Challenge:
Marketing needed to prove their value to sales and drive enough "Qualified Leads" by tracking and presenting analytics and KPI's on a monthly basis. The task was to increase qualified leads or MQL and report on key analytics by using Eloqua (E10), as well as developing and maintaining an agreement between marketing/sales for MQL, SAL, SQL and lead scoring.
Goals:
To reach revenue targets with Eloqua by hitting a preset amount of qualified leads as well as gaining the ability to predict the amount of qualified leads that can be driven that will be attributed as lead source to marketing originated. Predicting qualified lead and revenue with Eloqua can help marketing request more budget and improving marketing spend - meanwhile keeping sales happy.
Benchmark or document current state:
We needed to define what Qualified lead was for each of our lead stages. We used revenue, lead source original to see lead originating from marketing,opens, clicks, form submissions, and explicit feedback from sales.
Strategic Initiatives:
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1) By using best practices taught by Eloqua University to score implicit and explicit information in prospects, we setup lead scoring in Eloqua with a low of ZERO and max of 100. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) was at 40. Marketing collaborated with sales on what are the key determinants in making a sales lead ready. Once lead scoring was set in Eloqua, we used Eloqua's Closed Loop Reporting and Analytics to prove Marketing Value and Display Key Performance Indicator's on a regular basis.
Lead source original and lead source most recent was used to track were leads originated from and calculate Cost Per Lead MQL to see which marketing channels were performing best.
KPI's =
- Revenue
- MQL, Cost Per Lead per MQL
- Lead velocity model of drop of each lead stage to stage (IE MQL to OPP, MQL to close, MQL to SAL)
- Conversion rates
- Lead score
- Funnel Metrics by Marketing Channel
Tools used to collect and report on KPI's =
- Eloqua + Analyzer License
- Salesforce
- Google Analytics
- Excel
- SQL
- Eloqua University Training
2) Our main strategy was having interesting or great content backed by the core channel of driving it with Eloqua's Email Marketing—since Email Marketing is the lowest cost to reengage your prospects at best value to your website. Eloqua's Closed Loop Reporting (CLR) and Eloqua advanced prospect tracking methods were used to track a buyer’s long journey.
3) Because sales would complain that leads were being routed wrong or are duplicates, we setup standards for importing data in Eloqua and cleaned up our current database as well as improved data quality. Another step we took in tackling this challenge and per Eloqua University’s tip’s is to stop buying lists, data normalization and much more.
We focused on having topics or content that the buyer would be interested in hearing early stage focusing on informational content. This was taught in the Eloqua University RPM courses, which taught demand generation best practices.
Key Take Aways
- Email Marketing and great content is the best way to drive qualified leads at lowest cost on your current database.
- Eloqua is not just for emails, but a good way to prove marketing value to sales and predict revenue / qualified leads.
- Data Quality is important and Sirius Decisions says companies with strong data quality drive 7x qualified leads.
- Proving marketing value to sales and the c-suite is important and Eloqua provides KPI tracking that will show marketing value.
- Lead scoring should be setup to have both implicit/explicit and minimum / maximum to keep scores from becoming inflated.
- Eloqua is only as good as the people and processes that use it.
Key Impacts or Results
We were able to track and show how many MQLs marketing generated based on a month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter segmented metrics. Money spent per channel now had ROI tracking, enabling us to stop spending money and increase accordingly. Having strong data quality standards and processes facilitated the ability to gain clear insight into our reporting.
Things we would have done differently
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- Building Engagement Streams of recycled or inactive leads.
- Stronger standard on data import into Eloqua to ensure good data is being imported with a system of check and balances.
- Set SLAs with sales on how long things take to be done to manage their expectations. IE event list upload, ad hoc campaign runs.
Helpful Eloqua University Classes
These classes below were helpful in learning about best practices of demand generation and of setting up Eloqua.
Eloqua 10: Closed-Loop Reporting
Topliners
Was a great help when looking for ad hoc information when running into day to day challenges of administrating Eloqua. And finding documentation on Best Practices. And how to integrate Eloqua with Webex (webinar tool) and other apps.
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