This high employee turnover is not only a headache for employers, but also a big concern for B2B marketers trying to reach decision makers in companies who aren’t there anymore!  Some may have dismissed the “Great Resignation” as only a problem in entry level positions in retail or entertainment, but it is reaching far into high tech, healthcare, and manufacturing and squarely at middle management and above, where the majority of B2B demand generation campaigns are targeted.

How the Great Resignation Could Have a Devastating Effect on Your Demand Generation Campaigns—But You Can Start to Fix this Now

This will begin to negatively affect your B2B demand generation campaigns in several ways:

1. With increasingly poor email deliverability, from bounced (undeliverable email addresses).
2. Wasted sales team efforts in trying to follow up on leads that are no longer at the company.
3. Disrupted decision making teams in companies. You could have been close to a sale in an account and voila 2 of the 5 key decision makers have left. You will need to navigate into the company all over again in a few months to find out who the new decision makers are.

All of the issues above are reflections of B2B data quality issues created by this unprecedented employee turnover.  These data quality issues will begin to negatively affect the number of marketing and sales qualified leads you have in your marketing automation system, and maybe even the open opportunities in your CRM.  It could have a devastating effect on your sales pipeline for the next two quarters if efforts are not taken to stop the data hemorrhage now.

How to Fix the B2B Demand Generation Problems Caused by the Great Resignation

The first step in addressing the problem is to acknowledge there are significant financial risks to not addressing it immediately.  The second step is to recognize it will take marketing budget to fix it.  In my experience, marketing data cleansing has been the most underfunded aspect of marketing. There always seems to be lots of shinier marketing tech stack things to spend marketing budget on, rather than good quality data.

I recommend several steps be taken immediately:

1. Analyze the data deprecation rate (ie the rate at which you are getting email hard bounces, etc). This will give you a sense of how fast your company database is aging and help you to talk to vendors about how much data cleansing you need on a monthly basis.
2. Get help. Bring vendors on board who can interface with your CRM and continually cleanse your marketing data.
3. Get more help. Cleansing your current data isn’t enough to keep up and probably not enough to keep ahead of your demand generation goals.  Your database will fall behind if all you do is try to correct your current data.  People are moving jobs at too quick of a pace.  You are going to need to identify, profile, and target key accounts more aggressively than ever before.
4. Have a strategy to reach remote workers. 74 percent of workers say that having a remote work opportunity would make them less likely to leave a company, and 64 percent of recruiters report that being able to pitch a work-from-home policy helps them find high-quality talent.⁽²⁾ They are an elusive bunch that are hard for data companies to find their email addresses and even harder to find their phone numbers. You need to get them to come to you with very good content programs. Use content networks to your best advantage, test using social media advertising on networks such as LinkedIn, and by all means optimize your SEO so that when they’re looking for a solution on their own, they’ll find you.

We predict you’ll need to spend a higher proportion of your marketing budget on data cleansing, content programs and SEO than you ever have in past years to keep up with your target’s job changes and lure them to find you. Hopefully what you’ll find on the prospect’s side is happier employees who will stay at their next job for a while, but maybe not, so keep the data cleansing going!

Need help with your b2b list or SEO? Contact us!

Written by Laurie Beasley

¹ “19 Employee Retention Statistics That Will Surprise you (2021)”; Apollo Technical; July 30, 2021; https://apollotechnical.com/employee-retention-statistics/

² Steward, Jack; “The Ultimate List Of Remote Work Statistics for 2021”; Findstack; September 21, 2021; https://findstack.com/remote-work-statistics/

The post How the Great Resignation is Damaging Your B2B Demand Generation Campaigns—and What to Do About It appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

When you search Google on the phrase “Integrating your CRM with Google Ads,” about 2.8 million results are offered. Obviously, this is a common integration issue. Having an integration checklist will help you plan your process before starting (which is the reason I wrote this blog). I hope my checklist will save you time, money and create ROI for you in the long run.

For the sake of giving examples, we’ll use Marketo as our representative Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), and explain how it connects to SalesForce (our CRM). These are not the only choices in the market, but they will serve to illustrate common opportunities and challenges.

Integration Checklist Questions

We list here a series of questions we will explore in the following sections. You might want to jot down answers to these questions first before we review each in detail.

1. Do you have a separate Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and Customer Relationship Management system (CRM)?
2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection/interface?
3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?
4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?
5. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?
6. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?
7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?
8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?
9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?
10. How many people will own this process?

Here are Additional Details on each Question and what they Imply

1. Do you have a separate MAP and CRM?

Some CRMs have great marketing automation built into their infrastructure and do not need the addition of a MAP. Often though, companies start with a MAP and eventually move to a full-blown CRM.

If you do not have an integrated MAP/CRM connection, budget additional time and resources to connect the two. This often can be a major hurdle in launching your campaigns. One of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing’s (BDOM) clients ran into this issue and an additional 6 weeks of development time was required to launch the campaigns.

2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection?

Both Marketo and SalesForce have invested time and money into creating these connections at the API level. Take advantage of this and use what’s there instead of trying to recreate the wheel.

Be sure to test the connection between the MAP and CRM before launch. In spite of having off-the-shelf solutions, BDOM has found allocating time and budget for running initial tests is key to long-term campaign and larger marketing initiative success.

3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?

Is it one way or two way? Being able to send sales data back to Google Ads will make a much more efficient campaign over time. BDOM has found that where this exists the integration process is easier, and we are able to see a much more detailed view of what’s happening from click to meeting to closed sale. Be sure to spend time familiarizing both your marketing team and sales team with what results say. Having your sales team understand results goes a long way towards getting them to take online leads seriously as they allocate limited time to what they view as the best prospects.

4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?

It will save you time and lots of effort if you bite the bullet and convert all your forms to the native version offered by your MAP. This is probably the biggest source of frustration and delay when going through this process.

One of our clients chose to have a hybrid approach with new forms being built in Marketo and older forms being “imported” into the system. While they were able to make this work, it required additional development time when a new campaign would target the marketing collateral associated with an older “imported” form.

Spend the time and effort up front to convert older forms to your MAP. It will allow your team to be more agile and effective for future campaigns.

5. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?

Make sure your SalesForce campaign fields match your Google Ads fields. Also, importing your cost data into SalesForce can make your ROI much clearer at a glance.

This comes back to the idea of managing your resources effectively. We all have limited budget to drive traffic to our site, whether from paid search or email outreach. Being able to understand which traffic is driving the best leads and how much those leads are costing your company will allow your team to make better decisions on which campaigns are performing best. It also cuts down on the number of “poor” leads your sales team needs to shepherd from marketing qualified to sales qualified.

Your sales team has limited time to devote to qualifying marketing leads and will begin discounting them over time if poor leads are being sent because they appear to be “affordable.”

6. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?

Keeping the naming convention consistent from the start will cut down on significant data issues. It’s easier to match them up at the outset of your integration process than going back to retrofit the data later.

One key field that needs to be included in SalesForce is the “gclid” field. This is the container that Google Ads uses to transmit all the campaign, ad group, ad, search term, targeting and cost info into a nice little package that SalesForce can decode.

7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?

The more touches needed, the more you need to make sure you’re getting a clean, two-way data stream between Google Ads and your MAP/CRM.

Our team spent a lot of time and effort ensuring we are able to follow the lead stream with our clients to understand what is working. Having good, two-way communication between the eventual sale and the click that drove it is key. This can be the area in which a well-connected MAP/CRM solution pays for itself, giving the marketing team the data they need to focus on the best source of high-quality leads for the sales team.

8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?

This is known as shifting a lead from an MQL (marketing qualified lead) to a SQL (sales qualified lead).

BDOM will sit down with our client’s marketing and sales teams at the beginning of any new engagement and ask how they qualify the lead, what makes for a good SQL vs. an MQL and what history the two sides have. This will often result in a better understanding on both sides and better long term buy-in to a process that may not be turnkey.

9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?

Be sure that these are used to score the lead and it transmits to your CRM when the lead is transferred.

This again is a key step for getting sales and marketing on the same page in understanding the process and developing trust with the quality of the leads as they go through the pipeline.

10. How many people will own this process?

Is it just one person or are you splitting the work among different people and teams? Getting the multiple parties involved at the outset to discuss goals and possible issues is vital to having a successful process. Be aware that different team members will have different goals for the integration. Some may not want to do the work required and will need to be convinced of the final result’s value.

The ins and outs of the process will be very dependent on planning details before any steps are taken. Like any project, a road map with clear responsibilities will make your integration much more successful.

Additional links that can help you get started.

Link Salesforce and Google Ads accounts
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7538740

Import conversions from Salesforce
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6299296#setup_steps

Google Ads Integration Questions? | Marketo Marketing Nation
https://nation.marketo.com/thread/44948-google-adwords-workings

Google Ads Integration: Optimize Ads Using Marketo Offline Conversion Data
https://www.marketo.com/cheat-sheets/google-adwords-integration-optimize-ads-using-marketo-offline-conversion-data/

Do you need assistance integrating your Marketing Automation Platform and CRM with Google Ads? We can help. Request a free consultation here.

For digital marketing case studies, go here.

By John Thyfault
Vice President of Search and Social Media Marketing
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

The post 10 Steps to Integrate Marketing Automation Platforms and CRMs with Google Ads appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.