First, stop thinking about segments and start thinking about individuals: Maria. If we want to run a campaign to Maria, what fields in the database and what values in the database would make up Maria’s persona?

Take another look at our example of Maria’s buyer persona. In the sidebar, we’ve identified some of the database fields and their values that we’ll use to create our “Maria.” In your case, you’ve got to identify what fields and what values are appropriate for your personas, then create those personas within your database.

Fields and Field Values

To “operationalize” your personas, you need to have structured records with the appropriate fields in both your marketing automation (MA) and CRM systems. For example, you will no doubt want a segment in your database that is targeted to prospects or non-customers, so you probably need or already have a field called type. The possible values for the field type might be customer, prospect, partner, vendor, competitor, employee, and so on.  Depending on your industry and type of business, you might have more specific values for type.

This illustration shows the database fields that we have decided to associate with Maria.

Maria is an ideal buyer for our mortgage product, and because we took the time to develop the buyer persona for Maria, we have gotten to know her pretty well! So it is fairly easy to establish the values that our Maria will have in these six key fields. It’s all about her fitness for our product.

Role: Loan Processor

Maria is a loan processor, so that is her role in the business. We need to know this so that our messages to her are appropriate for her role.

Type: Not equal to customer, *prospect*

When we target Maria as a prospect, we use this field to exclude customers from the campaign.

Number of offices: >2

Our ideal customer is a mortgage business which has at least two offices. Anything smaller is not a good fit for our product. Therefore, Maria’s business has more than two offices. Perhaps for another purpose you would create “Maggie,” another persona representing a loan processor who is a “one-man shop.”  But Maria is the persona of a loan processor who works within the right size company. If your Number of Offices field has multiple ranges for offices, you’ll likely use filters in your marketing automation system to include all the appropriate ranges.

Loans per month: >5

If a mortgage business is doing fewer than five loans a month, it’s not a good prospect for our product. Therefore, Maria’s business does more than five loans per month. The same thinking applies here as applies to the Number of Offices field above.

Number of loan officers: >5

If the business has fewer than five loan officers, it’s too small for our product. Therefore, Maria’s business has more than five loan officers.  For segmentation, the Number of Offices field is used and would include all ranges above 5.

Region: Segment X

In the mortgage industry, regulatory issues differ greatly across the country. Therefore we have established certain regions that are the best fit for our product, and Segment X is one of them. So Maria’s business is located in Segment X. If your marketing needs require it, you might also have “Martha,” who could be Maria’s peer persona in Region Y, “Magda” in Region Z, and so on.

It’s critical that your marketing automation system and your CRM are in parity with regard to fields and field values. Fields and field ranges in your CRM should directly line up with the fields in your MA system. That way if a salesperson is capturing or changing that information, the MA system and CRM remain in sync with one another.

Targeting with Personas

Take another look at our two persona examples.

You’ll see that the one for Gary the mortgage broker/owner includes the same field set: the only core difference is the role. Because we are distinguishing between the two personas at this detailed level, we can truly tailor messaging to the right persona. Both of these personas represent our ideal customer profile: they work at the same type of office/business, but their roles are different.

Let’s imagine we want to run a campaign for an inquiry nurture. Without personas defined, anyone who goes through this nurture campaign would get the same messaging. But now that we’ve designed our personas, we can run campaigns with messaging that speaks one-to-one with the prospect. The way to build these segments  is through contact filters.

Nurtures can be designed in one of two ways; really, it’s personal preference as to which way you choose. We can tailor emails using multiple nurture tracks, or use dynamic content through a decision rule: is this recipient in this contact filter? So we can tailor our message to the Marias in our database by establishing a contact filter specifically for her. Using Contact Field Comparison, we can set this filter to match the criteria we already established for Maria. An example of one:

Buyer personas can be helpful to marketing in a lot of ways—but persona segmentation is the ONLY way to get the depth of understanding needed for precisely targeted campaigns. The results are worth the effort, and you’ll find it a fun way to talk about your campaigns: “We have a campaign going out today to Maria!”

When you first sit down to work on persona development, it can be a little intimidating to stare at that blank sheet! To help, we’ve come up with a very useful tool for defining personas that we’ve used successfully with a number of clients. The Persona Development Tool is a template that guides you through the process of creating a buyer persona, setting up questions to help you describe your ideal buyer. It’s a basic format, allowing you to make it as simple or as complex as your needs require.

We’ve filled out a couple of examples to help you understand how to use the template. For our examples, we used the personas of a mortgage broker and a loan processor, which we used in our work with Ellie Mae—a leading developer of software for the mortgage industry.

Download an Example and a Template

We like to start by giving our imaginary person a name and supplying a (stock) photo. This really helps make this persona feel real, allowing us to more easily endow him or her with skills, experience, education, thoughts, and feelings.

The Profile Overview
In the overview, imagine that you are telling a friend about this person. Is it a man or woman? About what age? What’s his role? How does she spend her workday? Depending on your product or service, you may want to look at different kinds of attributes. The goal here is to build up a solid picture of this person that everyone can recognize.

Pain Points
What does your prospect worry about? What does she wish she could change? Be sure to create your list from the prospect’s point of view.

Key Drivers/Motivators
These are the issues that mean the most to this person: the things that are behind every decision he makes, with particular emphasis on issues relating to your product/service.

Role in the Buying Committee
Is this person the decisionmaker? An influencer? Who might influence this person?

Effective Influences
What kind of content and information is most effective in communicating persuasively with this person? Are there particular kinds of information he is most likely to want? Is any one kind of media more effective than another? Is she likely to take advantage of any particular kinds of offers?

Buying Stage Table
This simple grid makes it easy to see how your messaging needs to change based on your prospect’s stage in the buying cycle. First, you define your persona’s motivation at each stage and what questions are being asked at that point. Then, you look at the right messages and value propositions that should be communicated at that stage, and what medium is best.

Working Through the Exercise
Persona development is a fascinating exercise to do with your team. You’ll discover all kinds of new ideas and insights as you think about each facet of your buyer’s personality.

Next time, we’ll discuss using the personas you’ve created to help with database segmentation.

Adapting your conversation to fit the other person is a common, usually unconscious, human behavior. It’s a way of helping your conversational partner understand you better, which ultimately makes your communication more effective. In marketing, we use this same approach in a conscious, defined manner to improve our “conversations” with our prospects, by means of establishing buyer personas. Geoffrey Moore popularized the concept of personas in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm. As part of your segmentation efforts, buyer personas offer an excellent means of making your marketing automation more effective.

Defining Personas: Let’s Get Started

Start by sitting down and thinking about who buys the product, who uses the product, and how they are different. Let’s take marketing automation (MA) as our example, as most of us have some knowledge of the leading products.

While MA is typically a purchase decision made by the marketing VP or Chief Marketing Officer, the users are the marketing managers and marketing operations staff. Both users and decisionmakers may respond to campaigns for an MA product, but their interests will be different: they will have different concerns and questions. In this situation, the users are likely to be quite influential in the purchase decision. Other influencers may not even be on your radar: people in Sales, interested in lead scoring; people in IT, who might want to know about integrating with other back-office applications; people in HR, curious if the product could be useful for recruiting or internal projects.

If you hit all these people with the same messaging, most of that messaging won’t stick: you’ve got to hit each one with a message that is relevant to that person. So that means you have to delve down to uncover the secrets of each particular type of buyer:

• their pain points
• the kind of questions they have in mind
• what their objections are likely to be
• what they need to understand in order to move to the next stage in the buying cycle.

After that, you’ll define the kind of content you need to develop that provides that relevant information to each specific persona. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves….

Next time, we’ll share a very useful tool for defining personas, and take you through the process for a sample product.

Katie Drake develops content and content strategies for DemandGen and its clients.

Coming in 2012:

• Facebook usage will start to decline as people lose interest in ”putting it out there”
• Cloud computing will become the fastest growing segment of the information age and technology firms will set corporate priorities to move applications and products into the Cloud
• The stock market will rise and fall, but essentially remain flat over the year
• The housing market will not rebound, as too much inventory will drive prices further down 5-8% across the country.  Bonus: Mortgage rates will stay around 4.x%
• Business-to-Individual (B2I) marketing will be the new mantra of marketing to focus on the importance of one-to-one messaging
• No Marketing Automation vendor will go public, but consolidation and acquisitions will occur
• The Mayan calendar will be proved inaccurate for protecting the end of the world
• Salesforce.com will get acquired (best guess: Microsoft)
• Apple will release a new iPhone, a new iPad, a new iTouch, and a new iPod (okay, I needed one sure bet)
• A flying car will be available for purchase for around $200,000
• Microsoft will announce a new Xbox

Happy New Year from all of us at DemandGen!

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

• Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead (Forrester Research)
• Nurtured leads produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities over non-nurtured leads (DemandGen Report)
• 60% of marketers believe that technology can help them develop more high-quality leads (Forrester Research)
• Sales reps dedicate 14% of their time to lead development, but only 6.3% of leads are utilized (Sirius Decisions)
• 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance (MarketingSherpa)
• 84% of qualified leads are not ready to buy (Aberdeen Research)

As you look toward 2012, why not make a resolution to add a few key lead nurturing programs in the coming year? To help you achieve that goal, here are the key tactics:

• Internalize the Demand Funnel
• Decide which types of nurture to build
• Develop clear nurture objectives
• Inventory existing content
• Map existing and future content to stages
• Build out workflow process
• Measure effectiveness and optimize

Happy New Year! We’ll be back next week to look at some other ways to make your marketing automation system work better for you.

During this buying process, you look at different kinds of information to help with your decision:

1. At first, you’re typically interested in general information: how do I solve my problem?
2. Then, you look at different products or services to explore the ways that they approach that problem.
3. You narrow your focus to the products or services that seem best suited to your problem, and examine them more deeply, looking at details of implementation or usage, reviews, risks, price, and more.
4. You decide on one solution and go through the purchase process.
5. Then you must implement that solution, make sure it works properly, keep it updated, and address any future issues with it.

As you use nurturing to move a prospect through the demand funnel from inquiry to closed sale and beyond, you should have one goal in mind: provide the specific, relevant information that your prospect needs at each stage. This is where you have to begin translating the buying stages into the stages of your demand funnel, so you can identify the right information to deliver at the right time.

This illustration shows the primary points where nurturing is needed to deliver key information to your prospects and drive them through the funnel.

Inquiry to MQL: Education

Moving your prospect from being just an inquiry to being a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a process of education, so your nurtures should be focused on educating the prospect about your solution, but with an emphasis on the prospect’s needs. This is sometimes described as welcome nurturing, but we feel it should be much more than that! This stage is your greatest opportunity to engage with your prospect and generate real, sustained interest in your product/service. Educational nurtures are the right place to use your exciting multimedia offerings, webinars, and the like as calls to action.

Depending on the nature of your business, you may need multiple nurtures to address the specific needs of different kinds of prospects, and within each of those nurtures may be numerous tracks or paths that your prospect may take, depending on the prospect’s digital body language.  For example, a software company likely has several different software products, and each of those may be used by different kinds of businesses with different types of challenges. The more specifically you can address your prospect’s needs, the better success you will have at moving the prospect on through the funnel.

MQL to SAL: Connection

The next step for nurturing is to move the lead from MQL to becoming the Sales Accepted (sales-ready) Lead. The main goal of this stage is to get the lead and the salesperson together. The best offerings at this stage are tools like ROI assessments, consultations, and personal demos: anything that will result in a communication between the prospect and your firm to take the relationship to the next level.

SAL and SQL: Recapture

Think there’s nothing for Marketing to do after leads reach Sales Accepted or Sales Qualified stages? Think again!

What happens to leads that are accepted by Sales, but turn out to not be ready? In many organizations, these leads simply fall through the cracks, and that’s a waste. If they weren’t Marketing Qualified, they wouldn’t have gotten this far, so they still have value. Send these leads back through the funnel as recycled, and continue to nurture them.

What about lost business? Sales Qualified Leads are lost for a variety of reasons, and most of them don’t mean that the lead can’t have future value in one way or another. Your company may have other solutions that could benefit the lead. The solution they end up buying might not work out. It’s honestly very rare that an SQL should be trashed! Set up a nurture for these lost business leads, and continue to engage with them.

SQL to Closed/Won: Onboarding, Retention, Upsell

Woo-hoo, you’ve won the business! But don’t relax: your job’s not done. As we all know, it’s a lot more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an old one, so now it’s up to you to keep them through ongoing nurtures.

Start with a welcome nurture for net-new customers, followed by onboarding and training nurtures when your solution is complex, or anytime that customers can use help to benefit from it. Upsell and cross-sell campaigns are obvious nurtures to plan. Continuing nurtures for loyalty and retention often include ongoing trainings, invitations to events and webinars, user group communications, industry news and trends. The goal here is to keep your company top-of-mind throughout the customer lifecycle.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the impact lead nurturing can have on your marketing programs. . .and to your company’s bottom line.

• A defined objective
• Entry and exit criteria
• Touchpoints/key messages
• Frequency/timing
• Key messages
• Assets required
• Reporting requirements
• Post-nurture plan

A defined objective. Consider what you want the prospect to do or to know by the conclusion of your nurture. You should establish a very specific, measurable objective for every nurture. Otherwise, how can you determine how well it did? If you can’t define a specific, measurable objective, you won’t be able to measure it and determine if it is working. An example of a vague objective is “Increase awareness of our company/product.” An example of a good one is “Convert 5% of free trial users to paid subscribers.” By using segmentation techniques you can determine how many of the people who entered the nurture achieved the desired goal.

Entry criteria. How will contacts be fed into the program: contact group, filter, or form submission? Can they go through the program more than once? Are there differences between the initial feed of contacts and any subsequent or ongoing feeds? What are the specific field requirements? What contacts should be excluded from being fed into the program, and how should they be handled; are there different exit paths for different exclusions?

Exit criteria. Under what conditions should contacts be removed from the program? Is it when they complete the program or when they achieve the goal? What other use cases would cause an exit: for example, unsubscribe, hard-bounce, successful registration, or changes to record type in the CRM? The trick here is to basically build personas of people who should and should not be in the nurture.

Touchpoints/key messages. Is there only one track for the contacts entering the program, or will there need to be different tracks for unique personas? If there are multiple tracks, how does the content differ? In each track, how many touchpoints will there be? What is the key message and call to action for each touchpoint?

Frequency/timing. Is there a waiting period at the beginning of the program before any evaluations or email sends? What about at the end of the program? What is the waiting period between email sends? Are there day/time restrictions on sends? Are there conditions where someone should skip a touchpoint?

Assets required. Are landing pages or fulfillment material (white paper, case study, etc.) needed? Do those materials already exist? How many emails must be created, and what type of template will be used? If these assets don’t exist, who is responsible for creating them? If these assets will be gated by forms, don’t forget to define the requirements for the forms, such as campaign ID, fields used, pre-population, or progressive profiling strategy.

Reporting requirements. How will you measure the success of the nurture? What specific metrics will you track? What reports would you like to see, and how often?

Post-nurture plan. What happens to the leads after they exit the program? Does that change depending on whether they exit in the middle or at the conclusion of the program?

Check out The Grande Guide to Lead Nurturing…

Next time, we’ll examine the different types of nurtures and where they fall at different stages of the demand funnel.

DemandGen’s Definition of Lead Nurturing
The process of engaging prospects
by providing the information and dialogue they need
at each stage of their buying process
to position your company as the best choice
to help them achieve their objectives.

Let’s look more deeply at the key points of this definition.

Engaging prospects
Just sending a lot of emails to your prospects is not “engagement.” When we talk about “engaging,” it’s important to realize that we’re talking about two-way communication. Take two minutes to watch this humorous video to drive the point home.

So engaging your prospect involves not only what you communicate to them, but what they communicate to you through their behavior: their digital body language. You need to take into account the feedback you receive from prospects, both explicit and implicit, and adapt your communications accordingly, in order to successfully engage them and keep your company top-of-mind during their buying process.

Engagement means a dialogue, not a speech; it means communication that has value for both parties, so that both parties have an interest in continuing to communicate.

Each stage of the buying process
Unless your product is an impulse buy, your prospect goes through a multi-stage process in making the purchase decision.  Remember, the prospect’s BUYING process is not the same as your SELLING process! Typically, the buying process looks like this:

What are the points within the buying process at which your prospects can be helped by receiving information from you?  It may seem obvious: Step #2. But in reality, your prospects can probably benefit from receiving relevant information before and after every stage of the buying process. . .including the first and last stages. The key word here is relevant. For your particular product or service, you need to define exactly what kind of information is relevant at each stage (we’ll discuss that issue later in this series).

Most companies have more than one product, and more than one kind of customer. And, for most companies, these stages aren’t nice clean little boxes: they are multi-step mini-processes in themselves. So it’s important to take some time to sketch out the buying process (or processes) for the specific prospect type and specific product/service for which you are designing a lead nurture.

Helping prospects to achieve their objectives
Why do prospects become customers? Ultimately, it’s because they decide your solution will help them achieve their objectives. They believe that yours is the best choice, for whatever reasons, to solve their problem.

The point here is that lead nurturing needs to be about THEM, and not about you. Too often we see nurtures that are completely focused on product features: the “what” rather than the “why.” Of course features are important, but nurturing is as much about feelings as about facts. Start from the perspective of why the prospect should care about your product rather than what the product does.

It’s a process
The first two words of the lead nurturing definition are perhaps the most important: “The process.”

Lead nurturing is an ongoing, continual process. It’s not a one-shot deal, and every nurture is unique. Good nurtures are the opposite of shotgun-style marketing; they are carefully constructed with a variety of facets to gently but firmly drive prospects to a very clearly defined goal.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the essentials of lead nurturing and how to get started with the basics.

Lead scoring presents you with two key measurement opportunities:

• Greater Sales Efficiency
• Higher Conversion to Opportunity

Greater Sales Efficiency

This quantitative metric will be best measured over time, but a little qualitative research within the first 30 days of launch will let you know if you’re on the right track. Interview the top salespeople who are using the lead scoring system regularly, and get their candid feedback as to whether they’re finding A and B leads more responsive to their contact attempts. The answer should be yes! If it’s not yes, your demand gen team may need to adjust the scoring model.

To measure sales efficiency quantitatively, track the time from when a lead record is first accepted by Sales (meaning it’s being worked) to the time when an opportunity is created in the CRM. Plot this measurement for some time period prior to the launch of lead scoring so that you have a baseline for comparison. As more and more salespeople adopt the system, you should be seeing a progressive  improvement (shortening) of the timeframe from acceptance to opportunity creation.

Higher Conversion to Opportunity

To see if you’re increasing conversions per sales rep, you have to be looking at the number of opportunities that a rep typically creates in a given period of time. (Again, you need to track this data for benchmarks prior to the lead scoring system deployment.) It would seem obvious that if, in a given month, your top rep normally created 15 opportunities, and since lead scoring it’s 25, you are seeing improvement. But it’s not quite that simple; here’s why.

The 80-20 Rule

First, most sales organizations have a few individuals who skew the numbers. The 80-20 rule typically applies: 80% of the opportunities are created by 20% of the sales team. You may find that a particular number of reps generate a lot of the opportunities. So initially, I recommend that you take an average of total opportunities created by the aggregated sales team per month. This approach will give you a general perspective of how your new model is working. But when you’ve got at least a quarter’s worth of behavioral data, you should delve down and look at the numbers for each rep.

Most likely lead scoring will not be immediately and fully adopted by every one of your sales reps; in other words, some of the folks will completely ignore you and your radical newfangled ideas. You can have the world’s best lead scoring system, but without adoption and utilization, you won’t see the benefits in sales efficiency.

Expect to see remarkable improvements in efficiency by a small number of reps who are embracing it, and no change in the efficiency of others who may not be fully convinced of its value. (Showing this data as a graph to the team may spur some enthusiasm! And healthy competition.)

Sometimes Less Is More

Maybe your numbers look quite different. Instead of 15 opportunities, suddenly your top rep is only averaging 9 per month. If you see a drop in the number of opportunities created, don’t freak out and rush down to unplug the system! You’ve probably uncovered a dirty little secret: your opportunity creation process was bad, and allowed many opportunities to be created which shouldn’t have been. A drop in absolute numbers of opportunities isn’t a matter for concern; the endgame is whether Sales is converting more opportunities to won business.

Don’t be surprised to find that the number of created opportunities goes down, but the number converted to wins goes up. Measure on percentage of closed/won business to the opportunities created. If that top rep is now closing 75% rather than 50%, that’s the kind of statistic that really matters. That’s a sign that your folks are  spending their time on the right stuff: working fewer opportunities, but doing a better job on the ones they work. And that’s a good definition of “sales efficiency.”

Can’t We All  Just Get Along?

Don’t forget, when you’re looking at ROI, to consider the intangible benefits of building and using lead scoring. A less quantitative way to measure its impact on your organization is to look at how it has enhanced and strengthened the relationship between Sales and Marketing. Most of our clients have found that their conversations are more positive and constructive, with less accusation and assigning of blame. We typically see a much greater emphasis on team orientation that extends far beyond the lead scoring project itself, pervading every aspect of the relationship. To my mind, that’s almost the best part of the whole thing.

Next week, we’re moving on to another topic: lead nurturing is our theme for December!

The Demand Gen Taskforce

• Pull together the key stakeholders in Sales and Marketing and get them into the same room.
• Make sure experienced, in-the-trenches resources from both teams are assigned to the project—this is not the right project to entrust to entry-level staff.
• Get executive support to ensure this effort is made a high priority for the company
• Consider bringing in an expert resource to help guide your project. I know it sounds self-serving, but trust me, it will save you a lot of time and pain! Plus you probably already know that a neutral third party can be very helpful in mediating disagreements between strong-minded colleagues. . . I probably don’t need to go into a lot of detail on that issue. . .