The Nurturing Waterfall Framework

Lead Nurturing, or even Account Nurturing, has been a long established “must do” for B2B Marketers. Instead of a salesperson constantly sending useful content to top leads, the marketer can do this at a larger scale. Many firms say (or prove) that nurturing reduces time to Revenue and lowers Cost per Lead. It’s a great idea and a lot of us say we are doing it. Yet, when I work with clients or join a firm, I find no one is doing it very well at all.

What you probably do now

According to Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing (new | old), you should have separate nurtures and content by Buyer Persona and Stage of Purchase. The actual names of the stages (Early, Mid, Late vs. AIDA) are irrelevant. What I see many firms do is find any content they already have and put it in the “content grid” just like we were taught. And then that set of emails is placed somewhat randomly into each Stage Stream. Perhaps it looks like this a bit.

And then we decide to move leads to later streams when they fill out forms at least twice, or hit a lead score, etc. Most firms have only 3-6 pieces in each Stream and rarely update it. Within the past two months, several people asked about “restarting” the lead at the beginning of the Nurture if they exhausted without becoming an MQL. Does repeating content really help here?

But this is all a guess. If we have time, we start testing specific emails, but not the order of emails, let alone the type of content. Who has time for that?

Let me show you how to think about this in more depth.

Content and Storytelling

In my recent presentation, I spoke about Permission and understanding your customer more deeply than they know themselves. You should prepare all of that before proceeding.

Next, you should really consider how you plan to tell your story.

The common fallback for marketers is some variation of the AIDA Model – Attention, Interest, Decision, and Action. While this is a good first step, this is a very firm centric view of the world. It fits nicely into Marketo’s Engagement Streams and the Content Grid. But this still allows you, as a marketer, to get sloppy.

AIDA is a sloppy methodology because it doesn’t force you to consider the order of content or the story you tell people about the company, your solution, or place the lead at the center of their story. This is about you, and what you want.

The best way to get what you want, is to help others get what they want.

This is an old axiom and it holds true for whoever takes it to heart.

So how do you apply that to lead nurturing?

To go beyond AIDA, you must learn storytelling techniques. Think back to a campfire where you share stories after a long day. Which stories resonate with you? Who is the best storyteller and why did they draw you in? The best salespeople are storytellers about the problems and solutions their company solves. I learned Sales partially by listening to the stories of the experienced salespeople and then used those stories myself.

The most compelling story technique is the Hero’s Journey  first outlined by Joseph Campbell, and then used lucratively by George Lucas in Star Wars. Effective ads, or famous ads, tell a story in 15 to 60 seconds. When we do lead nurturing, we have to tell a story and we have to write chapters that help make the lead the center of their heroic epic to become better at X.

The content grid for a Hero’s Journey will be very different than the AIDA model or just a regular nurture. We could have an entire workshop on this. Instead, consider the following.

• Each email is an invitation to continue the story.
• Each email or whitepaper is a chapter.
• Each chapter can be across channels or offer types.
• Use cliffhangers.
• Who is the helper? SDRs? Salespeople? Are you sure they are the right mentors?
• When should the mentor step in?
• Who is the “enemy” or “blocker”?
• Does revenue attribution occur at the Story or the Chapter? Both?

Whether you work at a technology startup or a large firm, your ability to tell the firm’s story and become the lead’s mentor is crucial to building, retaining, and converting an audience.

The Lead Nurturing Waterfall

The lead nurturing waterfall is a concept that can (and should) be used for demand generation and account based marketing. This is an operational method that builds on the story and content you created. In the example below, we have several Tracks.

• Generic or Introduction: this is designed to ask the lead for more information to continue the story. As soon as we know what kind of person this is, we will start telling a version of our story that is more likely to resonate. The Generic Track is the first one you should attempt to build.
• Solution Track: this track could be the second one you build. It discusses the particular Problem-Solution. You may need more than one, depending on the products you have.
• Solution by Persona: If you can write more specifically for a particular Person, your story works better. This would look like “Marketing Operations Managers who need automated lead nurturing.”
• ABM Matrix – Solution-Persona-Industry-Account: this track would be a very specific story that would potentially include firm specific references, such as becoming a “Marketing Operations Hero at an multinational aerospace firm like Boeing.”

Remember that each Track has a “Goal.”

Your goals and story will be different, think about this.

Entry Conditions

Each Nurture should have a set of conditions for hearing the Story. Who and When. Ideally, you already know because you wrote specific stories for each group. A Generic track might look like:

• Anyone who has an Email Address, Unsubscribed=F, is missing Title and Role, and isn’t in another nurture.

Goals

What is a goal? Never create a Nurture without a goal because to do so means you have already failed. A goal could be:

• Obtain Title and Country.
• Fill out Contact Us Form
• Make it to MQL
• Make it to SQL.

This is also known as a “good exit.”

Marketo Users: create a new Program Channel for Engagements with these statuses to match Goal and Exit. You will also add Leads to a Static List and an Empty Stream at Goal and above.

Exit Conditions

In the table above, there are at least four other Exit types. These are called “bad exits” because the lead did not reach our intended goal. Generally, exhausted leads are not bad exits. But leads who became invalid, unsubscribed, or did other “bad” things, will be excluded, paused, and counted.

Transitions Between Streams and Nurture Tracks

In Marketo, you can leverage Engagement Streams like railroad tracks. You can use the Transitions or Smart Campaigns to move leads between Tracks. Consider using them in particular ways:

• Accelerate the Story – move a lead to a faster Cadence.
• Decelerate the Story – slow it down for less engaged leads.
• Tell a different part of the Story – different buying stage, or entirely new Engagement Nurture.

Remember, keep these conditions simple when you start out. The more complex you make transitions, the more can go wrong. Just because you can, does not mean you should.

Cadence or Timing

The best timing is what your audience thinks it is. Unfortunately, it is hard to know this with a high level of confidence. Here are some suggestions:

• Best Guess: this is usually 2-4 times a month and decide when you think someone wants more, or less.
• Semi-Guess: use an email report to learn the best Time of Day and Best Day of Week for Clicks. If you have Marketo’s RCE, you can do this pretty well. The challenge is that this data is based on when you traditionally send, which is based on a Guess.
• Machine Learning: new tools are coming that can use your behavioral data and larger sets of data to make better predictions as to when a lead should receive your next chapter. [paper]

Metrics and Success

In the Definitive Guide, Marketo suggests monitoring before and after metrics like CPL and Time in Revenue Stage. That’s certainly helpful in proving ROI. But if you can’t do that well, then I do suggest using the counts from your Entry, Goal, and Exits to monitor the success of your story. For example, “of the 1,000 leads who entered, 5% reached Goal, and 8% exited badly, while 34% are currently exhausted.” More ambitious metrics would include Opportunities and Revenue attached back to the Story and to the Chapter.

If you are interested, here are the original slides: (Remember to subscribe for more posts like this)

Last time we reviewed Nine Techniques For Testing in Marketing Automation platforms. The examples were a bit skewed to Marketo, just like today’s post. Remember, these techniques can likely be applied to any platform. Here is the process and a walkthrough of a real-life Lead Routing example from my friends at Beachhead.io.

Step 1: Create a spreadsheet of every lead combination that matters. This is your Test Plan

For example, if you are routing leads based on US State values, you’ll need 52 test leads (50 states, and 1 null, 1 that doesn’t match your list). If you route based on Fills Out Form and list import, you’ll need 104 test leads (52 per location * 2 entry points in your routing). In our case, we had 104 examples to test.

The columns:

• The columns for your CSV will look a lot like this.
• An ID Number for each lead. This is just for your needs, do not upload this column!
• A name describing the example, here State_Territory_Status. Which gives us Lead_CA_w_NotSCR for a lead from California who did not fill an Sales Contact Request.
• Same procedure with the email address: team+7_CA_w_NotSCR@beachhead.io so with only the email address you’re able to judge the accuracy of the results. (Note that you can use “+” sign to create a new unique email that goes to the same box).
• Country does not influence our routing, but is a part of the location and may be important in global routing.
• State is the key element to route leads by territory. You can see the first to leads as example of edge cases we want to monitor to make sure our routing is flawless.
• And finally your expected Lead Assignment. In your CSV, add a column to define who you expect your lead to route to. This will make it easier to review later.

Remember that when using this list of Leads to import or test, only import the Columns you need. Never import ID!

Step 2: Warn and Review Other Teams

Before going any further, you should:

Review your CSV with stakeholders. Your VP of Sales probably doesn’t think in flow charts and is more comfortable reviewing a list of examples. This is to make sure that you have covered all of the possibilities. Your inside reps are probably more aware of data flow errors than the Sales VP.

When ready to test, notify the sales team these test leads will be coming. They can safely ignore the leads marked as Company=Test – IGNORE or Email Address= X. This helps prevent salespeople from deleting or moving leads before your test cases can be complete.

Step 3: Add the Brake

Add a filter to each of your routing campaigns to require a specific email address. For example, our filter would say “contains beachhead.io”. Then every lead that enters without a beachhead.io email address will ignore this campaign.

Step 4: Run the Tests

For each case and lead, conduct the necessary tests, which could include:

• Importing the Lead
• Filling out a form with the Lead’s information
• Creating the Lead in Marketo or CRM.
• Modifying the lead’s details after creation.

Step 5: Record each Test Case’s Results against the Expected Result.

For any cases that the Expected and Actual Result are different, you will need to investigate the causes. Use Lead Detail View and Lead Field History as aides. This sheet will be called the Test Script.

Step 6: Clean Up

Once the tests are complete, you can clean up, which may include:

• Removing the Brakes
• Deleting Test Records in either or both systems
• Switching on the new campaigns.
• Turning off older or conflicting campaigns

Step 7: Migration of Older Systems or Turning Things On

Once you’ve validated your new lead routing works as expected, here are the general steps to replace an old routing program with your new routing program:

• Plan the change for the weekend, if possible. Even with testing, things can go wrong, and you’ll be better able to handle updates if the volume of new leads is lower. This also makes sure you can fix massive errors before anyone notices on Monday.
• Set aside 2 hours of uninterrupted time to make the changes, just in case.
• Create reports for potential bugs. For example, if you have five sales reps and ten total Salesforce users, your smart list might be all new leads assigned to someone who isn’t a sales rep. If you require a 2-digit state value for leads to route, then create a report of new leads this week by state. These reports will make it easier to spot issues as the routing goes live.

The migration will start on a Friday afternoon or holiday:

1. Deactivate current campaigns.
2. Activate the new campaigns.
3. Run a few additional tests.
4. Remind people that changes occurred and to send possible errors with the Lead’s Email Address directly to you and not NOT modify anything yet. Otherwise, valuable information can be lost.
5. Monitor the lead flow regularly for at least a week.

Final Thoughts on Testing in Marketing Automation Platforms

These examples and techniques are among the best practices for testing workflows in Marketo and in any other marketing automation platform (MAP). While I do encourage you to try things out in the Sandbox or a testing area of your instance, be sure that you take the time to test and test rigorously the more complex the system and the more you have at stake.

The final “Engineering Test Method” is the gold standard in testing any complex process and I urge you to do this when you build out lead lifecycles or more complex systems. What often separates the best consultants or marketing ops managers is their willingness to go all the way to avoid live errors.

More Resources on Software Testing

However much marketers like to believe they are not engineers of a sort, they are. If you are getting into some complex martech systems, it’s worth knowing more about software testing techniques. (Secret aside – I nearly became a tester at Microsoft as a first job). You may not need all of these for your daily marketing ops role, but you may find these helpful when discussing major integrations with IT folks.

• What is Software Testing?
• The “Box” Testing Methods
• History of Testing and Techniques
• Are we building it right, or the right product?
• More testing techniques.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is becoming more important to martech implementations. UATs are often seen in larger projects and multi-region roll outs where marketers are less familiar with the tools and were not part of the actual build. As you grow your stack, this process should be a part of your testing and finalization process.

Bonus – Join me and dozens of other amazing marketing automation nerds at the Marketo Summit in Vegas. Use this coupon by March 14: Hill200

As you gain experience with Marketo, you will build increasingly complex flows to manage leads as well as to nurture them.

Marketo, in essence, is a rules engine. You decide the rules for your system and your audience. As with all computers, the rules you decide on are executed faithfully and without question. Thus, if your rules are not properly setup, they will go ahead anyway (if they are logically correct). For example, if you set your Smart List to ANY instead of AND, you will likely bring in many more leads than you intended, possibly ruining data or worse, sending out 100,000 emails to the wrong people.

Fortunately, there are ways to build workflows and test processes to avoid disasters. If you follow these principles and any other policies your firm has, you can reduce the error rate greatly.

Technique 1: Pay Attention

When to Use: all the time

Time Involved: 1 minute

Level: All

Paying attention seems like an obvious way to avoid mistakes. It is also prone to many human biases such as “Glossing over work you just did,” and “I’ve done this a thousand times before.” Be careful and follow a few of my rules when I operate alone.

• Carefully create the smart lists. It is easy to drag, drop, and dash only to see the batch campaign send to 10 times the number you intended. When you think you are done, stop and look at the AND vs. ANY rules as well as the Counts.
• Watch your Flows – I always check these three times. Remember a Flow step will run once for every lead that goes through.
• Watch for red squiggly lines in Flow Steps and Filters. Even if it looks right, it means Marketo did not like something.
• Watch the Schedule Count – does this count match what you thought? Did you subtract the blocked email count from the total? If something seems off, STOP.
• Qualification Rules – Every vs. Once vs. something else. One of the most frequent questions on the Nation are related to this feature.
• Scheduled Time – I always schedule a run for 10 minutes in the future because it is very easy to realize that the Email Subject Line is missing 9 minutes after you press Run.

Technique 2: Review Thrice

When to Use: always

Time Involved: 1 minute

Level: Any 

I use this technique in combination with Technique 1, cycling through the steps three times…or maybe I’m a little OCD about sending emails to thousands of people.

1. Smart List x 3
2. Flow x 3
3. Schedule x 3

Technique 3: Paired Campaign Managers

When to Use: always

Time Involved: 1 minute to 1 day

Level: Any

A technique the Marketo marketing team uses is paired campaign managers. One person builds the Program, while the other prepares the creative. Then they switch to review each other’s work.

If you have the staff, I highly recommend setting up this system as it helps to avoid the human ability to ignore errors and typos after working on something for 4 hours.

You can go further and setup an entire approval process, even with just 3 to 4 team members:

1. Build Program
2. Add Creative
3. Review Creative
4. Review Program
5. Test Program
6. Approve by Director
7. Launch

The one challenge with a full blown approval process is Marketo does not have an “approval system.” It may be possible for you to break out Roles according to the process above. For example:

• Approver: can access all Marketing Activities
• Program Builder: Marketing activities, but cannot send or approve emails or Pages.
• Creative: Design Studio, Build Emails or Pages only. No Approval rights.

Technique 4: One Email, Multiple Leads

When to Use: Any system

Time Involved: 1 minute

Level: Any

This trick works on any email platform, although I tend to only use it on Gmail. You can create as many individual Leads in Marketo as you want and have them all go to the same email box.

your.email@gmail.com

your.email+test1@gmail.com

Replace “test1” with anything you want and even leverage the spreadsheet drag and populate to add more. In fact, on my email list, several people use this technique to filter my emails to a specific box: josh+marketoguides@company.com.

Send an email and you will get all of them in the same inbox.

A similar trick can be used if you happen to be the main box on a Google Apps Account – just set all emails to go to the one box and you can make up any email address you want.

Technique 5: Reset the Test Lead

When to Use: Any system

Time Involved: 1 hour or more

Level: Intermediate or above

This technique can be used on its own or as part of other techniques. If you have a Trigger or Batch that is listening for a particular value, you can test it continually using the same Test Lead.

The Test Lead should have the following components:

• An internal email address or one you own.
• Marked somewhere as a Test – IGNORE.
• Fields values as you want them to be for the Test.
• Qualification Rules set to Every Time. (otherwise, the lead goes through once regardless of test changes).

Once ready, be sure to copy the email address to a Form or notepad so you can keep using it. Then, make the change of value using any of the following steps:

• Direct Edit
• Edit in CRM
• Fill Out Form
• Change Data Value in Flow Action

Once your test is done, adjust your flow (if needed) and keep testing. To re-set your Lead, just undo the Data Value Change you made using the Direct Edit or another flow action. 

Technique 6: One More Time…

When to Use: Basic Trigger workflows, Drip campaigns, Engagement Nurture, Lifecycle Testing, Lead Routing

Time Involved: 1 minute

Level: Any

This technique is just to modify the Schedule to use a Qualification Rule of Every Time. This way you can continually run the same set of Test leads.

Technique 7: The Brake

When to Use: Basic Trigger workflows, Drip campaigns, Engagement Nurture, Lifecycle Testing, Lead Routing

Time Involved: 1 hour to 2 days

Level: Any

This is by far the best technique and it is the most simple. At the end of your Smart List, add one of these two filters:

Member of Smart List IN “Internal Test”

Email Address CONTAINS “@yourcompany.com”

Or better yet, restrict the Email Address filter to use specific test leads or a special test domain like mine.

Email Address IS “3930303@yourdomain.com”…

The Brake prevents the Trigger or Smart List from activating any other Lead. It retains the rest of the system so you can easily remove the Brake when you are done. This way you can test the full functionality and triggers without emailing or affecting real leads.

Technique 8: Brake and Clone and Wait

When to Use: Wait Steps are involved with Basic Trigger workflows, Drip campaigns, Engagement Nurture, Lifecycle Testing, Lead Routing

Time Involved: 1 hour to 2 days

Level: Any

In this version, you use the Brake and add some tweaks:

• Clone the Program or System – instead of editing the entire system you built. You can then edit the Brakes and modify as needed without losing previous work. You may end up having to duplicate your work in the original Program, or just use this one as the final.
• Edit Wait Steps to 1 second or 1 minute – when you Clone, Brake, and Wait, you need to reduce all Wait Steps to 1 minute Any Time. Otherwise, you will Wait 2 days until Tuesday for the next email to go out. It can be a bit time consuming, which is why Cloning and Testing work better.

Technique 9: Software Style Testing Process

When to Use: Lifecycle Testing, Lead Routing, Very Complex systems

Time Involved: 1-5 days

Level: Advanced

This process involves setting up leads that meet various criteria to flow through your workflow. Each time you run each lead, you should have an Expected Result and an Actual Result. Once complete, you will have a clear list of potential flaws in the workflow and possible ways to resolve them.

Do not let “software” intimidate you. The test cases you setup will likely be a bit short of what a full Engineer in Test might do, but it’s close. Here are some terms you may come across:

• Edge Case: used by engineers to discuss unlikely scenarios that could happen, but may not be worth the effort to test or fix. Be very careful that edge case leads do not bring the system to a halt.
• Test Case: this is a planned test and lead that meets certain criteria we expect to happen. For example, the Lead is entered in Form X with State=CA and Country=Canada. What do we expect will happen? Test Cases may be called “Use cases” if created before the build.
• Test Plan: The combination of Test Cases and materials to run through the system with Expected Results vs. Actual Result.

Next week, we’ll go through a walkthrough of a real-life Lead Routing example from my friends at Beachhead.io.

Bonus – Join me and dozens of other amazing marketing automation nerds at the Marketo Summit in Vegas. Use this coupon by March 14: Hill200