Right now you are likely focusing all your resources on your most important goals.  Some of those may be:

• Hitting your sales and profit targets
• Exceeding your customers expectations and building their loyalty
• Delivering high quality products and services
• Keeping your best employees happy and productive
• Improving your company’s financial position (accounts receivable, cashflow, expenses, etc.)

Although implementing a CRM or ERP system can be a big job and big expense, it can help reduce the stress of a tough economy and help you achieve your most important corporate objectives.

One example of the value of a CRM/ERP system in a tough economy is that it can help you sell more to your existing customers.  In a down economy, many companies go into hibernation mode and tend to conserve cash “for a rainy day”.  They also become hesitant to purchase products or services from a company they have never done business with before.  However, if a company already trusts you to deliver high quality and timely products and services, they are more likely to buy from you, even during a down economy.

It is much easier, faster, and less expensive to sell up-sell or cross-sell additional products and services to an existing customer than it is to win a new customer.  A well implemented CRM system can help you mine your existing customer base more effectively and proactively find sales opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

If you don’t already use Netsuite CRM / ERP, you may want to read more about how it can help you achieve your goals.  If you’re just warming up to the idea, maybe you should consider adding this to your budget for next year?

If you DO already use Netsuite, you may want to consider bringing us in to help you sell more to your existing customers.  Yes, you likely have the skills and knowledge to optimize Netsuite and take it to the next level of productivity, but… DO YOU HAVE THE TIME?  Call us for a FREE EVALUATION to determine if we can help you get more out of your existing tools and staff.

In recent years, applications have come a long way but it’s not fair to assume that some of the big names, like SAP, always have the perfect solution for your business.  And by solution I mean both the application, and the ecosystem that surrounds the app.

So lets get to some of the questions I feel are important.

What’s been the track record over the past 5 years?

Software, and especially software as a service has developed tremendously over the past few years and it’s important to understand the trajectory of the company and the application.  A series of false starts is sure to be a warning sign.  Progress need not be tremendously rapid, but always forward, and always with the needs of customers at heart.

Perhaps things were a little rough?  What steps have been taken to improve things for the now many customers the vendor has up and running.

What does an implementation look like?  How flexible is it?

Every company is different and yet, the same in many respects.   Do you have choice in how to deploy the system and who is involved in the implementation?  Can the implementation be modified to fit your needs, timing, and budget?  Are there resources readily available who can make sophisticated changes during the initial implementation, while at the same time ensuring that your company is self sufficient at running the app?

How deep is the functionality?

It’s easy these days to develop software that fulfills the check boxes required by the marketing team.  The trouble with any application is the level of sophistication the functional areas have, and how easy it is to actually use them day to day.  Perhaps the system can send email, but can it do so automatically and intelligently?  Perhaps it can track opportunities, but can it track projects, quotes, sales and tasks related to those opportunities?

If the answer to “What’s next on the product road map” contains many very simple requirements, perhaps it’s time to be cautious.

How Scalable is it?

As a customer, getting caught in a bait and switch has got to be one of the worst experiences.  It pays to avoid starting out with apps that are designed to upgrade you, at significant cost soon after you sign up.

Sometimes limits on the use or scalability of an application make sense.  If your company has 10 employees, a cap of 1000 would seem reasonable.  But a cap of 10 or 20 likely indicates that it’s an arbitrary number, defined in the marketing department and not actually a software limitation. And if the new app you’ll need to move to requires a new implementation?  You know you’re in for it.

What is the Vendor’s commitment to Accessibility?

Any SaaS vendor worth their salt can give you reasonably detailed uptime metrics on their systems.  Compare these to your own uptime metrics that, hopefully, you’re keeping in your own IT departments.  While all systems go down from time to time, including big name apps like Gmail and WordPress, having a track record, and a stated commitment to protecting your data is important.

In Closing

Hopefully these questions give you a start on asking some very reasonable questions of a potential vendor.  They’re not questions with a pre-defined acceptable answer, such as, Are you a public company? or with no good answer at all, such as What if you go out of business?

With luck these questions will get you into a dialog with your potential vendor and you can both work together to determine if their application meets your needs.

If you’d like to have that conversation with us, particularly as it pertains to NetSuite, please contact us.

But what about the details?  Just who exactly is visiting your site?

If you’re selling to other businesses wouldn’t it be great to know what potential customers were reading your content?

Pardot is now offering a very small subset of their functionality, for free, that enables you to see what companies are visiting your site, and what they are doing while they are there.  As long as a company can be identified from a reverse lookup, you’ll get their name in a report.

Not only can you see who’s visiting, and potentially spot opportunities before they contact you, but you can also examine specific visitor behavior, to see if your site is working as intended.  Sometimes overall stats are nice, but sometimes you need to look at the anecdotal behavior of one user.

From the Pardot Site:

Real-Time Reports Online

Log in to your VisitorID account at any time to view up-to-date reports on your identified website traffic.

Tracking which companies are visiting your website can help you both gauge interest for deals that are in progress and identify new target customers.

Detailed Activity View

Dig deeper in to a lead’s activities and see which pages were viewed, how long they spent on each page and what search terms they may have used. The detailed activity view gives the sales team greater insight in to a prospect’s area of interest.

Daily Activity Emails

For a simple way to keep up with your visitor reports, you can choose to activate daily activity emails. Each morning open your inbox to find a report of all visitor activity for the past 24 hours. Easily forward the reports to your sales reps or share with others in your organization.

If you’re interested in signing up, contact us, or sign up at Pardot’s site.

Step #1: Identify the high traffic pages

If you are using some sort of website analytics tool you will be able to easily identify the pages where the majority of your traffic is landing on your site. If the bounce rate for the page is high then you need to work on the page.

don’t get confused with exit rate and bounce rate, if your page has a high ‘exit rate’ then this could be a good thing, especially if it is a step in an online store checkout process. The bounce rate is the measure of effectiveness, this is the percentage of visitors who left your site after landing on the page.

Step #2: Assess the page from a visitor’s perspective

Try to look at the page from your web visitor’s point of view, your visitor entered a keyword or phrase into their favorite search engine and landed on your page (note that your web analytics tool should also tell you what the most common keywords were entered to reach your page). Answer a couple of questions…Is this what I expected to see? And, I’m interested, what now? If your bounce rate is high then your page design is probably not providing the answer to the first question and a change in the design is required. If you want to provide an answer to the second question move to Step #3.

Step #3: Decide on the business goal for the page

Unfortunately when delivering web pages to visitors you provide a lot of options in the hopes that what they want to achieve is available to them.  Sometimes the best approach is to focus on one business goal and provide a means for the visitor to take the desired action. Here are some typical business goals and the desired visitor action:

Some of those goals may seem obvious, and the trick is to make it obvious for the visitor to complete the goal.

Step #4: Make it easy for your web visitor to complete the goal

Once the goal has been identified deliver the call to action in a prominent location on the page (if possible without having to scroll down, sometimes called above the fold), here are some customer examples:

• If it is a button make it an obvious clickable button with a short, concise, call to action message e.g. Buy Now, Download White Paper etc. Use universal symbols like Play Buttons if you want a user to watch a video as shown in the example below:

Landing Page Example 1 - Prominent Play Button

• If you want your visitor to fill out a form try putting it on the page rather than relying on the visitor to pick a button/link in order to go to another page to fill out the form; that way you are reducing the number of clicks required to achieve the goal. The example below shows a form to request a quote for the special offer:

Landing Page Example 2 - Prominent Form

• If possible try to reduce the amount of secondary calls to action, or at least reduce the prominence on the page. Make sure that the obvious choice is your main call to action. In the example below the ‘Choose a SolidWorks Bundle’ call to action is a red highlighted area to try and draw the visitor to the call to action options and button:

Landing Page Example 3 - Obvious Call to Action

After making these changes to your high traffic internal pages you should find that your leads/sales will increase and the bounce rate for your pages will go down.

Need some help converting your high traffic pages into landing pages? Contact us we would be happy to help.

If you are looking for more information about best practices for landing pages download our white paper: ‘Guide on how to double your Qualified Leads’

What is Web Visitor Analytics?

However the major thing that is missing from the popular web analytics tools is you don’t know what each individual visitor is doing on your website. For instance you have a product page on your website, from your web analytics you can determine that 850 visitors landed on the page last month, and 245 of those visitors picked on a link to watch a video. But can you identify an individual visitor from the 1,000s that visited your site? Where did each visitor go after watching the video? Did they download a white paper? Did they visit your blog or read a customer success story?

This is where Pardot Web Marketing Automation can help you. Pardot is able to track what an individual visitor is doing and how they are using your website.

How does Web Visitor Analytics work?

Pardot seamlessly attaches a cookie to your web visitor’s browser and then tracks their interactions with your site. The visitor reporting will tell you where the visitor came from, and what pages/content they are interacting with. This provides you with immediate insight into what an individual visitor is interested in. In the example Pardot visitor analytics report shown below  you can see a list of the pages that a visitor looked at, the type of action carried out , time spent on each page, and the date and time of the visit.

Visitor Website Interactions Report

When a visitor fills out a lead form on your site to gain access to content, like a white paper, or to contact you for a quote; your visitor then becomes a Prospect. Pardot will store each prospect in a hosted web database (Pardot will sync the prospect data with your CRM system, and works with NetSuite, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sugar CRM).

How can Web Visitor Analytics help me?

Every time your prospect returns to your site and interacts with your web content their activity is tracked, as shown in the figure below.

Prospect Activities Report

Pardot can then help you to nurture your prospect with web marketing automation based on the activity with your website. For instance, if a prospect read a specific customer success story, Pardot could then send them a related white paper or product data sheet automatically without them having to fill out another form or make a request. Or your prospect registered for a webinar and downloaded a guide after the event a salesperson in your company could be alerted automatically by Pardot to contact the prospect.

Conclusion

As you can see having web visitor analytics in addition to your existing website analytics means that you can better utilize your web site, understand how visitors use your site, automate your lead generation activities and nuturing campaigns based on how a visitor interacts with your site.

Want to learn more about Pardot? Contact us to schedule a live demonstration or click here to watch a video and download our Web Automation Guide.

The problem is… will they be contacting you? Or will they be contacting your competition? Making your website into a lead generating machine rather than an electronic brochure is now more important than ever!

View our presentation below to learn how the Pardot Web Marketing Suite can help you to obtain more qualified online leads for your sales pipeline. Our presentation includes…

• How to nurture your leads until they are sales-ready.
• How to enhance your website with search tracking, landing pages, and lead capture forms.
• Being perceived as a thought leader, rather than a spammer.
• Automating the process of nurturing a potential buyer through their investigation process.
• How to track what your prospects are doing on your website

Pardot Demo on Vimeo.

Here’s a funny video from NetSuite spoofing the Apple vs Mac ads, except this time it’s SAP vs NetSuite.

There are a couple other amusing videos on the NetSuite Youtube channel.

The real goal is to get the reps more efficient by putting lower margin items online, and have reps spend their time on the larger, more consultative, opportunities.

Here’s a few of the tips I gave them during my presentation on how to properly market their webstores.

Channels

Your Website – This is an obvious one but a few had started with completely separate URLs for their store.  Integrate the store with your regular website, and link product/item descriptions to the appropriate item over in the store.

Sales Force – With large, and strong, sales teams, these companies need to ensure that their customer facing folks are on board.  But, aside from doing the legwork convincing reps that this is in their own interest, they should also:

• Move low margin items to be “Store Only”
• Include a link to the store in email footers
• Include items in the store that don’t have pricing, but are items that must be quoted by a rep

Email Marketing

These companies send a lot of blast type email, so they know how to craft a message, but some are simply including a link to their main storefront in emails to customers.

• “We have a store” doesn’t work
• Be Focused with the message
• Highlight products in Newsletters/Tech Tips
• Drive to a “Landing Page” (including an store item)
• Should be integrated with current email program
• Allows for more “news” as product line expands
• Add rules based drip marketing

Segmentation

Segmentation when thinking about your webstore may be  different than normal.  Breaking down by industry, or region, no longer matters.

• Large Existing Customers
  • Can get value from a store if it allows information on ordering history, cases, etc
  • Need to be able to purchase at pre-negotiated rates
• Small Existing Customers
  • Store is focused on these customers
  • Want detailed information, Quick Purchase
  • Set expectations on process following purchase
• Recent Customers
  • Use Store Promotions at time of Initial Sale
  • Drive to store for additional training and other items
• Leads and Prospects
  • Initial Training, Stand Alone Software
  • Store is primarily a research tool
  • New Avenue for lead generation via:
  • Shopping Networks
  • Natural Search

SEO and Inbound Marketing

We can all do a better job and getting our site found.

• Extended Natural Language Descriptions
• Feature Lists
• Images should click through to products
• Blog Articles/Tech Tips on store products
• Proper Use of Meta Tags, Alt Image Text etc
• Limit Flash Animations
• Subscribe to Online Product Catalogs
  • Froogle
  • NexTag
  • Shopping.com
  • Shopzilla

Paid Advertising

• Works better for Training and Software (in this industry)
• What works changes over time
• Focus on Geography
• Ensure you use an analytics service (Google)
• PPC vs Pay for Conversion
• Ads lead to landing pages to convert immediately
• Ads and Landing pages are very focused

Focus on Conversion

• Focus on your Site Conversion Rate
  • # Buyers/# Visitors
• Every section of your site should lead to:
• Product in Store
• Contact me Form
• Download Information Form

Drip Marketing

• Use it to segment your customers by interest
• Use it to test messaging
• Use it to time offers to your customers
  • 3 months after purchase – Product A
  • 6 months after purchase – Product B
  • 12 months after purchase – Service A
• Cart Abandonment Emails

Who Owns the Store

Treat your store as a Sales Rep

• It needs to be productive
• It needs to be fed traffic
• It needs to be informative
• It needs to be easy
• It needs a quota

It’s not “Just Marketing”

There’s a few bullets to think about.  There’s a lot behind those simple lines of text.  If you’d like to have a conversation about your e-commerce desires, send us a message.

Pardot’s email marketing automation solution is a tremendous application for anyone who wants to do a better job sending emails and generating leads. With rules based email, intelligent lead scoring, and integration with NetSuite, Salesforce and SugarCRM it’s sure to improve almost any marketing department that sells B2B.

The first thing to know is that Prospect Insight, Pardot’s application, works just great as a stand alone application.  When you are using it in combination with a CRM tool it’s designed to operate “in front” of your CRM, feeding it with leads when it’s appropriate to contact them.

The image to the right really sums it up.  Pardot will capture web visitors information and activities, score the lead, automate email followups, and then, when you deem it useful, assign the lead to a sales rep.

Do you have problems with large quantities of “junk” leads?

Do you wish you could sort leads by how interested they are in your website?

Do you wish you could nurture cold leads with a call to action that makes sense for that individual contact?

I could ask a hundred more questions.  But if you say yes, then read no more and contact us to see a demo.

Read more if you must…

Prospect Insight is a great email and general marketing automation tool designed for businesses who market and sell B2B. The suite is an end-to-end solution to manage your lead data, create automation rules, deploy them and then track ROI for online marketing campaigns.

• Automated Prospect Grading / Scoring
• Landing Page Generator with Dynamic Forms
• Automation Rules
• Full Email Capabilities
• Anonymous Visitor Capture
• Drip Marketing
• Automatic Prospect Alerts
• Campaign Tracking and Reporting
• NetSuite Integration
• Two-way Salesforce.com integration

Creating Campaigns, Emails, and Rule sets is much easier than other tools that you may be used to using.  This alone can save many hours per month just in the time spent managing lists, groups, responses, and ROI data.

Pardot allows you to track each prospect across a variety of marketing channels allowing you to track, segment and score each prospect based on their action and interest.  Did they search for pricing?  Did they visit multiple product pages?  Did they click through your email? This will help you to identify the most sales ready leads.

Once you know even a little about a prospect, your drip marketing rules can kick in.  The better your rules, the better you’ll give the prospect the information and experience they are looking for.

Drip marketing allows you to set a schedule of personalized, automated emails to send to less sales-ready prospects and nurture them. Drip Marketing keeps your organization in front of the client until the prospect is ready to buy.  Sales will be able to see the email that has been sent to each prospect, and what their response was to each message.

Now there is no need to just “set it and forget it.” Pardot also has the ability, to monitor in real time, who is visiting your site.  If you’re very interested in a particular prospect you can get connected with them right away and ensure, personally, that they are getting the attention they deserve.

At the end of the month, Management is always looking for reports and more reports so that they can understand just what is working and what isn’t from the marketing department.  It’s easy to say that the data is just too hard to collect, but with Pardot most of the excuses go away.  The data on what emails, messages, and drip marketing strategies are working is much easier to get at than you are probably used to.

There are a lot more reasons to love Pardot, but the final main one is that it’s hosted, and it’s pay as you go, with no contract.  Try it out for a month or two, improve your delivery rates, improve your response rates, and increase your conversion to sales.  For $500/month you can’t go wrong.

In a future post we’ll talk about how it integrates with NetSuite in more detail.