It’s amazing the type of talent and, ultimately, content being driven from the marketing automation industry. This is a real market with real competition brewing. Net-net, I love having these guys come on The Funnelholic and “spit game.”

This post is no different. Kevin Joyce is the CMO of Market2Lead Inc. , one of the vendors vying for marketing automation supremacy.  He is clearly experienced, with 26 years under his belt. He also has marketing automation chops — for seven years Joyce has worked with many companies on their demand-generation strategies and on marketing-automation solution selection and deployment, particularly as CEO at Rubicon Marketing Group.

Good work Kevin! Here’s his interview:

1.    What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?

• Greater acceptance of social media by B2B as a means to increase brand equity: I believe in the last few years many B2Bs were waiting in the wings to see if the blogosphere could really have an influence on their business outlook. There was some awareness that it was good for Search Engine Marketing results, but it seems many corporations didn’t understand how the added transparency of social media could affect them. Perhaps it came from the sneaking suspicion that they were losing control of what was said about them. No amount of traditional PR budget could clean up nor even catch up to a runaway controversy. I believe that in 2009 “the wisdom of crowds” will take center stage and marketing at B2B firms will start to learn how and why to influence opinion leaders (amateur journalists) via social media vehicles.
• Greater adoption of marketing automation: I believe we are watching the marketing-automation industry “crossing the chasm.” The early majority will start to flock to this software to help save marketers time and make them more productive. The target market will move from being the high-technology early adopters to the more mainstream finance, healthcare and media companies. The number of consulting organizations that offer services around these products will blossom. It will start to get easier to hire marketing employees who have experience with one of these systems.Adoption will also increase in the existing customer base. The number of marketing users per instance of the software will grow as existing firms expand their use of the systems and marketers get more familiar with the power at their finger tips. It’s rather like buying a new 46-inch LCD TV with a manual as thick as the tax code. At first you just turn on the TV and watch it, but after a few months you start paging through the manual and figure out how to turn on a few “automatic” features that make your overall viewing experience increasingly better.
• Marketing operations comes of age in B2Bs: I don’t believe that right brain, creative, marketing communications managers are going to wake up anytime soon with greater analytical powers. We enjoy their strong right brain creative talent — that mastery of transforming 1,000 words into a single image and knowing just how to distill complex messages down to a crisp sound bite. I wouldn’t try to change these people a bit. But there are increasing demands on the marketing organization to become more analytical when it comes to demand generation. What is the ROI of campaigns, how many qualified leads did you deliver from that unbelievably expensive trade show and your dimensional door drops? Yes, marketing automation provides the tools to collect and present the data but humans still get to analyze the data and make better business decisions as a result. Marketing operations will become more prevalent in an effort to centralize many of the left brain activities in marketing — reporting, budgeting, planning, project management, marketing technology management, data quality stewards and so on.

2.    What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

Accelerating the rebound from the recession: It’s easy for CEOs to cut marketing budgets during a downturn if they don’t understand where leads come from. This is especially true if marketing executives have been unable to paint the picture that 10% of the business closed last quarter came from marketing spend in the same quarter, an additional 30% came from marketing spend that happened in the prior quarter and 60% was influenced by marketing activities in the two quarters before that! Without this clear linkage, a CEO can cut marketing’s budget and see sales in that quarter drop only 10%. “Woo hoo! What did we spend all that money on marketing for?”

Of course, the next quarter, the results will be down 40%, but the marketing budget cuts will have been six months previous and a distant memory. “So why are the results so bad? It must be the economy.” The following quarter, the results are even worse and someone realizes that the competitor is actually doing well. “Time to put some money into marketing and the results had better increase by more than 10% this quarter as a result.” Right! So, our biggest challenge is to demonstrate the linkage between the opportunity funnel and marketing investments and to be able to show CEOs how every dollar they put into marketing impacts the business and how long it will take to see those results. For B2B companies with long sales cycles, marketing activities are not a light switch that can shine abundance on an empty sales funnel. So we must analyze Q1 results and determine exactly when the marketing influence took place for each and every deal that closed, and then project that forward so we can prepare our CEOs for the realization that the marketing cycle is probably twice as long as the sales cycle and that recovery needs to start now.

3.    What are three metrics that B2B marketers should care about and why?

I am going to ignore the obvious ones, such as total net new leads by lead source, and mention three others that may not be so obvious.

• Form completion rates by unique form: You need one chart showing the weekly historical trend for all of your major forms on the Web site (info request, newsletter sign up, free trial, download, partner sign up, PPC form, etc). Web leads can be very economical and are usually a good indicator of interest. I find it fascinating that so many people focus so much attention on getting more visitors to the Web site and so little attention on the “last mile” —getting the visitors to complete a registration form. Form completion rates can vary depending on the offer, but in many cases it will be a lot easier to double the form completion rate than it is to double the number of visitors to a Web site!
• Marketing conversion rate by lead source: This one might produce results that will freak people out, but it’s very important. What is it we all want to do in hard economic times? Cut the 20% of marketing programs that are not working. It’s usually easy to recognize the campaigns that are pulling their weight but much more difficult to determine what is the bottom 20%. One way to really measure the efficacy of campaigns is to figure out the lead-conversion rate by lead source. (A lead conversion happens when a salesperson elects to convert a lead into a contact/account and is usually a good measure of lead quality). Remember that you will want to have a good handle on your average lead age before it converts so that “young” campaigns don’t get dinged simply because the leads haven’t had time to mature to a conversion-ready state.
• Responses by contact/lead type: Marketing spends a lot of the budget on generating out-going touches. It’s nice to be able to measure the incoming responses and codify them based on the type of person that responded: Net new lead, existing lead in system, existing contact but not a customer yet and lastly customers. By graphing the responses you get each week by contact/lead type you have a rough idea of how much you are spending on marketing to your installed base (loyalty marketing), on nurturing prospects, or on net new lead generation. The results may surprise you!

4.    What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

The primary oversight I have seen over the years is in finding the balance between creativity and science in lead generation. If you head to either extreme the campaign will not live up to its full potential. Successful demand generation requires a balance of both art and science. The art is in the communication, the science is in list segmentation, the measuring of campaign efficacy and heuristics. It is nearly impossible to find individuals who have both communications creativity and analytical leanings, so firms have to marry these individuals in program teams to get the best results. Some firms look to agencies to provide the creativity whilst they in-source the analytical element; for other firms it is just the opposite. Driving a balance in these skill sets in program teams is what’s most important.

5.    What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

Don’t get too hung up on “lead source.”A lead comes to your Web site from a referring link because of some successful PR, and he or she fills in a form to download a white paper. So what is your “lead source” field going to say? Is it the offer name, the form name, your Web site or perhaps the referring Web site URL? Further, this person is the research assistant to the director of the department and only one of 10 people that will be involved in the final purchase decision. All 10 people will each have five interactions with your firm before the deal is close, for a total of 50 interactions. So what makes the very first interaction, the “lead source,” that important? It isn’t, and neither is the most recent interaction before the opportunity was created. What is important is to understand the mix of interactions that happened, and in what order and by title so that you understand how prospects that eventually become customers want to engage with you. If you get too hung up on looking for the lead source, you miss the bigger picture!

6.    What three Web 2.0 applications, cutting-edge technologies or lead generation sources do marketers HAVE to consider to be successful?

Of course I have to answer that marketing automation software from Market2Lead will be the most vital addition to any marketing department! As I mentioned in response to the first question, I feel marketers also have to engage with social media because that’s how prospects have already chosen to engage with them. So kick your blog into high gear and start learning about feedburner, chicklets, RSS, Twitter and so on because the conversation has started without you. Lastly, consider the many tools for cleaning up your data, presenting a centralized view of your marketing data and stopping poor quality data from entering the system. There are many products out there to help with data hygiene; it’s time to start using them and stop making excuses for data odor!

7.    What do you hope for in B2B sales and marketing for the new year?

I think it’s a fantastic time to be in marketing. When I left engineering for marketing some twenty years ago, my poor mother feared that my career had taken a turn for the worse! I am more excited to be working in marketing now than ever before because the number of tools at our disposal has exploded in the past five years. The possibilities for measuring our influence on business outcomes have never been greater. I hope this is the year we attract more left brainers into marketing because the tools and processes exist to make marketing more measurable and successful — we just need the people and the skills to fulfill the dream!

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter