Transcript: Interview with Justin Gray of LeadMD.    This is a literal transcript, authentic and unedited.  Or listen here while you work. 

 Jim:                               Welcome to SLMA radio. I am Jim Obermayer the host for Sales Lead Management Radio coming to you on behalf of the 8400 worldwide members of the SLMA. SLMA Radio is a syndicated show and our archives have 357 shows and 400+ executive interviews. Our producer is Paul Roberts and we’re coming to you live from our studio in Costa Mesa California.   SLMA radio is part of the SLMA Live network (now Funnel Media Group) which produces radio programs for business network listeners. You may subscribe to our shows through iTunes and Stitcher radio. We’ve got a special guest today and a special title.

                                Justin Gray is the CEO and marketing chief evangelist of Lead MD. They are a sponsor of the SLMA and the subject this week is marketing automation, quick wins in 30 days. 

                                Marketing automation has a lot of promise, no doubt about it, it’s a growing but how do you turn promise into definable wins? Justin is going to tackle that today.

                                Mr. Gray has been involved; he’s a strong voice for demand generation, value-based marketing and conversational best practices. He’s a recognized speaker, he’s published over 250 articles in industry publications and meanwhile his marketing blog, The Marketing Evangelist is one of the top marketing blogs.

You have permission from the Sales Lead Management Association and the Cartoonist, Stu Heinecke to copy and distribute this cartoon as is with attribution!

It isn't always easy for marketing to give prospects (and customers*)  appropriate content.   It's far too easy to snatch "something," jam it into the automated system and not think-out the needs of the end users.  It isn't enough to have your name on something and think that the touch is delivering something of value.   Garbage-in, Garbage-out;  deliver value every time.

Technology, security and more are constantly evolving. We have to stay on top of our websites. We need to clear out clutter, outdated items and more. But when we do BIG updates and restructure our sites, we have to remember to go back and check for fallout, or the fall-off of inbound links due to errors.

The SLMA has sponsors. 

Each sponsor gives us a link to their site for their banner ad. Most of them send us a link they can track. BUT, when these sponsors change marketing team members, structure of their site, campaigns, the links most likely will change resulting in a 404 error when people click on the ad. This makes us look bad. We have clicks but they show no conversions due to the 404. 

A great way to see what is happening is to use the search console from Google (FREE) to check for errors in the inbound links. You can see what pages are having issues and who is linking to them. This is a good task for an intern or marketing assistant to check monthly. Doing this will help you correct issues, connect with companies that believe in you enough to link to your content.

Hey, don't forget to check drip campaigns and email marketing templates, too. Once we set up these auto-pilot types of campaigns, we forget that if we restructure the links, change our provider on squeeze pages and more, we break our drip campaigns which will increase our unsubscribes and grumpy recipients. These are great tasks to add to a quarterly calendar. We have found in the past that once in a while we have a typo in a link, but then we share that same content or post with some reworking bringing along the broken link, so we perpetuate our own 404 errors. Search console will help you find those types of errors, too.

While you're at it, send the people linking to broken pages a thank you and the URL with corrected link so they can quickly find it and update it. If you make it easy, they will usually do it for you. 

 Listen to Fred Yee as he gives advice on converting sales leads that have a long sales cycle. 

Significant news, while posted on the SLMA Home page is also posted on our blog. 

Vista Equity Partners to acquire all outstanding Marketo common stock for $35.25 per share

  SAN MATEO, Calif, – May 31, 2021 – Marketo, Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTO), the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”), a leading private equity firm focused on investments in software, data and technology-enabled businesses. 

The terms of this all-cash deal provide substantial value to Marketo

This cartoon is one of many that appear in Stu Heinecke's new book, "How to Get a Meeting with Anyone."

I think marketing automation came about for two reasons:

1. Desperation for sales lead follow-up when sales management failed to enforce a 100% sales lead follow-up policy on the part of its sales people
2. Marketing learned it can do it with email nurturing of  inquires and sales leads without begging someone else to do it.  Note:  See Sales Management's Biggest Opportunity for Failure.

Why it Matters:

In this interview with Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD we discuss how to avoid being part of the 87% of marketing automation users who fail. The host this week is Susan Finch.   Lively program, great insight. 

It’s one thing to buy a marketing automation tool and install it. Its another thing to use it every day to manage and nurture, your most precious asset: sales leads. And yet some would say that this leading edge technology could be aptly named bleeding edge because of the effort it extracts from the users to make it work.

Justin Gray , CEO & Chief Marketing Evangelist

You might know Justin from the incredible amounts of quality best practices content

“How do you know,” I asked the marketing manager, “how much money to spend on marketing, and how many inquiries and leads to produce?”

Every social media venue has it's own language and style of posts. Some are hashtag laden, some prefer warmer stories, and some are all business.  You wouldn't wear the same outfit to a wedding, a business conference, a BBQ and a cocktail party - or would you? If you think one look covers it all, you may want to stop reading. If you only think you need to change shoes, stop reading.

Let's first cover the posting, not commenting styles for these venues that are often or exclusively used for business.

Twitter:

Include a LINK to something, unless you are sure that the inspiring quote you are posting is a standalone. But you have my attention for that VERY brief second or two - make it count. 

Find the company or people you are referring to and @mention them to give them an alert that someone is talking about them.

In this short SLMA Radio interview, Lars Helgeson, CEO of GreenRope makes the case that the right marketing automation program can definitely build revenue and users can measure the ROI from the campaigns. But how it does it is not necessarily what we have been taught to think. 

Certainly every marketing automation program makes this same claim, but as Lars points out, not every program can integrate all of the points of contact and properly allocate each one to understand what is contributing to sales.  You get the feeling it is working but you don’t know why.

Lars says that the right program can help businesses to understand what is driving people to take action on your site.  Yes, he gives us examples from GreenRope’s software product, but in doing so he easily points out the issues with so many software applications that boast and fail to perform.