#leadmd

Our Sponsors and Partners

LeadMD is the main sponsor of the contest and one of the leading Marketo partners and marketing automation experts. Their clients include some of the world’s largest companies including Symantec, Ricoh and PayScale. LeadMD is participating because they understand that traditional marketing software didn’t leverage modern marketing assets like content marketing and emphasized the wrong KPIs. Marketing automation enables marketers like LeadMD to focus on developing great workflows so their clients can put the right content in front of the right buyer personas.

Heinz Marketing is a Seattle marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. We help our clients achieve sustained sales success by growing revenue from existing customers and cost effectively identifying and winning new customers. Heinz Marketing is participating because we’re big believers that revenue generation from new and existing customers is better with the buyer personas and workflows enabled by marketing automation. We work with clients every day whose marketing assets and leads are better leveraged with vendors like Marketo.

Infer delivers data-powered business applications that help companies win more customers. Its cloud-based solutions leverage proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with hundreds of external signals from the web. Infer is participating because we collect internal and external signals to score your best leads. We can more effectively score leads if we’re collecting information about your customers all along the marketing and sales funnel. Marketing automation and CRM vendors like Marketo, Eloqua and Salesforce enable this data collection.

RingLead is the leading vendor for removing duplicate entries in your marketing automation and CRM platforms. RingLead has worked with over 2,000 companies, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, all across the globe. RingLead is participating because we all remember a world before marketing automation. Sales teams will struggle with unqualified leads with multiple duplicates sitting in different silo-ed spreadsheets. Marketing automation, powered by RingLead, removes these duplicates and gets you marketing and selling more effectively.

Cloudwords is the first cloud-based technology built to help companies automate, manage and analyze their content localization process. Cloudwords works with some of the largest brands in the world to help localize their content, including Groupon American Airlines and Marketo. Cloudwords is participating because marketing is a global opportunity and we need the right workflows to get the most out of your leads. With Cloudwords and marketing automation vendors like Marketo, we can help organizations better streamline their international customers, push global content to local sales teams and empower local stakeholders to manage their own leads.

What is the most common mistake you’ve seen from clients adopting marketing automation?

“Marketing automation is an ongoing process; not a single campaign.”

Marketing organizations from two-person startups to large organizations need to plan their transition to marketing automation technology and processes correctly. Some organizations don’t correctly account for “legacy process” before a marketing automation system is in place. Others have never used marketing automation before so there’s a bit of a learning curve to not just implement the technology, but also to train marketers and sales to use the system. This is why many of LeadMD’s clients are on retainer after the first engagement. Even with a process in place, marketing is cyclical and it’s important to recognize that you will not get results right away.

Where do you see the role of Sales in Marketing Automation?

“CRM is still the backbone of the organization but marketing automation is the head.”

We are seeing a bit “Death of a Salesman” in digital sales & marketing. That’s because the best salespeople today are also really good marketers. Terms like “solution selling” and “sales enablement” are relevant because good salespeople leverage marketing assets and utilize buyer personas. One major impact on sales is the end of demos. Potential customers can view demos without a salesperson. Rather, good salespeople walk leads through a solution and “make the lead an active participant.”

What are some areas that Marketers and Marketing Automation are still not getting right?

"Behavior and alignment to buyer persona are the only true indicators of lead qualification." 

Marketers should look to new metrics and the questions they answer:

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) conversion rate: “Does your marketing team know how to generate quality leads?”

MQL to Opportunity: “Does you sales team know how to ask for money?”

MQL to Revenue: “Is your sales team weak at closing?”

Most marketers still rely on vanity metrics, with “net new names” by far the largest culprit. Typically, sales will give marketing a large quota, even though the “sales team can never process all these leads.” This stems from a legacy without marketing automation, where leads are not well defined and buyer personas don’t exist. But in recent years, marketers have learned that buying lists of contact information simply does not yield significant results. 

To align marketing and sales, both parties must define what a MQL is. “Don’t set MQLs based on industry, revenue or demographic data, for example.” Rather, a lead should be “dictated by the buyer, not the organization.” Organizations that tend to create too many stages in the sales & marketing funnel can be “overly prescriptive.” Buyers behave as they normally would so even if they don’t click on that button or respond to an email to move them off that stage, if they are ready to buy, the process should recognize the buyer’s willingness to move down the funnel. Marketing automation can pick up these signals the way traditional processes cannot.

What is the one thing your clients are excited about in 2014?

“Content creation is still not part of marketing automation.”

Many of LeadMD clients are excited about content marketing but have outstanding questions. For example:

How do we crowd-source content?

How do we involve thought leaders?

How do we create high value content that breaks through the noise?

More LeadMD clients are getting engaged on content but inbound is still not being tied-in with marketing automation, and thus not being measured for effectiveness. Calendaring, content planning and other features need to be more deeply ingrained in marketing automation. 

For more information on Justin Gray and LeadMD, go to their website, their blog or follow them on Twitter.

LeadMD has a great resource on content and marketing automation. Click on the graphic below to download.