MTech14: Integration, Interruption: Why and How Marketers Should Command Control of Marketing Automation & CRM Technology - Jeff Russo

Editor's Notes

• #22: It’s pretty clear there’s plenty of data to go around in many organizations, but marketers and salespeople alike have a hard time leveraging it, in a lot of cases because there’s just so much of it. It’s understandably tough to look at what’s oftentimes hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of behavioral data that you are capturing in HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, whoever your vendor of choice may be - data like which pages a prospect has viewed on your website, which emails they’ve opened, which content offers they’ve maybe clicked on - and really make coherent sense out of all that data. It’s hard for us as marketers, it’s especially hard for salespeople who are more strapped for time and are oftentimes seeing all of this data wrestled into a CRM system that doesn’t do as good a job of displaying all of that data in a logical way. One solution to this kind of problem is to use marketing automation to reduce all of that data to some bite sized insights you can use to tailor your marketing communications, and that your sales team can digest quickly to tailor their conversations on the phone.
• #23: First example - most all marketing automation systems will capture the full page view history of a known lead or prospect, The trouble is, there’s oftentimes hundreds of page views and other data points in the mix. And while you can scroll through all that data, we as marketers aren’t typically in the business of doing that, and let’s be honest, our sales counterparts aren’t likely to devote a lot of time to something like that either. But that data is just too good to pass up. So a relatively easy solution that’s possible in pretty much every major automation platform is to set up some logic that uses a prospects’ page view history to make an educated guess about their specific needs or interests. If they’ve visited the product page for product X once, and product Y 5 times, use that to populate a “likely product interest” field. You can use this technique to sniff out a lot of important details. For example, if classifying your prospects by industry is important and that isn’t a detail you are capturing via form, start using a prospects’ page view history to deduce their industry where you can. That’s hugely useful information in tailoring your communication with a prospect. I might use this in subtle ways - for example, as a marketer, if I’m nurturing an earlier stage lead with thought leadership oriented content, being able to classify that prospect by industry when I haven’t necessarily yet asked for that detail, or knowing which of my products they’ve demonstrated an early interest in can allow me to do some subtle personalization. A secondary call to action in that content may offer up more information about that product specifically, or it may just be some subtle changes to the language I use to make it more specific to that prospect. For my sales team, they can start to personalize their conversations with that prospect in a similar way. They can go into a call with a better sense of what to expect.
• #24: Another example - using automation to advance a prospects’ funnel stage, lifecycle stage, whatever you use to classify where an individual lead is in your marketing and sales process. If there are certain pages on your website that are clear hints that a prospect is ready to talk to sales, use that information to trigger a stage change in your CRM. I’ll give you a quick example, at HubSpot, we classify any kind of content offer or download that is mostly product-centric as what we call an “MQL event” - a marketing qualified lead event. If a prospect downloads one of those pieces of content, they’ve demonstrated an interest in our product, so we advance their stage from lead to marketing qualified lead, at which point that lead ends up on the radar of a salesperson.
• #25: One more example of using this technique - level of sales engagement. This is more of an interesting field for marketing, as it takes a few different inputs and uses them to tell me as a marketer what the reality is of this leads’ contact with sales. I could wade through a lot of data to figure this out, but it’s easier and it’s a lot more useful for me and everyone on my marketing team when it’s a single line insight. How this works is pretty simple. If a salesperson has never logged a successful email or call, they are considered to be “never engaged”. If there’s been active engagement within the last 30 days, they are considered to be engaged. If there hasn’t been engagement in longer, they are said to be stalled. This is a simple example, and you’ll want to tweak the timing and the definitions to make sense for your organization, but it’s a useful morsel of data that impacts how our marketing team communicates with leads after they’ve been handed off to the sales team, and makes sure that those communications are in context.
• #26: A more simplistic technique that gets a lot of airtime is lead scoring. It’s a useful tactic, especially in scenarios where you have a large volume of leads and your sales team needs help prioritizing the leads they are going to call, leads coring can be very helpful. But thats really one small part of the equation. The most common feedback I hear from sales folks - and a lot of them give a similar response when asked of their opinion of lead scoring - is that it’s incredibly opaque. Marketing says I should follow up with this lead, but I want to know why. So lead scoring is definitely useful, but it’s much more useful when it comes along with a few summary points on a leads’ interests. So all in all, I’d implore you to look for new ways to use marketing automation to reduce all of the data you collect, your sales team collects, into something that’s a lot more digestable for both teams. It will help you get more out of the data you are collecting, and it’s a great way to better align with your sales team by giving them something that they’ll undoubtedly find useful. It may take them time to warm up to it, or admit it, but they will.
• #27: An important topic that I don't want to overlook is accuracy. And we saw a minute ago that in general, marketers are skeptical of the quality of their CRM data. And, clearly, whenever we are talking about making educated guesses about a prospects’ interests, accuracy becomes a question, because we aren’t likely going to be 100% right. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people don’t do it. But less than 100% accuracy is actually usually fine if you are mindful of this in how you use that insight. If I’m using a prospect’s likely product interest to tailor the nurturing emails they are receiving, it may only be a part of the message and not the overarching topic of the entire email. If I’m a sales rep and I’m going to initiate a conversation, I may be a bit more tactful in using that insight to tailor my message.
• #28: An easy way to control for this is to just include the confidence level right alongside any field data in your CRM system. If an insight is set by the system automatically, we denote right in the field that the property was auto-set. That gives a quick hint to anyone on our marketing team or anyone on our sales team whose going to use that insight that it was auto-set. As a marketer, when I’m building out email content for prospects who have demonstrated interest in a specific product, I may make it a little more subtle in my message for prospects who have had that field auto set versus prospects who have had that field set manually by a salesperson whose actually had a conversation with them. I may even seek confirmation of their actual product interest by offering up further calls to action about that particular product.
• #29: For certain pieces of data that your sales team collects or your marketing automation system collects that are particularly critical, you may want to capture the last date that piece of data was updated if your system doesn’t do this automatically. For example, I talked about “MQL event” a minute ago - a field we use at HubSpot to denote what that piece of content was that made an individual lead worthy of follow up by a salesperson. Because this is something our marketing team relies pretty heavily on to personalize nurturing, and because it’s often a field our sales team uses to decide how they’ll approach a first direct interaction with a lead, making sure it’s up to date is important. So we capture the date that field was set in a field that sits right alongside the MQL event.
• #30: A few minutes ago we saw that a lot of salespeople feel like they don’t have actionable data on their prospects. We talked about summing up a lot of the data in your marketing automation or CRM system, but it’s also important to think about when and how you surface that information to your sales team. When something important happens, something that warrants immediate follow up - maybe a highly active prospect hits a contact sales button, maybe an existing customer views a cancellation page on your website - when does it make sense to proactively notify the right person on your team to follow up?
• #31: Here’s a quick example of one such instance. Something we learned over the years at HubSpot is that a prospects’ first visit to our pricing page isn’t all that interesting. A lot of people visit our pricing page early in the decision making process just to get a ballpark understanding of what our product costs. But when some time has gone by, and a prospect who is already engaged with some of our product oriented content visits the pricing page for a second time, that warrants a proactive notification to the salesperson, because it’s a strong indication of intent to make a purchase. So, this is one of a few instances where we the marketing team will go out and proactively notify our sales team about an event, and in this case, we do it by email. We’ll send along some pertinent details so the rep can follow up quickly - the obvious stuff like name, company, email, phone - and some details about their most recent interactions. When were they last on our site? What was that original thing that first brought them to our website? It’s an easy way for us to tee up our sales team to have a positive interaction at exactly the right moment.
• #32: One more - Here’s a great example of a notification email letting a rep know that one of their active opportunities attended a marketing webinar. Probably something a rep would want to know about. The reason why I like this email is that it’s short and sweet, and it gives the rep a lot of context about the marketing event - in this case, the webinar - so that they can have an educated conversation with the prospect the next time they have a discussion. One thing to keep in mind - It’s important to be mindful of the signal to noise ratio here. If you send a lot of these, your sales team will quickly learn to tune them out. I always recommend setting yourself to receive these kind of alerts on behalf of a typical rep on your team before you roll it out more widely.
• #33: Let’s move on to another meaty topic that relates to automation & CRM - how you segment your database. I spend a lot of time talking to marketers about how they think about segmenting their databases, because it’s a tough nut to crack, and there isn’t necessarily always a clearly right or wrong way to be doing it. Effective segmentation also has the potential to solve one of the challenges we talked about earlier - that marketers and salespeople in a lot of cases don’t have an agreed upon set of stages or processes that everyone understands. And as a result, the left hand often feels like it doesn’t know what the right hand is up to, and vice versa.
• #34: Ideally, your segmentation strategy would touch every stage of the customer lifecycle, and take data from many different places into account - your marketing automation platform, your CRM system, support tools, and beyond. As a marketer, having a well documented segmentation strategy is also a great way to map out all of the metrics you track and all of the efforts you engage in. You’ll see what I mean by that in a minute.
• #35: But first, out of all the people I talk to about segmentation, they typically fall into one of three buckets. First, most marketers fit into the category of really just segmenting around marketing events a prospect has engaged in. They’ll have some segments and a nurturing flow running for the campaign they are currently executing, and maybe for a few of the conversion points they have on their website (whitepapers, maybe a demo request, typical things like that.) Those communications are relatively static, and don’t take much context about a contact into account, beyond the fact that they downloaded offer X, or attended webinar Y. This is a logical starting point, because it covers the critical bases of following up on a prospects’ recent interactions, which is important. But this approach to segmentation also leaves a lot on the table. In most cases, folks who are doing this kind of segmentation aren’t doing much to consider communication to the prospect as they move into the hands of the sales team, or what happens after they become customers. Marketers who fit into this category of basic segmentation They also usually don’t have a cohesive strategy for communicating with the other 80% of their database who haven’t recently converted.
• #36: A smaller chunk of marketers have evolved past this stage. They are doing that kind of event based segmentation that we saw above, but they are taking other important characteristics into account. For example, when a contact converts on an offer they have on their website, the corresponding communication takes other known factors about that contact into account. (Maybe the corresponding emails or other communications are tailored based on their industry, or their persona. They are probably tailored a bit based on the contacts’ stage in our funnel.) Beyond this, marketers who fall into this category are also usually running some targeted campaigns to market to the rest of the contacts in their funnel.
• #37: The height of effective segmentation is segmentation that considers the full lifecycle. It’s a mapped out set of stages that covers every single stage that your leads and customers move through. There are clear definitions for each stage, and metrics associated with each stage that are aligned with your larger company goals. Most importantly, every effort that you engage in as a marketer corresponds to one of these stages.
• #38: Here’s a great example of effective segmentation. This is a map of how we segment leads, users, and customers of Sidekick, our freemium sales product at HubSpot. Contacts essentially move left to right through the diagram over the course of the lifecycle. The chart covers the entire customer lifecycle, from the moment a contact is generated by the marketing team, through the sales process, and as contacts move into the care of our support team. At every stage of the lifecycle, there’s a metric and a goal that we are tracking towards. As a marketer, all of the campaigns I’m running, all of the nurturing flows I have in place, everything I’m doing relates to moving the needle on one of the metrics you see here. It’s a great framework for measurement and a great framework for organizing the efforts I’m engaging in.
• #39: I’ll give you another example of a marketer who happens to be a HubSpot customer who is doing a great job of segmentation, Jodie. Jodie has all of the leads in her database classified by persona, and by their lifecycle stage, and she uses these two pieces of information in conjunction with behavioral data - what a prospect has been up to most recently on her companies’ website - to tailor her nurturing campaigns.
• #40: Jodie has some logic set up in her CRM system that automatically advances an individual lead’s stage to “qualified” if they meet certain criteria. Maybe they have the right combination of factors like job title, company size, and lead score.
• #41: Here you see a few of the nurturing campaigns she has running. She’s actually got upwards of 50 running at any one point in time. And she didn’t get there overnight; but as she’s learned what works, as she’s gotten more sophisticated in how she segments her existing database and new prospects as they enter the funnel, she’s gotten a lot more granular in how she nurtures those leads. So moral of the story on segmentation - do your best to take the full picture into account. Make sure that your nurturing takes who a prospect is, where they are in the buying cycle, and what their most recent interactions with your brand have been.
• #42: This brings us to our next suggestion, which is to foster a common framework and a common language around the customer lifecycle. Once you’ve gotten your approach to segmentation documented in some way, even if it’s simple, share that! Share the map, and do some work to make it visible in your CRM system.
• #43: At HubSpot, we’ve got a field on every lead record in our marketing system and in our CRM system that shows what segment each lead currently fits in. Sales feels a lot less like they don’t know what marketing is up to, because they know and can see what the stages are that marketing owns, and there’s mutual agreement on the goals at each stage. Marketing feels like there is structure to the efforts the sales team is engaging in, and it’s easier for them to continue to help because there’s a common language for where each lead sits in the lifecycle and what the goal is for that lead. One note - don’t think of this as something that needs to (or even can) happen overnight. Your model for segmentation will always be evolving, and it’s going to take time for folks across your company to adopt them. My suggestion? Take your best crack at it, put the data in front of people, and hone it to the point where people at different levels of your organization find utility in it.
• #44: Now I want to touch on just a couple of suggestions that aren’t directly tied to the survey data we looked at a minute ago, but are still really useful suggestions, especially in light of some of the things we just talked about. One thing that I alluded to earlier that really pains me as a marketer, and I’m guilty of this to some extent - is just how email centric our thinking often is.
• #45: You’ve done all this work to take all of these inputs from all of these different places, to reduce them down to something that’s actionable, and get everyone on your team on the same page, right? That’s great. But what would be a shame would be if you as a marketer didn’t make full use of these insights. So, going a step beyond email, if you’ve got the capability to tailor landing pages & website content, those same stages that we talked about setting up a minute ago should be used to tailor that content as well. An easy way to start doing this is to just make sure that the calls to action a prospect sees on your website are aligned with the calls to action they are seeing in the email nurturing you are sending them. Now, you can go much, much further than this, but starting with calls to action and using the calls to action and the landing pages you are already using in your email campaigns is oftentimes low hanging fruit that really reinforces your message, and again, aligns what your leads and prospects see across all of the channels you use to communicate with them. Here’s an example of an organization doing a great job of personalization - here, you see the first page of their blog, which asks visitors to self-select what their role is. From this, they infer what type of content that person is likely interested in…
• #46: And they use that information to tailor the content a visitor sees on the front page of their blog. A bit more of an advanced tactic, but something that really doesn’t require a lot of data or many inputs to start doing, just requires some setup work.
• #47: The last idea I’ll leave you with is to take some simple steps to help your sales team keep CRM data on the prospects they are working up to date. We talked earlier about how much time an average sales rep spends just manually entering information into their CRM system every day. Aside from the fact that that’s a painful and thankless task for your poor sales reps, relying on them to keep every record continually up to date is for a lot of teams a losing proposition; it’s just not always going to happen.
• #48: Now this is a tough thing to solve outright, but here’s one simple thing you can do - Nudge your sales team to start automatically logging their emails. Almost every CRM system has a “BCC to CRM” email address that your reps can use to log their emails to the appropriate records in CRM. And there are a number of free tools out there that work with your rep’s inbox to BCC those messages automatically. We at HubSpot offer one such free tool, and there are many others out there that do the same thing. As a marketer, knowing that that logging is happening automatically gives me much much greater confidence in personalizing my communications. I know with a pretty high level of accuracy whether a lead is in constant communication with their rep, or if they are maybe trailing off and it makes sense for me to pick my cadence of messaging back up.
• #52: The HubSpot Blog - http://hubs.ly/y0hwh10 Marketing & Sales Software from HubSpot - http://hubs.ly/y0hwhX0