The next interview in the B2B Marketing thought leader interview series is with Mark Klein, CEO of predictive analytics company Loyalty Builders. Like me, Mark is a direct marketing expert whose background in science and passion for mathematics equates into a desire to help marketers improve their campaigns.

1. Tell us a little bit about how you got into mathematical marketing, and what you like most about it.

I was working for IBM, who had purchased my third company, when they initiated a compensation plan for senior management based on the company’s customer satisfaction scores. That wasn’t working well for me, for a couple of reasons. First, there was no granularity of person: good performers were compensated equally with poor performers. Secondly, customer satisfaction is a backwards-looking measure, and gave me no help in managing my small slice of that very big business. I left IBM to work on a better measure, and soon abandoned customer satisfaction in favor of customer loyalty, which was much more predictive. After a bit of work, I developed a model of customer future behavior based on past purchases, and most of what we do in Mathematical Marketing followed along. Earlier in life I spent several years as a theoretical physicist, so I was very comfortable using mathematics to predict the future. It’s been a lot of fun showing companies that they are sitting on a lot of data that can really boost their marketing.

2. You are a frequent contributor to the Longbow Direct Marketing blog, speaking to the value of using mathematics to help B2B marketers improve their campaigns, what are your top three tips in terms of how marketers can better leverage mathematics to help drive a marketing ROI?

You threw me an easy pitch over the middle of the plate. Our mantra around here is Track, Target, and Test. Tip #1 is collect, guard, and use your customer transaction data. It’s the basis of Mathematical Marketing. Tip #2 is to segment and target customers based not on firmographics but on the much more accurate, and more predictive, transaction data. Tip #3 is to constantly test, both offers and targeting. Testing is probably the fastest and easiest way to jumpstart your marketing.

3. What do you think is the biggest opportunity marketers have in terms of more effective lead generation? Specifically, in regards to how the marketing and sales teams work together?

Lead generation, like most existing customer marketing, is still too qualitative. Typically leads are cold, warm, or hot. Too few companies even know the cost of a lead, and if their leads come from multiple channels, for example trade shows and internet, they may not even know which channel is more cost effective. The same mathematical discipline we practice in existing customer marketing should carry over to acquisition. Further, Mathematical Marketing shines in creating lists for the sales team of customers and the products each customer is likely to buy. Sales people love those lists (they deliver fatter commissions), and that love extends to the marketing team that delivered the leads, fostering a good cooperation between the departments. Finally, there is lots of room to model responses to promotion, to carry personas developed in Mathematical Marketing over to customer acquisition.

4. In the B2B market, what do you see as the biggest hurdle to effective lead management?

While some marketers embrace quantitative methodology, a lot more avoid it. A good part of the industry needs an Attitude Adjustment Hour. People unwilling to change are the hurdle to be overcome. Our experience is that this problem fixes itself once some parts of the organization begin to use Mathematical Marketing. Typically their results are such a big improvement over what they produced using their older methodology that others want to jump on the same train, out of fear of being left in the dust.

Wild Card: Anything else you would like to add?

Will someone explain to me why most companies get the overwhelming share of their revenue from existing customers, yet allocate the overwhelming share of their marketing budget to customer acquisition? We’re seeing some shift, and the catch phrase is “retention is the new acquisition.” But marketing spend ratios are still badly out of whack. Today, there are some forces driving a different perspective. First, our shrinking global economy is making many companies look more closely at the revenue from their existing customers. Second, the wider availability of tools that don’t require statisticians on staff is accelerating this trend. I have an optimistic outlook.

Now that we are officially in a recession (at least in most states), it seems like more and more marketers are looking for tips and ideas about how to adjust their practices given the macro-economic conditions.

For the past two months, the number one post on my blog has been "7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide".  Originally published in June, what's really dramatic is how quickly it's ramped up since September when the crisis really took hold. Take a look at the Google Analytics report:

Put another way, that's a 1,300% increase in searches, clicks, and page views on that topic in just seven weeks, and yet another way, each and every day more than 35 people are typing "marketing in a recession" into Google and clicking through to read that blog post.  (And, when they get there, they are really spending time reading it, spending almost four and half minutes on average on the page.)

What does all this mean? It means that now, more than ever, marketers need to:

• Maximize conversion of their advertising dollars into prospects by optimizing their landing pages.
• Stop wasting leads that aren't yet sales ready and start using lead nurturing to build relationships so that when they are ready to buy, you'll be positioned to win. In a recession, new prospects are less likely to be looking to purchase right away — which means they are less likely to want to talk to a sales rep. Lead nurturing is even more critical in a recession to ensure you convert the precious dollars you spend acquiring prospects into revenue.
• Use lead scoring to identify the best leads and help the sales team prioritize where they spend their time
• Prove the impact their marketing activities have on revenue and pipeline

Do you have any additional tips for marketing in a recession If so, please share!

There is an amazing amount of great content about B2B marketing out there, ranging from trends in demand generation to best practices in lead nurturing, lead scoring, and landing page optimization to how to buy and select marketing automation systems.

To help you find the good stuff, we recently put together a new site with B2B marketing tools and resources that collects a whopping 64 eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts and blog posts to help you learn all these best practices and more. Many of these are authored by the team at Marketo, but certainly not all of them. As always, if you have an additional tool or resource you'd like to share, please let me know.

Seven Lead Nurturing Tools and Resources

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy. Over 50% of leads are not yet sales ready, so nurturing those leads rather than throwing them away can help you maximize results. These blog posts, whitepapers, and podcasts can show you how to do it right.

1. Best Practices for Lead Nurturing — Blind Date to White Wedding (white paper)
2. Lead Nurturing 101 (blog post)
3. Lead Nurturing — Keeping your Prospects Engaged (MarketingSherpa podcast)
4. Lead Nurturing: Triggered Emails, Newsletters and Webinars (blog post)
5. How To Use Thought Leadership To Build Brands and Nurture Leads (blog post)
6. Lead Nurturing With Brian Carroll (blog post)
7. The YouTube Approach to Lead Nurturing (blog post)

Four Lead Scoring Tools and Resources

By tracking your prospect's behaviors and web activity, you can determine their level of interest in your solution (engagement) in addition to your interest in them (demographics targeting). Only by combining both factors can you send truly qualified leads to sales. Download these resources to learn why lead scoring matters and how to do it right.

1. Best Practices in Lead Scoring — Are They Hot or Not? (white paper)
2. Lead Scoring Best Practices (Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast)
3. Improving Lead Quality Can Improve Sales Productivity (blog post)
4. Measure Relationship Depth (blog post)

Nine Demand Generation Tools and Resources

Demand generation is the evolution of traditional lead generation. Unlike traditional programs that throw any lead over the wall to sales, demand generation is about qualifying and prioritizing prospects, nurturing a steady crop of qualified leads that want to engage with sales, coordinating ongoing activities with sales, and measuring and optimizing the results over time. These tools and resources will help you research demand generation and learn the latest best practices.

1. Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems (analyst report)
2. Supercharge Your Demand Generation with Personalization (Marketo on-demand webinar)
3. Demand Generation Quiz — How Good Are You? (blog post)
4. 7 Tips For Practical B-to-B Lead Generation (MarketingSherpa on-demand webinar)
5. 8 Ways The Internet Changed Software Marketing (blog post)
6. Insights for Marketing High Tech to Businesses (MarketingSherpa on-demand webinar)
7. Practical B2B Lead Generation (podcast with MarketingSherpa)
8. Using White Papers to Generate and Nurture B2B Leads (podcast with Michael Stelzner)
9. Top 5 Challenges for B2B Demand Generation Marketers (blog post)

Five Lead Management Tools and Resources

Lead management covers the entire process of modern sales lead generation, including acquiring new leads, scoring leads so you know who's ready for sales, nurturing the leads that aren't yet ready, passing leads to sales at the right time, and measuring and optimizing the process over time. These tools will help you get started improving your own lead management capabilities.

1. Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation (workbook from the analysts at IDC)
2. Ten Tips for Best Practice Lead Management (eBook)
3. How Acteva and IDology Achieved Significant Results with Lead Management (on-demand case study webinar)
4. How Vindicia went from Zero to Lead Management Hero in One Day (on-demand case study webinar)
5. Lead Management Will Never Be The Same Again (blog post)

Six Landing Pages Tools and Resources

Relevant and optimized landing pages generate higher conversion rates, meaning you get more leads whenever someone clicks your ads or emails. Getting them performing at their best is one of the quickest ways you can improve your B2B marketing results. Download these best practices to get practical tips for optimizing your landing pages. There's even a free online calculator to tell you how long it will take your landing page test to return valid results.

1. Building Effective Landing Pages (eBook)
2. Practical Tips to Raise your Landing Page Conversions (MarketingSherpa on-demand webinar)
3. Landing Page Testing Calculator — How many test versions can you have? How long will it take to get results? (online calculator)
4. Landing Page Testing: How Much Is Too Much? (blog post)
5. Ten Tips for Lead Generation Landing Pages (TopRank blog post)
6. Two Practical Landing Page Tips That Will Save You Money (blog post)

Eight Marketing Automation Tools and Resources

Marketing automation tools help increase operational efficiency, drive revenue, and demonstrate marketing's impact on revenue. Since the space is changing and evolving so rapidly, it can be hard to know what features you need to look for and what other factors you need to consider. These tools and resources can help you understand the marketing automation space and learn how to make the right decision.

1. 5 Questions to Ask Before Buying Marketing Automation (white paper)
2. The Big Easy Guidebook to Marketing Automation (eBook)
3. Marketing Automation Glossary of Terms (analyst report)
4. Marketing Automation Market Trends 2008 (analyst report)
5. Marketing's World of Hurt: How Marketing Automation Mistakes Prevent Organizations from Measuring Up (analyst report)
6. Buying and Using Marketing Automation Systems (podcast)
7. Three Strikes and You're Out: Why Marketing Automation Failed the First Time, and Why This Time Is Different (whitepaper)
8. Why Invest in Marketing Automation (blog post)

Six Email Marketing Tools and Resources

Because of the complex sales cycles, B2B companies have unique email marketing needs that are not served by most email service providers. Get these best practices, webinars, and podcasts to learn how to optimize email campaigns and maximize email deliverability.

1. 20 Quick Tips for Improving Your Email Programs (StrongMail white paper)
2. Optimizing your Email Marketing Lead Nurturing Programs (eBook)
3. Email Marketing for Lead Generation (MarketingSherpa on-demand webinar)
4. Mastering Your Email Reputation: Seven Strategies for Improving Deliverability (StrongMail white paper)
5. How to Drive Revenue by Improving E-mail Deliverability (eWeek article)
6. Email Measurement: Opens or Clicks? (MarketingSherpa podcast)

Eleven Marketing ROI and Marketing Budget Tools and Resources

Marketers are under growing pressure to measure ROI and demonstrate their impact on revenue. Among other things, this makes it difficult to set and justify your B2B marketing budget. Download these tools and resources to learn how to increase marketing accountability, justify your marketing budget, and demonstrate marketing's impact on revenue.

1. Trends, Forecasts, Benchmarks — Key Metrics from IDC's CMO Advisory Practice (IDC on-demand webinar)
2. Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table — Why Marketing Needs to Be As Accountable for Revenue as Sales (blog post)
3. Marketing Performance Measurement: Areas Where Marketers Want to Improve (analyst report)
4. Selling your Marketing Budget to your CFO (benchmarks and white paper)
5. 7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide (blog post)
6. The Five Stages of Marketing Accountability (blog post)
7. Building Power and Respect through Marketing Accountability (podcast)
8. Better Marketing Accountability without Better Performance Won’t Improve Job Security (blog post)
9. Proving Marketing’s Value: Tangible Tools and Metrics for the 21st Century (podcast)
10. Are You a CMO or a VP of Marketing? (blog post)
11. So You Want to Survey Business Executives? Executives Speak Out on What Works to Gain Their Participation (analyst report)

Six Sales and Marketing Alignment Tools and Resources

The disconnect between marketing and sales departments is the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams align around a single revenue cycle, they can create dramatic improvements in marketing ROI, sales productivity, and most importantly top-line growth.

1. Coordinating Marketing and Sales across the Entire Revenue Cycle (IDC Analyst Connection)
2. Ten Easy Ways to Close Deals Faster: The Salesperson’s Guide to Aligning Marketing and Sales (white paper)
3. The Revenue Cycle: A New Model for Explosive Revenue Growth (blog post)
4. Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus (Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast)
5. Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus — The Sales Perspective (Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast)
6. Ten Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment (eBook from The B2B Lead)

Two Social Media Marketing Tools and Resources

Social media is one of the biggest forces driving change in B2B marketing today. Download these podcasts to learn how to use video and Web 2.0 tactics to boost B2B marketing results.

1. Using Digital, Web 2.0 Tactics To Boost B2B Marketing Results (podcast with Laura Ramos, Forrester Research)
2. Viral Video: Spark the Imagination (podcast with MarketingSherpa)

Do you find these tools helpful? Do you disagree with anything? Please share your comments, tips, and links to make this resource as useful as possible.

The next interview in the B2B Marketing thought leader interview series is with Robert J. Moreau, author of the B2B Marketing Best Practices blog and EVP Sales and Marketing for Rubicon Marketing Group, a marketing agency based in Portland, Oregon that specializes in defending marketing investments with marketing automation, marketing strategy, and demand generation expertise.

1. Tell us a little bit about how you got into B2B marketing and what you like most about it.

I originally started my career in direct marketing where I worked with some of the largest B2B and B2C companies in the world. To give you some context, I began my career with the feeling that B2B was "behind the times". The B2C marketplace (as it related to marketing) always fascinated me due to how you could truly craft a message to the "individual" vs. the group and track so many different variables to consistently improve results and create "predictable" ROI.

But over the last 7-10 years, B2B has really evolved to practice many of the same principals B2C has been practicing for quite some time, and now, with the introduction of technology (like Marketo) the gap is really closing between the two.

I now believe that B2B and B2C are not that different. Whether you are building a brand, managing direct marketing or driving leads for a large technology firm's sales team, you must understand:

• Analytics and demonstrating marketing's value
• The core objectives of what you are trying to accomplish
• How creative and messaging works together

I've always been a sales person first and a marketer second, so as B2B continues to evolve it is exciting for me to focus on this area. The dynamics of how marketing and sales should work together is something I am very passionate about.

2. From reading your blog, I see that you write a lot about B2B marketing innovation. What are your top 3 tips to help companies tackle the art of innovation?

1. Keep an open mind and don't let people in your organization say you can't do something. If you hear this, it probably means it hasn't been tried before or that the benefits of what you are trying to accomplish were not positioned properly. If you have a new idea, go for it.
2. Never stop learning! Marketing is changing faster than marketing departments (or executives) can keep up with. Take time out of your schedule to read the research reports and articles, go to some of the better conferences and most importantly, make sure you get the same commitment from your marketing teams. It does no good to educate yourself if you are not demanding the same of your team.
3. Learn and adopt new marketing technologies. What current marketing technology tools enable you to do is truly awesome and they bring a level of capability never before seen in the B2B space. If you want to be perceived as innovative, you must understand the importance of technology and embrace it. Don't get caught up in trying to do everything, just roll the technology out in phases and create value little by little.

3. A recent post on your blog speaks to sales and marketing alignment. What advice do you have for marketers and sales professionals as they develop integrated demand generation campaigns?

I have three key pieces of advice.

1. Customer Buying Process. Study your customers buying process and make sure both sales and marketing understand the integration between the "sales process" and the "customer's" buying process. It's unrealistic to expect marketing and sales to only communicate in certain phases of the buying process. It is imperative that each function know the type of communication that is happening during each phase of the revenue cycle. See The 5 Keys to Lead Nurturing - #1 Customer Buying Process for more detail.
2. Lead Nurturing. Understand that all your marketing and sales initiatives should complement each other. Dialogue with customers and prospects should be about sales and marketing providing the right content to the right people at the right time, and not one or the other controlling the conversation. This mindset change is one of the biggest transformations I see when working with sales and marketing executives in the technology space.
3. Consider your data to be one of your most important assets. We often recommend to clients, prior to starting a demand generation campaign, that they first clean their data, develop a data hygiene plan, and consider adding or appending information to records that can help drive better campaign results. Appended data may enable greater degrees of segmentation permitting sharper focus in the campaign messaging. A related benefit of marketing automation platforms is the personalization of messages to each prospect versus sending the same content to everyone. This personalization can be done based on behavioral and demographic data.

4. What do you see as the biggest hurdle to effective lead management within the sales pipeline?

Making sales understand the importance of their role in the lead management process. They are not accustomed (or compensated) to keep good data or contribute to this process. You must make them understand why it will help them, but it is still never an easy thing to do and is one of the challenges we run into quite frequently.

5. What do you think is the biggest oversight by marketers in terms of demand generation?

It's almost always analytics. Sometimes because they don't know how, but other times because it is just too time consuming to aggregate data from all of the different places in order to get dependable, accurate information.

6. With the multitude of promotion channels today (ie: social, blogs, email), what is your advice for B2B marketers striving toward marketing ROI?

1. Identify and evaluate your marketing department from a people, process and technology standpoint.
2. Develop benchmarks of success.
3. Make sure you have a solid lead management process in place first - it really won't matter what tactic you are using if this is not done correctly.
4. Examine each of your marketing campaigns on the basis of what their objectives are: Awareness, lead generation, lead nurturing, loyalty marketing, sales tools development
5. Draw from your web analytics, marketing automation analytics AND sales force analytics to develop dashboards that can provide the kind of information necessary to truly measure the sales and marketing departments effectiveness.

7. Wild Card: Anything else you'd like to add?

It is extremely exciting to see how far B2B has come over the past five to ten years. The idea that we would be able to profile customers based on online and offline behavior, map content and campaigns directly to the individual based on where they are in the buying process would have been something reserved for only the most savvy consumer marketing companies 20 years ago. Technology, along with a shift to marketing accountability, brings marketing executives an incredible opportunity to begin to show their organization's value at a level they never have been able to before.

Do you know how much to spend on your B2B marketing budget in 2009? How to allocate your budget across programs and headcount? Or how to split marketing programs budget between investments such as events, advertising, and PR?

In this on-demand webinar, “Trends, Forecasts, Benchmarks, and Essential Guidance for 2009”, Michael Gerard, Research Vice President for IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice and Executive Advisory Group, shares new research identifying the key trends, forecasts and benchmarks for B2B marketers — and just in time for your annual budget planning process!

Available now on-demand, Michael discusses the following topics:

• The marketing organization of the future (slides 5-7)
• Best practices for centralizing or de-centralizing your marketing department (slides 8-10)
• Making marketing more relevant through sales enablement (slides 11-15)

On slides 16-26, Michael also gives key benchmarks that are essential to help you plan your B2B marketing budget in 2009. (In one of my first posts, I reported on the same marketing budget benchmarks for 2006.) For example:

Marketing Investment Trends

• Marketing Budget Ratio (marketing spend/revenue): 2.8% average (2.6% for hardware, 5.1% for software, 0.8% for services)
• A-D (awareness spend as % of total awareness + demand): 49%

Marketing Staff Efficiency

• Program-to-People Ratio (program spend as a % of total mktg. spend): 61%
• Marketing Staff Throughput Ratio (program spend per staff): $293,000

Marketing Processes and Infrastructure

• Marketing Operations KPI (MO staff per total mktg. staff): 5.2%
• Marketing Automation KPI (spend on marketing applications software as a percent of total marketing investment): 1.9%

Slide 23 shows how companies allocate their program budgets across events, advertising, direct marketing, marketing support and sales tools, digital marketing, etc; slide 24 shows how staff is allocated across functions, and slide 25 shows how companies are allocating their digital marketing budgets across advertising, search, email, etc.

Note that these benchmarks are for large IT companies with average revenue of $6 billion a year, so smaller companies and different industries will have different ratios.

Register to watch the entire webinar on-demand now.

About the analyst: Michael Gerard joined IDC in 2003 to help establish IDC's CMO Advisory Practice. As research vice president, he currently directs research operations and consulting engagements for the Executive Advisory Group (EAG), which includes the CMO Advisory, Sales Advisory, and Market Intelligence Practices.

As a follow-up to my post about the importance of reputation in email marketing, I interviewed Spencer Kollas, director of delivery services at StrongMail, about the latest technology solutions to manage reputation and optimize deliverability. (Disclosure: Marketo uses StrongMail technology, and the techniques described below, to optimize our email services for deliverability.)

Where do most marketing automation and CRM solutions fail when it comes to deliverability?

In this situation, there are two components to deliverability. The first responsibility is on the solution provider for providing the right tools for engaging in email best practices. The second is on the end-user for following through with them. Having the ability to automatically throttle email based on ISP requirements is one core technology feature that facilitates deliverability, as is support for email authentication, smart bounce management and real-time reporting to address any challenges as they arise. Without these capabilities, the end-users of these solutions are unable to keep their lists clean or manage their email sending speed — both of which can get them blocked by ISPs. With email sender reputation being the most critical factor affecting deliverability, marketing automation and CRM solutions need to empower their end-users with the capabilities mentioned above — and not all of them do.

Can you explain the role of emerging authentication protocols such as DomainKeys (aka DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail), SPF, and Sender-ID?

These help to authenticate your messages with ISPs, letting them know your emails come from you and are not phishing or spoofing attempts. This can in turn improve deliverability since various ISPs use them as ways to filter mail coming into their systems. Many of the larger ISPs use one or multiple authentication methods to help their systems build a reputation for each sender. StrongMail continues to be at the forefront of these technologies, because we support all the key technologies, as well as understand and believe in the important role that they play.

Why is proper bounce handling important, and how does StrongMail technology automate the process?

Proper bounce management is critical for enabling good email practices and increased deliverability. Unless a marketer knows why their emails are bouncing and why, they can't effectively keep their lists clean, address deliverability issues as they arise, and promptly process unsubscribes. StrongMail has the most sophisticated bounce management technology in the industry, providing granular visibility into delivery rates. StrongMail's Smart Bounce Management technology automatically captures both synchronous and asynchronous bounces, processes unsubscribes, applies hundreds of rules to normalize data across thousands of ISPs, presents the consolidated information into logical categories, and offers tips for correcting the issue that caused the bounce in the first place. (Note: Marketo uses this information to automatically process bounces for customers.)

What other list scrubbing techniques are important?

In addition to maintaining proper bounce processing, you should also sign up for all available feedback loops to help ensure that your list is as clean as possible, and that you're only sending email to those clients that wish to receive your messages. And remember that list scrubbing should go beyond removing distribution accounts (e.g. sales@ and info@) and inactive and duplicate addresses — you should also be running your list against a list of known bad domains and role accounts.

For more email marketing best practices, download the joint Marketo-StrongMail whitepaper, 20 Quick Tips for Improving Your Email Programs.

B2B marketers struggling for growth in today's economy know they need to get maximum results for their email marketing efforts, but too many do not understand the critical role deliverability plays in the process of turning prospects into revenue-driving customers. All the creativity and planning that goes into a targeted email marketing campaign is meaningless if your emails don't reach their intended inboxes. Every undelivered email is a lost lead, and the money you spent to acquire that lead gets wasted.

In other words, email deliverability is critical to the success of your lead management programs. The world of email deliverability has changed quite a bit in the last few years. It's no longer good enough just to avoid certain words in your copy. The technology used by your email service provider can play a big role in optimizing delivery, and the most important factor today is your email sending reputation.

To learn more about email reputation, I posed the following questions to George Bilbrey, president of Return Path, the world's leading email services company. (Disclosure: Marketo uses Return Path's technology to monitor and manage our own reputation as well as that of our clients.)

What is the current state of deliverability for commercial email senders in the B2B space?

About 1 in 5 commercial emails do not make it into the inbox. Among our clients, that ranges from below 50% to close to 100%. The difference between the best delivery rates and the worst are the reputation of the sending mail server.

What is the economic impact of poor email deliverability?

In the simplest terms, whatever you hope to gain from your email marketing efforts (brand recognition, increased sales, client retention) is reduced by whatever percentage of email doesn’t make it to the inbox. But the impact can be worse. Imagine your salesperson has a great call with a prospect and then promises to send follow-up information by email. That email gets junked or blocked. Now the prospect thinks your salesperson is a flake. Or the client who thinks their account rep never returns email because it gets caught in their spam filter. Scenarios like these happen every day to businesses across the country and around the globe.

What’s the best way to maximize your email deliverability?

In one word: reputation. More than 80 percent of delivery problems today are caused by the sender’s email reputation. Senders with a good reputation get delivered. Senders with a poor reputation don’t. Simple as that.

What are the key elements to ensuring a good reputation?

First and foremost, keep your complaint rate low. If recipients mark your messages as spam that is going to lower your reputation substantially. Also, keep spam traps off your list. Our Reputation Benchmark Report found that servers that send to just one spam trap had deliverability rates 20 points lower than servers that don’t hit traps. We found the same for servers that have high unknown user rates, so keep your file clean. And definitely watch blacklists. We have found that even blacklists that aren’t used by ISPs or other receivers are important to monitor — not because they cause blocking but because they predict it. Permission is important, too, but it’s not a simple linear relationship (e.g., confirmed opt-in doesn’t automatically confer a good reputation). Permission influences complaints. Email recipients complain about email they don’t recognize. So, a confirmed opt-in process can be helpful, since recipients are less likely to mis-remember opting to receive your messages.

How can a company manage and improve its reputation?

Knowing what your reputation is today is the first step. We have set up a site where any sender can find out their Sender Score: www.senderscore.org. Your Sender Score is a number between 1 (bad) and 100 (good) that is a representation of your reputation based on the factors that ISPs and other large-volume receivers consider important. It works similar to a credit score. Having a high Sender Score doesn’t guarantee inbox delivery, but it strongly correlates to good deliverability.

Note: For more information on email deliverability and sender reputation issues, sign up for the Return Path blog at www.returnpath.net.

The next interview in our B2B Marketing thought leader interview series is with Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology blog and podcast.

Paul has spent more than 20 years in marketing, creating buzz for leading technology companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Avaya and Cisco. He is currently Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint. Paul has been a featured speaker for AMA, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, BtoB Magazine, ITSMA, CMO Council, Marketing Operations Management and his articles and research have appeared in CMO Magazine, Information Week, Marketing Sherpa, iMedia, and quoted several times in BtoB Marketing Magazine.

Tell us a little bit about how you got into B2B marketing and what you like most about it.

I had a role as the Director of the Emerging Markets practice at Siegel & Gale, a branding marketing and advertising firm that is now part of Omnicom. Emerging markets at the time was a nice term for dotcoms where we provided a full suite of services ranging from naming to identity creation to web site design to public relations and marketing plans and lastly advertising. Since our customers were mostly small tech firms at the time, I remember having to wear both B2C and B2B hats interchangeably. That's when the light bulb went off in my mind on the difference between how you need to market B2B vs B2C. At the time, much of the thought leadership and articles you could find on marketing were all about innovations in B2C — so you really needed to think creatively about how it could be adopted into B2B. What I liked most was the pace and the consideration that was needed for the purchase — in some cases 9-12 months. I can see how that might irritate most B2C marketers but I thought of this is a real challenge. Anyone can send out an email and make direct sales via clever direct response marketing, but it takes a real pro to sustain an effort for a long period of time and have that pay off for a B2B firm.

From reading your blog and listening to your podcasts, I see that you think a lot about marketing technology and innovation. What techniques and technologies can marketers use to take their marketing to the next level?

I think there has never been a better time to be in B2B marketing since there are new technologies, new tactics, and new innovations on old tactics being born every day that can help marketers accelerate demand generation. As short as a few years ago, B2B marketers were limited to search and targeted email marketing. Now you have RSS, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, wikis, mashups, widgets the list goes on. The big opportunity here is for B2B marketers to have a lead nurturing platform in place and then start layering on these tactics to keep the conversation going with potential prospects.

You also talk a lot about the value of "buzz" worthy marketing campaigns. How do you think buzz marketing and innovation tie together?

It's the old answer: it depends. Buzz marketing and buzz worthy campaigns don't necessarily need to be innovative. Take the YouTube video series "Will it Blend". It wasn't necessarily innovative in the fact that it was just a set of 5 videos with the CEO blending various items (as he was already known to do) — but it was wildly viral with millions of downloads within the first week. Sales went up 5 fold and at the end of 2007 there were 70 million downloads. To me, the innovation wasn't in the campaign but in the fact that it didn't use a single dollar of advertising money to put Blendtec into the top Industrial Blender for Home use category in the minds of anyone who has seen these videos. There have been plenty of innovations that aren't buzz worthy so I as I said, it depends!

What is your advice to help companies step out of the box and develop innovative marketing campaigns?

My first piece of advice goes to the individual marketer. You've got to have a passion for trying the newest things even if you only try it yourself. Early adopters are just that: early adopters! They try the latest technologies and get a good working understanding of them, then try them out in their day job since they are passionate about it and realize they have already experimented with it in private and know where the pitfalls are so they won't let the company fall in them too. That's a lot of what I have done at BearingPoint, trying RSS, trying podcasting, trying blogging on my off time and then finding ways to incorporate that into my day job.

My second piece of advice goes to the marketer's company: give these early adopters room to run with the ideas and let them layer them onto existing campaigns to see how they accelerate demand for your company. This is where some real innovation actually happens, and you get the ah ha moment of what truly works for your organization versus someone else's organization.

The third piece of advice goes to the CFO: let the marketing team have a small slush fund for trying these things out. Many of the latest technologies and new media tactics are not very expensive and if your marketing team can hit a home run like Blendtec's home run your will get some unbelievable ROI. (Footnote: if you can't get the funding you can always roll it into the activation costs that might surround a major event.)

With the multitude of promotion channels today (ie: social, blogs, email), what is your advice for B2B marketers striving toward marketing ROI?

I have two pieces of advice here. First, you have to have a lead nurturing platform in place. One that allows you to segment lists, send specific messages, score activities and profile behavior of those that have expressed interest in your company. Then you can bolt on more search traffic, and then you can serve special ads to those in your database. You gotta know what's happening on your website if you EVER hope to be able to calculate an ROI. Second, once you have that in place you can begin to layer on more types of media syndicated podcasts, third party wikis, external blogs and see if your database is going there and interacting with these sites were you are placing your content.

Have you had success (or failure)with an innovative marketing campaign? What tips do you have for creating buzz?

Michael Gerard, Research Vice President for IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice and Executive Advisory Group, recently published an Analyst Connection sponsored by Marketo titled Coordinating Marketing and Sales Across the Entire Revenue Cycle. In this, Michael answers several questions about sales and marketing alignment. Here are some excerpts (or download the full PDF):

As B2B customers become more sophisticated and competition increases, the integration of marketing and sales becomes even more critical for meeting and exceeding market demands. However, companies of all sizes continue to struggle mightily with marketing and sales alignment. IDC research indicates that approximately 25% of sales' time is spent on unproductive prospecting, even as 60 to 70% of sales representatives ignore marketing leads. In addition, IDC estimates that the annual performance cost per B2B sales representative as a result of poor engagement with prospects is $1 million.

On Marketing's role in the revenue cycle:

Marketing plays a big role in selling to the enterprise: Marketing "owns" the relationship with the broader marketplace (such as influencers, analysts, and other members of the broader buying committee); marketing also owns the initial relationship with prospects up until sales engages with a limited and specific subset of prospects; and marketing continues to be a supporting player after the sales engagement via the Web site, branding, search, and other campaigns that touch prospects.

Where things go wrong:

It is the hand-off process between marketing and sales where many revenue opportunities are lost and prospects' perceptions of the organization are damaged. Marketing leads may not be qualified properly, prospects' information may not be communicated properly as the leads progress through the organization, and well-qualified leads may not receive the needed attention to optimize revenue opportunities.

What does coordination mean?

Marketing brings a longer-term view while sales brings an action-oriented view to the customer creation process, or revenue cycle. Both marketing and sales capabilities are important at every step of the revenue cycle, so the key is coordinating the activities between the disparate functions. This requires more than just tacking marketing onto the front of an existing sales process. True alignment requires coordinating marketing and sales activities, starting from the day you first make contact with a prospect as part of the initial education process through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship and ultimately customer advocacy.

The soft benefits of an integrated revenue cycle:

Coordinating marketing and sales across this full revenue cycle enables marketing resources to focus on building higher-quality relationships with prospects and ultimately higher-quality leads for sales. In turn, sales will be more efficient and effective because more time will be spent on productive targeting of and selling to those leads that are in the best position to buy. Prospects will receive more relevant communications and assets from marketing, fewer leads will be ignored, and more sales reps will achieve their quota. Ultimately, this can result in a single revenue cycle that effectively shortens sales cycles and increases top-line growth. For customers, there is greater satisfaction because prospects are not annoyed by unwanted or irrelevant sales calls.

The hard benefits:

Each year IDC evaluates the best-in-class tech marketing and sales organizations to determine excellence in go-to-market execution and effectiveness, plotting these findings in the IDC Marketing Performance Matrix. Companies exhibiting the strongest alignment between marketing and sales continue to appear in the upper right-hand quadrant (i.e., the marketing leadership quadrant) of this matrix, indicating greater market share, financial performance, and Wall Street recognition. The average company is spending $12,500 per rep per year on sales enablement and $9,100 per rep per year on training. Better teamwork and focus by sales and marketing on enablement, including better preparation of sales for lead follow-up, will improve sales productivity by $260,000 per rep per year.

IT infrastructure for lead management:

In IDC's recent Technology Marketing and Sales Barometer study, both marketing and sales identified lead management as the area offering the greatest potential for improvement of the revenue cycle, with the highest priority for improvement in this area being better alignment of marketing and sales IT infrastructure.

Lead scoring and lead nurturing:

Deploying a lead scoring process will increase lead quality, enabling marketing and sales not only to better qualify and pursue "hot leads," thereby increasing sales’ efficiency and effectiveness, but also to better align with customers’ needs in the buying process. Lead nurturing is also a "low-hanging fruit," offering great return for organizations that improve this process. Lead nurturing is defined as the people, processes, and marketing activities that are specifically designed to "keep warm" and convert leads that are not "sales ready." An effective lead nurturing process will ensure consistent and high-value communication with prospects to increase the depth of the relationship, whether the prospect is an existing marketing lead or a recycled lead from sales that was not yet ready for deal closure.

About the analyst: Michael Gerard joined IDC in 2003 to help establish IDC's CMO Advisory Practice. As research vice president, he currently directs research operations and consulting engagements for the Executive Advisory Group (EAG), which includes the CMO Advisory, Sales Advisory, and Market Intelligence Practices.