DGR Interview: Avaya’s VP of Demand Generation Sheds Light On Innovative Strategies for Driving Demand

In late September, Demand Gen Report had the opportunity to chat with Yannick Claereboudt, Avaya’s VP of Demand Generation, about the company’s strategies around sales nurturing, lead management and sales enablement. In addition, Claereboudt offered insights into Avaya’s adoption of new media, including the early results into tests with mobile marketing.

The entire interview is very insightful and can serve as a barometer for other companies to benchmark their overall demand generation strategies. A few of the highlights from the discussion included:

On The Next Phase of Demand Generation: “The next critical area of focus – which we already started in FY07 - will be to integrate even further our web experience in order to engage our target audience in a two-way interactive dialogue. For example, we will be incorporating things like virtual briefings, video testimonials, podcasts and interactive assessment tools.”
On Sales Enablement: “We have adopted new media and techniques for sales to communicate with customers -- from interactive flash demos to cool video snapshots that tell our story in engaging and entertaining ways. On a quarterly basis, we receive feedback through a sales survey on the quality of these tools to enable further refinement.”
On New Media Adoption: “We do see opportunities and are testing several programs in order to evaluate and integrate mobile marketing into our plans. For example, to promote our Unified Communications platform, we recently launched in North America a mobile marketing pilot, pushing messages with a strong offer to PDAs, Smartphones and Blackberrys. In the first six days since the program's launch, more than 1,000 users registered via their mobile devices".

10 Best Practices Tips
To Optimize Landing Pages

By Kelly Abner, Director of Marketing, Marketo
If you can catch buyers early in their buying process, you have the opportunity to frame their decision and establish yourself as the company to beat. Since 93% of B2B buyers begin their buying process with a search engine, search marketing paired with landing pages is a great way to do this.
The landing page is critical. From the prospect's perspective, clicking on your link is easy and doesn't cost (them) anything. In contrast, converting and becoming a lead requires them to invest their time and energy to understand your offer and fill out your firm – not to mention risk unwanted marketing since you require they share their contact information.
That’s why getting your landing pages right is so critical. In our experience, optimized landing pages can increase your conversions by 200% improvements – or more. With that kind of ROI, here are ten practical tips you can use to improve and optimize your landing pages.

1. Layouts & Templates
Use simple designs. This isn’t your home page, so remove the navigation. It's worth taking the time to create a navigation-free HTML template.

2. Graphics
Graphics are the #1 thing that draws the eye. Include a hero shot – a mock up of the white paper cover or a photo of your webinar speaker. Two quick tips: Let people click the graphics to get more info (people often click on graphics) and be sure to have a caption (people read captions).

3. Content
Make it straight and to the point, but be sure to give enough info to sell them prospect:
Setup the problem.
Talk about the solution.
Deliver the offer (such as a white paper, demo or webinar).
Use bullets. People read them more than long copy (you're reading this, right).
Include a call to action.

4. Forms
Don’t ask for too much information. Collect as little as you need at this stage of your funnel. You can always collect more during your nurturing process.

5. White Papers
Don’t just serve up that white paper. Email it to the prospect. This is a great trick to ensure that you get a valid email address.

6. Confirmation Pages
Confirm the form submittal with a thank you. Do you have something else they might be interested in? Make another offer and collect more info.

7. Page URLs
The name of the page, along with the rest of the URL path, is weighed fairly heavily. Use CamelCase or dashes between words, not underscores – search engines like that better.

8. Meta Data
Good metadata can improve your keyword ranking by telling the search engine that your page is relevant. So be sure to write a keyword specific title and craft a good description with a call to action.

9. Test
Testing lets your customers vote with their actions, removing any debate about what works and what doesn’t. The best things to test are headline, caption, submit button, form length, and graphical elements.

10. But Don’t Over-test
Over-testing is a problem in the “high value, low volume” world of B2B marketing. A good rule of thumb is to take the number of conversions you get per day and divide it by 10. Then take your testing period in weeks and divide that by 2. Multiply the two results together to get the number of versions you can confidently test in your testing period.

About the Author
Kelly Abner is Director of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability. Download Marketo's new eBook, Building Effective Landing Pages by visting their blog, Modern B2B Marketing. For more information, contact Kelly at Kelly@marketo.com or via phone at 650-655.4830.

Social Networking and CRM:

Still Searching For A Fit

By Denis Pombriant, Managing Principal, Beagle Research Group

Social Networking (SN) is another one of those things I have been watching for a long time as the technology has slowly but steadily approached the front office. The idea of using SN technology to find a needle in a haystack was a kind of panacea. Imagine being able to find a mutual contact you never knew existed who might be able to introduce you to a sales prospect.
Interestingly, about a decade ago the same use was made of business intelligence software, it was supposed to be the stuff that could help you zero in on market segments.

In both cases early promoters of the technology were right but I wouldn’t say they were far sighted enough.
Social networking was supposed to be the next thing that would transform the way we sell but in the last couple of years, SN seems to have stalled in no small part because no body likes or wants to be the target of introductory emails from virtual strangers looking for a favor. That doesn’t mean SN has no place in CRM, instead, I suspect we haven’t figured out how to use it properly. The same kind of thing happened with business intelligence, it was supposed to help you segment your potential customer base into groups you could construct specialized target messages for.
Business intelligence worked out well enough for marketers but I think the technology found its voice when vendors and users turned its focus inward and began examining a business’s data to find trends and what worked best.
So far, it seems to me that with few exceptions, companies have looked at SN as if it was just another sales tool designed to help cram product into the market thus helping the sales team to once again make quota. Unfortunately, larger and longer lasting marketplace trends give that approach decreasing likelihood of success.
Customers are savvier about products today in part because the products on the market now are evolutions on original concepts. People are buying their second, third or umpteenth cell phone, mp3 player, computer, PDA or whatever and are not as likely to buy the first thing they see. Selling has risen to a new level of sophistication because customers have gone there first therefore technologies that simply aim to turbo-charge old selling habits will show diminishing results. Using SN for sales falls into this category.
Social networking has been used effectively for a long time by companies interested in engaging customers in a conversation aimed in part or in total at improving products and services. People have been using SN techniques much longer than they’ve been using computers. My favorite example comes from Eric von Hippel’s book http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/262
Democratizing Innovation in which he describes the rapid evolution of the steam engine from something that was barely useful at pumping water out of a coal mine to something that transformed mining.
According to von Hippel, mine operators, who should have been natural antagonists and averse to helping each other, traded information about steam powered water pumps thus helping each other and the steam engine manufacturers to build better products. These people used industry associations to transmit information, much as we use these associations today.
Where SN techniques can help best, I think, is in bringing together virtual communities of interest, people who will share their ideas about products and especially about their needs and attitudes. Using SN this way has several advantages over using it to get a deal. By using SN within a community you have the opportunity to test ideas with users and see how they react. The information you collect can then go into better product designs or whole new products. SN can also be used to test and validate marketing ideas, Web site design and the like. I call this “deep marketing” and it has an analog to older more labor intensive techniques such as the phone survey and the focus group.
This application of social networking comes in the nick of time if you ask me. Vendors need ways to better understand customers — not simply better ways to identify them — for the simple reason that customers often don’t know what they want or need until there is a solution. At that point customers wonder how they ever got a long without a product like a better steam engine.
The fact that technologies like social networking or business intelligence should morph a bit between the time that they are introduced and the time when they can be said to be mature should surprise no one. Early adopters frequently adjust a technology’s focus until it optimally suits some purpose and I suspect that’s happening in social networking even as I write this. You could say that I am a believer in the power of social networking and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Denis Pombriant founded Beagle Research Group, LLC in 2004 after a successful career in enterprise software sales and marketing. Pombriant is widely quoted throughout the industry and he is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for CRM Magazine. Pombriant’s writings appear regularly in print and online journals such as CRM Magazine, DestinationCRM.com, CRMBuyer.com and SearchCRM.com .