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What I Think - Drift’s ABM Release

After a few weeks of suspense with their teaser campaign, Drift announced the release of their latest addition to their conversational marketing product this morning, with Drift ABM.

Here’s what I think:

#1 - Thank you Drift, ABM should be embedded into all marketing software

The beauty of account-based marketing is, it’s just common sense.  It’s so obvious good marketers sometimes make fun of it, asking, “Is it really something new?”

That said, one of the opportunity drivers for ABM software is the fact that the preeminent sales & marketing software, Salesforce.com (what are they up to this week?), did a really bad job of enabling account-based marketing. Two huge flaws included:

  • No automated way to connect a “lead” to an existing account for its sales users

  • No automated way to track (like a lead is tracked with statuses & therefore built-in reporting) an incremental “lead” on an account - thus discouraging use of the account objects for managing prospect accounts

So it’s refreshing to have a company like Drift build account-based marketing right into their conversational marketing software. It’s logical. It’s useful. It helps their customers - which Drift is all about.

#2 - Sometimes the simplest use cases are the most powerful

You work hard to target your target accounts, through both inbound & outbound channels. When they get to your website, you want alarm bells going off for your sales team to capitalize on this, especially if the account is engaging in product specific or “higher intent” content.

I’ve previously made the point that this type of interaction is one of the intersection points between Inbound Marketing & Account Based Marketing, and Drift is taking that to another level by not only providing sales reps with the insight, but the ability to take immediate action and engage in conversation with that target account.   

Target account on our website. Alarm bells should be going off!!!!!
Target account on our website. Alarm bells should be going off!!!!!
...and give the account a personalized greeting
...and give the account a personalized greeting

It’s so simple. That’s the beauty of it though. How many businesses are actually doing this? Very few.

Which makes it a massive opportunity. Win for Marketing. Win for Sales. Win for Drift.

#3 - “Shipping” has massive value to company momentum

Drift ABM represents Drift’s second major product release in the past month, on the heels of the announcement of Drift email at the Hypergrowth show.

These releases are not just about the added product capabilities, it’s about setting the tone for the business. It’s a major statement from Craig Daniel’s product team and Elias Torres’ engineering team, which in turn builds more confidence for the sales & marketing teams to have the confidence to execute and deliver.

#4 - Put Drift on your shopping list

If you haven’t already done so from reading my “Five Ways Drift Helped Us Engage with More Web Visitors - in the First Week” blog or amazing recent articles from Jera Brown or Andy Raskin, put Drift on your company to watch list.

They have up-leveled the website chat product game to conversational marketing, and it’s an immediate way to 1) generate more leads from your website, 2) accelerate the velocity of those leads engaging with your sales team and 3) give sales & marketing teams a win-win that just makes sense, not to mention 4) be part of the rise of a company that is firing on all cylinders.

#5 - Drift’s big strategic question going forward

Drift has reinvented the live chat category. Cancel talks about his company's growth strategy is about finding a commodity category, and then winning in that category by building a better brand.

I expect Drift to be able to dominate customer acquisition in stealing share from other chat products, and winning over customers who are adding chat to their website for the first time. At a price point comparable to other chat vendors, the decision to add Drift should be a no-brainer at $250 per month or thereabout.

Here’s the big question though: will that be enough for Drift? Or are they going to take aim at eating the lunch of the marketing automation vendors?  They’ve gone out and said marketing automation is broken, after all.

That’s going to be closely related to the price point Drift wants to aim for to drive the greatest return for its investors such as Sequoia & General Catalyst. If it pushes up into the thousands of $ per month, marketers will be forced to think about Drift vs. Marketing Automation, and that will add a lot more friction to the sales process (short term) but present massive upside to the company (long term).

What’s for sure -  Drift could build a better marketing automation product. This is the team that rebuilt HubSpot and provided the product foundation for the multi-billion company HubSpot has turned into today.  I’m sure the team could build a better marketing platform.

As a marketing technologist, I’m rooting for it.

Online advertising is the newest oldest marketing investment to include in your mix (& now there’s proof)

When David Guerra at HG Data asked me to join their webinar earlier this week to talk about some of Bedrock Data’s success stories around targeted account digital marketing, I was happy to participate.

What I didn’t realize at the time – I was going to learn about some amazing research from my co-presenter, John Steinert, CMO of TechTarget.

I’ve been advocating for online advertising as a medium that should deliver payoff for most marketers – in this Inbound Marketing & ABM article, I characterized well targeted, on-message, relevant online advertising as the intersection point between Inbound & ABM.

Think about it this way – what’s so great about Inbound Marketing? It's that prospects discover you at a point when you can be of value to them, and then you create more, ongoing value for them through useful content.

But not everyone is going to find you. Well targeted online marketing helps you in two ways with your audience:

#1 - You may have some relevant content for your audience at that moment where they can take action (click through) or soon thereafter (view through). 

OR

#2 – You expand the awareness of your brand/company, so that over time your prospect is more likely to turn to your company as it develops the need for the types of problems you solve.

Number two can be extremely difficult to measure.

In some regard, you just need to have the conviction that delivering the right message to the right audience consistently is going to lead to positive results. For me, spending a decade with the top advertising agencies in the world at Omnicom Group has me pre-disposed with this conviction.

So back to the webinar: “Steiny” brought facts to the table to back this up.

TechTarget has just completed research-- which isn’t formally released but which is also covered here -- and the upshot is:

  • TechTarget studied 111,000 planned IT projects, and 1,675 ad campaigns covering 700 million banner impressions
  • For these planned IT projects, TechTarget found out from these companies which vendors were part of the consideration set for that project
  • The analysis after aggregating this data showed that the companies consistently advertising had a +25% lift on being considered as vendors for these projects vs. non-advertisers. Those inconsistently advertising saw a +10% lift.
TechTarget-Ad-Research.png

I wondered though about the chicken vs. egg question.

Were these companies being considered in more projects because they were more well known companies, and because they were more well known companies they had more marketing budget available to invest in online advertising?

Or, are the companies investing in online advertising getting considered for more projects because of the impact on awareness?

I asked John about this, and he said to correct for this "already well known" effective, the large brands that had been long-time advertisers were removed from the study. So most likely then the advertising investment was the "cause" and not the "effect" at play. 

So solid evidence to back the case for consistently running online advertising programs.

That said, doing online advertising right is difficult. Like most marketing mediums, it can get a bad rap based on mis-execution. If you are considering online advertising (or doing it but questioning your results so far), these are five things you  can do to best ensure success.

#1 – Target the right audience

Leverage account-based targeting to run advertising to the companies that matter to you. This is a great way to stretch your budget, and much rather have 25 ad impressions to 1,000 companies that matter to you, than 1 ad impression to a mixed bag of 25,000 companies.

#2 – Include context as part of your targeting strategy

The Google Display Network used to terrify me, because I often felt the context for my ads was going to be misaligned with the message -- and tracking Google Display Network results through to pipelines or deals usually disappointed. Now you can get much more granular with targeting and reporting on your ads by context, so choose the right context. Choose the topics that best align to both the problems you solve and the messaging for ads. That should continue to provide to be a winning recipe.

#3 – Build cross-channel marketing programs

Although I’m advocating for online advertising specifically here, it’s really as part of an integrated online mix. Your marketing programs should deliver a consistent message progressing through a storyline across multiple channels including online ads (multiple destinations), social media and email.

#4 – Look for successes and merchandise them

Look for successes – whether they are tracked through tracking a digital visitor through conversion, or looking at the pool of companies who are advertising to and connecting that to lead and opportunity data in your CRM. As you have successes, share those internally with marketing and sales teams to build confidence in the medium.

#5 – Be patient and skeptical at the same time

It will take time to see the full impact of online advertising, so you can’t expect immediate results. A three-month time window is the right time frame for a pilot. But at the same time be skeptical. If you are working with vendors or internal resources, work through the data to make sure it’s being executed correctly, and that you have good indicates that your targeting is hitting the mark-- click through rates vs. benchmarks, view through rates vs. benchmarks, reviewing the site URLs for fidelity to your plan. 

Want more insights like this on driving growth through integrated marketing?
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Five Ways Drift Helped Us Engage With More Web Visitors - In the First Week

As our Bedrock Data marketing team prioritized growth initiatives for Q2, improving engagement and conversions on our website was a key priority.

We decided to implement Drift on BedrockData.com as a key step towards that goal (cc Gabi Altunes).

I knew I was intrigued by Drift’s “No Forms” positioning (which I wrote about when they came out with it last year).

I knew Drift runs a phenomenal marketing program with great content from Dave Gerhardt & co.

And I knew the Drift product would be outstanding, coming from David Cancel’s awesome product and engineering team who turned HubSpot’s product from a potential liability to a huge advantage from 2011 to 2014.

What I didn’t know was - would Drift help us drive incremental leads (and opportunities, pipeline & customers) from our website? That’s what our Chief Revenue Officer Alan DiPietro really wanted to know.

If we were just “moving around the furniture” (diverting some would-be forms leads or call-in leads to Drift leads), that wasn’t going to do us much good.

One week - yes one week - into rolling it out, I’m happy to report that we are indeed seeing incremental lift.

I can point my finger at the engagement we’re getting, and while some of it certainly falls in the category of “accelerating leads we would have gotten anyway” (still valuable), there’s a definitive category of website visitors with whom we are engaging & converting whom I’m convinced would have bounced without live chat engagement.

I’ve categorized the impact into five types of website visitors:

#1 - Ms. Urgent

This falls in the category of acceleration. Marketing is about momentum, and if you can carry the momentum of a website visitors into a sales conversation, it’s a win for sales and marketing.

Momentum matters. After a good trade show, the question is can you carry the momentum from the tradeshow floor over to sales & marketing follow-up?  And the same is true for a website visitor - can you carry momentum established on your website over to sales engagement, immediately?

We had a website visitor looking for an urgent solution to their Pardot-NetSuite integration with news hitting that Pardot had dropped their non-Salesforce CRM connectors.

Through the Drift chat I confirmed we did in fact provide that connector, answered several questions and scheduled a meeting for later that day with a rep. I also directed our visitor to several links for expert content including a video walkthrough of what she was looking for. We even joked about how she was really looking to solve this problem quickly because her sales team was upset by the prospect of lost marketing automation-CRM integration.

Interestingly, this Ms. Urgent found us via a paid search ad for Pardot-NetSuite integrations - so if you are asking yourself “Should I put Chat on my paid search landing pages?”, the answer is yes!

By the time that afternoon meeting came around, the questions centered around “how quickly can we get started?” as the entire team had seen the video walkthrough shared from the chat.

#2 - Mr. Ready to Collaborate

This visitor was seeking collaboration - he wanted to know what we could do, and then ask some deeper & deeper questions around the details of, in his case, a Pardot-ConnectWise integration.

Thrilled by the interaction, our Mr. Ready to Collaborate scheduled a follow up call for that afternoon…. and a few days later became our first “Drift to Dollars” customer win.

 #3 - Mr. “Not Ready to Reveal Myself… Yet”

Here’s where we move from acceleration to true incremental engagement.

This is the largest volume of the chats. The chat starts out with a question - and you allow the visitor to do so and remain anonymous. They can ask their question without the overhead of having to identify themselves by name. They’re not quite ready to reveal their identity.

You answer the question - and engage in a conversation. Back and forth, back and forth. Provide clear, expert answers to their questions. Ask a follow-up question. Share a related link.  And then before you know it, the visitor is willing to share their information with you to schedule a follow-up.

It’s a combination of the visitor-driven engagement, a positive experience of chat interaction, and the sharing of expert content - where this magic happens - and back to Alan’s question - I’m convinced this is incremental. Here are some real world examples from Bedrock Data last week:

  • CFO knew his team was looking for a NetSuite-Pardot integration (different company than the one above), was vetting our capabilities after hearing about us from his marketing team

  • Marketer was doing his homework on Marketo-Eventbrite integrations as he built a plan for his team to add Eventbrite as their event management system

  • A web developer was checking on the possibility of connecting Zoho & NetSuite

  • A business development lead was checking on the capabilities of integrating HubSpot and NetSuite as his marketing team considers a HubSpot purchase, so he could refer a solution to his NetSuite power user  

  • A marketer wanted to know how long a Marketo-Zoho integration would take, and confirm the pricing (was surprised Bedrock Data does not charge a setup fee)

 The pattern here is that these web visitors are visiting the site with an intent to learn - and a live chat provides them a pathway to do so - and move them forward in their buying process.

 #4 - Ms. “I Need Help”

Another pattern that emerged was a type of visitor who was legitimately looking for help - as they were very unfamiliar with the subject because they had been asked to do research by someone else. Sometimes these visitors remained anonymous (after helping them out), or sometimes they self-identified.

 Some examples here include a procurement person doing research into options for a HubSpot-SugarCRM integration - and looking to report options back to their marketing team. Another example was a junior member of a marketing team asked to look into HubSpot-ConnectWise integrations by his boss.

 Without chat engagement, these visitors would not have been likely to self-identify, and would have left the site without a solid grasp on the information they were looking for. It was natural for them to ask a question via chat, but likely would not have been natural for them to “formally request something” (see what I did there - formally) as they were outside of their comfort zone with a new subject matter.  

#5 - Mr. International

Due to our capabilities of rapidly implemented integrations which can be self-managed by business users, we do a lot of business with international based customers looking to connect SaaS systems without a traditional IT integration project.

 We wanted to take advantage of chat engagement for our international site visitors as well, thinking it would be a nice touch to reinforce we are easy to do business with even though we are not located in their local country.

We came up with an approach we dubbed “Drift After Hours”, where we have a chat sidebar letting our visitors know we are not online but to share their details and we’ll be back to them as soon as possible. Still far better than having to find and fill out a contact us form.

Even better, when we get an after-hours chat engagement (like all Drift inquiries) we route them via Slack - so in the event a team member is available they can respond in real time.

So Wednesday night a little before 9:00, I’m sitting on the couch watching a baseball game and Slack lights up. A web visitor from Australia (where they are starting their next work day) wants to talk about his need to connect Marketo for marketing automation, HubSpot as CRM for his BDR team, and NetSuite as their back office CRM.

Yes we can do it!  

We engage in a great chat - answer his questions on capabilities, on-boarding time and pricing.

I’m on my couch, watching a baseball game and having a Slack conversation with a marketer in Australia about integrating Marketo, HubSpot & NetSuite. Drift is awesome!

couch-phone-Drift-baseball.jpg

My Only Pain Point

The only significant pain point so far is… integrations. Of course I would complain about that since I spend all day at Bedrock Data helping companies better integrate their sales & marketing systems!  

My issue is that although after a chat, Drift can push a lead into Salesforce (good), it can only bring over the HubSpot source data from HubSpot if that record also converts on a HubSpot form. Ahem, ahem - doesn’t quite align to the no form approach.

Since most visitors aren’t going to follow up a chat with a form-fill - at least not right away - then the tradeoff of bringing these leads in via Drift is losing your baseline metrics on conversions by channel - organic, referrals, direct, etc. That record exists in HubSpot, but it’s anonymous and not connected to the lead record in Salesforce - so the data is effectively lost.

I’m sure the wizards at Drift will figure it out soon. They built HubSpot after all.

Pain Point? Drift's on it! 

(Update June 26) - Drift is all about being custom-obsessed and customer-centric. Check out what Elias said in that post above if you want to hear more about that. 

I experienced that first hand. I published this post on Saturday, and by Sunday I heard from Drift's CEO David Cancel to express interest in learning more about the HubSpot integration challenge, and by Monday Drift's VP of Product Craig Daniel was in our office to talk about it. Craig told us that Drift's on the case, along with sharing some other cool upcoming features around reporting and routing. 

Customer Issue? Drift listens & solves

(Update 2 August 17) - After back and forth with me to test, happy to report Drift has firmly addressed the above issue - and now HubSpot source data flows cleanly into Salesforce. Here's an example of a Bedrock Data lead from yesterday using this new & improved integration. You can see critical digital marketing data such as the lead sourced from Organic Search and in this specific case Google.ca. They've also made the Conversion Event descriptions much cleaner.

Hubspot-Drift

This has been a great experience of providing a positive review of a product, but with one issue - and the CEO and VP Product Management jumping all over the issue - and coming up with a nice product improvement in a rapid time frame.  As I said here:

I'd be buying Drift stock if I could. 

What’s Next?

Next up at Bedrock Data is rolling it out for our customer success and support teams, including interface via our help site and in-product. Given the back and forth our support team typically has with customers, it’s sure to improve the customer experience for that interaction - and help to resolve questions more quickly.

So stop by and say hello - we’re open for business over at BedrockData.com.

Marketo vs. HubSpot – Comparing Purple vs. Orange at their Essence on 10 Key Points

It’s funny – although I’ve been following or using both HubSpot and Marketo since 2009, I  recently started sharpening my perspective on how the two marketing automation firms, now HUBS and MKTO on your CNBC stock ticker, directly compare.

Before I get to these 10 comparison points on Marketo vs. HubSpot, two ‘preamble points’ I want to make clear first:

  • Both are strong products, and both have come a long way since those early days in 2009 (thanks goodness!), and are going to continue to quickly evolve as both companies continue to invest significant resources into R&D. So the points below may look very different a year or two from now.
  • The below is very much a DRAFT – I would love to get feedback on these and other points – in fact the main reason that I am publishing this now is so that I can share my observations to date and get additional expert opinions on this topic.

So with that, here we go:

#1 - Marketo is a kick-ass marketing workflow tool

Marketo Flow Steps are a work of beauty for any marketing ops manager. Marketo gives its users tons of control for both recurring and trigger based data-driven actions, and the sequences of marketing or data activities that follow. It’s truly a powerful engine that supports lead nurture flows, lead routing processes and coordination between marketing and SDR/Teleprospecting activities.

 #2- HubSpot is a powerful lead attraction & conversion platform

If Marketo’s bread is buttered through marketing workflow, then HubSpot’s sweet spot in the process is the activities preceding and leading up to that initial web conversion (form fill). HubSpot gives digital marketers powerful insight into what pre-conversion activities (e.g. specific web pages, blog content or social media activities) have the most impact on both “conversions” as well as any follow on impact (e.g. MQLs, Opportunities, Pipeline, Wins, etc.). 

#3 - Marketo struggles big time (today) with pre-conversion analytics

I see Marketo already on the path to change this, and it’s just a question of when – and how well they communicate it. The core of this issue is that at its heart, originally, Marketo tracking leverages programs which sync to SalesForce campaigns; and these programs are wonderful at tracking ‘known traffic’ – once you are converted/cookied – a web visitor can be added to a Marketo Program with ease and powerful campaign influence reporting can be achieved from there.

Marketo struggles with granular program level tracking of anonymous traffic. For example, if you want to ask the question: “Which of my Blog Posts (or Web Pages, for that matter) have the greatest influence on the follow-on generation of MQIs – or MQLs, Opps, etc.?”, you’d struggle to answer this question in Marketo – whereas HubSpot is geared to naturally helps its users answer and optimize around that question.

You could (and should) create a Marketo program that adds any Blog Visitor to a program to be able to answer this question for the Blog as a whole – but doing it at an individual Blog post level seems impractical.

Marketo, as I’ll reinforce below, is a technology ecosystem player (which by the way I believe is the right approach), so the way they are attacking this problem is through Google Analytics integration which was released in April 2015.

And while I think this is the right strategy and will get to the desired result for Marketo users when fully implemented -- to date I don’t think it’s been well communicated or trained across the Marketo customer base.

And the missing link, which presumably is coming, is feeding Marketo lead outcome data (e.g. MQL, Opportunity, Pipeline) back into Google Analytics in a way that can help answer those original questions I posed around which specific blog posts, web pages or digital interactions are having the greatest impact on conversions and the follow-on business results. Once that is in place and well understood by the Marketo base, it will close a significant gap vs. HubSpot today.

#4 - HubSpot’s Blog Analytics crush anything Marketo can do

The reason I used ‘essence’ in this article title is many of these points come down to the original vision for why these two products were created and the problems they were focused on solving. In the case of HubSpot, blog optimization was at its core as a means to drive web traffic and 'leads'.

So therefore keyword rank tracking, real-time SEO guidance for blogging and what my colleague Matthew Wainwright calls “absurdly transparent blog metrics” are significant competitive advantages. Marketo tried to play catch up here in 2014 with its SEO module which let’s just say I wasn’t a huge fan of in its initial release. 

#5 - HubSpot leans towards “all in one”, Marketo is all about technology ecosystem

Whether it’s their Free CRM announced at INBOUND 2014, or their fully integrated Content Management System, HubSpot’s strategy has been “all in one”. That can be incredibly powerful for a business  to connect its website, digital marketing, lead nurturing through to CRM.

Marketo’s strategy has been one of enabling hundreds of technology integrations through its impressive LaunchPoint ecosystem. Some of the integrations my team has done already include Marketo to On24, SnapApp, LinkedIn Lead Accelerator (the former Bizo platform for retargeting) and Integrate.

The result of this is what you’d expect:

HubSpot can go very wide, and for those organizations who have minimal existing infrastructure and minimal infrastructure requirements – this can be hugely powerful. This is why HubSpot has leaned more towards the SMB user base who fit this criteria.

Marketo’s integration approach means customers can go for “best of breed” and leverage a range of other technologies. I tend to prefer this integrated approach for achieving business value, although costs will also be higher in this approach across multiple vendors (vs. "all in one").

#6 - Marketo has a really strong SalesForce integration

Going back to essence, this has always been true of Marketo – including the automated data integration through to the SalesInsight plugin for sales visibility into prospect program and web activities. That said, HubSpot has closed the gap here over the years and recently announced a five-year extension to its partnership with SalesForce.

In addition to the standard Marketo-SalesForce integration, I’ve enjoyed the ability for Marketo to push tasks into SalesForce for custom integrations – creating SalesForce triggers based on specific task types has been useful for aligning more complex business processes between the two systems.

#7 - Marketo tokens provide great program scalability and maintenance capabilities

Marketo tokens continue to get more and more powerful. Tokens are Marketo’s method for data-driven content that carries intelligence over different programs. With properly implemented tokens, there is significant time savings, reduction in errors and additional marketing capabilities across programs.

For a simple example, think of a program token as a Webinar Name, Title, Speaker & Time --- updating that is one central place on the program and then propagating across all email invitations, follow up emails, registration pages, thank you pages etc. --- at the click of a button..

 #8 - Marketo scales better across multiple business lines and geographies

Because of the aforementioned tokens and workflow capabilities, along with other features including lead partitions – Marketo scales well as a single instance is applied across multiple business lines and geographies – more so than HubSpot.

 #9 - Don’t Sleep on Marketo’s RTP

Marketo is more than Marketo. What I mean by that is that when you think about Marketo you also need to factor in their Real Time Personalization Product which originated from Marketo’s acquisition of Insightera in December 2013. In fact, in that same article where I panned Marketo’s SEO module, I lauded RTP as the bright future for Marketo.

RTP answers many – not all, but many – of the pre-conversions concerns on the original Marketo product. RTP enables customers with the ability to target both anonymous & known traffic with more precise on-site targeting and off-site campaigns (including retargeting) – and -- again with Marketo’s ecosystem approach -- the approach here is largely to create web content modules that can then be embedded into any web site regardless of CMS..

 #10 - HubSpot partners are passionate digital marketers, Marketo partners are marketing ops geeks

I realize this is a generalization, but it’s true! (And I’m allowed to say it because I was one of the first Marketo partners before they even had a partner program in 2010.)

I see more digital marketing talent in the HubSpot partner community, whereas I see outstanding marketing operations expertise amongst the Marketo partner base.  

 

OK so that’s what I got. What did I miss? What did I get wrong?

Would love to hear additional points about how the experts out there are comparing Purple vs. Organize now and in the future. Fire Away!

#SDSummit Takeaway: SiriusDecisions clarifies a misunderstood statistic – and opens up a whole world of possibilities for integrated digital demand generation

Today is the day SiriusDecisions set the record straight.

Jen Ross & Marisa Kopec unveiled SiriusDecisions new research on B2B buying process and in doing so made a simple but powerful clarification that should open the collective eyes of sales & marketing organizations around the possibilities of digital marketing supported sales prospecting as a competitive difference maker.

The original 67% stat was “67 percent of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally”.

However it often got spun colloquially as: “Buyers are 67% of the way through the sales process before they want to speak to a sales rep.”

The implications of the misinterpreted stat were:

  • Buyers don’t want to talk to reps
  • By the time a buyer wants to talk a rep, they are 2/3 of the way through their buying process

The overall message to sales was one of helplessness and disempowerment.

It was WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

Today at the SiriusDecisions 2015 Summit we learned about the recent SiriusDecisions study of over 1,000 different B2B buyers from actual purchase processes and we got clarification that: Buyers aren’t 67% through the buying process when they want to talk to a Person/Rep. 67% of the buying process may involve digital content consumption, but the sales/rep engagement is threaded throughout that buying process and spans all stages.

And here’s where it’s most interesting, as I live Tweeted as the event.

The sales and marketing organizations who can partner and enable reps to leverage digital tools to get visibility and engage with prospects will create a massive competitive edge. What we are talking about here:

  • Expanding data sources of potential prospects
  • Leveraging scoring to prioritize best fit leads based on company attributes, web behavior and social interaction
  • Leverage social marketing, content and teleprospecting techniques to build credibility as authority and engage with prospects as early in the buying process as possible
  • Use tools to best tailor conversations and understand where buyer is in the buying process
  • “Rinse and repeat” to deliver useful content to support them through their buying process, wherever they may be

The impact will come from properly harnessing reps around digital interactions. It's about Sales AND Digital and how they work together through the ENTIRE buying process.

Much more empowering for sales reps and teleprospecting.

Much more inspiring for aligned sales and marketing teams to go after this together.

And great news for all the great digital technology vendors at #SDSummit who can add value to help companies build that aligned sales and digital marketing demand generation machine.

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