Marketing Rockstar Guides

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Marketo Frequently Asked Questions

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One of the things I like to do here at MRG is to help new Marketo users get up to speed as fast as possible. As more marketers make the transition from older forms of direct marketing, online marketing, and digital marketing, the demand for understanding the systems like Marketo will only increase.

But what happens when the vendor docs, support, training, and forums aren’t enough? Not everyone is a born marketing technologist or even “techie” who can pick up the concepts and features quickly to build a whitepaper collector.

The good news is you can visit a site like this one, or one of my many friends in the marketing tech consulting world. Of course, it is hard to know what (and whom) to listen to. I speak to many new and fairly new Marketo users and one of the common challenges is showing real ROI in the first six months.

And what is the biggest impediment to ROI?

Hint: it is not reporting on the funnel.

It’s training.

In a survey I conducted in June, 51% of respondents said that needing to show ROI on Marketo was their top concern, while 50% said “getting campaigns out faster” was their next top concern.

The good news is you can absolutely hit both of those with the same stone: good, focused training. What are the keys to learning Marketo well enough to be effective at your job? The answer is not reading the docs, it’s understanding how to build the things in Marketo that help marketing activities.

The Top Ten Things You Need to Know to Get Moving Today with Marketo

  1. Understand what Marketo is and how it works
  2. Get the Word Out with Emails
  3. Optimizing the Word with AB Testing
  4. Let Leads tell you who they are – Forms and Pages
  5. Acquisition: The Whitepaper Collector – Programs, Campaigns, Filters
  6. Live from your office – the Webinar System
  7. Butts in Seats – the Roadshow System for Success
  8. Are they done yet? Baking Leads with Scoring.
  9. The Sync – Get Leads into your CRM
  10. Show Your Work – Reporting on ROI with Marketo.

What about everything else I talk about on this blog? Get to that after you understand these top ten marketing activities. Or better yet, hire a consultant to help you work through the implementation process so you can focus on learning what really matters for showing executives that Marketo is worth it.

Need help? Let me know: hello [at] marketingrockstarguides.com. 

More Resources for Marketo Newbies

Some links may require a Marketo Login.

Building a Full Subscription Center in Marketo

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Since my original posts on email preference centers and subscription management, many firms have gone well beyond the basics, building dynamic pages that literally speak the lead’s language.

Here are updated instructions on building the ultimate subscription management center (or email preference center) in Marketo. The process involves four phases to achieve pages in dynamic languages.

Every customer receives the standard Unsubscribe page when they first turn on Marketo. This page helps you conform to the minimum legal standard in most countries. If you are smart, you will want to build out a subscription center fast to reduce total unsubscribes and encourage people to subscribe to different kinds of communications.

For example, you may want to provide options like:

  • Newsletter
  • Event Invitations
  • Webinar Invitations
  • Solution A Content
  • Blog Posts
  • Unsubscribe All

Remember, these are examples. You may want to add more like Fax, SMS, and other channels. When I create these fields, I usually use a picklist in Salesforce first, with Yes, No, “null” as values. This way, the system is easy to understand whether you are an engineer, salesperson, marketer, or machine.

Email Preference Center Phase 1: New Channels 

Ingredients:

  • Program – Operational
  • Email Preference Center Page
  • Confirmation Page to display results
  • Email Preference Form
  • 01 – Unsubscribe All campaign flow
  • Additional fields as desired

Step 1: Create a Program

This program should be Channel=Operational. In some situations, I have created a separate Channel called “Subscriptions” where the statuses are Opted In, Opted Out and the Type is Operational so reporting is not affected. This only helps you with the counts and is totally unneeded from a technical perspective. Up to you.

Step 2: Foldering and Naming

This is how I set up my folders, which is largely the same across all Program Channels. Note the leading number ensures the order is how I want it.

The basic subscription center program

Step 3: Create a Confirmation Page

The reason we create this page first is to ensure the Form is completed more quickly. You will use this page several times, so might as well do it first.

Most of my clients request the Confirmation page to reflect the new values provided. This is pretty easy with some tokens.

confirmation-page-1

confirmation-page-2

As I mention in the sidebar above, it is possible to display a human value. This is why I almost always use a picklist for each field with Yes/No/Blank. Blanks mean that the lead hasn’t made a selection and we cannot send to them yet. The default token will say “Not Selected”.

Example URL SLUG: http://you.yourcompany.com/email-preference-confirmation.html

Remember to check Meta tags: set this to noindex, nofollow as this page should not be found. 

edit-page-meta-tags

Step 4: Create a Form – Main

Here is an example form and how to set the fields. Your Form will look different.

  • Add Email Address
  • Add requisite fields.
  • Modify the Values as needed. In this case, I want Unsubscribe All to encourage people to do what I want, but you can leave it as a simple checkbox.
  • On this form, we will keep everything as Not Required and Prefilled to show the current settings. You may want to mention that on the page.
  • Set the Confirmation page on the Form to ensure that it always goes to the right place. 

main-form-edit-1

not-you-form-4

edit-values-form-2 settings-form-3Step 5: Create an Email Preferences Page

This is the main page you will point everyone to.

 The URL slug should look like this:

http://you.yourcompany.com/email-preference-center.html

Meta Tags: the default is Index, nofollow. In general, it is safe to leave this because you do want this page to be found.

email-center-page-1

Step 6: Create the Unsubscribe All Campaign

This campaign is designed to unsubscribe people from all subscriptions if they choose Unsubscribe=TRUE. In theory, you can use on page javascript to set the subscriptions to “N” as well. The advantage of doing so is to reduce the system load as well as confirm visually to the user.
 Unsubscribe All Campaign

Step 7: Test

Remember to test everything once it is turned on. You may want to use an email address brake on the Unsubscribe All campaign until you are ready. 

Step 8: Update Admin > Email with the appropriate URL.

Please visit this page to understand this area. Gregoire Michel wrote a detailed How-To on the Unsubscribe Link.

Back it up the original text.

  • Take URL and add to Admin section or Email Template as desired.
  • Must replace with full URL

The entire URL we created above is fine, alternatively, you can append the URL slug to

%mkt_opt_out_prefix%email-preference-center.html

You should remove the next section:

mkt_unsubscribe=1&mkt_tok=##MKT_TOK##

as it is now unneeded and will cause problems.

Press Save!

Please send yourself a Live Test to confirm the new link works as intended.

Step 9: Redirect the original Unsubscribe Page(s)

Once you are finished with the tests, I recommend creating a redirect in Admin > Landing Pages > Rules to point the original Unsubscribe page to your new page.

http://you.yourcompany.com/unsubscribe.html > http://you.yourcompany.com/email-preference-center.html

This ensures that anyone who finds the original page or clicks on the old link finds themselves at the correct place.

**Remember to approve and re-approve Forms and Pages when you update them.

Also, there is a durable unsubscribe in Marketo and a lead can only be re-subscribed in a particular way.

Completed Email System Version 1

Email Preference Center Phase 2: Not You?

A new trend started in the past year with firms adding a Not You link on the Preference Form. This is intended to avoid a few situations:

  • Email was forwarded and another person messes up the lead’s data because of the token in the email identifying the original recipient.
  • Allowing people who find the page to Add themselves to your database. (Yeah, rare, I know).

To make this happen is fairly easy. There are two methods: Easy with more assets; and Hard with coding. Let’s talk Easy.

URL Slug:

http://you.yourpages.com/email-preferences-new-person.html

Meta Robots: set this to noindex, nofollow as this page should not be found on its own.

Ingredients: add:

  • Email Preference Form – No Prefill
  • Preferences Page – Not You

Add link to Not You under the original Email Preference Form as shown.

not-you-page-example

If you really want to go the Hard way, you can do one of two things:

  1. Have the Not You link reset the page without the munchkin identifiers.
  2. Go to the second page without any munchkin.

I like Easy and it takes advantage of Marketo’s existing features. 

Email Preference Center Phase 3: Dynamic Snippets by Region/Language

If you are operating programs internationally, especially at a fairly large firm, you will eventually need to implement a regional or language friendly system. The process is fairly simple, however, I would urge you to test it carefully.

Option 1: one subscription page per Region.

The overhead increases because you have to manage the links in your email template footers.

Option 2: one subscription page per Region with Dynamic Snippets

This option takes partial advantage of dynamic content.

Option 3: one subscription page to rule them all.

This is much better, however, I urge you to test it a lot before going live. We’ll talk about this one in Phase 4.

With Option 2, you get to try your hand at Dynamic Snippets. This is a fairly underused feature of Marketo, which can be very powerful if thought out.

Ingredients:

  • Segmentation by Region or Language
  • Email Footer Snippet
  • Add to Emails

Step 1: create a Snippet

Go to Design Studio > Snippets

Step 2: create the dynamic content for the snippet.

dynamic-snippet-email-footer

I recommended using one Segmentation per asset to avoid confusion.

Once this Snippet is ready, test it on an Email that uses a Template with a Footer as editable. The results should flow through automatically in preview or a Live Test.

Email Preference Center Phase 4: Dynamic Languages on One Page

Of course, the holy grail is Option 4: just using one page for everything. In this situation, we will add new ingredients and modify the original Email Preference Page to be dynamic.

I will go through most of the steps, but be sure to read the docs on setting up Dynamic Content and Segmentations in order to follow along. Please remember that your Segmentation Segment order and smart list criteria will determine which Language is visible to the lead.

New Ingredients:

  • One Form for each Language
  • Modify the original Email Preference Page to use Dynamic on the Form and any other text.

**The Not You Page will still be the Default Form because new leads won’t have a Segment yet. Remember to set the Default to English or the major language of your audience.

full-email-center-program

Step 1: Create new Forms for Each Language

Here is an example in Japanese I made using Google Translate.

japanese-email-center-form-example

Step 3: Test the Forms in a Clone Page

If you already have a live Preference Center, I highly recommend that you clone the original Preference Page and Confirmation Page to test these Forms before going live.

Step 4: Set the Form in the Email Preference Page to Dynamic

email-center-page-dynamic-1

email-center-dynamic-page-2

Step 5: Set the other page content to Dynamic

Step 6: Make the Confirmation Page Text Dynamic

Look how cool this is! Is it all clicking now for you?

Step 7: Update the Unsubscribe All Campaign

You will have to add all the Forms to the Trigger. Feel free to test it.

Wow, after all that work, you now have a fully functioning, international web page. What more could you need? Some options to consider for the future:

  • Double Opt In – this is required for GDPR. It’s a good best practice and  ensures email validity and engagement. All you need to do is add a flow or two to send out a confirmation email and link whenever someone subscribes. They click on the link and your second flow handles the final steps.
  • Confirmation Email – please avoid this unless it is for Double Opt In. If I unsubscribe, I don’t want a final email. Use the Confirmation page for this.
  • Leave me alone for a while. This option was first made famous by Marketo years ago. In this system, you ask people if they want to suspend emails for 30 days or more. The challenge is in setting up the workflows and lists to properly suspend someone for that period. Remember, the simpler methods work best.
  • List Setup – of course, you will want a set of smart lists and even static lists to manage people who are Opted In vs. Out by Subscription. You will also want to update any suppression lists.

Here’s a video of how this works:

Interested in having your own custom email preference center? Contact Etumos.

Real Time Sales and Marketing Tools

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“Social media are tools, Real time is a mindset.” – David Meerman Scott

Once the mindset is there, you still do need the tools. In this section, I will go over some of the tools to consider. For a very long list, go here. I have not used most of these tools, nor do I necessarily recommend them, and have not received any compensation for their mention. (I do have a free HubSpot CRM account). These are here as examples. Please do your research beyond this list and think about the tools you need after you have decided on your real time workflow. 

Free Tools or Freemium Tools

Most B2B SaaS services are not freemium, but the cost per month is low enough for many businesses to try. Freemium tends to work very well with the social tools themselves because they are on the B2C side as well, allowing a small firm to grow into the paid offering.

If you are a small firm like me, or prefer to test out options first, here are a few free options. Remember, “free” means “no cash needed,” not “no work or customization needed.”

  • Google Alerts and Google News
  • Hootsuite
  • LinkedIn
  • HubSpot CRM & Sidekick
  • Buffer
  • Embedding search URLs to various platforms.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the number one free tool for salespeople as well as for marketers. A good salesperson can use LinkedIn effectively without paying because it lets you find people up to 3 levels out, making it possible to glean enough detail to contact them directly. Marketers find LinkedIn effective because there are several third party tools for connecting (or scraping) LinkedIn details for sales prospectors. (I don’t think scraping is an effective, or ethical use of LinkedIn). Marketing ops finds that connecting LinkedIn to their MAP and CRM with the free API is the best use of time. In the New Rules of Sales and Service, Scott describes the training a salesperson should undergo to use LinkedIn well.

Eventually, Sales and Sales Operations will want to go further. It is possible to do this by paying LinkedIn for improved levels of access for your Sales team. Marketing, of course, can pay for PPC ads or engage carefully in Group Discussions. As with any forum, I advise you to be helpful and to share content that will be viewed as helpful. Too many people spam Groups and it is really, really obvious. I am probably guilty of this too even though I try to frame my content as a question (very effective) and not use the content to promote my paid services.

To add power to your LinkedIn, see options like Sales Navigator.

Hootsuite

This tool usually starts out in Marketing as the social media manager’s free tool, eventually becoming the marketing team’s paid team tool for monitoring across social media. I have used the paid service (and currently use the free service) and have found it very effective for scheduling, monitoring, and engaging across platforms. I have not used the reporting features or UberVU via Hootsuite. The Marketo Integration pulls in engagement conversations and creates new records from the Hoosuite Dashboard.

LeadSift

LeadSift is ideal for those attempting to buy social media ads or engage specific follower groups. I would be careful with this one in the twitter context simply because many brands have had automated messages appear ham-handed and too obviously automated.

Web Enablement Options

While HubSpot’s Sidekick and Hootsuite’s browser plugin come to mind, what other tools are there for marketers and salespeople to instantly research someone they find on the web?

  • Riffle – seems possible to do this, but they are a bit vague on what they offer over Hootsuite. Social Media Examiner explains the tool displays details of the top things the Twitter user does on Twitter.
  • Buffer or Buffer for Business which helps your team schedule posts and directly act from a web page, much like Hootsuite’s tool.

Nimble

Nimble is a social CRM service designed very similarly to HubSpot’s CRM. The conversation and timeline views are integrated with backend company data to reduce manual data entry. The platform includes a marketplace and appears to offer more social platforms built right into the monitoring portion of the tool.

Sprinklr

This is another social tool that is quickly becoming a platform by itself. In fact, their homepage has a grid explaining their feature set against solutions and functional needs. If anything, this may make it hard to decide how to use Sprinklr if other tools already exist. Expect more community integration with their acquisition of Get Satisfaction this year. They also have an integration with Marketo, among others.

ZenDesk

Part of operating a firm in real time is integrating your help and support systems with your CRM and Marketing. Your customer success and support teams should be able to monitor conversations in real time too, and connect those conversations back to customer records. There are many tools besides ZenDesk, yet it seems this is the one everyone talks about when they don’t mention Salesforce ServiceCloud. ZenDesk has built in listening and behavior tools alongside a robust ecosystem of social integrations.

Trendspottr

A few articles mentioned this tool. It seems aimed mostly at PR professionals and content marketers looking to stay on top of trends and sentiment.

Configure Price Quote Tools (CPQ)

CPQ is not often mentioned in the martech stack because it tends to be owned by sales operations and enablement. This is an important part of the real-time stack because rapidly generating proposals and stock arguments are important for a closer. If the CPQ system can pull in real-time information to prompt customization or even just drop in the latest adjustments from product marketing, that’s a big win. I find Sales teams are very concerned with speed and avoiding “administrative” tasks, including proposal generation. CPQ tends to be more effective at larger firms with clear, but complex pricing sheets and product options. In terms of real-time sales, be careful to add the human touch instead of sending along a standard proposal written by marketing only.

Tool options include

Salesforce Platform

Much has been written, and announced, about how Salesforce handles real time for each function at each stage of the funnel. The recent changes with Lightning should offer improvements to the real time aspects of Salesforce.

First, it is easy to add social media search links to any record page layout. There is the native functionality as well as the link tools, which can leverage LinkedIn and Google, or even Google News Alerts. If that’s not enough for you, then it is time to add more SFDC components.

Second, the evolution of Salsforce seems aimed to keep your entire funnel staff on one screen: Salesforce.com. While Marketo wants to be a marketer’s “third screen,” the vision of a single screen is far more compelling. The question is whether or not it can be done in a way that is actually adopted. It is rare for a complete suite to function well for everyone. Time will tell.

Here’s what SFDC offers us to help make real time a reality:

  • Salesforce1 enabled new mobile functions, customizations, and even a new view of Marketo Sales Insight. Now Sales can see more on the go and, hopefully, take action.
  • Radian6 & the Marketing Cloud. This embeds social listening and engagement for Sales and Marketing.
  • Marketing Cloud: covers everything from email to customers with the tools from ExactTarget and Pardot, although Pardot is still somewhat separate. The full service includes web personalization as well.
  • Sales Cloud provides new real time tools such as Engage, bringing together all the data a customer or lead might have and making it more actionable. I suspect the amount of work required to make this work for your sales team is pretty heavy.
  • Service Cloud claims to integrate cases, chat, and social. Ideally, each section of SFDC should allow the employee to respond in the original medium first, and if needed, invite the customer to a more private discussion.

Marketo Sales Insight and RTP

Marketo’s main offering typically includes Sales Insight, which is a plugin for the CRM. I have only worked with the SFDC version. MSI, as it is sometimes known, is an effective real time sales tool because it posts real time behaviors to the Lead record in SFDC. Marketo can be configured to trigger email or SFDC alerts to bring the salesperson back to the record. If Sales is using their mobile device, they can use Salesforce1 with MSI to see their latest Interesting Moments and response behaviors from their leads. MSI also works with SFDC to email leads with approved content and with Outlook or Gmail to record email interactions to SFDC and Marketo.

Marketo’s Real Time Personalization tools work a bit differently. RTP is designed for marketers to more effectively tailor their website to post offers or adjust messaging to the specific lead. Of course, this requires effective buyer personas and clean data to drive the system. Normally, I’d recommend a good data cleansing and appending automation for this one to show great results. RTP can go hand-in-hand with a retargeting program. See Bizible’s amazing work with this exact situation.

Even if you do not want to spring for Marketo’s real time add-ons, there are ways of using tokens and dynamic content to appear more real-time to leads. Users of Marketo Standard and up get dynamic content options in email and pages which, when built carefully, have the effect of real time personalization.

HubSpot CRM, Sidekick, and Marketing

For the past two years, HubSpot has been working to make their tools work more closely with Sales just as much as they are building real time principles into the platform. This is no surprise because David Meerman Scott is one of their advisers.

  • HubSpot Content Optimization System – this is their version of dynamic content and tokenization. Marketers use this with their buyer personas to quickly adjust messaging based on a lead’s details.
  • Marketing – along with COS, HubSpot displays social details for each lead and can pass this information along to Sales or Marketing. The contact view is in a timeline format with all marketing and lead engagement and behavior data in one view.
  • CRM and Sidekick – these two freemium services work hand-in-glove to deliver the conversation timeline, record lead behaviors, and alert the salesperson to opens, clicks, and other changes. I have been using these two for a few months and am increasingly happy with the CRM tool, although I tend to not care much about the Sidekick alerts. I suspect a Lead Development Rep (LDR/SDR) would very much want the alerting features for Gmail. Be careful though because open information is not to be confused with engagement or interest in your product.

For additional sources and reviews:

Account Based Marketing Tools

With ABM being the latest wave of discussion, it is worth mentioning that ABM can be considered real time as well. If your systems are designed to connect individuals to Accounts automatically, then Sales can see into major companies much more easily and take action when the Account reaches critical mass.

Bonus – Real Time Email

Recently I attended an event here in LA on the “future of email.” In the sales pitch, two vendors explained how they combined real time information at the time of open for email. The solution seemed targeted at B2C and ecommerce, yet there could be dozens of possibilities for B2B. Check out one option: LiveClicker. For those of you on the forums wondering how to make email more dynamic, this is one option. (And I have no idea how they do it!).

Vendor Ecosystems and Real Time Business

During my research, I began to see that to build a Real Time marketing and sales operations stack would mean a martech stack would resemble the multi-platform topology rather than a central platform. Social media tools integrate with MAPs, CRMs, and each other, leading to this multi-platform view. Several firms come to mind.

The Real Time Sales and Marketing Stack

As you consider vendors, remember what the constellation stack may look like:

Real Time Martech Stack Constellation

Have you constructed your martech stack to be a real time system? Why or why not? How did you do so? 

Disclosures: I received an advance copy of the New Rules of Sales & Service before it was released in 2014.

Real Time Business Reports

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David Meerman Scott mentions using such dashboards to monitor what is going on in the world that is relevant to your organization. In the image above, the “Real Time Dashboard” is just one component. Each team will need a separate dashboard because they work at different parts of the funnel. Salespeople are less interested in total RTs per hour than the Communications team. Dashboards may include a war-room like console for the Communications team and Social Manager.

Sales Dashboard – High Level

This higher-level dashboard can be used by a territory manager or SVP to look at the overall flow of real time data and monitor what is being said about the company.

Sales Dashboard – User Level

Most LDRs, SDRs, and Account Executives will have their own screen with customized feeds for their leads and clients. It is easy for Sales Operations to adjust the feed to focus only on the user’s territory or assigned records.

Marketing Dashboard

A Marketing Dashboard should display overall data points such as Sentiment, Key hashtags, Shares, and number of stories related to the firm. A user can drill down into each area and even go to the Real Time Console to look at stories. A CMO might use this to see if content sharing is enough and if people are engaging overall. The dashboard could display counts by Platform as well as if real time channels are receiving revenue attribution overall.

Real Time Communications Console

These are the tools used by the Communications team for engaging in and monitoring conversations related to the organization. It should allow a user to push data to the lead record and on to the right person to handle it.

Advanced teams could have versions dedicated to Communications, Leads, and Customers.

Customer Account Dashboard

Customer Marketing and engagement teams will use a dashboard to monitor their overall success. This should go beyond NPS and counts of onboardings. This dashboard should also show the number of customers engaged in conversation about the firm and their sentiment level. It should allow immediate action and routing of tasks to the right people. 

These dashboard may look different from business to business and from platform to platform. Do you have examples you can share? Let me know.

Disclosures: I received an advance copy of the New Rules of Sales & Service before it was released in 2014.

How to Insert Real Time Technology into Your Workflow

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“When you are building systems to scale your business, you have to build systems that you can put into the hands of ordinary mere mortals that will produce above-average results. You can’t count on having superstars.”  Lawrence Janesky, CEO of Basement Systems, Inc. (Real Time Sales & Service, Scott, 59).

As Mr. Janesky suggests, excellence is a habit formed by an excellent system to help sales consult with potential clients. When I was in Sales, I performed consultative selling, yet my tools – the system I had – was not designed for this sale. I built my own proposal system, forecast sheets, and deep product analyses. Most firms today could not hire a salesperson without these available from day one.

Notwithstanding the continuing work on Sales-Marketing Alignment and “they don’t use the tools they’re given” gripes, how could you build a workflow that propels any salesperson ahead of their peers at other firms?

In the last post, I wrote about the Real Time Tech Stack, and here is how I would view it in terms of the revenue generating workflow.

The Real Time Marketing Tech Stack

Marketing Real Time Workflow

Real-time information is most developed on the Marketing side of the system, or at least that’s what I see in my work.

The workflow in Marketing and with any agencies should lend itself toward agile sprints as well as on-call designers to quickly tweak existing ad images and copy. Your ad managers should be able to plug in new content to existing ad tools along with keywords and triggers very easily. 

Real time ads and websites can be tested rapidly and in real-time. Website tools, especially ones integrated with your MAP are making sites come alive for your buyer personas instead of asking the lead to click on their “solution area.” Adtech Demand-side platforms (DSPs) can make instant adjustments based on your guidelines and market conditions. Even if your volumes are not high enough to justify a DSP, a skilled operator can adjust ads very quickly. When ads are pointed to your MAP’s landing page and data collection system, top-of-the-funnel name acquisition becomes real-time.

Of course, such ads must be relevant to the audiences and be based on rapid content generation or repurposing. If your storytelling and values are prepared, your team will find it easy to insert the right piece of content into the right medium at the right time. With Marketing Automation, it is easy to clone a data collection system, modify the content, and deploy it, usually within 20 minutes or less. If you are running a complex nurturing system, adding fresh content is often very simple.

Sales Real Time Workflow

Earlier we saw how real time behavioral information and instant contact information is pushed into the CRM workflow. Social media connections are also part of the standard CRM setup now. A common complaint, however, is the data feed for what key prospects or accounts are up to are not always customizable. Work with your Sales Enablement/Ops team to customize this feed or alerting system. Each salesperson works a bit differently – some are always on their phones, some want emails, and others want a special app.

Each sales team – Lead Development Representatives (LDRs), Business Development Reps (BDRs), and Account Executives/Field Sales (AEs) – need different views because they are at different stages in the funnel (and buyer’s journey).

An LDR may be happy with contact information and the latest behavior, while the AE closer may want the complete dossier on need-solution ideas and call history. Prospectors need potential contact information while closers just want the direct dial. One of the critical steps is the initial sales contact by the LDR. It is easy to call too early, before the lead really wants to chat, and it is easy to be creepy about it. Please make sure your playbooks explain that this line is a bad move:

“Hi Josh, I saw you downloaded our recent whitepaper on social media compliance in finance, is there something I can help you with?”

I used to get this line (and hear it said by Sales) at a few jobs. This is one of the creepiest lines you can use and it really does not make me want to share my needs with you. Marketers know that certain content pieces are early, mid, and late stage. Your real-time workflow must be setup to not push early stage content behaviors to LDRs as MQLs. In other words, just because I downloaded some content, does not mean I am ready to speak with Sales. If my behaviors indicate I am likely to buy, then find better introductions.

Sales and social media is another area where both training and tools can help be effective real time processes. I personally recommend Hootsuite for smaller organizations. Make sure that you provide training on the tool and proper engagement on each platform. If you have a social media manager, this is his job to train everyone as well as find out the best way to begin. Find the most engaged salesperson and work with them to feed pre-built lines, approved tweets, and content to share. Perhaps it makes sense to have the social media manager push data to the CRM and alert the right sales steam when a lead comes in via Facebook. All of this depends on your business, the people you have today, and your industry’s regulations.

Consider helping certain salespeople get accounts like @company_bob if they do not want to confuse personal and professional accounts. This can be effective just to help the team monitor pre-built streams themselves so they can see how real time engagement works and why it matters.

Training People to Work in Real Time

Training people to work in Real Time is challenging from a management perspective because the desire to control is often stronger than the desire to let people go out and work the crowd. David Meerman Scott discusses this at length in his books, but here’s my take on how to train teams, having done this a few times.

First, make sure you hire people who have good principles and people skills. Training can start with Marketing with the social media manager tasked with organizing the “real time team” across functions.

Second, train people to tell your story and live it as much as an employee can. If your firm has a poor story, it won’t resonate internally or externally. If your staff cannot “live it” during the day, perhaps your entire culture is not living it. The point is if you have people who buy in to the “why” and can internalize this story well, they will be much more likely to do the right thing.

Third, train people to consider the implications of what they say out loud externally as an employee or in their personal lives. This can be done with

  • IBM style rules
  • Role play scenarios
  • Case studies
  • Guidelines on who can engage and when. My personal guidelines include never engaging trolls, never engage haters, and if I am unsure about the implications, I do not respond.

Each firm, team, and role will need different training and may even use different tools – think Social Media Managers vs. Salespeople and which screens each uses.

  • Marketing Team Training
    • Communications is the most important team to train well because they are monitoring and engaging daily as well as sharing content. The social media manager, who owns your accounts and overall tone, is likely located here. David Meerman Scott wrote an entire book on this. Use it.
    • Demand Gen/Field Marketing should work with the Communications or social media manager to integrate real time with the long-term aspects of demand generation such as adding real time content to nurturing flows, updating events, and running new content fast. In my view, this team should operationalize delivering the real time news to LDRs along with MQLs alerts. Some teams might have Sales Ops or Marketing Ops handle that part.
    • Customer Marketing should monitor and be attuned to customer changes and actual customer people. If a customer record is showing activity related to the product or in other areas you can help, make sure that news is given to their Customer Rep as well. Customer service should be able to communicate with the Customer and internal reps quickly and with the real-time information from the customer such as behaviors, posts to forums, and public complaints or comments.
  • Sales
    • Sales Development Rep (SDR) or “Lead Development Rep” (LDR) as Hootsuite more accurately calls them.

Apart from the basic training, LDRs should be in the habit of monitoring their assigned leads or accounts for activity and real time news. If a lead is asking their network on Twitter and LinkedIn for help on which firm to investigate, make sure they call them up or ask an Evangelist to engage directly. It may be difficult for a LDR to engage this conversation without looking like a salivating lion, or overly self-serving. The training should help the LDR decide when to engage directly to help and when to have an Evangelist or Customer help.

  • Account Executive/Field Sales

Continually monitor profiles and streams for news about their accounts as well as specific leads. As with LDRs, be aware of real time requests for information and engage in the same medium or by direct contact. For example, if a lead at an Opportunity requests references for your product, the AE must first engage in the same medium:

“Hey @hotlead I’d be happy to connect you or visit http://product.com/testimonials”.

It might make sense to follow up with a call with them as well as the Evangelists.

  • Account Manager/Customer Manager

Continually monitor client information to ensure the new Customer is getting the right support from Customer Support and Onboarding. If they are hitting your forums or ecosystem blogs, then directly help in those mediums and try to bring the conversation back to you. If they are asking bout third party integrations, help them get to the right page as well as ask the third party to engage, if appropriate. 

The Three Ds of Real Time

Real time methods do need some level of discipline, decency, and delicacy – the three Ds of Real Time.

  • Discipline not to react without careful thought. Discipline to monitor the conversation always.
  • Decency to engage appropriately, in the same medium, at the right time.
  • Delicacy to engage or say something at the right time, or to say nothing at all.

There are hundreds of examples of brands and people engaging well (Oreos) or engaging badly. Be careful with scheduled tweets, auto follows, and rogue staff. And while Twitter is an infamous venue for these wins and fails, plenty goes on with Facebook and LinkedIn too.

Now that you are operating in real time, how can you report on the results?

Disclosures: I received an advance copy of the New Rules of Sales & Service before it was released in 2014.

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