Archive for September, 2010

Eloqua Experience 2010 to Feature Nine Couch & Associates Clients as Finalists in Fourth Annual Markie Awards

by Justin Lowe on September 21, 2010 in Other with No comments



Couch & Associates en Route in Support of Nominees

TORONTO, September 21, 2010 – Couch & Associates, a professional services marketing organization specializing in marketing automation and sales enabling is proud to announce that this year’s Eloqua Markie Awards harbour 9 of its clients as finalists in various marketing and revenue growth categories.

The Markie Awards honor excellence in marketing and celebrate the leading achievements of Eloqua users in campaign creativity and impact. Sponsored by Eloqua, the awards have been the home of recognition for outstanding achievement in such fields as social media innovation and revenue, sales impact and marketing visionary for the past four years. ADP, Forrester and Balluff Inc. are just three companies among Couch & Associates’ nine clients named finalists in the integration innovation, clean house and extraordinary email categories, respectfully.

To commemorate the achievement, Couch & Associates, a Certified Eloqua Partner is en route to the event: Eloqua Experience 2010 held between 18-20 October at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. Among prominent key-note speakers, daily work-shops and training sessions, Couch & Associates hopes to attract prospective companies with an undisclosed contest and winning prize while creating a memorable experience for honorary clients amidst lavish treatment all throughout the event.

About Couch & Associates
Couch & Associates Inc. is a professional services marketing organization that specializes in adding value to marketing processes through automation, effectiveness and sales enablement. Couch & Associates consultancy consists of lead consultants, account & project managers that drive initiatives to their 200+ clients ranging from SMB to Fortune 500. The Couch & Associates design and technical teams add value through their knowledge of best practices and experience with marketing technologies and surrounding infrastructures. The team is certified with a variety of software platforms including Eloqua, Salesforce, Netsuite, SLX and Microsoft Dynamics.

About Eloqua
Eloqua helps clients dramatically accelerate revenue growth. Eloqua provides powerful business insight to inform marketing and sales decisions today that drive revenue growth tomorrow.  The company’s mission is to make its customers the fastest growing companies on earth. Thousands of users rely on the power of Eloqua to execute, automate and measure programs that accelerate revenue growth. Eloqua’s customers include Adobe, AON, Dow Jones, ADP, Fidelity, Polycom, and National Instruments. The company is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, with offices in Toronto, London, Singapore and throughout North America. For more information, visit www.eloqua.com, subscribe to the It’s All About Revenue blog, call 866-327-8764, or email demand@eloqua.com.

A Simple Method For Scoring Offline Behaviour With Eloqua

by Mike MacFarlane on September 1, 2010 in Lead Scoring with No comments

In the 4+ years that I have worked in the marketing automation space, I have seen many different ways that companies use a lead scoring process.  Whether it is scoring based on product, service, frequency of activity or simply the title of the individual, a well thought out lead scoring program can help with efficiency on the sales team as well as validate the efforts made by marketing.

But the one question I have always come across is: How do I score someone’s offline behaviour?

Let’s look at a simple example – you have a booth at a trade show where you are scanning names of those who come by to chat and ask questions about who you are, what you do and what services/products you offer.  At the end of the day, you receive a file of all the names that you scanned and you want to ensure that sales can follow up with these people as quickly as possible.  But at the same time, you want to ensure that sales is following up with leads that you have considered “hot” based on your lead scoring process.

Utilizing Eloqua’s Program Builder functionality, you can create a simple 5 step program that works alongside your existing lead scoring program that will allow you score leads based on offline activity. (*note – the process defined below might not line up with how you currently add names to your Eloqua database or the frequency in which you score someone, but can be easily modified to do so)

Here is what you would want your program to do:

- Add contacts to a contact group
- Add contacts to your lead scoring program
- Hold the contacts for 1 day
- Remove the contacts from a contact group
- Remove the contacts from the program

The group that you are adding a contact to would have to be referenced within your lead scoring program.  You will want to create a decision rule or a conditional program step that evaluates if a contact is in the contact group in which they were added – if they are, then you can run an update rule on the “YES” path or based on if the condition in the step was met that increments their lead score by X amount of points.  I would also recommend reviewing your lead scoring matrix to see what score would be appropriate for someone who attends an event.

Here is what the program would look like:

Eloqua Offline Lead Scoring Process

This is probably one of many methods that could be used, so if you have another way that you are scoring offline behaviour, please do share it by leaving a comment below!