Part two of this three part blog series is a review some of the key takeaways from our webinar, “Movin’ on Down: The Funnel,” and a deeper look at some additional best practices for optimizing your sales and marketing funnel.

Image source: LeadFormix http://bit.ly/q6TjzB

It can take a fair amount of planning to avoid confusion between sales and marketing teams after an event has taken place, whether it be a webinar or tradeshow. When you have taken the time to assess (and re-assess) your  marketing funnel after each of your campaigns, you will begin to notice a much smoother transition  from moving marketing-generated leads over to the sales team to further qualify and hopefully turn into new revenue.

One of the main takeaways of the joint webinar with MarketingSherpa and Eloqua was the importance of automation and integrated marketing campaigns. Without the power of automation, timely lead follow-up and precise campaign tracking is virtually impossible. Having numerous marketing campaigns funneling to the same call to action (new product demo, free trail, service discounts, etc.), makes it easier for the marketing team focus on putting out the most applicable content if leads are pushed toward one desired outcome. You don’t want to create distractions for your prospects by giving them a hundred different options. Push them to your desired outcome. You may capture their attention through different means – landing pages, banner ads, website copy, webinars, tradeshows, direct mail, PPC and SEO campaigns – that’s the point of integrated campaigns, but you don’t want to deter them from your main call to action. Each of these sources points to the same offer; you’re just ahead of the game because you know you are likely to capture your target audience in a number of different places.

So, we understand the integrated campaigns, but let’s chat a little more about the automation piece. How can we make all these great campaigns work more efficiently? As marketers we wear a hundred different hats. So how do we make efficient use of our time when it comes to managing all of these moving parts? We get something that manages it for us – marketing automation. This tool can help us to understand who these leads are that are continuously coming into the funnel from the various campaigns.  It helps hone in on the quality of the quantity that is being generated. Automation can help with:

Lead nurturing – that consistent dialog with a prospect as they move toward (or even away) from a purchasing decision.

Lead Scoring – qualifying prospects based on both implicit and behavioral criteria. Implicit being the right demographic (company size, title, role, etc.) and behavioral being the actions they have taken to show their level of interest (whitepaper download, attended and/or registered for a webinar, page visits on your website, etc.)

Generating Revenue – obviously the more leads being dumped in the funnel, the better chance there is for revenue. However, the right leads are the ones that matter. Quality trumps volume. But when you are able to capture the correct information with your integrated campaigns and begin to both nurture and score those leads, you will ultimately end up with your target prospect looking for your product at the right time. And that equals revenue.

All this talk about automation brings me to my last point for this post – integration. This is a crucial piece of the pie. You may have all your platforms in place to generate, track, score and nurture leads but if they can’t communicate with one another, you’re almost back at square one. Sure, there are workarounds, but not without having to implement lengthy manual processes which can ultimately hurt the overall success of your campaign due to the lack of timely follow-up.

ReadyTalk recently launched both CRM and marketing automation integrations designed to increase the accuracy of your campaign data, specifically those leads coming in through your webinar platform. This helps move leads through the sales pipeline faster and eliminate those time-consuming manual tasks. These integrations were designed to help marketers skip the tedious spreadsheet work and streamline the process, increasing data accuracy and speeding sales follow-up. If you’d like to learn more about our CRM integration specifically, check out the upcoming webinar on September 27 at 2:00ET featuring three progressive companies that have automated their webinar process by integrating their conferencing platform with their CRM. And stay tuned for the third and final part of our “Funnel” blog series!

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.

In a previous life, I was the director of marketing at a small IT analyst firm in Boulder, CO. A large percentage of our leads came from webinars that highlighted our research studies and positioned our analysts as thought leaders. We also hosted dozens of webinars each year to help our technology vendor clients meet their own lead generation goals. On average, my small team of three was running two webinars a week in addition to handling all of the other marketing activities for the firm (PPC campaigns, email newsletters, PR, website, trade shows, partner marketing, report production, etc., etc., etc.).

As I look back, one of the things we dreaded most was wrapping up after each webinar – particularly the time-consuming task of getting registration and attendance data out of our webinar platform and into our CRM system. This painful process involved waiting for our webinar vendor to finalize the attendance report, downloading it as a .csv file, manually de-dupping the data and then uploading the clean data into our CRM. Depending on the size of the event, this work could take 2-3 hours – both numbing our minds and delaying time-sensitive sales follow-up. What a headache!

These memories were fresh in my mind when I joined the ReadyTalk product marketing team and learned that my first assignment was to define an integration between ReadyTalk and salesforce.com. Now, two years (and countless customer conversations) later, I’m excited to be heading to Dreamforce to launch ReadyTalk for Salesforce.

Designed to help marketers and trainers skip the tedious spreadsheet work, ReadyTalk for Salesforce streamlines once-manual processes by automatically capturing registration and attendance data in salesforce.com. The application even makes it easy to create new Lead records for registrants and attendees not found in salesforce.com.



As an added benefit, ReadyTalk for Salesforce increases access to important webinar and training programs by allowing sales and others in the organization to:

• See a summary of which sessions their prospects and customers are involved
• Quickly send webinar or training invitations right from the Lead or Contact record

So far, we’ve had great feedback on the application from our early access testers.. If you want to see it in action for yourself, register for an upcoming live demo or come see us at Dreamforce next week (Booth #1021). Ready to get started? Install the free ReadyTalk for Salesforce application from the AppExchange now.

Here’s to marketers and trainers spending their time doing what they do best instead of manually schlepping data back and forth between systems that can’t talk to one another!

As Director of Product Marketing, Anita is focused on talking to customers about their needs and translating these into priorities for the ReadyTalk product roadmap. Before joining ReadyTalk, she gained first-hand experience with the challenges of running a webinar program while serving as director of marketing at an IT analyst firm. When she’s not thinking about conferencing, she likes to do yoga and spend time with her dogs.

Accidents happen. At ReadyTalk we’re committed to helping our customers prevent accidents and mistakes. Each month, ReadyTalk’s Account Specialist Team shares a recent accident and tips for how to avoid it in the future.

Once upon a time, Sarah, a webinar organizer, wanted her clients to know about the company’s upcoming webinar. Hoping to spread the word, she used ReadyTalk’s social media tools to post the webinar registration link to her company’s corporate Facebook page.

Usually, sharing on Facebook and Twitter is a great way to market webinars to the public. However, in this case, Sarah wanted participants to pay for this webinar prior to registering and receiving their automatic confirmation. However, once the registration link was posted on Facebook, it allowed participants to bypass the payment step and register for the webinar. Sarah deleted the link immediately, but unfortunately, once it was posted on Facebook it became searchable for anyone to find. If someone stumbled upon this link they would have found a registration page for this webinar. They could have registered and been automatically confirmed for free.

ReadyTalk tries to remind customers that anything you share on social media outlets will be searchable even if it is no longer on your Facebook profile. There are a few things Sarah could have done differently:

• Setup the event with manual confirmation versus automatic confirmation. This way, Sarah could confirm participants once she received their payment.
• Include an event description on the payment page and shared a link to that page instead.
• She could also ask her ecommerce vendor to integrate with ReadyTalk via the ReadyTalk API. This would allow Sarah to accept payment and register attendees in a single interface.

Do you have a webinar or web conferencing gaffe that you’d like to share? Share it below.

A couple of weeks ago Ken Molay wrote a great blog post, Conversion Features For Webinar Technologies. He expanded on a post by Brian Massey, which explores what features and experiences customers should expect from webinar vendors (among others).

Ken outlines the elements that he believes should be available to every webinar organizer and I agree. I also think the timing of this week’s launch of the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk couldn’t be better, since it addresses and expands on many of Ken’s requirements.

Here are a few of his requirements that the cloud connectors address:

Allow Customizable Registration Pages. ReadyTalk’s registration pages are pretty flexible and allow event organizers to create as many 100 custom registration questions (warning: you should be careful about the number of questions you include since as the number registration questions increases the number of participants typically decreases).  Customers, who use Eloqua, can now fully customize the registration pages to maintain a consistent look and feel with existing marketing materials.

Follow Lead Source Tracking From Start To End. ReadyTalk already had a built-in campaign tool for tracking where registrations were coming from; but this data lives outside of a customers’ marketing automation program. This is one of the reasons that the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk  are so powerful. I would also mention your registrants are cookied as well so you can track their digital body language – something a conferencing service does not offer.

Allow Total Control Of All Email. Not only does the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk give you control of the look and feel of your emails, using Eloqua lets you automate the email processes so that after the event you can send emails based on actions customers took. For example, registrants that didn’t attend can receive one email and those that did can receive another….and this process can be fully automated.

One thing that neither Brian nor Ken touched on is the need for these vendors to integrate with each other. Whether it’s out-of-the-box integration or the ability connect via an open API, the ability to move data seamlessly from one platform to another is essential. Eliminating manual spreadsheet works saves significant time and ensures the accuracy of data. It also makes actionable data available faster.

What other features would you like to see incorporated into your webinar program? Are there platforms you would like to see integrated?

By Melanie Turek, Industry Director, Frost & Sullivan

Recently I was speaking with Karen Gwynne, Director of Sponsorship at the American Marketing Association, about how the AMA is using web casts to increase membership in the organization. Gwynne says that if a prospect attends three or more web casts, he or she is far more likely to join the organization as a dues-paying member, and stay loyal to the AMA in the months and years to come. Not surprisingly, the AMA is taking advantage of web conferencing to boost its brand, increase member loyalty and, ultimately, improve the bottom line.

In February, I wrote about how good web conferencing is for internal corporate and customer training. This month, I want to emphasize its value as a marketing tool. Today’s marketing professionals are faced with multiple challenges as they try to generate leads in an increasingly global and dispersed business environment. They must also develop a strong brand identity among a multitude of messages and imaging, much of which crosses the Internet; qualify leads and deliver contextual information about them to the sales team; and justify any expense with a clear ROI calculation. Web conferencing—which let’s marketers deliver interactive presentations via the Internet, easily and cost-effectively—can help with all these mandates.

Online events deliver global reach
Reaching a variety of customers and prospects can be difficult, time consuming and costly, especially as businesses extend their global footprint. With web conferencing, organizations can deliver marketing information and online training to small and large groups located anywhere in the world, with specific content designed just for them. This will help improve product and brand awareness, drive usage rates and satisfaction levels, and generate more new sales as well as cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Pre-registering attendees and gathering feedback delivers more qualified leads
Using web conferencing, marketers can increase the number, frequency, reach and quality of their marketing events, and they can expand those events to cover niche areas and target special interest groups. By using the software’s interactive features, speakers can create marketing sessions that offer valuable educational information, which in turn will increase brand awareness and loyalty, and deliver warm leads. Using conferencing’s Q&A and polling capabilities, presenters can better qualify those leads and help sales teams boost their conversion rates. Finally, sales people can use web conferencing to follow up with interested customers and prospects in a more targeted, intimate and interactive way.

Collaboration capabilities let marketing, sales and line-of-business work together to drive revenues.
Web conferencing cost-effectively enables internal communications among dispersed teams, so that sales and marketing staff can work together at every level—from research and planning to content development and account management. They can also tap the resources and expertise of line-of-business employees, to ensure marketing efforts map to broader business goals and product capabilities.

For more on how web conferencing can positively impact your marketing efforts, and your company’s bottom line, please join me for the webinar “Generate More Qualified Leads with Webinars” on the topic on April 27 at 2pm ET.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.