Sue Hay of BeWhys Marketing

November 8, 2010 by 2 Comments

Today, The Funnelholic wraps up its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Sue Hay, author of the blog 21st Century Lead Generation and founder of BeWhys Marketing, a full-service lead generation consultancy with managed services. The BeWhys team has helped midsize to enterprise organizations increase revenue by creating and implementing targeted lead nurturing campaigns using marketing automation. BeWhys incorporates lead process management best practices, lead scoring, persona building, content creation and mapping to achieve results.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Sue: The relationship between marketing and sales has significantly evolved over the past several years, as is evidenced by the Sirius Decisions research.

What has also changed significantly is the buying process. Potential buyers can educate themselves expeditiously from a myriad of channels: websites, blogs, webinars, tradeshows, eGuides, analyst reports, customer reviews – you name it, it’s out there. All to help them make an informed and intelligent buying decision. So I tried to visualize where it all starts and where it ends. And there are different factors to consider – such as people who are not ready to buy but still interested in engaging with you; prospecting specific target accounts; the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers – that need to be taken into account. It’s a continuous flow, yet being static picture, it doesn’t really show the movement that is predicated on the buyer’s cycle. So the funnel you see is the lead management process that sits over the top of buyers’ cycle.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?
Sue: I enjoyed looking at all of them, because they come from very unique perspectives. It was fascinating. I thought Barbra Gago’s and Matt Heinz’s both touching on the community perspective highlighted the human element. In particular the evolution and creation of evangelism; that’s a very powerful concept. Funnels are just diagrams of a process, but at the core are humans, and they are our customers. We need to understand what they like; what they are looking for; how do they feel comfortable communicating; how they react, interact and engage with us, and vice versa. Ardath Albee’s buyer-experience funnel captured that thinking. Michael Damphousse’s Demand Gen Cloud was fun and rings true that buyers really do put themselves in the funnel where and when they want, and there is a lot more movement than ever before. And I also enjoyed Carlos Hidalgo’s methodical stage-by-stage process – that thoughtfully overlaid the nurturing of the relationship with the buyer, and the reality of metrics, conversions and making money.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?
Sue: No one funnel is right or wrong. It’s an iterative process – the buying environment can change, so your funnel/process should be flexible enough to adapt. Be open to incorporate new or alternate ideas, while simultaneously focusing on “keeping it simple.” Try not to over complicate – keep the vision clear and focused.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?
Sue: Mapping the process out and brainstorming on a whiteboard is particularly helpful. Having representatives of both marketing and sales in that session is essential – at the end of the session both have to agree on what that funnel looks like, the definitions of each element and what the lead management process is – otherwise it won’t work. It can be a painful process but well worth the undertaking. A few things to consider going through the process:

  • Try to understand the person who might buy your goods or services. Create a persona, describe what they may look like, what they do, what they read – as well as all the typical demographic information.
  • How will you begin to develop and foster a thoughtful and trusted relationship? What does that look like, how does it map out into a integrated nurturing program?
  • What does the funnel look like from a sales perspective and from a marketing perspective? Identify the differences.
  • Overlay a lead management process to match that understanding, so that you don’t miss any opportunities.
  • What are the benchmark conversion rates at the various different stages of the lead management process?
  • Identify the goals that both marketing and sales are working to achieve.
  • Meet on a regular basis, once per quarter, to review your goals, conversion rates and optimize. The numbers will give you a good idea if you are on track.
  • Identify the right tools and resources you need to help you achieve your goals. Marketing automation and sales-force automation tools can really help in this area.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

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

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, DRIP and Lead Nurturing, Funnels, sales, Thought Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Focus Funnel Expert: Mike Damphousse of Green Leads

November 5, 2010 by 1 Comment

The Funnelholic continues its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Mike Damphousse, CEO/CMO of Green Leads and author of the blog Smashmouth B2B. He is a consummate sales and marketing executive, leading the growth of Green Leads while sharing B2B demand generation knowledge with others.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Mike: You mean my cloud? This concept was actually a blog article that has been in draft mode for months as a result of a whiteboard discussion I had with one of my clients. They were suffering with all the changing aspects of demand gen. It wasn’t what they were used to from years past and were trying to harness and make order of it. As I was listening to their CMO, I went back to the days when I spoke at Chaos Theory conferences and grabbed the marker from him and crafted the demand gen cloud.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if order doesn’t come to the cloud and the prospect starts moving along in the traditional manner, but they WILL come from different sources and WILL jump around the process and WILL define their own buying cycle. We simply need to harness it and move the order to where we want it to be.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Mike: Steve Gershik’s was touching on similar dynamics to the cloud. His description of how prospects “move forward or backward depending on their needs” just needs the word “sideways” in there too. We see it all the time with b2b appointment setting – we can insert a prospect that wasn’t already in a buying process right into the middle somewhere, or they can do it themselves with some action that bypasses the traditional process.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Mike: I actually talked to several people about it, and when we kept going down the path of a traditional funnel, pipeline or waterfall, we just kept uncovering dynamics in the models that didn’t fit. The lesson for all of us was to challenge traditional thinking. Don’t be afraid to adapt our systems and processes to better address how our buyers buy.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Mike: Whiteboards and debates. Get everyone involved. It’s not a marketing discussion or a sales discussion alone, it’s not just a C-level project. Get anyone that touches, influences or hears from prospects together and don’t start the discussion with a funnel on the whiteboard, start by just slapping words up there and then build the model. That’s how the demand gen cloud emerged.

I don’t know Craig, maybe you should rename yourself “The Cloudaholic”?

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

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

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Funnels, sales, Thought Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Focus Funnel Expert: Steve Woods of Eloqua

November 4, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Continuing with our series of interviews with contributors to Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models, today we interview Steve Woods, Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua and author of the blog Digital Body Language.

Steve co-founded Eloqua in 1999 and has held the position of Chief Technology Officer since that time. He is a prolific writer on topics related to demand generation and the current transitions within the marketing profession, and is the author of the book Digital Body Language – Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Steve: This view of the funnel was done with a mind to understanding how to evaluate and compare marketing efforts that may resonate with buyers and cause them to engage, but not directly drive revenue at that particular moment in time. If the buying funnel is looked at as a series of stages of increasing buyer interest, starting from unaware and ending with a closed deal, each stage can be associated a rough value. This value is based on the probability that people at that stage eventually purchase, and the value of a purchase.

With this value-by-stage in place, you then have a framework for analyzing how each marketing campaign moves buyers forward by one or two stages. The change in value associated with these stage changes is what the campaign drives, and thus how one campaign can be objectively compared with another, even if both are engaging with early-stage buyers.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Steve: All of the funnels were well thought out, and each teaches a slightly different lesson. Ardath Albee looks at the buying process from the eyes of the buyer, Mike Damphousse addresses the non-linearity that is key to understanding buyers, Barbra Gago looks at customers as the new marketers in their role as advocates, to name just a few. Each funnel contributes a very valuable perspective on how the leading thinkers in the space are thinking about the buying process.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Steve: It’s an ongoing effort. Understanding, and then analyzing, the overall revenue process given today’s dynamics is new, challenging and complex. We’re dedicating a lot of effort to this endeavor, and working with many of the top marketers in the space to formalize this type of thinking into a discipline that is beginning to be called “Revenue Performance Management.” Creating this funnel, and working with many of the thought leaders who have created their own way of understanding the funnel, is an important step in that effort.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Steve: The first and most important effort is to understand your buyers. Who are they? How do they learn about you? How do they validate their assumptions? Where do they seek information? What do they need to know? When are they interested in hearing from your sales team? That exercise is the hardest in creating a funnel process for your organization. Once that has been completed, mapping that buying process to a set of named stages of the funnel is much easier.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

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

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Funnels, sales, Thought Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Focus Funnel Expert: Adam Needles of Left Brain Marketing

November 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

It’s time for another interview with a contributor to Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Adam Needles, Vice President of Demand Generation Strategy at Left Brain Marketing. Adam is a passionate marketing change agent in B2B marketing, helping companies develop more buyer-centric demand generation programs that drive revenue and build their brands in a bottom-up fashion, and he pens the blog Propelling Brands.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Adam: Let me start by saying I have no artistic talent. So my lack of design composition skills aside, I think there is a powerful insight in my funnel.

Modern B2B demand generation is not about the marketer, it’s about Buyer 2.0. And funnels/conversions in the modern demand generation environment are not linear. That’s why I think it’s powerful to envision an iterative nurturing loop — one that we can go around and around in, having two-way, content-based dialogue with a prospect and engaging in progressive profiling, until (s)he is ready to talk to someone on our sales team.

If you have a clear Universal Lead Definition — at Left Brain Marketing, we talk about knowing at what point you have a definable Sales Opportunity — then this hand-over point is clear. And then our pattern of nurturing activities should be about building up to the point where we have a match.

This is not to say you should not have a conversion model, and in fact, over the next few weeks we will be launching a new conversion model — The Left Brain Model — that we believe is a critical model for qualifying Prospects and for delivering Sales Opportunities.

But I think it’s critical to capture the idea that modern B2B demand generation must be two-way, must place buyer education at the core, must be buyer driven and must proceed at the buyer’s pace. This may sound complicated, but this is where sound nurturing logic combined with sophisticated marketing automation can make a big difference in delivering on-demand generation that is sustainable, buyer-centric and one-to-one.

This also is the key path to predicting and managing revenue, because your insights into what works, marketing-wise, and what doesn’t, and your visibility into where you stand at a given point in time, will be the 100% accurate and closed-loop amalgamation of all of your one-to-one buyer conversations, rather than some random estimate of how you’re doing. Bottoms-up, versus top-down.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Adam: The funnels in the book that I saw that most embrace this concept of buyer-centric marketing are those from Michael Damphousse at Green Leads and Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group. In fact, I’m pretty excited by the evolution of Carlos’ lead management diagram — something we collaborated on a bit when I was at Silverpop — because it does a good job of co-integrating the nurturing loop with the conversion waterfall from SiriusDecisions.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Adam: Two things: A.) Using your brain a lot can be tiring. B.) The funnel has flipped in modern B2B demand generation; the buyer is now at the center, and campaigns must be dynamic; however, it can be tough to illustrate this. It’s way too easy to draw a linear funnel that everyone can wrap their heads around. But this does B2B marketers a disservice. So it’s worth the challenge of coming up with a way to depict the fundamentally new approach we need to take in this Brave New World.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Adam: Start with your targeted B2B buyer. What buying stages does (s)he go through? And where does (s)he consume information during the buying process? Then you need to figure out what constitutes an ideal Sales Opportunity, and work your way backward — rationalizing qualification levels and requisite content interactions against buying stages. In fact, we think that our upcoming release of The Left Brain Model will help organizations, so I look forward to sharing that in the marketplace.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

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

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Funnels, sales, Thought Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Focus Funnel Expert: Tom Scearce of Scearce Market Development

November 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The Funnelholic continues its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.

Meet Tom Scearce, Principal and Founder of Scearce Market Development, a Seattle-based sales and marketing consultancy. Tom has helped companies in diverse industries (business services, media, technology, medical devices) and sizes ($10 million to $1 billion-plus) increase revenue, and he writes the popular blog The Lord of the Leads.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Tom: I wanted to create a funnel that would add something to the conversation, which is a tall order from the get-go. As you, The Funnelholic, know better than most, the funnel has been a heavily used metaphor for years. There are already a lot of really good funnels out there, and I knew that the submissions from other Focus experts would only raise the bar. So I figured out early on that I would need to do something nontraditional. I didn’t yet know what that meant, but it was a small victory to just mentally break free from the funnel shape.

Serendipitously, I was working at that time with two prospects where our discovery meetings turned into white-boarding sessions. (It seems like white-boarding always succeeds where canned PowerPoint slides and freeform discussions fail.) My submission originated from those two prospect meetings, one of which eventually resulted in a new client relationship. I go into a little more detail about this on my blog.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Tom: I like how Ardath Albee shows the funnel widening as the buying process becomes more involved and the exchanges between buyers and sellers become more rich. One of my main beefs with “old school” interpretations of the funnel is the relentless focus on conversion – getting a subsets of leads at each stage to progress to the next stage. I get that we need to work the numbers to drive conversion. But just like financial over-engineering contributed to a collapse of our economy, funnel over-engineering can contribute to failure in sales. So instead of trying to mechanically force conversion, we should just be doing things that show the right client (an important caveat) that we are a viable option for their business, and equipping our salespeople with the tools to do likewise in their conversations (with the right client). I think we all know this and practice it in our work with clients, but Ardath’s model seemed to reflect (better than mine, actually) the natural widening of the funnel as we engage the right clients.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Tom: In a nutshell: “Keep it simple, stupid.” Actually it’s more like: “Keep it simple, then step back, look at it, realize it’s still not simple enough, then make it simpler, stupid.”

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Tom: I think everyone does need to create a funnel to model their business. But I have found that it’s usually premature to create a funnel (or a Web site, or collateral, or even a marketing team) before there’s solid agreement between sales, marketing and the CEO on the answers to some fundamental questions, such as:

  • Who is the wrong client for our business and why?
  • Who is the right client for our business and why?
  • What is the message we want to send to the right client (and the wrong client, too)?
  • What types of media (owned, influenced or paid) will we use to deliver the message?
  • Exactly how will each form of media (including people) carry the message to the right client?
  • What are our offers (content-based and commercial) and how do those offers attract and appeal to the right client?
  • What offers can we deliver to the wrong client that effectively…
    • …keep them from taking up our salespeople’s time and thus throwing a wrench in our funnel, and
    • help them to someday become or refer the right client?
  • What is the experience (of our brand and business) that we want the right client to have when they get the message?
  • How many of the right clients need to get the message, so that a portion of them will buy our products?

Getting agreement (or at a minimum, getting the CEO’s mandate) on these questions makes the funnel-modeling exercise much simpler and more productive.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

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

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Funnels, sales, Thought Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Focus Funnel Expert: Steve Gershik of 28Marketing

November 1, 2010 by 2 Comments

This week, The Funnelholic continues its series of interviews with the industry luminaries who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models. As you’ll recall, Focus.com’s book of funnels features interpretations of pipelines from sales and marketing thought leaders, providing insight into how frameworks can vary.

Steve Gershik is the CEO of 28Marketing and the blogger behind The Innovative Marketer. Steve has worked in online marketing and demand generation for 17 years for companies such as Eloqua, Nuance and TOA Technologies. As founder of 28Marketing, he’s worked with a number of B2B technology and cloud computing companies, as well as Apple, HP and Oracle.

The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.

Steve: Often, marketing and sales depict the funnel as gravity fed – leads go in the top like meat into a grinder and eventually all come out as hamburger at the bottom. Of course, we know the funnel is much more complex than its real-world counterpart – sales leads just don’t move through in such a linear fashion.

The problem with looking at the funnel as a geometric shape that diminishes in volume as you move from top to bottom is that it misrepresents what is often in reality within the B2B firm. Frequently, you have many contacts stuck at a particular stage, but think you need more leads coming into the top to help with sales efforts. At the end of a particular quarter, you may see many more opportunities at the bottom of the funnel than you’ll see just a stage or two prior. So at 28Marketing, we try to represent the funnel by looking down into it, and seeing that leads are not static within a stage, but very often in motion, moving around within a particular buying moment, and then moving up or down as their situation changes.

A common situation at companies I work with is they have good visibility into the activities that go into the top of the funnel (“marketing creativity”) as well as a reasonable view of the deals that they expect to come out the bottom (“sales heroism”). What they lack is insight into the Intra Funnel MarketingTM, the set of activities that takes place between lead acquisition and deal closure.

The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?

Steve: They all resonated with me in one way or another. The fact that they were all different indicates there is no one universal tool that works for every company.

The funnel that most resonated with me was the “waterfall” picture illustrated by Carlos Hidalgo. It’s a proven model first popularized by the sales and marketing analyst firm Sirius Decisions in recent years. What I like about Carlos’ model is that it presents a solid visualization of prospects moving from one stage to another, and a good framework for understanding conversion rates.

The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?

Steve: Images are powerful. Whether you depict your funnel as a classic larger-to-smaller shape or some other form of geometry, the picture you use to illustrate your funnel forms the basis of conversation between marketing and sales and the executive team. Make sure it reflects the reality of your sales situation.

The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?

Steve: Here are three good practices for companies who would like to start modeling their sales cycle:

  1. Face the complexity. Buying cycles are more complex these days, often with multiple stakeholders from within the company. Companies that oversimplify the real process through which their buyers come to them may be creating a holographic view of their sales pipeline, not a real picture of the actual funnel.
  2. Don’t be afraid to start simply. Stipulating that this is a recursive exercise, and that you’ll get better over time, will help you get started now, which is the very best time to start.
  3. Be sure to give your Intra Funnel Marketing its due attention. While social media and search marketing hold the spotlight for many marketers, it’s often the set of activities and processes that address the people who are in your funnel now that will determine your revenue results later.

Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’

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

Filed Under: b2b Marketing, b2b Sales, Funnels, sales, Thought Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,