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.

Marketers are always looking for the next best way to create buzz around their product and their brand with the right audience.  There are so many promotional outlets in which to market your content, especially on the internet; webinars tend to bubble to the top due to the likelihood of a lower investment and higher ROI.  Over the past few years, many companies have put significant effort into building their following through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.  Each of these has a different flavor of audiences, including what topics are relevant and which will resonate. Despite the differences, these channels can be a great way to promote your upcoming webinar.

The first step is using social media to get the word out about your upcoming event. After coming up with a catchy title, interesting content, and engaging speakers, you have to get people to care…and then, register!  Posting your event to your company’s various networks gets you there, partly; but allowing your registrants to post to their networks snowballs your efforts even further.

The next step, and probably even more important than the first: tracking the effectiveness of each social media outlet! Which site gets you the most traction, the most bang for your buck?  And, even more so, do you have a few ‘power users’ that are consistently promoting your events, and bringing in a significant number of registrants? If so, you probably want to keep inviting these types of people to your events!

So the moral of the story? Keep up with social networking, yours and your followers…it pays off!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to Event Services and ReadyTalk’s Conference Center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

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.

Don’t you just hate it when hot prospects suddenly stop returning your call?  It’s especially hard to deal with when they’d been so eager to move forward with you only weeks before.

At first, you assume their lack of responsiveness is an isolated situation that will quickly self-correct. But after repeated failed attempts to connect, you start to question your own sanity.

You could have sworn they were interested, but their current behavior indicates otherwise. And, not wanting to appear too desperate or to come across as a real pest, you’re stymied in terms of what your next steps should be.

Truth be told, they’ve disappeared into the infamous “Black Hole” – sometimes never to be seen again.

Why They Disappeared

As a seller, it’s always important to analyze what may be causing this behavior before taking action. In my experience, these are the typical reasons why prospects disappear into “The Black Hole.”

• They’re totally swamped. Without a doubt, this is the most common. In virtually every company today, people have way too much to do and not nearly enough time to get it all done. They fully intend to continue the conversation, but not right now.
• Priorities changed. This can happen overnight. Changing market conditions, bad 3rd quarter results, and new leadership are just a few of the possible root causes. But when this happens, it’s darn near impossible to regain your momentum in the short term.
• Lack of urgency. Sometimes sellers confuse a prospect’s interest level with a desire to take action today. As such, they share all the glorious details about their offering instead of building a business case for immediate change.
• Column fodder. Occasionally prospects just need comparative bids/pricing to justify their decision to go with another company.
• They know everything. When prospects feel they have all the information they need, there’s literally no reason to talk with you any further.

Different reasons call for different actions. Some you can prevent by doing things differently in your customer interactions. Always be open to this possibility since prevention is your best cure. Others you have no control over.

In any case, you need answers! Is it “yeah” or “nay”? Are they still interested or not? Should you keep pursing them or find new prospects?

If these are issues you’re struggling with, join me for my Friday webinar on How to Keep Sales Momentum Going. You’ll get lots of ideas you can use right away.

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 recently revamped the company website. It took hours of research and planning and expertise from all types to develop a user friendly site that portrayed the corporate brand and the way we deliver service and support to our clients.

A new website like this is not for the faint of heart. Whether you are doing a major overhaul or a touch up to your site, we highly recommend starting with the upcoming AMA Virtual Xchange to learn about building brand into your website.

AMA’s Virtual Exchange – Your Website, Your Brand: Maximizing Impact, Technology and Trust is coming up on November 11. It’s a full-day online forum and a great way to learn more about building brand into your website without leaving your office. Best of all, you don’t have to be an AMA member to attend.

If you make it to the event, stop by the ReadyTalk booth to find out what’s new with us.

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.

5. Mastering the Technology: Technology can be intimidating especially when your presentation depends on it. While ReadyTalk’s webinar tools are easy to use and designed to eliminate this concern, we still recommend that conference organizers and their speakers do a full dry run prior to the event. This ensures everyone on the webinar is comfortable with the technology and the content of the presentation.

4. Poor Participant Experience: We’ve all been on those bad webinars where the chairperson forgets to put all 500 participants on mute or turn off the conference entry tones. We often encourage customers to have the event organizer appoint someone that is solely responsible for running the meeting. This person doesn’t have speaking or moderating duties and can focus on the technical details as well help with queuing up the chat questions and other logistics.

3. Boring: There’s nothing worse than joining a webinar that promised interesting content that falls flat. Worse than that is when the presenter isn’t engaging. Polls and questions are a great way to engage the audience and prevent a boring webinar. ReadyTalk’s lead trainer, Shawn Cardinal, hosts free training sessions to help presenter’s learn skills for engaging the audience.  

2. No One Shows Up: So much time and energy goes into scheduling and hosting webinars—writing a compelling abstract, lining up speakers, scheduling dry-runs, invitations, reminders and more. There is nothing scarier than wondering if anyone will show up. Make sure your pre-event plan includes promotion. ReadyTalk’s integration with marketing automation and new social media tools make it easier to leverage your existing networks and reach new audiences.

1. Public Speaking: This is a common fear. However, many people find webinars to be easier because you can’t see the audience. Another way to ease your fears is to practice, practice, practice. If you’re familiar with the content and the technology it will make presenting much easier.

Do webinars scare you? Why? What have you done to overcome your fears?

The attendance at my session also reinforced our perception that marketers are very interested in solving this pain. While it was the last session of the show, the room was packed and there were a lot of questions during my presentation and also quite a few people who came up to me after the session to ask very detailed questions. I was very impressed with their engagement and knowledge of both Eloqua and the webinar process.

While we did not win a Markie Award in the category of Sales Impact it was an honor to be a finalist and to sit up front during the awards ceremony. Joe Payne, the CEO of Eloqua, hosted the event and is very dynamic and entertaining speaker.

I would like to thank Eloqua for such a great event and I am looking forward to next years already!

With the interest in partnerships high, we need to be quick and smart in our decisions. To streamline due diligence the partner marketing team devised a partner profile and a scorecard to rank the prospects and estimate the value of the partnership to ReadyTalk. Most importantly, we recognize that not all opportunities provide good value and classifying our business objectives will help the decision making process. For ReadyTalk we can classify current partner needs as technology and marketing.

So you may be wondering what a partner profile and scorecard consists of. Based on the goals you have established, a clear partner profile and scorecard is easy to create. Below I’ve used marketing partnerships as an example.

Marketing Partners

Set goals. Every organization should define unique goals of their partner marketing program. Is it to generate leads? Build brand? Expand into a new market? Making this choice up front will help define the partner profile. Defining goals will assist in understanding what partnerships are critical to business.

Create a score card for your criteria. Score cards help you evaluate your priorities against what a partner has to offer. Using the profile of your ideal partner, define the desired elements and rank them in order of importance. Build a scale of your choosing. As an example 1-5, with 5 being a required item.

Every business has different needs so your profile will be unique. To start, list the desired criteria, keeping in mind that not all will be viable, so be prepared to live without some of them. Companies that have multiple decision makers on the partner marketing team can have each member rate individually, then review an overall team score.

Consider issues such as:

• Not a competitor but in the same market and selling to the same decision maker
• Similar price point, unless your product is the lead or add-on item
• Complementary products/services
• Define a new market to enter

Define a rank value for criteria. Setting rank value and understanding the score applied is important. There are several ways to do this, be sure and document how you want a score applied.

Example scorecard sample where 5 is the highest ranking:

Take a two step approach to researching your prospects. First, identify prospects with the profile in mind and do preliminary research on the company. Mark the scorecard with the information available to the public. Now you have initially prioritized the list. At this point, determine if you want to go forward and make contact with the prospect. A few conversations will help you learn more about the prospect and if there are synergies.

A great example of a marketing partner for ReadyTalk is cloud based services in the marketing automation systems and in the customer relationship management space where the decision maker is a marketing executive. We can easily build criteria and rank value with this example.

You may be able to see immediately the companies that travel in your circles, if not – contact me and let’s go over options.

Taking a measurable approach to partnerships can help you prioritize your needs and build a strong partnership based on common goals.

The ReadyTalk partner programs are outlined here or you can comment here with questions and your insights into building partnerships.

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.

Yes, you.  Your analytics.

Do any of these sound familiar to you?

• Spending a few hours each week populating an Excel spreadsheet with numbers you painstakingly gather from twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other sources?
• Drowning in too much data and too many experts trying to get you to do too many things?
• Depending upon Facebook’s web-based insights to measure the impact across all your pages– locations, products, causes, or whatever entities? Unless you’re a small business, your presence is not just on multiple social channels, but multiple Facebook pages, whether you’re aware of them or not.
• Being asked the value of a fan and not being able to defend the answer. Or measuring your social power vs just how many fans you have versus someone else.
• Having one place to track your website analytics (such as a Google Analytics), but then trying to tie in the impact of everything else online and offline into a single, simple, automated dashboard.
• Having a lot of fans, but not able to determine which ones, by name, are your top fans– then rewarding them for being so?

If so, then you need to come to “The Right Social Metrics for YOUR Business”, coming up in 2 weeks. Mark your calendars.  Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal and Justin Kistner of Webtrends share tactics for brands, small businesses, non-profits, direct marketers, and everyone in-between.

Today’s guest post was contributed by Dennis Yu, chief executive officer, BlitzLocal. BlitzLocal provides clients with every tool necessary to run a profitable internet marketing campaign. From engineering to analytics, they help you grow your business and generate more revenue. They are also a customer and partner of ReadyTalk.