Wednesday, July 28, 2010

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!


Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Quick Tip: How to Organize Your Email Templates in Outlook


Here's a quick tip for those of you that use Eloqua's plug-in for Microsoft Outlook to provide email collateral for your sales team. Make it easy for your sales reps to choose the correct template by organizing your folders by sales stage (you may also refer to this as "opportunity stage"). By grouping your messages this way, the rep can easily send the right message at the right time and then quickly move on to their next prospect.

Here's an example of how this might look:

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Using Eloqua emails as social media content



(Guest post from Joel Rothman)

Out of the box, Eloqua allows you to create a link that will send someone to a Social Media site, such as Twitter, Facebook or Linked In. This functionality is great, and very easy to use. But, I have been asked a couple of times how we can create a link to the actual email itself that can be placed used for twitter etc… and there is a pretty easy way to do this, assuming you are just a little bit comfortable with HTML.

Most social sites have a specific URL type that can be used to push someone to the site, and prepopulate the content box with the text that you want. For example, for twitter, it’s this format:



Where you substitute what’s in the “content” are for what you want to pre-populate, with + signs instead of spaces in your text. So, what you need to do is come up with a line, such as “Check out this Newsletter for valuable B2B tips”, that would look like this:
(click for larger image)



But wait, it’s missing the URL! How do you get that, you might be asking? Simple, insert this code:
(click for larger image)



So, you’ll end up with a link that looks like this: (click for larger image)



And Voila:

Now, a couple of notes. Any personalization in emails will not show. In fact, it will just be blank (ie if you have Dear Joel, it will say just Dear). Also, these links expire after a few weeks.

Now, that URL says now.eloqua.com.. what’s up with that? Can you change that? Stay tuned…

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Success Tour Destinations in August and September


I learned my lesson in writing post titles last time with my "Success Tour Stops in June" title. No, the tour does not stop, it was just a list of the stops on the tour. In fact, the tour is going incredibly well, and the most recent destinations have been great fun for everyone involved, and have included a growing roster of cities, like our first stop in Los Angeles.

Other stops, including Chicago, Portland, and Toronto have all of course featured a visit from Drake, who just ran a great iPad giveaway contest which resulted in him being seen (and photographed) over 200 times in cities around the world!

The full schedule of Eloqua customer success tour stops is always available on user.eloqua.com, but if you haven't had a chance to go there and find your city, the following stops are coming up in August and September:

Austin, August 11th
San Francisco, August 19th
Washington, D.C., September 2nd
New York City, September 14th
Denver, September 15th
Atlanta, September 21st

Attendance is free, just let us know you'll be there by registering on user.eloqua.com, and we'll see you there. Some great customer stories are shared at each event, and there is often a preview glimpse of Eloqua 10, and a number of other upcoming product innovations!

Follow along with the conversation on Twitter by following the #EloquaTour hashtag.

Hope to see you out at an event.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

And the iPad winner is...


A few weeks ago our Eloqua Success Tour Ambassador, Drake, kicked off a contest to give away an iPad. Well, today is that magical giveaway day. It was an incredibly difficult decision for Drake because there were so many creative entries. (If you’re one of Drake’s many friends on Facebook you’ll be able to click the links below to view the photos.)

Drake commented that he really wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and he got versions of his wish in Vegas and on Ellis Island. He traveled as far away as Australia and Hawaii, and all over the US and Canada. He flew on a trapeze with the greatest of ease and celebrated a bit too much at a winery in Napa Valley. He went swimming (which didn’t end well), was burned, umpired a baseball game, golfed, scaled amazing heights, and even braved the protesters at the G20 summit. Drake also made friends with kangaroos, koala bears, sheep (ouch!), roosters, ducks, pigs, cows, dogs, donkeys, and llamas with really bad teeth. He had a bit of peace and music at Woodstock, and a tiny bit of corporate espionage (shhh). And yes, he even managed to play in the World Cup. And all the while he was spreading the gospel of marketing and sales alignment to everyone he met.

Drake is a tired man.

But not too tired to award an iPad! Drumroll please…

The iPad goes to Amy Kolzow! She managed to take Drake to eleven states across the US – impressive! - and even gave Drake several new outfits. But the real reason she won? She cleverly named Drake’s dog “Markie”. A shining moment in Eloqua branding. (Not sure what the connection is? Visit http://markies.eloqua.com for the scoop.)