Gartner: stifling innovation

I recently came across a (not so new) Gartner Magic Quadrant report, which reminded me why some analysts just don’t get it in my mind. I have removed any identifying information, but basically this is what the report says:

Niche vendors are offering new technology in the market…These vendors include risk aspects such as small reference bases and vendor capitalization issues. Organizations that embrace a higher level of risk should seek compensation in the form of discount, and even extended pilot implementations with below-average prices for support during the pilot period.

Gartner prides itself on serving the user community, so what’s wrong with this statement?

The problem I have with this statement is that it represents short-term, narrow-guided thinking. It is understood that not every organization is willing to trust a solution that has a limited track record of success. That’s fine. But at the end of the day, we all need innovation, even the laggards. If you don’t have the stomach to adopt a new solution, that’s absolutely legitimate. But if you are willing to take the risk of new technology in anticipation of bigger rewards and an early adopter advantage, please don’t try to squeeze an innovator (in many cases a cash-strapped startup) for a few less dollars. Remember, you want this vendor to be successful, right?

What Gartner says here promotes the notion that vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP should be able to charge a premium for their track record (which is rather dubious in many cases), while startups that may have a better solution should settle for lower margins or even a loss. This attitude only encourages market stagnation, which doesn’t serve anyone except the incumbents.

So, my call to the Gartner and other analysts is: your job is to help your clients understand the solution landscape, not to shape it! Telling clients to squeeze new vendors on pricing is bad service to the industry and bad service to your clients.

Lessons from the Obama Campaign

Just heard a great presentation given by David Plouffe, Obama's Campaign Manager at the Digital Marketing World virtual conference. Here are the keys to success based on his presentation:

1. Keep a consistent message
2. Repeat the message
3. Reach out to people through multiple channels (web, e-mail, text, twitter, etc.)
4. Use “real people” (i.e. not your standard company spokespeople) to deliver your message
5. Make information available: there is no such thing as too much information
6. Don’t be afraid to innovate
7. Measure everything you can

Simple, well-known, but it works!

A Different Kind of Marketing

Today I participated in a kickoff meeting for a pro bono project I have signed up for through the Taproot Foundation, an organization that matches the needs of non-profit organizations with volunteering professionals. I will be working with four other marketing professionals to help the Whittier Street Health Center in Boston to rebuild its website in order to better serve the community while supporting its fundraising goals.

We were all very excited to get started on the project. Coincidently but very fitting, it was the day that President-Elect Obama called on all Americans to volunteer for community service. We were also highly impressed with how well the Taproot Foundation equipped us for the project. We have a complete blueprint for the entire project, with great templates for everything we need to do from project plans to website wireframe diagrams. Definitely better organized than anything I’ve ever worked with!

If you are looking for a volunteering opportunity that will allow you to leverage your skills while working with a team of fellow professionals, I highly recommend you check out the Taproot Foundation.


"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?' "
--the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Marketing in a Downturn

The first thing that comes to mind when you think about marketing during an economic downturn is why bother. Nobody buys anyways, so why do we need any marketing?

On a second thought, is this really the case?

We now know that the US has been in a recession since the end of 2007. Does it mean that nobody bought anything? Not really. From the small sample of software companies I am aware of, most have done pretty well. Even now that the recession word is out, companies are still closing a good amount of 2008 business. And this holds even in market segments that are making headlines littered with words such as “crisis”, “losses”, “slumping”, and their synonyms.

So while I agree that we all have to be cautious with our spending as we plan for 2009, we also have to be careful not to bring about our own demise by shutting down our marketing presence.

So what should a software marketer do?

First order of business is to use this opportunity to become more efficient and effective in your marketing operations. Marketing is one area where you don’t necessarily get what you pay for. You can pay a lot of money for things that don’t get you much, and you can do many things that cost very little yet have a huge impact.

For years, advertising and tradeshows have been my two poster children for ineffective marketing. Guess what? They still are, because companies are still spending too much money on them.

Take tradeshows for example. The cost of exhibiting in a tradeshow keeps going up, especially when you consider the travel costs involved. All this while the returns keep going down, as buyers are cutting back on their own travel expenses.

At the same time, there are many more inexpensive ways to reach buyers at our disposal today than ever before.

There are many things you can do to make sure you get the most out of your marketing budget, but if I had to pick my top three “getting ready for 2009” initiatives, they would be the following:

1. Fine-tune your website

Your website is the key to marketing effectiveness. You want to make sure that your message is not only crystal clear but also tuned to the concerns of your buyers given the current economic climate (although you don’t want to overreact to it).

Speaking of your website, you can spend a lot of money on fancy search engine optimization (SEO), but you can do some pretty amazing things with a low cost SEO effort that will drive more relevant traffic to your website.


2. Communicate often

Use your e-mail list to continue communicating with your market. Make sure you deliver value in your messages. This is something that is always true, but even more important when many are not necessarily in the mood for buying right now. Use (and reuse) educational material to keep the conversation alive and maintain top-of-mind awareness so buyers turn to you when budgets free up (and they will!)


3. Use “old” and “new” media to spread the word

PR is no longer about reaching the press. It is also no longer reserved just for “big news.” You can use your PR to bypass the traditional media and reach your buyers directly, and you can do it with very high frequency at extremely low cost (see a good example). In addition, you can use “old” media like blogs and “new” ones like twitter to reach your buyers through multiple opt-in vehicles and communicate your messages even more frequently.

But so far we only discussed defense. Now let’s move to offense.

How about taking advantage of this downturn to gain ground on your competition? If you can maintain or even increase your market presence, you may be able to move ahead of competitors that are cutting back and are not as effective as you are with their marketing spend. This may be a good time for competitive upgrades and other offers directed at the competition’s soft belly. And remember: they can do the same to you if you cut back too much or if you don’t make the most out of your marketing budget.

Post a comment and let me know how you are handling your 2009 marketing budget. And check out our no-risk offer to help you fine-tune your 2009 marketing budget.

Selling to the Middle?

Much has been written about selling to the top. Here is one more evidence why you should. A recent McKinsey research finds that middle managers often have difficulty balancing new ideas with current priorities and therefore have negative attitudes towards innovation. If you are selling an innovative solution or one that requires the buying organizations to change the way they do business, middle managers will often be your opposition. Even if you find a middle manager who does support innovation, you would need the support of top management to overcome potential resistance from your supporter's peers.

 

B-to-B Branding Revisited

Pragmatic Marketing features an interesting and thought-provoking post by David Meerman Scott titled Branding is for Cattle. While I agree that the notion of branding in the context of technology marketing is often misunderstood, dismissing branding altogether is the easy way out. Branding is still important; the challenge is finding a way to make it relevant in the context of technology marketing.

Branding is not about glossy print ads. It’s not about logos and colors. It’s about creating a connection between companies and buyers. It’s about communicating value. It’s about the consistency of focusing on the customer through every interaction.

Here is the real question in my mind: can branding help sales? If done right, I think it can. Read this article to see how.

What is your take?

 

The killer demo: why demos are killing your sales

We’ve all heard about the killer demo. The team comes back from a sales meeting and reports how great the demo went and how impressed the viewers were: “They really loved it! They were floored… they just cannot wait to get their hands on it!”

A month later, the sale seems nothing but dead. Your salesperson is shaking his head: “I don’t really know what happened; they loved the demo but they are not returning my calls.”

The demo indeed was a killer; it killed your sale.

There are four main reasons a demo can be such a sale killer:

1. You talk instead of asking questions and letting the customer talk


There are probably hundreds of books that have been written on this subject, so I won’t waste your time stating the obvious.


2. The people interested in the demo are usually not the people that can buy


While getting buy-in from the intended user is important, the key to making the sale is reaching the decision makers. Most decision makers are not interested in the details. They want to know how you’re going to solve their business problems, not how your screens look like. Many of them wouldn’t even know what to look for in the demo. If the person you are dealing with is asking to see a demo that’s a clear red flag.


3. You are showing them something that you don’t know they need


There is no doubt that before you close the sale you will have to show a demo of the software. The question is when. If you didn’t spend enough time understanding the customer’s issues, the demo you are showing could be a great solution to the wrong problem.


4. If they don’t like the demo they will walk away


By showing the demo too early, you could lose the line of communication with the prospect before you had a chance to reach the decision makers, understand their needs, and explain how your solution could help them. The lower-level people you have been communicating with now think they have seen it all; they are now moving on to the next demo or the next problem they are trying to solve. Sooner or later they stop returning your calls.

So what can you do?

It’s actually quite simple. All you have to do is institute the three rules of the game:

• There is no demo until there is a clear understanding of the needs


• There is no demo until there is a clear identification of the decision makers


• There is no demo until there is a clear agreement on the decision process

If your salespeople are having a hard time making the adjustment, give them some role playing training and some lines to work with, such as:

“We’d be happy to show you our software. It may take us many hours/days to show you everything the software can do, so before I spend your valuable time I would like to make sure that what we show you is relevant to the business issues you are trying to address.”

There are always exceptions to the rules. If you sell low-cost software that is really simple and easy to work with, showing the software could be the best way to sell it. If that’s the case, you should bypass the demo altogether and provide a free trial. That’s a topic for another post, though.

Why is all this important to you, the marketer?

By the end of the day, if the leads you generate don’t translate to sales, your marketing effort was a waste. Every campaign you embark on should have a clear plan for how sales will follow-up on the responses. Make sure the follow-up leads to a meaningful conversation to identify needs, decision makers, and the decision process--not a killer demo!

 

Six Keys to Lead-Generation Success

This article was recently published in MarketingProf.com.

Lead generation is an important function, yet one of the least understood and most mismanaged in many organizations. Why is that so, and what can you do to put in place a best-in-class lead generation program?

Here are six keys to success that I have formulated over years of working with B2B companies to get lead generation right.

1. Get sales and marketing on the same page

Lead generation is a strange animal. It is usually executed and owned by Marketing, yet its success is really judged by Sales. When you go to the board meeting, you can show how great your programs are and how many leads have been generated, but if the sales VP says your leads are no good, that's what the board will hear.

For a lead-generation program to be successful, its goals must be clearly agreed upon by both organizations. That's not an easy task, but it's doable. The agreement between Marketing and Sales ought to spell out which leads should be passed to Sales and which should remain with Marketing.

To reach an agreement, both sides must make an effort to leave their fixations behind. Marketing has to realize that salespeople care only about leads that are ready to engage in the sales process. At any given time, the amount of leads that should be passed to Sales is probably no more than 5-15% of all leads generated.

At the same time, Sales expectations must be realistic and match market reality. In an early market, Sales should not be looking for leads that have well-defined needs, budget, and authority. There are just not enough of them out there. Your salespeople must be willing and equipped to start the sales process with prospects that have a latent need and work them to the point they are ready to buy.

2. Offer content that delivers value to buyers

People love buying but hate to be sold. Naturally, they are suspicious of anything that smells like a sales pitch. They are looking for credible sources to help them make an informed decision. They want to be educated, and if possible even entertained—two things that can be rarely achieved by your typical sales pitch.

So rather than telling them how great your product is and offering them brochures and datasheets, you can help buyers get educated by enlisting the help of more credible third-party sources, such as industry experts and analysts.

The most obvious and credible source you can use is your existing customers. Customer success stories are always effective, but some are more powerful than others. Make sure the story describes the problem that the customer is solving with your solution. Try to get into the details so readers get a real flavor for the problem and how it is solved. If the story sounds like an infomercial, you lose credibility. Use the customer voice as much as possible. Make the customer the hero, not your product.

Once you have the story written, get it placed in an industry publication. Publications are usually hungry for content, and it will carry much greater credibility in the eyes of your prospects.

3. Put in place the process and tools

Lead generation is a process, not a once-and-done project. Just like your salespeople can't stop selling, you cannot stop filling up their pipeline with new opportunities to pursue. And just like you cannot time the stock market, you cannot time the sales process.

You need to constantly reach out to each prospect, so when the time comes for them to start the evaluation process they have you at the top of their minds. You want to contact each prospect at least once a month, preferably 2-3 times. Don't worry about overdoing it. As long as your content delivers value, your prospects will appreciate it. And the few that will opt out probably wouldn't have been be buyers anytime soon anyway.

Frequent use of your list gives you an opportunity to optimize your response and conversion rates over time to make the most out of each outbound campaign. You can and should continually optimize the message, the format, the day and time you send your messages, and how you segment your list.

Touching each prospect 2-3 times each month means that you need a good database to manage your prospect data. You cannot manage all this activity without some automation.

That doesn't mean everything has to be automated from day one and in a single system. Rather than rushing to pay big bucks for an all-encompassing system that automates everything, first figure out the process, then put in place the systems to support it.

You might start with a collection of a few small systems stitched together by some manual steps before you know what you really need and are ready to invest in a more complex, enterprise-type system. It is important that you figure out how the system can help you connect Marketing and Sales and whether the two organizations will use a single system or two separate but integrated systems.

4. Ensure timely follow-up

Many good lead-generation efforts go to waste due to poor follow-up. Some research shows that if left up to Sales, up to 90% of the leads would never be followed up. A "hot" lead that is not followed up in a timely manner will cool down very quickly—some studies show that response rates to a follow-up call can diminish by 50% if you wait just 48 hours, and as much as 90% if you wait a whole week.

The number-one problem with lead follow-up is ownership. Marketing assumes that Sales will do it, while salespeople are too busy closing deals and chasing their own prospects. They also don't trust the quality of Marketing's leads and often see them as a waste of time.

The success of your follow-up is tightly related to the alignment between Marketing and Sales. Once salespeople are confident that the leads they get are ready for a sales conversation, they are more likely to follow up on these leads and can be held accountable for it.

To make sure they get only the leads that match your criteria, you need a way to qualify all incoming leads. You can collect qualifying information in your registration forms, although in many cases a follow-up call to verify some information would still be required. This could be the job of Inside Sales, but it works better if you have a special lead-development function that reports to Marketing.

5. Have the metrics to measure success

Your metrics should reflect the three steps that lead up to sales, which are reach, response, and conversion: how many people you reach, how many of them respond, and how many of these responses you are able to move to the next stage in the sales cycle.

Most marketing departments do a decent job of measuring reach and response. Once you have an agreement that leads should be passed to Sales, measuring conversion becomes relatively straightforward as well.

Not every campaign will generate the same numbers. Some campaigns have a broader reach and response with lower conversion rates; others are more focused but generate higher conversion rates. For example, you might have a whitepaper campaign that will generate many responses from early-stage leads, and follow it up with an evaluation offer to a smaller portion of the database that will get a lower response but higher conversion rate.

As long as you define a clear goal for each campaign, you can design a mix that will address all three metrics and allow you to measure the results against your goals.

6. Find your lead-gen champion

As with everything, it all boils down to people. You need people who are dedicated to lead generation. They need to have the right set of skills to manage lead generation. And they have to be passionate about it.

Most companies have no problem hiring additional salespeople but fail to staff the lead-generation function adequately. The truth is that finding people with expertise in lead generation is still tough. Most people that are looking for marketing positions think of themselves as the creative types, while lead generation is 70% process and 30% creativity; so you might have to go outside the traditional marketing talent pool to find your lead-generation champion.

Why do organizations fail?

Your lead-generation program is only as strong as your weakest link. If any of the above is missing, your entire program will be compromised.

* * *

From what I have seen, not many organizations are able to master these keys to success. At the end of the day, it all comes back to the fact that most senior managers still don't have a good grasp of lead generation. They may understand sales, they may understand marketing, but lead generation is a strange animal that requires specific expertise, which most of them still lack.

The good news is that lead generation is a discipline that can be learned; so if you can recruit one expert, either as an employee or a consultant, she or he can pass the knowledge to others and help you build a best-in-class lead-generation program.

The Buyer's Journey through the Leaky Funnel

The Leaky Funnel is a book by Hugh MacFarlane that should be added to the “must read” list of every sales and marketing executive. The premise of the book is “how to earn more customers by aligning sales & marketing to the way businesses buy.” I like the extension of marketing and sales alignment to the way customers buy. Rather than just advising sales and marketing to work better together, it gives both organizations a guiding post to align with – the customer.

The two concepts the book is focusing on – the leaky funnel and the buyer’s journey – are tightly related to each other. Many potential buyers start on a journey that could lead them to your solution, yet only a few finish there. Most will get distracted on the way; some will get lured by more promising value propositions; others might give up if the journey looks too challenging, or simply get bored with what you have to offer.

Here are some basic things you can do to keep buyers on track and reduce the funnel’s leakage:

• Clarity: buyers are looking for guidance. If your offer is easy to understand, more buyers will follow your path. Keep your value proposition clear and simple.
• Uniqueness: if your value proposition looks like many others, it is easy for buyers to get confused and hop on a different trail. Make sure your offer is differentiated enough so buyers can evaluate it against the rest of the field.
• Ease: buyers today are busier than ever. In our multitasking world, they embark on many journeys simultaneously. If finding the information they need in order to take the next step is not easy enough, they may choose an easier path. Make it easy for them to find the information they need.
• Frequency: there are many bumps on the road to your solution. If buyers get stuck on one of them for too long, it may be tough to get them back on track. Don’t wait until they ask for more information; offer it to them early and often.
  

Keeping the frequency of information flow to buyers is a challenge. Many companies spend a lot of money on marketing campaigns that generate buyer interest, but fail to keep buyers on track with timely and relevant follow-up. There are three common reasons for this failure:

1. Ownership: passing all the leads to sales is a sure recipe for a huge funnel leakage. As much as 70-90% of the leads that are passed to sales are never followed up since sales believe they are not worth the time.
2. Timeliness: being late is almost as bad as not following up at all. Some research shows that the likelihood of reaching a prospect on a follow-on call goes down by 90% within one week from the initial inquiry.
3. Relevance: I don’t have statistics on this one, but this is what happens when a salesperson calls someone that downloaded a white paper and asks if they have an active project and approved budget. If the follow-up call is too aggressive, it fails to match the next logical step in the buyer’s journey. The results can be disastrous, as buyers will not only get lost on their journey but may also tune out any future communication.
   

How can you avoid such failures and ensure effective follow-up? Here are some things you can do:

1. Plan the follow-up as part of each campaign
2. Match your follow-up communication to the buyer’s journey
3. Dedicate specific resources to do the initial follow-up and screening of leads before they are passed to sales
4. Be clear on which leads should be passed to sales
5. If you don’t have the bandwidth to follow-up in a timely manner, get outside help

Let me know what you think or if you need help with any of the above.

Best practices, optimization, or proven steps – which one would you choose?

This week we had a good reminder on the importance of testing your message. Working on a client’s campaign, we tested three different messages promoting a new whitepaper. We tested the messages as a lead nurturing campaign to the client’s house list, with the intention of using the best performing version for a lead acquisition campaign to a rental list later on.

The three messages were identical in format and most of the text. The only differences were in how we phrased the topic of the whitepaper, which appeared in the message subject lines, the title, and in one line in the e-mail body. The three variations were:

- Ten ways to optimize
- Ten best practices
- Ten proven steps

The results were rather striking. Open rates for all three messages were rather similar despite the differences in the subject line (24.0-24.8%). However, click through rates were significantly telling:

- Ten ways to optimize – 21.9%
- Ten best practices – 16.0%
- Ten proven steps – 32.1%

Given the significant differences in click throughs, I was a bit surprised to see the similar open rates for the three different subject lines. At the same time, it has been a trend I have been seeing developing for awhile. My take is that sender name has become much more important than the subject line (we used the name of a salesperson + the company name as the sender name, with the salesperson’s e-mail address). If the sender is someone I know and trust, I would probably take a look at the e-mail.

So what did we learn from this experiment?

1. Obviously, we know which message we will use for the rental list.
   
2. The parity of the open rates does not mean that we should stop paying attention to the selection of subject lines. I am pretty sure we could have come up with some bad subject lines that would have performed significantly worse even with the same sender name.
   
3. With sender name having a major effect on open rates, it is more crucial than ever that each e-mail we send delivers value to our audience. Once they stop reading our e-mails, even a great subject line is unlikely to reverse the trend.
   
4. Above all: we are going to continue testing as much as we can. 100% more clicks is not something we can pass on!

Please send me a note or post a comment if you have any interesting test results you can share.

Starting the Year with a Bang

Conventional wisdom says that as far as marketing activities go, the first quarter is a big ho-hum. January is typically eerily quiet, as the marketing department struggles to recover from last year’s holiday parties and finalize the new year’s budget and work plans. This is also how January looked in past years at Cimatron Technologies, Inc. (CTI).

Does it have to be this way? CTI’s Director of Marketing Lisa Sterling was determined to prove the contrary.

It all started back in 2006, when Lisa and Sam Golan, CTI’s President and CEO, set to outline the 2007 marketing plan. Over the past couple of years, CTI has developed a respectable portfolio of marketing activities that generated satisfactory results. Even the salespeople were hardly complaining about the lack or quality of leads (can you believe?!). But rather than just duplicating last year’s plan with some minor modification, Sam has challenged Lisa to raise the bar for 2007.

The ingredients of the plan Lisa and Sam came up with remained similar to what has proven to be a winning formula: direct marketing activities focused on the company’s target customers, and emphasis on activities that deliver educational value to the audience. The difference was the frequency and reach in which they would execute the program: they decided to take the activities that have been successful so far and turn them from one-off campaigns into a systematic year-long program that would significantly increase the frequency and reach to new prospects as well as the existing customer base.

Here is what Lisa and CTI were able to accomplish during the first month of 2007:

• CTI has been publishing a newsletter focused on topics specific to the tooling industry, aptly titled Tooling Times. The newsletter has been published on schedule each and every month for over three years, and this January was no different when issue number 39 hit the inboxes of over 4,500 subscribers (up from less than 1,000 three years ago).
• A little over a year ago, CTI has started publishing a second newsletter called Tooling Tips, with technical information directed at product users. The newsletter has been a great success, with open rates topping the 40% mark. For 2007, Lisa has decided to further leverage this success and launch a monthly Tooling Tips webinar. Needless to say, the first webinar was conducted in January…
• CTI has been conducting solution-focused webinars for a number of years, but these have been sporadic in nature as Lisa often struggled to line-up the resources required to support these events. While drawing the 2007 plan, Sam has committed the application engineering resources required to support two solution webinars each month. The first two were successfully conducted in January.
• To top it all of, CTI ended the quarter with a webinar hosted by one of the industry premier publications. The webinar featured a CTI customer that described the adoption of Lean Manufacturing practices and how Cimatron’s products support the Lean processes. The webinar attracted over 600 registrations, with over 300 attending the live event.

That’s the way to start a new year!

If reading this story makes you envy of CTI’s vast marketing resource, I should probably mention that Lisa serves as a one-person marketing department. And if you thought that Lisa was busy this past month, I should complete the picture by adding that all these activities took place in parallel to the many other “routine” tasks that occupy Lisa on a day-to-day basis, including two new press releases, tradeshow preparations, ongoing sales support, and none less than the implementation of a new CRM… and just in case you were wondering, the February checklist looks no less impressive!

How has your 2007 started? If you have a story to share, I’d love to get your comment!

Top 13 Marketing Budget Wastes—and How to Avoid Them

This article was recently published in MarketingProfs.com.

Once again, it is that time of year... when marketing departments are busily preparing next year's budget. As we all know, chances are you won't be able to get everything you're asking for. But, believe it or not, this may actually be a good thing.

Take it as an opportunity to re-evaluate what you have been doing and how you have been investing your marketing dollars. There is always a way to do more with less.

To help you get started, here are some common marketing budget drainers to avoid.

Marketing Waste No. 1: Spending money to reach the wrong people

The biggest waste in marketing is spending money on activities that reach the wrong audience. This is especially an issue for B2B companies that have a limited target market (how many Global 2000 companies are there?). Advertising and large tradeshows tend to be the biggest budget items, yet much of the audience is often off target. You will get much higher return for your marketing dollars by going directly to the companies and individuals that can purchase your product.

Building a database of your target market prospects is not an overnight proposition, but it will be the best marketing investment you've ever made. See more about it in "Reverse-Engineer Your Marketing."

Marketing Waste No. 2: Generating leads that Sales doesn't want

The second-largest waste is generating leads that Sales will never follow up on. It is way too common to hear Marketing complain that Sales doesn't follow up on its leads, while Sales complains that Marketing leads are a waste of time. Both have to agree on what constitutes a good lead, and both sides have to be accountable for their share of the equation: Marketing for generating "good" leads, Sales for following up on them.

It's the CEO's job to make sure that Marketing and Sales are in synch, and lead follow-up is where the rubber meets the road.

Marketing Waste No. 3: Failing to follow up on leads

Invest in lead-development personnel. Some call them Inside Sales, others call them Telemarketing, but both fail to describe the role that will give you the most for your money. The lead-development function is the guardian of the agreement between Marketing and Sales. Its role is to make sure that every good lead generated by Marketing is passed to Sales, and save Sales from wasting time chasing leads that are not a good fit for the company.

Marketing Waste No. 4: Killing the conversation

Provide Sales with follow-up tools and templates. Even when Sales is willing to follow up on the leads it gets, the conversation often dies once the lead is handed over to the salesperson. The easiest thing for salespersons to do is copy an old email or use the same opening sentence they always use when calling on a prospect. This is like starting all over with a new pickup line rather than continuing the conversation that has already begun.

So don't leave it to chance: If you're putting together a campaign, make sure you provide Sales with the follow-up scripts and email templates they can use when the leads start coming their way.

Marketing Waste No. 5: Overemphasizing new leads

While Sales might dismiss some leads as "old," those are actually the best leads you can give them. Software buyers require multiple touches before they are ready to engage in a serious sales conversation, so your best chance to make a sale is to someone who has already been in touch with your company.

If you continue pursuing only new leads, you will soon find yourself out of companies to go after, and even sooner out of budget.

Marketing Waste No. 6: Targeting new leads with late-stage offers

While lead nurturing is crucial, you still need to acquire new leads that have not heard from your company yet. Since you have to buy access to these leads (in the form of list rental, newsletter sponsorships, tradeshow booth, etc.), lead acquisition is expensive.

Good lead-acquisition activities are those that appeal to a broad audience of early-stage prospects, such as whitepapers and webinars that are focused on industry issues, not on your product.

Marketing Waste No. 7: Direct mail and rental lists

Email promotions to your permission-based list will usually generate response rates that are 5-10 times higher than email to rental lists and 10-15 times higher than direct mail, at a fraction of the cost. As a result, cost per response from your email list can be over a hundred times lower than for any other method. In addition, turnaround time for email promotions is shorter, which means you can communicate in a more timely fashion.

A good permission-based email list is your company's biggest marketing asset and your best lead-nurturing vehicle. At the same time, if your email is not permission-based, you run the risk of breaking the law and alienating your audience.

Marketing Waste No. 8: Failing to use your permission-based list

You don't want to inundate your prospects with too much communication, but most software companies fail to communicate enough. Newsletters and blogs are great vehicles to keep the communication flowing.

Your customers are eager for knowledge; so, as long as you keep your content relevant to your audience and tone down the sales pitch, most of them will welcome your emails. For those who don't, offer ways to opt out of specific items so they don't have to remove themselves entirely from your list.

Marketing Waste No. 9: Failing to get the most out of your email marketing

A well-designed message (not necessarily a pretty one) can increase response to your emails by up to 50%! That's a huge difference in the return on your marketing dollars.

There is no magic formula for a good email message. To make sure your message is well designed, you have to test every element of the message—from the subject line to the placement of the links and the call to action.

Marketing Waste No. 10: In-person seminars

Webinars are much more effective than in-person seminars. They cost less—and you can draw a national and even an international audience to a single event. The typical seminar will draw 25-50 people, but it is not uncommon for a webinar to draw hundreds.

A webinar can also be easily recorded for future use as an on-demand presentation, extending the lifespan of the event months or even years beyond the initial take and generating up to twice the responses of the live broadcast.

Marketing Waste No. 11: Losing people on your Web site

All roads lead to your Web site. Any serious prospect will be looking at your Web site multiple times throughout the interaction with your company—before, during, and after the purchase decision.

The first thing you need to make sure is that your Web site content is of interest to your prospects. The second thing is to have calls to action that will get your Web site visitors to engage—view a webinar, download a whitepaper, fill out a survey.

Last, you need to make sure that you can track these interactions. With this information in hand, you can fine-tune your follow up to match your prospects' interests and avoid wasting valuable marketing and sales resources.

Marketing Waste No. 12: Failing to double (and triple) dip

Creating new content is often the bottleneck to new marketing initiatives. Once you have created some good content that will engage your customers, don't let it go to waste. Your prospects process information in different ways, so you can take the same content and repurpose it in multiple ways.

For example, turn your webinar into an article, post it in your newsletter and blog, pitch it as a PR placement, or offer it as a podcast.

Marketing Waste No. 13: Not knowing what you get for your money

Every marketing activity should be attached to a measurable goal. If it's not, you probably shouldn't be doing it. A measurable goal could be number of leads, number of new contacts, number of meetings, opportunities, deals, and all the way to revenue dollars. See more about it in "How to Measure Your Marketing" and "Measuring Marketing ROI—How Low Can You Go?"

The key to marketing optimization is continually weeding out the budget drainers while seeking new ways to deliver greater market impact at lower cost. If you're looking to do more with less, you must be willing to embrace change. As the saying goes, "You cannot continue doing the same things and expect different results."

Reverse Engineer Your Product Development

A few months ago I wrote about reverse marketing. After talking to a client about recent issues with a new product launch, I came to think that a reverse process could work for product development as well.

If you ask software developers why their product fails to gain market acceptance, you are likely to hear that the culprit lies with either with the customers, the sales force, or both.

Customers are largely at fault for being lazy and incompetent: “How don’t they see that if they just pulled down this menu, clicked on Options, Advanced, More, and then checked this box they would be able to do exactly what they were looking for?!” Really, how don’t they?!

If faulting the customer is somewhat politically incorrect, placing the blame with sales is the common fallback position. “They just don’t know how to sell the product. They don’t show new prospects how to use all the options. They sell the product short.”

It’s not a question of blame. As long as we don’t change our product development process, we will continue to come up with products that customers can’t figure out and sales cannot sell.

Here is how a reverse engineered product development process would look like:

Step 1: decide on product positioning

Most products start as a solution looking for a problem. It would be much easier to sell the product if we could start with the problem. Who is the product for? What problem will it solve? How will it be used? How is it different from existing solutions?

Step 2: develop the sales presentation

Once we have answers to these questions, we can start testing the reaction of prospective buyers. Do they perceive the problem like we do? Is it important enough for them to take action? Does the proposed solution fit into their business process? Are the benefits clear? Will they be willing to pay for it?

One way to get answers to these questions is by putting together a sales presentation and running it by potential buyers. You can either do it yourself or by hiring a marketing research company to do it for you, and you would need to run it by 15-20 prospects to start seeing some patterns emerge.

Step 3: develop demo scenarios

Assuming the reaction to our sales presentation is positive, we can now move forward to the next step in the product development process. Now that we validated what our buyers are looking for, we can define the scenarios that describe how they will actually use our product to derive the promised benefits.

These scenarios serve a dual purpose. In addition to supporting the sales effort, they also serve as use-cases, which can help us define the functionality of the product.

Our positioning statement, sales presentation, and demo scenarios will serve as the guidelines for the entire product team from here on. With these three items in hand, we are ready to sell the product. All we need now is develop it…

Step 4: develop the product

We have two options here. The more formal process would be to write detailed product requirements and hand them to the development team. This formal approach reduces the risk of misinterpretation; at the same time, it diminishes the role of product developers and limits their creativity and sense of ownership.

Many developers would prefer the freedom to work on the product without detailed product requirements. Based on the product positioning, sales presentation, and demo scenarios, they should be able to come up with a product that delivers on the benefits users are looking for.

Whichever way we do it, the key is to make sure that once product development starts, it stays true to our demo scenarios, sales presentation, and product positioning. To ensure it stays the course, we need to conduct frequent (weekly!) reviews of product development against the above three items, and immediately correct anything that doesn’t match.

I have yet to see a company that follows this process. Most companies I know do it the other way around. Done right, I believe this reverse product development process can help companies make products that deliver more benefits to their customers and are easier to sell. What do you think?

Bridging the Sales and Marketing Divide

I recently spoke at a webinar on the topic of sales and marketing collaboration with Gil Rapaport, EVP Marketing and Strategy at XOsoft. Gil has been the mastermind behind XOsoft’s implementation of a state-of-the-art marketing and sales process that has helped the company post 30% quarter over quarter growth for the past 3 years. A recording of this webinar presentation is now availble.

UPDATE: On July 11, 2006, less than a month after the webinar I held with Gil, XOsoft was acquired by Computer Associates. In an interview with Globes, Gil talks about the acquisition and the XOsoft “marketing machine.”

Reverse Engineer Your Marketing

This article was recently published (with some minor modifications) in MarketingProfs.com.

Reverse engineering is the process of back-working a solution from the end result. In the era of result-oriented marketing (how did we ever afford to do it differently?!), reverse engineering can help marketers refocus their efforts and resources to ensure marketing delivers results that are on-target with business goals.

Let’s take a simple scenario.

It’s time for your quarterly board meeting. This time, you’re going in with a spring in your step. Last quarter you really nailed it with your marketing programs. You did a webinar, a white paper promotion, and you had your biggest tradeshow of the year. Altogether, these programs generated over 1,000 leads for your sales force. You did your job. Now it’s up to sales to follow up on these leads and convert them into real opportunities.

You present your numbers and sit down with a winning smile on your face. Next is the VP of Sales. You haven’t seen her in weeks, she’s been busy closing deals on the road. After presenting last quarter’s results (they didn’t quite make the numbers, but “it was a good quarter”), she talks about next quarter. The pipeline is dry, she says. There are not enough marketing leads. You hold yourself not to bolt out of your seat, but you politely ask what about the 1,000+ leads you just passed to sales. These are 1,000 names, she says, but they are not good leads…

You’ve heard this before. Who is right?

The biggest problem is that nobody knows (so nobody can get fired, although the VP Sales is usually the first to go, with the VP Marketing not far behind…)

The conventional process of sifting through thousands of leads and trying to figure out which are the good ones is time consuming, expensive, and in most cases is not followed through. Much of your marketing effort goes to waste, but you don’t know why.

Here is how you can do it differently with reverse-engineered marketing:

Stage One: Figure Out WHO Sales Wants to Talk to
And it cannot be "the person who has a check ready for me"... Jokes aside, before you spend a single dollar on outbound marketing, sit down with sales and clearly define who they are trying to reach.

Agree on the Target
Define the industries, company size, and any other characteristics that describe the companies your sales people are calling on. For them, these will be the only leads worth following on. Then get down to the individuals. Who are the decision makers, influencers, and gatekeepers they want to speak with? Write down these definitions and hang them on your office wall. From here on, everything you do will be focused on these targets.

Get the Names of these Companies
Most enterprise software companies have several thousands companies in their target market (how many companies are in the Global 2000?), so getting the names of these companies is a manageable task. Still, most companies don’t bother doing it. If the task seems too daunting to begin with, break it down into smaller chunks – by vertical, geography, solution – whatever makes sense.

Analyze your Target Market Coverage
Run your contact database against the list you have created. What percentage of the target market is currently there? How many more do you need to reach? Do the Same for Individuals. Do you have the type of contacts your sales people are looking for?

Establish Metrics
The end result of this analysis should be a measurement of coverage: “we have contacts at X% of the companies we are after, and Y% of them are at positions of interest to us.”

From this point on, marketing has two goals:

1. Move the dial on these numbers to increase target market coverage.
2. Generate repeat responses from target individuals at the target companies to create multiple opportunities for sales dialogue.
   

This is not a one-time analysis. These are numbers that you need to always have on your dashboard. Many executives are now adding demand generation metrics to their dashboards, so having agreed upon metrics is critical to establishing a common language for the boardroom conversation.

Stage Two: Figure Out HOW to Reach Them

Now that you know who you’re after, you need to figure out how to contact them and how to get them to respond to your message.

Get Additional Contact Information
There is no easy or cheap way to add new target contacts to your list. However, if you have to spend the money, at least you’re better off now that you know exactly what you’re looking for. You can buy lists of names that will match the specific companies and titles you are after. One way or another, you’ll need to put someone on the phone to use your existing contacts within an organization to get these additional contacts you need to reach.

Look at Past Results
Go back to your database and see what the people that fit your target profile responded to. What marketing vehicles seem to generate better response from your target prospects? Do certain messages seem to resonate better for specific segments?

Ask Them What They Care About
At times, we get so engrossed in analyzing our campaign data that we forget there is another way to find out how to get across to the people we are trying to reach: just ask them. Put together a short survey; ask them what their burning issues are and how they prefer to learn more about them. Have someone outside the company call them up; you’d be surprised how many people will give you a piece of their mind if you ask for it in a non-sales situation.


Stage Three: Execute and Measure

Get Started!
With all this information in hand, you are ready to start creating the content, messages, and campaigns that are targeted at your desired audience. I know I make it sound simpler than it is. You can have a good starting point, but don’t expect to have all the answers upfront. You cannot wait for that. Just start executing to the best of your knowledge, then continue to test what works best and experiment with different ways to reach your target audience.

Measure Against Your Goals
As you start generating leads, make sure you measure against the goals you have defined upfront:

1. Target market response: how many TARGET MARKET responses have been generated?
2. Target market coverage: how many NEW TARGET MARKET leads have responded?

As long as you keep hitting these goals, you are generating opportunities for your sales force to start a dialogue with the people they want to talk to and helping them move forward the dialogues that are already in place. And as long as you keep doing this, chances are your next board meeting is going to unfold better.

Some Additional Practical Details
As leads come in, you will need to figure out whether they fit your target market profile. The following chart describes a process you can use for that purpose.

Expecting sales to be responsible for the process is risky. I strongly recommend that you make this process part of marketing’s role in generating leads BEFORE they are passed to sales.


So put in reverse, and get your engines going!

Webinar Helps Close the Deal

Working with a new client is always fun. There is an inevitable apprehension about newly launched marketing plans. Once the results are in, seeing the skepticism giving way to sheer excitement is a very satisfying moment.

A couple of weeks ago I helped a client put together their first ever webinar. They were concerned whether their audience would tune in to this media. The results exceeded their expectation on every metric – from invitation open rate (over 40%) to the number of registration and attendance rate (over 55%). Moreover, Over 30% of the registrations were highly qualified NEW prospects.

It gets even more exciting.

The webinar took place Tuesday. On Friday morning we sent each person who registered to the webinar a follow up e-mail from the salesperson in charge of their account. By Friday afternoon I got a call from a salesperson telling me that he received five responses to the e-mail, all of them interested in learning more about the software.
Can it get even more exciting? You bet!

One of the e-mails was from a prospect he has been working with for a couple of months and was trying to close as a Q1 deal, but the guy has not been returning e-mails or calls in the past few weeks (I’m sure you’ve been there…). The e-mail said “come over and get a check for a 1/2 of the cost, we’ll pay the rest next quarter.” The date: Friday, March 31st.

This doesn’t happen very often, so the point of the story is not to create the impression that webinars are good deal closers.

The point is that you need multiple touches to move a prospect through the sales cycle. A salesperson can use marketing help in creating these touches by providing information that is of value to the customer. In many cases, these will generate better response than a sales call. And once in a while, it can even help seal the deal.

That’s fun!

What’s Your Pickup Line?

This is one of the best marketing posts I’ve ever seen. It shatters the value/word meter.

The Spark This blog entry hit my e-mail box as I was listening to a client presenting to a prospect and thinking to myself “why do they talk so much about themselves - who cares?!”

Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Just check out how many website homepages are about the company, its vision, its founders, its offices, etc, just not what it does for the customers!

Marketers beware - marketing myopia starts here…

The Sales Imperative

Maybe the problem is in how we call them. Salespeople. Good salespeople put the “people” first, then the “sales”. Here is another reminder on the topic from the Revenue Journal’s authority Kristin Zhivago. If you don’t have time to read the article in its entirety, read at least the four points at the bottom.

Leads are People Too

There is nothing better than a good body massage. Naturally, I was excited to hear about a new masseuse that came highly recommended. The masseuse introduced herself as Olga and went right to work. There wasn’t the usual “what bothers you” and “how do you like your massage” questions I was used to being asked before getting a massage. Olga went straight to business. After about five minutes, I thought my back was about to crack. I was too shocked to even say a word, and barely crawled away from the massage table. I was bruised and sore for the next couple of weeks.

Sometimes I suspect that many in the software industry came from Olga’s school. We tend to forget to ask our customers what they really want. Owen Thomas writes about it in an excellent article titled What Silicon Valley can learn from UPS. This is true not only for engineers, but also for those that are supposed to be our best communicators – marketing and sales people.

Take lead generation, for example. A prospect downloads a white paper and, what do you know, a few days later a salesperson is calling assuming the prospect is actually interested in buying a product. At the same time, prospects who are really interested in buying may be waiting weeks for someone to call and help them buy.

Some forward-thinking marketing departments have embarked on ambitious efforts to avoid these problems by using sophisticated lead scoring models, attempting to assign an objective score that will tell salespeople which leads to follow up with. To be honest, I am not sure we need to go that far. Just like Olga, we fail to ask our customers a simple question: “How much pressure do you like?” As a matter of fact, we don’t really need to ask. The answer is there, but we fail to listen.

Let me explain.

If you walk in front of a store and there’s a guy standing at the door yelling how great his product is and trying to hand you a pamphlet, you’re probably going to walk a little faster to get away before he grabs you. But when you walk into a store and look at a product you’re interested in, you would probably appreciate if someone were available to answer some questions.

We appreciate responsiveness and care, we run away from pushy salespeople. So do our “leads”.

When a prospect registers to a webinar, all she’s saying is “I’m interested in learning about the topic.” The follow up to the webinar registration should acknowledge the interest and gently check what else might interest her. A white paper? A case study? Perhaps a product demo? Jumping ahead and talking about the product or asking about project and budget is like trying to grab a person walking in front of your store. All you’re going to do is make her run.

A well-designed marketing campaign will present the prospect with a number of options that can tell us how ready the prospect is, if we just listen. Instead of worrying about lead scoring, let’s look at leads as people. Ask them polite and relevant questions, be there to answer their questions, and listen carefully to what they are telling us.

In short, I believe the formula is rather simple: marketing’s role is to provide opportunities for starting a dialogue; the role of the sales team is to use these opportunities to take the dialogue one step forward, and follow the queues of the prospect as to how fast the dialogue can develop.

What do you think?

Three Approaches to Your 2006 Marketing Plan

With the start of the New Year, marketing executives are busy crafting new plans. The easy way out is to copy last year’s plan, move some dates around, and call it a day. However, this approach will not work if you operate in a dynamic environment, as most software companies do.

Here are three approaches you can use to come up with new and improved marketing initiatives for your 2006 plan:

1. Analyze and Repeat Success

A clear-cut strategy for generating more leads is to do more of what you have already been doing. This does not necessarily mean that you have to spend more money. By analyzing the results of your past activities, you can focus on those that worked best and fine tune your marketing mix moving forward.

There are three things to keep in mind for this strategy to be successful:

• Define your metrics to reflect your marketing goals. Whether your main objective is to generate more leads, achieve the lowest cost per qualified response, or something else altogether, use the corresponding metrics to measure the success of your past marketing activities and the return on your investment.
  
• Focus on measurable activities. The more measurable activities you have in your marketing mix, the better you can optimize your results based on your previous track record. E-mail and web-based marketing vehicles provide you with almost immediate feedback, allowing you to alter the message, design, or concept to maximize the results of every campaign.
  
• Use measurable tools. Make sure your e-mail tools, website infrastructure, and campaign management systems provide easy-to-use tracking of click-through and response rates that are granular enough to decipher the most beneficial sources for success, such as a specific list or message.

For more information on measurements and marketing metrics, you may be interested in reading Marketing by the Numbers and How Low Can You Go.


2. Find a Shortcut

If the first strategy for leveraging past success utilizes quantitative metrics, a second strategy applies a more qualitative approach. The idea is to find out what makes your customers tick and emphasize the factors that made them buy from you in the past in order to increase your success moving forward.

The first step is to establish a profile of those who became your customers in the past year or two: Do they come from a certain industry or segment? Are the companies of a certain size? Who were you competing against? Most importantly, what were the reasons they chose your solution over the competition?

Once you uncover some common threads, you can incorporate them into your marketing mix. Use the reasons people chose your solution to fine tune your messages. If your message resonates better with specific vertical markets, focus on these verticals. If you have more success against a certain competitor, go after their customers and expose their weaknesses.

Your customers will be happy to share this information with you, but listening to your customers requires a proactive approach. Strangely enough, while many companies claim to be "customer-driven", very few use this strategy-- all the more reason why you should!


3. Become a Knowledge Beacon

Many industries still lack efficient media for knowledge exchange. This vacuum is your opportunity to become the facilitator of such a community – a place to share knowledge with industry peers. In doing so, you position your company as the “go to” place for industry knowledge. This is probably the most effective form of branding you can do.

Here are three examples of knowledge-based communication vehicles that you can employ, even with the limited resources of a small company:

Best Practices Survey
Putting together a benchmark survey allows you to provide the industry with useful, relevant, and current information. At the same time, it gives you insight into market needs, industry challenges, current practices, and future plans. As a valuable byproduct, it can also generate new leads, which can be easily qualified by their responses to certain survey questions.

A web-based survey requires little effort and cost, and it can be used in multiple ways. You can use it in e-mail campaigns, banner advertising, and at tradeshows. See an example of such a survey, the results, and the subsequent publicity.

Newsletter
Publishing an industry-focused newsletter is an easy way to start gathering an audience for your knowledge-based communication. A company that started a newsletter two years ago has since seen its subscription list grow 200%. The newsletter has also helped the company position itself as an industry thought-leader. Stories published in the newsletter have generated interest from industry publications and led to ten articles published in the past year—all with no PR agency, no PR budget, and little to no advertising.

Blog
Blogs provide a new channel for customer interaction. They allow executives and other employees to communicate directly with customers without the confines of PR formalities (although I am not sure how long this freedom will prevail). You can turn your blog from a monolog into a dialogue by inviting comments and responses from your customers. Companies such as Microsoft and Sun have hundreds of such blogs, but even smaller companies are starting to experiment. Ex Libris, for example, started a blog by getting employees involved as a grassroots movement, with the hope that it will eventually take off to engage its customer community.

For your knowledge-based marketing to be successful, it has to be credible, so keep your sales pitch out. If the effort to create the content seems daunting, it doesn’t have to be. There are many creative ways to reuse existing content and generate new material with a reasonable amount of effort.

For example, you can take a web seminar and turn it into an article to be published on your website, newsletter, or in an industry publication. Since your customers have different preferences of how they like to process information, reformatting and repackaging the material may generate new interest. One company that tested this concept sent an e-mail campaign to their house list, announcing a collection of recent webinar recordings. Since no new content was created, it took little time and virtually no cost. By merely remarketing their existing content, the campaign generated 45 “free” new leads.



These three strategies are not mutually exclusive, and I am also sure they are not the only strategies you can apply. Post a comment or drop me an e-mail and let me know what you’re doing in 2006.

David and Goliath: The Enterprise Software Version

Annraí O'Toole, Chief Executive Officer of the small Cape Clear Software is taking on IBM in a battle for the future of SOA.

O’Toole is joining the ranks of other CEO’s of software startups anticipating the demise of Big Blue and other industry giants. Another example that comes to mind is Salesforce.com’s outspoken Marc Benioff, who has taken on the established enterprise software regime with his “end of software” rally cry (check out Benioff’s latest response to Bill Gates’s memo on Internet Software Services and the Microsoft Live announcement).

So far, Benioff has been able to marshal the success to back his rhetoric, but for every successful modern-day David like Benioff, there are hundreds of software CEO’s that lost their battles against industry Goliaths, burning through many millions of VC dollars in the process.

What makes one successful and others fail? Had I known the answer, I would probably be as rich as Benioff, so I am still hoping you can help me figure it out… One thing that separates Benioff from many others is that Salesforce.com presented a real paradigm shift in the way software is used.

Perhaps even more importantly, Salesforce.com made it easy for users to test out this new paradigm. While Benioff presented a grand vision for his “no software” approach, Salesforce.com started out with a small and simple SFA application. It kept expanding the solution in small increments with quarterly updates of the software. This was a brilliant way of taking advantage of the Software-as-Service model to add new functionality in an incremental, non-intrusive, and easy-to-digest fashion.

I am a firm believer that ease-of-adoption and ease-of-use could either propel your software to greatness or spell its doom. You may point to SAP as an example of successful yet tough-to-use product, but let’s not forget that SAP made its big market push as a replacement to IBM and other legacy systems, which were even more difficult to use, implement, and maintain.

The push for small, simple, and modular software grows as computing becomes more and more distributed, decentralized, participatory, and collaborative.

I don’t know enough about SOA to tell whether Cape Clear provides such a solution, but if you asked me to bet on the success of a newcomer taking on the reigning gorilla, these are the questions I would ask:

First, I would ask, is it a real paradigm shift or just a slightly better product that does the same thing as IBM? Second, and not less important, is the solution easy to try and adopt?

If it’s not a real breakthrough, you’re going to run into the “why bother” roadblock; if it’s not easy to try, you will hit the “who has the time” roadblock. There are additional roadblocks that must be conquered on the path to beating Goliath, but if you cannot get past the first two, I would suggest you find yourself a weaker target to take on.

Good luck!

Service: the Free Prize Inside

There is a good article in Harvard’s Working Knowledge, describing how companies such as Progressive Insurance, Commerce Bank, and Intuit use customer service as a competitive differentiator. These companies made service the “free prize inside” their product. I like it!

Early Stage Marketing

I love startups. There is nothing more exciting than this early stage when so little is defined yet everything seems possible. So whenever a startup approaches me to help them with marketing, I get really excited. Unfortunately, I don’t get to enjoy it for long. Having been in these situations many times over, it doesn’t take long before reality sets in.

“We need you to help us generate leads,” says the founder. “We have a great idea, the ROI is less than 3 months. We just need to let the world know about it.” I agree the idea is great. I am not so sure about the ROI. “Tell me who is using the product,” I ask. “We are talking to some companies about using it,” says the founder. “We are going to close the first pilot by the end of this month.”

I am still excited, but by now, my responsible self takes over. There is so much to do, and generating leads is NOT one of them. But how do you tell it to a proud father (that is founder, I mean…)? How do you tell one that the company is not ready for this type of marketing yet?

I usually end up telling the founder that they should wait until they have a few success stories to prove they are for real. When you have these stories, marketing can be effective. You can generate leads. You can spend money and get a return. Until then, save your marketing dollars.

It doesn’t mean you do nothing. You need to get these first customers somehow, and you need them quickly before you run out of money. What you need is a leverage point. Something that will get a buyer to trust you can deliver an unproven solution.

Maybe it’s someone you know. Maybe it’s someone your VC knows. First and foremost, though, your solution has to solve a clear and well-defined problem, and your offer has to be compelling and carry low risk. This is, for example, how Impress Software was able to land six major corporations to be in the pilot group when they were developing a new product. It didn’t hurt that they had the support of SAP. That’s a leverage point.

In the meantime, you can also learn more about your market, build your target market database, and establish a thought-leadership position in the industry. One company that has done a remarkable job at cultivating a thought-leadership position in an early market is WebLayers.

While the company was still in stealth mode and working with its pilot customers, WebLayers founder Motti Vaknin started the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Forum, an exclusive Fortune 500 roundtable of enterprise architects who are mandated with the challenging mission of creating a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in their enterprises. Forum members include senior architects and IT executives from companies such as AIG, Bank of America, DaimlerChrysler, eBay, Intel, JP Morgan, Northrop Grumman, P&G, and many other leading corporations.

Vaknin is very careful not to abuse the forum as a sales channel for WebLayers. At the same time, the forum provides him with access to top-level, relevant industry contacts. It’s a way for WebLayers to learn about industry needs. It also positions WebLayers, the small startup, as a thought-leader in SOA. All this is done with very little financial investment (although the attention of Vaknin is required, but well worth it). Could you ask for anything more at this stage?!

Do you have any other ideas for early stage marketing? Let me know how you go about it!

Can you sell? Can they buy? You don’t know until you ask the right questions!

I often wonder to what degree we can blame our fast-paced lifestyle for the difficulties so many software companies have meeting their sales goals.

I have recently been involved in a number of interesting exercises with several software companies that are trying to improve their marketing and sales processes. It has been interesting, and at the same time disappointing, to see how difficult it is for salespeople, marketing managers, and company executives to come up with a clear definition, not to mention a unified one, of what constitutes a qualified lead.

Now, I’m not talking about the terminology. Granted, “qualified lead” could mean different things to different people (read about The Fallacy of Qualified Leads). I am talking about salespeople not being able to come up with a clear set of questions that could tell them whether a company is a good fit for their solution.

So what do salespeople do when they don’t know these questions? They ask the easy question: “Are you looking to buy?” “Do you have an active project?”

That’s an order-taker question, not a salesperson’s! A salesperson is looking for a problem to solve, a goal to help a buyer fulfill, a pain to be relieved.

That’s where our hasty culture and go-getter attitude trip us. We are all in a constant race to do more and faster, that we don’t put the time to think through and come up with a solid, customer-centric selling process. Rather than take the time to understand the customer’s issues, we rush to tell him how great our product is.

The skill pool of solution selling is dwindling, and as a result, companies are missing their sales targets, while new salespeople and managers keep coming and going every 12 to 18 months through the endless motion of the company’s revolving doors.

How do we put an end to it? How do we get our salespeople to stop chasing and pushing and start engaging and cultivating?

I don’t have the answer, but I believe we first have to take the time to evaluate what we do. Going through these exercises, the companies I mentioned are taking first steps in this direction. I just hope they have the patience to see it through.

The Price of Personalization

Personalization is marketing’s two-edge sword. On one hand, personalized promotion promises better response and higher return on marketing investment. On the other hand, new personalization devices such as TiVo and e-mail filters make it tougher for marketers to reach their target audience.

Amidst the enthusiasm surrounding TiVo and iPod, Christine Rosen ponders the social price we are paying for the ability to get “just what we like."

You can read Christine’s interesting but long The Age of Egocasting, or read a shorter take in her NPR interview.

What do you think? With the growing capability to filter out everything, are we really damaging our ability to tolerate and stay open minded?

The Patriots' Game

Regardless of how they fare in tomorrow’s Super Bowl, the New England Patriots have been a model of success for the past four years. This article takes us back to the Patriots' first Super Bowl win. Whether you follow football (American, that is) or not, there are lessons to be learned from the Patriots' success.

The article was written by Michael Hammer, the author of the 90’s classic Reengineering the Corporation.

Welcome to the MarketCapture blog!

Is it time to take the plunge? Am I ready to start a blog? The truth is that I don’t know. There are all sorts of questions. Who will read my blog? How will I know who does? At the same time, blogs are “in”. Everybody is blogging. ABC News nominated bloggers as People of the Year. And anybody who knows anything about marketing swears that a blog is a must.

I’ve been publishing the MarketCapture Newsletter for almost 3 years. After 30+ issues, I see blogging as an opportunity for a change of pace. Rather than writing long articles and publishing a well structured newsletter every month, I can just write whenever I feel like. Which is exactly what makes it a very dangerous proposition. Without a schedule to stick to, will I be motivated enough to write at a reasonable frequency? Time will tell.

As you can see, I’ve decided to take the plunge. I’m going to try it, have fun, and learn something new in the process. You are welcome to join me. Isn’t that what marketing is all about?

I invite you to join me on this journey. To add your input, just click on the Comments link below and then click on Post a Comment. If you’re having any difficulty, just e-mail me.