What's new in field marketing?

At the Sirius Decisions summit in Las Vegas, experiencing some connectivity issues.  Will provide updates as network availability warrants.

Tony Jaros, VP of Research for Sirius Decisions, talks about the next evolution in field marketing. Field marketing 1.0, he says, introduced concepts of systematic, predictable and repeatable marketing.  Talking about target marketing, getting sales and marketing to work together on who companies should target.  Lead flow process, handoffs and agreements between sales and marketing were part of the processes that were covered in the first generation of field marketing.   And then technologies, service partners and metrics need to fit together at the top, to bring together a close-loop process. 

Jaros says that more is needed and possible, because once these building blocks are in place, efficiencies are realized.  The problem is that many companies adopt the field marketing 1.0 concepts in principle, but they tend to implement them inflexibly, in a one-size-fits-all approach.

Here are some other highlights of Tony's talk:

There's a difference between cleaning a marketing database and creating a process to keep the database clean.

This is such an important point -- most marketer's don't regularly cleanse their marketing database of old or dead information, data which accumulates over time and affects your ability to crisply pull useful information.  For companies that do quarterly or yearly practice data hygiene, don't feel so good about yourselves.  Sending your data out to be washed and folded and returned a week from Tuesday is fine for that particular point in time, but the day you get your list back, the data pollution begins again.  Jaros says that organizations need to institute processes to continually keep the information in your database scrubbed.

Many metrics we use are of no use to the rest of the organization.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who reads and follows Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg, but our companies don't care about, among other things:

• Response rates
• Click through rates
• Attendee numbers
• Message testing figures
• List performance
• Programs completed per month/quarter/year

Rather, we should concentrate on providing the measures our organizations do care about, including:

• Inquiries
• Marketing qualified prospects
• Sales accepted leads
• Sales opportunities created
• Closed and won business

Comments

[Tony Jaros]

We are NOT advocating abandoning these metrics, as they help to indicate the efficacy of "filling the funnel" at its very top. Of course, one can be very effective at filling the funnel, and very poor at converting these raw responses further down. In the end, we believe the organization could care less whether you drive a one percent or 10 percent response rate; the real test is how these responses wind up converting into marketing qualified leads, sales accepted leads, sales qualified leads and closed revenue.

[Manjula Selvarajah]

Huh? Steve, am I reading this wrong? Surely Siruis cannot be advocating abandoning measures like list performance and response rates? If so, I have to disagree. These ought to be the secondary set you look at after the "inquiry to close" metrics to assess the state of your programs. Take this example: what if you had winning "lead to close" numbers but missed analyzing a list performance metric that may identify opportunities to increase results with the same programs but a few database changes?

[AC]

To your comment about metrics that companies don't care about, vs. those that they do care about, is your point that we should measure results and not just numbers? If so then isn't it more an issue of ending the journey at the results stage rather than just stopping at the numbers stage? Because some of those basic numbers or metrics provide you with some crucial input needed to uncover and understand results. Is that what you meant?

[patrickdh]

I totally agree with you. As much as it is difficult and as much as it takes to overcome skeptics.

good initiative. Patrick