes three dial attempts per day, with a voice mail every three days or so.

During the nurturing period (after the first two weeks), consider one email per month and one voice mail per month.

4. Thorough — attempts to penetrate thoroughly and then back off

Good response and lead nurturing means attempting to reach your potential customer with the optimal frequency quickly after an exhibited behavior with a relevant offer, but then not pestering them if they don’t respond. Then you will continue to target them with personalized, relevant contacts over a prolonged period of time as mentioned above, perhaps once per month after the two week response period (see Nos. 1 and 2).

5. Automated

When you have a comprehensive response and nurturing system all in place comprised of : 1) a measurement system (discussed in the first posts around B2B measurement), your auto-dialer, CRM system, and email/ direct mail system are all synced, so that you’re not trying to do any of this manually, you’ll be more thorough, your communications will be well-timed, you’ll be able to be relevant and personal, and you will waste less time.

Typically, sales does not wring the most value from leads because they do not contact the lead often enough (3 to 5 attempts rather than 26 or so in the first two weeks), they have low contact rates (20% to 50%) and their communications are not personalized and relevant.

Worse, email communications following a sales lead are often, frankly, horrendous.

Have you ever gotten emails like these? Images are broken, there’s no personalization, formatting is wacky and the offer is irrelevant.

In my next post, I’ll offer a better solution to the typical autoresponder email, with samples for both B2B and B2C companies.

Tools

When it comes to choosing a tool for closed-loop reporting, the most important thing to look for is a product that couples the correct methodologies with the technologies, so that you can generate reports in the ways that give you the most useful insights.

Most tools do not offer the methodologies along with the technology. Of those that do, like Omniture’s Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce, it is important that you truly understand the methodology behind the tech. (I’m not trying to give a sales pitch on this, but we built our own internal solution over a two-year period due to a lack of a comprehensive tool on the market that we then made available to our customers that use Salesforce.com. If you are interested in a sales pitch, here’s the link to the Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce product demo)

Then, you want a tool that allows you to look at multiple dimensions of the data, and to create relationships between those multiple dimensions, via fact tables, data marts and data warehouses. You want to be able to layer in the analysis of multidimensional reporting tools known as ETLs (for extract, transform and load), so you can take raw data, extract it and load it into a more pristine environment where you can do the analysis needed.

Such capabilities will allow you to pull a wealth of information: for example, you can look at a series of marketing campaigns and ask for the first campaign touch that brought the prospect account into your database, all the campaign touches in the middle, and the last campaign touch right before the opportunity (meeting – in person or via the phone with the prospect) was created. That will allow you to pinpoint the campaigns that are the most successful at bringing in accounts, the most successful at moving them through the sales funnel, and the most successful at closing the deal. This helps you discover which campaigns are the ones in which you want to invest most heavily.

Or, you can choose to look at all closed deals in the fourth quarter, and build a report that shows when the opportunities that were created that led to a closed deal. This will show you just how long the sales cycle is and which campaigns led to a sale.

When you become skilled at pulling reports such as these, you’ll be able to tell just how many dollars you have in return from every campaign. More information helps you better understand better where to invest your marketing dollars for an increase in ROI and a decrease in sales cycle length.

I can easily understand the confusion. Such closed-loop reporting is not impossible, but companies traditionally do find it quite difficult. In fact, one top research and analyst firm has found that less than 12 percent of customers are trying to achieve closed loop reporting, and of that 12 percent, very few are successful at making it happen.

I believe that’s because there are so many elements involved; just having the right tool to spit out the reports is not enough. You must have the right processes and people in place to make the reporting give you the information you need.

One reader wisely asked exactly what those processes, people and tools were necessary for closed-loop reporting.

For the next two posts I’ll outline the three elements to be successful: expertise, processes, and tools.

Expertise

The person handling closed-loop reporting within your organization should be someone who has the ability to be quantitative and who understands the methodologies used to arrive at campaign ROI and other metrics.

Most web analysts, experts at analyzing data for sites, are not yet qualified for analyzing data all the way through to the closed sale due to a lack of experience with the offline sales process (now, I have met a few that have learned this and do a very good job). He or she should understand technology and analytics, but also marketing and sales processes. You should not have to explain to them the definition of a raw lead (I define this as someone who has provided contact information to your organization), a sales-ready lead/opportunity (I define this as a meeting has been set up with a prospective buyer who has demonstrated interest) or a closed deal (although each company needs to go through the process of establishing their own taxonomy and metrics through the entire sales funnel).

Processes

Before putting the technology in place to begin a closed-loop reporting process, marketing needs to decide a number of things:

• Which metrics are the key metrics to study?

• How much will each team commit to, in terms of lead generation?

It’s important that a commitment is established between marketing, sales and channel partners to know what percent of sales (through sales-ready leads and raw leads – unqualified leads) the sales team will source, what percent marketing will source, etc.

• Does the marketing team have the staff and budget to support those goals?

If marketing signs up to provide 50 percent of all sales-ready leads to ultimately source 50 percent of all sales, is the funding in place to achieve that? It’s a matter of a simple calculation to discover the average cost per sales-ready lead/opportunity by product line and sales division. Multiple that number by the number of sales-ready leads/opportunities marketing has committed to supplying, and it is easy to know how much money you need in order to generate that number of leads.

• Is the funding available in the appropriate quarter?

If you have a six-month sales cycle and you’re committing to generating sales in the first quarter of 2009, your funding will need to be available in early to mid 2008.

A closed-loop reporting process is not a quick-fix solution that gets put into place a single time and continues to work on its own. It is something that requires ongoing refinement and management, so it is essential to have weekly and/or monthly operational meetings with key stakeholders in marketing, sales and channel marketing to refine the process.

I’ll talk about tools in my next post. Stay tuned!

• Friendly Name of Campaign/Initiative with its unique tracking code—with some of the below elements
• Start Date—this is essential to know which date in time to begin allocating metrics associated to the tracking code such as costs
• Global Campaign Initiatives or Parent Campaign (i.e. new product launch)
• Product Theme—which product this most closely aligns to or promotes
• Geo Emphasis—Americas, LACA, EMEA, APAC, etc.
• Program Initiative—lead acquisition, customer cross sell, retention)
• Departmental Campaign Initiatives—marketing, sales, channel
• Channel—online or offline
• Promotional Formats—white papers, webinars, product tours, case studies
• Promotional Offer—which white paper, webinar, etc.
• Media Source—MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Forbes, USA Today, Tradeshow XYZ, etc.
• Tactic—email, paid search, SEO, banners, e-newsletters, print, cold call, trade show, press release, etc.
• Ad Formats—banners (468×60, 728×90, 300×250); keyword lists and copy)

Another important notion is to ensure that marketers are uniquely tracking different aspects of a campaign. For example, a campaign that drives visitors to the Web site should not be overridden by an onsite promotion of a whitepaper or product launch, thus losing visibility of which tactic drove them to the site. Marketers should set up tracking where the multiple attributes of a campaign can be measured to avoid overriding each other. These are some attribute examples:

• External Campaign IDs/elements—what drove visitors to the Web site/tradeshow booth
• Site Creative IDs/elements—which copy imagery converted best to a lead
• Site Conversion IDs/elements—which white paper or webinar converted best to a lead and subsequently propelled them to become a more qualified lead
• Re-Marketing IDs/elements—which lead nurturing campaigns (emails, automated telephony scripts, direct mail, newsletters, product launches) created an up sell, cross sell, or simply new sales opportunity

With the right closed-loop marketing infrastructure, marketers should be enabled to better prioritize their efforts and dollars and more accurately assess their contribution to the sales pipeline; (as opposed to implementing a very expensive and time consuming data mart and cumbersome reporting interface). Use your flexible Web analytics solution by integrating it with your SFA/CRM application.

By integrating the analytics solution together with a SFA/CRM environment, you can be provided with one important item—relevance! By understanding the account or a contact’s Web site browsing interests at a product or service level (such as keywords, product tours, white papers, time spent in each area of the site and other pertinent visitor patterns) you can quickly provide much more meaningful context to the sales process (call, email). With more sales information, you can close more deals, and close them more quickly.

Looking back: Part III—Why B2B marketing is difficult to measure.

1. First source—which campaign/interaction sourced the account (not just the lead) into your database regardless of how long ago it happened.
2. Marketing touched—that any campaign/interaction (defined as a meaningful exchange or interaction – i.e. they downloaded a paper, took the product tour, attended an event; companies can decide if they want to include less engaging metrics such as a click to a particular product or personalize landing page or click-through from an email.
3. Last touch—The interaction just before the opportunity is created. I’m defining sales-ready opportunity as the phone or in-person meeting between a sales professional and prospect to review the solution (once the authority of the prospect and potential need or interest have been established). This last touch (also referred by some, as “progressed” i.e. Sirius Decisions) often demonstrates which interaction is most influential in getting the account to “meet” with you.
4. Combination of marketing touched—this would be a report that would show you the combination of campaigns/interactions at an account level to show which interactions worked harmoniously to create the opportunity; this could also be created an roll up level to decide which combination of campaigns/interactions were the most common to a grouping of closed deals or created opportunities.

Looking ahead: Part IV—Slicing your B2B marketing measurement for prioritization. We’ll next discuss breaking your reports down into different classifications or views for reporting.Looking back: Part II—The Real Metrics & KPIs for B2B Marketing