When Is It Nurturing, When Is It "Big Brother"?

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		March 2009, Issue 61

Lead-Generation Best Practices
When Is It Nurturing, When Is It "Big Brother"?
Q&A from Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World, with Steve Woods, CTO, Eloqua; and Todd Davison, President, Bulldog Solutions

Eloqua CTO Steve Woods and Bulldog Solutions President Todd Davison address concerns about being "overbearing" in the use of digital body language. They also spell out some differences in BtoB and BtoC buyers' behavior in this Q&A from the March 10 live Webinar, Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World. Bonus material: We've included responses to questions that were not covered during the live event. View the on-demand Webinar.

Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World

Join Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua, and Todd Davison, president of Bulldog Solutions, for an on-demand Webinar where they share best practices for:

identifying prospects' stage in their buying process based on their activities
nurturing those who are early in the process
when to involve Sales for those who are later stage

View at your convenience.

Q: What is the major difference in digital body language exhibited by a BtoB buyer, versus a BtoC buyer?

Todd Davison, Bulldog Solutions: BtoC is about impacting point of sale—shopping carts and other conversions to a purchase. In a BtoB context, you've got a much longer sales cycle. So what you're really doing is creating a marketing program to influence and support a sales cycle that is driven with real people and real moving parts that isn't happening at the point of connection.

Steve Woods, Eloqua: With BtoC you've got a definitive end point. You've got the point-of-sale conversion where you can say, "Yes, this worked; this didn't," and it's in real time. You're automation-focused because you're looking at online behavior of large numbers of people. In BtoB, you've got less definitive endpoints. You've got scored leads, opportunities in the pipeline. You're more field-sales-focused, which is more a presentation of that "digital body language" to someone in field sales who is going to understand it and use it to guide a sales process.

Q: You've moved the process along to that sales call. You're still capturing intelligence at that point. What kinds of things would you be doing with those face-to-face engagements?

Steve Woods, Eloqua: Even when you go all the way down to the end and you're interacting with field sales, the digital body language gives you insight. Here's an example from VMWare. In their strategic accounts group, they use real-time notification to give their strategic accounts folks insight into what's going on in their larger accounts. They can use that to identify objections, identify key stakeholders. So when they walk into a room, they understand that this person searched on Google for certain keywords; this person has no interest, etc.

Q: Both of you have mentioned real-time notification. I take it there are fundamentals one would need to take before you want to put that in place. Can you touch on that?

Todd Davison, Bulldog Solutions: This first thing you need is the technology to support it. Then you want to think through, how high do you raise the bar? You don't want your sales team getting 200 notifications because Marketing sent out a newsletter and 200 of their prospects opened it. You want to create some logic saying, "Only notify the salesperson if this person is on the Web site and visits more than four pages" or something like that. I'll also say, though, that this is one of the easiest to implement, highest impact things out there. The value to the salesperson, as much as insight and data, is just the notice that one of their biggest clients is on the site.

Q: Don't prospects feel like there's a "Big Brother" looking over their shoulders if they are being targeted based on their activities? What's the balance between nurturing and being overbearing?

Steve Woods, Eloqua: If you look at the flip side, look at marketing before it had the ability to understand the buyer. You ended up with overindulgence in marketing. If you can't target, then you have to just go with this carpet-bombing approach we all got tired of in the late '90s and early 2000. If you can target, as a marketer you're able to do a much lower volume of messages, and get them to really connect with the buyer ... which the marketer appreciates and the buyer appreciates.

Q: To whom should you set up a nurture campaign: Those who didn't respond or those who responded? If they responded, wouldn't you want to direct them to internal sales?

Todd Davison, Bulldog Solutions: That's actually a question we've addressed in our own marketing activities at Bulldog. The first part of my answer would be, don't look at it as just two groups. You have the opportunity to get even more targeted than that. If you've got good lead scoring, you'll be able to see some stratification. For example, your top leads might have displayed a match in terms of their profile and their behavior. They've responded to a high-value call to action and are clearly engaged, and they're in the right industry. And to your point, yes, you'd probably want to connect with them right away.

There might be another set of leads that clearly has a good profile match, but you need to tease out more information about their intent. Perhaps that group is put into a nurturing path that addresses their pain points, gives them examples from their industry and other highly relevant information. Then maybe there is a third group, one that does not appear to be a good match. You don't throw them away: You nurture them, as well, but with a different set of communications and calls to action that set the bar much lower. Nurturing can mean a lot of different things, and you can (and should) have simultaneous nurturing initiatives going on.

Q: If information is free and Marketing/Sales is not an information conduit, is BtoB marketing at risk of going obsolete?

Todd Davison, Bulldog Solutions: Of course not. Marketing and Sales are not the product information gatekeepers. That means that Marketing needs to operate differently, understanding and responding to prospect activity to produce relevant calls to action that lead to engagements. If anything, this shift is a great opportunity for Marketing to put some science into the mix. Marketers now have unprecedented ability to track and measure activities and use that information to deepen the level at which they engage and to drive continuous improvement in their activities.

identifying prospects' stage in their buying process based on their activities
nurturing those who are early in the process
when to involve Sales for those who are later stage

View at your convenience.

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Steve Woods is CTO of Eloqua. Todd Davison is president and co-founder, Bulldog Solutions.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing.