Professional Services Marketing Automation: What You Need to Know
Marketers are charged with filling the top of the sales funnel with qualified leads. That requires technology. Or more specifically, it requires a marketing automation platform (MAP).
Professional services marketing automation systems such as Adobe Marketo, HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud bring precision, process, analysis and scale to digital marketing campaigns. These applications track, acquire, score, nurture, and transfer sales-ready leads to sellers. Here’s how they do it.
- Lead Tracking. MAP systems track anonymous visitors using cookies. They store click-stream data by cookie ID and apply IP reverse lookup to identify the visitor. When the anonymous visitor becomes known, the cookie history is transferred to a lead record.
- Lead Acquisition. Most MAPs include tools that can be used by non-technical staff to create landing pages and registration forms which capture anonymous visitors and convert them into known contacts. By tracking each visitors digital footprints, including what content they have consumed and what search terms they used, the marketer can begin to understand their buyer role, preferences and where they are in their buy cycle.
- Lead Scoring. Most leads visiting the company website are still researching. Forwarding these contacts to sellers annoys buyers and wastes valuable sales time. Instead, marketers must offer educational and other helpful content to help the buyer advance in their purchase journey.
They must also monitor the lead to know precisely when he or she is ready to speak to a salesperson. This is where lead scoring is useful. Lead scoring is a process of assigning point values to visitor attributes and behaviors to measure fit and propensity to purchase.
It’s a good idea to first capture and score implicit buyer behaviors such as the volume of visits to the website, the type of searches performed, the specific web pages read, and the type and number of collateral downloads. Each of these behaviors provide specific and actionable data points which automatically update lead scores.
When the lead reaches or exceeds a threshold score it is automatically forwarded to a salesperson for follow-up. MAPs also score explicit criteria such as firmographics (i.e., company size, industry, location) and demographics (i.e., contact title, role). These criteria measure fit with the company’s target audience or ideal customer profile.
When leads are objectively scored to advise when they are sales-ready, marketing passes fewer but higher quality leads to the salesforce. By holding back unqualified leads until they become qualified, the sales-ready leads get more attention and seller productivity increases. In fact, one study found that a 10% increase in lead quality generates a 40% increase in salesforce productivity.
- Nurturing Marketing. Buyers are no longer forced to engage with sellers to learn about a company's products or services. The abundance of online information has changed the way buyers search and research service companies.
According to Forrester’s Sirius Decisions, "70% of the buying process is now complete by the time a prospect is ready to engage with a salesperson." That means marketers now own the majority of the buy cycle and must implement techniques which engage buyers before they down-select their vendor shortlist.
MAPs use a combination of customer insights and nurture campaigns to deliver progressive email communications of educational and informational content to engage and advance buyers until they become sales-ready.
In the B2B space, research shows that 26% of new leads, on average, are sales-ready when received. These leads are immediately forwarded to sellers.
49% are not sales-ready when received but about three-quarters of this group will eventually become qualified. This group is assigned to a nurture marketing campaign. Lead scoring will track their behaviors and forward them to sellers once they reach a sales-ready lead score.
That leaves 25% of new leads, on average, that are not sales-ready when received and never will be. This group is disqualified.
This data highlights how nurture campaigns can generate just as many leads from the not-yet-qualified group as the initially qualified group. It’s a high impact revenue opportunity that goes untapped by most service companies.
- Lead Transfer. A MAP can automatically distribute qualified leads to the sales team once those leads reach a threshold score. But finding the right balance so that qualified leads are not held back from the salesforce and unqualified leads are not forwarded to them is a fine line.
Continuously reviewing and enhancing scoring models will improve learning and lead distribution results. Many marketers are also finding that by delivering buyer intelligence with the lead—such as including the visitor’s online behavior history and appending the lead with demographic or social attributes—they can save even more valuable sales time.
A Sales Optimization Study by CSO Insights found that 20% of a sales rep’s week, one full day, is spent researching new prospects. If marketers can deliver more intelligence with their leads, including history, content or links to valuable sources, they can empower sellers with more time for selling. Marketers can use the MAP to deliver alert updates when previously transferred leads engage in new or unusual behaviors.
- Lead Analytics. Information reporting is essential for continuous process improvement. Most MAPs have the capability to tie every lead, customer, and revenue dollar back to the marketing program or campaign that sourced them. However, this is quite often not an out of the box capability. Some additional configuration is usually required.
Also, most MAPs do not capture or integrate marketing costs which generally reside in financial or ERP system. That means key metrics such as campaign ROI and ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) remain elusive. To do better than the norm, begin your revenue attribution by defining your lead to customer conversion cycle stages and metrics.
Marketing Software ROI
It’s no small effort to implement a professional services marketing automation system. But the payback is worth the effort.
A Forrester lead-to-revenue study found that marketers with marketing automation clouds sourced 44% of their company's sales pipeline. On the flip side, marketers without marketing clouds contributed only 34%.
Aberdeen reports that companies with MAPs see 53% higher conversion rates (from initial lead to sale opportunity) and 3.1% higher annual revenue rates than non-adopters. And according to analyst firm Gartner, companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6 to 9 months.
One More Thing
Forrester estimates that taken together, lead origination and lead nurturing account for 21% of the overall B2B marketing budget — the largest component of marketing spend. It’s a big investment with an even bigger return.
But beyond an increase in conversions and revenues, there’s another benefit of a professional services marketing automation system that should not go unnoticed.
It's not uncommon that the head of marketing doesn't possess the same clout as the head of sales. This is often because the head of sales regularly projects revenues to the company and is therefore associated with revenue generation. In contrast, the head of marketing all too often fails to project revenue contribution and is therefore associated with costs.
According to Forrester, 76% of B2B marketers agree or strongly agree that their “ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect.”
