Richard Eldh at left and John Neeson at right, Co-Founders and Managing Directors at SiriusDecisions, present the award to Brian Goffman and James Raybould (center).

As you probably know, SiriusDecisions is the world’s leading source for B2B sales, marketing and product best practice research and data. Recipients of the ROI Awards are selected from organizations that SiriusDecisions has observed implementing winning strategies by applying innovative sales, marketing and product integration practices to maximize topline growth. CDW, Dell, Pegasystems, and Siemens PLM Software were also honored.

Brian Goffman (left) and James Raybould of LinkedIn present at SiriusDecisions Summit 2013.

Brian Goffman, Vice President, Enterprise Marketing, and James Raybould, Director of Insights, Global Sales Organization, accepted the Marketing Innovation award for methodologies and tools developed to enable data-driven and predictive decisionmaking. Nicolas Draca, Director, Demand Generation and Saad Hameed, Sr. Manager, Marketing Ops & Demand Generation at LinkedIn were also there to receive the award and were instrumental in leading the technology innovations highlighted at the show.

Read the press release

San Diego may always seem warm, but May 8-10 things will be downright hot when the SiriusDecisions Summit 2013 comes to town!

At Summit 2013, SiriusDecisions analysts and top sales and marketing leaders from Fortune 500 companies and major SMBs will come together to learn, network, and share how B2B organizations are solving critical issues that hinder predictable growth.

And of course, DemandGen will be there! See us at the vendor showcase, and if you’d like to meet with us, just contact us to schedule.

Get the Party Started at Cocktails and Conversions!

If you know us at DemandGen, you’ll know that we know how to work AND we know how to party! So join us for a fabulous get-together on San Diego’s largest rooftop to kick things off, on opening night of the Summit.

Join us at the exclusive rooftop Cocktails and Conversions Party!

• When: Wednesday, May 8th at 9:00 pm
• Where: Andaz, San Diego, Ivy Rooftop, 600 F Street, San Diego, CA 92101
• Co-sponsored by DemandGen and Demandbase

Space is limited, so RSVP Now!

DemandGen CEO David Lewis has recently joined the advisory board of LeadSpace, and DemandGen uses the technology. Leadspace is the first solution to help sales and marketing teams find new sales prospects and enrich and rank leads based not only on job titles, but also on what they do, and how closely the prospects resemble the people to whom they have already successfully sold.

Find out more in this recent press release or by visiting the Leadspace website.

Everyone seems to be heading to San Francisco this spring! It’s time for DemandCon, and you’ll find DemandGen there! Be sure to come by our booth and say hello. And if you’d like to meet with us at the show, drop us a note to schedule.

On Monday, April 15, our own David Lewis will moderate a really interesting panel discussion for the “Lunch & Learn” session, 12:15 -1:30 pm.

Marketing Performance Management Unveiled: How To Keep Score Of Your Success

Do you know why sales gets “the big bucks”? Because their impact on businesses can be directly measured and attributed from their efforts. Can marketing’s impact also be measured and attributed? Finally, the answer is yes!

Dave will lead a panel of seasoned marketing pros, who will share their secrets for creating effective marketing dashboards that communicate marketing’s contribution to the business. The panel includes:

• Greg Forrest, Sr. Manager, Marketing Operations & Demand Center, Concur
• Doug Sechrist, Vice President, Demand Marketing, Five9
• Nicolas Draca, Director, Demand Generation, LinkedIn

Session Highlights

• Which vital marketing metrics should serve as your key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Techniques for explaining your KPIs to fellow executives using an approach they’ll understand
• See how your peers are creating effective marketing impact dashboards
• How you’ll need to enhance your website, campaign tracking, marketing automation system and CRM systems to ensure for proper tracking of data for reporting
• What types of resources you’ll need to enable you to collect, analyze, and report on marketing’s impact

Don’t miss it!

The Marketo Summit is coming to DemandGen’s neighborhood!

We’re thrilled to be a Gold Sponsor of this year’s event in San Francisco, April 8-10, and invite you to take full advantage of all the fabulous opportunities to learn, network, explore, and grow:

• Register for the Summit (if you haven’t already)
• Peruse the info-packed agenda – it will be hard to choose from all the fascinating sessions
• Stop by our booth to say hello and pick up a free copy of David Lewis’s recently published book, Manufacturing Demand: The Principles of Successful Lead Management
• Don’t miss the session “Sales & Marketing Alignment – What Happens After the Honeymoon,” featuring David Lewis along with Christine Crandell (New Business Strategies) and Jeff Coveney (Application Security) – on Wednesday, April 10
• Meet with us to talk about your lead management strategies; we’ll have a meeting suite at the Hilton throughout the show. Contact us to schedule
  

See you there!

1. Listen to Your Customers

Initially, we developed thought leadership content that talk about best practices and methodology. As our firm grew and we amassed tons of success stories with clients, we shifted our entire content strategy to profile the award-winning work we have done using the voice of the customer. Since the #1 question we always get is “what are you doing with other clients” our entire content strategy has shifted to answering that at the top of the funnel, mid-funnel, and in life-cycle marketing programs.

2. Establish Buyer Personas

We have two key personas that are segmented in our database using dynamic filters. Once a potential buyer enters our demand funnel, they proceed into our inquiry nurture (based on persona) and then into our MQL nurture assuming their lead score progresses high enough. The nurtures have a minimum of 4 touches each and use a conversational 1:1 content model. Our typical MQL to close duration is 45 days so the nurtures are fairly accelerated to keep the conversation active during the education and selection process.

3. Define “Qualified”

Our MQLs could be called AQL (Automated Qualified Leads) because we use lead scoring to determine the difference between an Inquiry and MQL. We use a “velvet robe” model, meaning that it’s pretty hard to be an MQL. Our two-dimensional lead scoring model incorporates fit and interest so only companies that meet our minimum fit criteria and have a high interest based on digital body language get to be an MQL. At that point, a lead development rep is assigned and follows a strict cadence of touch points based on written SLA’s (service level agreement) between sales and marketing.

4. Track Effectiveness of the Entire Conversation

We use nurture performance gauges that we custom-developed to determine the effectiveness of our mid-funnel content strategy. Essentially, they count the members who enter the nurture, and then it shows us what percent of the members exit successfully (achieving the goal of the nurture) versus unsuccessfully. We have a target percentage as well as baseline and if the guage falls between or above, we know our content is effective. This way, we remove the subjectivity of evaluating each piece of content in insolation but rather measure the conversation (the nurture) in its entirety.

5. Segment Further with Narrative Personas

We started by developing narrative personas for each buyer persona. When I say that, I am also including a persona that we don’t sell to. Call that the DQ persona. Then we took the narrative personas and identified 4 database fields and pick-list values that determine when someone falls into each persona. Call that a profile. For example, if someone uses Marketo and Salesforce.com and their company is a particular size and industry, they are one persona/profile. If they use a different marketing automation system, they might fall into a different persona profile. Although we’ve systematically developed 6 primary personas and one DQ persona, we only use 3 unique profiles for feeding the content tracks because there wasn’t a need to be so segmented. The pain points, motivations, and needs could be aggregated into 3 base profiles from the 6 personas. We do have the 6 unique personas segmented in the database, but we only use 3 content profile tracks.

6. Create Valuable, Digestible Content

Our target market is modern marketing professionals and the content that really resonates best with them is personable, conversational, educational, and entertaining. We blend those dimensions into various content pieces so the content is engaging, memorable, but purposeful.

7. Enjoy Your Successes, and Share Them Internally

The piece of content I am most proud of is the book I wrote on lead management entitled “Manufacturing Demand” (available on Amazon.com). If you’re reading this blog post, you deserve a free digital copy of the book and you can get one at ManufacturingDemand.com/vip. It’s the very first book written on this important modern marketing discipline. It has become a tremendous tool for establishing us as thought leaders and was a great vehicle for combining case studies with best-practice methodology. Best of all, it’s become the “playbook” for my team and our clients. However, my mom stopped reading at chapter 3 she tells me.

8. Learn from the Successes of Others

The best piece of content I’ve ever seen created was by Redbull which was the lead-up and live streaming of Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner’s free jump from space. If “Redbull gives you wings,” no piece of content could have underscored there message of pushing yourself to the limits than this one.

So how have these 8 buckets worked for DemandGen?

“We believe our average sales cycle has been consistently shorter than most B2B industry averages because of our extensive use of lead scoring, lead nurturing, well-defined sales process, and engaging content,” says David. Take a lesson from the pros. In competitive industries, a constantly evolving strategy is the only way to stay on top of your game.

• Embracing the latest integrated digital strategies and technologies
• Advancing the industry through education — speaking, blogging, and teaching
• Driving game-changing results for their clients and organization

One of these experts is DemandGen’s own David Lewis, who is quoted in the article. (Ignore the fact that our company name is misspelled. . .even the best marketers make the occasional mistake, right?)

Check out the full article here.

Target Marketing Magazine presents an upcoming webinar, sponsored by Marketo and featuring DemandGen founder and CEO David Lewis!

“Optimizing Lead Generation and Management:
Top 5 Strategies to Turn More Leads into Customers”

February 6, 2013
2-3 pm ET/11 am -12 noon PT
Free

REGISTER NOW

Capturing leads is a key goal for many marketers, but what happens next can make or break your success as a marketer. How can you manage and nurture those leads to maximize conversions, engagement and ultimately sales?

Many marketers never optimize their lead generation and management efforts. This may be due to a lack of time or resources, but the reality is that taking time to automate and optimize these processes can dramatically improve marketing performance and your own productivity.

This educational webinar, taught by lead management expert David Lewis, DemandGen’s CEO and author of the book Manufacturing Demand, will show you how to:

• Fully automate and integrate the key principles of lead management
• Define your lead funnel to better align marketing and sales
• Apply principles of lead scoring to quickly identify the most qualified leads
• Implement triggered lead nurturing campaigns to automated personalized interactions with leads
• Measure success and business impact to prove the value of your programs

REGISTER NOW

Free E-book! All attendees will be able to download a free copy of David’s book, Manufacturing Demand, which expands on many of the concepts we’ll be discussing during the webinar!

You’ve probably already heard that Oracle has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Eloqua—but you may be wondering what this means for our industry.

At DemandGen, we believe this is great news for the field of marketing. We first got excited about the blending of CRM and MA when Salesforce purchased a large Eloqua license for its own marketing needs. That was significant because it told the business world that CRM was not the only tool to use for sales and marketing. Now, with this acquisition, one of the largest software companies in the world is paying nearly $1 billion to add marketing automation to its suite of offerings–validating that marketing automation is a critical component in B2B marketing and sales.

Oracle is historically very partner-friendly, and as a Gold certified Oracle CRM partner we’ve enjoyed a longstanding collaborative relationship, so I’m very optimistic about our future opportunities there. Kudos to Oracle for being the first CRM company to buy an MA platform to offer to their massive customer base—and opening that huge customer base to the power of marketing automation.

I’m especially excited because DemandGen is positioned very well to help our customers use any of the core systems in this market. Since our founding, we’ve built thriving practices in both Eloqua and Marketo, and we are certified partners for both Salesforce and Oracle. In fact, we’re likely one of the only companies in the world that is a global certified partner on each of these systems—which enables our clients to select the systems that are right for their businesses, knowing we can help them regardless of their choice.

Over the past five and a half years the CRM/MA landscape has changed a lot, and our experience has enabled us to help clients in a variety of situations. Hundreds have migrated from Salesforce to Oracle and Oracle to Salesforce. Dozens have switched their MA from Marketo to Eloqua and Eloqua to Marketo. We’ve aided clients with integrations and deployments across all of those systems. And in every one of these projects, we’ve seen our customers further their success.

I want to extend an open invitation to any of our 300+ customers, who might want further insight as to what this news means to their businesses, to reach out to me or your account director; we’ll be glad to talk with you.

In the meantime…the end of year is upon us, and on behalf of everyone at DemandGen I want to wish you the happiest of holidays, and all the best for 2013! Happy New Year!