The Marketing Automation Success KitKickstart your marketing automation success with this five-step starter kit.

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B2B marketers who implement marketing automation increase their sales-pipeline contribution by 10%. -Forrester Research

It’s not a number to scoff at. And it’s no wonder that marketing automation, a SaaS solution that can simplify and streamline complex sales cycles, has now amassed widespread interest across industries — in fact, 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. (Gleanster)

So how do you join the ranks of this top percentile, streamlining your sales process and bringing in impressive results with your new marketing automation platform?

INTRODUCTION

Marketing Automation: Understanding the Benefits

intro

This kit will walk you through a step-by-step guide to setting yourself up for success, but first let’s take a quick look at some of the benefits behind these statistics, to understand how marketing automation will impact the way you do business.

Create a marketing and sales super team. Ultimately, marketing and sales teams have the same goal: driving revenue. So shouldn’t they be working towards this goal as one, unified team? One of the most important benefits of marketing automation is that it allows for greater transparency and alignment between marketing and sales, enabling you to work smarter in ways that will benefit both teams. By integrating marketing automation with your CRM system, you can give sales reps insight into their prospects’ activities, align your process for qualifying and distributing leads, and allow reps to identify the hottest leads at a glance.

Do more — stress less.

Regardless of company size or industry, there’s one resource that modern marketers never seem to have in excess: time. But what if you could eliminate some of the more tedious tasks filling your schedule (like qualifying and assigning leads, or sending out endless emails)? What if you could scale your messaging efforts while still delivering personalized messages that speak to a buyer’s specific needs? Marketing automation essentially adds another member to your team by automating more mindless tasks and scaling personalization — freeing you up to focus on higher-level strategies.

Understand (and show) marketing success.

As a marketer, you’re always reassessing which processes are working and which are not, so insight into the sales cycle is your best friend. Reporting features of marketing automation can show you every interaction that a prospect has with your brand — from click to close — allowing you to identify snags in the buyer’s journey and improve the efficiency of your funnel. And having access to numbers that prove marketing’s contribution to overall revenue doesn’t hurt either — particularly when it comes time to make budget requests.

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78% of successful marketers cite marketing automation systems as most responsible for improving revenue contribution. -The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups

Getting Started

Marketing automation has many features and capabilities that can greatly simplify the lives of marketers, but the prospect of implementing, learning, and maintaining a marketing automation system may not sound simple at all.

Marketing automation is a significant investment, and one that requires proper strategy and reflection behind it in order to see optimum results. That’s why we’ve broken down the process of achieving marketing automation success into five manageable steps, and included the resources you need to plan your strategy. In this guide, you’ll learn how to set appropriate goals, what your strategy will look like, and how to set your business up to succeed with marketing automation.

Prepare for Implementation SuccessIt’s one of the most important steps when adopting a new tool: taking time beforehand to consider process and strategy around your implementation. Let’s look at a few things you can do before you have your platform up and running that can ensure success down the line.

Talk with Your Sales Team

One of the biggest mistakes that automation users make is thinking that marketing automation is just for marketers. Marketing automation is about the revenue generation process as a whole; the quickest way to success is through collaborating with your sales team and helping them to see as much value from the platform as you do. Start the conversation by asking your sales team questions about improving the sales cycle and targeting ideal leads.

Answer the following questions to get a true understanding of your own goals and how marketing automation will impact your organization.

What does a great lead look like? What indicates to you that a prospect is going to be a good fit for our product?

Are there certain pages on our site, or certain actions a prospect could take, that would indicate to you that a prospect is ready to talk? What are these actions?

oneSTEP ONE

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What ratio of sales engagements currently results in a closed deal? What steps can marketing take to improve this ratio?

How long is a typical sales cycle, from the point that you first contact a prospect to the point they sign a contract?

What are some of the areas in which prospects are having difficulty seeing the value of our product? How can we help you better position our product through content and targeted messaging?

Organize Your Data

The current customer data you have may be spread out across multiple platforms. In order to make the implementation process easier, gather all of your data into one location. To ensure a seamless transition into a marketing automation platform, use one consistent format for customer data. For example, to personalize contact information, include the contact’s one email address, correct first and last name, and location. Implementing data is an easy process within marketing automation. CSV files can be uploaded and fields are easily mapped. Email addresses are used as unique identifiers to create new records or locate and update data in existing records. Customer data is the center of a lead management system and is especially important to marketing and sales departments. With marketing automation, the data will be synced seamlessly between the marketing automation solution and a CRM system.

Among B2B marketers, the #1 benefit of marketing automation is generating more and better leads. Additionally, 75% of the companies using marketing automation implemented their platform in less than 6 months. -Pepper Global

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Ready to share your plan with the team? Download our free PowerPoint template below to pull all of this information into your own customized presentation.

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Define Goals & Set Dates

Getting marketing automation up and running can seem like a sizable task, but keep in mind that you don’t have to have everything running right away — and that you’ll have plenty of help along the way. The worksheet on the following page will help you to establish ownership and goals internally before you begin working with your implementation specialist.

An implementation specialist can help you set up basic features so you can start seeing results as soon as possible, and you can work your way towards more advanced features as you have more bandwidth. So talk through a plan with your vendor or specialist and lay down some goals for dates when you’d like to launch your initial programs. Having a timeline will help you stay on track and set expectations internally for when you might begin seeing results.

Implementing data is an easy process within marketing automation. CSV files can be uploaded and fields are easily mapped. Email addresses are used as unique identifiers to create new records or locate and update data in existing records. Customer data is the center of a lead management system and is especially important to marketing and sales departments. With marketing automation, the data will be synced seamlessly between the marketing automation solution and a CRM system.

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1. Marketing automation point person: Who in your company will head up this initiative?

2. Users: Who will have a seat in your platform?

3. Current pain points: ex., low lead quality, small ratio of leads passed to sales become closed deals.

4. Long-term goals: What do you want to accomplish in the long term?

5. Short-term goals: What do you want to accomplish in the short term?

6. KPI’s to measure: ex., MQLs

WORKSHEET ONE

Ownership & Goals

STEP TWO

Streamline Lead ManagementNow that your new platform is up and running, it’s time to focus on your next step: streamlining your lead management processes. As leads start interacting with the landing pages, emails, and content that you’re now tracking with your new platform, you’ll want to make sure you have functionality in place to qualify these leads and segment them appropriately. This primarily means setting up your model for automated lead qualification.

Not only is automated lead qualification some of the most basic functions of marketing automation, it’s also an excellent way to see immediate results and secure further buy-in from your sales team. Let’s take a look at the process of building a customized scoring and grading model.

68% of successful marketers cite lead scoring based on content and engagement as most responsible for improving revenue contribution. -The Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups

Build Your Scoring and Grading Model

Remember that conversation you had with your sales team about what a good lead looks like? It’s time to put that information to use.

Lead scoring, or automatically scoring leads based on implicit buying signals such as form submissions or page views, allows you to evaluate a lead’s level of interest before assigning them to a sales rep. Lead grading, or automatically qualifying a lead based on factors such as company size or industry, prevents your sales reps from wasting time on leads that aren’t a good fit for your product.

The best news about automated lead scoring and grading: it can be fully customized to identify your business’ ideal prospect. But before you start choosing values for prospect activities or setting your thresholds for lead assignment, answer the questions on the following page to ensure that your model accurately represents your ideal customer. Then, get building!

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Who are you selling to?

Do these companies need to be of a certain size or in a certain location?

Who within a company is qualified to buy your product?

What actions on your website indicate an interest in your product?

What actions indicate intent to buy/sales-readiness?

WORKSHEET TWO

Build a Scoring and Grading Model Part IWhen it comes down to it, building a customized scoring and grading model is all about asking the right questions. Use the questions below to guide your conversation with your sales team, and ensure that you’re collaborating effectively to establish a system of lead qualification that you’ll both agree upon.

Tweak as You Go

The simple truth of the matter is that you probably won’t build a perfect lead scoring and grading model the first time — particularly if you don’t have any historical data on which to base your model.

To get the most out of automatic lead scoring and grading, the best thing you can do is to periodically reevaluate and adjust your approach. Pick a time to revisit your model (it could be three weeks or two months, depending on how confident you are in what you’ve built) and ask your sales reps about the quality of leads they’ve received in that time period. Use the data you’ve collected to look for patterns and key indicators you might have missed — and use the worksheet on the following page to guide the conversation with your sales team. Then, give itanother shot!

Your ideal scoring and grading model will ultimately depend on your product, industry, and buyer persona. Learn more best practices for building your model and finding the approach that works for you in this e-book.

OPTIMIZE YOUR MODEL.

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Have you noticed an increase in the number of qualified leads since we implemented our scoring and grading model?

Tell me a little bit about the quality of leads you’ve been working with lately. Are you seeing any common characteristics

that we can use to further weed out unqualified or non-sales-ready leads?

Tell me about a deal that you successfully closed recently. What were some of the actions the lead took that indicated to

you that they were intending to buy and were ready to talk?

WORKSHEET THREE

Build a Scoring and Grading Model Part IIYour scoring and grading model can (and should) always be improved upon. Once you’ve established a system, revisit it regularly to make sure that you’re effectively qualifying incoming leads and passing them off at the right moment. Set a time to sit down with your sales team and discuss the following questions:

STEP THREE

Kickstart Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing, also called drip marketing, is one of the most powerful and sought-after features of a marketing automation system — and one that you should take advantage of as early on as possible. With the ability to drive revenue from a database of leads that you’ve already acquired, lead nurturing has the potential to transform the way you do business.

At its core, lead nurturing is the process of automatically “dripping” relevant information via email to sales leads over time, usually based on user action or a predetermined time interval. Using nurturing capabilities, emails can be sent to prospects at exactly the right time, reducing much of the manual labor involved in sales communications. The benefits of this are numerous, and extend far beyond simple sales functionality.

Build a Simple DripIf you’re just getting ramped up with automation, start with something basic and expand over time based on the results you see. This process should also start with input from your sales team. Have a sales rep walk you through your typical buying cycle and common roadblocks they see. What questions are prospects asking as they learn

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about your product? What are the pain points prospects wish to see addressed? Then find a few resources that could be helpful for someone in the beginning stages of researching your product, write up a few short emails, and build out a simple nurturing track with minimal branching.

By placing colder leads on this nurturing track, you ensure that leads are more educated by the time they speak with a sales rep — and that your hard-earned marketing-sourced leads don’t go to waste just because they aren’t yet sales-ready. Use the checklist on the following page to make sure you’re optimizing your approach as you lay the groundwork for your lead nurturing strategy.

67% of B2B marketers say lead nurturing increases sales opportunities throughout the funnel by at least 10%, with 15% seeing opportunities increase by 30% or more. -DemandGen

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Define your KPIs. Understand and track the metrics that will indicate the success of a campaign.

Map content to sales cycle. You need to know which pieces of content are best for each buyer stage.

WORKSHEET FOUR

Successfully implementing lead nurturing campaigns requires laying a stable groundwork of responsibilities, understanding, and processes. The checklist below will help ensure you start off on the right foot.

Plan for Successful Lead Nurturing

Define your audience roles. Who is involved in the purchasing decision? What are their main concerns?

Understand timing. Know the length of your sales cycle and how often you can contact prospects.

Understand your sales cycle. Know the stages of your sales cycle and what denes each one.

Have a store of content. Content is the key to nurturing success and you need to have plenty created.

Determine responsibilities.Determine who is in charge of creating, monitoring, and updating campaigns.

Test. Test. Test.You’ll never get it right the rst time. Be prepared to track and iterate.

Do more with nurturing. Lead nurturing is great for new or cold leads, but it’s capabilities don’t stop there! The applications of lead nurturing actually extend through the entire length of the buyer journey, from creating initial brand awareness to supporting current customers. To learn more about eight different types of nurturing campaigns, check out our interactive lead nurturing lab!

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Deploy Exceptional Emails

The email capabilities of marketing automation extend beyond lead nurturing tracks. For branded email sends, let your marketing automation system guarantee top-of-line deliverability rates, and use a WYSIWYG email template builder to create sleek email templates without having to know HTML. Make sure your newly-minted emails are super targeted to your prospect’s needs by automatically segmenting your database based on criteria like location, product interest, and more. This allows even the smallest marketing teams to target their communications to specific audiences, helping to increase engagement rates.

Get Smarter with Social

Maintaining your various social outlets, responding to your audience in real-time, and distributing your content can all take up a significant portion of your day. Marketing automation allows you to post to your social profiles from one interface, monitor your link clicks, and schedule out your future posts. This takes some of the tedious but necessary posting duties off your plate, ensuring your content still gets distributed appropriately, and leaving you with more time to focus on creating meaningful interactions.

fourSTEP FOUR

Build Your One-Stop Marketing Shop If you’ve planned out your strategy, started developing content to support it, and put some basic functionality in place, it’s time to pull in other areas of your marketing.

Having an array of marketing tools spread across multiple platforms not only wastes a significant amount of time, it also prevents you from having a complete view of your customer. With these major marketing initiatives housed under one roof (and the benefit of single sign-on and data syncing), marketers can stop jumping from platform to platform. Furthermore, marketing and sales teams are able to access all prospect and customer data in one place and use it to target their campaigns more effectively.

Let’s take a look at some of the other important marketing tools that are built into your platform — and don’t forget, with integrations to other popular marketing favorites (think SEO tools, and webinar- and video-hosting platforms), you can create a single destination for tracking prospect interactions and marketing success across complex, multi-channel campaigns.

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Events can be a significant investment of both time and money, so it’s important to see returns. Get more out of your efforts — and collect trackable results — when you use marketing automation to collect booth leads, send targeted communications, and more. Use the pre-event marketing checklist on the following page to start planning, and be sure to check out our e-book, 9 Ways to Leverage Marketing Automation at Events.

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Streamline Sales Intelligence

By using forms and landing pages to fill your database with tons of actionable information, you can effortlessly gather data to power your online marketing campaigns and, just as importantly, arm your sales team with valuable insights. All of a prospects interactions will be tracked and compiled in a comprehensive profile, giving your sales reps the information they need to have meaningful conversations at a glance. Furthermore, your marketing automation platform integrates seamlessly with your CRM, allowing sales reps to access this data in a tool that they’re already familiar with. Finally, real-time alerts enable sales reps to react immediately to meaningful prospect activities, helping them to ‘strike while the iron’s hot’ and close deals faster.

Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour. - Harvard Business Review

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Start working on your follow-up plan. Follow-up may not happen until after the event is over, but it’s essential you start thinking about a plan before the event.

Think about your “differentiator.” There’s a lot going on at events. Think of something that will make your company stand out — a photo booth, scavenger hunt, fun swag, and more.

WORKSHEET FIVE

Marketing automation can impact many areas of your marketing — even offline events! Use the checklist below to prepare more effectively for marketing events with your automation platform.

Pre-Event Marketing Checklist

Segment your lists. Not everyone in your database should receive the same pre-event emails. Use segmentation to create lists based on location, industry, and more.

Prepare your swag. Speaking of swag, you’ll want to think about fun giveaways and handouts that will attract attendees to your booth or website.

Then send targeted communications. Cater your communications to each of your audiences using the lists you create. Make sure each person understands why the event is important to them.

Talk to your sales team. Events represent huge opportunities for sales as well as marketing! Make sure both teams are on the same page before the conference begins.

Take Sales Intelligence a Step Further Enabling your sales team is one of marketing’s mostcrucial responsibilities — and one that directly impactsbottom-line success. What if you could place invaluable marketing data and insights at the fingertips of reps before every conversation? Notify them the minute a prospect interacts with your site? Help them send the right messaging to the right prospect at the right time?

Sales Cloud Engage, a new product from SalesforcePardot, was designed to do all of the above. Engage plugs right into the tools your sales team is already using, and makes marketing an indispensable asset for closing the deal.

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52% of lost sales are due to sales enablement failure. -SiriusDecisions

With the right tracking in place, where a lead originated and what influenced them along the way is never a mystery. This allows marketing teams to make more intelligent decisions about how to spend their budget, and helps translate formerly siloed campaign spending into the language of the C-Suite: closed-won new business.

Perfect your approach. You may feel like you have a general understanding of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your basic marketing assets and messaging (landing pages, emails, etc.), but why not improve where you can? With performance metrics on emails, landing pages, and hosted content, you can continually tweak your assets for optimal results. You can even use A/B testing on emails and landing pages to test variables and compare results side-by-side.

Unsure of which metrics you should be paying attention to with reporting? Follow the link on the following page to see some examples. of metrics that indicate campaign success — and some ‘vanity metrics’ to avoid getting hung up on!

fiveSTEP FIVE

Measure & Understand Success You can only improve the things you measure, so delve into reporting as soon as you have campaigns to report on. Let’s take a look at three basic types of reporting that can provide high-level insights into what’s working and what’s not. And don’t forget, with marketing automation you can schedule periodic reports to be delivered to your inbox, helping you to effortlessly keep tabs on campaign success.

Get a big-picture view. Lifecycle reporting can give you a high-level overview of the health of your sales cycle, and is a great place to start when you’re just getting a handle on reporting. See the number of net new prospects for a particular date range, understand how quickly prospects are moving through your pipeline, and drill down into specific prospects to see their full “lifecycle.” With these insights, you can begin to get an idea of how well your sales and marketing teams are coordinating — and find areas that need improvement.

Close the loop on reporting. Closed-loop reporting helps clear up gray areas when it comes to revenue attribution.

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Marketing Metrics that Matter Measure, measure, measure — and make sure you’re paying attention to the right metrics. Find out what metrics really matter in this inforaphic.

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CONCLUSION

Think Bigger. Already seeing success with marketing automation? Don’t stop here.

This success kit is just a brief overview to get you up and running with some of marketing automation’s most basic (but extremely impactful) functionality. As you continue to explore the options with these and more advanced features of your platform — dynamic content, A/B testing, etc.— you’ll discover that the opportunities for new and innovative marketing initiatives are endless. Happy marketing!

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Your customers are smarter, more capable, and better- informed than ever before. This new breed of consumer demands a better breed of marketing, and the Pardot platform has the capabilities to get you there.

Pardot is B2B marketing automation by Salesforce.

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