0 B2B Marketing Automation Report Is Now Available Online. Thanks, OfficeAutoPilot

Thanks to the heroic efforts of my friends at OfficeAutoPilot, the new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) is finally available for online sales. You can click here to access the new landing page and order forms.

There's a long story behind this, with many lessons that reinforce and illuminate the basic premise behind marketing automation: that is, marketers need a system that makes it easy to do their jobs. I don't have the energy to write that at the moment, however. But I will point you to the animated video on the OfficeAutoPilot home page, which is laugh-out-loud funny (to me, at least) and makes the fundamental case quite clearly.

I'll qualify this a bit by pointing out that OfficeAutoPilot is one of the systems aimed at small businesses, which means it includes the CRM and e-commerce components you don't find in products aimed at larger organizations. This is what made it perfect for Raab Associates' own needs, since the specific roadblock to selling the VEST on the existing Raab Guide Web site was that the e-commerce bit wasn't working.

Even more important, OfficeAutoPilot (again like other small business specialists) has recognized that its clients need a great deal of help in setting up their systems and has organized accordingly. The OfficeAutoPilot staff spent nearly two full days working to get me running, drawing on best practices to create a much more sophisticated process than I would have started with by myself. More to the point, they did this without charging a penny -- which I'm pretty sure is what they do for all their clients, not just industry analysts like me. In fact, although OfficeAutoPilot owner Landon Ray did give me a free subscription to the system (full disclosure), the staff who worked on my project didn't seem to have any particular sense of what I do.

This gets to the heart of the marketing automation deployment challenge, which is helping marketers get real value from their systems from the start. Industry gurus, myself included, rant about this endlessly. So I wasn't particularly surprised to find myself living it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that OfficeAutoPilot really works to solve it in the most direct way possible: by just doing the stuff for clients who need help. I fully recognize that life isn't so simple at bigger organizations, but it's still an important example to hold up as one type of ideal.

Ok, I guess I wrote a little more about this than I had planned--it's my way of winding down after an intense several weeks of first getting the VEST created and then finally putting it into the market. The job isn't really done: I need to toss the old Joomla-based Raab Guide site and create a new one in WordPress that I can maintain personally. And at some point I still need to do a more detailed review of OfficeAutoPilot itself, which I'll say in general I'm finding quite satisfactory. But for now the real story is just to say thanks to the folks at OfficeAutoPilot who took such good care of me, and I am quite certain will continue to do so in the future.

0 B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Comparison -- Here's a Sample

I’ve been having way too much fun working on my new industry report. I decided to make it an interactive document that lets users (viewers? readers? The Chosen?) set their own weights for the different scoring categories and do detailed, side-by-side comparisons of vendors they select. This gives the document vastly more play value than a simple report. Much more important, it reinforces the point that I keep stressing, which is that every evaluation must be based on the buyer’s unique needs. Having three different sets of scores was a step in that direction, and making things interactive goes still further.

Click here to download a sample of the format. (Beware that it's a big file and can take several minutes to load.) Vendor names have been replaced with football teams and the specific details are excluded. But you can see the results of the different scoring schemes and also get a list of the specific items with their weights and definitions. The sample also contains draft versions of the introductory materials, which need some reformatting. (Note to Mac users: this is an Adobe Flash document; you'll have to use Adobe Reader to view it.)

In case it’s not obvious, you can move the little sliders on the “Sector Chart” tab to see how the different vendors move around depending on how you weight different categories of attributes. The final report will show directly how much each category contributes to each vendor’s score. You can also adjust the category weights on the grid within the “Scoring Weights” tab, which shows the detailed items. You have to mouse over the numbers in the grids – not the most convenient method, but the one allowed by the software I’m using (SAP Business Objects’ Xcelsius).

I actually did work up a version of the report that lets users set their own weights for the individual items. Unfortunately, that seems to overtax the software, so I’ll have to leave that out of the final product. I might put it out as a separate product or upgrade to the base report.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. The report itself should be ready for distribution within a few days, and of course I'll announce it here first.

0 150+ Questions for Your Marketing Automation RFP

Summary: I've posted a list of nearly 200 RFP questions that I hope many people will adopt to their own needs. If it's used widely, buyers and vendors both benefit.

Death, taxes and RFPs. For business software vendors, all three are equally inevitable – and it's not clear which they dislike most. In my on-going humble efforts to serve the industry, I’ve posted nearly 200 detailed questions that could serve as the backbone for many RFPs. The list is available in the Resources section at www.raabguide.com; it’s free once you register.

The thought here is that everyone would benefit if many buyers worked from a standard list. Vendors could prepare one set of answers and buyers would get faster and more reliable responses to a thorough set of questions.

I do have a minor ulterior motive in posting this list. Those of you familiar with the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems know it already contains very detailed information on major vendors (Aprimo, Eloqua, Genius.com, Manticore Technology, Marketbright, Marketo, Neolane and Silverpop). But preparing each entry takes a tremendous amount of work and, frankly, it’s hard to make sense of the results. So I’ve come up with a list of mostly yes/no questions that highlight key differences among vendors. This is much easier to prepare and probably easier for buyers to use. I’ve sent this list to two dozen vendors and will publish the results in a new report as soon as the replies come back. Posting the list will encourage the vendors to participate, since they can expect other people to ask the same questions.

Obviously I wouldn't have planned the new report if I didn't think it was worthwhile. Still, the approach has several drawbacks. Here's how I'm dealing with them.

- It relies on the vendors to answer accurately. Outright puffery aside, written questions are open to interpretation and you can bet the vendors will give themselves the benefit of any doubt. The best I could do was to make the questions as specific as possible. Here’s a typical example:

share assets across campaigns: marketing materials such as templates, emails, Web pages and forms, content blocks and links can be shared across campaigns. “Sharing” means the component is stored outside of a specific campaign in a central repository which is accessed during campaign development. The system may either create an independent copy of the item for each campaign, meaning changes to the local copy or the master do not affect each other, or it can establish a link between the campaign and the master copy, meaning any change to the master will be reflected in all campaigns using that item.

Hopefully this is precise enough that a “yes” actually means something. I’ve also described a couple of alternative ways of solving the problem, in the hope that this will encourage buyers to dig deeper on their own.

- The list is generic. Buyers have different needs. Each will care about only some of the questions on the list and about other questions I’ve left out. Of course, I can (and just did) warn buyers to select the items that matter to them. Beyond that, I’m creating separate weights for how important each answer is to small, medium and large marketing departments. That will let my final report include summary scores that help identify which vendors are best suited for each type of buyer.

Naturally, people will disagree with some of my weights. But that’s a healthy debate. In fact, prioritizing requirements is the most important discussion buyers can have when selecting a product. So bring it on.

- Not everything can be scored. Usability, vendor support and reliability are just some items that are hard to capture in yes/no questions. They also can change pretty rapidly. I can’t offer a solution other than to stress the importance of buyers doing their own research through demonstrations (based on their own scenarios), reference checking and conversations with other users.

In theory it should be possible for social media to provide a public forum for such issues. But I don’t see a way to do this without having self-interested parties distort the results. Suggestions, anyone?

* * *

Speaking of suggestions, I’m sure people will think of questions that should be added. I actually have a few myself. Changes will have to wait because the current set has already gone out to vendors. But if this concept generally works, we can expect future iterations of both the report and the master list. So there will be time for updates. If this really takes off, perhaps the list can be maintained in a communal form such as a Wiki. Raab Associates does not need to own this.

Indeed, a truly ideal solution would be for vendors to post their answers on their own Web sites. That would give buyers clear, consistent information without issuing a RFP at all. I’m not holding my breath for that one, however.

In any case, please download the list, use it as you see fit, and let me know what happens. As near as I can tell, everybody wins.

0 Marketing Automation System Trends: What We Found in the Raab Guide

Summary: Social media and access for sales people were the two big trends among demand generation vendors last year. But enhanced reporting was the most common improvement of all. Could marketers finally be ready to spend on measurement?

I’m pleased to report that the 2010 edition of the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems is officially available today, with updated entries on all vendors (alphabetically: Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Market2Lead, Marketbright, Marketo, Neolane and Silverpop Engage B2B).

Preparing the updates gave me a good review of where developers focused their efforts last year. Even though this is limited to the vendors in the Guide, it's a pretty representative sample of the industry as a whole. Here’s a quick look at what I found.

- Social media. At least three vendors (Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop) introduced new features aimed at improving marketers’ ability to use social media. What’s most interesting is that no standard approach has yet emerged. Eloqua focused on making it easier to embed sharable links within conventional marketing assets. Marketo added features to capture Twitter posts and Helpstream customer support interactions within a lead’s activity history. Silverpop made it easier to add social media handles to lead records so these could be used to send messages.

- Sales access. The same three vendors also added new tools to give salespeople better access to information the marketing automation system has captured about their leads. But in contrast to social media applications, the sales access modules were remarkably similar. All aimed at showing the activities of selected leads, typically by showing overviews and trends, and then letting users drill into details. The vendors also charged additional per-user fees for these modules. This contrasts with traditional demand generation pricing on database size and/or activity volume, but is the way sales automation systems like Salesforce.com are usually sold. These modules open up a major new revenue stream for the demand generation systems while simultaneously giving sales departments a greater reason to support marketing's purchase of the systems. Even though the modules clearly trespasses on the CRM vendors turf – inviting a potentially devastating counter-invasion – the opportunity seems irresistible.

- Upgraded reporting. You already knew that vendors were adding features for social media and sales access, but did you realize that nearly everyone (five of my seven vendors: Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo, Manticore Technology and Marketbright) also made substantial improvements in their business intelligence and reporting capabilities? Popular new features included user-customizable dashboards, better user-defined reports and more extensive standard reports. I take this as evidence that marketers are demanding more sophisticated reporting from their vendors, and suspect further improvements are on the way.

- New user interfaces. Market2Lead, Manticore Technology and Silverpop all introduced major interface upgrades. The focus was less on adding new capabilities than on making existing functions more accessible. I don’t need to remind you that usability is a critical point of competition among industry vendors. But as older vendors revamp their interfaces, it will become harder for buyers to differentiate along those lines. This might lead vendors to highlight the structural differences in their campaign engines, which are ultimately more important for usability than the visual interface. But, the structural issues are much harder for buyers to grasp, so this might not be an effective marketing approach. Could this lead vendors to compete on other grounds entirely?

- Anonymous user look-up and data enhancement. At least three vendors added or enhanced features to use IP address to identify the company of anonymous Web visitors, and/or to look up prospect names and other data about those companies in directories such as Jigsaw and Hoovers. I won’t name those three because the other vendors may have similar capabilities. In fact, anonymous visitor identification and enhancement have become pretty much standard features: today, it would be an exceptional vendor who did NOT make them available. These features also tie into both social media and sales access modules. They illustrate how the role of marketing has changed from simply gathering leads and handing them to sales, to building and managing prospect relationships.

So much for 2009. Many of these trends will surely continue in 2010, but I think we can expect some new directions as well. I'll talk about those in my next post.

0 Pedowitz Group Offers Free Support for New Eloqua Clients

The Pedowitz Group announced this morning that it was offering $15,000 in free consulting services and guaranteeing a five-day implementation to new clients who purchase Eloqua demand generation software . (Click here for the announcement.)

(If you’re not familiar with The Pedowitz Group, President and CEO Jeff Pedowitz ran the professional services group at Eloqua for several years before starting the company. The firm also works with Marketo, Silverpop Engage B2B and MarketingGenius depending on client needs. )

My initial reaction to the announcement was to wonder if it would be interpreted as evidence that Eloqua requires a lot of consulting to implement. Certainly that’s how I’d spin it if I were a competitor. But then again, maybe I wouldn't, because it focuses attention on how much support is really needed to deploy other systems.

On the surface, this is a strength of vendors who promise free implementation and deployment within a few days. But the reality is that most marketers need outside help to design their email campaigns, nurture programs, scoring rules, and CRM integration. This has less to do with learning the software than with knowing what works and how to apply it to their own business.

Yes, some products really are easier to use than others, especially for simple programs. That's one reason Pedowitz works with several vendors. (Download the Raab Guide report on Vendor Usability Scores for more on this.) And yes, some marketers will get their system running with no more than telephone support.

But it’s just plain silly to think that most marketers can quickly deploy sophisticated demand generation programs without some expert help. This is what’s highlighted by the Pedowitz Group offer – and it’s a discussion that vendors selling the dream of an instant deployment should probably avoid.

0 How to Compare Demand Generation Vendors: Choosing Summary Measures

I’ve more or less decided to offer a free summary of the demand generation vendor information in the Raab Guide. This might cost me a few sales, but it will enable many more people to benefit from the Guide’s contents and will make the Guide more valuable to the sponsoring vendors.

This raises the issue of exactly what should be in the summary listings. It seems that what people really want is an easy way to identify the best candidates for their particular situation. (Duh.) This suggests the summary should contain two components: a self-evaluation where people describe their situation, and a scoring mechanism to compare their needs with vendor strengths and weaknesses.

Categories for the self-evaluation seem pretty obvious: they would be the standard demand generation functions (outbound email, landing pages and forms, nurturing campaigns, lead scoring, and Salesforce.com integration), maybe a menu for less standard functions (e.g. events like Webinars, paid and organic search, online chat, direct mail, telemarketing, partner management, etc.), price range, and willingness to consider less established vendors. Once you’ve settled on these, you have the vendor ratings categories too, since they have to align with each other. That lets you easily find the vendors with the highest scores in your highest priority areas. Simple enough.

Except...some marketers only need simple versions of these functions while other marketers need sophisticated versions. But every system in the Guide can meet the simple needs, so there’s no point to setting up a separate scores for those: everyone would be close to a perfect 10. On the other hand, the vendors do differ in how easily they perform those basic tasks, and it’s important to capture that in the scoring.

The literal-minded solution is to score vendors on their ease-of-use for each of the functions. Sounds good, and as soon as someone offers me a couple hundred thousand dollars to sit with a stopwatch and time users working with different systems, I’ll get right on it. Until that happens, I need a simpler but still reasonably objective approach. Ideally, this would allow me to create the scores based on the information I’ve already assembled in the Guide.

My current thinking is to come up with a list of specific list of system attributes that make it easy to do basic functions, and then create a single “ease of use for basic tasks” score for each vendor. As a practical matter, this makes sense because I don’t have enough detail to create separate scores for each function. Plus, I’m pretty sure that each vendor’s scores would be similar across the different functions. I also think most buyers would need similar levels of sophistication across the functions as well. So I think one score will work, and be much simpler for readers to deal with.

The result would be a matrix that looks something like the one below. It would presumably be accompanied by a paragraph or two thumbnail description of each vendor:

	Ease of Basic Tasks	Sophistication of Tasks					Other Tasks (list)	Ease of Purchase (Cost)	Vendor Strength
		email campaigns	Web forms/ pages	nurture campaigns	lead scoring	Salesforce integration
Vendor A	5	8	4	8	4	9	4	7	5
Vendor B	8	4	8	4	7	4	7	5	8
Vendor C	4	8	4	9	4	7	5	8	6
...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...

So the first question is: would people find this useful? Remember that the detail behind the numbers would be available in the full Raab Guide but not as part of the free version.

The second question is: what attributes could support the “ease of basic tasks” score? Here is the set I’m considering at the moment. (Explanations are below; I’m listing them here to make this post a little easier to read):

- build a campaign as a list of steps.

- explicitly direct leads from one campaign to another.

- define campaign schedules and entry conditions at the campaign level, not for individual steps.

- select marketing contents from shared libraries.

- build decision rules from prebuilt functions for specific situations, such as ‘X web page visits in past Y days’.

- build split tests into content, not decision flows.

- explicitly define lead scoring as a campaign step, but have it point to a central lead scoring function.

- explicitly define lead transfer to sales as a campaign step, but have it point to a central lead transfer function.

These items are all fairly easy to judge: either a system works that way or it doesn’t. So in that sense they’re objective. But they’re subjective in that some people may not agree that they actually make a system easier to use for basic tasks. Again, I’d much prefer direct measures like the number of keystrokes or time required the complete a task. But I just don’t see a cost-effective way to gather that information.

Other measures I’d use in my scoring would be the amount of training provided during implementation, typical implementation time, and typical time for users to become proficient. These should be good indications of the difficulty of basic tasks. I do have some of this data, although it’s only what they vendors have told me. Answers will also be affected by differences in vendor deployment practices and in how sophisticated their users are. So I can’t give these too much weight.

Let me know what you think. Do these measures make sense? Are there others I can gather? Is there a better way to do this?

++++++++++

Explanations of the “ease of basic tasks” attributes:

- build a campaign as a list of steps. Each step can be an outbound message (email), an inbound message (landing page or form), or an action such as sending the lead for scoring or to another campaign. Campaigns can be saved as templates and reused, but the initial construction starts with a blank list. (This seems counterintuitive; surely it would be simpler to start with a prebuilt template? Yes for experienced marketers, but not for people who are just starting, who would have to explore the templates to figure out what they contain. For those people, it’s actually easier to start with something they’ve created for themselves and therefore fully understand.) Another aspect to this is that many marketers prefer a list of steps rather than a flow chart, even though they are logically the same. The reason is that simple campaigns tend to be very linear, so a flow chart adds more complexity than necessary. (Of all the items on this list, this is the one I’m probably least committed to. But the really simple systems I’ve seen do use lists more than flow charts, so I think there’s something to it.)

- explicitly direct leads from one campaign to another. Even basic marketing programs need to move leads from one treatment sequence to another, based on changes in lead status or behaviors. But building many different paths into a single campaign flow quickly becomes overwhelming. The easiest solution for basic marketing programs is to create separate, relatively simple campaigns and explicitly direct leads from one campaign to another at steps within the campaign designs. This approach works well only when there are relatively few campaigns in the program. More complex programs require other solutions, such as using rules to send different treatments to different people within the same campaign, having each campaign independently scan the database for leads that meet its acceptance criteria, or embedding small sequences (such as an email, landing page, thank you page and confirmation email) as a single step in a larger campaign. Systems built to handle sophisticated campaign requirements sometimes provide an alternative, simpler interface to handle simple campaign designs.

- define campaign schedules and entry conditions at the campaign level, not for individual steps. Basic marketing campaigns will have a single, campaign-level schedule and set of entry conditions. Even campaigns fed by other campaigns often impose additional entry criteria, for example to screen out leads who have already completed a particular campaign. Users will look for the schedule and entry conditions among the campaign attributes, not as attributes of the first step in the campaign or of a separate list attached to the campaign. More sophisticated marketing programs may also give each step its own schedule and/or entry conditions, instead of the campaign attributes or in addition to them.

- select marketing contents from shared libraries. The libraries contain complete documents with shared elements such as headers, footers, layouts and color schemes, plus a body of text and data entry fields. Marketers can either use a document as-is or make a copy and then edit it. In practice, nearly every system has this sort of library, so it’s not a differentiator. But it’s still worth listing just in case you come across a system that doesn’t. More sophisticated approaches, such as templates shared across multiple documents, only add efficiency for more advanced marketing departments.

- build decision rules from prebuilt functions for specific situations, such as ‘X web page visits in past Y days’. This saves users from having to figure out how to build those functions themselves, which can be quite challenging. In the example given, it would require knowing which field in the database is used to measure Web page visits, how to write a query that counts something entries in that field, and how to limit the selection to a relative time period. There are a great many ways to get these wrong.

- build split tests into content, not decision flows. The easiest way to test different versions of an email or landing page is to treat the versions as a single item in the campaign flow, and have the system automatically serve the alternatives during program execution. The common alternative approach is to directly split the campaign audience, either at the start of the campaign or at a stage in the flow directly before the split itself. This results in a more complex campaign flow and is often more difficult to analyze.

- explicitly define lead scoring as a campaign step, but have it point to a central lead scoring function. This is a compromise between independently defining the lead scoring rules every time they’re used, and automatically scoring leads (after each event or on a regular schedule) without creating a campaign step at all. Independent score definitions are a great deal of extra work and can lead to painful inconsistencies, so it’s pretty clear why you would want to avoid them. Doing the scoring automatically is actually simpler, but may confuse marketers who don’t see the scoring listed as a step in their campaign flow.

- explicitly define lead transfer to sales as a campaign step, but have it point to a central lead transfer function. The logic here is the same as applies to lead scoring. A case could be made that transfer to sales should in fact be part of the lead scoring, but if nothing else you’d still want marketers to decide on for each campaign whether sending a lead to sales should also remove the lead from the current campaign. Once you have campaign-level decisions of that sort, the process should be a step in the campaign flow.

0 Worksheet to Calculate Demand Generation Business Value Now Available

The fourth and final item I had planned to add to the Demand Generation Guide Web site was posted yesterday. This is a spreadsheet on calculating the business value of a demand generation system. Basically it defines a formula for calculating profit based on factors that are affected by a demand generation system: number of leads, lead-to-customer conversion rate, net margin per customer, acquisition cost, lead handling cost and sales cost. It then identifies which factors are affected by different demand generation applications (lead generation campaigns, lead nuturing campaigns, lead distribution, reporting). These are set out on a spreadsheet so users can enter the current values and then make changes to reflect gains expected from the demand generation system. The system calculates profits from both sets of figures and shows the difference, which is the value of the new system.

Nothing fancy about all that, but bringing it down to the different applications adds a note of reality to the usual "pull numbers of thin air" approach, I think.

The business case worksheet and other articles are available for free at www.raabguide.com.

0 Marketing Automation vs. Demand Generation: What's the Difference?

One of the first people I told about the new Guide to Demand Generation Systems -- an experienced database marketing consultant, no less -- was receptive to the Guide but asked whether there was any real difference between "demand generation" and "marketing automation" in general. This set off all kinds of alarms, since this was someone who clearly should have been familiar with the distinction.

As with most things, my immediate reaction was to write up an answer. In fact, I've decided I need at least three pieces on the topic: one explaining demand generation in general; one explaining how it differs from marketing automation; and another distinguishing it from customer relationship management (CRM). All this is on top of the piece I was in the middle of writing, on how to cost-justify a demand generation system. These are all fodder for the "Downloadable Resources" section of the new Guide site (have I mentioned in this paragraph that it's http://www.raabguide.com/?), which was looking pretty threadbare at just two pieces.

Anyway, the piece comparing demand generation vs. marketing automation is just finished and posted you-know-where. The short answer is demand generation systems serve marketers who are focused on the lead acquisition and nurturing portion of the customer life cycle, while marketing automation systems serve marketers who are responsible for managing the entire life cycle: acquisition, maintenance and retention. I suspect this distinction will not be popular among some of you, who will correctly point out that demand generation systems can be and are sometimes used for on-going customer management programs. True enough, but I'd still say the primary focus and competitive advantage of demand generation systems is in the pre-customer stage. One big reason demand generation systems aren't really suited for cradle-to-grave customer management: they don't typically capture the sales and service transactions needed to properly target customer communications.

By all means, download the full paper from http://www.raabguide.com/ and let me know your thoughts.

0 Sample Guide Entries Now Available on the New Site

The new Guide Web site is now fully functional at www.raabguide.com. Please visit and comment. If you want to make a purchase, even better.

Per yesterday's post regarding the comparison matrix and vendor tables, extracts of both are available on the site (under 'Look Inside' on the 'Guide' page). These will give a concrete view of the difference between the two formats.

I'm sure I'll be adding more to the site over time. For the moment, we have to turn our attention to marketing: press release should have gone out today but I haven't heard from the person working on it. Tomorrow, perhaps.