As the marketing departments of B2B companies gain recognition and responsibility as a full partner to sales in creating revenue through demand generation, marketers should continue to hone their skills and knowledge. With that in mind, Marketo is introducing a series of podcasts with thought leaders in B2B marketing.

Produced under the Modern B2B Marketing umbrella, these podcasts will highlight different topics, some strategic, others tactical, but all with an eye toward helping B2B marketers improve the return on their marketing dollar.

The inaugural podcasts are now posted and include:

Buying and Using Marketing Automation Systems
Howard Sewell, President and founder of Connect Direct, discusses Buying and Using Marketing Automation Systems, including the near term and longer term ROI benefits companies should expect from marketing automation and the key features and capabilities that someone should have on their list.
Using Digital, Web 2.0 Tactics To Boost B2B Marketing Results
In this podcast Laura Ramos, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, discusses how Web 2.0 tactics like rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks help B2B marketers meet their top challenges.
Using White Papers to Generate and Nurture B2B Leads
In this podcast with Michael Stelzner, the author of Writing White Papers, discusses how different kinds of white papers can be used for different marketing purposes, from demand generation to nurturing, and how blogging fits into your white paper strategy.

And look for more topics in the upcoming weeks and months.

Marketo Modern B2B Marketing podcasts are available via:

   
Feedburner            iTunes

What are the expected response rates for online marketing campaigns? What are the best ways to reach your targeted audience? How do I increase the quality of my leads? These are the kinds of questions that we marketers are always asking ourselves. Or worse, our bosses are asking the questions and we're struggling for answers.

Marketo and the Modern B2B Marketing blog has a mission to help B2B marketers by encouraging the use of best practices in all aspects of marketing, including PPC, email marketing, and landing pages. And part of that mission is to help you determine the success of your programs, not only by the number of leads generated, but also by comparing them to the industry.

To that end, Marketo is honored to  team with industry-leading research firm MarketingSherpa to produce Best Practice webinars. Our first, Optimizing Email Marketing for B2B Lead Generation, was a huge success and is available on-demand.

The next webinar is scheduled for June 4 and is entitled "New Insights for Marketing Business Technology."  Designed for technology marketers, but filled with information for all of us, I encourage you to attend. Registration for this free webinar is now available.

Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa and I recently hosted a webinar all about helping marketers increase the results from their B2B email marketing campaigns.

This webinar is packed full of great tips, including:

1. Newsletter offers still work best for getting opt-ins (when you take Volume and Quality of opt-ins into account).  Free Trials / Downloads get the most opt-ins.
2. Newsletter subscribers are 22% more likely to enter the purchase cycle than other forms of opt-ins.
3. 64% of decision makers view email on mobile devices, so be sure to optimize for those devices.
4. Don't put multiple "Call to Action" links in an email or newsletter.  One Action got the best click through rate; two Actions are OK, but more than that and CTR goes down dramatically.
5. Using customer  behaviors to trigger emails dramatically increases relevance and response rates. According to Jupiter Research, compared to untargeted broadcast emails, using web activity data raises open rates by up to 50% and conversion rates more than 350%.

There are even more tips in the full webinar, which is now available on-demand (after a short registration).

Watch Now: B2B Email Marketing Webinar with MarketingSherpa.

Sponsored By: MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008. Get $100 off if you act now (offer expires May 1).

Google AdWords — Updated Display URL Policy

Starting April 1, Google is enforcing a new Display URL Policy. Not everyone knows about it, and those that do are wondering what it means.

Let's start with this paragraph directly from Google:

"Based on feedback from both our advertisers and users, and consistent with our efforts to present relevant results, we'll no longer allow certain exceptions to our display URL policy. These include, but aren't limited to, redirects and vanity URLs. In line with our existing policy, we'll continue to require that your ad's display URL matches its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). This policy will be strictly enforced for new ads, regardless of previous exceptions."

Google says that your existing ads will continue to work, but makes no promises for how long.

What this means:
I'll use Marketo as an example. The URLs for Marketo landing pages are on the "pages2" subdomain, as in:

pages2.marketo.com/landing-page.html

Our display URL is www.marketo.com, so we're compliant with the new Google policy.  But if that same landing page was at:

www.coollandingpages.com/marketo/landing-page.html

and our display URL is www.marketo.com, then that URL — and hence, that ad — will not be allowed under the new policy.

What you should do:
If your landing pages are hosted anywhere except your website (or subdomain of your website), or you use a landing page software that hosts your landing pages, you should create a subdomain (also called DNS Aliasing or Domain Mapping) for that hosting site. Marketo has created a fast and easy guide to Setting up DNS Aliasing for a Custom Subdomain on our Community Success forum.

The actual Google policy is available on the official "Inside AdWords" blog.

As part of our ongoing series about sales and marketing alignment, Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast and I recently chatted about why B2B marketers should care about lead scoring and how they can get started qualifying and prioritizing leads.

Download the full MP3: Sales is from Mars, Marketing is From Venus — Vol II  —  Lead Scoring.

Podcast Summary:

Lead scoring is the process of determining a prospect’s level of interest in your solution (engagement), as well as your interest in a prospect (demographics targeting). Lead scoring matters because fewer than 25% of web inquiries are sales ready. Since sales reps don't want to waste their time on leads that are not in an active buying cycle, passing these early stage inquiries to sales tends to hurt the relationship between sales and marketing.

Lead scoring matters because there will always be some leads that are truly "hot" so B2B marketers need a way to find the hot leads and pass them to sales before a competitor contacts them or they go cold. At the same time, the majority of inquiries require lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.

When used effectively, lead scoring means you will pass fewer, but higher quality, leads to sales. By not wasting sales time on low quality leads, reps can focus on just the high quality leads—meaning wins rates and sales productivity go up. In fact, as little as a 10% increase in lead quality can generate a 40% increase in sales productivity. In a world where the sales department costs 20 or 30% of total revenue, this kind of improvement means a dramatic impact on the bottom line.

When it comes to email marketing, B2B companies have unique needs that are not served by traditional email providers. The days of batch email marketing campaigns with low response rates are over. To convert raw inquiries into sales ready leads, modern marketers need 1:1 dialogue marketing capabilities.

These include drip campaigns with automated lead nurturing and the ability to trigger follow-up activities based on specific consumer behaviors such as whether the prospect opened a prior email or visited a specific webpage. By augmenting prospect profiles with targeted information like this, marketers can improve lead scoring and better measure prospect interest and engagement.

Live MarketingSherpa Webinar — Free — Register Now

Join me and Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa we discuss Optimizing B2B Email Marketing for Lead Generation. This free webinar will touch on:

• Moving from batch marketing to building relationships with dialogue marketing
• Open rate / click rate benchmarks for B2B email marketing
• Best time of day / day of week for B2B offers
• Impact of mobile devices on B2B email best practices
• Targeting emails for different types of buyers in different parts of the buying cycle

Date: Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Time: Time: 2:00pm Eastern/11:00am Pacific
Sign Up: Register Now

Fresh off the launch of Marketo Lead Management, Phil Fernandez, our president and CEO, was the subject of an interview with Andrew Gaffney of Demand Gen Report. In his presentation at Under The Radar last week, Phil iterated that Marketo aims to 're-invent marketing automation.' The Demand Gen Report article lets Phil expound on that statement, and make a few others, including these highlights:

• 'The founding team of Marketo all came out of Epiphany, where we believe we reinvented the BtoC marketing software category. The products that Epiphany released in the late 90’s were quite revolutionary in their time, and our mission is no less ambitious here. We want to reinvent marketing software for the BtoB marketer.'
• 'We believe we can have customers up and running their first campaigns within 48 hours of beginning to work with us. That is very short deployment time and it includes complete bi-directional incorporation with their Salesforce.com account, all up and running in a couple of days.'
• 'We are the first complete software in this space that lets marketers act responsively -- to build and deploy campaigns in minutes, not days or weeks.'

Read more from this Demand Gen Report article with Phil at
http://www.demandgenreport.com/demandviews.php?codearti=1115.

$300 billion dollars a year. That’s what the 3,000 largest B2B companies in the world spend annually on lead generation, resulting in billions of leads. Yet despite this massive expense, I have yet to find a sales executive who is happy with the number and quality of marketing generated leads.

Why the disconnect? The old model where marketing generates a lead and sends it over to sales doesn't work anymore. Mass marketing, big tradeshows, and buying lists don’t work in a world where buyers use the web, search, and social media to take control of their buying process. Companies today meet prospective customers earlier in the buying cycle, and those customers want to engage with sales later than ever. This dynamic complexity also makes it harder than ever for marketing to identify which programs really impact revenue and pipeline.

To close these gaps, B2B marketing professionals need better lead management capabilities, such as:

• Lead scoring: Qualify leads and improve sales effectiveness by passing only hot leads to sales
• Lead nurturing: Develop raw inquiries into sales-ready leads via relevant and personalized nurturing campaigns
• Lead tracking: Arm the sales team with detailed information about prospect interests and activities
• CRM integration: Track sales follow-up and recycle leads if necessary
• Marketing ROI Analytics: Learn which programs really impact the pipeline

Pain and Expense

These capabilities have been offered by marketing automation vendors for a few years now, but traditionally marketing software has been too complex, too hard to use, and not intuitive enough for most marketers. These solutions were designed for statisticians and programmers more than for marketers, and required help from IT and significant training.

Worse, marketing software has never been easy enough for marketers to buy. It’s been too expensive, and large technology investments don’t match the way marketing budgets work. Software as a Service (SaaS) alone is not a solution. Most of the on-demand players in the marketing automation space still use an expensive direct sales channel and require long implementations and significant IT support and training.

Seven Ways to Liberate Marketing

So, what are the key elements of a modern B2B marketing software solution? Although I work for a marketing software vendor, the following list comes from my years of experience working with technology enabled marketing solutions.

1. Intuitive interface: Most marketers didn’t start their careers as programmers or project managers. Complex tools with Visio-like user interfaces and pseudo-code programming environments may be powerful, but they’re hard to learn and end up requiring dedicated resources and/or significant professional services. Marketers need an intuitive system they can learn quickly – think of how many marketers know how to use PowerPoint.
2. Great design: Let’s face it – marketers are visual people, and how software looks and acts and feels matters. Just take a look at the iPhone.
3. No upfront costs: Marketing departments typically have significant monthly or quarterly program budgets, but large one time payments can be hard – especially if it isn’t planned for months in advance. The same marketer that can commit to a $25,000 agency contract (paid monthly) without batting an eye needs CxO approval to justify a technology investment of similar size.
4. Free trial: Seth Godin says that most businesses aren’t price sensitive; they are value and risk sensitive. They need to justify to the people they work with that they didn’t get ripped off, and they don’t want to have to apologize to their boss for buying the wrong thing. A trial is a great way to get comfortable that the solution really works and meets your needs. If a vendor can’t offer a free trial to serious prospects, it’s probably because their software takes too long to install or is too hard to learn without significant training.
5. On-demand: Software as a Service is a godsend to IT-starved marketing departments. It means you don’t have to buy any hardware or install anything, the system maintains itself, and new upgrades are delivered automatically.
6. Great support: A great solution is much more than just the software you get. To be successful, marketers need easy ways to get started, access to tips and best practices, and responsive customer support. Of course, success shouldn’t come with a price tag, so you shouldn’t have to pay extra for these services.
7. Powerful and complete: Sophisticated problems require sophisticated solutions, and B2B marketers shouldn’t have to compromise functionality to get great design, usability, and fast implementations.

In your experience, what else is required from a successful B2B marketing automation solution?

The relationship between Sales and Marketing at B2B companies is too often precarious and subject to change day by day.

The problem is that Marketing and Sales play by different sets of rules. Sales are quota and bottom-line driven, where success can be easily measured through the number of closed deals. In Marketing, nebulous terms like ‘impressions’ and ‘website traffic’ are too often used to benchmark results. All too often, Marketing thinks it is exceeding its lead generation goals while at the same Sales is wondering why they aren’t getting enough good leads.

However, even though it appears that Sales is from Mars and Marketing is from Venus, the two functions do have something in common that highlights the deep relationship that exists between them: the need and desire to drive revenue for their organization. So, sales and marketing executives need to find ways to get along and work together towards the common goal of driving revenue.

Buzz Marketing for Technology Podcast

Marketo’s CEO Phil Fernandez and I recently spoke with Paul Dunay of the very popular Buzz Marketing for Technology blog about the differences between Sales and Marketing, and how to bridge the gap.

Download the full MP3: Sales is from Mars, Marketing is From Venus — a CEO’s Perspective.

Note: This podcast is also posted to MarketingProfs DailyFix.

This is the first in an ongoing series of podcasts with Paul about sales and marketing alignment, so stay tuned for more!

17 Days to Marketo Launch

In the online version of Business Week, I just came across this article entitled 'Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs.' Since most of us build and/or deliver presentations, and everyone has sat through interminably dull slide shows where the presenter reads the deck, word for word, I think this is a great refresher article.

Granted, not everyone can present like Steve Jobs, since he has legions of fans who hang on almost every word. And insist on wearing black mock turtlenecks even though they're hopelessly 1995. But we can all take note of some of the suggestions from business communications coach Carmine Gallo, who wrote the article. A few of my favorites are:

• Create visual slides. Let the graphics and the presenter tell the story, not bullet points.
• Don't sweat the small stuff. The bigger the presentation, the greater the chance that something will go wrong. Keep moving and speak to the slide as if it's still there. You aren't reading the bullet points anyway, right?
• Make numbers meaningful. Put the numbers in context. Compare them to competitors, or to the GNP of small countries.

Other tips include rehearsing and selling the benefit, both of which should be part of your presentation best practices. 

So what does this have to do with lead management, lead nurturing and lead scoring?  Nothing, and everything. Presentations are 1) typically part of the B2B sales process, and 2) they are usually produced by marketing. They're a good lead nurturing deliverable, particularly as a webcast, where marketing can score leads on attendance, questions asked, etc.

So get a handle on your presentations. Set a tone, do some training. And turn your CEO into Steve Jobs.