Miscellaneous Marketing demo bits

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing has all the ingredients for a great demo: sexy dashboards and email/journey analytics, multiple drag-and-drop GUIs (Outbound Marketing journeys, Real-time Marketing journeys, lead scoring), and calendar views. As you know, I have two different directions I tend to take my Marketing demos: the Journey Journey™ or the Meta Marketing Demo™ (I don’t think it makes sense to do both in the same demo). But there’s still lots of functionality (and value, of course) not covered easily by either of those demos, offering opportunities for other bits and Easter eggs to make your demo more entertaining.

How I segment my Segments

In the interest of diversification, my segments are divided into four different segments:

1. Prospect inspired. segments customized for the demo audience based on segments they talked about during the discovery call (car dealerships in the southwest, regional hospitals, Chardonnay drinkers, etc.);
2. Journey required. The Journey Journey™ requires a few segments already be created: Young, urban males from the upper Midwest, Strangers, and Everybody;
3. CI acquired. I have 2-3 segments that are exported from Customer Insights into Dynamics Marketing. Even if they’re not looking at Customer Insights today, I want to plant a seed with a couple examples that speak to segments you can only create with a unified customer record;
4. Fully wired. A single, ridiculous hero segment that utilizes behavioral fields and firmographic/demographic fields so that I can talk to both within one segment, rather than having to go back and forth between several examples. At least one row tied to previous email activity, another to event activity, another to form activity, and then several tied to Contact or Account fields. The goal isn’t to have a realistic segment, but to have a single segment where you can talk to all those options.

The biggest helicopter leasing event in the Western hemisphere

Between events necessary for the Journey Journey™, the Meta Marketing Demo™, and events I’ll rename based on actual events the prospect hosts, there isn’t much need for filler content. But there is one event I throw in as an homage to Commandment 2 (not every joke has to be for everybody): the Catalina Wine Mixer. It’s a good example of a recurring (annual) in-person event with venues, passes, and sponsors. If you’re not familiar, the video below is NSFW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs0uLXodDVA

Marketing Emails

I would hope most Marketers realize a Marketing Automation solution can be used for more than just stereotypical marketing purposes like promotions, new products, events, etc. Just in case, I like to edit the Purpose field on a bunch of the emails and/or journeys to get the wheels spinning. Yes, you can do all the basic marketing functions, but you can also orchestrate journeys around onboarding, free trial expirations, surveys, product recalls, and so on. My list is below but it won’t make sense unless you’re familiar with the Journey Journey™.

The Mother of all Models (lead scoring, that is)

It’s great that Microsoft ships with 3 sample lead scoring models, but there’s at least 3 issues with them:

1. They don’t work out-of-the-box because the conditions aren’t populated.
2. In a demo, you need to open at least 2 of the 3 to talk to behavioral and demographic/firmographic conditions.
3. You can boost your marketing cred by using vernacular your prospect is hopefully already using (if not, they should). Specifically, “lamb or spam” and “Ideal Customer Profile.”

To address all three of those issues, I create “the Mother of all Lead Scoring Models” (pictured below). It’s a giant model for B2B lead scoring so I can get through all the key value points without having to click into and out of multiple models:

Conditions: while the model looks chaotic, there’s a method to the madness. Basic email behavior is the first 5 conditions, events are the next 3, web behavior is the next 2, then Lamb or Spam, and lastly, Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). It’s also organized to set up a punchline as I’ll explain at the end.

Increase/decrease scores: most actions increase lead scores, but some, such as unsubscribing from a list, or a hard bounce, decrease the score so I can talk to that.

Activity depreciation: the more important the activity (in my humble opinion), the longer I’m willing to score it, while the less important, the faster it should fade. So my model looks at event actions over the last year, but web behavior only for the last month.

Frequency (Each/At least/None): To talk to frequency, I use “Each” for most conditions, but consider using “At least” for one of the behaviors. For web clicks, I use “At least” to only score web visits once per month, and only if it’s greater than 2 clicks (one click could be accidental but two clicks is likely intent).

Expressions: the final two categories of conditions (Lamb or Spam and ICP) use expression such as “Email domain=aol.com,” “Industry=[Prospect’s Industry],” or Job Title=”[Main Stakeholder’s Exact Job Title].”

Lamb or Spam: it’s more than just scoring based on email address, but that’s a good shorthand for what it does. Someone submitting a form with an aol.com email address is likely a weaker lead than someone submitting with a corporate email address (I use this as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at people with AOL email addresses like my mom but ymmv. Side note: not shown here, but to demonstrate that you can have different models with different grades, my Lamb or Spam model uses the same grades the USDA uses for beef: Prime, Select, and Choice (you can use the JMGA scale for Wagyu beef if that’s more your speed).

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): this is basically what the Firmographic example is that ships OOB, but I would suggest you customize it for each demo based on what you think the ideal customer profile would be for your prospect. This is also a good question to ask in discovery (do you have an Ideal Customer Profile, and if so, what does it look like?). You don’t need to build out the full, final model; just show them you listened.

Job Title as punchline: as I mentioned at the top, this is organized this way on purpose. We’re starting with the least valuable and lowest scoring behaviors and building to the most valuable (form submissions, industry, etc.). Prior to a demo, I will stop the model and edit the Industry condition to equal the industry of my audience. A demo to a medical device company will see that Health & Life Sciences companies are “in our sweet spot,” but the next day, a media company will see that they, in fact, are in our sweet spot. You know the drill. While that sends a friendly signal to the prospect, it will climax with the final condition of Job Title/Role. There, I will put in the exact job title of the main decision maker (CMO, VP Marketing) to indicate that they are our *ideal* customer. To get real-world titles right, would be lots of conditions (CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, VP Marketing, Vice President Marketing, etc.) so rather than bother with all that, take the person you think it most important in the decision, and use their exact title for maximum effect. For example, below, I’m saying that the *ideal* customer has a title of “Director Marketing Operations and Technology.” You can bet that when he (in this deal it’s a he) sees that in the model, he’ll chuckle. And isn’t that what this whole blog is about?

On a separate note, lead scoring is a rare exception to Commandment 9 (prospects love a drag-and-drop UI). Don’t get me wrong — I love lead scoring, and I think it has to be in every Marketing demo. But it feels like Microsoft shoe-horned it into a drag-and-drop UI that makes it very inefficient to use. Best to show it by focusing on the ends, and hand wave through the means.

Text messages in Real-time Marketing

To show that you’re hep with the latest slang, you might consider a couple filler SMS messages in Real-Time Marketing.

Video

By no means a critical thing to have prepared, but on the slight chance a prospect wants to see how video can be stored and inserted into a Marketing Email or Marketing Page, I’ve got just one video loaded just in case. Clicking on the link takes you here.

Power BI

The OOB dashboards in Marketing are cool, but remember Commandment 8: executives LOVE dashboards and reporting. You cannot give them too much. I don’t think you need to spend too much time going into any of the Power BI reports for Dynamics Marketing that Microsoft has made available, but I would have them all embedded such that you can show them from the Dashboards link in Dynamics to make the point that there are more analytics than a marketing team can possibly consume.

Event Portal customization

If you’re really ambitious, you might work on customizing the Event Portal. Since nothing can be easy, the Event Portal is not only built in a totally different framework than all the other portals (Customer Self-Service, Field Service, etc.), but you need to use a variety of code editing tools to make the simplest of customizations. Fortunately, Amey Holden has written up a step-by-step tutorial for some of the customizations you’re most likely going to want to make.