Because of the tremendous growth we’ve seen over the last several months, we’re a bit short-staffed – which is a great problem to have!

We’re excited to announce not one, not two, but three open positions at Optify.

If you’re a smart, talented and fun individual with a passion for tech, digital marketing and free bagels, we’d love to hear from you.

Currently, we have the following opportunities:

Support: Customer Engagement Specialist

In this position, you will be directly responsible for ensuring customer happiness. We educate our customers about the Optify software and digital marketing in general, guide product adoption, resolve questions, and create support processes for greater scale.

Core responsibilities include:

• Conducting customer-training sessions on the phone or in person, developing and learning new training flows on an ongoing basis
• Troubleshooting software issues and answering support calls and emails with diplomacy and ease
• Improving existing and creating new easy-to-use help documentation such as training videos or written documentation
• Following up with customers on their experience and driving adoption of new features through calls and targeted emails
• Helping to develop new reports and processes that allow us to scale while continuing to ensure the highest possible customer satisfaction

Read the full job description and apply here.

Sales: Account Manager

In this position you will be responsible for managing a customer base of around 200 accounts, expanding the usage across that customer base, delivering online product demonstrations, as well as being responsible for minimizing cancellations.

Core responsibilities include:

• Generate additional revenue from an existing customer base
• Become an expert in digital marketing, as well as being an expert in identifying the challenges that our customers face, which can be solved with digital marketing strategies
• Build and maintain good working relationships with customers as well as expanding the users at a given company
• Work collaboratively across the sales and support teams to complete activities including presentations, prospecting, qualification, closing and account management
• Contribute to product roadmap by communicating key product and service needs to marketing and engineering teams
• Track relevant sales activity in Salesforce.com

Read the full job description and apply here.

Sales: Account Executive

In this position you will be responsible for qualifying inbound leads, scheduling appointments, delivering online product demonstrations, whining to our marketing team about your leads (we consider this your solemn right as a sales team member) and closing new customers primarily over the phone. Just kidding, we’re experiencing high demand for our software and services, so you’ll deal with highly qualified leads!

Core responsibilities include:

• Generate new customers consistently at or above quota
• Become an expert in digital marketing, as well as being an expert in identifying the challenges that our prospective customers face, which can be solved with digital marketing strategies
• Build and maintain good working relationships with customers and potential customers
• Work collaboratively across the sales team to complete activities including presentations, prospecting, qualification, closing and account management
• Contribute to product roadmap by communicating key product and service needs to marketing and engineering teams
• Track relevant sales activity in Salesforce.com

Read the full job description and apply here.

If any of these positions seem like a great fit, we’d love to hear from you!

Disclaimer: I love math.

If you’re a B2B marketer, you’re probably in one of two groups – you either hate anything to do with numbers or you love it. I love it. It’s also the reason why I became a marketer; the combination between art and science, left brain and right brain, creativity and data-driven decisions. B2B marketing tends to be heavily skewed towards the analytics side, and the success of any business comes with figuring out the mathematical model that makes it a profitable organization. So is the case with marketing teams. If you want to be successful in generating demand for your business and delivering high quality leads to your sales team, you need to understand the mechanics of your business.

How much is a lead worth?

I recently visited a friend who works for an event center. He manages the marketing and sales and has one junior employee and one contractor. It’s a B2C business but since the price of an event is on average $10K, it operates more like a B2B organization – leads, long sales cycle, multiple decision makers, etc. (Read more about B2B Marketing vs. B2C Marketing here.)

He asked me to look into his marketing and help him understand why they are not seeing an increase in leads even though they are spending much more on PPC. They rank organically on the first SERP for a few of the more competitive terms in his market (industry and location) and spend more than $1,500 every month on PPC. So after I went over the basic discovery process and gathered the information on the basic mechanics of his business, I asked him – “How much is a lead worth to you?”

I ask this question whenever I get a chance and the answers always fascinate me. I find it to be extremely revealing – it tells me how knowledgeable the person is, how they approach marketing, how they treat leads and if they have a sense of the basic elements of their funnel.

The next hour of my friendly session was all about math – the math of marketing.

The basic math of B2B marketing

“Let’s outline your sales process,” I said. His sales process is fairly simple and since the price point is high but the business is small, the volume is relatively low and he deals with the entire process. He gets about 150 leads per month, which he calls ‘inquiries’. The next level in his sales funnel is a qualification call to set up a meeting. If a lead is qualified and willing to meet, he sets up a meeting during which he shows the venue and talks about the service (the lead is now an opportunity). From the 150 leads, he gets about 60 meetings (opportunities) — a 40% conversion rate. After the meeting, he follows up with an email and calls again 3-4 days later. He also sends some recommendations about the place and if he feels like the opportunity needs a “push,” he also offers a discount (nurturing). If the person is interested, they meet again to close the details of the deal. From 60 meetings a month, he closes, on average 18 deals — a 30% win rate (!).

“Now you can calculate how much a lead is worth.” I continued, “Let’s start from the end. Your revenue from each deal is $10K and your win rate is 30%, so a meeting is worth $3K. In other words, you need 3.3 meetings in order to close a $10K deal. Since your conversion rate from a lead to a meeting is 40% – you need 2.5 leads to get an opportunity – then a lead is worth $1,200!” He looked surprised and said, “You want to tell me that every lead I get is worth $1,200? That sounds unrealistic. I also don’t intend to spend that much on getting leads.”

I replied: “Good, because if you do, you will lose money. The $1,200 is only the revenue you get from each lead based on the numbers you gave and based on the assumptions in this model. To calculate your breakeven point, you need to use profit, and in order to calculate the marketing budget for leads, you will need to exclude from your current expenses all the variable costs you spend on marketing – PPC, display, etc.”

This is a screenshot of the marketing sales calculator I created. You can download it below.

We ran a quick analysis of the company’s costs and determined a profit margin of 12%. This meant a profit of $1,200 per deal. We plugged it into the model and came up with $144 per lead.

I explained: “With the numbers in your model, to break even, you can spend $144 on every lead you generate; this is the value of your leads. Now, let’s go back to your PPC initiative. You told me that you spend $1,500 per month on PPC. Using your lead value of $144 per lead, you need to ask yourself a simple question – are you getting more than 11 leads per month from this channel? If you do, assuming all the other assumptions in the model are true for this channel (conversion rates, revenue and profit-per-deal), then this is a positive ROI channel. But if you are generating 10 or less leads a month, then you are spending more money than you earn and you should reconsider this channel.”

I left him with a lot of homework, but a better understanding of his business mechanics and the math behind his marketing and sales. A few days later I met another friend who sells heavy machinery equipment to companies. We met for lunch to talk about lead generation. “How much is a lead worth to you?” I asked.

Marketing-Sales Funnel Spreadsheet Example

Download my “Marketing-Sales Funnel: Calculating Your Funnel Values” spreadsheet below to make your own calculations.

Our speakers, Karen Burka, author of “Digital Agencies 2013: A Marketer’s Guide,” and Rob Eleveld, CEO of Optify, provided an overview of the current digital agency landscape and a look into the future of digital marketing services.

Watch the recorded webinar to learn about:

• the convergence of paid, earned and owned media
• mergers & acquisitions in the agency industry
• the evolution of ‘traditional’ channel services
• how digital marketing services transform into integrated marketing services
• pricing models for B2B digital marketing agency services
• how to add new services to your agency offerings

Presentation: The Future of Digital Marketing Services: Where Will Agencies be in 2014?

This webinar included an interactive polling of the audience, providing a benchmark among peers. If you are a B2B marketer or a digital agency trying to make sense of the digital marketing agency landscape, please help us learn more about the changing landscape of digital marketing services and complete this quick survey (less than 5 minutes). Thank you!

All too often I talk to agencies that don’t offer email marketing campaigns as a service for their clients. This always leaves me puzzled because as a small business owner on a budget, email campaigns are my bread and butter, next to word of mouth. They are easy to do, drive lots of traffic and lead to more sales than any other marketing campaign I’ve attempted. Email campaigns are the basis of my entire month, and my mom (business partner) literally schedules her trips (flight attendant) around when we are doing new email campaign promotions.

Agencies have the opportunity to manipulate their clients’ revenue streams around email marketing campaigns and grow their clients’ house lists through email, SEO, social media, PPC, etc.

I wanted to write this post to highlight the major reasons why email marketing campaigns are so effective and as an attempt to put some noise in the way of SEO and social media. Studies have shown that SEO and social media results aren’t even close to the results from email campaigns. Of course, SEO, social media and other marketing tactics are important as well for their own reasons, but in terms of cost-per-leads generated, email marketing takes the cake.

Here are 5 reasons why you absolutely need email marketing campaigns:

1. Return on Investment

According to the Direct Marketing Association, the ROI for email marketing in 2012 was 4,300% — or for every dollar you spend, you make $43. Direct mail and print only have a 1 to 3% ROI.

On top of that, DMA forecasted that email marketing produced $67.8 billion in sales in 2012 and will produce $82.2 billion in 2016. In contrast, social media has an average conversion of less than 2%.

2. Cost

Depending on what type of software solution you use for email marketing campaigns, your budget could be $0 (i.e., MailChimp), or hundreds of thousands of dollars sending to millions of contacts. Typically, email costs about $0.01 to send to a single recipient. Compared to other marketing channels, email simply wins on budget; for example, direct mail typically costs about 100 times more than email.

3. Visibility

Email marketing campaigns give you more visibility than most other channels. In fact, it’s the only marketing channel that has the ability to reach 100% of its target audience. Email has the maximum potential delivery rate because you’re sending marketing directly to an individual’s email box. If you follow the rules by only sending to opted-in lists and use a whitelisted email provider, your delivery, open and click thru rates will be much higher. TV commercials average 30 seconds of visibility and only 10-15% of audiences using Facebook EdgeRank Algoritihm are exposed to paid ads.

You can manipulate how many people see your campaign by sending it at an optimal time and day that performs well for your targeted market. According to GetResponse, Thursday is the best day to send emails, looking at overall results for open rates and CTR.

4. Targeting and Segmentation

Unlike most marketing campaigns (with the exception of paid social media ads and SEO/PPC), email marketing lets you target and segment your personas. Depending on the email system you use, you can filter the personas by things like customers, prospects, opportunities, or mothers age 40+ vs. males age 20-30. Segmentation typically comes from the landing page conversion.

5. Real-Time Metrics and Autoresponders

Email campaigns give you the ability to see performance metrics starting right when you send the campaign. It typically takes about 3 days total to give you the final metrics for opens, clicks, visits, unsubscribes and soft bounces (to account for people who don’t open their emails right away). Some email campaign software can give you visitor intelligence from the email or new form submissions/purchases.

You can also set up autoresponders that automatically send an email after a visitor converts on a landing page. Autoresponders can significantly increase your businesses visibility, as new prospects are being exposed via organic search, paid search or simply direct from word of mouth.

If you are running into trouble trying to convince a client to convert prospect names through landing pages or use email as a marketing channel, hopefully this post will help you do some selling!

This webinar has been rescheduled to Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 11am PDT.

Email marketing is still the primary correspondence for businesses with their customers and clients. The ‘newsletter’ is a critical communication and demand generation vehicle. However, to do it right requires a contact manager, email, landing pages, autoresponders and more.

Join us for a free 1-hour webinar on how to develop and deploy a customer newsletter using the integrated tools of Optify. For digital marketing agencies, learn how to price and sell this important marketing service to your new and existing clients.

Zach Okun, Optify’s director of product management, will present a step-by-step process for how to develop, build and send a customer newsletter using Optify.

Rob Eleveld, Optify CEO, will then explain how to price and package this new service to sell to your existing and new clients.

This webinar is designed for both B2B marketers and digital marketing agencies and does not require an Optify account.

Can’t register from here? Click here to sign up on our BrightTalk channel.

About the speakers

Rob Eleveld, Optify CEO, is a 20-year tech veteran with deep experience in B2B sales and marketing. Rob is passionate about growing business through partner channels at Optify and excited about the opportunity that inbound marketing affords to forward-thinking digital marketing agencies.

Zach Okun, Optify’s director of product management, is responsible for enforcing Optify’s simple mantra – ‘Simple,  Insightful, and Actionable’, and thinks that marketers deserve better tools to deal with a rapidly changing technological landscape. Prior to Optify, Zach was a senior product manager at Amazon Web Services, where he worked on what he refers to as “the bowels of the internet.”

For any sales team, there’s nothing better than being handed a batch of freshly qualified leads. But even the best Marketing department can’t tell you everything about who’s picking up on the other end of the line. Lucky for sales, there’s social.

I used to work in politics, and before any political candidate makes a dial to fund their next campaign, they want to know three things about the lead: what are the names and ages of their children, and do they have a dog. In sales it’s no different – well, okay, it’s a little different. We talk a good deal less about our dogs, but it does help to know that little something extra you can’t get from a job title. In this digital age, whether it’s the name of your Border Collie or the company you worked at two years ago, that something can probably be found on a Facebook Wall, Twitter feed, or Linkedin profile.

LinkedIn

My SEO conversation with a former SEOMoz employee is not even close to the one I’ll have with the customer whose entire career has been spent in print media. Knowing a lead’s resume informs me how to inform them. And a quick LinkedIn connection is a great way to encourage someone to go back to their inbox for another look at my email.

What you’ll find here:

• Resume
• Alma mater
• Specific responsibilities and focus
• Common connections

Twitter

Twitter is the social space where customers and businesses interact. Some Twitter feeds read like a client testimonial page. As a sales rep, I need to understand how my customers do business, and nothing starts off that conversation better than discussing the big deal they just closed or the bar they went to celebrate it.

What you’ll find here:

• Ongoing company campaigns
• Restaurant, movie, and event check-ins
• Sports affiliations

Facebook

With Memorial Day weekend at the end of this month, vacation and travel will push deals to the brink of the 31st. Facebook may not be a hub for professional discussion, but when someone is looking forward to 5 days on a beach in Cancun, they usually let you know on Facebook well in advance. It’s those little insights that might get you dialing that lead before their next post about security lines at the airport. Keep in mind: many folks opt to make their Facebook profiles private, so this might not always be an available channel.

What you’ll find here:

• Family background (Border Collie?)
• Recent travel
• Birthdays

What other social media channels do you use to research your prospects? Leave ‘em in the comments!

SEATTLE – May 13, 2013 – Optify today announced that Optify Connect has been named a Finalist in the Marketing Software New Product of the Year category in The 2013 American Business Awards, and will ultimately be a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie® Award winner in the program.

“We are thrilled and honored to be named a Finalist for this year’s Stevie® Awards,” said Rob Eleveld, CEO of Optify. “We’ve been fine-tuning our software suite to meet the ever-growing needs of digital marketing agencies, and Optify Connect is an integral part of that success.”

The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small.

More than 3,200 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories, including Most Innovative Company of the Year, Management Team of the Year, Best New Product or Service of the Year, Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year, and Executive of the Year, among others. Optify’s Optify Connect is nominated in the Marketing Software New Product of the Year category.

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of Finalists in all categories are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

In addition to being named a Stevie Award Finalist, Optify Connect has also won a 2013 Gold Edison Award for excellence in digital marketing software and was named Network Products Guide Lead Generation Campaign of the Year.

About Optify
Optify delivers a simple digital marketing software suite that is the industry standard for agency marketers. Our complete cloud-based platform empowers agencies to easily create and manage multiple lead generation programs, nurture the hottest prospects, prioritize the highest performing programs and streamline reporting of client results — all from one login. Optify is headquartered near Pioneer Square in the heart of Seattle, Washington. To learn more about Optify, please visit the Optify website or the digital marketing blog.

About the Stevie Awards
Stevie Awards are conferred in four programs: The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. A fifth program, the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, will debut this year. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.

Everybody has probably heard the term “decentralized organization” and wondered how anybody could possibly drive consistency across a group that’s by definition spread apart. In this particular post, I’m writing about companies that have a corporate headquarters, but rely on managers out in the field to perform the day-to-day marketing activities. This could be a franchise model or a re-seller network.

These activities can be anything from complete website management to simply sending an email campaign once a quarter, but it can be extremely difficult to grow as an organization without implementing good processes around the marketing communications of these individual offices.

The goal in these organizations is not to hire 3 or 4 good marketers at the corporate level to drive the business forward; it’s to inspire good marketing out at the local office level. Here are 3 tips to help manage a decentralized marketing organization.

1. Define consistent metrics

In marketing we rely heavily on metrics to drive our decision-making. If the Florida office reports on visits as their success metric from email marketing, the New York office reports on unique opens, and San Francisco reports on conversions, we’ll be comparing apples, oranges and peaches.

Think hard about what metrics matter most to your business and ensure that each office is capable of delivering that metric to you on a regular basis. One way to ensure consistency is consolidating the technologies used by each market, preferably one that provides the corporate marketing department access to the metrics – allowing them to compare markets’ performance and gain insights into which campaigns are most effective.

2. Create initiatives that are easy to adopt

Driving adoption of any initiative across a distributed network is difficult for a number of reasons, but number one is likely that it’s difficult for them given their resource constraints. Corporate headquarters may have 4-5 advanced digital marketers who are each capable of managing sophisticated technologies and campaigns – but if you create initiatives with these marketers in mind, the offices will not be successful. Typically these offices have 1 (or fewer) marketer and they have to manage every aspect of marketing, on and offline.

Create how-to documentation for any digital initiative you push out to your offices, provide access to technology that simplifies the process and start small!

One of the keys to showing these offices that they can be successful with this (or any other) campaign is working with a couple offices and proving that success at the local level, then sharing that success with the entire network.

3. Provide incentives and oversight

This tip seems to go without saying for most organizations. The reason we have managers is precisely to provide oversight and ongoing incentives. Decentralized organizations are presented with a challenge however, since the corporate marketing team isn’t necessarily managing all the marketers in their network. Additionally, by definition, they aren’t in the same office.

In these organizations, the incentives need to be peer to peer, and the oversight needs to be based on relative performance.

Provide a prize to the top 3 lead generating (or whatever metric you feel is your top priority) markets each month – send an email each month congratulating them in front of the other markets and don’t be afraid to show the entire list. This will notify them that you’re keeping tabs on everybody, not just propping up the top performers.

The motivation for the markets that are slow to adopt your technologies and initiatives will be the relative performance of their colleagues above all else.

Managing decentralized networks is not easy, but in marketing organizations these three tips will provide an equal and consistent system by which you can measure relative success. It will also encourage and inspire marketers in your local offices to keep up with their colleagues, and raise the bar for what success means.

These brave marketers followed the general rules of PPC and thought they were good to go, but instead they found themselves burning through their budgets at a rate that they had not seen since the early days of advertising on Twitter. Those lucky enough to not waste tons of budget seemed to be unable to get their ads displaying with any sort of regularity. Sound familiar?

I was in the same boat, but through trial and error I’ve been able to determine some best practices for Linkedin advertising.

1. Test, test, and retest

The reason I’m able to write this blog post is because I never gave up. I tested and retested every element of my campaigns. LinkedIn is a developed platform and as such it gives you — the marketer — the ability to sufficiently test your campaigns. To be exact, LinkedIn allows 15 ads per campaign, which translates to 15 tries to dial in your ad.

I shouldn’t have to explain the importance of testing — there isn’t a blog post out there that doesn’t stress this fundamental component of marketing. To our benefit, LinkedIn will take your best performing ads and show them most frequently, so get on it. It’s not just the language that is important, but the combination of language, call-to-action and catchy image working together that will result in the right clicks. So test different combinations and retire your poor performers so that you can try new ads regularly.

2. Hyper-Targeting

Everyone wants to talk about hyper-targeting these days. It’s great for smaller businesses targeting their ideal customers, but it’ll result in low click volume and low performing ads that won’t be served. Remember, you’re not the only brand running ads targeting your ideal audience. Instead of being hyper-targeted, find a wider audience in the 50-500k range. This will result in your target audience actually being served regularly and it’ll also allow you to hit your goals.

3. Provide substance

Don’t just serve an ad, provide value and substance. Make your ad copy compelling enough that people actually want to click on it.

Your target audience gets served ads all day every day, so if you want the clicks, you’ve gotta earn them. What does your target audience value, what pain points can you solve, what can you teach them? Stop thinking about yourself for a minute and ask yourself, “What does my audience care about?”

Once you know what that pain point is, tell your audience in plain language how you can help them solve it. When you’re finished constructing your ad, ask yourself, “Would I click on this? Is it actually interesting, fun, valuable?” If the answer is no, then start over.

4. Price for goals, not for suggested range

Success on LinkedIn requires that the advertiser buy at the high end of a suggested range in order to gain visibility in competitive areas. Going in at the minimum results in seriously poor performance (much more than on other ad platforms). A higher spend combined with clicks will result in high frequency and will allow you to hit your goals.

5. Optimize your ads

Like all social advertising, the content must speak directly to the target audience. Ads with poor creative result in low CTR and, as many LinkedIn advertisers have noticed, CTR below 0.25 get very limited impressions due to poor performance. With LinkedIn, high CTR is paramount to success. It’s also important to note that many advertisers get too specific with their audience, resulting in poor campaign performance. This may seem counter-intuitive, but a wider net will enable your ads to pick up the stragglers who haven’t properly identified themselves on their LinkedIn profiles, resulting in higher campaign performance.

BONUS TIP: Landing pages

As with any social campaign, it’s important to properly direct your clicks to highly relevant and optimized pages. We have a great article on landing page best practices, so check it out for quick tips. Even the best performing LinkedIn ads are a waste if you’re not converting, so be sure to do everything you can to test and modify your landing pages.

I hope this post inspires you to get back on that horse and give LinkedIn advertising another try. If you’re an advertising newbie, I can honestly say that I’m jealous — I wish I knew then what I know now.

1. More fields

We recently took a very detailed look at how some of the best companies out there are (or aren’t) using autoresponders.

As part of that effort, we saw that the average number of fields on some of the most successful forms tends to hover in the 5-7 range. We remain committed to the premise that fewer fields is better–every field you add is another impediment to capturing that precious lead info. However, we realized that sometimes you simply need more than 6 fields. So we now allow you to add as many fields as you want to your Landing Pages. But be careful — this is one of those cases where more is decidedly NOT better.

2. Multi-line text fields

We hear you, sometimes you just want a big field for a lot of input. We all see these fields all the time. The company asks for “Comments” or “Tell us about your needs” or something else that requires a short paragraph. Just go ahead and create a custom field (or 10) and set them to “Text – Multiple lines” and now you can have “More” :)

3. More colors

While we’re in the spirit of offering more flexibility, why not let you go nuts with colors? (Actually, please don’t :]). We understand that you may very well have exact hexadecimal codes for your company colors. Who are we to tell you that orange and purple and yellow do not look great on your form? You should get to pick from all the colors of the rainbow, and then some.

Please let us know how you like these changes. Oh, and if you like these, just wait ’til you see what we’ve got for you in the coming weeks …