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All Modern Marketers understand the importance of Sales and Marketing alignment. The term “Marketing and Sales BFF (Best Friends Forever)” comes up a lot. It’s even a Markies award category. There is, however, another team Marketers need to be “BFF” with and that is IT. A great deal of IT’s responsibility relates to security, and Eloqua’s platform offers a wide range of security capabilities to meet the requirements of IT departments.

In this chart, we took a look at the use of some common Eloqua security features. A few examples include custom security groups or account lockout policies. As the number of marketers using the system grows, so does the number of security features being used. That makes sense as the larger an organization, the more involvement IT usually has. But with the advent of SaaS, IT involvement in projects is definitely not isolated to large enterprises. Marketing teams and companies of all sizes need to be aligned with IT. Doing so will allow you to come to a fair middle ground that maximizes marketing efficiency and meets the security and IT requirements of your organization.

Who is Marketing’s Other BFF? [CHART] is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

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There is no denying 2012 has been a big year for Modern Marketers. You can see it everywhere from the launch of Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud to the incredible success of Eloqua Experience 2012. Perfect evidence of this is the apparent boom in Australia, with many analyst numbers and press releases touting growth in digital and media.

At Eloqua we have seen this in the form of increased customers as well as partner growth. We thought it would be interesting to dig a bit deeper and benchmark our Australian customers who have been with us for at least a year against our global customers of at least the same age. Using a few key activity indicators as seen above, it’s clear marketing activity growth in Australia is outpacing growth around the rest of the globe.

If you’re based in or market to the region, be sure your efforts reflect this level of activity because odds are your competitors will be doing the same.

As a Canadian I’m personally not as jealous of the growth as I am of the fact that their summer is just starting and I am seeing the first signs of snowfall!

If you liked this chart, we have 40 more. Come explore all the marketing insight.

Australia is Experiencing a Marketing Boom [CHART] is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing

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Lead Scoring is becoming an industry standard for ensuring marketing and sales agree on what qualifies as a lead.

Taking agreed upon profile and engagement criteria for qualified leads, you can input this information into lead scoring, which helps you understand a buyer’s decision-making status within the context of how engaged that buyer is with your marketing efforts. Typically, a lead’s profile is scored A through D while a leads engagement is scored 1 through 4. Put together you get a lead score, say, an “A3” for someone who fits the ideal buyer type but hasn’t engaged with you much yet.

When you identify criteria for your lead scoring, you’ll want to comprehend how that gets distributed across your marketing database. The majority of leads will be low quality in need of nurturing. But you’ll want to confirm that you also have high quality leads that are ready for sales.

We looked at customers who have implemented lead scoring and found that less than half have a single “perfect” lead with a score of A1. Compare that to the over 80% who have leads scored as D4, the least qualified of the bunch.

The problem: Over analyzing what to score on can lead to a scoring matrix that is too strict, resulting in not enough leads making it over the wall to sales.

Remember to start simple and re-evaluate your scoring efforts every four to six months. Look at your distribution of lead scores across your database and collect feedback from sales on how accurate scoring has been when following up. For more information on lead scoring, check out Eloqua’s Lead Scoring Grande Guide.

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Are You Over Analyzing Your Lead Scoring? [CHART] is from Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue, a Blog Covering Business To Business Marketing