MindMatrix Adds Sales Support to Marketing Automation

One easily predictable trend in B2B marketing automation is that vendors will tailor their systems to specific industries. This is happening to some extent, but not as quickly as I had expected. The reason may be that B2B marketing automation products have a narrower scope than B2C systems, meaning there’s less advantage in creating vertical editions. For example, the data model of B2B systems is largely fixed, so industry-specific data models (a major component of vertical systems) are largely irrelevant. 


But while I see just a few general systems trying to become vertical specialists, I do keep finding specialist products trying to serve additional markets.   I wrote in February about one set of these vendors:  Balihoo and others that specialize in helping central marketing organizations work with channel partners such as dealers and franchisees. In May I wrote about Demandforce, which specializes in local service businesses such as dentists and auto repair shops and had just been purchased by Intuit.  I'm sure plenty of other specialists exist as well.

MindMatrix  is one of them. Founded 14 years ago, the company has built its business serving the real estate industry, where individual agents and local agencies work in conjunction with large national franchises. The company has nearly 250 clients and about 34,000 end-users, making it larger than most B2B marketing automation vendors. MindMatrix already has 30% of its business outside the real estate market and has recently begun to promote itself as a general purpose marketing automation system – or, more precisely, as the “next generation” of such systems.

The company’s justification for this claim is that it adds sales-marketing alignment to standard marketing automation features. Concretely, this refers to centrally-created marketing materials that are automatically personalized for individual sales people; desktop and smartphone alerts for Web activity by sales targets; and creation of personal Web sites, landing pages, and social media accounts. As the table accompanying my Balihoo post indicates, these are pretty much standard features for channel partner systems. But MindMatrix is correct in saying that they’re not part of mainstream B2B marketing automation.

Mindmatrix does a good job with these features. Content personalization is especially sophisticated, supporting dynamic content (i.e., conditional logic) within templates; drawing personalization variables from user, partner, contact, and other tables; and providing precise control over which content attributes can be edited by a salesperson or other end-user.  Personalized output formats include not just email, but also Web pages, Powerpoint, and online or pritned PDFs. The content can be sent from the smartphone app as well as the desktop. Emails can be sent through Microsoft Outlook and tracked in the MindMatrix contact history.

The system also provides a full set of standard marketing automation features. These include landing pages and forms for lead capture; email and postal mail; lead scoring on attributes and behaviors; branching multi-step campaigns; and bi-directional synchronization with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, and SugarCRM. Integrations with ACT! And Saleslogix are under development.

Lead scoring rules can consider response to system-generated documents, such as proposals and presentations, arguably allowing more accurate scoring than other systems. Another unusual feature, due for release in January 2013, can add personalized Web messages, polls and chat requests as pop-ups within an external Web page.

The system’s campaign flow builder is reasonably powerful, with support for test splits, filters on based on time and on complex behaviors such as number of Web page visits, updates of contact data, and sending contacts to a different campaign. The interface lays out steps in the flow like a deck of cards, making it unusually straightforward. Flows can be shared with sales users, with some or all features locked down to prevent unauthorized changes.

Does all this really make MindMatrix the next generation of B2B marketing automation? I don’t quite think so: although sales integration is indeed important, I believe the next generation will be focused on serving other groups within the marketing department, including acquisition (advertising and social media) and administration (budgets, planning, content creation, workflow, etc.). Integration with sales will be important but there’s only so far marketing automation systems can go before they compete with CRM – a contest that marketing automation will inevitably lose, since CRM will remain the primary system for sales.

Although MindMatrix has been sold primarily as system to coordinate central marketing with channel partners, it is also used with internal sales groups. The company is actively targeting small companies, with a starting price of $499 per month for the marketing features and another $25 per sales person per month. This is competitive with conventional marketing automation products for small-to-mid-size businesses.  It's a pretty good deal considering the additional sales alignment features that MindMatrix provides.

OneSource Survey: Salespeople Accept Value of Leads from Marketing

Summary: A survey of business-to-business salespeople finds they (still) consider themselves their best source of qualified leads. But marketing-generated leads are gaining increasing respect and salespeople are increasingly looking for help from outside data vendors. Marketers should work closely with salespeople to reinforce these trends, which promise to lower the overall cost per sale.

Most of my interactions are with marketers, so it was interesting to see the opinions of 136 salespeople reported in a recent survey from data vendor OneSource.

The most interesting information was what respondents saw as their largest source of qualified opportunities. By far the leader was “outbound prospecting”, which is a bit frightening given the high cost of such leads. For example, the State of Inbound Marketing 2010 survey from Hubspot found that outbound leads (from telemarketing, trade shows and direct mail) cost an average of $332, compared with $134 per inbound lead (from social media and Web sites).

I suspect that sales people have always felt they must rely on their own outbound prospecting to be successful. What’s probably more significant is that the three next-ranking sources in the OneSource survey come from marketing: Website, inbound calls and email campaigns. Events and trade shows actually rank below all of these. Bringing up the rear are social networking and direct mail, which are rated equal – a pretty impressive showing for social media if you think about it – and Webinars. All together, I see this as a perhaps-grudging recognition by sales people that marketing plays a critical and growing role in generating qualified leads.



Other survey answers were largely consistent with the theme of salesperson self-reliance. The most valuable types of information were targeted contact lists and new CRM contacts; the most useful external data was email address, direct phone numbers and segmented; and the most useful company information was the basics of location and size. These draw a picture of salespeople saying, “Hand me the leads and let me do the rest.” There’s no hint of a role for marketing in nurturing unqualified leads or building brand awareness, although those questions were not exactly asked.

One anomaly in this data is sharply increasing reliance on external business information services. Twelve percent of respondents said they had recently started using these services and a whopping 37% said they were relying on them more heavily. Just seven percent were relying on them less and only 24% are not using them at all. I see this as an acknowledgment by salespeople that outside resources can indeed make them more efficient, even if they still do the actual outbound prospecting themselves.


For what it’s worth, the survey (taken in December 2009) also found some optimism about future sales: 55% said their pipeline was significantly or somewhat better than last year, compared with 33% who said it was significantly or somewhat worse. But sales cycles are still growing: 59% said they were longer than last year vs. 16% saying they were shorter. Although I wouldn’t read too much into such a small survey, this is at least consistent with the hypothesis that there’s a long-term trend towards lengthier, more complicated sales cycles that will continue even once the economy recovers.

Altogether, the results reinforce the conventional wisdom that marketers need to work closely with sales departments to ensure they are delivering qualified leads and that sales people recognize this. Longer-term projects such as lead nurturing and branding are harder to tie to specific sales revenues, but marketers must trace this connection to justify their funding.

5 Steps to Marketing Measurement Maturity

Summary: marketing performance measurement can start with simple response tracking, and grow in stages to show business impact, track the buying process, optimize results and demonstrate strategic alignment. Each stage adds new data, systems, measures and processes.

I’ll be talking about marketing measurement this Tuesday at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University seminar in Palo Alto, with a repeat performance in Boston on November 4. The core of my presentation will be a 5-step measurement maturity model for B2B marketers. This post will give you a brief summary.

A little background: marketers’ objectives for performance measurement generally fall into five broad categories: measure response, show business impact, track the buying process, optimize results and demonstrate marketing alignment with business strategy. Each category has different requirements for data, systems, measures, and processes. Because some of these requirements overlap, there’s a natural progression starting with the simplest requirements and adding new requirements for each stage. This progression leads to a maturity model. Here are the details.

1. Measure Response. The most basic requirement is simply to count the number of responses to each marketing program. This stage also includes the closely related step of calculating the cost of those responses for a simple cost-per-response measure that can be used for a rough ranking of investments.

Key data needs for this stage include mechanisms to capture responses and campaign costs and to link responses to campaigns. This requires a campaign management system to execute the campaigns and track their costs, and a marketing database that stores the identity, promotion history and response history of leads generated by the campaigns.

2. Show Business Impact of Marketing Campaigns. The cost per response tells little about the business impact of a marketing program. You must also know the value of those responses. At a minimum, this requires linking marketing leads to closed sales. This typically means importing closed opportunity records from a sales automation system and linking those opportunities back to the original marketing lead. Add the cost data already gathered in stage 1 (response measurement) and you can calculate a simple Return on Investment based on revenue / acquisition cost.

Of course, true ROI is based on profits, not revenue, and incorporates all incremental costs, not just the initial marketing expense. A proper business impact measurement thus requires capturing the full marketing, sales and product costs associated with new leads, as well as their actual or estimated long-term value. These give a ROI measure that comes reasonably close to showing the true business impact of each acquisition campaign.

In terms of new requirements, this step adds sales opportunity data, which implies integration with a sales force automation or CRM system. It also requires processes to assign opportunities to leads and leads to campaigns, and, optionally, ways to import and connect lifetime costs and revenues.

Keep in mind that this approach only applies to lead acquisition campaigns, not to campaigns that nurture existing leads or customers, or branding campaigns that don’t generate a direct response. This is a smaller issue for B2B marketers than many consumer marketers, who often have no direct way to identify the customers acquired or influenced by their activities.

3. Understand the Buying Process. This stage looks at the impact of non-acquisition marketing treatments on moving customers through the buying process. It requires defining stages within the buying process, tracking the movement of individual leads through those stages over time, recording the marketing treatments applied to those individuals, and measuring the correlation (if any) of treatments to stage changes. The result is both a more detailed understanding of the buying process and a way to decide which treatments are most valuable.

Meeting these requirements implies capturing more information about leads, including static attributes (company, job title, etc.) and behaviors such as Web site visits and email responses. These can be used in scoring models or other tools that decide which stage a lead is in at any given moment. The system must also keep a history of each lead’s stages over time, so it can correlate stage changes with treatments. The treatments themselves are already captured in the marketing database needed for response measurement, so they do not represent a new requirement.

4. Optimize Results. Once you’re tracking lead movement through process stages and measuring the impact of individual treatments, you’re ready to build an end-to-end model that calculates the impact of each small change on final sales. You can then optimize the combination of treatments across the process. For example, you might find you can spend less on acquiring new leads if you spend more on nurturing existing ones, to produce the same sales volume at lower cost.

The calculations for this type of optimization are fairly simple, and they don’t require any new information beyond the previous stage in the maturity model. But you do need more precise information about the impact of different treatments, which means formal testing of alternative treatments and careful analysis of results. You’ll also need a business simulation model that can estimate the impact of changes on near-term revenues and costs, since the company still has its quarterly targets to hit. You'll also need to define you goals -- higher revenue? higher profit rate? lower marketing costs? -- so you know what to optimize.

Ideally, you’ll also add optimization software that can automatically find the best of all possible treatment combinations. But few B2B marketers have the data volume or statistical skills required for this, so you’ll probably end up manually running a variety of scenarios through your simulation model instead.

5. Demonstrate Strategic Alignment. Delivering the optimal set of treatments won’t satisfy your CEO if your marketing programs don’t align with the larger business strategy. That alignment may in fact require campaigns that produce low short-term returns, such as investing in a new product or market segment.

To demonstrate alignment, you must first show that your planned marketing activities support business goals, and then show that those activities have yielded the expected results. For example, a strategy based on selling to a new group of customers might yield a marketing plan with 10% of acquisition spending aimed at generating leads from that segment, and a goal of that segment accounting for 5% of new leads received.

The exact requirements for this stage will depend on your specific strategic goals. But it’s likely that you’ll need more information about the purposes of your marketing spending (so you can show which funds are supporting which strategic goals) and more about lead attributes and behaviors (so you can show that results are in line with expectations).

Incidentally, demonstrating strategic alignment doesn’t depend directly understanding the buying process (stage 3) or optimizing results (stage 4). So a company that has reached stage 2 in the maturity model could jump immediately to demonstrating strategic alignment if desired.

Final Thought: once you get past counting response, all later stages in the maturity model assume you are measuring your marketing performance against the ultimate goals of closed sales and long-term customer value. This is increasingly necessary as marketing remains involved with leads even after they are officially transferred to sales. It implies that marketing and sales must integrate their systems, so they can view, coordinate, analyze and ultimately optimize sales and marketing activities across the entire buying cycle.

In companies where the marketing's responsibility still ends with the hand-off of qualified leads to sales, the maturity model could be adjusted to optimize only through that stage. But that's an increasingly obsolete approach.