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How to Fix Data Disasters in Marketo

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This is a somewhat inadvertent follow up to this week’s Six Principles of Data Cleanliness.

I was working with a client and for some reason we decided to setup an “Unqualified Auto Delete” flow. At the time, it seemed like a good idea because they did not want to keep disqualified leads anymore. It looked something like this:

Member of Smart List IS "Unqualified"
Delete Lead, From CRM IS TRUE

Bonus points if you can tell me why this is bad before we continue. The campaign was set to run nightly, on a daily basis.

Here’s what it should look like (and I don’t recommend this most of the time):

Marketo Auto Delete Flow

In the meantime, I went in and built a lead lifecycle system, with the brilliant idea of an Auto Disqualify flow. This would take all of the early stage leads that they never wanted and just set Lead Status=Disqualified. Naturally, the Unqualified Auto Delete would handle the rest. How many leads would this affect? Not too many, right?

Wrong.

A bit of a logic error led to a whole ton of leads being pushed to Disqualified and into the waiting jaws of the Unqualified Auto Delete campaign.

<unmentionable words>

Except we were saved by a weird Marketo error and my own foresight. First, I had noticed the Auto Delete did not have a Wait Step. I set that for 30 days before I completed the lead lifecycle. Second, the Queue names had changed in SFDC, but somehow Marketo never updated them in the Change Owner step that predated the name change. So when the Lead was Disqualified, it was never moved from its current owner. (phew!)

But the Scores were changed and that was not as pretty. So now I had 4000 Leads waiting to be deleted from both systems, all without Scores, in the wrong Lifecycle Stage, and with the wrong Status.

How did I roll this back? These lessons will be important if you want to correct the inevitable data error.

Step 1: Who was affected?

This part was fairly easy. It turned out that the Auto Disqualifier was the culprit, so anyone who was a Member of Campaign IS “Auto Disqualifier” is our target. You can also look at Campaign Members at the top of each flow.

Turn that off immediately.

Step 2: Remove from Flow – Save the Leads!

Much like the liver, we better go save those leads from Auto Deletion. In this case, we probably only needed to turn off the Schedule Recurrence until we cleared up the mess. Just in case, however, I ran a Remove from Flow on all the Leads. This is a useful flow step that has been much neglected since the demise of the traffic cop.

remove-from-flow

It’s a good idea to turn off any flows that may affect these leads or other leads.

Step 3: Reset Data Values

I looked at the Lead Statuses and set everyone who was “Disqualified” to “Open”. It’s not easy to go back unless you had been tracking field history on Lead Status in SFDC. Most firms do run history on this field, so make sure you start to do this.

Then we have to move everyone back from Stage=Disqualifed to Stage = ??. In this case, the Auto Disqualifier was only set to listen for Engaged Leads. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the remaining leads were pushed to Engaged, the Auto Disqualifier did its work. So I just set everyone back to Engaged.

Step 4: Restore Scores with a List Import Overwrite

In Marketo, as you might know, it is really difficult to roll back a data change unless you happened to know precisely what occurred. Thus, Step 3 was easy because we knew all the Leads were Engaged or Disqualified. With Scores, however, we have no idea what it used to be.

Fortunately, another quirk of this system is that all the Score fields were being tracked by SFDC history. I was given a spreadsheet of Old and New Values and worked to get the sheet ready for an import. Once I had the fields:

Lead Score | Behavior Score | Email Address

I could proceed with an import. Marketo will match the records and overwrite the existing scores. Keep in mind that some scores will be above the MQL threshold, thus the Data Value Change will trigger the MQL stage. That is ok, but be prepared for hundreds of leads being pushed to Sales. Warn someone!

If you are field blocking one of the fields you are trying to overwrite on import, Marketo will let you know. Check Admin > Field Management and temporarily remove the restriction.

Step 5: Ask Why This Happened

By this step, I already knew. I had failed to do enough quality checking and testing due to time constraints on the project. Always give yourself enough time to include full testing on a system as complex as Lead Lifecycle (LLC).

Of course, correct any flows that you can.

Step 6: Switch it Back On

After the cleanup was done, we turned the corrected flows back on. The exception was the Auto Disqualifier. I did not trust it to do its job even though I fixed much of the logic. It was too risky.

Remember these key steps to correcting your data errors:

  1. Who is affected?
  2. Turn off campaigns and remove from flows
  3. Reset the data values
  4. Use a List Import to reset data values (optional)
  5. Ask why this happened
  6. Switch corrected flows back on
  7. Call Marketo Support (if you can’t figure it out).

And here are a few tips on setting up your system to help you repair errors:

  • Never automate deletion of leads without at least a 30 day wait step. (I don’t recommend this at all actually, you should do this as part of your Marketo housekeeping).
  • Turn on field history in Salesforce for key fields like Score, Lead Status, Lifecycle, etc.
  • Test all of your flows.
  • Make sure SFDC is backed up.

Have you had any mini disasters with Marketo? How did you solve them?

The Six Principles of Data Cleanliness for Marketing Automation

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This post expands on my post at RingLead.com: Six Marketing Automation Principles to Keep Your Data Clean.

Do Not DuplicateMany marketers who are new to marketing automation suddenly discover their success on the job is directly affected by databases that seem out of their control. CRMs have data that is imported by salespeople, interns, hand typed, etc. That one hot shot sales director you poached from your competitor? He brought his “personal” list over and uploaded 5,000 records with no Lead Source, few Emails, no unsubscribe, no lead assignments, and uploaded it all without permission.

Sound familiar?

Almost always this data is not imported correctly or with consistency. It is just there!

But you can take control. If you want your job to be successful with marketing automation, you must take control – and take responsibility – for the data from Sales. (and sometimes your CRM managers). You need not worry, you can do this and do it well with the principles of data cleanliness.

Principle One: Design the System to Avoid Human Error

Marketers I have worked with have a familiar refrain: “Sales, Leads, and Other People are always importing bad data into the CRM.” When I look at their CRM and Forms, the most common root cause of these errors is the design of the system. Simply design your workflows and access levels to encourage certain behaviors while blocking bad behaviors. This is the first principle because the others rely on system design.

How do you design the system to make behavior work for you? Let’s try a few common CRM tools at your finger tips.

Picklists

Picklists ensure that your field values are completely static and controlled by you. The user or lead gets a choice, but the spellings are always precise. Common fields to use these on are: Country, State, Lead Source, and Lead Status. For countries and States, I use the ISO Country List.

Read Only Fields

Some fields are meant for information to Sales or to Marketing. Thus, only a few people should ever be able to access the field. For example:

  • Comments History
  • Interesting Moments
  • SFDC Campaign Member
  • SFDC Campaign
  • Lead Source
  • Subscription management fields

Import access must be limited to certain people

Even within Marketo, you may want to restrict junior or inexperienced staff from importing lists. The most well intentioned user can create havoc by not following procedures. With a marketing automation platform (MAP), always import into the MAP, never into the CRM. Of course there could be exceptions, but only an administrator would really know when those should occur.

Role vs. Title

Another design principle is to use picklist fields and free text fields at different times. For example, Role is a picklist that you might put on a form early in the buying process. Later, or in a progressive form, the Title field would appear. The reason I like this two-part data collector is that Role is easy to just choose. Titles vary widely and are for most people’s vanity. Lead scoring and other routing based on free text fields has to take into account a lot of options. Why not avoid issues early on?

Principle Two: One Field for One Purpose

The field that comes to mind is Description (in SFDC) or “Notes”. This field was intended to be for either the Lead to fill out some detail or to provide a scratch space for Sales. Instead, it is often used to put in call notes and the history of the Lead.

Do NOT permit this to happen. Sales absolutely must use Tasks or Meetings to log calls, even voicemails or emails. These records are stamped with time and date and have appropriate fields to help track Sales’ interaction with the Lead. Tasks are also a great way to tell Sales what Marketing is up to.

Thus, a field like “Description” is best used as a temporary field for handling data that will be passed to a Task or a “Comments History Field” [see instructions].

Principle Three: Use Automation to Correct Data Values

The use of automation rules to correct common misspellings or missing data goes back to the 1960s and early principles of data quality when direct mail errors could result in thousands of dollars wasted. Today, data quality mistakes ruin reputations far faster than a misdirected mail piece. Email reputation, choice of language, and customer experience matter and they matter more because mistakes can go publicly viral in minutes. Save your firm’s reputation with automated data cleansing.

These data management flows are one of the first things I setup in Marketo. Most firms setup these flows to start.

  • Country Corrector (although you should have followed Principle 1 to not need this)
  • State Corrector or Mapper – often helpful if you have Country and Inferred State.
  • Count of Employees to Employee Range – again, Principle 1 and 2 say you shouldn’t need to do this, because you chose one option, but it’s possible you ignored me 🙂
  • Bad Lead Source to Good Lead Source
  • Email Invalid to Email is Good if the Email changed.

For example, this flow adjusts Employee Range based on Employee Number.

Old Employee Range Corrector

Principle Four: Prevent Duplicates at the Source

Your system can include tools from the Appexchange such as Dupeblocker or RingLead to stop a user from entering a duplicate at that very moment. If you get the settings right, this should discourage salespeople from just entering data without thinking.

Then you should run a deduping process over your entire CRM before you connect your marketing automation platform (MAP). You will thank me later. Most marketing automation firms offer a cleansing service (including Marketo), but you can ask other firms for help. If you have an SFDC Admin, they will know the tools and services to help you dedupe effectively. Usually this involves DemandTools, if your company can afford it.

Principle Five: Establish a Regular Cleaning Process

Remove DuplicatesThis cleaning process includes a monthly or quarterly review of the MAP+CRM. You will want to bring your team into a room, with laptops, and with pizza. Spend an entire Friday afternoon doing this and life will be better the rest of the time. Assign one person to each area at the start, and then go from there.

  • Duplicate count review: find out who is doing this and clean it up.
  • Asset Cleanup: turn off or archive old emails, landing pages, workflows, programs. Marketo does a great job of allowing archiving to retain data. Also, team members should delete tests and other items they no longer need.
  • Workflow Review: are the right ones working properly?
  • Empty Value Counts: review records that are still missing key data: Country, Employees, Annual Revenue, Industry, etc… whatever is crucial to determining customer fit, scoring, and MQL status.

Principle Six: Automate Data Appending

You will always have leads without key demographic data points. These leads could be interested, but if you do not know they are in your target audience, you will never pass them to Sales. Nor should you!

Instead, find an appropriate data appending service. There are two types:

  • Form Based Autofill with ReachForce, for example. These tools ask the Lead to confirm if they are at a specific firm. The Lead confirms and the system autofills geographic and firmographic data automatically in the background.
  • Backend Autofill: these services are similar to Hoover’s, DiscoverOrg, RingLead, and ZoomInfo. Their integration or service backfills missing firmographic data based on your rules. This happens in the background, but the Lead never sees this.

Often, firms use both front end and back end appending tools to cover as much of the data gap as possible. Whichever one you prefer will help you improve segmentation capabilities and reduce the number of unaddressable Leads.

Remember these principles as you clean your database:

  1. Design the System to Avoid Human Error
  2. One field is for One Purpose
  3. Automate Data Correction
  4. Prevent Duplicates at the Source
  5. Establish a Regular Cleaning Process
  6. Automate Data Appending

Here are a few resources you can use for preparing your database to be clean in and out:

(Disclosure: I sometimes write for RingLead). [Updated: Feb 15, 2018 – removed back url]

Image Credits: Whatleydude, Barbourians

Review of The New Rules of Sales and Service

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For those of us in the new world of inbound marketing, the idea of social selling is not new. In fact, several marketing automation and sales automation providers have bought or created systems to aid in real time conversations.

But have salespeople really caught on? Beyond the vendor anecdote or testimonial, can we really say salespeople have embraced social selling? I personally have yet to see this with most of my clients.

David Meerman Scott SpeakingDavid Meerman Scott suggests this revolution is not yet complete. On August 27, he released his latest book, The New Rules of Sales and Service. I suspect many of you have already read his bestseller, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, which is the basis for concepts like real time marketing. David offered me an advance copy of The New Rules of Sales and Service to review and I am excited to share with you some of his insights as well as how social selling can work with marketing automation.

The book is a great guide for salespeople, especially sales vice presidents, who want to understand this new world of social selling and service. David describes this new world with a series of compelling anecdotes, illustrating how real time sales and service work, and why it works. The principles work at large and small organizations, and David shows how with detailed stories and interviews from around the world.

The New Rules of Sales and ServiceSalespeople should view this as advice from a fellow salesman, not a marketer. David started out in Sales and moved into marketing only to go back into sales for himself. (This is a path I followed as well). The New Rules of Sales and Service is an important new Sales manual, akin to yesteryear’s Cold Calling Techniques That Really Work, How I Learned the Secrets of Success in Selling, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. The principles of interaction are much the same, but today the tools are different and the starting point is different.

If you read David’s blog often, you will be familiar with many of the ideas in the book. There are a few new stories here that highlight how real-time Sales and Marketing work. So the book may not be the best buy for you, but it is a great gift for your favorite salesperson, sales team, or business owner. The primary benefit for the reader is that the lessons of the past several years are packed into 248 pages instead of 10,000 articles scattered throughout the web.

“Just as online content is the primary driver for successful marketing and public relations, online content is quickly becoming a dominant driver for sales and service as well.” – David Meerman Scott (Scott, 12)

The book takes what the leaders of content marketing and marketing automation have been saying since 2006 and gears it toward how salespeople think and what they do. Since the book covers a range of sales stories, the guide should resonate with Sales, just as much as it can for marketers too. The best part is David provides clear instructions for how a salesperson can take advantage of these new opportunities to close deals.

Key lessons from The New Rules of Sales and Service include:

  • People (Consumers) control the Buying Process and while Marketing may know this already, Sales needs to know it too.
  • The Buying Process is the new normal – not the Sales Process, so stop selling and start helping. As David noted, when he is ready to buy, most sales people assume he knows nothing about the industry or product. I’ve experienced this too, even when buying marketing automation. At the B2B level, salespeople should help connect the Buyer with the Solution, providing confirmation of the narrative as well as additional details and customizations only a one-to-one conversation can make.
  • Authentic storytelling creates content that your audience will care about and connect with. Sales and service people should act and speak congruently with this narrative.
  • Big Data can help collate and analyze patterns in buying behavior that can help Sales adapt to needs and the Buyer.
  • Real time engagement is critical. Sales happen now. Buyers ask questions now. Failure to respond to my email or Contact request means that I go find your competitor. Real time Sales also means being “agile,” which is another way of saying, “Be at the right place, at the right time.” Of course, being agile requires finesse, lest the effort is misperceived.

“While marketing is the provision of content to many potential customers, sales and service are now about the provision of content to buyers one at a time based on their needs.” (Scott, 11)

Thus Sales is content on a one-to-one basis, personalized for each situation as Greg Alexander of Sales Benchmark Index put it. I would go beyond that to say salespeople bring the marketing narrative—the authentic story—to life, confirming to the Buyer the reality of the company story. Because people buy from people–people they like–the salesperson provides the detail that cannot come through in marketing copy or manuals. The salesperson also is responsible for guiding the Buyer to a Yes or No, and closing skills are still highly valuable, and useful.

David reminds us that Sales’ stories and actions must be congruent with the company narrative. He uses the example of a hotel asking him to re-use towels to save the environment, except the hotel has a giant atrium that costs a fortune to cool in the hot summer. Likewise, if your narrative is one of unparalleled luxury and you hire the classical smarmy used-car salesman, it is unlikely you will see many repeat buyers. Thus your narrative, culture, and people go hand in hand (see Zappos). Over the years, I have noticed that many of the best sales people are former Buyers or Users who are enthusiastic about the company, its narrative, and message. Such sales people find it easier to connect with Buyers because they “lived it” and “have been there before.” Remember that the next time you hire a sales team.

Marketing and sales content is about teaching others enough about what you do so they trust you and want to take action of some type, even if it is to do nothing. Buyers will remember you taught them something useful. Both Marketo and HubSpot taught me much about the new way of Marketing and I will remember that fondly whenever I use those tools or discuss the topic with others.

While the book is aimed at entrepreneurs and business owners, the savvy sales or service leader will read it too. This real-time mindset should always be from the top-down because staff often feel they need permission to embrace new methods. The stories come from a range of owners and managers, yet I was surprised that a number of anecdotes came from people in Marketing, and several stories appeared in earlier works like New Rules of Marketing and PR and Real Time Marketing and PR. From my work in marketing automation, it is true that Marketing often is responsible for delivering the new social or data tools to Sales. At the same time, having the Marketing perspective could mean Sales teams ignore the core message of this important book.

In the past few years, Marketing teams have been exposed to a torrent of content exhorting marketers to install systems that deliver real time, high detail data to Sales. The idea that Sales should watch social signals such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to find new prospects and engage early and often is not new. Service people have also been told to get on this bandwagon or risk angry customers taking to the public channels to air dirty laundry, causing permanent harm to precious brand reputations.

All of this is true. But it may take more than success stories to help salespeople move out of their old habits. While I love David’s work, I was disappointed that this book had similar weaknesses to other business books: a reliance on anecdotes with limited data sets. I would worry that limited data could weaken David’s point in front of some leaders who are used to counting Calls, Meetings, and Dollars.

David does share an interview with ADP’s Matt Petitjean where there was a comparison of social salespeople vs. a control group. The social salespeople “consistently outperformed the control group.” While I don’t expect a rigorous regression analysis of 2,000 firms, I thought there could have been more data and similar stories. It also would have been very interesting to hear from individual sales managers who are actively conducting social sales and compare their revenue results and experiences against their peers who are not. Perhaps a more data driven conversation with HubSpot’s Mark Roberge on social selling?

The final question David poses is “How long will it be before sales incentives change to move teams to be social?” For Service Teams, the incentive is to avoid very public complaints in social media. Sales should also pay attention to public venting because Buyers are looking at online reviews, complaint sites, and bloggers for advice before ever picking up a phone to contact the company.

“Sales managers are being held to old standards and processes so they don’t move to the new ways, same with SVPs who want to change, but got to where they are with the old ways…I’m sympathetic, because it’s difficult when companies are still measuring them using old-school metrics and holding them accountable to yesterday’s business process execution. I talk to a lot of them in the course of my business, and while many of them tell me they want to use social selling, it’s difficult to find the time because their company requires them to do countless other things that consume 100 percent of their capacity.”  – Greg Alexander, Sales Benchmark Index (Scott, 242)

What might those new metrics and incentives look like? I considered what might be possible and like SBI’s thought that compensation plans should map to the Buying Process.

Old Metrics New Metrics Notes
Cold Calls per Day Connections per Day Includes phone, social platforms, responding to inbound requests. Size of “Rolodex” or Network (suggested in book)
Call Time Meaningful conversationsGoing above and beyondTurning detractors into promoters. Challenge is in measuring this in Sales, not just Service.
Meetings per Month Opportunities advanced More concerned with concrete discussions, not intro calls.
Opportunities Created Proposals sent More concerned with concrete discussions, not intro calls.
Revenue vs. Quota Revenue vs. Quota Revenue is still #1

In a previous role, I used many of David’s suggestions on real time marketing and social selling to empower my sales colleagues. I took the following actions, which David still recommends:

  • Adapted IBM’s Social Media Guidelines.
  • Training sessions to explain tools and how to engage.
  • Added tools like Hootsuite and LinkedIn.
  • Helped Salespeople get on social, even if it was just to monitor conversations.
  • Created more content to share.
  • Monitored my market and audience for ideas and content to share.

Did all of this work? Did sales go up dramatically in 6 months and was that attributable to social selling? No, I can’t say that. Social selling is a big mindset and habit shift for most decent salespeople. At least one of the salesmen said he was seeing more and more success by using LinkedIn, for prospecting and for sharing. I started a conversation in an industry discussion group on LinkedIn that lasted an entire month and brought in several luminaries in my space. That was pretty cool, but I can’t say it led directly to a sale.

Companies can go further and setup social monitoring systems (Hootsuite, Radian6) and loop in customer evangelists to participate in public conversations. Marketo does this well by inviting key customers to respond to questions about marketing automation and Marketo. When I participate, I always keep in mind what is best for the person who asked, and invite them to a deeper conversation. Sometimes (but not often enough), salespeople from Marketo and other firms join the conversation too. From the reactions I have seen on Twitter, firms have to be careful not to sell into these conversations, but to offer help.

From my experience, I would absolutely continue to do social selling and service. Being out there in the crowd is hugely important today and will be in the future. For my business, I am always out there: writing posts, participating in LinkedIn Discussions, answering Marketo Community questions, etc. Does each post clearly lead to money? No! Immediate cash is not the point. By participating, sharing, and occasionally offering deeper help, I make a good living. People know who I am and know they can ask me a question publicly or privately and get a helpful answer. I love that. All of my business since 2012 has been from social selling and inbound marketing. I know this works. But it takes dedication and time to pay off. And you have to keep being a useful member of the community by helping people, not selling to them.

The New Rules of Sales and ServiceI am confident that The New Rules of Sales and Service will be assigned reading for major sales teams, university entrpreneurship courses, and corporate training. If you want to learn more, you will have to go and read it yourself.

Next week we’ll talk about how social selling and marketing operations work together.

P.S.: David put together this fantastic presentation about the ideas within the book

Tracking Video in Marketing Automation with Vidyard

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Over the past several years of content marketing, video has been a much touted format and yet the least understood by most B2B marketers. With the advent of marketing automation, the need for compelling content is greater than ever before. Video can help fill the need, but it is often viewed as expensive, time consuming, and hard to measure. Many marketers continue to use video for “branding” instead of for lead nurturing and information transfer. Often this is because video is not easy to tie back to results. In the Marketo Community, I have seen several video consumption questions pop up. The tracking is difficult until Vidyard’s solution.

Tyler Lessard CMO of VidyardI recently spoke with Vidyard’s CMO, Tyler Lessard about his firm and how Vidyard integrates with marketing automation (and Marketo) to provide clear statistics and attribution for video consumption.

Josh: How did you become involved with Vidyard?

Tyler: In late 2013, I met Michael Litt and Devon Galloway, Co-Founders of Vidyard, through a mutual acquaintance in the Venture Capital community. Michael and Devon are two of the most reputable entrepreneurs in my home town of Kitchener, Ontario, and I found this to be a great opportunity to learn more about the evolving technology landscape right there in my own backyard.

What started as an innocent conversation about the growing tech scene and the state of local entrepreneurship quickly turned into a fascinating discussion about marketing technology, the power of online video as a marketing and sales tool, and the evolving role of video marketing platform technology in the B2B market.

Being passionate about both marketing and technology, and having spent over 15 years in various marketing and business development roles within B2B markets, it didn’t take long to gain an appreciation for what Vidyard had built and where the company was going. I got so excited about the business model, the market landscape, and what Vidyard was developing that we quickly began discussing career opportunities. One thing led to another, and not long after I decided to join Vidyard as Chief Marketing Officer.

Josh: I suspect most marketing automation admins and all campaign managers agree video is becoming essential to pulling leads through the funnel. All would agree video is expensive to make. What do you recommend for cash strapped marketers who know they need video, but are not sure how to do it well and for a reasonable cost.

Vidyard - Video Tracking for MarketoTyler: Video is becoming a mainstream component of the content marketing mix, yet many organizations still treat it as a special, one-off content medium reserved for major campaigns or projects. It’s time to move past that and to start thinking like a media publishing company within your own marketing organization. Hire one or two great video producers and you’ll be amazed at the volume, and quality, of video content that you can create and push out. That’s not to that agencies aren’t important – but you can’t rely on them for all of your video production needs or you’ll be second guessing every product video, customer testimonial, and campaign video that you want to produce.

Here at Vidyard, for example, we have an in-house Creative Director who is a whiz behind the camera and proficient in post-production software. He films and produces all of the videos on our website, including some of my favorites like the animated “Tale of Two Marketers” and the hilarious Back to the Future spoof. All the scripts and graphics are developed by our content marketing team. We inject video into almost everything we do, and the resulting engagement levels by our online audiences are remarkable as a result. Allocate the budget for one or two people dedicated to video and it will be worth every penny!

Josh: You are pioneering the concept of scoring leads based on percentage of content consumed. I know you do this for video, but how might one apply it to white papers, web pages, and even events?

Tyler: One of the reasons we are so passionate about video is that it’s an ideal content medium for marketers – not only because audiences love it and you can tell compelling stories through it, but because it is a highly measurable content medium that can offer amazing insight into customer intent. Because video content is streamed from your server, you can track every second of consumption if you have the right video technology in place. By doing that, you can actually score leads based on the percentage of the video they actually watched, not just based on whether or not they hit “play.” This type of progressive lead scoring allows you to dynamically score leads based on actual consumption of the content, rather than binary transaction like “clicked on a link” or “downloaded a whitepaper.” This is important because a lead that actually watches 3 minutes of a product video is likely a much hotter prospect than someone that downloads a white paper and never reads it.

We do this here at Vidyard where we will often assign 5 points if someone starts a video, another 5 points if they make it past 50%, and another 10 points if they it past 90% of the video. That said, it is difficult to do consumption-based scoring on whitepapers and web pages because they are not streamed content types. There is no meaningful way to know how much of a web page someone actually read. And with whitepapers, there is no way to track engagement in a PDF unless you are using a third party technology that is presenting the document over the web in a proprietary format and tracking page clicks. Still, it’s hard to know if someone actually read the content, or if they simply skipped past numerous pages to the end.

Josh: Vidyard encourages scoring by percentage of content consumed as well as total content consumed per day. Would you really say that a lead who watches 2 hours of video this week indicates the lead is as highly qualified as one who requests a call back?

Tyler: Every organization is different in how they associate value to different actions taken by a prospect, but the most important thing is to be able to track the most relevant qualification data available and attribute points that best correlate to intent-to-purchase.

I would definitely argue that a lead that watches 2 hours of video in a week is more qualified than one that visits several web pages and downloads two whitepapers, yet most marketers don’t score video views today and thus the lead that watched a lot of video will walk away unnoticed while the other will likely surface as a marketing qualified lead for immediate follow up. A prospect that requests a call back is certainly well qualified, as is one that consumes a great deal of video content. Marketers need to be smart in what data they track and how they assign points to ensure that each of these leads get flagged for follow up at the appropriate time. It’s also worth noting that not all pieces of content, nor all videos, are created equal. We typically assign more points to views of videos that are further down the sales funnel. For example, we may only assign 10 points to a lead that watches the entire brand awareness video, while we will assign 30 or more points to a lead that watches more than 5 minutes of product demonstration videos.

Josh: Marketing automation managers often struggle with measuring video content. A common question on the Marketo Community is “How do I score based on length of view time?” Would you tell us more about how Vidyard helps you do this without being a programmer?

Tyler: This is one of the core functions that Vidyard is built for. When you publish a video to your website via the Vidyard platform, it automatically tracks every second of every video view by visitors to your website. Through its integration with Marketo, it automatically identifies if the viewer is a known prospect in your Marketo system, and if they are, the Vidyard platform pushes the video viewing results right into the associated lead record in Marketo. It’s really as simple as that. The activity log of a Marketo lead record is now updated with the name of the video they watched, how many seconds they watched, and what percentage of the video that represents. Using the standard tools in Marketo, you can specify custom rules for assigning lead scores, for segmenting users based on their viewing history, or for initiating automated nurture activities in response to a viewing activity. It’s a very powerful solution, and it leverages the native tools in Marketo so the marketing operations team doesn’t need to learn new technology or do any custom programming.

Josh: Tyler, you place an emphasis on the CTA in the video. With YouTube and other platforms offering this rich experience, how can a marketer use a CTA effectively? Should a video CTA always say, “Call us now?” or can you weave together several videos and CTAs to let the lead create his experience that tells (sells) him your story?

Tyler: We always say, “Never let your video fade to black.” If a viewer has made it to the end of the video, they have demonstrated interest and intent, and now is the time to ask them to take the next step.

With Vidyard we make it easy to add a Call-to-Action (CTA) to the end of the video without having to edit the video itself. A CTA may tell the viewer to call a number, visit a URL, or to download a certain content asset. We also enable automated post-roll actions to jump to another place on the web page upon video completion or to auto-start another video that is next in the playlist. The right CTA depends entirely on what the intent of the video is, and what action you want the viewer to take next on the path to conversion.

Josh: Now that you’ve closed the loop on video and marketing automation, what other technologies and content formats do you see on the horizon?

Tyler: Many of our customers are now expanding usage of Vidyard beyond the walls of marketing and out into the Sales team. We offer a comprehensive integration with Salesforce.com, enabling individual sales reps to track the viewing habits of their prospects within CRM records and even send videos directly to clients and track if (or when) they actually view it. This can be a very powerful sales prospecting tool for both inside sales reps and account executives.

We’ve also seen customers use Vidyard for distributing internal sales training videos, with the ability to track which sales reps have actually viewed which training videos. This gives managers better insight into how engaged different reps are, and to correlate consumption of sales training to effectiveness in the field. Last, but not least, by tracking video viewing history inside the CRM’s leads and opportunities, we enable the sales and marketing teams to report on the actual ROI of each video asset. Through a simple Salesforce.com report, they can see which videos have influenced the most pipeline and closed revenue. Having this data handy can be critical to understanding what’s working, and to justify additional investments in video content production.

Josh: What do you do for fun?

Tyler: I love to watch superhero movies, go to the local water park, read Fancy Nancy books, and take long trips to Disney World. Sometimes, even with my kids!! Oh, and if I ever find time to golf again, we’ll add that to the list. But don’t hold your breath.

Josh:

Stay tuned in for a tutorial on how video content is tracked inside Marketo using Vidyard. How have you been tracking video? Let us know in the comments below!

Achieve Closed Loop Marketing with a Phone Call

By

I am fortunate to meet very interesting people who are often top marketers. Sharing those conversations with you is one of my goals here at Marketing Rockstar Guides. I find these discussions are a great way to better understand marketing and what’s possible now and in the future. Last fall, I interviewed several of the top marketing automation consultants in the Marketing Automation Consultants’ roundup. This year, we will focus more on the vendors in the specialist areas of Marketing Automation.

Eric HolmenRecently I sat down with top marketer Eric Holmen, President of Invoca. Invoca provides inbound call automation and intelligence directly to marketing.

Josh: Let’s talk about high intent mobile search and click to call – how do you support this? 

Eric:

The challenge in achieving closed loop marketing reports is that the phone is the big remaining gap between what happens online and the final action the prospect takes to reach a salesperson. If 60% or more of the first part of the buying cycle happens online, and many of us have structured our funnels around online engagement, what happens at that 60% mark when the prospect calls us on the phone?

Does all of that prospect data get connected to that phone call? Will the salesperson be able to make that connection? If it is a manual connection, will someone make the right one?

[Josh: I’ve been there, trying to connect 1-800 inbound calls by hand and it never worked.]

At Invoca, we support high intent search and click to call by connecting the same prospect across all devices.

InvocaAs that buyer clicks on mobile, they build a device profile that can be used for future marketing. Marketers can then send more mobile friendly emails. And by “mobile friendly,” I mean sized right, but also a call-to-action (CTA) that is targeted by device. If they are on a phone, the CTA could be “Call Us”. That CTA could include a dynamic, trackable phone number just for that lead. Desktop offers would include video or papers with form fill outs. Tablets could have more multimedia offers. And Apple recently announced their plans to make it easy to integrate click to call from an Apple Laptop or iPad with your iPhone.

To close the gap between the rich clickstream history collected and the prospect’s phone call, Invoca’s JavaScript generates dynamic and unique phone numbers posted on emails, sites, and ads so when that call is made, the system automatically knows who the lead is and precisely which ad or keyword caused the call. Because of this capability, Sales and Marketing know a lead’s history all the way through the first phone call.

Josh: What is your take on Remarketing and Retargeting, especially with mobile?

Eric: When B2B marketers use remarketing or retargeting on mobile, it is not about acquisition. The lead already knows who you are. Remarketing for B2B is about staying in front of the lead at all times, which influences search and phone calls. If you, as the marketer, can use remarketing messages and CTAs effectively, you will receive a phone call from that prospect.

Josh: And when that call comes in, Invoca will ensure a completely closed loop report with no manual intervention.

Eric: Precisely!

Josh: How could I use Invoca for a B2B firm, rather than a B2C firm?

Eric: Business-to-business sales have long buy cycles and most buyers start the process at their office desktop. Most marketers have developed online sales funnels centered on the desktop. And I am not talking about “responsive” templates; I mean that content and call-to-actions are designed for a desktop, even when the email is formatted to be mobile friendly.

But the emails marketers are sending to buyers are increasingly viewed on mobile device – when someone is traveling, commuting, at nights – all away from that desktop. How many people want to download a paper on their phone? Will they really read it.

Remember that we can track all the way through the phone call and it’s possible to target messaging by device. Do not cut and paste desktop marketing into mobile marketing. Responsive is hard and marketers always start there for some reason. But you should focus on the phone number at the top of the page on mobile and desktop.

Mobile is not about forms; mobile is about getting quick answers. Thus, content in mobile should be un-gated, it should be easy to read, and it should have a mobile friendly CTA.

It is important to remember that mobile is simpler, spontaneous, and may not be the first point of contact. Mobile is not the best place for certain content. Marketers spend more time worrying about responsive to make the desktop flexible when they should focus on creating mobile conversations.

I believe mobile spend is about staying “front-of-mind” and similar to what was done in the older days of interruption advertising, where repeated messages were key to success.

So my question for your readers is, “Have you made the B2B buying cycle mobile?”

Josh: How do sales people react to the additional insight from Invoca – and the recording of their calls?

Eric: They love it. Usually our first conversation is with the senior sales team at a company. Sales people want inbound calls instead of trying someone ten times who just filled out a form.

[Josh – it’s true, every salesperson wants the inbound call that happens to need something right now.]

As for recording, yes they are hesitant. Salespeople don’t want to be evaluated initially because everyone is a bit hesitant to be monitored and possibly receive feedback. Here’s what companies do with us:

A firm can setup Invoca Signal – it listens but does not give marketing a full recording. Instead, it checks the call for key phrases and then scores the conversation. This approach makes Sales feel better about the machine recording. Somewhat akin to Gmail ads – the machine is producing ads, and humans don’t see your email.

Another option with Invoca for Salesforce.com is to turn on complete call recording. Invoca records calls and attaches them to the opportunity in Salesforce. This is a great tool for ISRs, who are monitored for qualification and call quality. With 50 to 100 calls per day, they may write in Call Notes that miss important subtleties or key messages the Prospect had. The notes could be incomplete in some way.

When the Opportunity is passed to Field Sales for the meetings, the Account Executive can look at the Notes and listen to previous calls with the attached .WAV file. There is no need to go back to the ISR and ask them to remember one of thousands of calls.

Sales teams also warm up to recording of calls because it is a great tool for training and mentorship. The ISR team is often a first step on the way to Field Sales. More experienced Field Salespeople can offer friendly advice on phrasing and listening because they can hear what is really being said by ISRs. Thus, your teams will benefit more from recording and once salespeople realize this, they are on board.

Josh: What kind of firm is an ideal fit for taking advantage of Invoca’s capabilities? Do I have to have a large SDR team?

Eric:

Our ideal fits are firms involved in B2B, local, and mobile services.

Take B2B, this is a considered purchase. These are expensive services that are similar to annuity payments and require some amount of configuration. B2B firms do business by phone and in person, not e-commerce.

Then you have Local and Mobile Firms. These firms are typically restaurants or dry cleaners. For the consumer, the activity is spontaneous and involves searching for the firm and possibly calling that company. We find that big or small firms or chains can take advantage of mobile click to call. Of course, only a very large dry cleaning chain could take advantage of Invoca. Thus, our local-mobile customers are large firms with local offices, such as insurance agencies. Invoca will setup dynamic numbers and couple that with local search and ads to drive phone calls dire

And finally are firms that do not take phone calls. While few firms are entirely without a phone presence, they do exist. This group is not ideal for Invoca at all. For instance, e-commerce firms or companies selling commodities or easy to buy products rarely use the phone. Amazon has been a prime example with email only support, but even they are experimenting now with the phone.

Josh: I am a big believer in the phone and in having a phone number available. Think about the times you need help from a firm. You don’t say “I’ll contact them via email,” you say, “I’ll call them to resolve this.” Only you find out they have no listed phone number. And you get frustrated because it would be easier and faster to just speak to someone. Treat your prospects and clients the way you want to be treated in the same situation – keep your phone number. Allow people to reach your firm in anyway they want or can: email, phone, webform, website, case creation.

Eric:

Absolutely. Conversion rates go up on web pages with phone numbers because it engenders trust that there is a real human standing behind the product. Some marketers have taken numbers off their sites entirely in an effort to reduce the cost of calls, but also to force leads onto the trackable web.

Phone calls break the clickstream history – it’s hard to connect a call back to a clickstream, unless you have Invoca using unique phone numbers to connect the lead back to his clickstream.. 

Josh: Your career is rich in database marketing, marketing automation, and mobile. Could you tell us about that?

Eric:

I started in 2003 with a mobile firm called Smart Reply. At the time, only Eloqua and Vtrenz were around, so I chose Vtrenz, which was acquired by Silverpop in 2007. Because of that relationship, I became friendly with the CEO of Silverpop, Bill Nussey. After SmartReply was sold, I joined The Marketing Arm as CMO.

In 2011, Silverpop completed their new platform, combining Vtrenz and Silverpop’s email system. With that, Silverpop could now work for both B2B and B2C firms. Marketing automation for B2C became much more sophisticated, allowing for a personalized experience.

I liked Silverpop because it could send millions of personalized emails per day, which is critical for B2C firms as they achieve one-to-one marketing.

I was very proud of what we accomplished in my time at Silverpop.

As for Invoca, I had been looking at mobile and spoke with the CEO of Invoca, Jason Spievak, and was surprised because I realized I had ignored the power of tracking the inbound call channel. The possibilities with dynamic phone numbers based on individuals and their online activity is enormous. This “last mile” of mobile closes the loop on the final step in marketing – an area that had no visibility in the lead lifecycle.

Many B2B firms, and quite a few B2C firms, have made the mistake of trying to control the conversation with their audience. Sites no longer have phone numbers. But the phone is still ringing! People do find a way to call. Why? At some point you need to have a fluid, real time conversation. The only way to do that is with the phone.

I had a client who removed their phone numbers from public view. They still received 1500 calls per week – people went out of their way to find a number to call. They realized that people want to speak with them and those people are engaged and want to buy. So they put the phone back on the site.

Yes, the majority of your leads will still be on the web and will start there. But when they call you, how will you know what they have already done?

Josh: What do you do for fun?

Eric: I go sailing on my yacht, The Tequila.

Josh: Sounds very pleasant!

Many thanks to Eric Holmen for taking the time to share his thoughts on closing the loop with phone call tracking and his insights on B2B mobile ads.

Do you have a firm you would like me to interview? Let me know in the comments below.

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