Due to the growing need to digitize all business functions, a new CXO has been born. Gartner also predicts that “by 2015, 25 percent of organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer.” What role will this new executive play? According to Russell Reynolds Associates, a leading global executive search and assessment firm, “CDOs will be the executives with the operating experience, management skills, strategic mindset and vision to lead businesses in an increasingly technological future.” This person is not only responsible for the driving revenue growth, but also for transforming the company (and all of its business units) into a seamlessly operating digital machine.

So, how does this affect marketing leaders? In the words of Scott Brinker, Author of Chief Marketing Technologist Blog, CDOs are truly just “hybrid marketing- technology change agents at the right hand of the CEO.” Brinker continues, “The mission of the CDO is to understand and connect with the organization’s modern customer”—not a far battle cry from that of a CMO. Rather than the CDO and CMO sitting distinctly side-by-side, it is not too far of a stretch to assume that these roles are going to overlap. In many instances, it could be a digitally savvy CMO who steps up to play the role of Chief Digital Officer.

According to Brinker, the “ideal scenario” would have the CDO and the CMO under the same corporate umbrella forcing one to report into the other. The inherent goals of these two roles are too closely aligned.  The CDO role and the CMO role with have to carefully operate together or morph into one. As Brinker writes, “When it comes to understanding and connecting with the modern customer, that leader can be either the CMO or the CDO — but it’s harder for it to be both.”

No matter what new structure the executive tree takes, it is clear there will be significant changes ahead for the goals and operations of the CMO. The digital revolution has already begun, and it will continue to evolve the daily operations of successful companies and their marketing departments. The solution lies in adapting and moving forward with the digital shift. Those who become lax with the change will surely fall behind.

1)      Number of MQLs. At Sales Engine, a marketing qualified lead (MQL) is defined by lead score. Each month, we measure how many leads pass our lead score threshold and become an MQL. To do this, we pull a report from Salesforce.com (which is integrated with our Manticore marketing automation platform) that tracks a change in lead score for all leads in our database. We then filter the data by the lead score criteria to determine our total number of MQLs.

2)      Conversion Rate of MQLs to SALs. To measure the conversion rate of our MQLs to sales accepted leads (SALs), we consider two factors: the percent of leads that converted as well as the average days it takes to convert. For our purposes, an SAL is a lead that has accepted a meeting with our sales team. The tricky thing about the conversion rate is that we must consider velocity—not every MQL is going to convert to an SAL within the same month.

To calculate the percent of conversion, we break our SAL data into three buckets: converted within 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days—after 90 days our lead score depreciates by 100% and the lead becomes a suspect again. To calculate the average days to convert, we measure how many days passed from the date each lead became an MQL to the date they converted to an SAL. Then, we average the days for all the leads within the current month.

3)      Conversion Rate of Unknown to Known Web Visitors. The conversion rate of unknown to known visitors measures marketing’s ability to capture new leads. To calculate this number, we look at Google Analytics to tell us how many new visitors came to our website within the current month. Then, we run a report on the Manticore platform which tells us how many new leads registered on a landing page in the same month.  Finally, we divide the number of new registrants by the number of new web visitors which give us our rate of new lead conversion.

4)      Cost per SAL. The cost per SAL tells us how many marketing dollars it takes to convert an MQL to an SAL. To determine this value, we simply take the number of marketing dollars spent within the current month and divide that by the number of SALs converted in the same month. We do not take velocity into consideration for this calculation. The data is too volatile at a monthly level, so we actually aim for a yearly average instead. The hills and valleys created by this shifting data are just as important to capture.

These KPIs are the top four metrics that our marketing team is accountable for on a monthly basis. However, they are only a small fraction of total reporting. We also examine at channel performance, lead source, the conversion rates for leads that advance beyond an SAL, and more.

For information on additional, higher-level marketing metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV), view our webinar: How much marketing do you need?

Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO and Founder of Selling Power, opened the conference discussing the importance of Sales 2.0 technology in order to improve a company’s sales engine (no, we did not pay him to use these words, though we felt it was a nice touch).

Citing the 2013 Sales 2.0 Impact Report, Gschwandtner revealed the growing impact of Sales 2.0 technology on sales organizations. Not only are sales leaders moving faster towards adoption and forecasting the substantial impact of the technology—69% believe that Sales 2.0 solutions are important or critical—but sales leaders are actually seeing the results. The report shows that for companies using Sales 2.0 technology:

• 39% saw an increase in sales rep productivity
• 44% received positive feedback from their sales team
• 46% measured an increase in revenue

However, according to Gschwandtner, the true key to success with Sales 2.0 technology rests in what he calls “the secret sauce.” It takes the right combinations of the following four bullets to drive a company’s sales engine. It takes:

• The right culture, strategy, and execution
• The right mind-set, skill set, and tool set
• Alignment of people, process, and technology
• Management of lead flow, performance flow, and content flow

In other words, the technology cannot stand alone. It takes all of the above to jump start the sales process and increase revenue growth.

Visit our photo album on Facebook for pictures from the Sales 2.0 Conference.  After all, according to a 2012 Aberdeen Study quoted by Gschwandtner in his keynote, “79% of salespeople who incorporate social media into their sales process make quota – compared to the industry average of 43%.”

As content marketers, we’re not re-inventing what content is, or how it gets made. Rather, we are returning to a focus on content: how important it is, how well it can be developed, how it can initiate a dialogue, how it can hold someone’s interest, and how it can persuade. In re-focusing on content, we are unpacking what content has meant to us and what it can mean to us. We’re redefining the how, when, and why of content.

A few weeks ago, I was scanning over Facebook and noticed that a former colleague of mine had posted as her status the following quote: “Design is a behavior, not a department.” To me, this felt like a bit of a rallying cry. The quote is attributed to David Milne, the founder of DMD Retail Design, and it reverberated with me. I held on to it for some reason, and just couldn’t put it down. It was as if that simple statement were a good book I wanted to read over and over again.

Why?

Most likely because it is a really eloquent and to-the-point way of saying something our content team at Sales Engine has been discussing for many months. We all love what we do. We bring passion and knowledge to what we do. We are also all very dedicated to the process of continuously re-defining and re-scoping content marketing.  I’m not hesitant to admit that as a content group, we spend a lot of time discussing a fundamental issue: what is content exactly? We’ve defined it as the intersection of text, design, and user experience.  Again, none of these unique fields is undergoing a phase of massive re-invention. But all of these fields relate to behavior: the behavior of the person who consumes the content, and the behavior of the person who creates the content. Behavior is consistently evolving and being re-defined.

David Milne’s quote resonated with me because the underlying call to action in his message is what we’ve been in the midst of remembering ourselves. Content marketing is evolving, and we are part of its evolution. For our content group, once we acknowledged who we are, it was no longer enough to just be a functional department. We set out to produce content that behaves, and understanding that content development itself is a behavior.

Defining our identity this way meant that how we work—and how we organize our work—simply had to undergo some adaptations. We anticipate that those adaptations won’t be a one-time thing. Rather, kind of like an agile work environment, we’ll be making adaptations along the way, and we’ll be better positioned to act on them because we accept that adaptation as part of the behavior of what content is.

Our first major shift was to re-categorize the types of content we’ve produced and are producing. We stepped back to ask what the common formats in content marketing are, and what other formats in different forms of media perhaps should make their way into the world of content marketing. We all know people are bombarded by messages—by content—all day. As an industry, we know we want to make that content better and more relevant.  For us at Sales Engine, a huge part of that process is determining what formats people actually use every day and redefining our content offerings accordingly.

Visit the Resources section of our website when you have a moment. Those of you who have been following us for a while will note that things within that page of our site have shifted a little bit. There is, quite suddenly, a whole new type of resource we’ve made available to readers. For those of you who have only recently started following us, allow me a moment to explain. Previously, the Resources section of our website had the standard types of content you would come to expect from a company that provides MaaS, demand generation, and content development services. There were the ubiquitous white papers, case studies, and webinars. And they are still there of course, as they should be. Because people want and need those things.

But our clients and our reader-base were asking for more. Furthermore, as a content team we wanted to produce more. Let’s flip David Milne’s quote and make it explicitly about content. Content development is a behavior. There have been a lot of changes within the realm of content marketing in the past several years. We have started creating content differently and our clients are seeing things differently. The more things have changed, however, the more desire there has been for them to continue evolving.

As it turns out, our clients want more than just facts and data. They want to know our opinions, and they want us to demonstrate why those are our opinions. So, we added a new format of content—a new behavior. We call the new format the Op-Ed. Ladies and gentlemen, the Op-Ed is a new type of resource we’ll be delivering from here on out.

Funny thing, the op-ed format. Most people assume the term is short for “opinion editorial.” Actually, that’s not the case. The format was created as a page of content in newspapers to stand in opposition to the page of editorials written by a newspaper’s staff members. In other words, the traditional op-ed is a format of content that is opinion-based, but from a fresh perspective. While the traditional editorial page was designed to carry an established point of view or opinion, the op-ed page was designed and formatted to create a perspective that could complement or contrast the page of content directly along its side, resulting in a dynamic dialogue within the publication.

Open and transparent sharing of knowledge is what we are going for in our Op-Ed format. We’ll use it to share a combination of good principles, ideas, and patterns we’ve seen, as well as our opinions about them. These pieces are to complement and contrast overall approaches we’ve taken ourselves and seen within our industry.

Recently, we made a mistake. As an organization, we neglected to use our own process for publishing a campaign. The result was less than stellar. Did it hurt? Sure…errors always do. But as an organization full of like-minded, goal-oriented people, we pulled together to learn from it and move forward.

In our eagerness to reach our audience with really positive feedback we’d gotten from a client, we went outside of our traditional approach. We went rogue, one could say. Rather than crafting a campaign, collaboratively editing its message according to its target audience, and matching it to the right prospect at the appropriate place within our own funnel, we enthusiastically wrote a message and published it.  Unfortunately, while the message was meant to deliver this fantastic client feedback, we neglected to actually include the client feedback. A placeholder ran front and center in the main visual real estate of a campaign. How did this happen? The campaign was not put through our standard quality assurance process.

It was a moment of do as I say and not as I do. The results speak for themselves.  Automation of any kind will do one of two things: accelerate success or accelerate failure. This happens because, as we’ve said before, the foundation of any effective marketing or demand generation process is not the tool you choose to use. What counts is the process, skill, and effort poured into the tool. Successful employment of a marketing automation tool requires a quality assurance program.

Quality assurance is a practice, not a philosophy. As an operations guy, I’m not interested in theory. I’m interested in processes that work in a repeatable, scalable manner. If there’s a way to prescribe an outcome, I want to make sure we are doing it and documenting what it is. Quality assurance is, essentially, a methodology to prescribe a positive outcome.

Modern quality assurance, or QA, is a process designed to make a product ready for its intended use. After identifying the purpose of a product, specialists conduct a series of tests to ensure the product meets the requirements of its intended purpose. Boiling it down, if your product was designed to generate leads, it should do so right out of the gate. Your product should be consumed as intended, not as unintended mistakes or errors. A QA validation process manages out any errors or unplanned results in the materials, assembly, or transmission of your product. Pragmatically, by designing a great product and determining the user is consuming your product in its intended manner, you’re prescribing a positive outcome for your organization.

At Sales Engine International, we plan to conduct one webinar per month in 2013. Taking our past experience and our current plan into account, we have developed a running checklist of significant items to cover when preparing for an upcoming webinar. This is by no means an entirely comprehensive list, but it is a good place to start. Next time you find yourself about to prepare a webinar, pull this list and give it a quick run through before going live.

For each webinar, consider the following:

• Before all else, answer the following question: What is the desired outcome of this webinar? Start your plan there and build the pieces to make it happen.
• Create an agenda with milestones and tasks outlining the steps to complete the webinar preparation. This should include the objective to be accomplished and/ or a call-to-action (what do you want the attendees to do next).
• Consider your ideal attendee. It is important that the presentation takes your target persona into account during development. Think in terms of presentation length, the use of charts and graphics, how to leverage data, etc.. For example, if you are presenting ideally to sales people, consider their attention span.
• Presentation slides should be used as a visual tool, NOT as an outline. They should support the speaker’s presentation, not lead it.
• Be sure that the presenter is in a closed room with NO audio devices (including cell phones, desk phones, computer audio, etc.). If there are any audio devices present, they must be turned completely off.
• Determine who will advance the slides. At presentation time, this person’s computer screen should be clear of everything except the slide show. This includes exiting all programs that send pop-up notifications (Outlook or other email applications). We learned this one the hard way.
• Have an employee in-house (but outside presentation room) monitoring audio and video quality. They should be in silent communication (via email or chat) with someone in the presentation room—someone other than the slide manager. For our webinars, the moderator typically plays this roll.
• If applicable, let the audience know at the beginning of the webinar that you will be recording the presentation and will provide it to attendees shortly after the presentation. Someone will inevitably ask.
• Leave room at the end of the presentation for Q&A.
• Follow-up via email personally with those attendees who ask questions that were not answered in the presentation Q&A.
• Create as many prepared questions as possible. This is a good way to prep the speaker for the true Q&A session. Also, if the webinar runs short, then you will have some talking points ready.
• Schedule a practice session for the whole team and use the same technology planned for the live run. That way, any possible kinks will get worked out before you go live.

Join us next week for our latest webinar, Finding the Optimal Marketing Mix, where we will have (hopefully) successfully implemented our webinar checklist.

Marketing software accompanied with a strategic, lead-to-revenue process improves sales and marketing results and can ultimately increase revenue growth.  A technologically supported process provides increased visibility into measurable data. This allows sales and marketing leaders to make educated decisions as well as easily determine ROI. Some of the ways in which a technologically supported process can help include the following:

• Discovering and targeting prospects. Inbound lead generation is proving a valuable way to attract prospects. The issue is in knowing just who these prospects are so that a follow-up can be targeted and proactively implemented. With marketing technology, marketers can use anonymous web visitor ID  to see click paths and identify the company associated with a website visitor. Also, it can help identify the source that attracted that prospect which, when measured at a higher level, can provide detail on where a target audience lives. This information is invaluable when designing targeted campaigns or for a sales rep when a prospect is ready to be engaged.
• Tracking individual prospect behaviors. Marketing software also provides the ability to narrow the focus to the behavior of an individual prospect. It can identify the campaigns they've responded to, the number of times they've visited a company’s website, and their click path details. Armed with this information marketers can separate the random “tire kickers” from the prospects expressing sustained interest in solving a specific problem. [Provided the right content has been developed.] Prospect behavior data can also give marketing leaders information on the success rates of various marketing channels and provide insight on resource allocation for future campaigns.
• Compiling lead behavior and demographic information into one profile. Lead scoring is a tool that all B2B companies should have in their arsenal. The beauty of a lead scoring model is that it enables marketers to create profiles that measure fit, interest, and depreciation. Accessing all the information about the lead’s demographics, activity, and frequency means that marketers can see when a lead is sales-ready based on the universal lead description they've agreed to with their sales team. No more hunting through a variety of databases or relying on gut instinct when trying to prioritize leads for sales pursuit.
• Assessing the overall ROI. One of the biggest issues for marketers is proving that their campaigns deliver a return on investment. With the plethora of data provided by marketing software, company leaders can immediately identify which marketing programs are paying off and which are falling flat with prospects and should be replaced. The best part is that marketers can do this as their programs roll out, not the quarter after the campaign has ended. Current data allows for changes to be made more dynamically, in response to prospect behavior, optimizing budget on campaigns that produce the highest results.

Visibility is necessary to address the needs of prospects choosing to self-educate and hold salespeople at arm’s length until they are ready for a sales conversation. With the right technology and process in place, marketers can become more responsive to prospects and reduce the leakage from the funnel that will happen without the capability to see and assess the meaning of virtual behavior over time.

The biggest question I wanted to ask Dianna was why she continued to come back to Sales Engine. First, she filled me in on her strategy for growing business. Dianna is firm believer in staffing for core competencies only and outsourcing all other functions. Following that maxim has helped her turn-around the profitability at her previous companies and is fueling the launch of her newest endeavor.

Dianna originally choose Sales Engine because our solution freed her organization to focus on core competencies while we, as a demand generation partner, provided programs and activities to support revenue growth. However, the feeling of collaboration and teamwork is what brought her back a second and third time and has made her a lasting client.

“Sales Engine gets results. The PMs (program managers) are constantly trying to broaden the marketing experience,” Dianna stated. “It is like they work for you. It never feels like a vendor relationship, rather like a team engagement.” She confessed that she had tried other vendors in the past but never had that team feeling.

Lasting client relationships are invaluable to company growth. To create that foundation, it is essential to build a partnership and a feeling of team engagement with clients. Rather than simply providing for a client, a company must change and grow alongside their client. The following are three blog posts addressing best practices in building lasting client relationships:

• 6 Tips for Building Lasting Relationships with Clients
• Happily Ever After: How To Build Long-Term Client Relationships
• The Formula for Lasting Client Relationships - Respect and Passion

Next week, Dianna will be joining Sales Engine CEO, Paul Rafferty, as a speaker at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The pair will host a breakout session on Tuesday, April 9^th titled, Punch Above Your Weight: Marketing, Selling, and Winning against Bigger Competitors. In it, Dianne will share a story of her first (of many) successful experiences in using a partner for demand generation.  For more information from the conference, visit the Sales 2.0 website. For our thoughts on the conference and a discount on registration, visit our blog post: Sales Data from Sales 2.0 Conference.

The webinar begins by taking a look at buyer behavior and the way buyers engage sales and marketing organizations. As marketing extends further into the purchasing process, the alignment to buyers’ needs will shift. Later in the presentation, Mike makes the point that the purchasing process is really a series of integrated touches between sales and marketing—almost a tag team effort. In order to better align to buyers needs, marketing and sales leaders need to consider the answers to the following questions:

How Much Should You Spend on Marketing?

To determine the amount of money organizations should spend on marketing, they must first calculate the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and factor in the customer lifetime value (CLV). This will show the return yielded from sales and marketing efforts to acquire a single customer. However, the months to recover from customer acquisition costs must also be taken into account.

How Many Leads Does Your Sales Team Need?

First, organizations should start with a simple, funnel conversion model based on revenue goals. It is important to account for nurturing and remarketing as Mike points out, “80% of all marketing leads that sales disqualifies, go on to make a buying decision within a year.” If these disqualified leads can be recaptured, there are a lot of potential sales to be won. Finally, the numbers should be adjusted to account for velocity as new leads are typically not converted into wins within the same month.

How Big Should Your Database Be?

To begin, sales and marketing leaders should calculate the amount of suspects required based on the number Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) needed each month. Then, decay and atrophy need to be factored out. According to NetProspex, a database decays by 2% each month. Finally, organization must again account for velocity and consider options for database maintenance and growth.

Mike did a great job of walking attendees through the numbers and calculations step by step. Furthermore, he created a Revenue Growth Marketing Calculator to help sales and marketing leaders run the numbers specific to their organization and answer the above questions with ease. For additional direction on these questions and how to use the Revenue Growth Marketing Calculator, visit the recording of our webinar, Revenue Planning (Part One): How Much Marketing Do You Need?

ALSO IN THE SERIES:

Part Two: Finding the Optimal Marketing Mix

Thursday, April 18^th at 1pm EST— Once you have determined the amount of marketing, discover the precise combination of email, PPC, SEO, social, etc. you need to meet your revenue goals. Stacey Steiger, VP of Marketing and Product Management, will answer the questions:

• What are the most effective digital marketing channels?
• What is the right marketing mix?
• How should I allocate spend on each channel?

For more information, visit Revenue Planning (Part Two): Finding the Optimal Marketing Mix

Part Three: Critical Resources for Growth

Thursday, May 23^rd at 1pm EST—With a firm grasp on your revenue growth plan, learn how to efficiently support that plan with the appropriate skills and resources. Paul Rafferty, CEO, will answer the questions:

• What skills are required to execute?
• How should I organize my Sales & Marketing structure?
• How do I integrate people, process & technology?

For more information, visit Revenue Planning (Part Three): Critical Resources for Growth

When Sales Engine chose to sponsor the Sales 2.0 Conference, we knew we would be joining a strong community of sales experts and industry thought leaders. We were particularly excited about some of the research Sales Dot Two, Inc. had conducted to be revealed at the conference. At first we thought we had to patiently wait for April, but while reading some of our favorite blogs, Funnelholic and Radius Blog, we found some interesting and revealing posts.

Craig Rosenberg, consultant and author of Funnelholic, has been working with Sales Dot Two, Inc. on their 2013 Sales 2.0 Impact Report. The goal of the study was to take a buyer-centric look at the Sales 2.0 solutions market. In his post, Sales 2.0: Three statistics every sales leader must know, Rosenberg believes there were significant trends found in the data of the report. Unfortunately, Sales Dot Two is “waiting to release a deeper analysis of survey results at the Sales 2.0 Conference on April 8 by host Gerhard Gschwandtner in his opening keynote address.” Luckily for us, Funnelholic readers were given a preview of two, very strong data pieces featured in the report:

• 70% of sales organizations believe Sales 2.0 solutions will be “very important” or “critical” to achieving their 2013 objectives
• 50% of sales organizations surveyed plan to increase spending on Sales 2.0 solutions in 2013

Both pieces of data show a serious shift in the way sales organizations are approaching technology. Furthermore, we are likely to see additional change in the way sales organizations operate.

After reading this post on Funnelholic, John Hurley, author for Radius Blog, wrote a piece titled 50% of Sales Organizations Plan To Boost Sales 2.0 Solutions Spend In 2013. Hurley sat down with Larissa Gschwandter, VP at Selling Power and Sales 2.0 Conference, for an interview on the 2013 Sales 2.0 Impact Report results.  The blog post featured the same two data pieces revealed in the post above, but sadly, Hurley was also told he must wait for Gerhard Gschwandtner’s opening keynote for the rest of the story.

Nevertheless, Larissa Gschwandter did reveal one other trend that we feel is very relevant to the Sales 2.0 solution market as well as the marketing technology market. The trend shows that many companies still struggle with user adoption. Sales Engine can attest that we see this difficulty often. As a result of this challenge, Gschwandter feels there will be an “increased need for organizations to build a more solid infrastructure (people, process, and strategy) to ensure that each implementation is a success.”

This means there is likely to also be a shift in  spending for things like content and design services, database development, search engine management, and other demand generation services needed for easy implementation and to fuel such powerful technology.  We look forward to the upcoming movements in the sales and marketing arena, and we certainly look forward to the opening keynote at the Sales 2.0 Conference for further noteworthy trends.