Your portfolio spans multiple products, and revenue depends on how customers stitch them into daily workflows. A multi-product PLG score turns scattered signals into a PLG scoring model operators can act on. Teams often track an account health score and run Eloqua and Marketo lead scoring, yet expansion is driven by cross-product usage and collaboration—the patterns that convert activity into timed, targeted actions.

What is the multi-product PLG score?

A composite built from how customers move across products and work as a team. Core inputs:

• Adoption sequences (what starts the journey, what consistently follows)
• Feature synergy (pairs/clusters used in the same window)
• Stickiness across tools (repeat multi-product use vs one-offs)
• Integration depth (CRM/chat/analytics connections)
• Collaboration intensity (creators, shared assets, workspace growth)

Why use a PLG scoring model for this?

Point rules on single features flatten behavior and miss timing. A PLG scoring model that incorporates the cross-product pattern and collaboration becomes an early, defensible indicator for upsell, cross-sell, and save plays. Explainability is essential so sales and success can see which events moved the number.

How to build the score (fast path)

1. Instrument the event dictionary (feature used, integration added, workspace created) with reliable user/team/product IDs.
2. Select 4–6 inputs from the signals above; set light initial weights and test on a sample cohort.
3. Define thresholds and actions: tiers (nurture, assisted, high-touch) with specific outreach, offers, and handoff rules.
4. Enable real-time triggers for material score changes; log the reason each trigger fired.
5. Explain & improve: show local drivers to field teams; use feedback to tune inputs and thresholds.

What are Best practices & governance?

• Cadence: monthly drift check, quarterly retrain with change log.
• Overrides: allow exceptions with guardrails and approvals; maintain an audit trail.
• Documentation: model card, training snapshots, validation results.
• Feedback loops: capture false positives/negatives from sales and success and fold into the next retrain.

Is marketing automation suitable? It depends.

Marketing automation can absolutely accept product events and power scoring-driven programs—but suitability depends on latency, volume, identity complexity, and model type.

• Use MA alone when you have a small set of high-value events, near-real-time to daily latency, rules-based logic, and person-level updates that roll up cleanly.
• Supplement MA (warehouse/CDP + scoring service) when you need sequence-aware or graph-aware scoring across multiple products, robust account-level rollups, heavier event volumes, or sub-minute reactions. Compute externally; write the score back for orchestration.

Can I push in-app product usage to Marketo/Eloqua for scoring?

Yes. Define a compact event dictionary, stream to your CDP or warehouse, normalize IDs, and sync scoring fields into the systems of action. Smart Campaigns/Program Canvas can react immediately. Teams typically map usage into Marketo lead scoring for behavioral adjustments and Eloqua lead scoring for structured engagement inputs, qualify into lifecycle stages, and alert sales. Start with a handful of high-value events and a closed-loop report to verify lift.

Future-ready extensions

• Market-aware adjustments for pricing or competitor moves
• Cold-start aids (transfer learning) for new products
• Coverage expansion to include partner usage and marketplace add-ons

Conclusion & next steps

Growth depends on seeing the whole pattern—how products and people come together, in what order, and with what staying power. A multi-product PLG score embedded in a PLG scoring model gives you an actionable signal instead of a noisy dashboard. Put it to work by auditing events, defining a lean schema, wiring thresholds to concrete plays, and enabling real-time triggers with explanations so every move is timely and defensible. Keep the account health score current for executive roll-ups, and align lifecycle programs with Eloqua and Marketo scoring so marketing automation and field execution move in lockstep.

If you want a fast start, 4Thought Marketing can lead a focused sprint to map your product graph, finalize inputs and thresholds, pilot on a controlled segment, and return a model card plus playbooks ready to deploy.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQs)

Sales and marketing need to work together—but common sales and marketing alignment mistakes get in the way. Below are six pitfalls you can spot fast and practical fixes you can apply this quarter. Sales and marketing alignment is the operating system for growth: shared definitions (ICP, MQL/SQL/SAL), a simple service-level agreement (SLA), and unified KPIs so leads move quickly from interest to opportunity to revenue. When teams prevent common sales and marketing alignment mistakes, handoffs get faster, win rates rise, and pipeline becomes more predictable.

1) The Marketing Expertise Trap

You are a marketing professional, dedicated to the art and science of marketing. A copy of Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising sits in a prominent place on your office bookshelf. You use Eloqua and other sophisticated marketing automation tools. You’ve run events with hundreds or thousands of attendees. You’ve delivered hundreds of drip and nurture campaigns while earning multiple certifications. You’re proud of your accomplishments, and rightly so. But don’t fall into the expertise trap.

When you meet with your sales reps, you’re probably out of your domain. Your marketing expertise can come across as “educating” sales—dazzling them with automation and MQL volume—rather than aligning to their daily reality. Unless you speak in terms that show you understand how sales works, you risk sounding out of touch.

Fix — Speak sales’ language and priorities
Adopt the vocabulary sales uses: pipeline creation, SQL acceptance rate, meetings set, win rate, and time-to-close. Bring 1–2 quick stories that link your programs to those outcomes (e.g., “webinar X drove 12 new opportunities and reduced time-to-first-meeting by 3 days”). Save marketing jargon for internal sessions.

2) Fighting Over KPIs: Marketing vs. Sales Qualified Leads

Historically, sales and marketing argue over KPIs. Marketing points to MQLs generated last month; the VP of Sales counters that referral leads close faster. Meanwhile, growth goals suffer while both teams defend their dashboards.

Sales leaders watch talk time, activity metrics (calls, meetings), and interactions that move deals forward. Page views and time on site may feel distant from that reality. And the tech stack fuels confusion—when exactly does a prospect become a lead ready for sales?

Marketing may call a lead “sales-ready” after three activities (download, email open, social interaction). Sales pushes back, noting that many of those contacts aren’t BANT-qualified.

Fix — Share one journey-wide scorecard
Agree on a lean set of shared KPIs: MQL quality, SQL acceptance rate, opportunity creation, pipeline value, win rate, and sales cycle time. Use closed-loop reporting so sales can reference the content that influenced opportunities (e.g., “this case study was cited in 28% of won deals”). This reframes the discussion away from volume toward business outcomes—reducing common sales and marketing alignment mistakes tied to KPI silos.

3) No Clear Lead Definition

Marketers equate traffic, event attendance, and asset downloads with “leads.” Sales lives in a world of quota and accelerators. If you host a great webinar and many attend, are they all “leads”? From a marketing perspective, yes. From sales, not necessarily. If sales feels swamped by low-quality names, they’ll naturally cherry-pick—and real opportunities may be left on the table.

Fix — Define MQL/SAL/SQL + set an SLA
Create clear lifecycle definitions together and automate the handoff in Eloqua and your CRM:

• SQL: sales-validated need and timing (BANT/MEDDIC elements present).
  Add a simple 24-hour follow-up SLA for accepted MQLs. If a contact doesn’t meet the threshold, nurture until they do. This single page of definitions and response times eliminates one of the common sales and marketing alignment mistakes that causes the most friction.
• MQL: fits ICP + meets a behavioral score threshold (e.g., webinar attended + high-intent page views).
• SAL (Sales Accepted Lead): SDR/AE validates fit and basic need.

4) Not Seeking Feedback from Sales

At the start of the fiscal year, everyone’s aligned: win key accounts, build the brand, grow share. A few months later, each team pursues its own plan. Resentment builds quietly; suspicions emerge about who’s “missing the number.” Left alone, that resentment erodes performance.

Fix — Install a monthly feedback loop
Don’t wait until quarter-end. Book a 45-minute monthly sync with sales leaders and SDRs. Bring a tight agenda:

• Top customer questions and objections this month
• Which assets helped advance deals (and which didn’t)
• Content gaps to fill quickly (one-pager, case snippet, objection-handling email)
• Patterns from lost deals worth addressing in nurture
  Report back the following month on what changed. This habit prevents alignment drift—another of the common sales and marketing alignment mistakes.

5) Sales and Marketing Technology Frustrates Cooperation

Marketing owns CRM, Eloqua, and the database. Sales relies on Salesforce and tools like Yesware, Outreach, or Salesloft for prospecting. If platforms don’t talk, insights die in silos. Even basics like email deliverability learnings don’t transfer—so both teams repeat avoidable mistakes (hello, Gmail Promotions tab).

Fix — Integrate and surface context where sales works
Map fields and events from Eloqua into CRM so reps see score, last marketing touch, and high-intent behaviors next to the contact. Share deliverability insights both ways (subject lines, send times, domain health). Stand up shared dashboards (MQL→SQL flow, SLA compliance, pipeline created) to replace anecdote with data and reduce tech-driven common sales and marketing alignment mistakes.

6) Sales and Marketing Incentives Are Not Aligned

It’s tempting to pay both teams only on revenue. Or to comp Marketing on MQL volume alone. Both approaches can backfire—blurring accountability or encouraging low-quality volume.

Fix — Use a balanced Marketing scorecard
Blend revenue influence with quality and velocity metrics: demo requests, SQL acceptance rate, influenced pipeline/ARR, and content utilization. Keep revenue as a shared north star, not the only lever for Marketing compensation. This directs effort toward the behaviors that actually help sales win.

Conclusion: Take Ownership of the Alignment Problem

Since Marketing owns the top of the funnel, it’s on you to set the system: shared definitions, a simple SLA, one scorecard, and a monthly feedback loop. Do that consistently and the common sales and marketing alignment mistakes that slow pipeline will disappear—replaced by faster handoffs, higher win rates, and fewer “who dropped the ball?” conversations.

• Start with formal alignment techniques such as ironing out complimentary goals and streamlining sales and marketing software.
• Connect with your sales team frequently. Find out how they win and lose and work together on solutions.

By proactively engaging sales, you will realize two benefits. First, you will avoid complaints about the marketing department appearing out of touch with customer relations. Second, you will be better informed to adjust your marketing tactics and methods to suit the needs of sales.

If your sales and marketing teams are struggling to work together, then we invite you to contact us. Let us share our experience working with many sales and marketing teams to work better together and improve sales and marketing outcomes.

Effective lead nurturing is a critical component of successful B2B marketing strategies. Distributing content without a targeted framework often leads to inefficient resource allocation and suboptimal lead conversion. This article will delve into the powerful integration of Marketo Nurture Stream Programs and Lead Scoring, demonstrating how these steps can be leveraged to establish meaningful relationships with leads and drive measurable revenue growth. We will examine the mechanics of these tools and illustrate their capacity to automate converting potential clients into valuable, sales-ready prospects.

The Magic of Marketo Nurture Streams:

Marketo Nurture Stream Programs facilitate a refined, gradual engagement approach akin to the meticulous preparation of a custom blend. Rather than employing indiscriminate email campaigns, these programs deliver highly personalized content tailored to each lead’s specific stage within the buyer’s journey. This strategy prioritizes relationship cultivation over unsolicited mass communication. The operational framework of these programs can be summarized as follows:

• Strategic Stream Segmentation: Marketo Nurture Streams are structured into distinct pathways, such as ‘Top of Funnel,’ ‘Middle of Funnel,’ and ‘Bottom of Funnel,’ to accommodate varied lead progression.
• Dynamic Content Delivery: Each stream is configured with a unique cadence, targeted content, and transition rules, ensuring timely and relevant communication.
• Scalable Personalization: Leveraging tokens, snippets, and intelligent segmentation, Marketo enables the efficient deployment of personalized marketing initiatives, achieving a high degree of individualization at scale.

Through these steps, marketers can effectively guide leads through the sales pipeline, enhancing engagement and fostering a more productive sales environment.

Marketo Nurture & Lead Scoring: Your Intent Decoder

A key aspect of successful lead management is recognizing when a lead moves from the nurturing phase to being sales-ready. Without a robust scoring mechanism, marketers operate without precise indicators of buyer intent, resulting in inefficient resource allocation. Lead scoring provides a quantitative methodology to assess and prioritize leads based on predefined criteria, facilitating a more targeted sales engagement strategy. The key elements of this scoring process are outlined below:

Demographic Qualification

This assesses the alignment of a lead with the ideal customer profile, considering factors such as job title, company size, and geographical location. This ensures that sales efforts are focused on prospects that match strategic business objectives.

Behavioral Engagement Analysis

This measures the level of interaction a lead has with marketing assets, including website visits, form submissions, and email engagement. This provides insights into the lead’s active interest and readiness to engage further.

Threshold-Driven Sales Enablement

Upon reaching a predefined scoring threshold, automated alerts are triggered to notify the sales team, and leads are seamlessly transitioned through the nurture streams. This facilitates a streamlined handoff process, ensuring timely and effective sales engagement.

By implementing a structured lead scoring framework, organizations can optimize their sales pipeline, enhancing the efficiency of their sales teams and maximizing conversion rates.

The Power Couple: Marketo Nurture + Lead Scoring

The true efficacy of Marketo‘s capabilities is realized through the integrated application of Marketo nurture programs and lead scoring. This synergy creates a robust revenue generation system, optimizing the lead-to-customer conversion process. By systematically nurturing leads and accurately identifying sales-ready prospects, organizations can prioritize quality interactions over mere volume, significantly enhancing the efficiency of their sales pipeline.

Strategic Implementation Recommendation

• Rigorous A/B Testing: Conduct comprehensive A/B testing to determine optimal content and messaging strategies, ensuring data-driven decision-making.”
• Periodic Scoring Model Refinement: “Implement quarterly reviews of the lead scoring model to adapt to evolving buyer behaviors and market dynamics, maintaining relevance and accuracy.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Foster seamless alignment between sales and marketing teams, establishing shared objectives and metrics to ensure cohesive lead management and revenue generation efforts.
• Automated Lifecycle Management: Utilize intelligent transition rules to automate lead progression through the lifecycle, optimizing resource allocation and enhancing operational efficiency.

By adhering to these strategic recommendations, organizations can maximize the return on their marketing automation investments and achieve sustainable revenue growth.

Conclusion:

Achieving meaningful growth starts with connecting your marketing efforts to real buyer intent. Marketo Nurture Stream Programs and Lead Scoring offer a powerful framework to identify, prioritize, and engage the right leads at the right time. When used effectively, these tools move your strategy beyond guesswork and vanity metrics, enabling consistent, relevant communication that builds trust and accelerates pipeline. This article explores how to shift from reactive marketing to a data-driven approach that drives measurable impact and long-term success.

Contact us…

Customer nurturing is an essential part of the marketing process. After all, acquiring a new customer requires much more time, money, and effort than maintaining and growing with a current one. But marketing shouldn’t be the only department involved in nurturing. When marketing enables the sales team to participate and control nurturing to suit their needs, it opens the door to a new strategy: sales-influenced nurturing.

Understanding Sales-Influenced Nurturing

Sales-influenced nurturing focuses on supporting sales activities through tailored marketing efforts, ensuring that both current and potential customers receive relevant and timely information as they move through the sales funnel. This strategy is particularly crucial during the middle stages of the funnel, where nurturing can significantly impact qualification and opportunity management processes.

Sales Qualification

At the early stages of the funnel, sales teams engage in qualification activities to identify potential customers’ needs and determine if they are a good fit for the product or service. Marketing automation can support this by sending targeted emails, using page tagging to understand customer interests, and providing valuable content to help resolve qualification questions.

Opportunity Management

During the evaluation stage, the focus shifts to managing opportunities. This involves providing comparison criteria, offering social proof through testimonials, and avoiding content that might disrupt the sales process. Effective nurturing at this stage ensures that the customer feels understood and supported in their decision-making process.

Who Benefits from Sales-Influenced Nurturing?

Sales-influenced nurturing can benefit various roles within the sales team, each with its specific needs and challenges:

• Sales development representatives (SDRs): SDRs often face long and challenging processes as they attempt to connect with leads. Nurturing can help maintain engagement, especially when initial contact attempts fail.
• Inside sales teams: Typically handling smaller deals with a faster turnaround, inside sales teams can benefit from nurturing that aligns with their quick-paced environment, enhancing their ability to close deals efficiently.
• Field sales representatives: Handling larger, more complex deals, field sales reps are often the most resistant to marketing interventions. However, when done correctly, sales-influenced nurturing can provide valuable support without risking disruption to their processes.

Implementing Sales-Influenced Nurturing: Strategies for Success

To successfully implement sales-influenced nurturing, consider the following strategies:

• Empower sales reps with control: Sales reps should be able to control the nurturing process. This can be achieved through simple on/off switches, pause functionalities, or allowing reps to select specific nurturing campaigns from a predefined list.
• Leverage CRM integration: Integrate your CRM system with your marketing automation platform. This integration ensures that sales reps can update fields related to nurturing campaigns directly within the CRM, which then syncs with the marketing automation system.
• Use activity-based triggers: Implement activity-based triggers to start nurturing campaigns when there is no sales activity for a specified period. This ensures that potential customers continue to receive valuable content, even when sales reps are unable to follow up promptly.
• Phase implementation: Introduce nurturing controls in phases to ease the transition when you introduce sales-influenced nurturing. Start with basic controls and gradually introduce more advanced options as the sales team becomes comfortable with and have confidence in the process.

Overcoming Challenges and Gaining Buy-In

One of the most significant challenges in implementing sales-influenced nurturing is gaining buy-in from sales leadership. To address this:

• Present data and narratives: Use success stories and data to demonstrate the positive impact of nurturing on sales outcomes. Highlight cases where nurturing helped re-engage prospects, maintain interest if the prospect becomes distracted, or close deals that were previously at risk.
• Ensure sales rep autonomy: Emphasize what sales reps will retain control over in the nurturing process. This autonomy can alleviate concerns about marketing interfering with sales activities.
• Address potential concerns: Be mindful of the political dynamics within the sales team. Collaborate with sales leaders to align nurturing strategies with sales goals and address any objections proactively.

Sales-Influenced Nurturing:

Sales-influenced nurturing offers a powerful way to enhance the collaboration between marketing and sales, ensuring that potential customers receive relevant and timely information throughout the sales process. By empowering sales reps with control, leveraging CRM integration, and implementing activity-based triggers, businesses can create a seamless and effective nurturing strategy that drives engagement, improves conversion rates, and ultimately boosts sales performance.

For a head start on your own sales-influenced nurturing strategy, get in touch with our team today.

Businesses naturally want to generate leads. And if a customer is already on your website, an online form is one of the best ways to capture them as a lead. Directing the customer to the form is easy enough. But unfortunately, getting the form in front of your contact doesn’t guarantee that they’ll actually fill it out and submit it.

No “magic button” to guarantee form completion exists. However, Oracle Eloqua users have a powerful form design editor at their disposal to make the whole process easier to complete. Today, we’re looking at design principles and how to decrease form abandonment.

Lead Generation from Online Forms

Obviously, online forms exist to generate leads for your business. But a quality lead is more than just a name and email address. A college student working part-time is not a worthwhile lead for a jet engine manufacturer, for example. Gathering valuable leads means collecting enough information to make it obvious whether this lead is worth pursuing.

Here we run into a problem. Marketing experts will tell you, correctly, that gathering as much information as possible on a lead provides a much-needed boost to nurturing and customized marketing. But collecting that information can be a challenge. Forms that get too long and complicated, or that ask for data not readily available, can add friction and lead to the dreaded form abandonment.

What Causes Form Abandonment?

Simply having a form on your website is not a guarantee of lead generation. Customers may start filling out your form but stop halfway through and never finish. Marketing experts tend to agree that form abandonment usually results from one of these issues:

• Long, complicated forms with too many questions
• Forms that load slowly and force users to wait
• Requests for information that is not readily available (i.e., information the customer may have to leave the computer to find)
• Confusing layout or instructions
• Questions with an unclear purpose (i.e., the customer doesn’t know how you will use their data and if they agree)
• Hindered accessibility from poor form design
• Lack of privacy controls

Fortunately, these problems are easily treatable with Eloqua’s form design system.

User-Friendly Online Form Design Strategies

Changing how you develop online forms can make a significant difference in your lead generation numbers. As you revamp your form templates in Eloqua, keep these principles in mind:

1. Optimize your form for the correct device. Poorly formatted forms can lead customers to decide this isn’t worth it.
2. Test your form ahead of time, repeatedly. Catch any glitches, errors, or loading problems long before a customer ever sees your form.
3. Short and sweet. The longer a form is, the more likely the potential lead will lose patience. Only request information that is strictly necessary.
4. Limit your form to a single column. This makes the form appear simpler, shorter, and cleaner. This also optimizes your form for mobile devices.
5. Give your form and fields clear titles. Customers want to know they’re on the right form, and what information you’re asking them to provide.
6. Avoid drop-down menus. Consider radio buttons instead, where all possible answers are visible at once so the customer can more easily decide.
7. Start with the easiest information to find. Keep “harder” but necessary questions, like information the customer will have to leave the computer to find, at the bottom. Since the form is mostly complete by now, this makes them more likely to return and finish.
8. Be upfront about your privacy approach. Clearly explain how the requested information will be used. Additionally, provide a link to your full privacy statement for details. This should feed into your marketing consent solution like 4Comply.
9. Provide an unmistakable CTA. The form won’t do you any good if it’s not submitted!
10. Thank the customer. Always say thank you when someone trusts you with their information.

Collect More Quality Leads with Well-Designed Forms

High-quality Eloqua forms do both you and your customers a huge favor: they make lead generation quick and easy. Why wait to improve this? Get in touch with 4Thought Marketing today to improve your Eloqua form design and increase lead generation.

Simply put, lead scoring is a method of assigning numerical values to leads primarily based on their characteristics and actions. The higher the rating, the more likely the lead is to grow to make a purchase. Lead scoring is a powerful function of the Marketo platform that allows users to prioritize leads primarily based on behavioral data. It also enables the alignment of advertising and sales efforts, and improves lead first-class and growth conversion fees.

Lead scoring may be divided into categories: person scoring and behavior scoring.

Person Scoring

Person scoring is primarily based on the lead’s demographic and firmographic attributes, which include name, identity, industry, corporation size, vicinity, and so forth, all normally amassed through information enrichment tools. Person scoring facilitates the identification of the lead’s fit for your products or services.

Behavior Scoring

Behavior scoring is based on the lead’s recorded activities, such as internet site visits, email clicks, form submissions, or event registrations. These behaviors are tracked with the aid of Marketo and mirror the lead’s degree of interest and engagement.

Lead Scoring: Building A Comprehensive User Profile

Combining person and behavior scoring can construct a detailed view of your lead, and can help  segment your leads into specific stages of the customer’s journey. This way, you could tailor your advertising campaigns and sales outreach to the lead’s wishes and possibilities.

Marketo Lead Scoring Best Practices

While managing your lead scoring process in Marketo, you must keep several important steps in mind. Always make sure to:

• Align with sales regarding the definition and qualification of leads. This will ensure that both teams agree on lead scoring goals and standards and that the leads are passed to sales at the proper time and with the right facts.
• Take both explicit and implicit facts into account for lead scoring. Explicit records are what the lead tells you about themselves—identity, industry, and so forth. Implicit information is what the lead suggests to you via their conduct—website visits, email clicks, etc. Both forms of records are critical to evaluating the lead.
• Keep your lead scoring easy and obvious. Avoid using too many scoring guidelines or complex scoring formulas that can contradict each other.
• Review and revise your lead scoring model often. This will help you to preserve your lead scoring model applicable even as your business goals, target marketplace, and client conduct change over time.

How to Install Lead Scoring Software in Marketo

Finally: in order to begin lead scoring in Marketo, you first have to configure the necessary software. The process will look like this:

1. Define your perfect patron profile and client personas. Use this to define the criteria and weights on your person scoring. For example, you could assign higher ratings to leads who suit your goal industry, role, or enterprise length.
2. Define your lead lifecycle ranges and thresholds. This will help you to decide the standards and weights for your behavior scoring. For example, you could assign higher scores to leads who visit your pricing web page, download a whitepaper, or request a demo.
3. Create a lead scoring model in Marketo. This is where you assign scores to different data points using smart campaigns. You can use tokens to make your scoring rules scalable, and use rating degradation to reduce the score of inactive leads over time.
4. Test and optimize your lead scoring version. This is where you screen and analyze the overall performance of your lead scoring model and the usage of reports and dashboards. Consider using A/B testing or client feedback to compare distinctive scoring scenarios and find the preferable option.

Putting Marketo Lead Scoring into Practice

Lead scoring is an excellent way to understand your audience and what they want. When used effectively, it results in improved marketing campaigns and increased revenue. But what if you’re new to detailed lead scoring? That’s where we can help.

Get in touch with our team today to learn more about Marketo lead scoring.

W. P. Carey is one of the largest diversified net lease REITs, specializing in the acquisition of operationally critical, single-tenant properties in North America and Europe. It primarily engages in sale-leasebacks, where a company sells its real estate to an investor (like W. P. Carey) for cash and simultaneously enters into a long-term lease.

As the company grew, its integrated communications team began looking for ways to further optimize and automate marketing efforts to increase reach and efficiency. One step the team took to achieve this was to integrate its MarTech stack.

Problem 1: Data Quality

W. P. Carey has used Oracle Eloqua as its primary marketing automation platform for over ten years. As a result, the company had a decade of old data cluttering up its system. The first challenge was performing the required housekeeping to clean up contact data.

Problem 2: Eloqua Expertise

The Integrated Communications team also noticed that when reaching out to the platform for support, they were met with different representatives, each of whom required a detailed background explanation of W. P. Carey’s system before they could help. Consequently, this process made support tickets take longer, posing a challenge as the team did not have a designated expert on call who understood Eloqua and W. P. Carey’s system to quickly address challenges.

Problem 3: System Integration

The primary reason W. P. Carey partnered with 4Thought Marketing was to assist with a system integration project. W. P. Carey uses Salesforce as its CRM and Eloqua for marketing automation, but hadn’t integrated the two tools yet. This resulted in disconnected contact databases, created a gap in reporting, and limited the team’s abilities to email contacts and tenants. Without their own backend Eloqua knowledge, the team sought an experienced agency to support the integration.

The Solution: Partnership with the 4Thought Marketing Team

Following a thorough evaluation, W. P. Carey decided to establish a partnership with the 4Thought Marketing team.

The 4Thought team quickly integrated with W. P. Carey’s team to help address their challenges. First, they focused on data quality, clearing out the old contacts from W. P. Carey’s Eloqua instance. Next, 4Thought fully integrated Salesforce with Eloqua, allowing W. P. Carey to engage with contacts through Eloqua marketing campaigns and record responses in Salesforce.

Kelly Mulvaney, Digital Marketing Manager at W. P. Carey, says this simple change was revolutionary to her team: “We could now track the entire contact journey from start to finish, create reports with just a few clicks, and enhance our overall marketing automation strategy.” The saved time allowed the team to focus on other important projects, like the W. P. Carey blog newsletter (distributed via Eloqua).

The 4Thought team also provided a primary contact that supports W. P. Carey, so the marketing team always knows who they should contact for questions or to discuss strategy and plan future improvements. Most importantly, the marketing team enjoyed near-immediate responses to questions or requests.

What’s Next for W. P. Carey?

As the company moves forward, the Integrated Communications team plans to use the newly reworked MarTech stack to make landing page and email creation more efficient, as well as take full advantage of Eloqua’s ability to connect contact data to campaign activity. “We look forward to developing evergreen lead generation campaigns and an improved lead score model,” said Kelly. “Most of all, I’m excited to have an optimized framework in Eloqua that I can share with the rest of the company as a huge timesaver.”

Write Your Own Success Story with 4Thought Marketing

Do the challenges faced by W. P. Carey sound familiar? If your marketing team needs better systems integrations or an on-call Eloqua expert, we’ve got you covered. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.

Companies that put all their money into advertising and sales may be missing a potentially valuable source of revenue. You have an additional option to maintain customer connections and increase sales: leveraging your relationship with existing customers.  Even the strictest privacy laws allow you to contact leads who have demonstrated a strong interest in what you have to offer. And the longer you can keep a conversation going, the more likely you are to be rewarded with a purchase—or even a long-term loyal client that will spread the word about your company!

Leverage Customer Relationships

Happy customers are far more likely to leave a good review, recommend you to a friend, or help you out in some other way! But don’t forget that preexisting customers are likely to buy from you again if they like what you have to offer. Even if you don’t get a new client out of the deal, retaining a particularly profitable one can be just as good.

A few ways to leverage customers include:

• Keep existing clients engaged. For example, a customer is more likely to click on an email sidebar for a product they’ve shown interest in.
• Offer rewards for referrals. Anyone who refers a new client to your company might get a gift card, a discount on future products or services, or some other reward. (Some companies may also offer incentives for positive reviews.)
• Write a success story with them. Invite the client to talk about how your product or service improved their own business. A professional success story lends significant credibility to your brand.
• Continue nurturing your customers. Stay within reason—obviously, no customer wants to receive sales calls or emails every day. But a customer that has already purchased from your brand is a potential repeat customer. Upsell related products or services they’ll appreciate.

Leveraging customer feedback is a relatively untapped source of potential promotions. Don’t ignore it!

An Additional Source of Revenue

Existing customers who appreciate your products or services will spend more money with you. Especially appreciative customers will happily encourage a friend to check you out or share their success story with you for promotional purposes. And in an increasingly competitive world, every potential avenue for marketing should be explored. How are you leveraging your customers?

Finally, remember it’s not just products or services that make customers happy with you. Professional communication that plays to their interests goes a long way. If you’re struggling to determine who needs communication and when, based both on local privacy laws and the customer’s own interest, we can help! Our privacy compliance software, 4Comply, will keep your customer communication plan profitable and legally viable. Get in touch today to learn more and get on the path to higher profits.

Email marketing: all marketers use it. Eloqua’s functionality is built around it. But if you’re only leveraging Eloqua’s email system, you’re missing out. You can get even more from your Oracle Eloqua instance when you include all your marketing channels – and when you take the time to properly integrate, automate, and measure them. Let’s look at three marketing channels you can start using right now.

3 Powerful Non-Email Marketing Channels to Integrate, Automate & Measure with Oracle Eloqua

1. Social Media & Paid Ads

You know how important your presence on the web is. Apart from getting eyes on your content, what’s most important is to track those interactions in Oracle Eloqua.

Integrate

Capture the content your audience is reading. It is easier said than done, but the effort is worth it. These Oracle Eloqua tools may help you capture specific interactions:

• Enable content sharing on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook
• Capture data from Facebook lead ads to transfer to Oracle Eloqua
• Use Facebook and Twitter widgets (likes, follows, etc.) to promote audience engagement
• Use LinkedIn Form Autofill features for better conversion
• Re-target Oracle Eloqua contacts with digital LinkedIn advertisements

Once you are able to associate social media and paid ads engagement to contacts and track their interactions in Oracle Eloqua, you can better understand and influence your customers’ journey.

Automate

Configure your Eloqua setup to leverage data from social media and paid ads. Use this input to adjust Lead Scoring and nurture campaigns. Additionally, consider how to get these contacts to comment, share, and like more of your content. Once you have that working without manual intervention, all you need to do is measure the effectiveness.

Keep in mind that your social media outreach should include more than your new leads. Existing customers are a great source of shared content, comments, and likes. Balance your campaigns to provide both current and potential customers with ample high-quality content to engage with.

Measure

Not enough companies give measurement the attention it deserves. Social media and paid ads kick-start a customer’s journey. If you aren’t measuring the results, how can you know what works and what doesn’t? This is too important to be left to guesswork.

If a contact interacts with a social media post, and then completes a contact form a week later, do you attribute that social media campaign to the lead? Or at least consider the influence of the social media post? You’re in luck – it is indeed possible to track this user’s journey to see how they found you! Watch this short video for details.

2. Video Marketing

In a Google-dominated world, using video to get your brand, product, or services out to the world is key. Here’s how to approach working with videos in Oracle Eloqua:

Integrate

Tools like Vidyard allow you to see how viewers interact with your video content. You can then store the collected data (such as the video title, watch time, and viewer location) in a Custom Object for later segmentation. This feedback will also tell you if customers tend to click away from your videos and they need an upgrade.

We also recommend including interactions throughout the video. Use opportune moments to encourage viewers to click through for a demo, more details, or other important information. You can configure the responses to these prompts to go straight to Eloqua. These points of interaction will not only help harvest new leads, but they can also prompt you to score and target those leads with the right follow-up message.

Automate

Making a good video takes time and effort. As tempting as it is to pat yourself on the back after your video gets lots of attention, don’t wait! The sooner you follow up, the better.

Use the information flowing in from your video interactions to automate your next actions. For example, if a person watches past a point where the video discusses an important product or service-related feature, configure Eloqua to send them follow-up communication. If they watched to the end or watched multiple times, assign them to a segment to follow up with other relevant content. If they watched the video and are located in an area where you are having an event in the near future, let them know right away. You can then follow this personalized announcement with a general bulletin in the next scheduled email.

Remember to score leads accordingly. Video viewing data is just as important as email clicks and landing page visits, if not more.

Measure

Once you’ve integrated and automated, find out what impact video marketing has had on your ROI. Depending on the product or service, it can take many interactions with an individual to convert them into a lead or an opportunity. Has your video created enough leads to justify the cost of creating it? If so, fantastic! Stick with what works. If not, consider how to improve next time.

Once again, measurement is critical here. Relying on guesswork can torpedo your marketing campaign and, in the long term, your general ROI.

3. SMS Communication

With texting as prevalent as it is today, why not try promoting your business via SMS? Here’s how to get started with SMS promotions in Eloqua.

Automate

For text message marketing, we recommend starting with automation instead of integration. The best SMS tool in the world won’t help without a properly formatted, working phone number. Start by implementing progressive profiling on your forms so you don’t immediately ask for their mobile number. When you eventually do ask, make sure to also request consent to receive texts from you. Automatically send a text to re-affirm their consent (and include unsubscribe information if they change their minds later).

Remember: text message marketing requires consent as much as email marketing does. Take the time to develop a sustainable plan for capturing consent and keeping your messages legal.

To make sure the telephone numbers you collect are formatted correctly, we recommend setting up a data normalization program in Eloqua. You’ll need to use the phone number and country fields to obtain the country code and phone number format, so your text messages go through. A phone formatting app may help simplify this process.

Be careful when segmenting here. Only target contacts with SMS for specific types of communication, such as:

• Form submission follow-ups: if you know they used a mobile device, send an SMS to thank them or provide additional information.
• Form abandonment follow-ups: a text message may yield a faster response and motivate the user to finish the form.
• Registration confirmation/event reminders – make sure your events get added to your contacts’ calendars.

Integrate

Integration for SMS marketing is relatively straightforward. Find an SMS tool that integrates smoothly with Oracle Eloqua. You’ll want to capture key data, such as the message title, the date it was sent, and any responses you received.

But don’t just monitor customer activity. Keep track of how many SMS communications you send and when they go out. This information can tell you if you are under- or over-communicating with your clients.

Measure

With the integrated and automated data above, you can start tracking the success of your SMS campaigns. Tracking these results will look somewhat different from tracking video interactions or social media likes, but it is still very possible with the right tools.

Go Beyond Email Marketing

Oracle Eloqua has far more potential than just email marketing. Maybe you have the same problem we’ve observed in other companies – marketing channels like SMS or video marketing are ignored or tracked separately, while Eloqua functions only as an email marketing platform. Don’t make this mistake! Tying your marketing channels together allows you to create a unified view of your ROI and use Oracle Eloqua to its fullest potential. Good news: it’s never too late to get started! Contact us today and let us help you take your marketing channels to the next level.

Account-based marketing (also called ABM) and lead-based marketing are two popular strategies for businesses. Choosing the right model is important to ensure that organizations’ revenue processes are efficient. Let’s take a look at the two methods and which one is more appropriate for your business.

Definition of Lead-Based Marketing

Lead-based marketing tends to focus on volume and lead scoring. This is the process of ranking leads based on their engagement behavior. Values are assigned to leads based on certain criteria, including various elements such as industry, job title, age group, interests, and so on. Their engagement behavior is also determined by their level of interaction with your website and other online activities.

Definition of Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing, on the other hand, is focused marketing that requires a targeted accounts list. The end product is usually a highly targeted, bespoke campaign resulting in a much higher return on investment.

What is Account Scoring?

One very important part of effective account-based marketing is account scoring. Account scoring is the process of sorting potential customers in order from most to least valuable to help organizations understand which accounts they should prioritize. The “value” of each account depends on a variety of attributes, including:

• How interested or engaged they are with your offering
• Where in the buyer’s journey they are
• How close the potential customer is to your ideal customer

Using strategies to zone in on areas of higher value means that organizations can work on campaigns targeted to capture the attention of these accounts and convert them into customers.

Account scoring can be done simply by tracking accounts in Excel and manually weighing the different criteria. Alternatively, more advanced artificial intelligence methods can group data to profile potential customers.

ABM: The Better Choice?

All this leaves us with the question: is account-based marketing a better choice than lead-based marketing? Lead-based marketing focuses on loosely targeted messages to a broad category of a target audience. These methods often result in a high volume of leads. However, they might not be the right leads. Meanwhile, ABM allows you to focus and convert high-quality prospects through a more purposeful outreach to build sustainable and long-lasting relationships. The right choice, therefore, depends on what your organization is trying to achieve. However, high-quality leads should be considered more useful than a high volume of low-quality leads.

Conclusion

To summarize, each strategy has pros and cons and is appropriate depending on an organization’s needs. However, ABM is often preferable as quality wins over quantity. We usually find that ABM-driven accounts are bigger, better, and faster.

If you are unsure of which method is right for you, the team at 4Thought Marketing is here to help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about account-based vs. lead-based marketing.

Eloqua’s often-overlooked page tagging feature is a powerful tool you should definitely be using. But why is this feature so important? Besides obvious benefits like webpage categorization, well-done page tagging can improve the sales process, from customer segmentation to lead scoring. Let’s take a closer look at several top benefits of page tagging.

1. More Accurate Lead Scoring

Page tagging allows you to categorize each webpage based on its place and value in the sales process. For example, you can observe when customers move from lower-value to higher-value pages and thus progress a prospect through the sales funnel. These patterns will help you plan the ideal customer journey and revise your website as needed to make it happen.

2. Easier Categorization

Along with information such as the funnel stage, consider adding general categories to each web page’s tags. Category tags might include:

• Case studies
• eBooks
• Nurture
• Upsell

This tells you at a glance what categories on your website get the most attention, and which play the more important roles in the customer journey.

3. Funnel Stage Tracking

Tagging each page with its appropriate sales funnel stage offers another form of customer segmentation. For example, focusing on visitors who made it to pages with tags such as “upsell” or “nurture” allows you to give special attention to the people most likely to purchase, leading to more accurate lead scores. You’ll be able to track their journey through the funnel nearly in real-time.

4. Target by Product/Solution

Finally, with product/solution tags, you can easily identify cross-selling opportunities and build your segmentation strategy around them. For example, a customer buying a new phone might want a case, screen protector, or other accessories. A well-constructed page tagging system will show you what products they might be interested in for your segmentation strategy.

Get Started Creating Page Tags

Eloqua’s page tagging capabilities can significantly contribute to your marketing and sales efforts. With their potential to increase the quality of your lead scoring, website design, and future marketing strategies, they are well worth your time.

Ready to start adding page tags to your website, but not quite sure where to begin? Get in touch with us for professional help.

Lead generation and demand generation may sound like the same thing. In practice, they can be similar. However, the differences are critical for any marketer to understand. Let’s compare lead generation vs. demand generation and see how they differ, and what that looks like practically.

What is Demand Generation?

Marketers must view demand generation as the bigger picture and lead generation as one element of the wider demand generation function.

Demand generation is the process of increasing awareness and demand for your company’s service or product. The focus here is getting your brand name out there and drumming up interest in what your brand has to offer.

In other words, demand generation is bringing new visitors to your business or website. The goal is to establish your target audience, get them thinking or talking about you, and build trust with them through thoroughly planned content and interactions.

One common method of demand generation is creating ungated content, meaning customers don’t have to commit to anything to access the content. Examples of this can include:

• Blog posts
• Case studies
• Interviews
• Infographics
• Press releases
• Social media posts
• Resource pages
• Videos

This content aims to increase the brand’s or company’s profile and attract attention to it. You can build trust and connect with your target audience through engaging content. That will encourage them to come to you.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation requires a specific skill set, as it is about conveying interest to leads and guiding them through the funnel. It could be described as a way to funnel through eventual buyers of your service or product. Its purpose is to capture personal data.

Remember that lead generation strategies are used to obtain names, email addresses, and phone numbers, with the hope that some of these people will convert into qualified leads. Hence, gated content is the main priority here, meaning people must sign up and share their contact information to download or receive the content.

The most typical types of lead generation content include:

• Email subscriptions
• Ebooks
• Research papers
• Online courses
• Product demos and free trials
• PDF guides
• Cheat sheets or checklists
• Whitepapers
• Viral contests

Where Do Lead Generation & Demand Generation Fit into the Sales Process?

Comparing lead generation vs. demand generation efforts is essential to tracking the impact of your B2B sales process. These strategies involve applying research, building credibility, and addressing consumer challenges through your content. Well-produced demand-generation content offers solutions and helps connect your target audience, resulting in more leads.

Demand generation marketing techniques let you reach a big audience with impactful messaging in different ways. The goal is to raise visibility for your digital presence, solidify your position as a thought leader, and keep your business at the forefront of your mind. Demand generation thus fits well into the research and prospecting part of the sales process.

Meanwhile, lead generation strategies enable better access to set up a first sales consultation or product demo for interested parties. It also keeps the sales pipeline filled with qualified leads you can move throughout the sales process. Identify where those leads are in the sales funnel and personalize the approach according to their interest level. That will help you close more deals and establish better long-term client relationships.

Running Both Strategies Together

What you need to bear in mind about lead generation and demand generation is that they are both essential to your B2B marketing strategy. They are made to work well together, along with lead generation, to support the work completed by demand generation.

Other organizations may focus on lead generation to acquire contacts and email addresses to hit sales targets. However, the ideal approach is to deploy both lead and demand generation simultaneously. This is because you cannot produce leads to your fullest potential or sustainably if there is no demand in the first place. People must know who you are and the products or services you provide.

Similarly, demand generation requires the further push of lead generation. Otherwise, all the hard work to get people interested in your brand could go to waste if you cannot convert them into leads.

Lead Generation and Demand Generation: Better Together

So, should you pursue lead generation or demand generation?

Realistically, you should pursue both. Without demand gen, you will have trouble getting leads into your funnel to convert a significant number into customers. On the other hand, you may end up attracting poor-fit customers who won’t help you grow your brand and business without quality lead-gen strategies.

With strong inbound and organic marketing processes to raise awareness of your site and excellent lead-generation practices to identify best-fit customers, you will be well on your way to huge growth.

How 4Thought Marketing Can Help

Determining what your prospects want and what they need to conquer their challenges will help your sales efforts. Deliver information that supports your solutions and demonstrates their effectiveness. Those ongoing lead and demand generation efforts drive high-quality engagements with qualified leads and continuously connect with new prospects. 

At 4Thought Marketing, we are well-versed in B2B sales and can guide you on the tools, strategies, and techniques essential to flourish in your B2B sales process. Get in touch with us today to get your marketing strategy on the path to success.