The Marketing Automation Universe’s Center – Part III

The Marketing Automation Universe’s Center – Part III

This is a continuation of the activity at DemandCon in San Francisco this week.

Doug Sechrist (@dougsechrist) of Eloqua started the second day with a keynote – “Pulling the Right Levers to Drive Revenue.”  Growth is hard.  The S&P’s growth over the last few years has been choppy.  A lot of this can be alleviated by adopting the principles of “Revenue Performance Management.

Eloqua defines Revenue Performance Management as a systematic approach to identifying the drivers and impediments to a firm’s revenue, persistently measuring them, and then pulling the economic levers that will optimize top line growth.  Using real examples of customers like Polycom, Doug was able to narrated how lead flow rose 82%, resulting in increased revenues of 34%.

Another Eloqua customer, Erin Rampey, the Marketing Automation Manager of NetApp, described the transformation her company had to make to start to lay the foundation of growth her company has seen.  Their goals of integrating, innovating, and growing required much planning and cooper ation.  One of the more important points she related was the need for standardization for reporting at a global level and who has responsibility for what data.  Some positive results have been a 42% rejection rate of Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by Sales.  12% of all of their MQLs are attributed to nurturing programs, and this statistic is being used as a benchmark moving on.

Christine Crandell (@ChrisCrandell), the SVP of Marketing at Accept Corporation, went into very coherent detail about “Sales and Marketing Alignment.”   She emphasized that “reorganization” is not Sales and Marketing Alignment; while alignment may involve structural change, there is also a profound cultural change required for alignment.  Additionally, automation by itself is not Sales and Marketing Alignment.  You must change people in addition to changing processes.  Lastly, do not underestimate the depth of the emotional commitment and the tenacity it takes to change behavior for Marketing and Sales Alignment.

She described Six Archetypes of Sales and Marketing: for Sales, the Thinker, the Blamer and the Junkie; and for Marketing, the  Egoist, Strategist, and the Tactician.  Additionally she described three basic stages of alignment: Ambiguous, Collaborative, and Aligned.  Once you identify your archetypes and which stage your organization is in (usually the first two!), you can better manage process, because alignment actually means something that is company wide, not limited to just two departments.

One of the last speakers of the morning, Mike Bird of NetProspex, spoke about his company’s impressive achievement of over 21 million business contacts and what to look for in sourcing a contact vendor.  You should ask how are contacts acquired; how is contact information verified?  You need to know how their rate of database growth relates to your revenue growth goals.  How can you slice and date their data?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.