Creating Reports from Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com

(guest post from Ben McPhee)

As you may know, we recently launched a new sales tool called Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com. This application, written entirely on the Force.com platform, provides sales reps both individual and account-level activity insights paired with flexible tracking tools so that they are able to understand which prospects they should be engaging, with what content they should be engaging them and when engagement would be most effective.

But the question comes up:

How can management and executives get the same information? What about the management and executive level folks that do not directly own or engage all sales opportunities but want to leverage the insights provided by Discover to keep track of general activity within territories and understand who the hottest accounts are?

Because of the way Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com is designed, you can easily generate rollup activity reports right in Salesforce.com based on rep & region and know exactly which Accounts in which regions are most likely to buy. Here’s what it can look like:

The graph below illustrates which regions have the greatest purchase interest at the Account level, broken down by which reps own those Accounts



The graph below illustrates which Accounts are showing the most buying interest, by region. Hovers allow you to quickly see exactly which Accounts are exhibiting the highest engagement



How do you do this? It’s actually pretty straight forward.

In short, you just make a report in SFDC that references a few extra fields that Discover has added to your Account object. You could also do it based on fields added to the Contact and Lead objects (the same fields are added to all), but for illustration purposes, we’ll focus on the Account rollup reporting here.

Once Eloqua is up and running with activity synchs to SFDC and you have installed and configured Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com, you can go to create a new report.

To create the reports shown above, you will want to create a Accounts & Contacts report, then base it on Accounts.



Select the type of report you want (e.g., Summary) and then when you get to the Standard Summary Fields interface, scroll down and you will note additional fields that have been added to the Account object by the Discover application:



Opt to Sum any of the fields on which you want to report – in this case, we have used Total Buy Signals and Total Open Opportunities (we are using Total Open Opps so that we can filter out Accounts that do not have at least one open opportunity).

Depending on how you want to group the data (e.g., You are interested in seeing, by region, WHICH ACCOUNTS have the most Buy Signals), select the appropriate metrics. For the second graph above, we use the following grouping logic:



Then make sure that in your Columns selection, from the Account: Custom Info area, you choose the 2 new fields – Total Open Opportunities and Total Buy Signals:




Then, make sure you apply a filter that weeds out:
• Accounts linked to no open opportunities
• Accounts that aren’t showing a relatively significant amount of activity



Depending how your regions are broken out, you may also want to generate several different reports only covering certain regions or certain reps (as we have done in this example), so the filters are entirely up to you and will simply dictate the breadth of data you want to cover in each overview report.

Now, you just have to put the finishing touches on your Chart. The below outlines the basic setup for the Hottest Accounts by Region report:



And you’re done!

Now that you can quickly whip up overview reports of your hottest Accounts, Leads and Contacts, Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com quickly becomes an invaluable tool for not only providing your sales reps with close power but also for providing your sales management and executive team with high-level insight into which regions, reps and accounts are seeing and generating the most interest in your products.

If you’d like some general info on Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com, please get a hold of your Customer Success Manager and/or check out http://eloquaforsales.eloqua.com/.

A question out to the readers and users – will this type of reporting prove valuable? Why? If not, what are the additional metrics and perspectives that would really drive this over the fence?

Drake Has a New Contest For You

(Guest post from Eloqua's Drake)

This is Drake, Eloqua's Success Tour Ambassador and I'm kicking off another round of Customer Success Tours beginning today in Austin, TX. Our theme for the events this quarter is "sales enablement", but actually the goal is to make you, the marketer, a hero to your sales team. Envision them giving you accolades at the next company-wide meeting...

In honor of this theme I've cajoled the folks at Eloqua into letting me host another contest on Facebook. Here's the scoop: post a picture on my Facebook wall (facebook.com/eloquadrake) that depicts marketing and sales being aligned. Think "lock-step" and "BFFs" (or whatever kids these days are saying). And most importantly, think creatively, because that's what will win the prize. You can post up to three times, so make 'em count. The deadline is September 6 (Labor Day) so you have a little time to strategize.

What's the prize? Your personal reward is a $100 iTunes or Amazon gift card (your choice) and your company reward is 10 licenses of the Eloqua Sales Toolkit which contains Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook, Eloqua Prospect Profiler and Eloqua Discover. What's Eloqua Discover? Come to a Success Tour to see a live demo of this great new tool. So it's a win-win for both you and your company.

Get started by friending me on Facebook so you can see all the postings and scope out the competition. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

(Oh – my Eloqua friends asked me to remind you that this Friday, August 13th is the early bird deadline for Eloqua Experience. You can attend for $999 if you sign up by this Friday, so what are you waiting for? After that the price goes up to $1350 – is there really anything to think about?)

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!

Customize your Real-Time Web Visitor Alerts

Alerting your sales team that their prospects are online is one of the easiest and quickest ways to add value to sales and enable sales to sell better. A real-time view of prospect activity gives sales insight into which accounts are active, who at those accounts is doing the investigation, and what conversation starters might engage them in a discussion right now.

However, having the content come labeled as "Eloqua Notifications" may confuse your sales team unless you have a chance to educate them on what to expect. Luckily, you don't have to. The notifications can be completely customized to your exact needs.

To begin configuring notifications, go to Setup->Management->User Management and select the user you want to configure the visitor alerts for. Select "Visitor Notifications" from the drop-down next to that user, and you can see any notifications that are already configured.

The section of "Who Triggers this Notification" allows you to configure exactly when an alert is sent out. Usually, you will configure it to match the salesperson's territory (by industry, ownership, or geography), and a minimum bar of activity (a few visits, viewing specific areas of the website, etc).

With that configured, your salesperson is able to receive alerts, but they will be generic in formatting. Use the "Notification Content Configuration" setting to select a new look and feel for them, and you can configure any area of the content you wish.

One of the most interesting areas to configure is the subject line. This will provide an at-a-glance view of who the person is and whether they are worth connecting with. Usually, inserting an email address in the subject line is worth doing, as it provides that instant recognition. Also, depending on your sales team's familiarity, you may need to have the subject line provide insights as to the purpose of the email, such as "Hot Lead Alert:".

The data shown in the visitor alerts is, of course, completely configurable. Just choose (or create) a Contact View in the "Data/View Shown in Notification Email" and that will be the exact set of data shown to the sales person. Usually a minimal set of information is best - anything extraneous tends to lead to distraction.

Usually you will want to have your corporate headers or standard messaging to again help the sales team understand what it is they are receiving. Do this under the "Email Header for Top of Email" section once you have selected the "Customize Branding" option.

You can also select whether you want to provide your sales team with a direct link to the visitor activity overview, and whether they should be allowed to configure which notifications they receive.

With that complete, you are ready to go. Your email notifications to your sales teams are completely configured; what triggers an alert, the data in the alert, who it comes from, and what the look and feel of the email is:

As one of the quickest, but most valuable things to set up, I would encourage everyone to set these up for your sales team.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement

One of the panels at Eloqua Experience that was very much worth watching was the panel discussion between Paul Teshima, Eloqua's SVP of Customer Success, and three of the industry's top CMO's and marketing leaders - Chris Boorman of Informatica, Drew Clarke from Cognos/IBM, and Tom Miller from ADP.

Some great insights came out of this panel as they each showed how they are measured, how they measure their teams, how they build their marketing dashboards, and what they are doing about measuring new media and the effects of social media.

The conversation is divided into parts so you can skip to the section of most interest to you. I hope you enjoy the insights from these leaders as much as I did:

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 1: Paul Teshima introduces the panelists and the topic of the marketing metrics that matter and building the CMO dashboard.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 2: The four key elements of marketing analysis are introduced - Campaign ROI, Funnel Health, Strategic Segment Analysis, and Benchmarking - and a discussion on "How are you measured today?" starts.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 3: The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Chris Boorman and Drew Clarke)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 4: (continuation) The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Drew Clarke)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 5: (continuation) The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Tom Miller)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 6: Open questions regarding percentage of pipeline that marketing is expected to contribute, and how data is maintained across the entire lifecycle of a lead in the marketing process.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 7: Open questions on measuring buzz from social media and its effect on search and SEO, as well as measuring brand equity vs revenue.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 8: Open questions on measuring influences of marketing in deals rather than just sourcing.

Custom Activity Tasks in CRM Integration

Guest post by Mike MacFarlane





Recently, Steve wrote about the various options for marketing automation/CRM integration – the integration between marketing and sales data. This got me thinking about how we at Eloqua use our integration capabilities with various CRM systems to help enable our sales team by passing over relevant, actionable information that we as a marketing organization can report on. One of the things we take a lot of advantage of are "custom activity tasks" that I can configure to do, or write, anything I need into Salesforce.com, our CRM system.

A while back, I wrote about setting up your Social Media GPS – showing a salesperson if a visit to your website (or Eloqua tracked page) was a result of click through from various social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. This process was built on Eloqua’s ability for a marketer to create a simple activity task that fires over to the CRM once the activity occurs. This has been a great win for us at Eloqua, as we can now report and track social media activity within our CRM system in combination with what we are already reporting on in Eloqua (check out how to track Inbound Referrals in a past Artisan post). But this process can be used for many other functions in relation to what activities/action someone takes.

At Eloqua, we use this process in combination with our Lead Scoring program. Whenever someone is fed into our scoring program (either through a form submission or a website visit), they are scored and we will automatically create a task that is assigned to the appropriate salesperson that contains all the scoring details and explicit information.

To access the often called “Integration Tab” in Eloqua, simply click “Setup/Integration”


For the sake of keeping this brief and to the point, I am purposely by-passing a few steps here, but you can find all the documentation you need to do this within Eloqua’s Customer Central.

Simply select if you want to create/update an object in your CRM, then select the object you want to use (note that if you are “creating” an record within an object in your CRM and you want to update that record later on from Eloqua, you will want to store the CRM ID within a dedicated Eloqua contact field):


Next, you will need to choose which fields from your Eloqua database you would like to use to populate fields within the task record in your CRM. Notice that the mappings screen is broken out into two sections: the left hand side are the fields that reside on the object in the CRM – the fields on the right are the fields that exist in your Eloqua database. Simply drag the Eloqua field you would like to use and drop it into the object field on the left hand side. This screen will also highlight fields that are “required” in your CRM (if you have fields that are required to create a record in an object) and alert you if you have not mapped values to those fields.


If you have done this successfully, you will see the Eloqua field name show up in red and in italics:



Another option that you have is to hardcode values into specific fields OR you can combine hardcoded values with Eloqua fields. A really good example of this would be in the Subject line of the task (this is what the salesperson would see initially when they receive the task). In this example, I want to make it obvious to the salesperson that this task is related to lead scoring, so I am going to construct my subject line to read “FIRST NAME LAST NAME just went through our scoring program”. Here is how it would look in the field mapping screen:


So when this call fires to the CRM, the task will pre-populate with the first and last name of the person that just went through the lead scoring program.

Once I have completed my mappings, I can then use the built in External Call tester which allows you to test the call you just made before you decide to push it live. Eloqua will show you the data that exists in the object before the call fires and what data exists after the call fires.

Once you are fully satisfied with how your new External call works, you can add it into Program Builder as an Integration Action to fire when someone hits that specific program step.

Prospect Profiler - As an AutoHotKey Shortcut

In the second post in a two-part series on Prospect Profiler, one of our keys to sales enablement, Ben McPhee continues exploring the topic he introduced in his first post; Prospect Profiler as a stand-alone. This time, Profiler is accessed as a AutoHotKey shortcut from within your email client.

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Option 2: Take a shortcut from your email client!


This is REALLY cool. We don’t officially support or have any direct integration with this software, but if you run AutoHotkey®, you can easily jump from your email client (e.g., Outlook) straight to a contact’s Prospect Profiler record with just the press of a few buttons.

Click the following link to download the custom AutoHotkey script that we wrote: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=58ec0aca75258a2ac79b87b207592a1ce04e75f6e8ebb871

When you are prompted, Save the file to your desktop. Once it is saved to your desktop, select it and drag it into your Start Menu > All Programs > Startup. Drop the file there so that the file runs every time you start up your computer. Having this script run on startup allows you to always use a hotkey combination to view a Prospect Profiler record for a contact.


Once the script has been ‘installed’ successfully, the next time you start up Windows, you should see an AutoHotkey icon appear in your toolbar:


Now all you have to do is the following:

1. Select an email address from your email client (make sure you select the entire email address, rather than the address book display name):


2. Copy the address: CTRL + C
3. CTRL + SHIFT + Z: This runs the AutoHotkey script
4. Select “Yes” to the prompt confirming that you want to look up the activity for the contact with the email address you copied


Your internet browser will now automatically load up with a view of the Prospect Profiler for the contact you identified! Going forward, all you need to do is copy an email address and then hit the hotkey combination above and you can load up an activity overview of your lead or contact in seconds.


Again, if you have not already logged into the Eloqua application or stored your user credentials with the Profiler, you will be prompted to enter your company name (no spaces), your Eloqua user name and your Eloqua user password. Make sure you select the “Remember Me” option, then log in.





Note: If your user account does not have access to Prospect Profiler (it is an add-on product offering), you will get a message to this effect. Contact your CSM if you are interested in Prospect Profiler.

Prospect Profiler - without a CRM System

Today's post on Artisan is another guest post, this time from Ben McPhee, on our Product Management team. Ben is most well known for his recent work on Prospect Profiler, one of our keys to sales enablement, but he is also responsible for our work with the sports marketing vertical where we work with a number of professional sports teams, arenas, and racing facilities.

In this post, Ben revisits Prospect Profiler, and looks at ways in which it can be used in stand-alone manner, without relying on being embedded in a CRM system as it normally is.

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No CRM system? No problem. While Eloqua’s Prospect Profiler is most effective in the context of a Lead or Contact record, we recognize that context may not always be ideal or available. There will be instances in which sales reps would like to simply see a contact’s activity without having to navigate through a CRM system and other instances where reps have not been provided a CRM tool at all.

Focused on making both marketing and sales as successful as possible in as many scenarios as possible, we want to let you know about some alternate routes/shortcuts your reps can take to get to Prospect Profiler and acquire a more in depth understanding of their prospect’s interests and behaviors.


Option 1: Just get on the internet and go to it!

Go to http://prospectprofiler.eloqua.com/
If you have not already logged into the Eloqua application or stored your user credentials with the Profiler, you will be prompted to enter your company name (no spaces), your Eloqua user name and your Eloqua user password. Make sure you select the “Remember Me” option, then log in.

You will then be presented with a search bar – going forward, when you go to the URL above, you will be automatically taken to this search interface. Type in the email address of the contact whose profile you wish to view (notice that once you type in the ‘@’ symbol you’ll get a list of possible contacts from which to choose), then hit Search.


The page will then load that contact’s profile with all the standard features of the Prospect Profiler – hover-overs, drilldowns, previews, etc.

Option 1B. If you’re a Mac user, set up a dashboard

In case you’re a Mac user, we thought we’d point out a quick and easy trick so that you can have quicker access to the great information available in Prospect Profiler.

Open Safari and navigate to http://prospectprofiler.eloqua.com/

Login to the profiler using your Eloqua login info (make sure you select the “Remember Me” option)

Choose "File" and "Open in Dashboard..."



A purple bar will drop down from the top of your browser window - click on the "Add" button at the right end of that purple bar.

You'll now see prospect profiler living on your OS X dashboard making it instantly accessible at the click of a button (or swipe of your mouse if you're using expose)


Styling Tip: You can change the style of the dashboard frame by clicking on the small "info" button located in the bottom right corner of the Profiler dashboard.

With these techniques, you can make Prospect Profiler, and the insights it provides into prospect buying behaviour, available anywhere, without needing the context of a CRM system.

Note: If your user account does not have access to Prospect Profiler, you will get a message to this effect. Contact your CSM if you are interested in Prospect Profiler.

Eloqua Experience: Highlights from 2008 - Nic Zangre, Aquent

Continuing on the theme of Eloqua Experience 2009 that we started recently, I wanted to continue with a highlight presentation from Eloqua Experience 2008 that remains very relevant today. Nic Zangre from Aquent would clearly be in the theme of this year’s “Rock Star” track (see the agenda for more details) with his detailed presentation on data management and advanced approaches to sales and marketing alignment.

If you’ve taken Sales and Marketing Alignment to a new level, as Nic did, don’t be shy about submitting it for consideration for an award at the Markies Gala on Tuesday night, where the industry’s best marketers will be celebrated in 12 categories. An entire category is dedicated to Sales and Marketing Alignment, as it is such an important topic. Remember, the deadline is fast approaching on Friday, October 2nd so you’ll want to submit soon.

In this presentation, Nic draws on his experience at both Fast Search and Aquent, in order to provide a very deep and hands-on presentation about data management, and the nuts and bolts of lead hand-off to sales:



Some highlights from the presentation if you want to use the “Chapters” tab to skip ahead (once the audio has loaded):

4:45 The CRM Engine
Nic’s perspective on the lifecycle of lead flow from marketing to sales, and the feedback to marketing in terms of successful results and the levers available to you.

7:15 Symptoms of Engine Trouble
How does data quality affect marketing and sales results
Can you identify segments and territories effectively?

13:40 Right Tools
Looking at which Eloqua tools work for which data challenge you might be having
- Decision rules
- Contact Groups and Filters
- Deduplication Rules
- Data Tools (validation, update, match rules)
- Multiple Program Feeders


16:20 Garbage In, Garbage Out
Nic looks at dealing with duplicated data, and managing a clean database from that point forward through data validation

20:59 Salesforce.com Dashboards
Aaron Rothschild looks at some sales dashboards that can be based on marketing activity once a good marketing process is in place.

27:10 Sales Needs
Nic explores territory distribution and advanced lead routing in order to handle lead allocation by geographic territory, especially in cases where territories or sales staff have changed

28:35 CRM Update Program (through to CRM Cleanup at 40:00)
A deep dive into the way that leads are identified, matched to territories, routed, and sent over to Salesforce.com. This is a very interesting and deep section that looks at a very robust process for lead handoff and management. If you are looking at advancing how you think about sales and marketing alignment, this is a great section to watch in full.

41:55 Results
Some very compelling, real, and clearly measured results from Nic’s work.



Remember, Eloqua Experience is in San Francisco on Nov 2nd - 4th, 2009, and is the event of the year for any marketer focused on marketing automation and demand generation. Hope to see you there.

Eloqua Experience: Highlights from 2008 - Fred Waugh, Convio

Eloqua Experience 2009 is just around the corner. Coming to San Francisco on Nov 2nd - 4th, 2009, this is the event of the year for any marketer focused on marketing automation and demand generation. We’ll have 3 tracks this year; a “Rising Star” track for those just getting up to speed with campaigning, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and sales alignment, a “Rock Star” track for those who are looking for cutting edge ideas on understanding, communicating with, and facilitating buying processes, and an “Executive Insights” track for those leading marketing organizations and looking to transform their businesses.

Topping it all of is the Markies Gala on Tuesday night, where the industry’s best marketers will be celebrated in 12 categories. If you have not yet written up your Markies submission, the deadline is fast approaching on Friday, October 2nd so you’ll want to submit soon.

In preparation for this year’s event, I wanted to highlight a few of the presentations from last year that I thought were particularly interesting. Not only are the ideas shared in these presentations still highly relevant today, but most of the marketers you hear in these presentations will be back at Eloqua Experience this year as veterans, and you will have a great opportunity to talk with them and get their advice and insights into not just how they re-engineered their businesses as discussed in these presentations, but how they have grown from there in the past year.

Today’s highlight is Fred Waugh, VP Marketing and Alliances at Convio. Convio is a leader in software for non-profits, and as such they serve a very broad base of customers, ranging in size from local food banks to the American Red Cross, and in their focus, ranging from libraries to cancer foundations.

In this presentation, Fred walks through their transition in Sales and Marketing alignment, from a “Field Marketing 1.0” perspective, to their current state. The presentation is rich in metrics, and ways of analyzing the Marketing pipeline.

Some highlights from Fred's Sales and Marketing Alignment Presentation (use the “Chapters” tab to quickly jump through the presentation):

5:03 Marketing 1.0
Fred discusses their previous state, what they were measure on, and how they tied closed/won business back to marketing’s influence.

14:00 Model Sensitivity
Fred looks at the sensitivity that their models had to changes in assumptions on close rate and what that did to drive the need for more leads in Marketing.

20:12 Report Card
A comparison of Convio data to benchmarks from Sirius Decisions

22:21 Pipeline Contribution
A full report of funnel data all the way from marketing through to sales, based on the quarter in which an opportunity was created


I look forward to seeing you all at Eloqua Experience 2009 in San Francisco, and I hope you will all submit your Markie award submissions before next Friday.

Sales Enablement and Management

As marketing organizations move beyond just lead flow and more into sales enablement, a number of new opportunities and also new challenges arise. One of the new opportunities that we spoke about recently was the use of marketing content in the sales organization through Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook (commonly known as ELMO).



The advantages are great in that you can provide on-message, on-brand content to your sales organization and allow them to quickly nurture and educate their prospects from an environment that they are comfortable in - Microsoft Outlook. However, this opens up a new question - how do you know that your efforts in enabling sales are successful?



This is very easy to do with Eloqua, as long as you set yourself (or your sales management team) up with the right reports on their team's performance. Now that all communications are trackable, not just for prospects' interaction with them, but also for how sales used them, it is much easier to understand how they are being used.



Let's look at a few of the reports that are available for managing your team's performance. For each of these reports, you can search for all or part of the name in the Reporting Console, choose the parameters (usually just time frame, sometime also which sales person) you are interested in, and then run the report.



For an overview the AutoTracker Email Overview shows you, both in aggregate, an for each of your sales people, how many emails were sent, how many of those were marketing provided templates, and the open, clickthrough, and form submit rates for those emails.

(might have to click on this image to see it more clearly)

Next, you can easily look at which of your content is being used most (and most effectively) through the Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Overview. This shows, for each piece of content, how many times it has been requested by sales people, how many times they have used it, and how effective it has been with its recipients.

(again, click on the image for a larger version)

You can also see a similar view, but by person, for what each person has done in terms of both requesting and sending marketing-supplied content through Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook. Note that this only includes marketing-supplied content, not emails that have been written by the sales person themselves. Use the Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Usage report

Another very interesting and insightful report is the AutoTracker Email Visitors report, which shows the visitors to your website who have clicked on tracked emails sent from Outlook. This gives you a great sense of who in your prospect base is showing interest.




If you want to see which of your sales reps have installed, updated, and begun using the Outlook Plugin, the AutoTracker Usage Overview does this well. Not only can you see which version each person has installed, and when they last used it, but you can see the settings they have selected as their defaults, which can be useful in understanding their usage profile.

With the wealth of analytics available on the ELMO product, you can easily see what content is deemed useful, who is using it, and whether it is being effective. This gives you great insight into whether your sales team has adopted the content and tools you are providing to them as they engage their prospects.

Email Content and Sales Enablement - Quick Tip on Security

The recent posts around sales enablement have generated a lot of discussions. One specific topic was the Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook plugin (aka. ELMO to many), that allows you to provide marketing content for sales. The content can easily be controlled at the folder level, so specific folders can be enabled for sales, while other folders are not provided to sales.

However, the discussion surfaced an interesting challenge. If you are keeping your marketing content organized through foldering, based on topics or initiatives, then it may not make sense to use the folders to split content into that which is accessible by sales and that which is not. Luckily, there is an easier solution to this.

Within any folder of emails that is available to sales, you can select whether the content should be kept private from users of MS Outlook (except for the email's creator of course). Under advanced options, just click the checkbox for "Private in MS Outlook" and that email will not be accessible by sales. You can keep a folder-based organization scheme in place, while still maintaining full control over which emails are accessible to sales.

Lead Scoring for Sales Enablement - Visual Cues in Salesforce.com

We all know that sales people are visual people. We touched on that quite a bit in last week's post on sales enablement. Rather than interpret a list or a number, they would much rather quickly look at a picture to indicate whether a person was qualified as an individual, or hot or cold as a prospect.

This visual orientation is one of the main reasons for the popularity of Prospect Profiler among sales professionals, as it provides this quick, visual view of what is happening with a prospect.

However, even without Prospect Profiler, these visual cues can be extremely valuable to your sales team. Having a visual indication of whether an individual is qualified and/or interested, is something you can configure quickly and easily within salesforce.com or your CRM system of choice, without any additional cost.

To do this is very simple. Essentially, you are building custom formula fields, where the "formula" returns an image that represents what you are interested in displaying.

To get started, go to the setup area, and under Leads->Fields, scroll down to Lead Custom Fields, and add a New field.

From here, you will be guided through a quick wizard to set up the field. The type of field you want to create is "Formula" as we will be applying some logic to the image display, and the output type is Text.

Provide a field label for your field, such as if we are building an image of 0-5 stars to represent how qualified a person is as a buyer (explicit score), we might label the field "Explicit Rating Image".

From here, you are presented with a Formula screen - select the Advanced Formula tab to get started. Note that we are just creating a formula to look at the Explicit Lead Score (which is already present) and return an image. We are not building a formula to actually score the leads, which will have been done in Eloqua, based on the best practices for lead scoring, and passed into Salesforce.com.

There is a small amount of code being used here, but nothing to be overly concerned about, as you can edit an existing code sample in order to build the exact image you require.

When we are looking at the explicit score, it may vary between 0 and 100, so we'll return 0 to 5 stars based on where it sits in that range. The first thing we need to do, however, is to tell the formula which field it is looking at to find your lead's explicit score.


Click on "Insert Field" and a dialog box will give you a list of your fields. When you select it, the internal name for that field is inserted in your code. You'll need to replace the internal name in any of these examples with your own in order to have it work in your CRM system.

For this example, to look at an explicit lead score field called "LS_Explicit_Score" (replace this with your own), and display stars based on the range of values in the score field, the code would be as follows:

IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 80,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_500.gif", "5 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 60,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_400.gif", "4 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 40,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_300.gif", "3 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 20,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_200.gif", "2 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 10,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_100.gif", "1 star"),
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_000.gif", "0 star")
)))))

You can see that this also takes into account the range of scores (ie 0-100) you have in your scoring, so it is important to make sure your lead scores don't grow with time more than appropriate, and that the right scoring caps are in place. This ensures that your scores remain cleanly between 0 and 100 as they should.

With this in place, you can then define who the field is visible to, and edit the Lead Layout to add in your field where appropriate. Generally, it is a good idea to drage the field for the images next to the number for the score so your sales team begins to get a feel for the underlying numbers.

This same process can also be followed for the other dimensions of lead scoring, such as implicit scoring (how interested a person is). Follow a similar process, but build your formula off of the implicit score. If you wanted a formula that would use a Consumer Reports style set of partially colored circles to represent the score, the following would work:

IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 80,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating5.gif", "High"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 60,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating4.gif", "Med-High"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 40,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating3.gif", "Med"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 20,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating2.gif", "Med-Low"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 10,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating1.gif", "Low"),
IMAGE("/img/samples/s.gif", "no rating")
)))))

Again, you will want to replace LS_Implicit_Score with the name of the field in which you store your implicit score. Continue this process for any other fields you like.

If the field you are building a rule from has a ranking or stage such a Hot/Warm/Cold or A/B/C, rather than a score that comes in a range (0-100), you can use a slightly different way of writing the code, using a "Case" statement, as follows (again, in this example, replace "Rating" with your own field, and the A/B/C values with the values you expect in that field:

IMAGE(
CASE(Rating,
"A", "/img/samples/flag_green.gif",
"B", "/img/samples/flag_yellow.gif",
"C", "/img/samples/flag_red.gif",
"/s.gif"),
"status color")

With this in place, you can easily provide your sales team with the visual cues they need to quickly and easily understand which of their leads are qualified, which are interested, and which require follow-up.

10 Ways for Marketing to Enable the Sales Team

Marketing and sales often don't enjoy the best of relationships. The great news is that this situation has an amazing opportunity to change. Marketing can, right now, provide their sales team with insights that can make a tremendous difference in their lives and drive bigger commission cheques for them. Nothing changes a relationship with your sales team faster than a larger commission cheque.


Here are 10 things you can do, with Eloqua and your CRM system that will quickly deliver a lot of value to your sales team:

For Their Territories:

1) Territory Traffic Light Dashboard - For each sales person's territory, configure them a "traffic light" dashboard that gives them an instant view of which of their accounts are showing buying interest.


Here's how to build a Territory Traffic Light Dashboard



2) Territory-Based Email Alerts - configure for each rep, automatic email alerts for the accounts they own. This will give them a real-time indicator of buying interest, and let them manage the accounts proactively based on buyer interest.


Here's how to set up Territory-Based Email Alerts




3) Unknown Company Visitors - Show them which companies are on the website doing research who may not currently be known to your organization, give you a great opportunity to initiate a conversation as a buying process starts at that organization.


Here's how to configure a report on Unknown Company Visitors




For Their Accounts:


4) Account Insights and Key Players - Give each sales person a roll-up view that shows, for each of their accounts who the people are who are showing interest and what they are interested in. Armed with this insight, your sales team can quickly determine what the key conversations they need to have are.

Here's how to show sales a report that provides Account Insights and Key Players


5) Configure Your Social Media GPS - Identify social media activities and pass those through to your CRM system so that your sales team can understand which accounts, and which individuals are engaged in social media conversations. By presenting the prospect's social media activity within your CRM system, you enable your sales team to understand new context to the prospect interaction without leaving an environment they are comfortable with.


Here's how to Configure Your Social Media GPS

6) Find Sales the Right Contacts - Integration into role-based discovery services to drive real insight into who can make a purchase decision, not just a raw list of quasi-targeted and out of date names. Often, the person doing the bulk of the research is not the ultimate buyer, so discovering the names of the inviduals in the right role can be very beneficial to your sales team.

Here's how to Find Sales the Right Contacts

For Their Contacts or Leads:

7) Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights - enable Prospect Profiler in order to provide a rich, interactive, graphical view of each individual's interest. This allows your sales team to guide conversations and know who is showing the right level of buying interest.

Here's information on Eloqua's Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights

8) Show Areas of Prospect Interest - Configure your CRM integration to identify areas of your website that a person is showing interest in and highlight those within their concact or lead record in your CRM system. This enables sales to immediately know which topic of conversation will be most warmly received. Be sure to also use graphical imagery to more clearly highlight interest.

Here's how to Show Areas of Prospect Interest to sales in your CRM system

For Your Communications

9) Send-on-behalf-of-Sales - Have your marketing team send outbound email campaigns on behalf of your sales team. Not only does this drive a much higher response rate to the email campaigns, but it also builds upon the salesperson's relationship with the prospect and provides a great opportunity to start dialogs.

Here's how to set up your marketing campaigns to be Sent-on-behalf-of-Sales

10) Provide Sales with Content - provide marketing-created content to your sales teams in their Outlook desktop email environment so they can find great content, personalize it, and send it in a trackable way to their prospects quickly and easily.

Here's how to Provide Sales with Content within their Outlook environment

There are many ways that your marketing team can enable your sales team, and the 10 ideas above are great ones to get started with. In today's environment, it is possible for marketing and sales to have a much stronger relationship than they ever have had before, and it all starts with sales enablement.