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well hi good morning everybody thanks for joining today's webinar we'll get started in just about 30 seconds just allowing a few more people to join into the room this is Dave Lewis founder and CEO of demand gen international and I'll be hosting the webinar today and the focus of today's session is on the demand funnel and establishing a process from click to close alright let's go ahead and get started we'll be spending about 40 minutes together I'm going to leave plenty of time for questions at the end we pull up the agenda and just to let you know a little bit about BrightTALK if this is your first time using it you'll notice up in the top of the menu bar you've got the ability to post questions by clicking on the questions button and you can post questions there I'll try to take as many questions as I can online during the end of the session but if you have questions that we can't get to I'll provide you my contact information at the end you'll also notice that in the footer of the presentation I've got my Twitter handle for you in case you feel like tweeting or reaching out to me directly and at the end of the session or if you have to leave early there is a ratings button and I'd love your feedback to hear what you thought of the today's session not only by giving it a rating from one to five stars but if you have any suggestions or comments love to get your feedback as well I've got the agenda in front of you and we're going to start off by talking about aligning sales and marketing into a unified process something I'm very passionate about then we'll get into the demand funnel talk about how to integrate lead scoring and nurturing into the demand funnel and then finish up with reporting and I've got some sample reports to show you and I save those for the end because I know a lot of you have always been very curious on you know different report layouts and templates that you can use to effectively communicate the volume and velocity of the funnel and other ways to measure marketing so feel free to stick with us to the end and I think you'll enjoy the concepts there that I'm sharing with you so let's start off with a little humor unfortunately in a virtual webinar can't hear the chuckles and laughs but I'll give you a moment to take a look so I've lived through this experience literally myself I'm sure a lot of you have where there's this friction between sales and marketing and it's really important that as as we go through this content that there's an important place that you have to start and that is to ensure that there's alignment between sales and marketing not only from a cultural perspective but from a process perspective I got my degree in computer science and in marketing and I remember the four PS of marketing very well and I feel like they skipped at least two of them maybe the fifth and six P where the process was not really well focused on it having a well-established sales and marketing process as well as the the other P which is all the programming marketing has become almost like the second IT Center within an organization we've got a lot of tools and technologies available to sales and marketing today and we certainly have a lot more programming available to us so to end this friction that that exists between sales and marketing is a big focus of today and a lot of people always ask me where's the name demand gen come from and it was from my previous experience before I started the company demand gen that we set up a demand generation task force and my last company and the idea what there was that our key stakeholders wouldn't call themselves the marketing team of the sales team that the members of this task force would be the demand gen team and it was a great way to start the alignment process and begin our definition and this is a become a very big passion of mine this alignment and what I'd like to encourage all of you to do is as we go through this transformation that's happening in marketing that you really think about you know setting up your company and setting up your sales and marketing process into a factory this Factory thinking where the the raw materials at the very top of the funnel those raw materials are typically we call leaves and the output of that process our customers in revenue and so let's not have this disjointed activities and separate sales function and marketing function but look at this as one integrated sales and marketing process that you know is going to consistently and predictably manufacture demand for us so how do we do that I'm going to start off with taking a look at a little bit more of a systems approach and then get into the funnel and the taxonomy and so when I say that what I mean is a lot of you on the call today and on the webinar probably either have a marketing automation system or are going to get one in the next six to 24 months it's certainly not a matter of if it's it's a matter of when that marketers are grabbing hold of some of the leading marketing automation systems and bringing that in especially for those of you and b2b demand generation many of you are probably most of you have a CRM system or again are in the process of getting one brand like salesforce.com are certainly very popular but the important piece here that the foundation that you're going to need to make everything happen and what I share with you today is having this integrated system of marketing automation and CRM and that it's one integrated system the marketing automation system is the interface to the data from marketing and the CRM is the interface to the data from sales but it's one integrated system so how does it all come together and you've got it laid out here on this slide starting with you know marketing running campaigns whether that's inbound marketing or outbound marketing and that you know this is probably the last time I'm going to use the term lead but those campaigns you know have you capturing leads and then in a well-integrated factory thinking approach we're going to score those leads and you'll see why that's so important in just a few minutes and then nurture those leads to move them through the buying process and facilitate the engagement and communication that needs to happen and then any good system is going to have you know an important dashboard for reporting and tracking it so this is a common framework that those of us getting marketing on erm our familiar with today it's the messaging that we're hearing from the vendors there's a lot of other content out there that focuses on this but what I want to do is really demystify today some of the secrets of how to make this all work really well in terms of this approach to the factory and the first place to start if you notice this is very this this system right here assumes that every lead comes in and gets scored and nurtured and handed up the sails and winds up being a customer we all know that that's not the case so where do we start how can we improve upon this foundation and the place to start is with what we call the demand funnel and there's many different terms out there for it I put up some definitions for those of you that are going to either look at this presentation at a later time or watching it not in the live format you've got some information and it really help describe what I mean by the demand funnel this is a systematic framework it's almost a way if you think about as grouping these prospective customers into defined stages and buckets as they move through the buying process it's really a language - that discusses what the process is for your company on how they're going to move all the way from the top from an inquiry to a customer and lastly it's critical because it defines the stages of this foundation so that you can segment score route and nurture and ultimately report on the funnel and its velocity and I'm going to go into that in greater depth some of you may have seen the demand funnel exposed to you from companies like series decisions and so what I'm going to share with you is what some of you may traditionally view it and then kind of give you a different perspective on how to really operationalize this funnel so what you're looking at is the integrated sales and marketing funnel notice the word integrated that this is all the way from click to close the key stages of the buying process and it offers some taxonomy that you can use as a starting point although you may adapt your own language within your own company I'll go through this language and then give you some definition for you to take away on the next slide in this case what you're seeing is three different pieces on this slide the five stages of the buying cycle from interest all the way to purchase a taxonomy that puts people into each bucket as they move through those stages and then a little bit about what's happening between sales and marketing so if you notice the suspect stage that sometimes referred to as like the total available market those are the folks that are not yet respondents to your campaigns and so marketing is capturing these respondents as they launch the campaigns and that is the interest stage of the buying process someone's identified that they have a problem and they're out looking for a problem and they have an interest in your product or service instead of calling that person a lead we call that person that respondent in inquiry and that properly labels them and eliminates a lot of friction that happens between sales and marketing because I got to tell you I've done tons of webinars and tons of on-site consulting sessions and I've asked people for their definition of a lead and I've never gotten the same definition let alone even from the same company or same department within a company so having important and specific definitions for each of these is critical the inquiry is going to if it progresses move to become marketing qualified as they go through the learning and education stage hopefully it will then start evaluating your solution and comparing it against others and comparing it to how well it satisfies their needs and solving the problem they'll then justify that and ultimately blend in a purchase environment and I'm going to address in a minute what to do when it doesn't move through the perfect world of going from click to closed but you can also see down below kind of what's happening at each stage from the last graphic that I showed you on that process you can see that once you capture that inbound inquiry marketing's job right there is to score and nurture and continue the conversation if it progresses to an MQL or a marketing qualified lead sales should accept that and further qualify they're going to ask different sets of questions that marketing on the forms and if things progress into an opportunity into the pipeline sales are going to facilitate that buying process of answering questions developing a relationship and really moving them ideally through to the customer process so all the sounds really good on a PowerPoint slide right it really makes a lot of sense as you think through that we just don't generate leads and throw them over the wall to sales but how do you operationalize it is when I'm going to really focus on and tie in scoring and nurturing here's some definitions for you that kind of expand on what I've already shared and I wanted to include those in the presentation these definitions or versions of these definitions were originally created by a company called serious decisions out of Connecticut who has really been a thought leader and and coined the phrase the demand waterfall and a lot of the modern marketing is based around this language that they created between sales and marketing but even serious decision recognized recently at their conference that took place in Arizona just a couple months ago that this model was evolving and changing for a lot of organizations and what I want to share with you is there isn't just a model you should adhere to there's there's a model that you should adhere to that's right for your business you may have a longer sales process or a more integrated process than once here today for example a lot of companies are using lead development reps these are people who sit either within the marketing or sales organization and they are handed the marketing qualified leads that are generated from marketing and then they do additional pre-qualification and if an opportunity is likely then that lead development reps handed off to sales and that process is used by companies like concur technologies and Taleo who is recently acquired by Oracle and many other companies and serious decisions has published these newer models in addition to this original model that they came out with about seven or eight years ago and again it's not that this model or their new enhanced model is the right model for you important point I want to make today is that there is a model for you to determine and a way to do it is to have that demand yen task force go through the process from click to close what do those look like well they start on a white board like this and they get sketched out and when you sketch it out and you think about the process from the marketing campaign generating the inquiry the inquiry getting qualified through a scoring algorithm scoring system and then getting accepted by the lead development wrapper sales and then moving through that you can well define who owns it how many different stages there are and what happens when things don't move through like the little post-it note over there on the right which indicates that not always is someone going to move all the way through the opportunity they might need to get recycled or disqualified and that really as you can see from the previous slide is not accounted for in the funnel what happens to people that don't move all the way through the funnel and to fully operationalize this methodology you've got to come up with taxonomy for not only each stage of the funnel but you've got to come up with taxonomy for the stages that are outside the funnel and even give reasons as to why they landed in that stage which I'll show you recycling this idea of recycling is a very important concept and it's often overlooked what happens here if you don't recycle is right marketing can generate 100 200 500 thousands of inquiries and mq ELLs and hand them off to sales and a sales doesn't have a way to kind of bring those back and recycle them to marketing all that money all that time all that effort gets wasted and that is using our factory analogy or metaphor that would be a waste of a lot of raw materials that will ultimately turn out someday into customers they may not be your customers someone else's if you don't follow up on it but about 80% of the demand that you generate will ultimately wind up in a customer at some point but only a smaller percentage maybe five to ten percent are going to wind up as your customers initially so what's going to happen with that rest of the 80% they're either going to buy somewhere else or hopefully you can re-engage them and recycle them and bring them back into the process for those of you that have Salesforce I'm just going to show you a quick screenshot of what it might look like if you operationalize this model and you can see here that we're looking at a lead record from within salesforce.com where a sales rep is going in and changing the status of that lead they're actually changing the status to recycle and you can see there's several different reasons that have been established by this task force to say why are they being recycled with their no engagement meaning that the rep couldn't engage with them could reach them on the telephone or through their own emails or was it theme that they're too early in the buying cycle or maybe there was a poor fit that this doesn't really represent close enough to the ideal customer profile at this stage or there wasn't budget maybe they're not a prospect or maybe there was a competitor already engaged there and they're shopping for other solutions and that purchase may not happen for quite some time by coming up with these reasons between sales and marketing and recycling them you can see the power that marketing can then use to nurture them and really tailor the messaging and know the appropriate timeframe for nurturing in the future so that gives you a little basis for where to start putting together a funnel that has each stage and then moving ideally someone through from click to close but addressing the stages where that doesn't happen and truly operationalizing that meaning putting it to place in your CRM and your marketing automation system and the leading systems today are adapting these models and working with firms like demand Jim to help them where they don't have the expertise and the impact that it's having on their revenue and the success is really tremendous part of making this all successful is not only having a lead scoring system which I'll get into but integrating the lead scoring system to the demand funnel and I rarely see that happening a lot of companies have lead scoring systems but they're not integrated to the funnel it's almost like it's a separate system that's been designed to create sales efficiency but they're not taking full advantage of what lead scoring can do from moving people into the right stage and that's what we're gonna focus on today so sharing with you another cartoon they probably all remember for those were around back in the days of I Love Lucy how Lucy was trying to keep up with what's happening and I also feel as a marketer sometimes that we struggle with dealing with the proper routing and segmentation of everything coming in and so with this cartoon attempts to do is take a humorous look at what happens when leave scoring is effectively in place that the lead scoring system is moving that inbound marketing effort into the right buckets whether that's the inquiry or qualified and that sales is picking up where they should and taking the qualified leads and marketing taking the recycled ones that are handed back and putting it together so how do you work with sales and marketing to make this all happen first of all you have to create the motivation for sales efficiency if you're not generating enough demand today you probably don't need to make sales efficient but if you are generating a lot of inbound inquiries the problem that you'll have like Lucy had with the chocolates is that sales can't keep up they don't know which ones to focus on so the big payoff of lead scoring is creating sales efficiency because you're going to rank each lead at the top of the funnel and help sales focus on the highest priority leads well that's easier said than done so I've put together six steps for any lead scoring project these are the six steps that you should use and I've spelled it out here for you so again for those of you that get or re-watch the webinar at a later time you can have that and note them first step is to put the task force together and like I said in my former company we called ourselves the demand gen task force and this task force was put in place to discuss the characteristics of what a sales ready leaders we had a lot of friction between the two teams because we were generating thousands upon thousands of enquiries and we didn't feel that sales was following up and the reason that sales wasn't following up with some of them is they felt that they didn't fit their ideal customer profile or they weren't the right person within the organization so putting that task force together to what is the sales ready leaders a great starting point that teams going to work on identifying the fit criteria and I'm going to give you a case study in just a little bit of what it might look like for a sample company but that criteria is kind of a tall dark and handsome information if you will it's what criteria what questions what I ask of a prospect that would help determine if they're ready for sales engagements next step is to take that criteria and weight them not all questions have the same weighting you might find that some questions that you ask in a forum are more important than a question another question kind of like a midterm and a final exam and even the answers for those questions might be different I'll give you some examples again in a moment next step would be to review the finalized model with this task force and make sure that you agree upon before you put it in place and I've often seen some mistakes here where people try to rush through this process so they don't work with an outside firm to help moderate it and they will make guess work and a quick one-hour meeting of what these questions should be and then go implement those on their forms and if you do that and kind of rush through the process or maybe you purchased a marketing automation system and you rush through that process with the vendor to just throw a model together that's going to come back to bite you and I really recommend that you take the time to really review the questions the waiting's and the answers that you've come up with and finalize that before you implement it and that would be the next stage as implementation and training with sales and I got to tell you if you've ever looked at some of the challenges itself has on their side it has to do with CRM adoption CRM adoption is one of the real challenges that that companies have when they get a CRM system and don't properly train or hire a lot of new sales reps and you could have the best lead scoring system in the world but if you don't train sales on how it was implemented in the methodology and how they should use it you're making a big assumption that just because it's there it's going to get used and that there is no field of dreams here they will not use it unless they're properly trained and that's important step after you launch the the lead scoring system resist the temptation to change it immediately unless is actually something systematically wrong but you do want to hold regular task force meetings at least every quarter to audit the results of your scoring system and discuss any proposed changes and because changes are going to impact in many ways your forms on your website for those of you that have a lot of forms that can that can be a big piece of work so want to make sure that you think through those changes the impact of those changes rather than get kind of bullied into asking another qualification question or asking it a different way those are the six key steps for for getting a project started and completed in lead scoring now I'm going to take you through a little bit for those of you that don't have as much knowledge on lead scoring on how it's done there's many different scoring systems today I'm going to talk about two-dimensional lead scoring because it's the most common model that people are using that looks at qualification and interest most of you are using a model that looks like this for those of you that have been scoring you give points for qualification you give points for how interested they are based on their online behavior and then you establish an aggregated score and well that is a huge improvement over not having lead scoring I'll give you another perspective on it in just a moment that may be more impactful for you so what is the qualification criteria on the qualification criteria that's what I really think about that is almost like speed dating right and I I think it's a great metaphor in the sense that you only have a very short period of time for someone to engage on a landing page and fill out a form so you really need to know what are the best two to four questions that you can ask of a prospect to determine if they should go on a date with sales to follow the metaphor what questions would you want to know that would help you determine if this person is close to your ideal customer profile and those are the questions that you should put on your landing pages and this is where you're going to spend the most amount of time with your sales team is coming up with those questions and let me give you an example the company located on the East Coast and they make a diabetes management system and diabetes for those of you on the call that maybe have it or know someone who has it you know there's many different types of diabetes or two different types of diabetes there's type one diabetes and type 2 diabetes well this company's product and solution is designed primarily for people with type 1 diabetes but if you notice on all the TV advertising today they never really discuss whether it's type 1 or type 2 diabetes most of the marketing that's taking place around diabetes management and blood sugar testing they talk about diabetes generically but these are two very different versions of the disease and so it's very important for this company when they have someone on a landing page to ask what type of diabetes do they have because their product is really only a solution for people with type 1 diabetes imagine how effective their marketing could be at generating response and interest in their solution for all the people that have type 2 diabetes and sales getting frustrated that they can't sell to any of these people or very few of them because the solution is not really right for type 2 diabetes so that is the most important question and it should be heavily weighted and the best answer and almost only correct answer is type 1 diabetes for this company another important question is who are you what's the persona and we get into nurturing in a minute or two we can talk about the importance of that but understanding who they are not only helps with scoring in this case a patient is going to score higher than possibly a caregiver or maybe even a parent maybe that is maybe a parent is going to really resonate better than a patient depending on the patient's age and you notice that there's many different questions here six in fact and ideally unless you can ask all six questions on a landing page and maybe you can if you're using a free trial offer you're only going to really be able to ask two or four these questions and what you see here are some of the best questions that this company could ask to help profile and score including which insurance provider do they use because diabetes management is expensive if they have a good insurance carrier the chances of getting their product covered by insurance or copay is is maybe at risk and so this is a clever way of asking you know is their budget by asking you know who's your insurance provider and then scoring against the ones that are most likely to help fund this diabetes management system so those are some examples and there's certainly plenty of examples on the web of implementing scoring what I'm showing you here is a workbook that we use with our clients on how to identify the question identify the answers wait the question and wait the answers and derive the points for each one like I said there might be two to four of these second part of it is the digital body language and if you have a marketing automation system you can measure that today using things like website behavior form activity email responsiveness and probably eighty to a hundred different types of online digital body language that you can measure knowing which ones and how to measure it is part of this kind of secret recipe and we've certainly done a lot in helping companies develop their interest model but it's a very very effective way to help prioritize for sales who is most interested that leads me to taking these and integrating them together so it's probably the most complicated graphic that I'll show you in the presentation today so let me break it down for you this is how the funnel and scoring come together so it's really important that you understand this concept on the left side is our qualification level and that's basically saying based on our questions and answers today are they highly qualified medium qualified or low qualification and then how interested are they instead of adding a and B together notice that we've created an intersect model where we've said if you're highly qualified and high interest we'll give you an A but this also gives you the chance to change the ratings for each of these nine quadrants you might feel that someone who has a high interest level and low qualification should be a B and this way you can segment people in each other into the right ratings if you also notice the legend in the top right corner what I'm suggesting here is that here's how scoring in the funnel work together is that when you run a campaign when their score or the lead reading gets to a certain threshold you have it set automatically to change their status from inquiry to marketing qualified lead and that's how scoring in the funnel can work together to move people down the funnel in a systematic way and very Factory approach someone responds to a campaign their status is an inquiry put them through the scoring system if the scoring system grades them high enough then change their status from inquiry to marketing qualified lead and put them in front of sales using this methodology how does that look like in CRM again let me show you a quick graphic you can see one of the ways that we've implemented lead scoring for one of our clients and you'll notice that on the left hand side we've got a nice iconography where you've got stars for showing what the rating is alongside with the letter rating this is a much more effective approach than just putting a lead scoring number in front of them because it allows the right brain and left brain to work together so they can see who they should focus on and then this approach also uses some meters to show their qualification and interest level all right we'll wrap up with nurturing and then looking at reporting and so a lot of you are probably nurturing today again the focus today is to talk about how nurturing in the funnel can work together into an integrated process and so again many different definitions out there for nurturing here's one for you and there's really three parts to this definition it's an automated process and it's a dialogue it's a two-way conversation and what I mean by that is you're saying well Dave how could you send emails out and make that a two-way dialogue and that's done this way think about the content of who the persona is so your dialogue with them is content not so much just about your products but also talking about why your solution is a revolutionary solution why this is going to help them be successful and what content you have available for them to get educated and learn about the subject matter before you start educating about the specific features of your product and where are you going to do this at key stage of the buying cycle we could cover this in great depth today but I'm only going to focus on two key stages and those are the at the top of the funnel where marketing has control so if you're using scoring and you're automatically segmenting people into the stages of the funnel between inquiry and MQL what you're seeing here is that we would have an inquiry nurture that would pick up anybody who's been status as an inquiry and communicate a series of touch points to hopefully raise their interest and maybe do some additional qualification when their score gets high enough and they're reistad us to an MQL they would want to drop down into the marketing qualified lead nurture so that further education is happening at that stage of the buying cycle and possibly even an introduction to lead development or sales that could be one of the objectives of the nurture is to make that introduction so there's plenty of other nurtures like recycle nurtures and onboarding nurtures but what is nurturing through the funnel really mean when I talk about that it's building a set of nurtures that are tied to the segment's an inquiry nurture MQL and recycle being three that almost every marketer who has a marketing automation system should be putting in place and you may not even have just one inquiry nurture you may have multiple tracks by each persona I talked about this diabetes management solution attracting both parents and patients wouldn't it be better if the content for the parent was different than the content from the patient to really do provide a much more engaging conversation it's also about delivering the right content at the right time as well as having a you know purpose for each of the nurtures way too many nurtures I see develop just string together a series of emails and and say we've got a nurture that's not nurturing that's stringing together just a series of touches really have a purpose for your nurture and maybe that purpose is to take any inquiry and try to move them to an MQL by raising their interest but it really have a defined goal you've got to develop content there's plenty of webinars and additional resources online I'll give you some links at the end but start with a Content map which will serve as your guide for what content works best and when you've got to create different content just like this webinar is a different way of me providing this information and some of the content that we've got available for download on our website you're going to want to think about content in the form of you know whether it's industry white papers - ROI calculators and product demos different types of content to be used at different stages the buying process and that's really important and an important step in it in doing an inventory of what you have as you start working on your nurtures so covered scoring and we've covered nurturing how do we know if this is all working and we do that through reporting there's probably a bookshelf full of marketing books on reporting there's not a quite a whole library on them but there's certainly a shelf or two and today I'm going to focus on reporting in terms of the funnel and I took this screenshot which looks like a traffic watch operation center and you know whether you watch the weather which only has a couple key metrics that the meteorologists provide or you go to a hospital and they only monitor a couple vital signs or even drive a car which has a dashboard with only a few simple instruments I will tell you that marketing reporting should not be complex you less is more and in terms of today I just really want to focus on simple ways that you can report the effectiveness of your funnel assuming that you're capturing this information so let me give you some benchmarks and show you some places to start so these are some demand funnel bench benchmarks that were published by serious decisions and what you're seeing here is I've relayed out the content in a way that's hopefully helpful for you it's basically saying that for every campaign that you run you could expect a two to five percent response rate that's going on to saying based on these averages and benchmarks that the number of marketing qualified leads you'll generate from those inquiries is four to eight percent then it answers what the average number will get accepted by sales and that's 45 to 75 percent you might immediately think wow those are some low numbers that are going to get accepted by sales but keep in mind two things or multiple things are happening here one there may be an issue around process and that there could be CRM adoption that's preventing them getting getting accepted or don't forget that some of these marketing qualified leads are going to get handed back to marketing and get recycled or disqualified so those that get accepted are ones that are progressing through the funnel and getting properly acted upon 50 to 60 percent for sales qualified leads and then sales closing 20 to 30 percent but notice that I've also added on the bottom a couple velocity measurements that you should have which is what's the number of inquiries the percentage of inquiries that convert to close one what's the percentage of marketing qualified leads that turn out close one and the third measurement that you should report on is of your sales excepted leads how many go to close one that's going to help tell you how well the process and systems are working as well as how effective your nurtures are if you measure those three kind of jumping points that that not only are you measuring the stages from each funnel but also some jumping points where you move from the top of the funnel to the bottom now how might you present that I'm going to show you one example today before we wrap up and this is a sample funnel dashboard let me share with you what this clients put together it's a very simple primarily excel based report that they share on a weekly basis and on the left-hand side you see they've categorized instead of the five stages they've categorized everything into three distinct stages lead gen qualification and sales they put a short definition for what's happening in that stage and notice they've established goals they said our goal for the number of enquiries that we want to generate is four thousand five hundred and seventy nine and down at the bottom their goal is to win 42 deals to the column to the next two that they're showing what they've actually done so far and at this point they've generated fifteen hundred and fifty nine inquiries and one closed deal and they've shared where are they in relation to their goal and you can see that they're making really good progress at the top of the funnel already at thirty four percent of their goal but they've got a long way to go at the bottom of the funnel and this is a report that I'll share with you was a report that they used at the early stage of the of the process so they've got a 90 day average time from inquiry to close and this was used at the beginning and what's nice is that in that column last column to the right they're showing how many new have come in yeah in the recent week and when you see a high number at the top that's telling you that volume is good the amount of volume is coming into the funnel is good and the percentage is those other reports is how you measure velocity and that's the way that it's done for giving a sample funnel dashboard in this case using Excel to take and extract the information from the CRM or marketing automation system to provide an at-a-glance dashboard of how well things are working notice nothing about open rates and click through rates this type of tactical measurements that marketing is doing our best for the marketing department to look at to improve the tactics of marketing but this is a way to help sales and the executive team understand the volume and velocity that's heading towards revenue I'll wrap up before we take a look at the questions and I'll leave this up there with some online resources that you can download there's some guides that are going to more depth on scoring and nurturing off of our website as well as some online demos that show CRM in action that the one they the three-minute video that you see link there gives you a nice little example of how the CRM can be used from a lead scoring and lead management perspective including the recycling and disqualification stages and there's some longer videos in our area if you want to watch and see some of the behind the scenes at companies like concur technology and I'm working on a book that I just finished writing it's down the editing stages and that will be available later this year in November online and ideally at your book stores but certainly online that really covers in greater depth the content here today I hope you enjoyed the session and got something out of it I realize there's a lot of content here available for you as well and let's take a look at some questions for those of you that do have to leave or want to not stick around for the questions it would be great if you could provide a rating and by clicking at the top right button and any questions that or any comments about your your session this session today question about copy of the deck this session will be available through the BrightTALK channel you can watch it again and repeat it and I believe it's available for download if it's not available for you to download feel free to drop us a note you can send me a direct message on Twitter at samanage and Dave but I believe you can get the right content anytime to the BrightTALK channel on our demand gen channel let's take a look and see if there's any questions about some of the content looks like a few of you had some audio problem I hope that wasn't for everybody but it looked like it happened at the beginning and then hopefully got cleared up for some I don't know why that happened maybe but I know it's best always to call in on the phone but apologize if you had any audio difficulty you can replay the session hopefully at a later date it looks like we got another question on for a small marketing team which marketing automation tool would you recommend I get this question a lot and my always short answer is just get one you know it rather than tell you which one is best there are many different systems available to you some of the more popular leading systems out there for a small marketing team I don't know the size of the company but I've worked for large companies like Microsoft and and they have a huge marketing team but I've also worked four hundred and five hundred million dollar companies who still have small marketing teams so I'm not sure the size of the company or the lead volume I would recommend that you take a look at some of the leading platforms from Marketo from allah and from par dot and for maybe the small customer is really really small consider something like a hub spot for your system all the systems that I mentioned integrate with CRM and that's why I like them because you have to have a system that integrates with your CRM system but the exact system that's right for you is going to fall into one of those brands that I mentioned they are very different but they provide the same functionality and certainly cover all the things that I shared today from being able to operationalize your funnel scoring nurturing and reporting so again Marketo Eloqua pardon HubSpot are all good systems to to take a look at and evaluate what kind of timelines should affirm allow to do the end-to-end process I haven't seen it done all these things that I mentioned to you done successfully well in shorter than six months and the reason for that is there's a lot of process to be defined here there's a lot of work to be done here both from a CRM and marketing automation system as well as website integration and so if you need to set an internal expectation on how long this process can take to implement scoring nurturing and your system successfully well and know if it's working well the minimum time I would set is six months and I've seen it take as long as eight to twelve months and sometimes even longer but six months is certainly doable to have all of this process and infrastructure in place and really working well for you there's a question it's very tactical on how do you wait the score in scoring how can I get my hands on the scoring worksheets that we displayed if you go to the resources area on demand ENCOM and grab the secrets to successful lead scoring I think you'll find a lot of good additional information tactical information on how to score and wait inside that that guide for you that's a good place to go once again if you need to post a question you can click the questions button in the top trying to move through as many as I can and if you would be so kind to add a rating and appreciate it looks like there's been almost about 20 so far if you could rate it from one to five stars on how useful this content was to you and how helpful and provide any other additional feedback that'll be much appreciated another great question came in is what's the biggest roadblock you had with lead scoring I've probably implemented with clients about 60 different lead scoring systems over the past couple years many of them that I'm proud to say have won awards for how effective they are I got to tell you there's a couple roadblocks in my experience one is you need to make sure that there is sufficient demand coming through nothing is more offensive to to say hey let's put a lead scoring system in place when sales feels like they're able to get to everything that marketing is generated and then some so you need a sufficient amount of leads or enquiries that are coming in to really justify being it the effort to put a lead scoring system in place that said you know this is a system that you want to put in place before you are generating a lot of demand think about Lucy and back on her candy eating experience trying to deal with the wrapping of all those chocolates if she didn't have a well-defined process in place and sufficient resources for dealing with that once that machine gets turned on she had no chance of success so I'm not saying that you don't put lead scoring ahead of the Year demand generation activities I'm saying that do it when you know that there's going to be sufficient demand because the big payoff is creating sales efficiency and the second benefit is being able to move things right into the nurtures second roadblock I see companies struggle with is what questions to ask and very often again this is speed-dating right it's a great analogy because fewer at a speed-dating event I don't think the first question that you'd asked is someone that you sit down with us how much money do you make that would be an offensive question and probably not get you further down the process and so sometimes it's I see equally the challenge that sales might want to have marketing ask questions around budget and time frame and not be able to disguise the authority questions on the website and that's just going to turn off somebody who's downloading your content or downloading those resources so you've got to disguise the questions in a way that aren't offensive but also ask questions that are matchmaking those are the two big roadblocks I want to thank everybody for joining today here's my contact information if you have a specific question or want to reach out to me on Twitter certainly our website at the manjeong comm and the resources area is going to have a lot of great resources for you but I really want to thank everybody for today's session I'm going to end the webcast and thanks again you