The Benefits of Integrated Demand Generation

Optimize marketing spend.
Through comparative analysis across channels and campaigns, marketers can experiment with different approaches to determine which actions deliver the best return on investment.

Marketing by the numbers. NetSimplicity, an Eloqua customer that produces office administration software, relies on search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click advertising as critical components of its demand creation efforts. But the marketing team could not track which keywords were used by which prospects at what cost, making it impossible to optimize program results and ROI.

By deploying Eloqua’s demand generation platform integrated with NetSimplicity’s sales force automation system, the team was able to log and capture specific keywords used by sales prospects early on in the marketing process and how these activities combined with other marketing campaigns to drive the sales cycle. NetSimplicity now has a formula for determining which keywords to bid at what cost in order to optimize deal flow and program ROI. This has helped the company achieve the following successes in the past year:

Target and reach the right prospects in the right way.
With powerful capabilities for segmenting and profiling customers based not only on demographic information, but on their interests and actual behaviors, marketers can identify the right prospects for their campaigns – and the right messages for their prospects. They can, for instance, identify which customers have recently visited a web page, downloaded a white paper or attended an event that indicates an interest in a particular product or service.

Marketing by the numbers. Forrester Research recently profiled Inquira’s lead development system that drives more than 80% of the deals closed by its field sales team. Eloqua’s software helps this maker of intelligent search software gather implicit data – like site visits to high-value content (versus visits to the career page), search engine click-throughs, and registration form submissions – and learn how prospect activity is a better predictor of future lead closure than firmographic criteria like company revenue, industry or contact title.

As a result:

Score leads using implicit behavioral data to drive sales.
Once marketers can pinpoint the stages of a lead’s development, they can score leads according to those actions and responses that indicate their “sales-readiness.” Lead scoring is a highly effective way to keep expensive sales teams focused on the best leads while increasing their win rates and opportunity value.

Marketing by the numbers. Postini, a provider of on-demand communications security solutions, automates their lead scoring based on prospect behavior. By aligning their calling against these ‘interest scores’, Postini’s Mid-Market sales team has doubled its productivity. A telesales rep working off a list of leads ranked by their positive responses to campaigns can uncover twice as many revenue opportunities as from straight cold calling. Similarly, in a study of 10 B2B organizations using lead scoring systems, Eloqua found that, on average, deal close rates increased by 30%, company revenue increased by 18% and the revenue per deal increased by 17%.