Josh Hill

Marketing Automation on a Budget – Part 2

June 3, 2013 By Josh Hill

Thanks to everyone who sent in more ideas for marketing automation tools to review. Since that was a popular post, I thought I’d check out a few of the other services people suggested.

Infusionsoft

This tool came up several times in email questions. I’ve never used it, so I can’t say much about it’s real usefulness. First, I can’t watch a demo without filling out a form. That bothers me a lot – I should be able to view a basic demo without giving up my contact information. Next, let’s look at the feature set. Infusionsoft is a “complete” tool in that the Plus and Premier packages offer a basic CRM. There appears to be no SFDC integration, so if that’s an issue for you, this is not your solution. The service does offer email marketing, automation, lead scoring, and tracking. The higher value packages even offer shopping cart tools, which are not available on the major B2B solutions.

From the video demos, Infusionsoft seems to combine the oddness of Act-On and the Visio-like workflow tool of Eloqua. This could work well for people who like the complete visualization. Infusionsoft also appears to have an active user community and extensive library of pre-built workflows. Support options also include chat, phone, email, workshops, and in-person help. So Infusionsoft is a bit closer to the mainstream automation solutions.

As for pricing and value, this could be a good fit for a small business with 2-10 staff and under 100,000 contacts. The sticking point for me is that there is a contact and an email limit for each pricing tier. The last thing I want to think about is how many emails do I have left this month, especially if I’m approaching 4-10 emails per month at 80,000 contacts. As one user put it, “Good for first year…Bad for scale.” This solution is best for a small business that is doing local outreach.

GreenRope:

I hadn’t heard of GreenRope until the other day. Clearly Marketo and Eloqua have made the Marketing Automation solutions market hot and many firms think they have a solution for each segment of the market. GreenRope definitely fits the Small Biz segment with even better plans than Infusionsoft.

I’m always impressed by new features that some firms make difficult. GreenRope includes SMS and an event calendar system with payment tools. Many other firms force you to do this yourself or to integrate Eventbrite or third-party tools. Of course, many enterprise firms would find this tool limiting, but small businesses will find it an easy tool.

Like Infusionsoft, GreenRope includes a basic CRM and the usual email marketing and customer support cases. GreenRope does appear to offer some level of workflow templates through their modules and does include email and page templates. Neat options include integrated P&L and company support forums. GreenRope’s support includes chat, email, and phone except for the most basic plan.

GreenRope’s pricing plan tiers take the full range of the small business, up to 50,000 contacts (with an option to increase at 1/2 a cent). For 12 months, the full plan costs $4788/yr vs Infusionsoft’s $4588, however in year 1, Infusionsoft asks for $1999 one time setup fee. The kicker is that GreenRope has unlimited email for each pricing tier. GreenRope will have a lower total cost of ownership than Infusionsoft.

GreenRope knows they are up against Infusionsoft and wrote a comparison which sounds like the salesperson’s objection handling sheet. Ombud also has a review, albeit incomplete. Since there is an easy Free Trial option, I’d probably test GreenRope out before hitting up Infusionsoft. [Updated free trial link at Greenrope’s request – 11/12/14]

Office Autopilot

Office Autopilot is another tool I hadn’t heard of before. Given their emphasis on direct mail tools and ecommerce, I’d say they grew out of an old direct mail house.

The feature set in Office Autopilot is similar to GreenRope. They offer payment processing and an event management tool, rather than open workflow rules. Of course, you can do your own workflow rules if you want. WordPress integration and direct mail postcards are tied into the system as well, which is perfect for many small business that primarily sell from their blog. If I weren’t such a fan of Genesis Theme or custom solutions, I’d test this out.

The support options for OA are limited to email, phone, and chat during certain hours. As for the interface, the videos were less clear than the other services.

Pricing is where Office Autopilot seems to fall short against GreenRope. They offer two tiers: Pro and Team. With a max of 100,000 contacts and 100,000 emails/mo, Office Autopilot will cost you $7164/yr. If you need more emails, it’s $99/mo. This makes Office Autopilot a poorly scalable solution if GreenRope is an option for you, so I could only recommend it to pro-bloggers who are still well under 100,000 contacts and who also need integrated direct mail and WordPress.

Bottom Line for Small Business Marketing Automation

If you are a very small business, I would suggest trying GreenRope. Their packages are straightforward and they offer full support, which is not available with Office Autopilot or even Mailchimp. I can’t recommend Infusionsoft or Office Autopilot because of their pricing and support tiers; I also see their interfaces lack something. GreenRope also doesn’t pull back features for their packages. If you need Salesforce intergration and automation and if your budget permits, Pardot is good alternative to HubSpot and Marketo Spark/Standard because the feature set is similar and the pricing is usually 50% less.

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Marketing Automation on a Budget

May 7, 2013 By Josh Hill

“Marketing Automation on a Budget”? What could that possibly mean? Each automation provider claims they are for small-medium businesses or enterprise or all three arbitrary firm sizes. When you start to dig into the pricing and feature lists, you quickly find the top names are about the same price for each tier of database sizes.

So how is having 500,000 records at a $100MM business different than 500,000 records at a $5MM business? This is a good question I can’t answer very well right now. I’d say that the lead values are different for each firm due to product differences, growth levels, and conversion rates. My point is that a $5MM business cannot pay as much for the same system as a $100MM business without losing features.

I’m currently in the market for an automation solution that integrates with Salesforce, allows me to create workflows, pulls in data from my site, tracks leads, does email marketing, and reports well on all of these things. In short, I want the “Demand Gen Dream” of integrated systems and cross system data that I can query in any way.

At my budget level, it is not going to happen. I can come pretty close though if I choose my vendors carefully.

Possible solutions for me:

Marketo Pricing – Despite having written a ton of articles about Marketo, I’m not a huge fan of their pricing. The Basic and Pro options purport to be accessible to small businesses. My take: good for high growth tech businesses.
HubSpot – Who doesn’t love their blog? Their feature set is comparable to other MA systems, except that you have to start with the “Professional” level to use any of them or integrate with SFDC. As they’ve grown into the market with larger enterprise ambitions, their pricing has risen too. They have a clearer matrix system of three tiers multiplied by the number of database records. Usually the pricing is similar to Marketo’s. If you are undecided about which level, select your database size, then change the product level. There won’t be a huge difference in the annual cost. My Take: becoming out of reach of the original SMB audience.
Eloqua – I almost didn’t put this in here. Eloqua has clearly positioned itself as an enterprise service and it shows in their pricing. They have everything you could need, but it is pricey. My take: not a contender for any SMB. Oracle’s name there is a clear positioning statement.
Pardot – Its system is similar to HubSpot and Marketo. I’ve had a couple of demos and thought the interface was ok. Not as clearly logical as Marketo or HubSpot and not as visual as Eloqua. When someone’s on a tight budget like I am, I often suggest Pardot. Their chief limitation comes with 30K block pricing after the base price, API limits, and file size limits. For growing databases, you could easily end up paying more than you intended. Since Pardot is now part of ExactTarget, I’d expect more serious deliverability help and tools than other services. My take: more of a contender for those on a budget, but be careful with list size growth.
AWeber – It is the preferred platform for pro-bloggers to run drip campaigns with some automation. Its feature set is fairly advanced for an email platform but lacks the “automation” lead management functions we’ve come to expect. That’s okay because I might want to just have a better email system at first. I like AWeber’s pricing which is similar to Mailchimp’s. To me, Aweber has a more natural interface than Mailchimp with some key bonuses, like personalized email delivery times. Both AWeber and Mailchimp are perfect for newcomers with limited automation needs because of the extensive help and templates. My take: it’s not Marketo, however, it is a contender for basic nurturing.

Mailchimp – I already use this for this site’s newsletter and at my current employer. I find it has powerful features, but a poor interface because I can rarely figure out where functions are. The integration with SFDC is a bit limited. Mailchimp also bases pricing on database size with very clear options over 25K. I love it when companies are open about pricing at high volumes instead of “call us,” since it saves me the trouble of deciding to ask them. Mailchimp has similar features to AWeber with a friendly vibe thanks to the Chimp. They are very strict with CANSPAM compliance and will suspend you for even inadvertent low deliverability stats. My take: MailChimp is a much better starting point for SMBs or small list bloggers. Not sure it is a good choice for those with larger ambitions.

After exploring these Marketing Automation players and email platforms, I’d say if you are an SMB that is not desperately in need of lead flow management, you should find an email service provider who has a few tricks up its sleeve. I recommend AWeber or Mailchimp and then find a contractor to help integrate the sync between them at SFDC. For the moment, I’m sticking to an email only solution, for about 10% of the cost of marketing automation. That being said, I am looking forward to the day I can say a $30K solution will save me the cost of a new hire.

Using Marketo already?

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Marketing Automation Lets You Build a CRM for Your Business

April 18, 2013 By Josh Hill

Marketers and salespeople often complain their CRM is limiting them. Salesforce and MS Dynamics and Sugar CRM all pressuppose a particular progression from Prospect to Sale. No doubt that the system is based on 120 years of sales research best practices. But what about your business? Does the Lead > Contact > Account > Opportunity flow always work for you?

Marketing Automation systems like Marketo can help you bypass the restrictions in your CRM to build a sales funnel that makes sense for your business.

Each business operates a bit differently. Each business has its own sales culture, its own corporate culture, and its own view of how sales happen. So when a company tells you to use their software you have to change your process, you become resistant. And so does the sales team. I know many firms where Salesforce is a dirty word because it has dirty data and a process that no one tried to make work for the business. And therefore SFDC is “broken.”

This a big challenge for many smaller businesses who don’t have technology teams or even experience with the various CRM systems. They just want it to work. They want to record meetings, contact details, and sales and to find it easily without a lot of manuals. Salespeople never want to spend time working inside a system they don’t believe in.

It turns out there are quite a few CRM options for small businesses. Which is great, but if you read the article, no one system has worked for everyone. Few companies seemed thrilled. (The article also correlates having a CRM with having higher sales, which seems specious at best). When I was starting Marketing Rockstar Guides, I had to resist the urge to get my own CRM to record things. I knew it would be great to have one, but to spend money on it as a one-man band? No. So I tried a few free CRMs and nothing really worked so I decided it wasn’t needed.

But for larger firms with multiple sales people, even firms under 50 people, you do need something. Some system to help record sales and keep the data safe and accessible across the team. But to make that system work for your unique business can be a challenge. Thousands of firms make billions from customizing cloud software to fit your unique requirements. Salesforce.com constructed its system to allow just about anything you want using Force.com–but you need a VAR or salesforce consultant to make that happen. So a very small firm has to make a choice between “making do” and finding a consultant to making things happen.

This is where marketing automation can help. Marketers can get help bypassing a great deal of that specialized programming by using marketing automation to construct lead workflows which properly manage the lead flow across the CRM. So for a small business using a basic Salesforce setup, Marketo Spark can effectively adjust workflows you might otherwise have needed to build in Apex code.

Now, that’s not to suggest you can do everything with a marketing automation system. When I went through my first implementation, I had to spend a great deal of time with my Salesforce Admin building new triggers inside Salesforce. I’ve worked with firms who built all sorts of custom objects for their unique business situation. In fact, in the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo, I recommend that you spend time better understanding your needs in your CRM first before you implement Marketo.

Once you understand what can be done in the CRM, and what you can have done in the CRM, then you can build out helpful workflows in Marketo to avoid some of that work in Salesforce. This approach should work well with any CRM or marketing automation tool. If you still need specialized programming to ensure your CRM conforms to your needs–and your clients’ needs–then hiring a Salesforce consultant is the next step.

Do you have experience with Marketo Spark? Tell us below! And remember to sign up for email updates.

Marketo Summit Thoughts

April 15, 2013 By Josh Hill

I’m back from the Marketo Summit 2013 massive event where I met many of you for the first time in person. I’m so glad we were able to connect and talk about Marketo, marketing, and more.

Session Takeaways

EMEA and Canadian Privacy Issues: many thanks to Adam Waterston for his detailed look at the implementation of the EU privacy and cookie laws and how he helped Planon increase the proportion of visitors who accepted.
Using Multiple Product Lines requires serious planning to work well with RCM and scoring. We knew that though 🙂
Advanced Forms Use: in this session with the legendary Eric Hollebone, he and the other presenters described how they used javascript techniques to pull in tons of background detail on their audience without actually asking for it. Most of these methods will require a web programmer and possibly a tool like ReachForce. Seems well worth it to enhance data quality and targeting without annoying leads.
SFDC Dashboard Creation: Will Scully-Power from Datarati took us through his methodology for developing helpful dashboards that are Actionable and Understandable. His big tip is to start with the end in mind.

New Features and Integrations from Marketo

Hootsuite integration: this will be amazing.
Financial intergration: wow. This completely automates my budgeting and ROI process. If I had this right now, I would save at least 1 man-day a month on reporting.
Marketo’s new interface looks fantastic! Clean, modern, etc.
Forms 2.0: this could be a game changer for many of the less technically inclined.
Nurturing System Module!! Completely abstracts the complicated traffic cop flows to make nurturing super easy. As Glen Lipka noted in the “History of Marketo”, “We never wanted traffic cops.”
Multiple RCM Modules: I know quite a few advanced users have been asking for this for years to handle multiple partitions or product mixes.
Marketing Calendar: this sounds great. Not sure how it works yet.
Box.net Integration to upload files directly into Marketo. Pretty neat. I know more firms are using DropBox or Drive though.
Gmail Sales Insight Plugin: ok, this is very cool since now we can move away from the horror of Outlook while enjoying the benefits of Gmail and MSI.
Email Performance Reports: those with Revenue Explorer can now see very cool Day of Week and Hour of Day heatmaps.

These changes show me that Marketo is still very much attuned to the Ideas section of the Community and feedback from all of us. Perhaps a few of these features (Forms 2.0) took longer than we’d all like because it’s complicated to make things “just work.”

If you use any of these features, I’d love to hear from you! Remember to sign up for more updates.

Lead Behaviors, Not Lead Scores

April 8, 2013 By Josh Hill

In a previous post, I decried regular lead scoring, favoring instead Audience Filters and clear Behavioral Triggers for a marketing qualified lead system.

I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who now needed to integrate another service line into the scoring system. She wanted to create a new field “Product 2 Score” and a whole separate list of workflows to handle these leads. While there are some legacy process reasons for separating these leads, this is the exact scenario that prompted my earlier article. If you find yourself creating special scoring scenarios, then the scoring concept is just broken.

Let’s say you have 5 products, but the audience for each one overlaps 95% of the time such that you can technically market any of these 5 products to the whole market and expect some success. Only the lead’s behaviors and self-identification will help you narrow the actual product interest before the hand-off to sales.

Why bother having 5 scoring fields with 20 scoring flows (100 campaigns!) when what you actually need is better behavioral tracking and response tracking for your marketing programs? In other words, stop sending Products 1, 2, and 3 when the Lead only responds to Products 4 and 5. If the Lead buys Product 5 now, they may still need Product 2 at a later point if they responded to the Product 2 program.

Even if each Product has its own audience by functional area, you still don’t need scoring to help you. Simply setup Smart Lists or filters to help automate audience segmentation by Product. Then watch what each group does over time that leads to a sale. Then build the workflows to send promising Leads (marketing qualified leads) to Sales at the optimal times. All of this is based on behavior patterns, not abstract scores and unnecessarily complex workflows.

Since my original post, I had conversations with people about what they do and came up with possible models for marketers.

Lead Lifecycle/Buying Stage Triggers: you’re probably planning or already using these to move people through your Revenue Cycle Modeler or existing lead flow. Why not take the scoring triggers out of this and use the content engagement for your early stages? Your late stage leads are already with sales, so you can worry less about them.

Content Offer Hybrid Model: The Hybrid, two-stage content offer suggested by David Meerman Scott: 1 piece is a free download, the other webinar or more detailed paper requiring registration. In this model you get interest, sharing, and highly targeted engaged leads.

What is an Marketing Qualified Lead Worthy Trigger?

An MQL worthy trigger is one where the lead has taken the actions that indicate strong interest in your service(s). This is instead of a score threshold trigger. Such triggers could be

More than 1 form fill out in 5 day period
Responded to that juicy content offer by downloading and sharing it.
Or more likely, a Call Now – request for contact on a form or via a demo request.

In Marketo, such behavior triggers may work even better with Programs than some Lead Scoring systems because Progression Statuses are based on behaviors. So you might end up with 3 or 4 “tracks” for a generic system:

Call Now Request: a demo, an explicit request.
Multiple Form Fill Outs in a Short Period: at least 2 fill outs where Call Now was not an option or selected.
Multiple Views or Downloads of specific offers:
High Value Offer Download.

I’m very curious who else has given up on traditional lead scoring. Let’s discuss below.

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