Blog Repost: Lead Management Program beating the Average

Eric Webb, senior director of Go To Market Services for RSM McGladrey, recently posted an entry on his blog about his experiences implementing Eloqua as their demand generation and marketing automation platform. We love it when our clients talk about their successes (it's even better, as it is in this case, if we helped them achieve those successes). Below is a reposting of Eric's entry and a link to his blog:

With the implementation of Eloqua, a lead management and automated nurturing system, we’ve already improved our benchmark response rate from what was an average of 1% to 3.9% overall, and regularly hitting the 5-10% response rate with our email programs.

It’s only been a couple months and the various regional teams implementing the system and using it are catching-on quickly. The lead management program has had other benefits as well:
More consistent branding as team just leverage existing templates, collaboration as teams share programs and templates, and more attention to ROI.

We put out a regular response, open, bounce-back report and the teams are now pulling their own and spending more time analyzing what they’ve done and trying to figure out what to do. Our reputational sender score went from 50 to 90! A dramatic improvement for us.

Even our national Lines of Business are concerned with delivery, content quality and click thru rate. We’re slowly moving out of the “push” marketing arena and into the segmentation and opt-in marketing.

As we start to make the connection to Salesforce.com the next step is improving our lead quality before we send it along to the business developers.

You can read more about Eric by visiting Financial Services Marketing Weblog.

Join the new LinkedIn Eloqua User Group

Cadria created a new virtual Eloqua User Group on LinkedIn for current, and prospective, users located in or around MN. Come join the group, meet other Eloqua users, share experiences, offer up tips and helpful hints, or just learn how you can leverage Eloqua more effectively. Click here to learn more or to join the LinkedIn group.

Doing More with Less

In this time of economic challenge, the most commonly asked question we get is "how do I do more with less?" Less is relative - less marketing budget; less marketing staff; less sales team members; less confidence in the effectiveness of existing marketing programs. Regardless of which “less” you are dealing with, or all of the above, there are things you can do to optimize your marketing efforts. Here are a few places to start:

1. Centralize and clean up your data – most organizations have more data then they know what to do with. It comes in all shapes and sizes – trade show attendee lists, email newsletter recipients, webinar participants, purchased lists, targeting lists, etc. To be effective, centralize, purge, and de-dupe this data. It’s not a difficult task, but depending on the tools and support you have, it could be a tedious one. Just keep in mind the old rule of “garbage in, garbage out” – if you don’t start with valid information, you’ll end up just wasting dollars.


2. Rank your leads/contacts – not all leads are created equal. In fact, your sales team is potentially spending 25% of their time talking with people that will never buy from you – that’s one lost FTE for every four sales team members. Additionally, marketing may be providing sales with lots of names, but how many have been qualified enough to act on? Make your sales team more effective by providing only qualified leads – the definition of “qualified” will depend on your business, but try using a scoring program based on explicit information (like title, industry, company size) and implicit data, like visits to your Web site or receptiveness to your emails, to rank and order your leads. Send only those with high lead scores to the sales team to accept or decline.


3. Nurture, nurture, nurture – upwards of 50% of your leads may have high purchase potential, but just aren’t ready to connect with a sales person. Don’t dump them – nurture them. Use a series of various communication tactics, such as emails with whitepaper offers, webinars, and RSS feeds, to develop an ongoing dialogue with a prospect. Make it easy for them to “raise their hand” and contact a sales team member when they are ready. Don’t let all your hard work evaporate. Give your sales team all the information you know about prospects (implicit and explicit) and ensure that they are making personal contact and following up with the all those newly qualified leads.
   

Over the next few weeks, we’ll post some more ideas of nurturing, scoring and lead/customer development programs and approaches. Can’t wait? Fill out our Contact Us form or call our office at 651.493.7671.

Eloqua Named #1 Lead Generation Suite and Email Tools Vendor

For those who know us, we tend to be agnostic when it comes to tools and technologies. But, a few months back, we signed a partnership agreement with Eloqua, a leading demand generation and marketing automation platform provider. As we have gotten to know the product offering better, implemented our own programs using the Eloqua platform, and helped enable client programs, we can confidently say that we are happy with our strategic decision to become a marketing agency partner. Turns out, some other people think Eloqua is a pretty good pick as well. Today, Eloqua was named the number one provider of lead generation suites and email tools in an independent study conducted by Direct Impact Marketing Inc. This survey of 249 B2B marketers gathered feedback on which online tools are used for lead generation and how marketing organizations are converting online inquires to sales-ready leads. According to survey respondents, Eloqua is the dominant player in lead generation, garnering more responses than the next four vendors combined. Eloqua also topped the list of email tools vendors. Click here to learn more about the survey or, feel free to contact us if you want to know more about Eloqua.

Go by yourself, go with friends, take a child, take a grandparent...walk, jog, ride a bike...go in the morning, go after work...take a book, bring a sandwich, grab your iPod...Cadria encourages everyone to exercise their constitutional right and monumental privilege to vote.