Part Two: The ReadyTalk Solution

In my first blog post, I talked about the shortcomings of most nurture tracks and why they perform poorly. Specifically, they fail to uncover buyers at the right time due to poor linking between scoring and nurturing and underdeveloped personas. As you can see from the chart, it is important to be able to identify your prospects as early as possible to take control of the conversation.

This post addresses our solutions to those problems.

1. Content focused lead scoring/nurturing.

We wanted lead scoring that focused on the content that was being engaged in, and not activity (clicks and opens).

2. React to prospects behavior.
A good nurture track should be able to understand the type of content a prospect is interested in reading and deliver that content to them in a coordinated fashion. Further, it should also understand the content the prospect does NOT engage with and stop delivering that content.

3. Give the right content at the right time.
This is an extension of #2. It is not only important to deliver the right content, but also deliver it in a timely manner. If a prospect is engaging with content, the content should be delivered faster. If a prospect is not engaging in content, the content should be delivered in a slower manner.

4. Reduce false positives.
Nothing kills a nurture program more than the dreaded false positives. These are the prospects that are marked as MQLs, but a call (or email) from a rep reveals that they are not ready to buy, or worse, have no interest in ReadyTalk. A good nurture program will eliminate the bulk of these false positives and then work towards eliminating the ones that do sneak through by progressive iterations.

5. Find the buyer at the right time.
A good nurture track will uncover the buyer when they are ready to engage with a sales representative. If you engage too early, you risk wasting the sales representative’s and the prospect’s time. If you engage too late, they may have already eliminated your company from their decision process. A good nurture track will not only seek to uncover the buyer at the right time, but will also let you easily modify the criteria in order to fine-tune the outreach.

6. Don’t waste Sales’ time.
This is an extension of #5. You don’t want your representatives calling into prospects too early or too late.

7. Lead a prospect in a coordinated manner to buyer ready.
Nurture programs should lead a prospect from awareness to research to evaluation. The content in the program should do this in an explicit manner. In awareness, it should be framing the problem in a way that is favorable to your organization. Research illustrates solutions to that problem in an agnostic way. Evaluation should show specifically how your organization solves that problem. If you have framed the problem correctly in the first two stages, then you should be positioned as the best solution to their business problem.

8. Ability to measure velocity through the program.
A good nurture program will allow you to predict the number of MQLs that will be produced in a given time segment. The ability to measure velocity through the buyer phases is important.

9. Measure problems and content that is being used to give our marketing team feedback on what problems prospects want ReadyTalk to solve.
This is standard. Any nurture track should provide feedback on which content is successful and which is not. By understanding the problem and the stage the content addresses, the marketing department can also understand how potential customers want to interact with ReadyTalk.

10. Reduce the friction a prospect undergoes to reach our content.
You always need to balance friction versus value. You don’t want the effort (friction) it takes to get a piece of content to outweigh the perceived value of that content. However, you also need to consider the pieces of information that are necessary to gather in order to score properly. This allows the sales team to follow up and helps your data to remain clean.

Stay tuned for part three where I’ll discuss how we implemented our solution within Oracle Eloqua.