What would you do with 70 CIOs and CTOs standing in a room with more than $1 billion budgeted in projects and your company has the solution for those projects? You’d bid on them, that’s what you’d do.

Wait a minute? Did you just say ‘bid’ on them? Is this some sort of auction for executive-levels to snag face-to-face time and propose how your companies might be able to collaborate?  It certainly is.

Welcome to C-Level @ A Mile High. For the past 6 years, the Colorado Technology Association, a ReadyTalk customer, has been hosting an auction of C-Level “celebrities,” as they call them, giving more than  900 technology professionals a chance to buy dedicated time with the executives at a future date. Not to mention, a spiffy package of goods to go along with the celebrity (think golf outings, dinners, a day on the slopes—just to name a few).

In a world where getting quality time, let alone face time, with decision makers can be nearly impossible, CTA has created a marketplace of these individuals that is easy to access and open to the public. Got a cloud computing solution? Or maybe you design mobile apps? Bring your A-game and best sales pitch because these executives are looking for solutions. Oh, and if you’re concerned about the selection, don’t be. We’re talking big players in the technology sphere – AT&T, CH2MHill, New Belgium, Gates, Latisys, Google, Janus Capital Group, Newmont Mining, ViaWest, DaVita, MapQuest, Vail Resorts and the list goes on.

The event has grown greatly from its first few years. This year, there is a record-setting number of registrants, C-level participants (and their budgets), and silent auction items that will make it the single biggest technology deal-making event in the state. All proceeds go toward future events through CTA, which provides amazing networking opportunities and local business collaboration with the ever-expanding tech hub in Colorado.

The environment is fast-paced. The excitement rubs off on you when the first batch of executives is opened up for bidding. It’s a unique event and well worth attending. Even our own ReadyTalk CTO, Dan Cunningham, is up on the auction block. So check out the show – even if just to network with the hundreds of other technology professionals.

How do you manage your mountains of data?

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of assessing the health of your database. Because if you don’t know what is wrong, then you cannot fix it. Once you have assessed the state of your database against your ideal customer profile and your total marketing reach, it is a good idea to benchmark the current state of your databse so you can track improvement.

After benchmarking, there are a couple of ways you can go about cleaning and appending data; you can choose to do all of this internally or you can hire the services of an organization that does it for you.

If you choose to do this internally, there are several ways:

1. Offer content or a giveaway with a form that enables progressive profiling for the fields/data that are unknown
2. Re-engagement campaign to inactive prospects to try to get them to opt back into mailings or  verify their contact information
3.  Tele-prospecting to suspect accounts

There are also several companies that specialize in this type of activity as well:

1. They can append missing data and verify emails through automated queries that bump against external databases
2. They can telephone to verify information
3. They can identify role-based contacts as well

Regardless of which route you choose to go, once you have cleaned your database and appended information, you need to make sure you take steps to keep it as clean as possible. Business data tends to degrade at the rate of 3 to 6 percent per month so ongoing maintenance is essential to the health of any database.

I would love to hear some of the ways that you have appended and cleaned your data.

As the senior demand generation manager at ReadyTalk, Mike helps manage and execute ReadyTalk’s demand generation programs, which include email, online advertising, telemarketing and tradeshows. He also oversees ReadyTalk’s lead management process and marketing funnel by using Eloqua and Salesforce.com to automate ReadyTalk’s nurturing programs and lead follow-up.

I can think of plenty of reasons to be in Miami in February and attending ITExpo is a great one (okay, there are better reasons). The ReadyTalk channel team will be exhibiting in booth #1029 located in the CVx ChannelVision Showcase at IT Expo February 1-3.

This is our first time exhibiting at IT Expo and our goal is to develop partnerships with both resellers and wholesalers interested in adding audio and web conferencing services to their product line. We would also like tips on great places for dinner near the Miami Convention Center.

We are also looking forward to demonstrating a number of recent product updates that make it easy for marketing and sales pros to keep on top of lead generation activities, including integration with Salesforce, Eloqua and Pardot. These integrations are a value-add for customers who produce webinars or use web conferencing for sales demonstrations and collaboration. Want to learn how? Stop by our booth for details.

Some partners have other ideas for custom integration for their customers and can do so with the ReadyTalk API. Got an idea and not sure how to pursue it? ReadyTalk has product managers that can work with you on an integration – more details available at our CVx booth (#1029).

Going to IT Expo this year? Bring your sunscreen and if you need a pass, please click here; it’s on me.

Tracy focuses on channel and partner marketing at ReadyTalk, building out marketing programs to recruit partners and reinforce engagement with them. When she’s not coming up with marketing plans she likes to compete in canine freestyle Frisbee and ride her Ninja motorcycle.

2012 is the year of clean data for ReadyTalk.  If you think of your marketing campaigns and processes as the engine of your demand generation car, you can think of clean data as the motor oil. If you put in poor quality oil or no oil at all, your million dollar engine will not perform to standard no matter how hard you press the pedal.

There are really three stages to cleaning your database. Assessing the current state of your database, cleaning/appending  current data and then looking at all your inputs and standardizing those. Within each of these steps there are multiple stages, but that is it at a high level.

Let’s look at the first phase assessing the current state of your database. First, you need to decide which contact fields are critical to your marketing and sales efforts. These are the fields you lead score, fields that relate to your ideal customer profile and fields that impact deliverability.  You can assess these fields in a couple of different reports.

Total Marketing Reach:  # of contacts with a valid email or phone – (bounce backs + unsubscribed)

Total Email Reach: # of contacts with valid email – (bounce backs + unsubscribed)

Profile Completeness:  % complete of your marketing critical fields in your DB. This report (shown below) gives you a view of your database and what fields need the most work.

Armed with these reports you can begin to assess the health of  your database as it relates to your marketing efforts.

As the senior demand generation manager at ReadyTalk, Mike helps manage and execute ReadyTalk’s demand generation programs, which include email, online advertising, telemarketing and tradeshows. He also oversees ReadyTalk’s lead management process and marketing funnel by using Eloqua and Salesforce.com to automate ReadyTalk’s nurturing programs and lead follow-up.

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).