Download Predictive Marketing: Buyer`s Guide

Predictive Marketing:
Buyer’s Guide
Index
Introduction2
About This eBook2
1
The Benefits of Using a Predictive Marketing Solution
2
Recommended Steps to Making an Informed Purchase
2
Step #1: How do you set your company’s predictive marketing goals?
3
Step #2: How do we select use cases?
3
Step #3: 5 Things To Do When Selecting A Predictive Marketing Vendor
4
Step #4: Deconstructing the Predictive Marketing POC Process
5
Section #5: What Questions to Ask the Vendor?
7
Conclusion
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Introduction
Welcome to the world of predictive marketing. In this eBook you will find out why more and
more marketers are turning to predictive marketing methods to super-charge 'traditional'
marketing techniques. However, since we are still in the early days of predictive marketing,
how to choose the best predictive marketing technology can be unclear at best and totally
confusing at worst.
About This eBook
Predictive marketing can be technically complex. This eBook discusses the questions that any
marketer may face when dealing with choosing a predictive marketing solution.
The Benefits of Using a Predictive Marketing Solution
Modern marketers realize the challenges of making the most of their data. Whether updating
their database, discovering more about customers, targeting leads, or driving segmentation,
today’s challenges abound. With hundreds of thousands, and even millions of leads flowing
through marketing automation platforms, many marketers know they need to score leads.
However, traditional lead scoring isn’t enough anymore, because it remains based on a series
of assumptions and limited information.
Predictive marketing addresses challenges by offering unique benefits including:
Insight-driven marketing: predictive marketing is used by advanced B2C marketers such
as Amazon and Netflix to build highly tailored offerings. The big data behind predictive
marketing enables B2B marketers to gain deep insights into their buyer profiles and make
personalized real-time, data-driven segmentation decisions.
Better prioritization of activities: with predictive scores you can decide how much to
nurture each lead, which leads are ready to be sent directly to sales, and which don’t really
qualify for your company at all.
Better and more relevant data: which means better messaging and higher engagement
probability. By knowing more of the interesting information about your prospects you can
create better content and engage your leads more effectively.
Better alignment of sales and marketing: Leading analyst firm SiriusDecisions points
to lack of alignment between Sales and Marketing as one of the key business process
gaps. Predictive marketing solutions can help to align sales and marketing efforts to better
define and identify sales-ready leads. By working cooperatively to set scoring parameters
and define qualified lead criteria, sales and marketing become one team.
Recommended Steps to Making an Informed Purchase
Because there are a number of different offerings in the market, marketers should compare
different solutions in order to decide the best fit for their specific needs. Understanding your
current marketing processes, knowing how to measure success, and being able to identify
where you are looking for improvements, are all critical pieces of the predictive marketing
solution decision-making process.
The next sections contain an outline to help you compare, test, and select a predictive
marketing vendor:
How do you set your company’s predictive marketing goals?
How do we select use cases?
5 things to do when selecting a predictive marketing vendor
Deconstructing the predictive marketing POC process
Questions to ask vendors
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Step #1: How do you set your company’s predictive marketing goals?
What are your goals? It is critical to know your goals upfront for predictive marketing.
Would you like to create a data driven marketing strategy and increase marketing’s
contribution to revenue generation? Do you want to identify micro-segmentation to
improve customer understanding and engagement? Would you like to leverage fresh data
for precise targeting of prospects with relevant content and nurturing campaigns? Would
you like to significantly increase your marketing ROI? Do you want to improve the quality of
leads handed off from marketing to sales? Choose your goals and prioritize them.
Have you gained organizational buy-in? Every marketer should have an executive
sponsor to secure support. Gaining buy-in takes some work. Present a compelling case
that the benefits of a new solution vastly outweigh the costs. Always back your case up with
numbers. The benefits include higher conversion rates, more effective sales, and improved
campaign ROI. Be the champion of a successful solution and become a leader in your
marketing organization.
How will we measure success? This is one of the toughest questions, and ties directly
to why you are adopting a predictive marketing platform. If your goal is to increase
conversions, you’ll need to know what your current conversion rate is in order to measure
its impact.
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Have we realistically assessed the total cost of ownership of the potential solution?
Make sure you are taking every aspect of the solution into account. Some predictive
marketing platforms are all inclusive, while others feature add-ons, charge per model, or
charge per additional data field. Services can also significantly increase costs. In addition
to the cost of the predictive marketing platform itself, you should consider the cost of
maintaining data and model freshness. You will likely need anywhere between 5-20
different models and 50-150 data fields appended to your marketing leads to make the
best use of this new capability.
Once you are convinced of the benefits of applying predictive marketing, the next logical
question is, “how do I implement it?”
The most important step in implementing a predictive marketing solution is defining the
business goals you’re trying to achieve.
Step #2: How do we select use cases?
Creating funnel efficiency: If you place a machine between marketing-qualified leads
(MQLs) and business development reps (BDRs), marketers can select the best fitting leads
and create more opportunities for sales without wasting marketing dollars. This ‘machine’
is a predictive marketing solution.
Increases lead velocity: Every 12 weeks, 10%-15% of the leads in your funnel become
invalid – people change titles, emails, positions, or companies. That is why you need higher
velocity to get more value from the same marketing database. You need to get the best
leads through the funnel quickly, giving them higher priority at every step.
Officiates data cleansing and filtering: Are there really 12 million qualified buyers for
your products or services? Probably not. You should be able predict which 30% of your
database contains 95% of your eventual wins. Discard the 70% of leads which are much
less relevant and focus on leads that really matter.
Smarter segmentation (based on data): You should use a data-driven approach that offers to
run smarter marketing campaigns by segmenting the buyers, matching each lead to a distinct
persona, and adding the needed information to each lead (in your marketing automation or CRM).
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Aggregates data for effective cross-sell and up-sell: With predictive marketing you can
build models for different upsell and cross-sell activities, each with its unique characteristics
based not only on behavioral data, but interests and strong, refined company data that
your predictive model was able to aggregate. This will also let your sales team know to
whom they’ll cross-sell and up-sell.
Predictive marketing provides context during greenfield discovery: In these cases you
don’t have an abundance of past information and need to quickly get the best buyers in
this new space. Bootstrapping a marketing campaign is another important use-case for
predictive marketing.
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Automated decision-making on leads: With predictive marketing, you will be able to
make automated decisions on funneling your leads to the right place based on score and
data. High priority leads can go to sales immediately. In addition, funnel leads to the right
nurture track based on data-driven rules.
Most important is to define your use-case in detail and to articulate what problem you are
trying to solve. Then go into detail on how that activity is done today, and what you expect
to change by adopting a predictive marketing solution. The more granular you get, the
better you will visualize your new approach to marketing, and the higher the likelihood you
will achieve your goal. Investing effort in defining your goals is time well spent.
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Step #3: 5 Things To Do When Selecting A Predictive Marketing Vendor
Once you have decided you need predictive marketing and have set your goals, start looking
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for a solution. Evaluating vendors is your next step. Here are the actions, tests, and checks
recommended before you make a decision.
View vendor websites: Open the contending vendor websites side by side, tab to tab.
Read through the product pages and success stories to see if they can help you accomplish
your goals. Find out what kind of problems the vendor solves and what kind of results they
are achieving with their current customers.
Talk to colleagues: Your early adopter marketing friends have probably looked at some
of these solutions. Ask them what they learned and their assessment of the vendors they
have heard about or used services from.
Review analyst reports: Get a good idea of the capabilities of the vendors in your
distinctive space. In many cases the analysts have already done your homework for you.
Some of the recently published analyst reports on predictive lead scoring and predictive
marketing are:
SiriusDecisions “Predictive Lead Scoring 2014″ Field Guide (subscription required)
Gartner’s “Tech Go-to-Market: Using Big Data to Focus on the Right Prospects Can
Improve Sales and Marketing Effectiveness” (subscription required)
Gartner’s “Market Guide for Advanced Marketing Analytics Platforms” (subscription
required)
Forrester’s “B2B Marketing’s Big Data Destiny” (subscription required)
Make discovery calls: Speak with the vendors you are considering. Describe your problems
and objectives. Ask about their capabilities and how they would help you achieve
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your goals. Ask the hard questions—you will get a better understanding of the abilities and
limitations of each vendor. A list of recommended questions appears at the end of this
document.
Talk to customers of the vendor: See if the vendor will set you up with a reference
customer with a similar use-case so you can pick their brain about their greatest marketing
challenges and how the vendor is helping them solve their pain points. Ask what vendors
they have evaluated and how they have worked on making their decisions.
Pro-Tip: Get Proof
You will now move into a proof phase. You will want to pull your list of goals out again to
make sure you are on track and see if anything new should be added. Assess each vendor
against your goals in order of priority. Implementing a predictive marketing solution may
require new strategic thinking. If your company has a distinctive conceptual framework,
you should consider piloting the technology with a proof of concept. This will help you
understand the technology, get a feeling for how you work with the team, and what you
can expect when you implement the solution.
Step #4: Deconstructing the Predictive Marketing POC Process
Kick-off your fresh evaluation by understanding the basics of what kind of test you can run
to make sure the predictive marketing solutions you are looking at will actually solve your
problem.
Why run a POC? Proof of concept (aka: POC) is a method to run an effective, thorough
validation test of the potential vendor solution.
This will help you validate the technology and find out how the different vendors stack up
in relevant capabilities for your use case.
How does a POC work? In a POC, your vendor will use your data as well as their own data
to create predictions and insights about your customers and segments. You will usually
prove out one or two use-cases at this stage. You will then measure the predictions against
your actual results to check for accuracy.
How long will a POC take? A POC can be run in about two to four weeks, depending on
the complexity of your use-case and the quality of the data used to build predictive models.
What will I need to begin a POC? You will need your customer and pipeline data. You
will need a “Positive” population (a sample of your “Universe of Prospects”), and a “Test
Population.” Each of these sets of data are defined below:
Positives: Typically, several hundred “positives” or “wins” will suffice. You will use different
“Positive Sets” depending on your use-case. For example, a lead-based model requires
leads which have converted to opportunities or have closed. For an account-based
model, you will use accounts that have purchased from you. For an up-sell model, you
will use accounts that have purchased more from you than their original deal amount.
Universe of prospects: This will be a sample of the leads or accounts in which you are
trying to locate the Positives (the good leads or accounts.) For example, if you were
trying to find a great lead from your ongoing inbound lead generation, you would use a
sample of your inbound leads to compare against.
Test population: This will be a sample of leads resembling your Universe of Prospects
with Positives mixed in. Here, you must already have found the needle in the haystack —
you must already know which prospects were actually Positives. This will serve as your
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test of accuracy for the vendors. Exceptional models should be able to predict against a
test file with a very high level of accuracy.
Data freshness: The length of your sales cycle is critical to deciding on how big and
how fresh your samples should be. For instance, if it takes one quarter for a prospect to
become a Positive, your Test Population should be at least one quarter old and should
not be in your Positive Set of your Universe of Prospects.
Which vendor has performed the best? This is where the Test Population comes into
play. Each vendor should be able to offer you a sample of the prediction. Comparing the
accuracy of the prediction at the threshold which is most relevant for your use-case will
give you the answer as to which is the best model.
Set goals and timelines: Right from the start you should pay attention to your POC kickoff
process. In the kickoff you should:
Review your own goals for predictive marketing: Ask for the vendor’s insights and
recommendations. Validate their expertise by finding out what experience they have
had success with in the area of your specific goals.
Provide the vendor with your data: Your vendor should ask for several sets of data; a
set of Positives, a set to represent your Universe of Prospects, and a test set. Allow the
vendor to ask questions about the data and about your marketing and sales processes.
Your vendor should be a partner with you in this project.
Outline the expected timeline: Make sure you and your vendor are on the same page
about how long the POC should take. Have a shared course the various steps will take,
and the timeframe in which those steps will take place.
Review model results and insights: After the vendors have done their magic, matched
their data with your data, produced predictive models, and found insights, they should
share these with you.
The vendor should present the following results from the POC:
The data that went into the model: Your vendor should reveal what part of your data
was used in modeling and why. You should also receive information about validations
and statistics that have been run on your data to enhance it for the model building
process.
The strongest insights and indicators in the model: Your vendor should reveal what
data they have added to the equation and what is most relevant to your model and
business case. This provides a window into the models validity and granularity.
The model’s performance: Vendors tend to measure performance differently, so it
is hard to compare performance if you don’t have a statistics expert. To make things
simple, you should insist on a specific metric of your choice which you alone determine
to provide feedback to the vendor on what you’ve seen.
Measuring and comparing results: The key to this step is deciding what to measure. This
should be your decision, not the vendor’s. Choose the metrics, which are significant to your
business case. Below is a guide to consider how to measure results.
Use a good metric: A good metric would be “the percent of wins in the top 20% of
my leads.” All vendors will provide numbers that can easily be compared since we are
talking about groups of the same size. The top 20% is a large enough set to let you
measure accurately the number of wins (or positives.) That 20% can now be compared
directly between vendors.
Have a scorecard of important features: Measuring model performance is important,
however, so are all the additional features and data you should receive from your
vendor. Perhaps the quality of certain marketing automation and CRM integrations is
Predictive Marketing: Buyer’s Guide
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important to you. Perhaps there are certain actionable data points you want to have
from the insights and analytics in order to provide an “air-traffic control” for your leads,
to guide them down nurture tracks. Make sure to include this in your evaluation.
What will change the day after you implement predictive marketing: Understand how
processes and campaigns will change after you start implementing predictive marketing.
In addition, figure out what is the time to value or "quick wins" for your company.
Section #5: What Questions to Ask the Vendor?
After you’ve done the preliminary research, it’s time to sign up for some product demos to
learn about the features and capabilities of each predictive marketing vendor. Here are some
of the important questions that you should ask:
General Questions
vendor 1
7
vendor 2
vendor 3
Does the vendor offer an intuitive user
interface?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor understand our
business?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor understand our
marketing needs?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor offer all of our musthave features?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor offer dedicated support?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor help me maximize
adoption in my organization?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
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Modeling
vendor 1
vendor 2
vendor 3
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Is there an extra fee or charge for buyer
personas or different models for different
product lines?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor solution require data
scientists to build our models?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can I interpret the model’s results myself?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor provide an average new
model turnaround time of 24 hours?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor have the ability to score
leads and contacts including prospects
and existing contacts?
Does the vendor score leads based on
exclusive data that I don’t have?
Is there an extra fee or charge for data or
marketing indicators?
Does the vendor work in an all-inclusive
business model?
Can the vendor support 5-20 different
models for different product lines?
Integration
vendor 1
vendor 2
vendor 3
Does the vendor offer capabilities to
provide scoring and enrichment directly
on the Lead and Account objects in our
marketing systems?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor integrate my data into
his model’s data?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor refresh my data and
scoring on a quarterly basis to reflect
changes in the market?
Predictive Marketing: Buyer’s Guide
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Data
Your goal is to understand where the vendor is bringing the data from and whether it fits
your process.
vendor 1
vendor 2
vendor 3
Does the vendor cover international data
outside of North America?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor support data in
languages other than English?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor create custom data
points based my unique business needs?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Can the vendor enrich more than 80% of
the leads in my database?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor cleanse my data of
errors and invalid data points?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor provide intent data?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
Does the vendor share any of my data
with other parties or his database?
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
How many companies does the vendor have and how many data points on each company?
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Conclusion
Predictive marketing platforms are proving their value to B2B marketers, who are facing
a more complex customer lifecycle, a wider array of digital marketing channels, and an
unprecedented volume of prospect and customer data.
To be effective, marketers must be creative, targeted, aligned with sales goals, and have
greater visibility into buyer attributes and behaviors. Predictive marketing solutions can help
you become a better, more effective marketer. Set a goal, and find the technology that will
best help you and your company accomplish that goal.
Predictive Marketing: Buyer’s Guide
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Mintigo | [email protected] | www.mintigo.com