If ever there is an overused analogy when it comes to marketing, it’s got to be the dating analogy: you don’t ask someone to marry you the first time you meet them, you need to work at the relationship, you need to figure out where and why you are compatible, you need to be aware of what other people are saying about you, etc. It’s heavily used…because it holds up to any number of deeper dives on the subject.

At the same time, a tenet of good business for years has been to avoid getting caught up in spending all of your energy chasing down new customers and neglecting the customers you’ve already acquired. “It’s a lot cheaper to retain and grow your existing customers than to acquire new ones,” is a mantra in any business school and in most businesses.

When it comes to lead nurturing, these two concepts go together. Especially in a B2B or considered purchase environment, lead nurturing is critical when it comes to effectively acquiring new customers — when you have that first date (generated a lead), neither you nor the prospect knows each other all that well, and many of those prospects are not at a point in their buying cycle where anything you could do would drive them to buy. So, nurturing is the best way to prove your value as a longer-term mate so that, when they do get to a point in their buying cycle where it’s appropriate to move the relationship to the next level, it’s you that they want to take that step with.

This Post Is Not about That Kind of Nurturing

Let’s move beyond dating to when that dating has progressed to the point of a marriage — the analogy in business being a purchase event, when the prospect becomes a customer. Nurturing your existing customers is as important as nurturing prospects. When companies focus on customer growth and retention, they often see this as being simply “excellence in customer service and support” (I’m not implying that this is simple to do; rather, it’s a simple concept); that is inherently reactive — serving them well when they ask you for something. Nurturing is more proactive. It’s a way to both bring more value to the customer (solidifying your relationship) and to put offers in front of them that they are more likely to respond to.

Better Data for Segmentation

Typically, you have some very valuable information about your customers that you don’t have for non-customers. Mainly, you have data about what they’ve bought from you. You also often have more detailed and more accurate contact information. And, if the purchase was a B2B purchase, you have reliable information about their company — certainly enough information to find the company in Hoover’s or D&B or some other system to determine where their headquarters are, how long they have been in business, what industry they are in (SIC or NAICS code), and so on. In order to effectively nurture your customers, you need to determine which of this data matters when it comes to segmenting them.

Time / Service Renewals

One of the most commonly overlooked customer nurturing opportunities has to do with annual service renewals. Worst case, a company does not even notify its customers when their service period is up. Almost as bad is the situation where customers simply get a get a notice that their service period is about to expire.

A more effective nurturing program that addresses annual service contracts is to have both a “ramp up” period — providing information early on in the service period as to how to get the most benefit out of the service — and renewal-oriented nurturing that starts well in advance of the renewal date. Targeted e-mails that both let the customer know how often they/their company are using the service while also helping them use the service more effectively can plant in the customer’s mind that this is a service they must have. The goal here is, when the customer gets a renewal notice, they don’t scratch their head and try to figure out if they’ve actually used the service over the prior year.

Retention vs. Growth

Of course, you want to both retain and grow your customer base. While these go hand in hand, they can be different, and you should assess possible nurturing messages as whether they do one or the other. If you’re nurturing program is simply, “You already bought X. Would you like to buy Y?” you will quickly alienate your customers. Rather, “You bought X, and we wanted to let you know that some updates (software downloads, documentation, articles, etc.) are available that you might find useful” demonstrates that you are committed to the customer’s success, and, if the customer has not been actively using product/service X, it’s a soft nudge for them to start doing so. “Growth” messages (which can be combined with retention ones) need to be very diligently framed in customer benefit terms. Even though this is a Marketing 101 concept, it is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that, because the customer has bought from you in the past, that just the mere fact that you have a complementary product available, they will want to buy it. Clearly understanding the value of the cross-sell — what additional pain points the combination of products/services would provide, or why an upgrade might make sense from the customer’s perspective, is critical.

And a Final Word…on Divorce

First and foremost, existing customer nurturing is about preventing a business divorce — customer churn. You need to make a determination as to whether your company’s churn rate is unacceptably high. For many companies, the easiest way for an existing customer nurturing program to deliver real value is by finding “likely churn candidates” and nurturing them to retain them — the trick being to identify them as at-risk before they’ve already made the decision to leave. In the case of one SaaS company, this was done by comparing service usage by each customer over time and then correlating that to customers who failed to renew their service. The company developed a list of ways that they could offer to help the customers use their service more effectively — some of these did not directly bring revenue to the company, but, rather, were free resources or a linkage to partners — and then implemented a nurturing program to make these suggestions. The results were quick and substantial — within 3 months, their renewal rate went up significantly.

So, one more application of the dating analogy. Does it hold up?

Dating photo credit: smile4camera
Wedding photo credit: greggoconnell

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Sales and Marketing Functions must work in harmony to create and retain lead marketing balance.  When they don’t and work in silos, many departments are impacted; sales, marketing, corporate communications, finance and business operations.  Compare lead marketing to an ecosystem.  An ecosystem is defined as an interactive system established between a group of living creatures and their environment in which they live in.  You are constantly interacting with systems and groups of people.  Just as an ecosystem needs to sustain life, it needs things that are happening above and below the ground that we don’t observe everyday, but it is still a necessity to continue life.  This is where I see the most discord between sales and marketing teams who have accountability for lead marketing.  Often times Sales and Marketing teams are not in the know, and this impacts lead quantity, lead quality, branding, analytics and insight.

For example, does sales/marketing understand how your organization is driving lead quantity? How about lead quality? How do you integrate your brand into campaigns? How do you analyze campaign metrics at the onset of the promotional activity?

The one constant I have seen is that sales always wants more leads and marketing is always wondering what happened to those leads they provided. Now comes the million dollar question, how can sales and marketing move from discord to harmony? I have found that when you increase communication between sales and marketing, discussing lead marketing strategies, execution management and metrics, harmony is produced. Here are four areas where sales and marketing can collaborate together to create harmony between their teams:

Lead Quantity: Ask for ideas on how to drive large quantity of leads into the registration page. Some suggestions: highlight promotion and media plans and goals. Discuss branding partnerships, speakers and topics.

Lead Quality: Engage with sales team to create registration questions, identify desirable attributes. Ask them how they engage with their prospects. An example of four ways I engage with prospects:

1. Registration page
2. Sales acceleration email
3. Event polling
4. Event exit survey

Branding: Ask for opinions on how you can integrate your brand into the campaign. Discuss look and feel of all deliverables including online advertising, emails, landing and reg pages. Consider client and partner logos. Share client thought leadership messaging along with other resources and other links (blogs, archives/libraries, etc.). Discuss what is the next step for your brand and how can you test in a campaign.

Analytics and Insight: Begin analyzing campaign metrics at the onset of the promotional activity. Rely heavily on metrics to help you make swift changes during the campaign in order to maximize performance (i.e., change media, location of registration buttons). Review post event carefully with sales and marketing. Analyze how the audience responded to optimize the next campaign (i.e., subject lines, imagery, topic messaging, and audience). Use metrics to gauge success across your other related marketing programs.

That’s it for now.  I’ll blog some more later.  Now, practice makes perfect.  I have given you several ideas on how to create harmony, now go harmonize with your teams.

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Long ago* at Bulldog, when we were a company that focused primarily on planning and execution of Webinars, we’d refer jokingly to the process of audience creation as “getting butts in seats.” This was virtual butts in virtual seats, but the point was the same. Reaching the right people and generating enough interest to get them to commit to spending some time with you is both an art and a science. More a science with every passing day.

Next month we’ll host a Webinar on that very topic: Getting people in the “seats.” This session will focus on the message: what you say and how you say it to get people to engage with you. Lisa Harmon of the design firm Smith-Harmon and I will talk about some proven strategies, taken from our own playbooks at Bulldog and Smith-Harmon. We’ll cover, among other things, best practices for offering incentives; the “anatomy” of an e-mail; and the “talent search”-deciding who is going to deliver your message.

Register here. I think you’ll enjoy it.

*Note this is a relative term.

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RSS has been around for what seems like an eternity now, but truly since the late 1990s. If you are not familiar with RSS, here is a great video that gives a simple explanation.

Since its inception, RSS has been a great tool for technology teams, and a great way for end users to consume the content of their choice at their leisure. Historically, however, it has been a tricky tool for marketers to justify, since it is not measurable. A few (OK, maybe five now?) years ago, some great tools popped up that allow us to begin tracking your consumption at an aggregate level (Feedburner). That was definitely a step in the right direction. Recently, technology has stepped up again, and now offers the ability to track subscribers and the articles they read at an individual level. Big Brotherish? No more so than the ability to track at this level on e-mail and Web usage, which we’ve had for quite some time now.

Earlier this week I led a discussion about the recently released RSS functionality from Eloqua, the marketing automation platform company we use here at Bulldog. Here is a link to my presentation about the different ways the Eloqua functionality can be leveraged.

To prepare for the discussion, I learned more about RSS than I ever wanted to know, and set up some live demos to prove the point. At Bulldog, we are not shy about public experimentation. We’ve set up a dedicated subdomain (dogfood.bulldogsolutions.com) as our test bed. (The name refers to the concept of “eating our own dogfood,” but I’m sure you guessed that.) This is in no way intended to be a production site, and items we publish normally have a short shelf life.

Here is some of the stuff we’ve been playing with:

Different ways to create, manage, customize and aggregate content:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Great way to aggregate and filter different feeds
• Google Alerts: Great way to stay current on news you and your audience are
  interested in
• Eloqua: Provides a simple way to create, manage and publish your own content
  as RSS feeds

Different ways to publish content (for the moment, these are specific to the Eloqua application):

• General Web content: Keep your Web site fresh by publishing different feeds (see example below)
• Personalized Web content: This is based on Eloqua’s PURL (personalized URL) functionality where we can serve up different feeds that you have indicted interest in
• E-mail: Last, but certainly not least, Eloqua provides the ability to embed a feed directly into an e-mail with the same personalization as above. Need newsletter content?

Sound interesting? Give it a shot.

Here’s an explanation of what we’ve actually done and how to try it out:

• This page contains a feed that is the consolidation of the most recent posts from all of our blogs in our Blogroll. To consolidate the feeds, we’ve used Yahoo! Pipes. I’m not going to go into much detail about this application, but I will say it is a pretty slick tool. However, as with most betas, there is some work to do before it is totally ready for primetime.
• When you go to the page you will find a link to subscribe to the feed. Upon subscribing, you will be given your own personal feed URL that you can plug into your favorite reader. Trash the subscription immediately, if you want, or hang on to it: We don’t put slouches on our blog roll, and you might find some new content you really like. (I realize this comment is probably going to cause me extra work somehow, some way, but I do question the Gilligan on Data blog at times, authored by Bulldog’s Tim Wilson.)
• Now, if we already know who you are, then we’ll trigger an e-mail within 1 business day to let you know that we’ve got your subscription. If we don’t know who you are, we’ll still be tracking your activity, but until you bite the bullet and engage with us on a deeper level, by registering for one of our Webinars or white papers, for instance, you can continue to enjoy the anonymity.
• If you’d like to guarantee that you receive that confirmation e-mail from us (proving the technology works), you can subscribe to our monthly Marketing Watchdog newsletter. If you wanted to get fancy, you could subscribe to the RSS feed anonomously and register for something after the fact. This will show the ability to tie back to you after becoming known.

Ready? Click here and subscribe!

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There’s a good post over on The Social Organization blog titled Social Media Is Not Community. How could I not love a post with a title like that? Rachel Happe writes:

I’m finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.  Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content…which is not community.

She hits the nail on the head, and goes on to elaborate on the difference. To summarize / add to her thoughts:

• “Community” itself really has little to do with technology. The two operative elements of a community are people with something in common. Geographic location, political affiliation, usage of a particular product are all examples of “something in common.” The people who have that something in common have to be aware of each other and able to interact in some fashion.
• “Social media” is a class of technology that includes social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, etc.), social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.), blogging (WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc.), microblogging (Twitter, Pownce, identi.ca, Plurk, etc.), and social aggregators (FriendFeed…and many of the social network sites); it’s hard to classify the different types of social media, because many that may fall primarily in one class also have functionality that puts them in another class (e.g., Twitter is a microblogging platform that also is a social network); it’s an exciting and confusing area to try to stay abreast of (but there are plenty of blogs that try!)

Certainly, social media enables communities to form in entirely new ways. But, communities are a “what,” while social media is a “how.” We often run into clients who say they want to “build a community” but actually mean simply that they want to “start using social media.” We find ourselves coaching them to back up one more step and understand that what they should be driving towards is “engaging with their prospects and customers more effectively.” Understanding why they want to do that (and almost every company should want to do it…but some are not as ready as they ought to be from an internal culture perspective) and then tackling how to go about it is the way to go. Without getting that clarity of purpose defined up front, there is a very real risk that what will get delivered is a mish-mash of cool but unused social media technology, labeled as a community, but operating as an echo chamber.

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Lead scoring is a hot topic these days, and there are some awfully sharp minds trying to figure it out. Vtrenz has a white paper on the subject that has good information. We’ve got our own work on multidimensional lead scoring. The Pedowitz Group even tried to boil lead scoring down into “7 Easy Steps” (there’s some good information there, but I don’t entirely agree with the proposed approach). And, recently, SiriusDecisions put out a research brief on “When Good Lead Scoring Models Go Bad.”

The SiriusDecisions brief identifies three “attribute families” for lead scoring models: demographic data (both for the individual and for the company), BANT (budget, authority, need, and timeline), and activity. The brief points out how easy it is to focus on what you have historically used and what you have the easiest access to when developing a lead score…and points out the flaws in this approach.

The brief goes on to identify five common traps that they see companies fall into when developing their models. What is striking is that the first four traps are all, basically, about taking shortcuts and oversimplifying the lead score. They’re all valid — over-emphasizing BANT when it’s not appropriate to do so, under-emphasizing activity and demographics data, not putting enough thought into the different possible values for each variable used in the score, and weighting the variables equally. After reading through those, I audibly chuckled when I hit the fifth trap: “Overcomplicating the model.” The whole gist of that section is to keep the lead scoring model simple!

This is where SiriusDecisions falls short. On the one hand, they are wayyyyyy better than many analysts when it comes to laying out practical, pragmatic approaches to address business challenges. On the other hand, they’re still analysts, and they sometimes get caught up in words that sound good…but that are not necessarily grounded in reality. I wrote on one of my other blogs about the complexity involved in a simple, two-variable lead score situation. And, in that case, I was barely touching on the common mistakes SiriusDecisions outlines in their brief.

Which gets me to two pretty serious gaps in SiriusDecisions’s brief.

Gap No. 1 — Focusing on “What” Instead of “Why”

Their three attribute families — demographics, BANT, and activity — are families of what is measured, as opposed to why it is measured. Multidimensional lead scoring focusses more on decomposing the key attributes of your leads into “why” dimensions: their profile (who they are), their engagement (how mentally interested they are in your company already), and their position in the buying cycle. Each of these dimensions may include variables from multiple of the attribute families identified by SiriusDecisions.

This isn’t to say that SiriusDecisions doesn’t make excellent points. They absolutely do. But, I would be leery of using their implied structure as a lead scoring approach.

Gap No. 2 — Making Complexity Simple

One of the key points that I have to make whenever I speak or write about multidimensional lead scoring is that, while the name sounds complex, the fundamental approach is geared towards making lead scoring simpler. People are complex animals. Your leads are people. Lead scoring is inherently complex, especially in a B2B environment. I have yet to find a company where there are 2-3 magic variables that are both practical to expect your leads to answer truthfully (or that you can get without asking the lead a question) and that can genuinely assess the quality of the lead.

However, by deconstructing your leads into multiple dimensions, you can find a subset of attributes that are a good measure of their quality for each dimension. When it comes to measuring engagement, there are a number of measurable behaviors (there is a bias towards “activity” for the engagement dimension) that are indications of engagement. Any mix/combination of these behaviors can indicate a lead is sufficiently engaged to be sales ready on that dimension. In the case of the lead’s profile, there are typically some “must-have” attributes, be they BANT, demographic, or some combination thereof. Leads who don’t meet these minimum requirements should not be considered sales ready.

To me, if you are determined to stick with a single lead score — rather than multiple lead scores, and a requirement that a lead exceed thresholds for each one before they are passed to Sales — you will always wind up with a model that looks like it’s overcomplicated.

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In this issue: Getting the best of both worlds with a video white paper and taking a fresh look at your marketing messaging. Get it now.

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The American Marketing Association will host Mark Clemente, senior VP of strategy and development for the CMO Council, for a July 9 live Webinar covering key findings from the CMO Council’s Business Gain from How You Retain report.

The report was produced in April by Global Fluency (which runs the CMO Council) with CSC, IBM and D&B. It addresses the challenge of customer churn, and looks specifically at how marketers are using (or should use) the rich sources of data now available to them to improve their customer connections.

You can register here.

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Some good info, although a surprisingly low-tech setup, at yesterday’s Interactive Austin 2008. Great observation came from Bill Leake, CEO of Apogee Search. (Come to think of it I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bill Leake speak at a conference and not have something insightful and useful to say.)

The topic was Integrating New Media into Your Marketing Plan. The specific discussion was around how to get up to speed on social media tactics and decide which ones might suit your organization’s goals, and what to look for if you’re outsourcing some or all of this. Bill’s main point, and I think it’s a really good one for companies exploring these tactics to remember, was: Look for a marketing company that can guide you on social media, not a social media “expert” (actually I think he used the word “zealot”) to put together a marketing plan.

In other words…perspective, people, perspective. With the former you’re more likely to end up with integrated marketing. With the latter…there’s no telling.   

Interactive Austin 2008 presentations should be posted here soon.

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