Getting Bachelorette’s Attention

Today's Guest Post is by Meagen Eisenberg, Director of WW Programs and Marketing Automation at ArcSight.

What does ABC’s The Bachelorette have to do with sales enablement? Getting Ali’s attention on this season's The Bachelorette has some great parallels to successful sales enablement. We can apply a few tips from the bachelors.

Do you Accept this Rose?

We, as marketers, play the wooers to sales mindshare and attention. We want to get noticed, we want to be selected for the date, we want them to fall in love with us (or at least our programs), and we are competing against 25 other guys (well at least 25 other distractions). We want our programs leveraged to further the business. How do we get our sales team's attention and get noticed through all of the noise? Do you run the Roberto (the good-looking one), the Ty approach (the funny charming one with a Southern accent), the Craig (the "bring home the bacon" lawyer), the Jonathan (one-of-a-kind), or the Frank (the intellectual)? I am going to argue that you need all styles to be irresistible. A healthy mix at the right time seems to attract my Bachelorette sales team.

To get my sales team's attention, we started with a program that had sex appeal and charm that targeted their top 100 green field accounts. We created a multi-touch program to make prospects Flip for our campaign, a high-end highly-targeted program with a goal to set up in-person meetings (think 1-1 date with a rose). We knew that an email alone was not going to get sales' or our targets' attention, which led us to use Eloqua's multi-capability software with email, phone, direct mail (FedEx package), PURLs (personalized hypersites) and in-person meetings. We designed a catchy tagline and offer, hot graphics, video and personalized URLs for each recipient. The microsite displayed content based on the recipient's industry, sales rep, and company. We went as far as to include an auto-generated email with copy included to make it extremely easy to reach out to their rep. Click on the "Click to schedule meeting" on the PURL site to see for yourself. Every touch made it as easy as a click to work with a personal sales rep. We got sales excited when they saw the ArcSight branded Flip cams and the response rates! We loved the results we saw in the U.S. and decided to roll the program out worldwide.

What Do Sesame Street and Sales Have in Common? ELMO!

The Flip program was sexy and got sales' attention, but we needed to keep our appeal and get them to use our other available marketing assets – webinars, whitepapers, and events. So we laid on the humor with an ELMO video to get them excited about the power of Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook (aka "ELMO") and all of the marketing templates we had available for them to engage with and nurture their prospects and customers. Just to give you a sense of volume for ELMOs, our largest month was March, and we as a company sent 1,850 marketing created templates and used the tracking feature to send 3,041 emails. You can find the number of marketing emails sent for your own company under menu Evaluate > Reporting > Report Console at Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Usage, and the number of auto-tracked emails at AutoTracker Emails Sent. And if you want to see which marketing templates are getting the most play, run the Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Overview report.

For our one-of-a-kind approach, we designed personal daily reports for each of our sales reps. (Everyone likes to feel special and unique.) By creating daily emailed reports for our sales and inside sales team, we give them visibility into the activity in their territory. We also show them the quality of the leads in their region based on what the leads are looking at and how often they are on our website. They can even see what Eloqua terms as the "Unknown" visitor, companies on your website that have not filled out a registration form. Our inside sales team loves to catch the "Unknown" visitors, look the company up in Salesforce.com, and call into the contacts to see if they can find the person with the need we can fulfill - catch them while they are hot. You can find how to create daily reports for your sales team on page 27, and best practices for creating daily reports on page 28 from my February San Francisco Success Tour presentation.

Targeting Your Top Accounts

Do you have sales reps that don't cover a specific territory, but specific accounts instead? For our Strategic Account Managers, we create real-time individual company alerts through Eloqua's Visitor Notification tool (learn more on pages 10-12). Basically, daily reporting and alerts show sales what leads and companies are actively pursuing our programs, what products they are investigating, and how to track, contact and (with the help of ELMO) come across as a thought-leader in the space to our clients.

Show Me the Metrics!

And just when sales think we Marketers are all make-up and glam, we showed off our intellectual side. We hit them with Eloqua's reporting and campaigns module –providing reporting and insight into their territory with daily lead activity reports, the Integrated Marketing and Sales Funnel with stage health (All Responses by Lead Stage [see graphic]), and ROI information, such as Top Campaigns by Opportunities Generated/Revenue report and Influenced/Attributed Revenue and Cost (CPL, CPSO, etc). It shows our organization what programs and campaigns are effective, how we are building out their pipeline, and why we invest our dollars in some areas and not others.

With Eloqua capabilities, you get to be the best of all the bachelors – attracting your sales team's attention and enabling them to find and close the deal – sales and marketing alignment at its best. Our sales team has been very responsive to our multi-touch programs, the use of ELMO, and the daily reports. We have their attention and they engage with us on a regular basis to build pipeline and accelerate the closing of deals. With a multi-style strategy, your sales team can't resist and you will get the rose every time!