Today’s content comes courtesy of Eloqua.

ReadyTalk and Eloqua are co-hosting a breakfast event with Bulldog Solutions, DemandGen Report and Level 3 this Wed., December 7, at the Brown Palace in Denver from 8-11 am. Join us and take advantage of best practices from experts who have made real marketing transformations.

Six reasons you may need marketing automation…

1) You can’t target the right prospects

• Symptom: You pour your time and creativity into what you 
do – but when it comes time to select an audience for a promotion, you tend to go big. It’s not only ego that drives mass blasting – you also lack a better way to target. Chances are, you’re suffering from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to marketing. When you send the same message to everyone, or target your campaigns based only on customer demographics- your messages fall on deaf ears.
• Remedy: Marketing automation enables you to track your prospects’ online activity and gives you a clear picture of interest and intent. Combine that insight with clean, consistent and normalized data, and you can target your campaigns according to who your prospects are AND what they do. And by ensuring the relevance of your message, you will improve conversion rates and decrease those nasty unsubscribes.

2) Your time is completely consumed by manual, repetitive and inefficient activity

• Symptom: You feel like you are running in place. Your process for creating and deploying marketing campaigns lacks scale and efficiency – forcing you to be more reactive than you’d like. Whether its building lists, managing leads, or creating emails and landing pages – the development of each new campaign is like reinventing the wheel. Spending so much time executing programs leaves you with little bandwidth to focus on strategic initiatives or new ideas.
• Remedy: With marketing automation, you can trigger communications based on actions and build a re-usable process/ workflow for events, webinars and other repetitive tasks. By automating these manual tasks, marketing can
 stay in touch in a consistent manner (i.e. lead nurturing). From webinars and lead nurturing campaigns to lead scoring and routing programs, automating demand generation processes frees up marketing bandwidth to focus on innovation.

3) Sales and Marketing have an antagonistic relationship

• Symptom:You’re in a vicious cycle. The sales team has no luck with the leads marketing provides – so they only follow up on a fraction of them and claim the rest are “just no good”. Conversely, marketing feels like they’re doing their part to drive qualified leads, but they’re not getting credit for their contribution to pipeline and revenue. Marketing and Sales aren’t exactly living in perfect harmony, and the situation is getting tenser by the day.
• Remedy: The problem is a lack of prioritization. When every lead gets pushed to sales regardless of quality or stage, it’s hard for Sales to know whom to call first. Marketing automation allows you to evaluate and score the leads for fit (right title, industry, etc.) and behavior (email response, website visits, downloads and campaign membership). This scoring allows you to prioritize leads for Sales so they don’t spin their wheels on leads that aren’t ready to buy. Lead scoring gets marketing and sales teams to agree on the right FIT for leads, and significance and recency of the activity (last month’s tradeshow visit versus attendance at yesterday’s webcast). With lead scoring, the best leads always rise to the top, so the sales team knows where to focus their time and energy.

4) Marketing can’t prove its value to the organization

• Symptom: Marketers laugh at this old joke: “We know half of our marketing budgets are wasted, we just don’t know which half.” But your executives don’t find it funny anymore, and the pressure is mounting. You are struggling to consistently report on simple campaign effectiveness metrics, never mind Marketing’s impact on revenue. Your sales opportunity, revenue and campaign data live in different systems. And without the ability to trace marketing’s influence on pipeline, the executive team is having a difficult time justifying your budget.
• Remedy: Closing the loop on dollars spent and dollars made – across all channels – is the only way to gain one view of the truth into the tactics and strategies that guide marketing’s contribution to the bottom line. Marketing automation allows you to do this by measuring and reporting on the performance of all programs within a single integrated platform. Automation’s reporting and analytics capabilities provide a dashboard view of campaign effectiveness, pipeline performance and marketing program ROI. And – most importantly – it helps turns Marketing into a critical, justifiable revenue-generating function in your organization.

5) Sales is starved for information

• Symptom: You generate a lot of prospect activity but don’t have a good way of sharing those insights with sales. From email opens to website visits and form submissions, your marketing team is sitting on a wealth of data your sales team could use
to sell more effectively — but you have no way to make the information actionable for sales. This is likely because marketing and sales live in two different systems — and they might as well be living in two different worlds.
• Remedy: Marketing automation allows you to seamlessly feed that wealth of information that you are sitting on to your sales team – by integrating your marketing insights with the tools your sales team is already using. To be most productive and effective, Sales can now have a window into a prospects’ digital body language — those clues they leave behind when they open emails, visit your website or fill out forms. It’s likely your marketing is collecting those insights, but Marketing Automation makes that information actionable for sales.

6) You’re losing good leads to your competitors

• Symptom: You spend a large portion of your budget on programs and events with an end goal of acquiring new contacts – but not all of those contacts are ready to buy right now. And when a contact falls off the radar, the competition has an opportunity to swoop in and grab the prospect’s attention when they’re finally ready to buy. A system of identifying and flagging the reasons for rejected leads is either missing or lacking. Further, you may be missing a way to recycle them either into teleprospecting or field marketing for additional nurturing. And because of that, you not only leave money on the table, but you also build a wider gulf between marketing and sales as a result of wasted time, effort and money on both sides.
• Remedy: Marketing automation enables lead nurturing, which allows you to keep latent prospects engaged so that when they are ready to buy, your solution is front-of-mind. It empowers you to reproduce the intimacy of a one-to-one communication on a much grander scale. With automation, you can programmatically manage a dialogue with many people at one time, complete with natural pauses and behavioral signals necessary for a productive conversation. Automation also allows you to monitor a prospect’s activity – or lack thereof – and trigger the most appropriate response.

The end benefit? It allows you to keep good leads engaged that are not necessarily ready to buy now, but will be in the future. And when they are ready to buy, they’ll likely come to you first (rather than your competitors).

ReadyTalk will unveil its newly designed website soon. We’ve changed quite a few things – all for the better (we hope you’ll agree). You’ll notice an entirely new look and feel; you will still be able to easily access our platform whether you are hosting or attending a meeting; we’ve made it easier to learn about our features and new product launches; and we’ve improved the navigation to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Here’s where we started:

The current site was outdated and didn’t allow for much navigational and content flexibility. Our goals had changed in the years since the site first launched and we wanted to better reflect ReadyTalk’s values and culture in the imagery.

We started out by defining our site goals and objectives (see the post “Creating a New Website“), did some competitive reviewing of other sites, and put a timeline together. We studied our site user personas, determined our metrics for success and put together technical and functional briefs. Wireframes and site maps were created and new navigational structures were developed and vetted by internal and external users. Our information architect created paper prototypes and facilitated scenario testing with our customers. Then he revised the wireframes and began building out the mockups. Images were carefully selected to reflect our locale and our work culture. Once that was all approved the process of building it out in Drupal began.

We used the Agile process throughout the project. The team broke down the tasks to be done in two week iterations and then we facilitated a daily “stand up” in front of whiteboard to discuss what was completed and what tasks were blocked. It has been almost a year-long labor of love.

Here’s where we ended up:

The site is cleaner, easier to navigate, provides a wealth of support and training information and makes it easier for potential customers to schedule a live demo, sign up for a free trial or purchase our services immediately.

For this first phase of launch we wanted to make sure that the site continued to make it easy to join a meeting; provided information on how to use ReadyTalk through robust training and support); and communicated ReadyTalk’s values and culture.
We look forward to your feedback once it launches. Please tell us what you think as a comment below or send us an email. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them – positive or negative. And keep watching the ReadyTalk blog because we have more exciting things in store for the site in 2011.

In the last few weeks ReadyTalk has consistently been delivering more than a million minutes of audio conferencing a day (our web conferencing minutes are nearly double that!). This is a huge milestone for us – one that has been 10 years in the making. And if you work at ReadyTalk you know what that means — its time for a party! The entire company celebrated recently at Braun’s Grill, we gave away cool ReadyTalk baseball caps from Oglio and for fun we rented a photobooth from Shutterbooth.

The ReadyTalk Marketing Team

But for many of us (millionaires excluded), a million is a hard number to visualize. So we started thinking about what a million minutes actually means….One million minutes is…16,666 hours. One million minutes is…694 days. One million minutes is…1.9 years. It takes 278 hours to count to one million (if it was your full-time job, it would take 35 days to complete).

In the next one million minutes, the average person could:

• Upload 10 million hours of video on YouTube.
• Walk about 66,666 miles.
• Blink more than 20 million times.
• Have 5,840 dreams.
• Watch the movie The Dark Knight 6,579 times.
• Eat 50,000 meals.

What if you had a million dollars? You could buy:

• 33 full size 4WD pickup trucks
• 10-20 houses (depending on where you live, of course)
• 2000 TV’s
• 200 snowmobiles
• 50,000 music CD’s
• 40 university educations
• Half a Lear Jet airplane

Did you know?

• The average man grows about 1/8 of a pound of facial hair in a million minutes.
• From first grade until early in your sophomore year in high school, you will have spent about 1 million minutes in school.
• The average person spends about a million minutes on the phone in their lifetime (the events team is definitely above average).
• In a million minutes, a pig could run 183.333 miles.
• It takes Mars about a million minutes to orbit the Sun.

So, hopefully, now you too get the picture. This is a really big deal and we are very proud of this accomplishment. And, most of all, we are incredibly thankful to our loyal customers who helped us reach this milestone.

interested in using our pre-release version of Web Meeting 6 for their larger meetings or events in the next two weeks.

Meetings can be internal or external, but you have to be a ReadyTalk customer. Specifically we are looking for meetings that will have 100-600 participants for slide sharing; and between 100-350 participants in a meeting with application sharing. We’ll provide ample monitoring and support during the live test, offer operator-assisted audio and record the event.

Two customers, NTEN and TechSoup (thank you!), held meetings this week with close to 300 participants. Many attendees chatted in about how much they liked the polling feature and how they were able to enter the meeting very quickly using our Flash participant.

If you’d also like to be one of our lucky customers to try out ReadyTalk’s new service upgrade before it releases, please let me or your account manager know as quickly as possible.

To learn more about the features coming in Web Meeting 6 please view this recording Getting Started with Web Meeting 6 Preview or visit our Preview page. Not a ReadyTalk customer? You should be – sign up for a free trial.

ReadyTalk is preparing to roll out our next product launch, Web Meeting 6. But first, it’s time for a Preview. This afternoon, ReadyTalk Beta moves into Preview, bringing Web Meeting 6 one step closer to launch. Web Meeting 6, internally known as Native Client, has been in beta testing for several months. Thanks to continued feedback from our beta testers and the hard work of ReadyTalk engineers, we have been able to greatly improve the product before its release.

Our customers will be able to use Preview for scheduled meetings as well as on-demand meetings. Conference Center will be integrated with Web Meeting, so they can manage all pre- and post-meeting activities in the Preview environment.

Some of the new features you’ll find in Web Meeting 6:

• A redesigned and simple-to-use interface
• Flash-based participant entry to a meeting – this means your participants will be able to join your meeting even faster than before with no downloads required
• Enhanced polling with the ability to create six difference question/response types
• Application sharing with display resizing and rescaling
• A new ReadyTalk Control Bar puts all the chairperson conference controls at your fingertips without taking up valuable screen real estate
• Slide reordering can now be done with a simple drag and drop
• Audio participant name and number matching

Preview will be available on January 29; current customers can directly access Preview at http://www.readytalk.com/preview. Just use your current ReadyTalk access number and pass code and get started.

Not a ReadyTalk customer? Contact sales@readytalk.com and they’ll set you up with a free 30-day trial account that also includes exclusive access to the Preview environment.

Before we launch Web Meeting 6 we want as many customers as possible to experience a free preview and give us feedback. I will be announcing details of our Preview program in the next few weeks. Providing feedback is simple – tell us about your experience using the form at the end of your conference.

Preview gives customers an opportunity to test new functionality while helping us identify any minor kinks. Participating customers enjoy free web minutes while using the Preview environment in addition to experiencing new features.

Stay tuned for my weekly posts as I give you a detailed, sneak peek on the new features you’ll see, best practices on how to use them in your meetings and events, and keep you up-to-date on our progress during this pre-release time.

In the meantime, if you have any questions you can contact me directly at teresa.lawlor@readytalk.com or comment here.