A conversation with Jenny Coupe, director of worldwide demand generation, LogLogic

With a lean marketing team of just six people, LogLogic was using their marketing automation system primarily as a “batch and blast” application. Wanting to take their demand generation efforts to the next level with a more strategic approach, they enlisted experienced Revenue Marketer® Jenny Coupe to help them rev up their demand generation engine with sophisticated lead scoring and lead nurturing programs.

Where did you start?

First, I conducted a comprehensive audit of what I consider to be the two critical systems – our marketing automation system and our CRM system (Salesforce.com) – and then I sat down and began building a “road map” for the next four quarters. I set some goals to create what I called a “generic” or “general” lead nurturing track, working very closely with inside sales to determine what defined a marketing qualified lead vs a sales qualified lead. Then we looked at what we wanted to accomplish over the next year, which was implementing a basic lead nurturing track and basic lead scoring.

How has lead scoring improved?

Until then, there wasn’t really any lead scoring in place. There had been some discussion around what it could be and what it should be, but there was no stake in the ground, and that’s really the secret with lead scoring. There’s no silver bullet here. You’ve got to put a stake in the ground and then watch it and finesse it. So, we put together what I like to call your basic Lead Scoring 101 around some implicit and explicit factors. Essentially, we track explicit factors, which, in lead scoring terms, really means a prospect’s industry, title, company, revenue size and if they are a target account. And then we also track implicit factors that include things like behavior. For example, if a prospect comes to our products page and looks at certain pages on our website, we want to score that higher than somebody who comes to the jobs page or someone who just visits the homepage, but doesn’t actually drill down. We track these factors and then assign them a numerical and letter score – an A,B,C or D score for explicit and a numeric score for implicit.

Why use a letter score for explicit and a number score for implicit factors?

Explicit factors like title, name and company probably will not change, so they receive a “set” score of A,B,C or D. But implicit factors do change over time and by using a numeric score, you can build on that score. For example, you can add 10 points if they come to the website twice that week or take away five points if they visit the jobs page. The implicit value is the organic piece that will grow over time.

How many explicit and implicit factors did you originally build into your model?

Out of the gate, we started with five explicit factors and five implicit factors. The best bet is a crawl, walk, run approach. You may find, moving forward, that something you thought was important really isn’t that important, or you may want to adjust different weights of behavior over time because what you’re measuring or how you’re measuring it isn’t really reflecting the prospect or where they are in the buying cycle.

How long did you let this model cycle through before making changes to it?

We let it cycle through for one quarter because our lead nurturing cadence is one email every two weeks and we wanted to compare apples to apples. At the end of the quarter, we got in a room with inside sales and talked about how qualified the leads were based on the scores they received. We also instituted something called a “lead sweep,” so if a lead comes into Salesforce.com with a score above a certain level, it doesn’t sit in the MA system and continue to be nurtured. Instead, it appears in a lead queue for an inside sales rep. If the rep does not change the lead status for five days, it goes back into nurture. This way, sales reps are not forced to look at the score every week and decide if a lead is qualified. We’ve determined that, based upon lead status, if an inside rep does not actually touch a lead in five days, that lead needs to go back into lead nurture regardless of the score and then we adjust the score accordingly.

What advice would you give a marketer looking at lead scoring for the first time?

There is no wrong way to start. Begin with basic explicit and implicit scoring and build on that. It’s too intimidating to try to create something that is very comprehensive and covers all of the bases right out of the gate. The important thing is to just start somewhere.

How did you take lead nurturing to the next level?

First, I sat down and looked at the content we had. Lead nurturing is a lot like dating. As a marketer, you have to make sure that the content you are serving up – whether it’s a white paper, analyst report or product demo – is going to be delivered at a time that makes the most sense. There is an inquiry stage, then an, “Okay, I think I want to date you” stage and then you kind of get engaged and you decide to get married. And these map to real business processes. I consider the inquiry stage to be an awareness stage – a time to serve up industry white papers or maybe a case study. Certain pieces of content are appropriate for each stage of the buying cycle.

Did you create a content map?

We created a content map and also identified what we call buyer personas. We looked at late stage opportunities and closed deals and the typical marketing profile of those contacts including how long were they in our system, what kind of content they downloaded, etc. Then, we used that to help build our content map. We have identified the five stages of our lead nurturing cycle – awareness, interest, education, desire and purchase – and have mapped content to each stage. I am a big fan of repackaging content into different formats. A white paper in stage I might appear as a podcast in stage III. People don’t want to get information the same way every time.

How did you move from a general nurture campaign to dedicated nurturing by vertical?

I had a strong request from my federal team because that’s a very unique market with unique compliance and messaging. We built dedicated lead nurturing for our federal market and realized, for example, that we should change the cadence to once a month. We revisited the content to ensure it was relevant and talked about compliance that was unique to that market. Obviously, we’re serving up customer case studies that are from the federal market and white papers that are more relevant to their pains given the industry they are in. In stages I and II, for a lot of these nurturing tracks, about 80% of the content will look and feel the same because you are just building awareness. But as you move later into the nurturing cycle, and your prospect moves further into the buying stages, you want to be as relevant as possible.

When did you launch your vertical nurturing campaigns?

I didn’t want to launch this too quickly – I wanted to get some time under my belt with our generic nurture track. By doing that, I learned lessons on what content was resonating and the scoring. I also learned more about our segmentation. One key threat in all of this is if you’re not segmenting your content, it’s really going to impact the success of your nurturing. If you’re serving up “Content A” for some group, but all of a sudden other folks are getting it that aren’t a part of that group, you’re going to turn those people off. You’re going to see an impact on your deliverability, open rate, and scoring.

What kind of metrics have you been able to impact?

Nurturing has allowed us to increase what we call “emailable contacts” by 20 percent. We had a huge database of active and inactive contacts and my goal here, quite frankly, was to launch a reactivation campaign so that I could get those inactive folks to become active. We’ve also reduced target balances by 30% and reduced unsubscribes by 25 percent. Our nurturing program has touched one out of every three leads in our systems within the last six months and 30% of the deals that have come through in the last two quarters have been nurtured at least twice. In other words, they’ve gone through at least two steps of our five-step process. And finally, 50% of the contacts in our pipeline have engaged in some nurturing activity at some point.

What advice would you give marketers just acquiring a marketing automation system?

Five years ago, marketing was this black hole where you tried things and delivered leads and whether or not they actually impacted revenue was kind of a mystery. Now, you have the tools that can really help you automate processes and do things that you just couldn’t do before. But don’t forget that they’re just tools – you still need to be strategic about how you use them.

Jenny Coupe is an elite Revenue Marketer® with 16 years of B2B marketing experience in Silicon Valley and a history of launching successful buyer-centric demand generation programs. She has held the role of Director of Worldwide Marketing at many successful start-ups, as well as for larger companies such as Emdeon, formerly known as Healtheon/WebMD. While there, she served as a key member of the marketing team and helped grow the company to the largest e-health company, approaching a billion dollars in annual revenue with more than 8,000 employees and several billion dollars in market capitalization.