Tag Archives: steve woods

Demand Generation – Week in Review

Unfortunately the flu got the better of me last week, so my blogging and Twittering came to a halt. But let’s make the best of it, and collect a list of news from the past week. Lots of interesting things happened, and insightful articles were published. I probably missed several things, but these are the highlights:

Top-5 B2B Marketing tips

Jon Miller at Marketo summarizes the key findings of several B2B marketing thought leadership interviews.
1.Start with a solid base
2.Use Push AND Pull Tactics
3.Integrate Your Efforts
4.Innovate
5.Test, Test and Retest

Market2Lead 4.0 released

Market2Lead has launched version 4.0 with a completely revamped user interface. I was planning to write a short review, but haven’t found time for this yet. To be continued…

B2B marketing is Obsolete

Laura Ramos has published the final piece in the “Obsolescence of B2B marketing” series.
1.Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight
2.Shift from simply generating demand to managing it
3.Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations
4.Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles

Social Media and B2B Marketing

Steve Woods wrote this blog post that gives some great ideas on how to use social media for B2B marketing.
1.Set your information free
2.Focus on being credible
3.Understand their buying process
4.Match your marketing to their buying process
5.Keep interest high through nurturing
6.Only sell when they are ready to buy

10 Tips For Tweeting A Live Conference

Mike Damphousse wrote an interesting article for those who want to use Twitter for PR, in this case for the coverage of an industry conference (the Sales 2.0 conference next week in San Francisco). I will also attend this conference, so let me know if you want to meet up!

Vtrenz changes name to Silverpop Engage B2B

After being acquired by Silverpop, Vtrenz continued under its own name for a while, but now the name has changed to Silverpop Engage B2B. Which makes me wonder: do they rule out using Engage for high-value B2C sales processes? In any case, it’s good they make a clear choice and are developing a new brand for this established marketing automation product.

Marketo 3.0 First Look

David Raab got a sneak preview of  the new release of Marketo and writes about usability aspects of Demand Generation systems in general.

Genius.com announces Genius Enterprise

Apparently it’s the week for new releases: also Genius.com is preparing a new product: Genius Enterprise. Key new features are automated lead nurturing and lead scoring. David Raab again has the scoop.

DemandGen Report Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards

Last week I wrote about the Stevie Awards and complained that few vendors had submitted their customer case studies. This week the DemandGen Report announced the winners of their Sales & Marketing alignment awards. The winners are:

  • Enterprise Category: eTrique implementation at Cisco
  • SMB category: Eloqua implementation at Sourcefire
  • Fast Track category: Genius implementation at ADX

I hope this overview is useful. Please add a comment to give your feedback, or to report important events that I’ve missed. Thanks!

Book Review: Digital Body Language

I’m not sure if I like the term Digital Body Language, but Steve Woods’ book with that title I like very much. It clearly shows how the role of marketing in the complex sales has changed, and gives lots of detailed suggestions on how marketing teams can cope with this change, by using smart demand generation strategies.

Digital Body Language Book by Steven WoodsIn the old days, sales people managed the entire sales process: they took leads from the awareness phase, via discovery of possible solutions, to the final validation phase. Today, prospects get much of their information online, and often go through awareness and discovery without ever talking to a sales person. Sales may not be involved, but marketing for sure…

Where sales people used to look at the prospect’s body language to gather important information, the marketing team can now collect huge amounts of information from the prospect’s online behavior. Steve calls this pool of data the Digital Body Language.

It is marketing’s task to use the digital body language to move prospects through the funnel until they are sales-ready. This can be done by calculating lead scores and nurturing the prospects based on their stage in the buying process, their role, interest level and communication preferences.

A key element of marketing’s new role is to capture all possible data about the prospect. Everything should be recorded: email clicks, responses to direct mail, visits to the website, and so on. All this should be added to the prospect’s profile in a centralized database.

This also means that data quality is getting more important. The data should not only be centralized, but also normalized and free of duplicates and errors. This is also a key recommendation of another popular B2B Marketing book:  Lead Generation for the Complex Sale by Brian Carroll.

A next step is to nurture the prospect according to the prospect’s stage in the buying process, not according to the vendor’s preferred sales process. The prospect’s online behavior gives hints about where they are in the buying process, and it’s marketing’s task to distill this information from the prospect’s digital body language.

Steve also advocates more collaboration between sales and marketing. He suggests several ways to involve sales more closely in the nurturing process: letting sales initiate certain marketing initiatives, such as a specific lead nurturing program; letting sales send back leads to marketing if they’re not yet ready to buy; giving sales people notifications of important prospect activity, such as website visits or jumps in lead score.

And finally, the entire marketing process must be optimized continuously, based on the wealth of data that is now available. Not only can you measure the number of marketing-qualified leads, but also the percentage of leads that are subsequently accepted by sales (which should ideally be 100%).

All these changes requires marketing people with a different skill set: more analytical, process driven. It’s not about pretty graphics anymore, it’s about capturing and analyzing prospect’s data and intelligently running campaigns based on this data. Then analyzing the results and optimize continuously.

Digital Body Language is not an easy read, because it’s chock-full of information that has never been put in a book before. Steve has added about two dozen case studies, which are brief but provide practical examples that make the book come more alive. All in all, I think this book will soon become a classic in the demand generation space.

Steve Woods is CTO and co-founder of Eloqua. He blogs on the Digital Body Language blog, and the Eloqua Artisan blog. His Twitter name is @stevewoods.