Audaxium Blog

Audaxium is proud to be a sponsor of the Pardot Elevate 2011 User Conference (Nov. 15-16, 2011) http://bit.ly/uqbXQn

Here are the Top 5 Reasons to Visit us at our booth:

1) You’re a new Pardot customer, and you could use some help

Pardot is the easiest to learn Marketing Automation system available today. However, there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same objective in the system. It’s great to have powerful software, but it’s even more important to use it in the most effective manner possible to generate quality sales-ready leads.

Audaxium QuickStart implementations help shorten your learning curve, launch your first campaigns quickly, and get you up to speed on best practices and latest trends in the Marketing Automation community.

2) You’ve been using Pardot for a while, but you’re busy

Most Marketing teams have long lists of ideas for campaigns they would like to run, but they don’t have the resources to get everything done. A typical Marketer’s “to-do” list keeps growing rather than shrinking as tasks get completed.

If you feel that you haven’t gotten enough strategic work done in Pardot or aren’t taking full advantage of the capabilities, why not bring Audaxium in to help? We offer development of drip programs, email campaigns, landing pages, and content marketing strategies.

3) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish the integration with Pardot worked better

Pardot provides, at no charge, an out-of-the-box connector for NetSuite CRM. It automatically syncs data between the two systems and provides basic reporting capabilities. However, NetSuite has some unique ways that it manages data, so there are steps you need to take to increase the amount and type of data that syncs.

Audaxium can help you configure and optimize this integration in order to segment your lists of customers and prospects in Pardot more effectively, and to deliver to your dashboard better campaign ROI reports.

4) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish NetSuite were easier to use

NetSuite is in fact a leading system for not only ERP, but also CRM and eCommerce. However, some Marketing and Sales teams are not in love with the capabilities or the ease of use of NetSuite.

This is NOT because NetSuite isn’t a capable CRM tool, but rather because many NetSuite implementations are focused on the requirements of the Finance or Operations team, with little focus on Sales & Marketing.

When NetSuite is configured properly for Sales & Marketing, your team becomes much more productive.

5) You like craft beer or good wine

We really like craft beer and good wine, and we’re always looking for an excuse to buy new friends a drink at the bar at the end of the day. Drop by our booth to say hello, have a chat about Pardot marketing automation, then let’s meet up at the bar to celebrate great software!

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/u0bf2b 

Lead Source: Marketing’s most coveted, and most loathed, data field in a CRM system.

The Importance of Measuring ROMI

It’s stating the obvious to say that B2B marketing teams are being held accountable for a direct relationship between marketing spend and revenue generation. With limited budgets and resources, measuring ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is critical for determining the best marketing channels to generate quality sales leads that convert to revenue.

Since there’s no “silver bullet” for reaching everyone in a target market, marketers are using multi-channel marketing approaches to build their brands and generate sales leads. SEO, PPC, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, video, tradeshows, print ads, direct mail, social media… you name it. The question is: How best to divide up your limited marketing budget and overworked resources among all these channels?

The Challenge in Measuring ROMI

The challenge is that rarely will a prospect buy from you because of a single marketing touch, such as a webinar. How did they end up registering for your webinar? Perhaps by clicking on your PPC ad after searching online for something you sell. Then, maybe they read a few pages of a whitepaper you paid a copywriter to write, or watched a short online video you hired a production company to develop. They may even have picked up one of your fancy pens at your tradeshow booth in the past. Read More »

This webinar took place on June 22, 2011 => Click here to view the presentation

Questions to ask yourself:

• Have you outgrown NetSuite’s email marketing capabilities?
• Are you tired of low open and clickthrough rates on your email campaigns?
• Still sending generic marketing emails to large lists?
• Need to deliver a higher % of sales-ready leads to your Sales team?
• Don’t have time to deliver the 10+ email touches required to nurture potential leads?

The #1 Challenge in B2B Marketing

Studies have shown that 80% of inbound leads through your website are not ready for a conversation with a salesperson.  Often, when a person fills out a form on your website to learn more about your solutions or your industry, they’re simply doing preliminary research on an issue and it’s not high enough on their priority list to spend time on the phone with you.

The problem is that today’s marketers are charged with doing more with less.  Most marketers just don’t have the time or resources to manually send multiple targeted emails to a lead until they are sales ready.  It often takes months, or even years, to nurture an early-stage lead until they are ready to “shop”.

Marketing Automation Can Help

That’s where Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing come in.  Pardot is a cloud-based Marketing Automation add-on for NetSuite that provides website and email marketing automation.  Leads are scored, graded, and nurtured until they are deemed sales-ready, and shows your sales team exactly where to spend its time.  That way, they can focus on the leads that are the best fit and the most interested in finding a solution to a problem.

Why Attend the Webinar?

Learn automation best practices, including:

• Send more targeted messages with automatic segmentation of your leads by persona
• Increase lead conversion rates with progressive profiling on web forms
• Automate multi-touch lead nurturing and knowledge marketing campaigns

Pardot is a fully integrated add-on for NetSuite

As a certified SuiteApp partner, Pardot integrates tightly with NetSuite at no extra charge.

• View all prospect activity right from within the CRM system (useful for Salespeople)
• Bi-directionally sync Contacts, Companies, and Custom Fields to keep data current
• Track Opportunity statuses and values for closed loop ROI reporting

View the webinar presentation to learn how Marketing Automation with Pardot can help you deliver a higher percentage of sales-ready leads to your Sales team.

Recently I’ve spoken with a number of companies who’ve been getting decent traffic to their websites, but haven’t been getting as many leads as they feel they should.  This seems to be a fairly common complaint, but the good news is that there’s a few simple steps you can take to improve the number of conversions you get.

Put another way, there’s a few simple steps you can take to make it more valuable, and less painful, for your prospects.

Step 1 – Simplify your Forms

Use conditional fields to keep things short and sweet.With landing pages, less is often more. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than arriving at a landing page, seeing a compelling white paper offer, but then realizing she will have to fill out a long and complicated looking form before receiving anything of value. Companies who ask for more than a handful of data points in the first interaction with a visitor are encouraging form abandonment.

Step 2 – Track User Behavior, not just field data

Track implicit data in addition to explicit data held in your CRM system. Your prospects are telling you a lot more than it seems.You can gain valuable data from prospects on forms, but often even more telling is the implicit information that can be gleaned without your visitors even telling you. Read More »

Here at Audaxium, we have been spending a great deal of time talking to customers about how to get off on the right foot when implementing marketing automation software, in this case, Pardot.

These discussions are as unique as our customers, but there are a few constants in the equation that add up to a successful implementation. It’s important to give these careful consideration.

As point of reference, all of our clients sell to other businesses, and they typically have a lot of customers and contacts at those customers. But they also have a keen desire to both generate new leads, and manage leads sent to them by their partners. Our advice below makes the most sense in that context.

So what’s first? Where do we begin?

What first happens is a discussion of the value of marketing automation tools. Times have changed. It’s no longer appropriate to download lists of email addresses and spam them. It’s not valuable to email your entire customer base each week with every message you want to broadcast.

In a nutshell, you’ll be using an application like Pardot to achieve the following:

• Capture Lead Information
• Track Lead and customer behavior on your website and content
• Measure the “sales readiness” of contacts
• Manage the hand off of sales ready leads to the sales team
• Give customers content and offers they are interested in

But you already knew all that. You’re here to learn about your first steps.

Data Scrubbing

The first step is an analysis of your existing data. Just how good is it? This breaks down into two essential questions. How much data that you need to use to segment your database, is missing? Address, email, company size, industry etc. are typical but there may be others. The second question is, how much duplicate information is there?

While improving data quality should be an ongoing task in your organization, and not a one time program, you’ll need to make sure it’s happening as you move ahead with marketing automation. Clean your data.

Make sure you’re removing or merging duplicate email addresses. Put in place metrics in your CRM system to warn users when they are working with incomplete records.

Your database will never become perfect, but place a high degree of importance on the effort to make it so.

Click the green button to read more…

Read More »

The B2B world of buying and selling has changed. With the power of Google and other web tools, buyers have access to far more information and they are doing more research on their own long before even contacting the vendors. In many cases, by the time the buyer contacts the vendor, they already know everything they need to know to make a buying decision.

The problem is… will they be contacting you? Or will they be contacting your competition? Making your website into a lead generating machine rather than an electronic brochure is now more important than ever!

View our presentation below to learn how the Pardot Web Marketing Suite can help you to obtain more qualified online leads for your sales pipeline. Our presentation includes…

• How to nurture your leads until they are sales-ready.
• How to enhance your website with search tracking, landing pages, and lead capture forms.
• Being perceived as a thought leader, rather than a spammer.
• Automating the process of nurturing a potential buyer through their investigation process.
• How to track what your prospects are doing on your website

Pardot’s a great Application.  Check out the demonstration below.

Today I’d like to introduce Kasey Bayne of Javelin Technologies. She is the Marketing Manager at Javelin and is a very enthusiastic NetSuite user. She’s at the controls day to day, rolling up reports and planning campaigns. She’s also helped other NetSuite customers with tips and advice on how to get things done in NetSuite.

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Kasey, before we talk about NetSuite, could you describe how the marketing team did their work before NetSuite? What systems did you use and how did everything come together?

Hi Rob, and thanks for meeting with me today.

Before NetSuite, it seems now like we were living in the dark ages! We ran our marketing team on a number of systems – one for sending out campaign emails, one for creating emails, one for our customer database, and one more for managing our budget.

We used GoldMine, Mach5, some accounting software I don’t even know the name of, and more Excel spreadsheets then I could count (or would ever want to). None of the systems talked to one another. This made it difficult to track results of our campaigns, in terms of campaign performance and tie them to the sales cycle. It also made visibility across departments very difficult. We were constantly emailing documents around.

In one word – it was a mess.

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When you were first introduced to NetSuite what was the thing that changed the most for the Javelin Marketing team?

The greatest (and most beneficial) change to the Javelin Marketing team once we started using NetSuite was the metrics. Marketing success can be tough to measure, and Netsuite has given us the tools we need to track the data to make good decisions. Things like click-through rates, ROI, close rates, and even down to what happened with each individual lead we dig up are easy to find and help us make better, more strategic, decisions.

Previously we only had vague ideas of what was working and what was a waste of time.

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Change doesn’t happen overnight. How long did it take to get using all the functionality and reporting in NetSuite? What phases did you go though while learning NetSuite?

It didn’t happen overnight, but nothing worth it happens that quickly. We had a great NetSuite consultant (that would be you!) who helped us get set-up. I was nervous at first, especially about the email campaign portion. You don’t want to mess up when you’re sending out 20 000 emails! But you helped us get set-up quickly, do some testing, and that made me 100% confident in how NetSuite could work for us. I’d say we started using it on day 1, and it was about 4 weeks to having everything up and running (we kept adding new features as we discovered them!).

There were a few phases in our NetSuite implementation – we first took some time to map out our current processes, from lead generation to close. It was important to see what happened to a lead, from the time it was created to the time it closed. We were able to see where we wanted to make changes, and mapped those out BEFORE we started implementing the system. Taking this time out before hand was a huge benefit to setting up our system to work the way we wanted our business to run.

We had a good week of training, and then worked with our NetSuite Consultant to set-up and customize things as we got the system into place. We did some more advanced things with our Consultant once we had the basics down and were ready to take full advantage of some of the more advanced features. Now, things are working great across the board, and we are able to make better decisions because of it.

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What’s your favorite NetSuite feature?

There are so many, its hard to pick one! My absolute favourite has got to be the Campaign ROI Report, and really the reporting features in general.

Why did I pick the Campaign ROI report? In the past, to get these numbers was a HUGE ordeal. I’d lock myself in my office for a week straight, with a pile of spreadsheet printouts, and a pencil and ruler for cross-referencing by hand. Since it was such an undertaking to pull this all together, we’d only do it once a year, to wrap up the year’s events.

Being able to see this information at the push of a button is amazing! I can see the data often, and make quicker decisions to better run our marketing team. The change from one week to immediate is unbelievable, both in terms of time saved and in increasing my ability to make timelier, more strategic decisions. I can’t imagine running a successful department without it, its become that valuable to how I run my department.

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You’ve helped a few other NetSuite customers. What are some typical questions you get?

The main questions I get were in regards to setting up campaigns. That is one of the fundamental parts of any marketing program, and it is important to have it set up from the start. Its the most common area of questions, because it can be difficult for a non-marketing person to understand how campaigns work, so its important to have someone who understands the process there to help you get set-up right.

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Looking back, are there any recommendations you would make to other marketing managers out there who are just starting up?

The best recommendation I have is to take the time to get set up RIGHT at the start. Make sure you fully understand your own processes. There’s nothing more frustrating then having to go back and re-do something because it wasn’t set-up for the way things actually work in your organization. Take the time you need, and get some help! There are SO many functions in Netsuite, to help not only marketing, but every department, so get someone to help you out and take the time to really dig into things and take advantage of all the system has to offer. Trust me – it’ll help your business.
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Thanks very much for your time Kasey.  It seems like you really are a fan of NetSuite Campaigns!  I appreciate you taking a moment out to chat about NetSuite.  Have a good 2009 and keep us posted on how you change the way you market over the year. I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about.

You can find Kasey on twitter as @JavelinTech