Sales says the leads STILL aren't any good?

Marketers of a certain age will remember an ad from the Wendy’s hamburger chain castigating its rivals for its skimpy burgers. It showed, memorably, a little old lady yelling “Where’s the beef?” at employees of rival chains. (Walter Mondale also recycled the line in attacking his opponent Gary Hart’s economic policies.) )

I wanted to do some tweaking of my own when I read a recent blog post, How do you convince your boss to buy marketing automation, by Kim Roman, Director of Demand Generation at G5 Search Marketing. Among her excellent advice to prove the value of MA software (that automatically distributes and monitors the readership of marketing material) was to “approach the conversation with facts and numbers, not emotion,” to “present a solid business case” and to “touch on how goals and KPIs (key performance indicators” will be affected.

All well and good, but what “facts and numbers,” and “goals and KPIs” do we really have to prove the ROI of marketing automation used in email and other campaigns? Her blog post failed to mention any specific metrics to trot out, such as:

• Increased sales.
• Conversion rates (defined as a purchase, not downloading a white paper or signing up for an email newsletter.)
• Improved lead quality (as measured by sales, close rates or profitability per customer.)
• Reduced cost of sales.
• Increased profitability per customer.
• Increased upsell/cross sell per customer, or
• Increase in lifetime sales.

This lack of specificity seems to afflict marketing automation vendors in their case studies. All too often, what passes for results is “increased Web traffic” or “200% increase in white paper downloads,” which are steps in the right direction, but are only show increased market awareness. There’s no proof you’re getting more attention from the right people, or that those people are buying as a result of your marketing automation program.

“Increased marketing efficiency” or “reduction in marketing expenses” is another metric I often see which seems like all bun, no beef. If you’re doing an ineffective job marketing, and MA lets you spend less doing it, you’ve only cut your losses. Not a compelling ROI case.

Lauren Carlson, a CRM Analyst at Software Advice  on whose blog Kim’s post ran, argues that MA is evolving into what MA vendors Marketo and Eloqua are calling Revenue Performance Management, “layering on more analytics that will give you the exact numbers…making it easier to prove ROI.” There’s a great comment stream on her blog arguing whether this is just hollow rebranding or something more real.

From my own experience, I have sympathy for those still waiting to deposit a check with the words “Marketing Automation did this” in the bank. I know my own efforts over the last few months are working, in that I’m talking to and forming partnerships with more people  who “get” marketing automation and seen the vision. But developing a marketing automation strategy, not to mention the required content, is plain hard work, and is keeping a lot of us waiting for our burger and fries.

If anyone has a workable methodology that delivers quick, provable wins from marketing automation, this would be a great time to speak up.

Just checking Twitter once more before logging off...

Nothing makes me feel like a real industry expert than coffee with PR veteran Tim Hurley, who recently let me pontificate on his Web site about tech, PR and media trends in 2012. Based on a whole mess of reporting I’ve been doing for publications such as Computerworld and InfoWorld, and ongoing marketing work with clients in the cloud, storage and outsourcing areas, trends I managed to pick out of my cluttered mind include…

• Cloud computing going mainstream
• Not only apps, but everything IT, going mobile, and
• The challenge of using social media to enrich customers’ lives rather than distract them to death.

Another big trend I keep seeing is internal IT staffs, and outsourcers, struggling to move up the fabled value chain and deliver innovation, and not just lower cost, to the business. This requires change not only in business models (how staff and outsourcers are measured and paid) but changes in mindset. Good luck doing that while cutting costs and keeping the wheels turning in a tough economy.

On the media/communications/PR/marketing world, I observed that content marketing is still struggling to prove its worth to the enterprise, as is social media. I also predicted, somewhat hopefully, that “content curation” (automatically gathering content from around the Web to push to readers) will turn out to be just another buzzword. Why so nervous? Because, despite claims to the otherwise, I think it  undermines my value proposition of creating unique, high-quality content. Hey, as Andy Grove once said, even paranoiacs have real enemies.

On the skills front, I recommend PR and marketing pros learn how to 1) work with social media without busting the budget or working 25 hours a day, 2) cost-justify these social media and content marketing efforts, and 3) develop a multimedia strategy that includes podcasts, video and Webinars easily viewable on mobile devices.

One of my predictions, that PR agencies that still focus on story placement in print pubs are missing the boat, has already been undermined by several PR pros telling me such placements still drive leads. They’re also very important to Indian-based outsourcing vendors, because in India the print trade press is still far more robust than in the U.S.

Let me know if I’m right or wrong on story placement, and if you have any great ideas for how not to work 25 hours a day.

Make me really smile by paying me more than 60 cents an hour to make your toys.

In the wake of news reports of horrendous conditions at the Chinese plants that make Apple’s iPhone (and just about every gadget we love) ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asked readers how much more they would pay for “ethical” consumer electronics – in other words, that were built in safe, humane working conditions.

It’s question that goes right to the core of our entire fast-changing, tech-happy, consumption driven IT business model. As I recently wrote for the Global Delivery Report site I edit, companies like Apple rely on China not just for lower costs, but the flexibility to, say, change out the screen on a phone at the last minute so customers get the absolute coolest product possible. If 8,000 workers in China must be roused out of bed to make the last-minute change, so be it.

What percent of the business and consumer tech market would be willing to pay a premium for an iPad, notebook or home router certified to be made in a factory that protected workers’ lives and paid them a decent wage? Maybe 10% of the market? 20%? If the experience of organic grocer Whole Foods is any guide, there are enough upper-income folks out there to support a decent business (or maybe a store within a store at retailers such as Best Buy) selling such guilt-free goods.

True, at Whole Foods (which some folks call “Whole Ppaycheck” due to its nosebleed prices) you get the benefit of supposedly healthier food along with the feeling you’re helping the environment and not exploiting farm workers. Maybe combining the “fair trade” promise with “Made Domestically” would be enough to separate you from more of your money.

As with Whole Foods (and, heck, with Apple) the key is marketing and presentation to a high-end audience. (Ever wonder why the boxes of cantaloupes are left unpacked in Whole Foods? Because it looks more rustic.) The “green” theme will have to go beyond the eco-friendly bamboo covers (less harmful plastic!) some computer makers already offer. I see pictures of smiling workers next to the higher-priced yellow price tag, offers to donate to the local school rather than an extended warranty at the checkout counter, and patriotic denim carrying cases to show you’re packing gear made in the good ol’ U.S.A.

The only thing that’s missing is some obessed visionary, a la Steve Jobs or Whole Foods’ own John Mackey to make it happen. If you read this and get rich, throw me a few shares of stock to show how ethical you are. In the meantime, I gotta get back to work so I can afford the guilt tax on my next cell phone.

After burning more than a week and about 10 hours of my Web developer’s time trying to create emails in LoopFuse, I was about ready to launch my first email when the photos stubbornly refused to display correctly. Just then, an alert person at their rival Genoo (having read my blog whining about this issue) suggested I check them out. Turns out Genoo is unveiling e kind of easy to use, template-rich email designer LoopFuse lacked so I’m in the process of making the shift.

Stuck in a steady flow of tech issues.

(Before jumping ship, yet another shout-out to the superb sales and support folks at LoopFuse, who did all they could to help, as well as to Josh at their services partner Clever Zebo, who also jumped into the fray. For those of you with strong HTML skills in house, I’d still recommend LoopFuse as a good low-end platform and, besides the email, I like their interface. But I need to get the email portion of my marketing done ASAP, and messing around with email design was just getting in the way.

So far, the Genoo email interface looks useful, but as with anything there’s a learning curve. I managed, for example, to trash my image library by deleting the default “micro site” Genoo creates for each new user. Leave it to me to find a way to break something straightforward. (Genoo is currently tweaking their code, I understand, so anyone else who deletes all their micro-sites won’t run into the same issue.)

Suffice it to say, once more, whichever tool you use leave some time for learning and troubleshooting.

Now, for some good news. Even before launching formal content marketing, I’m getting results from the more frequent, consistent and focused blogging, Tweeting and LinkedIn commenting I’ve been doing. I was invited to do a guest post on the value of personas at the Savvy B2B blog, am in partnership talks with a Los Angeles-based demand creation agency, and got a query from a potential client about help with a lead generation program. While I can’t write “content marketing” on a check yet, after only six weeks I’m moving in different circles and getting interest from new and different potential clients.

Meanwhile, the tide of regular, paying work is picking up after the holiday lull, putting more time pressure on. The challenge new becomes to stay disciplined and to keep building out my Web site, content plan, and email blasts to not let my momentum slide. If anyone finds more hours in the day, send them my way!