Steve Woods is co-founder and chief technology officer for Eloqua, one of the leading providers of marketing automation technology to B2B and B2C organizations worldwide. As part of the launch of a new partnership between Heinz Marketing and Eloqua, Steve sat down with us to talk about where marketing automation began, why it’s so important now, and where it’s going.

As an Eloqua co-founder and author of Digital Body Language, you’ve seen the marketing automation promise & opportunity for several years. What drew you to this in the first place? What started it all for you?

We saw the general idea back in the first dot-com bubble at the end of 1999. There was a lot of excitement around e-commerce, and what the web was doing to the transaction that a buyer makes with a seller, but we saw an equal, if not greater opportunity to help with the information side of buying – especially in businesses where a bit more information needed to change hands before a buyer was ready to buy.

From there, the products we built helped organizations understand their buyers’ interests and intents – the concept of Digital Body Language – and then guide marketing or sales conversations based on that.

As we worked with the marketers who were early innovators in the space, they helped us form and shape the product to become what today is known as marketing automation; nurturing buyers based on their interests until they are ready to buy, and then passing the most qualified leads over to sales.

You have a 20-second elevator ride to explain marketing automation, and why it’s important, to a CMO that isn’t there yet. Go.

Today’s buyers have changed. They don’t come to your sales team to get educated on what your space is about, and what your products do, they get that information online. If you are not providing rich, meaningful content to those buyers, and then understanding which buyers are most interested and catering your conversation with them accordingly (including getting sales involved), you will lose those buyers to a competitor.

If you’re trying to guide the conversation’s content and timing, with each individual buyer, based on that buyer’s needs and interests, you can’t do that manually. You need a marketing automation platform like Eloqua to help you understand each buyer, and guide that unique conversation accordingly.

What do you see as the biggest barriers to adoption and successful implementation of marketing automation for most companies?

Shifting from a campaign-centered view of marketing, to a buyer-centered view is hard. It’s relatively simple to say “we’ll run campaigns on January 1, March 1, and June 1”, and then manage the creative and budgets to have that happen. It’s harder to say “these are the meaningful events in a buyer’s world, and how I will react to each buyer accordingly”. The marketer skill set is rapidly evolving to think in these terms, but it takes some time.

Most companies are used to making technology decisions through their IT department. Why is it so important that the CMO becomes a technology buyer today?

With Software as a Service (SaaS), the aspects of a technology purchase that used to require IT – like servers, networks, data centers, etc – are now not required. What is required, however, is thinking through the business changes that a new platform like marketing automation will require. New processes, new skills, new metrics are all possible. A CMO needs to own how their organization engages buyers, and in today’s world, that requires technology.

Much of the marketing automation conversation has centered around the sales process, but there’s at least an equal opportunity to optimize revenue and lifetime value after the purchase. Do you agree?

Absolutely. Purchasing one product is a highly meaningful event in the lifecycle of a customer. There are great opportunities to have them onboarded, brought to success, and potentially sold more products. We’ve seen a lot of successful organizations do exactly that to great success. Similarly, managing the renewal cycle for any customer engagement where there is an annual renewal or similar, is a large area of opportunity that many marketers are exploring successfully.

I’ve seen multiple statistics indicating that a high percentage of marketing automation users aren’t yet making use of the full lead nurturing features. How do you recommend they invest in the baby steps to get started and start seeing value quickly?

First, think of the world through the eyes of your buyers. How do they educate themselves, how do they find information, how do they discover new perspectives? For each of those, will you be discovered by them when they look? That will lead to great conversations around both content that is needed and the lifecycle of a buyer that can be managed.

Start simple, with the most obvious customer lifecycle event you can see in your business and build a communication path from that. From there, you can identify a few more customer lifecycle events and begin to evolve and experiment.

How will this technology evolve over the next few years?

Marketers can now understand who a buyer is, and what that buyer is interested in, based on their Digital Body Language. Now, however, we need to also understand who they trust. Understanding who a buyer is connected to, who they trust, and where they get their information from is critical to understanding their interest in making a purchase.

The connectivity between solutions is also very much of interest. In today’s world of modern SaaS software, it’s much easier to connect systems together than it ever has been. Today’s marketers must look for platforms that allow them to add in simple “Apps” to integrate webinar data, event data, social data, video data, etc. Without that, the marketers will be blind to a broader view of buyer behavior than they need to succeed.

Learn more about Heinz Marketing’s marketing automation services here.

Vendors are heavily focused on the land grab for market share and investors.   Unfortunately this is a traditional point in a cycle where customer focus often falls to the wayside.  The pace of innovation can slow down when investment funds are primarily directed towards sales and marketing efforts.

What drives this?  Investors primarily.

• Investors want maximum equity the least amount invested.  The more cash raised the more equity they want.
• Investors want their portfolio companies to increase market share as rapidly as possible.
• Investors want a short path to an equity event – IPO or acquisition. However with each new round, dilution occurs and that builds huge pressure for an exit.
• Investors push their portfolio companies hard to become cashflow-positive.

Through all this the customers are following The Light.  

The Peak of Inflated Expectations has been reached.

Gartner has a Hype Cycle model for emerging technologies.  Using their model I firmly believe the Marketing Automation category is moving from the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” to the “Trough of Disillusionment”.  This is normal and healthy.

Here is a 2010 Gartner Hype Lifecycle model that shows where various emerging technologies fit.  This model can easily be applied to marketing automation.

Here are observations we have seen first hand with B2B organizations who have subscribed to various marketing automation services.

• Key vendors are focusing more effort on their big enterprise customers – The Whales.
• In the PacNW we have seen many companies who buy the multi-year subscriptions but even after 2 or even 3 years they can’t effectively use their solution beyond rudimentary email blasts.
• Customer Success Managers at multiple MA vendors are overstretched.  (Since December I have spoken with 4 different companies each with $75M in revs and they are stuck and haven’t engaged with their CSMs for at least 6 months.)
• Customers are defecting from vendors because of self-inflicted wounds and poor vendor support.
• Service provider partners networks are often called in on 911 situations when the vendors can’t, won’t, or don’t help.

Four Must-Follow Steps to Align Marketing and Sales

In September 2010 my company, Egencia, Expedia’s B2B corporate travel service, decided to take the leap from an email management system to marketing automation. It was a change management process and a cultural mind shift as to how our teams reach out to prospective clients. While at times it was a bit painful, the end results have been amazing: It has taught marketers how to take accountability for the quality of leads they bring in the door, and it has also challenged sales people to assist in the marketing process by providing the right message to the right person at the right time.

Smart marketing is not new in concept, but it’s a new era where marketing and sales can’t point the proverbial finger at each other – we’re embracing that we’re all in this together for the betterment of the business. In my experience, there have been four “must follow” steps we’ve learned over the past year to help marketing and sales get on the same page.

1. Leadership alignment: You need to get your sales and marketing leaders onboard immediately. If sales can’t see the marketing vision and marketing can’t support the sales goals, nobody is going to be willing to shift behavior. I was lucky early this year to have new sales leaders in place that understood the world of marketing was changing. It was a chance to literally sit at the same table and agree on how we will support each other. My marketing managers were no longer interested in being “email monkeys” – batch and blasting the database with no real results. On the other side of the table, the sales teams were experts about their pipeline and knew where the different leads were in the buying cycle. It was time to elevate the entire organization.
2. Communicate the benefits: As with any change management process, you’re going to be met with resistance. New tools, new ways of doing things and new responsibilities are challenging when you’re trying to just do your “day job.” By communicating the benefits of marketing automation – transparency, automation, personalization and segmentation – both the marketing and sales leaders could keep their eyes on the ball.
3. Refine productivity: Once you’ve created new processes using new tools, constantly refine and audit what’s working. It’s not just a technical process to make sure that the assets are compelling and the functionality is correct, it’s a people process – ask the sales team if they’ve seen an uptick in activity. Ask the sales team if they have greater insights into the demographics and the digital body language of their leads – “the buy signs”. Lastly, ask that marketing manager whose job description was “sending email” if they feel more strategic and marketable in the ever-competitive pool of marketing talent.
4. Learn from your successes … and failures: One of my sales directors has said, “Fail with style, fail with grace, get up, and keep on going. Sales must work with their marketing partners to get the leads and campaigns that work.” If you acknowledge and course correct when something doesn’t work, there is greater trust amongst the sales and marketing organizations. And, if something works – celebrate it! We’ve learned that even the small wins can lead the teams to work better together. We’ve created a culture where marketing now has sales team members coming to us with new ideas on marketing programs. That reciprocation and willingness to work together makes everyone’s “day jobs” much more fun and rewarding.

 Read more about Egencia’s journey with marketing automation in this case study: http://www.marketo.com/library/egencia-case-study.pdf

Questions? Please feel free to contact me at jobrien@egencia.com, or on Twitter @Egencia_Jen.

About Jennifer O’Brien 

Jennifer O’Brien is the Director of North America Marketing for Egencia, the B2B arm of Expedia, Inc. She is responsible for setting the marketing strategy, coordinating cross-team collaboration, and managing all channels that lead the company’s demand generation efforts and customer retention strategies.

While at Egencia, Jennifer has spearheaded the launch of a marketing automation program to support the entire customer lifecycle. This effort has helped the marketing team contribute measurable results during the sales cycle. It has also improved communications and reach for the company’s customer relationship marketing.

Prior to Egencia, Jennifer was the Marketing Director for HomeTeam, an award-winning “cause” reality television show. She has also held several marketing and PR jobs with interactive marketing companies such as MindOH!, Luminant Worldwide and Free Range Media.

We would like to extend special congratulations to our friends at EMC Isilon for winning the

2011 Eloqua Markie for Event Nirvana!

For the complete listing of all 2011 Markie recipients, please visit the Eloqua blog here.

Driving the Business.

Revenue Marketing.

Decision Making Information.

These are the major takeaway messages for me.

This is the second Seattle Marketo event I have attended and as a service provider focused on marketing automation, I was impressed with Marketo’s focus on how a marketing team can directly impact revenue with technology, sales and marketing alignment, and business process.  Beyond the theory, real world examples and detailed analytics were provided.  This event isn’t for folks who are simply looking for a standard AMA chapter lovefest.  Bring your cranium. My interests lie more in how B2B marketers can have direct effect on revenue generation with best practices information on analytics.  Marketo delivers in this series.

Marketing automation vendors, solution providers and customers, bloggers and “experts” take note.  Marketo gets it.  (Full disclosure, Zephyr 47 is not a services or reseller partner with Marketo.)

I will be honest, the Marketo team is incredibly smart and even though elements of this program were repetitive to the spring tour stop, I felt as if I emerged from an MBA lecture on Revenue Performance Management.  In hindsight, the repetitive elements were very valuable because the revenue marketing message was reinforced with new high-value content.

Bottom line: I don’t care about platform features or cool infographics, tweets, or how vendors lecture press folks on op-ed pieces or the trendiest tradeshow exhibits.  When I see bottom-line, real-world information and analytics and customer case studies, I sit up in my chair.

Marketo’s new Chief Revenue Officer Paul Albright provided a detailed analysis on how marketers can rise above the traditional activity-based mode of marketing with data (and colorful) examples of best practices on how to focus people and money on the right effort.  Paul also showed concrete examples how marketers can find opportunities to align with sales, make course corrections, and use mathematical formulas to find what works and doesn’t when building a revenue pipeline.

After Paul Albright’s preso, a customer/sponsor panel discussed high level ideas on best practices.  Smart folks I respect, but I didn’t garner a lot from their discussion.

The customer presentation was excellent featuring Egencia, which is the corporate travel division for Expedia.  Both the director of marketing and sales director demonstrated the huge value and benefits of alignment.  I found incredible value how the described the alignment process with people across departments.  This is one of the most challenging exercises and Egencia pulled it off well.  Additionally, Egencia presented how they use technology to develop conversations and ultimately grow revenue with intelligent prospecting. Egencia is a model worth following for any B2B org.

The highlight for me was Marketo’s Maria Pergolino’s detailed and transparent presentation on how she approaches revenue marketing with her team.  A key takeaway was how Marketo looks at available content in campaigns and how leads and opportunities are influenced throughout a buying process.  If some content falls short in providing lift, make a course correction.  Test and retest.  The formulas and ratios were very detailed and sometimes complex in showing how the right mix of timing, segmentation, and content could dramatically impact revenue.  Especially important to me is how Maria showed marketers work through business analytics when asking for new headcount or additional budget.  More than ever, marketers need to demonstrate how investments will impact revenue and the formulas and approach presented by Marketo and Egencia were impressive.  If you get 10% more revenue, can you show the impact to the business?  If you can’t, you’re in trouble.

Regardless of where loyalties lie with marketing automation platforms or vendors, I highly recommend attending the Marketo Rockstar events.

Brian Hansford

Zephyr 47, LLC

Congratulations to Isilon! We are very happy that you are receiving this recognition!

For more information on the Eloqua Markie finalists in this category, you can visit here.

The continuing paradigm shift in the IT market shows steady movement towards a greater focus on the Channel — to increase sales, achieve increased market penetration and enhance brand recognition.  More and more, large vendors are announcing their intent to bolster their Channel efforts and direction, recognizing the substantial growth that can be attained.  The bottom-line is truly the bottom-line – how to increase revenues while reducing the overhead and direct costs of driving those increases.  Businesses today have many more options in their buying cycles – from research tools, analysis, social media, and an expansive reseller community.  This has changed the sales process dramatically, and technology vendors are racing to adapt.  Potential customers are expecting more competitive pricing, improved value, and consultative services to complement their process.

The Challenges – The channel model presents a number of challenges that must be identified and overcome in order to realize the full benefits and revenues.  These challenges are both internal to the vendor, external with the partner, and ultimately, reflected at the customer-level as well.  Some of the more recognizable challenges include identifying, on-boarding and training new partners, aligning messaging and solutions with partners, managing MDFs and Co-op funding, managing leads and follow up activity, and ongoing nurturing and cultivation.

The Solutions – There are some key steps that can be defined and implemented to help accomplish a successful channel marketing infrastructure and process.

1. Identify your optimal channel partner profile – evaluate alignment, corporate culture, growth, vertical markets, solution expertise, support, etc.
2. Assign dedicated resources to manage the relationship and marketing funding – nurture the relationship to a mutual partnership, leveraging knowledge, materials, and solutions.
3. Continually evaluate partner performance – Ensure partners maintain an agreed-upon performance level and contribution.
4. Develop Lead Nurturing Strategies – establish specific pilot programs to help the partner and VAR community develop a cost-effective framework for lead nurturing and cultivation.
5. Design, structure and implement a “Demand Center” framework – provide packaged campaigns, with centralized repositories of campaign information, preferred vendors, services, templates, lists, etc.
6. Host co-branded events – draw attendees based on the vendor’s brand recognition, and add further credibility to the channel partner.
7. Create and maintain ongoing feedback mechanisms and tracking – ensure continual two-way communications on all activity to create a teamed approach to close deals, through status reporting as well as automated tracking systems.

Addressing and implementing these 7 steps will help to build partner loyalty through support, knowledge, funding and programs, while ultimately increasing the revenue stream for both prime vendors and their channel partners.  The complete whitepaper can be downloaded from Winn Tech HERE.

Author Bio: Alan Feldman is Sales and Marketing Manager at Winn Technology Group, and has focused on the design, development and execution of direct marketing campaigns for many of the leading technology vendors in the industry over the past eight years.  Prior to Winn, he spent nearly 25 years as a Sr. Management Consultant in the technology, government, retail and education markets.

I invite you to join our LinkedIn channel marketing discussion group, WinnDemandCenter, to share your thoughts, contribute to critical discussion, and learn from others in the industry – all with the intent of improving processes and success in IT Channel Marketing.  Please click on the following link to join: http://linkd.in/e56Njb.

Winn Technology Group is a privately-held marketing solutions company headquartered in Palm Harbor, Florida.  Exclusively providing marketing support to the technology industry since 1990, Winn has partnered with leading IT firms to develop and execute B2B marketing solutions. For more information, visit www.winntech.net, or contact them at marketinginfo@winntech.net

Carlos mapped it very simply – the MAI wants to develop and support the Marketing Automation community and provide structured education that can help individuals learn and implement best practices.

I have joined the Marketing Automation Institute as an individual member and at Zephyr 47 we are reviewing becoming consulting sponsors in 2012.  I like the direction the MAI promotes by offering educational services and helping build an independent community where knowledge transfer and sharing is supported.

Marketing automation vendors in general provide a range of training services that are mainly product focused.  Some do a better job than others.  Other vendors simply can’t deliver training because they don’t have the resources or content to serve the need.  To be fair, training is not an easy service line to develop and manage for any company in any space.

The MAI plans to provide training that focuses on best practices in revenue marketing and demand generation.  This will help fill to gap between the technology knowledge and the best practices and techniques needed for successful 21st marketing.  Additionally they plan to offer certifications that I feel will be valuable both for the individual and the companies who employ them.

Vendor-neutral programs are hugely valuable. Based on the programs already offered and the talented people designing and delivering the mission of the MAI, I am very confident in recommending the services they offer.  Additionally I hope more MA vendors will come on board to support the MAI.  Marketing operations practitioners, technologists, and revenue marketers will benefit from these programs.  I look forward to being a part of the MAI community!

Brian Hansford

More and more B2B marketers are missing opportunities for impacting lead generation and ultimately playing for a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to budgeting.  The reason for this is the dependency on traditional or manual processes to gather, analyze and report on B2B marketing data.

As we move towards 2012, it’s essential for marketers to evolve their thinking and their choices when it involves marketing analytics. Without this evolution, the possibility for reporting on the impact marketing has on the business will diminish and impact future marketing forecasts and company sales revenues.

To understand why it’s time to move beyond traditional methods, consider these reasons to evolve your marketing analytics in 2012:

• Provide statistics to the c-suite – Obtaining sign-off from company executives on additional funding and additional campaigns is critical for any B2B marketing department. Although marketers can cite new technologies, social strategies and brainstorming ideas, without consistent and accurate data, they will meet a roadblock from the c-suite.To move forward and get that sign-off, prepare to evolve your marketing analytics for 2012 with a total solution that integrates with existing systems, gauges current and future trends and calculates the elements needed for a positive ROI.
• Identify trends and forecast- Forecasting what future B2B marketing campaigns will garner isn’t guess work – it’s a calculated process. Marketers need to identify emerging trends, analyze existing data and gauge customer experience to predict the effectiveness of future campaigns.If marketers are still relying on spreadsheets and homegrown databases to forecast marketing outcomes, they may fall short in their predictions. In 2012, more marketers will evolve their approach to data mining and bringing out relevant data needed to produce consistent and effective marketing forecasts.
• Identify inefficiencies and strengthen processes – Most marketing organizations may realize their processes have become flawed, but lack the data to pinpoint the flaws and strengthen them.  Marketers will want to identify these pain points, address them with revised or new processes and report back on the impact on results.Some resolutions to flawed processes may need a tighter alignment with sales to share ideas and strengthen processes or improve an ailing lead nurturing process with more engagement with prospective leads.

As you being to budget and plan for 2012, it is important to remember that to generate positive marketing ROI and increased funding opportunities, marketing analytics will play a larger role in the operations and strategies of B2B marketing teams.

Jon is VP Marketing and co-founder at Marketo. He explores everything from lead nurturing and social media to marketing ROI and revenue performance management in Marketo’s popular blog, Modern B2B Marketing, and was named a Top 10 CMO for companies under $250 million revenue by The CMO Institute. Jon graduated Magna Cum Laude in Physics from Harvard College and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Marketing departments are expected to do more with less.  Most importantly, these Revenue Marketing Teams are measured more on impact to revenue than anytime ever before.  (Or at least they are expected to measure impact to revenue.) The best people to staff these teams will possess unique skills and attributes that combine creativity and hard-nosed business sense.  Think of these unique teams and experts like Marketing SEALs or Marketing Special Forces.  Smart, tough, tightly knit small groups, focused on well orchestrated steps to accomplish a mission.  Empire builders who measure their success and egos by hiring tons of people won’t survive in the era of Revenue Marketing.

Here are some critical skills and attributes we recommend for recruiting the best marketing operations expert for your revenue marketing team.

Ability to Envision a Business Process

Marketing automation platforms enable the business process of demand generation and revenue marketing.  A marketing operations specialist must be able to design a process with the vision of end to end results.  Additionally, a marketing operations specialist must coordinate a process outside of the department with Sales and Support teams.  A marketing operations specialist must envision the steps a potential buyer will follow.

Implementation of a Business Process with Marketing Automation

Envisioning a business process is one thing.  Implementing the business process with a marketing automation platform is a special skillset that requires business savvy and technical acumen.  Sophisticated workflows require a powerful engine to support the steps, especially when lead nurturing and scoring programs are involved.  All are enabled and supported when properly implemented with a marketing automation platform.

Strategic Data Management, Analysis and Interpretation

One of the most critical roles a marketing operations specialist has is managing customer data in a marketing automation platform and in some cases, the CRM platform. (Politics aside, owning the customer data makes perfect sense.  Sales can still “own” the relationship.)  Data management is critical from the types of information captured, how much is captured, when in the buying process, where, and how.  This information helps build profiles and shapes the ultimate success of customer marketing efforts.  A marketing operations specialist can help build and shape this overall strategy.

Organizational Communications

Effective communication skills help set proper expectations on strategic initiatives and tactical execution. Additionally strong communications help report results and ensure executive-level support.

Hands-on Marketing Automation Platform and CRM Experience

Eventually CRM and Marketing Automation platforms will be available in a single platform.  Before this market convergence occurs a marketing operations specialist must understand the intricacies on how data and information flow between the marketing automation and CRM platforms. Basic levels of technical acumen are a must-have skillset.

Think Strategically and Execute Brilliantly

Strategy without execution is hallucination.  Marketing folks are great at talking strategy with great ideas and grand visions.  The ones who succeed will put the strategy into action with brilliant tactical execution.  A marketing operations specialist must see the big picture and use technology, content, and process to make a revenue marketing process work.  Avoid the people who merely want to attend high-visibility meetings and merely “own” the usage of a marketing automation platform.  Find the expert who has strategic brainpower and makes great things happen!

Content Curation

Without content, marketing automation platforms lack the fuel to drive campaign efforts.  A marketing operations pro may not be THE overall curator for content.  But they can work to mobilize an entire organization to support content creation for customer marketing efforts.

These are some of the most critical skills and attributes we see with the most successful marketing operations specialists and marketing automation experts.  Don’t be misled by the tag of “automation”.  There is a ton of heavy lifting involved with these special people who help drive revenue for an organization!

We’d like to know your thoughts on skills and attributes you find most valuable!