Reading “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale” by Ardath Albee

RT @rHubsInc Thanks @mercurygrove for hosting an amazing #democamp last night! Kudos @mymusicdotcom @openera @ProjectSpeaker @JetStreamHD @bigbluebutton

http://t.co/vAQ3Px7w B2B sales aren’t impulse buys, they follow a predictable path. Just like the proverbial trick for navigating a maze…

There’s a difference between gaining mastery of a field and just learning what you needed to know to do the job.

Some simplistic advice for staying on top of your network: Scroll through LinkedIn connections monthly, you’ll be amazed at what you learn.

RT @Emondm RT @selamissirian: a name becomes a lead when 2 people think it makes sense to continue a conversation Via @MarketingProfs

Have shuttered myself up today: doing Information Architecture for a site. #deepconcentration

RT @MarketingIntel How B2B Marketers Can Help Win Complex Sales http://ow.ly/9ETAJ

Pleased to donate a site optimization review for the #bootstrapawards prizewheel. Contests to all the worthy business winners.

@Obj_news gives rundown of #Ottawa incubators, including @thecodefactory, @mercurylaunch & @Exploriem http://t.co/XclESR93

Explaining the math behind marketing conversions & sales closes can get people down. Saying that a percent of a… http://t.co/WNdKWdoK

RT @techvibesOtt Who are Canada’s Top 100 Startups? You may be surprised ht.ly/9999V

Shopping for an Email Service Provider? Here’s a good comparison http://t.co/L88hIy9g

Best book chapter title: Fusing the Me in Social Media and the We in the Social Web – Brian Solis’ Engage!

good question raised in latest #marketingovercoffee asks What do you differently on each social network? #moc

On Google+? Have you visited this page where I regularly share thoughts on the technology world and marketing?… http://t.co/bP3wKCx5

Study in contrasts: social media spends lots of space talking up a product, online advertising uses as little space as possible.

Could your tech company use $22K? A new award being offered to an Ottawa/Waterloo company with wealth-building model: http://t.co/HccFnV2g

Have a Google+ business page? People now have an easier way to find it. Go to Google search and type your… http://t.co/24hQ14o0

@jackson_lo [my favourite podcasts are] Marketing Over Coffee, Talknowledgy, Under the Influence, Sitepoint podcast, Simple Mobile Review. That fills a week.

I keep breaking my work down into smaller & smaller tasks… And oddly I find I get the big jobs done faster that way. #productivity

RT @web20_marketing Marketing Excellence via Mobile Marketing Solution | Business | Un … bit.ly/wi251j

One of the biggest questions that weighs on the mind of technology buyers is Will it work? Many have been… http://t.co/3HQVR1q6

I’d love to connect with you on whichever social network you happen to use. Please follow me via the ‘badges’ on every page of my website or search for me, Glenn Schmelzle, under the name HeyGlennS.

As someone who’s been handling the tools for 18 years, I have noticed big changes in the technology that supports the buying and selling of products. These technologies have made life easier for both sellers and buyers, but I’ve deliberately skewed them because the more they’re used, the more they end up benefiting one side more than the other.

Innovations benefiting the buyer’s side

Probably the biggest boon for those who need to do their research before buying is the corporate website. Unlike the days of calling an 800 number and getting a brochure or catalogue in the mail (and several follow-up calls!), people can obtain rich detail on a product before identifying themselves. Thanks to XML, price-shopping sites allow them to compare competing products. Sellers aren’t fond of these developments, because they have to divulge a lot of information, but market forces give them no choice.

As email became the dominant communications mode for B2B interaction, it began to be accompanied by a terrific tool: the spam filter. This innovation, more than legislative restrictions, has put people in control of their inboxes. They are liked by marketers who use opt-in techniques and very feared by spam artists. Sure, there’s room for sellers to send a one-time-only inquiry, but in the end, you can choose who to maintain relations with on email.

Social media is on the rise as a buyers’ tool. Its chief use here is to connect with others to share information on products without even consulting the product’s makers. There were earlier iterations of this like TripAdvisor and Epinions, but the newer crop: Twitter, Facebook, Techcrunch and the blogosphere have put the web’s usefulness as a third-party opinion tool into overdrive.

Innovations benefiting the seller’s side

I think CRMs have had the largest impact in recent years. Whether local or in the cloud, private or open-sourced like Sugar, they are great for letting everybody in a company toss what they know about the customer into one bucket. The resulting profile gives a picture of prospects that is much more accurate than ever before. Here’s one example of how CRMs and direct marketing techniques have helped: You used to receive new product promotions in proportion to the product’s revenue forecast. If you weren’t part of the audience it was meant for, tough! Now, you are (usually) receiving promos for items geared for you. The fact that you receive more of these messages is owing to the mushrooming number of products on the market; it’s not marketing’s fault. 

The beta deserves mention. No, not the VCR format that duked it out with VHS in the ’80s. Few technologies today are launched ‘cold,’ most are pre-released to power-users. Everything about a product can be crowd-sourced today…and it’s a good thing. The vehicles for leaking info (and code) on new products have also exploded in use. Webex, appexchange, sourceforge and Amazon’s EC2  have all dramatically reduced the cost of sharing work-in-progress with potential buyers. This ultimately lowers risk for the seller; no one wants to have another ‘New Coke’ fiasco on their hands.

Creating documents in Adobe format has been a great development in marketing. As the P in PDF indicates, it’s made print-quality collaterals extremely ‘portable.’ This has not only removed printing and mailing costs, it has enabled instant gratification and reaction from buyers on the content of those documents. If buyers don’t react well to the collaterals, marketers can re-write and re-publish them in no time.

Finally, I’ll mention the umbrella category of Business Intelligence tools, that includes web analytics, email measurements, social media monitoring. These are all means for marketers to understand what works – this data was nigh unto impossible to have in pre-internet days. Automation point-solutions, as well as suite-providers like Silverpop, Marketo and Eloqua are now giving unprecedented visibility into the sales funnel. This holds the promise of tightening sales forecasts and informing executives of specifically how their tactics are working.

To conclude, these tools have been fantastic as they’ve forced buyers and sellers to rethink how they do business. Together, these have all helped buyers and sellers reach out to each other. I think they’ve supplanted old, crude, disruptive marketing methods. They provide a great indication of how far we can go in the future, although knowing exactly where innovation will happen next is anyone’s guess.

image credit: Flickr: k_unit

I recently had the good fortune of talking directly with two sales veterans, as part of a webinar hosted by the Sales Professionals of Ottawa The people on the call included Jim Carty, Sales Manager at Konica Minolta Business Solutions, Brian Boychuk, former EVP Business Development at WebTech Wireless and myself as moderator. We talked on the topic of sales leads for 45 minutes; here are some snippets.

Glenn Schmelzle: “A recent LinkedIn Poll conducted by the Sales Professionals of Ottawa found that 60% of reps receive a portion of their leads from marketing. Whose job is it to generate leads: sales, marketing or both?”
Jim Carty: “All too often, the reps are the people who are generating the first leads. Though they are supposed to be closing the business, they are the one out there developing the lead, simply because it’s their bread and butter that they’re looking for.”

GS: “Have you found that leads have changed over time? Have they gone through a metamorphosis, like the change shown in those famous Charles Atlas advertisements found in old comic books? I’m comparing prospects of yesteryear to the 98lb weakling, who didn’t have much power in the vendor-client relationship. Meanwhile I’d liken suppliers to ‘the Bully’ in the ads, using the strength of his product knowledge to keep the prospect under his control. The arrival of internet search has given prospects access to all the data they need to buy from suppliers, turning them from 98lb weaklings into musclemen, levelling the playing field between them and suppliers. So are you finding that leads are more informed today?”

BB: “Suppliers now feel pretty exposed…the direction is clear, the internet is playing that role.”

JC: “But clients may read up on a product on the Internet, sometimes to their own detriment. They come in and they have a preconceived notion of what they’re looking for. And now it’s often up to the sales rep to re-educate the person on what is available, what products can actually do, where the price point may or may not be and what’s available in any given environment. If a client says ‘these are my pains and I know that the solution you have looks like this, therefore give me information on [that solution].’ By jumping down that road and moving at the client’s pace, you’re not always doing your due diligence…. Sometimes it’s more important to slow down a prospect and ask ‘Have they addressed everything?’”

GS: “Do you have a uniform process for qualifying and handling leads? Do you treat all leads the same?”

JC: “Leads that come in as a referral, e.g. by a service technician who went to call on that client, are very different than cold leads.”

BB: “If a company has grown to where they use a sales force automation or CRM system, qualified leads should definitely be put in those systems.”

GS: “How long is the sales cycle from prospect to client? Is there a need to nurture leads over time?”

BB: “In Government it’s like a laundry cycle. you put the clothes in and then walk away, just checking periodically to ensure everything’s all right. In B2B, it’s about understanding [the customer] and what their key milestones are and what their process looks like. You want to keep an open dialogue and try to ascertain how much contact is warranted. So that’s a nurturing process which I think is an interesting area where marketing can help.”

GS: “What advice do you have for people who don’t have a lead process? What kind of reports should sales managers be asking for?”
JC: “This can become such a quagmire when you start to look at forecasting, funnel management, lead tracking. There is so much that can be thrown into the pile that it can become very daunting… What are the key activities or key performance indicators? If you were able to track three or four of those on a regular basis, that would be far better than trying to look at tracking every metric that’s available.”

BB: “You need to report frequently enough that you’re catching things that change with the prospect…and react in time.”

JC: “Not only that, but when done right, you end up with a shorthand system that reps can use to tell management where deals are at.”

BB: “What you’re trying to do in sales reporting is to mirror what’s going on at your prospect’s shop. Your milestones should be built around their stages, like business casing and budgeting.”

GS: “What’s the payoff for a company that effectively handles its leads?”

BB: “When you have the right amount of reporting and the right support from other departments like customer service and marketing, that’s the holy grail of lead management. This helps [the sales rep] bring the sale to a close, because you’re getting all the right support, and management is getting feedback…in real time.”

GS: “Thanks very much, gentlemen, for your great insights into generating and managing leads.”

thumbnail credit: royalty-free stock image

I think there is a need for this type of solution, but you need to evaluate the unique needs of your organization before plunging into the complex and costly packages that automation vendors offer today.

When you don’t need Marketing Automation

You don’t need it to just send emails. Jeff Erramouspe, CEO of Manticore, recently said “there are companies that bought marketing automation software, and then did nothing but email with it. And if that’s all you’re going to do, then you’re spending five times what you need to spend for basically the same results [as] hiring an email service provider.”

Stages of Automation

When we boil down most Marketing Automation suites, they are usually comprised of tools that perform four key functions:

1. Sending Contextual Emails
2. A/B Testing & Optimizing Landing Pages
3. Passive Identifying Website Visitor
4. Scoring Identified Leads

It should be noted that all of these functions have been available as stand-alone solutions. The question isn’t whether you’ve hopped on the Marketing Automation bandwagon, it’s really about which of these four things you’ve put to use in your organization?

The imperative for high tech

In a yearend roundtable by the Marketing Automation Institute, a panel was discussing how well automation tools have been adopted by certain industries. Bryan Brown of Silverpop said,

His reasoning for why high-tech companies adopt marketing automation so quickly is that their business models call for hypergrowth and that this forces the marketing and sales functions to work together closely, with the help of these new tools. So while I discourage technology firms from running out in haste to buy Marketing Automation suites, they’re not off the hook. I encourage them to follow the marketing principles these vendors have codified in their products, by starting off with tools that perform individual functions like contextual autoresponder emails and optimized landing pages.

If you want to know which low-cost tools (some are actually free) I would recommend before stepping into  full-blown marketing automation, simply email me.

image credit: Rube Goldberg machine, New Yorker (public domain)

It’s good to see 2012 on the scene, but we shouldn’t rush away from 2011 without taking one last look back. In the past few months, I learned a lot by listening to others on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Here are some of the thoughts and interactions that speak from that time. With the new year here, I want to invite you to the conversation – because there is much more left to learn.

Marketing What’s New has a Facebook page and I can personally be found on Twitter at @heyglenns,  Google+ as well as on LinkedIn.

Dec 28	Consumer marketing is rife with over-hyped language. Although it may work for B2C, it doesn’t work for B2B. Marketers must work to get the tone of their message right with businesses. This deserves almost as much emphasis as nailing the prospect’s need.
Dec 19	Year after year, the greatest marketing challenge that B2B organizations face is generating high-quality leads. according to MarketingSherpa, 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.
Dec 06	Google Analytics – you are powerful, yet oh so fussy. #web
Nov 30	Nominations are now open for Exploriem’s 2012 Bootstrap Awards, celebrating innovative businesses in Ottawa. You can submit nominations until January 25 – available at https://bootstrap2012.myreviewroom.com/
Nov 28	Have just left one-third of the Linked Groups I belonged to. I believe it’s better to be active in a smaller number of conversations than to loiter around too many groups without contributing. Agree or disagree?
Nov 27	@PhilGaudreau sobering interview with Steve Levy: marketers can’t get take their technology too far ahead of the crowd #TKNonCFRA
Nov 23	Simple, non-nonsense video showing Internet advertising options out there. Know what channels are out there before you…http://t.co/jzT8diFh
Nov 21	Good turnout tonight at Mobile Monday Ottawa.
Nov 18	Whether talking about the sales or the marketing end of things, it always comes back to the prospect’s act of converting.
Nov 17	Here’s a good formula to always keep in mind, especially in companies that source leads (or should be sourcing leads) through their website & online campaigns. Conversion rate
Nov 13	@marketing_101 takes both self-regulation & educating IT folks to remove email marketing’s spam stigma
Nov 02	Learned a new sales term today: Monkey Paw. Ping me if you’ve heard it or are curious to know what it means.
Oct 26	Pleased to offer a new fixed-price Landing Page Optimization program, geared for technology companies. http://t.co/7flAmrQh
Oct 19	I can’t tell you that connecting people is a surefire way to be successful, but I can say all the successful people I know are connectors.
Oct 18	Wonder why you should open your analytics and see how visitors are interacting with your site? This graphical… http://t.co/askC0Bq6
Oct 18	Wonder why you should open your analytics and see how visitors are interacting with your site? This graphical allegory shows the need to use your website like a farmer uses a candle: to differentiate real prospects from random traffic. If your site currently can’t do this for you, we should talk.
Oct 14	Does using LinkedIn Maps tell you anything interesting about who you’re connected to? http://t.co/ZRsgML6z
Oct 14	It can take a long time to reach the intersection of what a client values and what you can deliver…so be patient, you’ll get there.
Oct 12	#wmwott analytic data on visitors is powerful. Visitor data twinned with customer/proprietary data, that’s infinitely more powerful.
Oct 02	RT @chrisjschmitt Start-ups: The Denny’s Menu vs. The Iceberg Approach | Mark Evans Tech http://t.co/HifdrYIB  gotta whittle down choices
Oct 01	@judraz last IABC podcast made true pt: clients who won’t invest in their brand can’t expect clts to pay much heed to it, can they!
Sep 30	@Bill_Graham Yes, Mktg Automatn’s repeating many of errors DM industry made. Recall the 1980s? American Express offer that you got 8 times?
Sep 30	Post is nearly 3 years old, but it’s so right: Your Idea Sucks, Now Go Do It: http://t.co/uO5wrIEU #technology #startups
Sep 29	@Braatzy Really like @bemobilebuzz – you’re assembling a really sweet set of pkgd offerings.
Sep 28	move over SEO, Krista from gShift Labs says we have to optimize our presence all over the web: http://t.co/PvWJB2FU
Sep 13	At @salesprosottawa hearing Terry Ledden, burying the canned sales presentation in favour of a fluid Q&A with prospects.
Sep 07	@benkmyers I find Analytics is a fountain that dev’s, marketers, sales & mgmt all want to drink from
Sep 03	I’m still tweeting, but now layering on updates on networks like Google+. New post. http://t.co/r4jlXTu

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle (with public domain clipart)

Perhaps I’ve had enough of the holiday shopping season (or have been watching too many late-night infomercials), but I can’t get away from overt, in-your-face consumer advertising. The truth is, hard-sell marketing messages like “Drink Me” only worked on Alice in Wonderland (well, and on unwary consumers). In the world of B2B marketing, where you are cultivating long-term corporate relationships, your website must stop short of screaming “Buy Me” at the prospective buyer.  Though they may work in B2C, hard-sell tactics in B2B will backfire, take my word for it.

The reason for this is simple. Simple consumption products are bought by one person and are largely impulse-based. B2B products are purchased through means of signoff by multiple stakeholders. The other reason is that in crafting our message, we the vendors care most about SELLING. We blurt out pricing, features and back-office policies, which are likely unimportant to the buyer when they first encounter us.

So using the ‘shouting’ style typical of B2C advertising, B2B should be framed as a conversation. And there are social norms around a conversation that can help you as you develop marketing content around your B2B product. Putting this into practice is easier said than done, but let’s go through some of these conversational conventions.

One of the most tangible ways I follow the conversational style is by devoting at least half of my content to talking about the prospect’s problem and the payoffs of solving it. I resist that urge and focus instead on the buyer’s concern for colleagues that they must convince, the root-cause of their problem and the forethought that’s needed to implement the solution. Don’t talk solely about the capabilities of your product/service, even if that’s what you feel like doing.

Avoid using these phrases: important, don’t miss this, deep discount, great deal, act now, amazing features and limited time. Also, adopt the tone of a conversation by keeping the volume down, don’t use too many exclamation marks.

Be careful when using terminology not to get too cutesy. Take MailChimp, which serves both B2C and B2B. They deserve praise for extending their ‘email is easy’ message into their modules by using easy-to-remember names (e.g. their Scheduling module is called “Time Warp”). But their name choices for modules such as “Chimpadeedoo” and “Pyow!” just loses me – I’m not going to bother learning what the software does if I can’t make any sense out of the name.

Come up with offers that make sense. If you market a SaaS-based business application, ditch that pet plan to offer a free toaster to new subscribers. Instead, think of affiliated software providers to team up with and offer bundled discounts or the like.

We can always do more of these things, but how do we know when we’ve done it right? For web content, I suggest considering Landing Page Optimization. Running an A/B test gives that B2B visitor a ballot for voting on your marketing message. When they respond to your call-to-action and click through is healthy numbers, you’ll know that you’ve nailed their need and got the right tone. That’s how we’ll stay distinct from B2C, and that’s how we’ll be successful marketing B2B goods.

Image credit: Walt Disney Co.

Does your website come across as authentically wanting to help prospects?

As we head into wintery weather, I’m reminded of what happens when a car gets stuck in the snow. Someone passing by may come over to help the stranded driver, but once they’re behind the car, the driver really has no idea whether they are back there pushing or just standing idle in hope that the car will free itself and they’ll take the credit. That reminds me of how some vendors actually get behind their clients, while other vendors just pretend to. Sure, we say we meet our client’s needs, but is our marketing message backed up with actual proof?

There are ways that we can make our websites not only sound sincere, but actually be sincere (which I define as placing our client’s needs ahead of our own). Here are some ways as well as examples that show how genuineness can come through in our content and our messaging:

Structure your content from the prospect’s point of view. Take Webex as an example, their conferencing service moves bytes over pipes, yet they structure their how-to-use site according to people’s business activities, like ‘attend a meeting’ or ‘share your desktop.’ This illustrates that they know their technology is secondary to your objective of getting work done.

Show, don’t tell. It takes people a while to leave PowerPoint for a web-based presentation design tool, but that’s what Prezi is achieving day by day. Their website helps do this by leaving lots of white space (no screenshots of button-bars) as well as a video featuring their casually-dressed CEO, half their homepage is a showcase of what other users, just like you, have created using their tool.

If your product fixes a problem for the prospect, first show you know what pain they are going through. YouILabs makes user interface software for a variety of devices that contain display screens. This helps every device manufacturer, from printers to simple symbian phones to digital signage dazzle viewers with fast motion that shouldn’t be possible, given the low-level processor hardware they contain. YouiLabs understands that these firms have been hurt by the rampant sales of high-horsepower smartphones and tablets. While they could brag about the brilliant coding logic they used to pull off such a trick, instead they let the clients imagine how good they will look in front of THEIR clients, when their screens are using YouILabs’ software.

Use words that scratch people’s itch – afterall, they have come to your site because they’re looking for something. Repeating the questions they have is a good first-step, as Titus does with the rotating images on their homepage.  I’ll also give the example of Vanessa Fox’s agency, called Nine by Blue. While her business obviously depends on landing consulting clients, she publishes a lot of intellectual property on her site for free, labeling it under sections called “Learning Center (accented by the call-to-action Get Trained,” “Blog,” and “Book.”

In B2B/B2G situations, demonstrate how you benefit your client’s client. An Ottawa-based software company called PatientWay has done this. Though they sell their online appointment check-in system to hospital and clinic administrators, their site is devoted to showing the positive impact they have on patients. It’s no surprise that this succeeds, it’s the same principle I’ve been describing throughout this post, just extended one more degree beyond the prospect.  And yes, prospects dig it.

So go out there, push a car out of the ditch, and authentically show how you can help your clients.

If you make applications that charge clients on a subscription-basis, whether you know it or not, you are a conversion optimization fan. Why is that? Because when your website offers up your sales process in a self-serve format, you are able to see, via your web analytics, how prospects respond at every stage of the game. This rich data gives clues on what changes you can make that will influence their decision to try or buy your application. If your company fits this description, you should consider yourself lucky when comparing yourself to license-based models. Unlike them, you can instantly raise revenues by simply changing your website in ways that convert more visitors to clients.

I have found several opportunities for directly raising revenue, in working with websites of mobile app and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. But before jumping feet first into split testing every word, image and layout element on your site, I would urge you to first look at your analytics to see the weak parts of your current conversion paths. For example, look at the Google Analytics navigation summary for any of your main pages. Where do visitors go once they have seen your pricing page? If they have visited your sign-up page, then your pricing page has done its job. On the other hand, if they most often proceed to your homepage or your careers page, you should look at ways to strengthen how your pricing page works. The ultimate goal, for those who have reached your sign-up page, is to get as many as possible to complete the process and become users.

Optimizing User Sign-Up

There are two different types of subscription sales models, first is the pay-to-play model that requires users to pay up front, second is the partly-free model which can include free trial or freemium offers. While they must both convert visitors into paying users, the free trial and freemium models get there through the two-step process of converting visitors into users and later converting users into paying clients. Let’s tackle the conversion of visitors into users first, which usually centres around the “sign-up” form on the website. Here are some of best practices that you should consider for getting sign-ups:

• You can obviously list all the product’s features, but how about text or video describing how you are improving the user’s workflow. This shows that you understand your different user segments and, if your solution is a disruptive technology, this can help you overcome objections springing up in the prospect’s mind.
• Each sign-up process works slightly differently, try displaying a progress bar or a client testimonial that reaffirms how easy it is for someone to set themself up on your application.
• Users require extra love and care shortly after they sign-up, known as an onboarding period. To maximize their odds of successfully converting, you should send them training tips and job aids on the welcome page after they login. Use your analytics package to see when they hover over or click on these items – a good signal that the product is gaining traction with the user.
• Free trials can be of varying lengths, so if a prospect is looking at your enterprise edition, where you can expect heavy usage in a shorter period of time, you can offer a 15 day trial. For those looking at your starter edition, you can choose a longer time period which will give them a chance to use your product long enough to evaluate it.
• When the free phase ought to be winding up (trial expiring, user has reached the threshold of needing premium features), they should be seeing point-of-sale reminders, which hopefully increase in frequency as they draw closer to the point where they should purchase. If you can blend in analytics, it is even better to personalize them by quantifying their benefit since they started using your product (manual transactions saved, estimated time saved, etc.)

Optimizing Point-of-Sale

Regardless of which SaaS model you use, you will ultimately put your user at the point-of-sale where they must decide whether or not they will buy your product. Here are some best practices that you should consider for getting paying clients at the point-of-sale:

• Scrutinize your website’s explanation of your pricing, ask yourself if it can be made clearer, tiered differently, even differentiated by vertical market segment.
• Optimize your payment page, following the best practices of comparable e-commerce sites.
• Think beyond your subscriptions to how you might test some of your application’s other potential revenue streams, such as advertising, affiliate income from sales of complementary products and professional service packages.

A quick note about upselling and referral-based sales. If you sell additional modules to the users of your base package, ensure that these modules are presented in keeping with the basic user experience. For example, if your application uses tabs, premium modules should probably be integrated so they appear as grayed-out tabs. A client clicking on one tab could see marketing collateral the first-time, with sales offers on subsequent views. Users should never see a terse ‘module cannot be displayed’ error message. When it comes to selling via referrals, always structure your site so that a prospect can see clients that match the specific business problem they are trying to tackle. You can find this out anecdotally from existing clients or, if need be, by filtering your application’s analytics data into several segments, e.g. heavy report-module users, multi-location-users, etc.

Get Optimizing

Not sure if these optimization techniques will work on your website? The good news is that these can all be tested – so you have nothing to lose by trying. If your company needs another reason to optimize your web conversions, you can take it from my friend Jeff Bennett of ServiceVantage. He’ll remind you that there is someone besides you cares about conversions, who sees them as direct indicators of future revenue. That someone is an investor, who, as Jeff likes to say, “won’t buy into your company until you’ve nailed your conversion rate.”

Whether you have a mobile app or a web-based SaaS offering, I hope these suggestions can be put to use in how your website markets your web-based technology. Remember how lucky you are, compared to other technology-based offerings; any boost you make to your conversion rate has a direct impact on your revenue. After all, you have the unique ability to not only generate leads with your site, you’re able to convert those leads into online sales.

It’s hard enough designing a website, but technology firms seem to have an especially difficult time making things prospect-friendly. Despite even the best efforts when trying to describe a technology or justify its value, the information often gets lost in translation. Instead of being impressed by the website and the technology, prospects are often bewildered by the details they see. This is a real problem because, as a recent DemandBase whitepaper put it, “buyers are researching products and services before they engage with sellers, and are inviting sellers into the process much later in the cycle.” If they don’t find what they’re looking for on your site, it’s possible that you could lose a sale without even knowing it.

Regardless of when your site was designed or the way it currently performs, there’s probably some uncertainty gnawing at you. When I ask executives what frustrates them with their website, these are the five most-common issues I hear:

Do any of these describe how YOU feel about your site?

The way to identify the answer to all these issues is Landing Page Optimization, which gives a step-by-step process for revealing the best way to convert visitors into prospects. Done right, after optimizing your site’s main pages, you can give prospects an at-a-glance view of your offering, twinned with a clear decision path that they can follow when they’re interested in actively considering a purchase. In other words, you give your site the best chance of being a strong lead generator.

We are currently enrolling companies in our November-December running of the program. Get more details on how we provide Landing Page Optimization here.

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle (public domain)

Instead, the writing here comes to you courtesy ofwho wrote a book called “Always Be Testing.” This snippet describing someone Googling your product/service/brand encapsulates one of the most important parts of marketing online – relevancy:

Bryan masterfully shows, in the briefest of ways, what anyone using search and social tools must do in order to effectively market their wares.

image: stock photo used under license.

Of course, twitter’s not the only game in town. The new kid on the block, Google+ is already part of my regular online existence and the other social networks should look over their shoulder to see some nifty features of Google+. Here are the tweets from the summer; future digests will definitely draw from multiple sources.

Aug 25 Google Directory is gone http://t.co/O70tmTT Apparently, this search algorithm thing of theirs is here to stay.

Aug 22 From @obj_news Terry Matthews: Ottawa’s becoming more of ‘an R&D centre. We want deep-rooted companies’ #business #OttCity

Aug 20 The way I choose to look at “I have no idea what I’m doing” is “Wow, I’m learning new things all the time!” #perspective

Aug 17 I love work that teaches me how to do new things. The hardest part is I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to do them :\

Aug 16 Qualifying leads is the most underappreciated sales skill…and the one that, if not done, will bite you the hardest.

Aug 16 Can’t believe it took me until now to discover annotations in Google Analytics.

Aug 13 You know what proves the power of video? Youtube’s Ray William Johnson, whose show has now gotten 1.1 billion views.

Aug 02 Guy told me today he’s started to network. I can’t remember a time when I WASN’T networking! #goals #growth

Jul 29 @erinbury Sorry to hear Sprouter’s done. Don’t forget the exhilaration. In time, you’ll have another chance to apply your sizable skills.

Jul 22 Took in many good presentations at the Int’l Startup Festival recently. Hit the link if you’d like to see… http://fb.me/18035uKqi

Jul 21 Off to a Sales Pros exec mtg. Be back in the morning!

Jul 15 Charlie O’Donnell: to push your own career, paradoxically, start by building whatever’s missing in your local community. #startupfest

Jul 15 Thought from Startup Festival: if you’re mad about how hard selling & marketing your firm is, stop wasting time looking for an easier way.

Jul 15 CPA/LTV = how much of all $ I’ll ever get from clt to acquire them. #startupfest

Jul 15 Saas model: CPA/ARPU. Says how many mths of rev you’re paying to get current customer. #startupfest

Jul 15 Kedrosky: Don’t have yr head down all time & hope bankers notice. You’ll be screwed; markets aren’t that efficient. #startupfest

Jul 15 Being in Montreal reminds me, it was at a conference here 18 yrs ago, that my career actually got started.

Jul 14 PBwiki started off ‘Hilariously Simple’ – technologists need to pay heed. #startupfest

Jul 14 Your focus must change as you move thru diff phases of the #startup process. – @ashmaurya #startupfest

Jul 12 If anyone fancies connecting on Google+, I’m at http://plus.google.com/113504942461524559377/

Jul 12 RT @Lucialand Love the way a client’s face lights up when they realize the potential of a great strategy. #love (cont) http://deck.ly/~gm7Qo

Jul 11 Rockin’ it on WordPress 3.2 #whatageek

Jul 10 Just knocked the RSS reader down to a reasonable # of unreads. Now to hit the dead-tree pile. #Reading #learning

Jul 08 I think that regardless of how much you write, writing your own bio is always hard.

Jul 06 Here at YBN event on the Art of Networking. Hope they agree with my talk’s theme: that it’s just like marketing. #ottawa

Jul 06 Designing an ecommerce site. At times while doing this, I feel like a puppet-master.

Jul 05 Anyone from Ottawa going to Mtl next week for Int’l Startup Festival? http://bit.ly/hX93Bt

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

Jun/29 : Almost the end of 2nd Qtr. Time to turn focus towards how we’ll do in Q3, what we’ll do to influence future outcomes. #business

Jun/26 : For me, #pab2011 msg is that whether it’s validated or not, your story is always valid.

Jun/24 : Reminder to marketers: the people formerly known as the the audience now have audiences of their own. -@gregverdino in @micromktg

Jun/22 : Really digging Eric Ries‘ take on managing in a #startup #lean #technology

Jun/20 : This week’s @ageofpersuasion podcast highlighted Bill Cosby as power-spokesman: Kodak, Coke, Jello, etc. Consumer attention. He had it.

Jun/15 : Just saw RIM’s new Playbook ad, overlaid with Queen’s Flash Gordon. Give them props for hitting hard on edge they have vs iPad.

Jun/14 : Anyone needing marketing/design/comm strategy, talk to @All_Caps. He has the goods. #justsayin

Jun/09 : @robcharlebois is giving thinking behind many Corel.com pages. Candid. Penetrating. #zone5ive

Jun/06 : Finished Superfreakonomics over the wknd. Economists sure have a freaky way of looking at life situations.

Jun/03 : RT @dannystarr: Just shot a video review of @gregverdino‘s @micromktg with @heyglenns. Thanks to @rdecher for filming it. Great time!

Jun/02 : A year ago, Leadforce1 stated that: “LinkedIn was found to generate the most conversions for B2Bs at 61% in the Hub Sp…http://lnkd.in/JXSmmW

May/31 : Ottawa-area firm @sharethink got front-pg biz section in #OttawaCitizen. Their anti-spam solution beats CAP-TCHA hands-down.

May/27 : RT @TheCodeFactory continue to find that best founders of tech startups started out in the arts, literatur… (cont) http://deck.ly/~lT785

May/26 : @addsomespice You know every new brand must mean the death of the old brand.

May/24 : It dawned on me this weekend that though life is harder than it looks, it’s easier than most of us think.

May/19 : So simple, I want you to think the demo’s dumb; cause that means it’s useful.’ Tech should gloss over the guts. – Adobe CIO.

May/16 : Congrats to all of the OBJ’s Fastest-Growing companies http://bit.ly/karwgA #Ottawa #Technology

May/12 : My alma mater will swap tuition-for-shares in student startup: http://clarkson.edu/news/2011/news-release_2011-05-02-2.html

May/12 : @larawellman Here’s a handy tool that’s (sadly) often unused. Enter tags in, paste URL in your emails, voila: tracking! http://bit.ly/eptMCv

May/12 : CRM doesn’t capture a lot of rich data from analytics; just views it as a plain-vanilla lead. #zone5ive from @alexlangshur

May/12 : C-suite doesn’t care about many analytics #s, but they do care abt measures that can tie to funnel/CRM info. #zone5ive

May/12 : Not linking your CRM & analytics? That silo approach wastes potential, says @alexlangshur at #zone5ive

May/11 : Using LinkedIn’s Android app. It’s slick…and better than the third party apps that preceded it.

May/06 : One small step for untethering: I can now post to Marketing What’s New blog from my phone. Sweet. #wordpress #plugin

May/05 : RT @Agent_Janet Be grateful for what you have. When I was a kid,couldn’t afford Facebook.I had to walk 6 miles in snow to poke someone.

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

Local marketer extraordinaire Danny Starr and I both like to read. When we learned we had both gone through Greg Verdino’s Micromarketing, we decided to compare notes. With the help of videographer Robert Decher we were able to create our own little piece of micromarketing.
The video gives a 12-minute synopsis of how Greg believes marketing has shifted. We’d love it if this video helps you find out about the shift to smaller content and campaigns. We would also like to hear what you think about Greg’s book or the shift you’re seeing in either Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing.

image credit: Robert Decher

What’s Wrong with Marketing on Specs

Specs function as a proxy for identifying what customers want – and that’s all. While it’s true that these specs are appreciated by other technologists, there are very few products that engineers buy on their own. Even sophisticated products are now evaluated by end-users; these people aren’t swayed by a product’s “plumbing,” they only care about how it helps them. Prospects only want to hear about technical specifications in the non-technical context of how it solves their problems.

Saying you have the same specs everyone has is no way to differentiate yourself

Specs can also be a dangerous weapon in salespeople’s hands. Many reps are used to transactional sales where the client is simply ordering what they want. Trouble begins when prospects open up about their business problems and the technology reps don’t know how to visualize a solution. What do they do? They start handing out sales literature and dumping specs on the prospect out of context, taking your product down to the lowest common denominator of all similar products, commoditizing the very product that you worked hard to differentiate from what everyone else makes. The prospect infers from the salesperson’s chatter that all your products manage to do is to meet the minimal requirements, giving them an easy way to eliminate your product from their selection.

Let’s be clear here. I am not talking about product categories. Specs are not the same as product categories. A Hex screwdriver belongs to its own category because a whole ecosystem of objects were engineered to be adjusted by it and it alone. A Hex screwdriver’s specs would detail its length, the conductivity of its handle and other minutae. For someone who owns hex-based equipment, a hex-screwdriver isn’t just another screwdriver with “hex” in its spec; to them, it’s in a whole other screwdriver category! If buyers have put your product in its own category, then go ahead and trumpet the aspects of your product that place it all by itself.

Buyers set Specs, Not Sellers: A Cautionary Tale

Intel spent much of the 2000s racing against AMD for bragging rights for the world’s fastest microprocessor. But the speed of their chips remained about the same as rival AMD, so Intel tried to shift attention to another facet of its processors. They rolled out a specification that their chips would dominate in. Speaking at Intel’s 2005 Developer Forum, CEO Paul Otellini predicted that environmental footprint would be how most companies would come to evaluate chips. He said that Intel would rate their chips by “performance-per-watt,” touting the fact that they would lead the market in terms of power consumption for MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second). The problem was that Performance-per-watt didn’t matter to Intel’s customers the way that chip speed does. After spending lots of money on the idea, an embarrassed Intel withdrew this spec from their marketing messages.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Way to Market with Specs

How can you move from narrow focus on specs to a broad message about your products? A client of mine in an engineering-intensive industry did this first by knowing for certain that their products had the right specs. They did this by showing up at a major trade show with a questionnaire that they only gave to clients and close partners. We tabulated the data, which showed that my client indeed had the right specs. They then dropped specs from their broadcast messages and instead sold the fact that their product solved problems.

If you’re in a technology company that loves to cite all the specs that your products contain, consider instead staking a claim that you have leading technology and backing it up with client success stories. The way to do it is to first identify your product’s applications by audience, price range or the environment. In the case of a website, these could appear as several pages devoted to different industry verticals, each showing how your product is the right solution for their need. Only at this point should you introduce the specifications – as they will underline your ability to deliver on the solution previously mentioned.

It is true that customers want proof that you know what you are doing, specs are only one way of proving yourself, so be careful not to rely on them too heavily in your marketing. It’s better to build a brand whose claim is that you will always have whatever specs the market needs.

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

The most critical component to your plan is out of your control – it’s your customer. Startups and smaller businesses that make plans without a representative sample of clients are actually running a big risk. This is because you never really know what your customer’s world looks like and so, instead of sitting in a closed room planning what customer problems you’ll solve, you’re better off going out and getting a customer and THEN seeing what needs solving.

The Rule: Plan for an Unruly Future

I’ve seen some of the fifty-page business and marketing plans Kneale talks about. It isn’t the plans specifically that are the problem, it’s the painful, politically-charged process of setting the plan that’s the problem. I wish that planning exercises didn’t have to be so hierarchical – it breeds ‘org structure abuse’ – so I propose two simple rules that will minimize this:

• Bosses must not delegate down the tasks they don’t want to do.
• Front-line staff shouldn’t use planning as an excuse to procrastinate. Planning, according to one cynical definition, means “to assess the things to be done in order to determine which you cannot get done until tomorrow, later this week, or the dawn of the next century.”

While Kneale is right that companies that don’t properly plan fall short of their goals, I think we’ve got to admit that things hardly ever go according to plan. Whether it’s the economy in general or some specific external event that interferes with your plan (I had a broken leg this year that I didn’t plan on), the result is the same. In my opinion, plans really outline what you do and don’t know. The plan should include tasks that you’ll do during the period to plug your knowledge gaps so that by the end of the month/quarter/year, you know enough to make wise plans for the next cycle.

So how do we do planning in the real world? At the one extreme, you could bury your nose in a planning document for a very long time. At the other extreme, you could say ‘Plan? Schman!’ and do everything “…by the seat of your pants,” as Kneale says. I’m advocating a middle way that balances these two extremes. Kneale and do I agree that companies need to reckon with strategic planning. As he puts it, “Plans are useless without action. If you take the required time to set out a Plan, then actually carry it out.”

image credit: Dutch Cowboys

My friend, Peter Hanschke, is an authority on Agile Product Management. The Agile process is best described by others, but there are some highlights that bear mention. Agile busts the development ‘waterfall model’ wide open by engaging the market throughout the development process. Clients give marketing feedback early and often throughout the project; their ideas drive development’s next design-build stage (which is done in only 2 to 6 weeks). These stages loop repeatedly until the clients feel the product meets substantially all their needs. As the Agile Manifesto puts it: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

It Adds Value for All of Us

Agile probably offers the biggest benefits to engineers, who don’t like to code within the sedentary confines of classic development methodologies. With Agile, launches are no longer planned around arbitrary events such as summer vacation; instead they’re based on when customers could get the most value from them. Features can be added on a regular basis; new ideas are implemented quickly, rather than being relegated to the bottom of the wish list. If developers worked in a restaurant, using Agile would mean inviting patrons into the kitchen. Upon seeing the raw ingredients, they’d indicate what entrees they’ll buy. Doing things this way ultimately increases the chance that engineers build products the customer wants.

Agile also promises several benefits for marketing. The beta concept is a necessity, not an afterthought, real functional changes can now be made and they are certain to add value to clients…otherwise, clients wouldn’t have asked for them. Put another way, how do you know you’ve solved the customer’s problem without talking to them? Remember that these clients are providing real value statements, which takes away a lot of the guesswork that currently informs the input product marketing gives. From marketing’s perspective, if customers are engaged during the project, they will also feel like they helped shape its design and so will be in a better position to talk to the press and industry analysts.

It’s Happening

Agile didn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s actually product management’s response to a much larger phenomenon. Over the last 15 years, a seismic shift has caused us to move away from top-down marketing and toward crowd-sourcing the real value of a product. Marketing veteran Don Schultz, in the Sept/Oct 09 issue of Marketing Management, explains why marketers aren’t able to frame messages like they used to. “Positioning, perhaps the most important marketing concept of the 20th century, is probably no longer relevant. Marketers don’t control enough of the brand communication to develop a “market position,” and certainly not enough resources to maintain a viable position once it is in the marketplace. Today, customers do that through social networks, blogs and Twittering – tools marketers have yet to understand, much less master.”

It’s Up to All of Us

There are aspects of these new development regimes that require traditional functions to think in new ways. To engineers out there, I say: stop hiding out in the coder’s den, developing what you think clients need; involve marketers earlier in the process. They can never add much value if nearly-complete products are merely thrown over the wall to them. To fellow marketers out there, I say: you don’t get to choose what you market, get over it and get into alignment with the needs of your marketplace. We have to get over our fear that clients will ridicule us for admitting that we don’t know their every need. In fact, the clients themselves don’t absolutely know what they need…and that’s why they need a partner like you to help them find the best solution. If we make ourselves vulnerable, we’ll reap the benefits of early client input. Processes like Agile make marketers and engineers allies once again, so we can jointly tackle bigger issues…such as how sales fits into all this!

image credit: Broadway Video

60s group Peter & Gordon used to sing “A World Without Love” – I sometimes wonder what a world without marketing might be like. When I think of how the absence of marketing would affect buyers, I recall how things worked in the old USSR. Here are some examples of how buying would change if we had no marketing:

• Google would still be used, but without brand names, you could have to visit dozens of sites, all using different wordings, only to realize the products they’re describing are identically the same.
• When it comes to technology products, you would be subjected to hearing all about how a piece of equipment is put together, but you wouldn’t necessarily be told anything about what it’s used for.
• Without sponsorships and ad-supported media, the cost to receive business magazines or attend conferences and association events would double. There’d be a charge to see a company’s website or get a brochure. To call them, instead of a 1-800 number, the call would cost you a toll charge.
• Commerce in general would be tougher without the existence of intermediaries like Lyrico, Kelly Services, CDW, Nebs, Corporate Express, Staples, NewEgg and Acklands-Grainger.
• Because companies wouldn’t see problems from your perspective, they would sell what’s easiest for them to make. Mail-room machinery would fold letters but it wouldn’t apply postage – that’s up to you & the post office. You’d buy your workdesk from one supplier, but your office chair would have to be bought elsewhere. Hotdog weiners would come in lots of 6 and buns in lots of 8 (whoops, for some strange reason that’s the way it’s done today.)
• You wouldn’t recognize company names like Cisco, FedEx, Xerox, Oracle or Yahoo!….because their names would use the impossibly long technical terms that could identify their products.

I think you’ll agree that the world I’ve imagined is a pretty grim place. I’m far from satisfied with how marketing is done in our world, but I hope you’ll agree that we’re better off with it than without it.

Spring is a great time of year. As it begins I find people get retrospective; they stop their winter cocooning and start getting active. I think this same transition happens on twitter, depending on how long people have used it. At some point, I find that most ‘tweeps’ give up their binge tendencies (the tweet equivalent of eating junk-food) in favour of a more wholesome diet of tweets. I try to endorse this good practice by engaging with the tweeps I reach on the topics we really care about. there’s an easy way to tell if this strategy succeeds: hold a mirror up to your twitter feed and ask yourself if you like what you see. Given that I’m 6,000+ tweets into this, I hold up the mirror to myself every quarter. So here are the tweets from the last three months that I think are high in marketing nutrition. Enjoy:

From @fastcompany “Innovation often looks pointless at first, which makes first impressions crucial.”

31 Mar

RT @ShawnaActually Did you know you could add your Twitter name to your Facebook info page? Doing that now…

25 Mar

RT @AlisonGresik The neurology behind writer’s block ~ the impulse to create is rooted in the limbic brain. From Salon.com http://shar.es/3FrFF

22 Mar

RT @JuliaRosien Can’t believe Twitter is 5 years old today – doesn’t feel that old  http://bit.ly/gyo4JH

21 Mar

RT @benkmyers Gamification: People like being rewarded and recognized for doing stuff. It’s the latest craze. #marketingsecrets

RT @vincentwhite 12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post: http://bit.ly/huoLO8

14 Mar

Ppl don’t want to feel the hands of the puppeteer. Don’t rush to reward users, think of what their motivation is – D Nicholson at #SMBOttawa …aim is not to put whole game on your site but to glean game elements & leverage them for calls to action.

9 Mar

Nominate an #Ottawa firm for @obj_news Fastest Growing Companies list: http://bit.ly/f1HDju ddln: April 11.

8 Mar

RT @RobLane Excellent Fred Wilson opinion on marketing http://bit.ly/dFdTQB

3 Mar

Apple can even make non-features (thinner iPad2) sound like features. Clever marketing. Not 100% genuine, but clever.

3 Mar

RT @tredpath CMOs: Budgets Shifting; Social Spend, Optimism Up marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/45… @marketingprofs

2 Mar

EventBots 90-sec clip of the #BootstrapAwards has vignettes from this bastion of Ottawa entrepreneurship http://youtu.be/5sBQrEhZVFo

25 Feb

Proposed a new strategy for a group today. Pleased with how it went off; now to get down to executing on that strategy!

24 Feb

Congrats to @EmboticsCorp which recently closed a round of financing. http://bit.ly/ieoJUD #Ottawa #tech

17 Feb

Lots of mingling at #democampottawa15, intermixed w recruiting pleas by companies.

9 Feb

RT @elliotross: I didn’t know LinkedIN Tweets app shows twitter handle of all your connections…followed some previously missed contacts

8 Feb

RT @elizabethhowell: Media monitoring firm @MediaMiser garners $1M in financing from RBC/BDC http://bit.ly/ei2k3l (@obj_news) #ottawa <-Yay!

7 Feb

Want to see up-and-coming Ottawa tech co’s? Check out the LeadToWin enrollment list: http://bit.ly/fsv49P

4 Feb

Struck by how much of online marketing is merely making links/buttons that embody a call-to-action or user’s perceived benefit.

4 Feb

Thx to @mercurygrove for providing great venue for #mobileapps #Ottawa

25 Jan

Trying out the new Feedburner – very Google-Analytic-y!

18 Jan

Big News @ bitHeads: buys Bedlam Games to target cross-platform games; builds bullet analysis app 4 Pyramidal Tech http://bit.ly/g6UsHB

15 Jan

RT @neilhedley: I like finding new people to follow even better than finding that new people are following me. <-you’re doing it right

11 Jan

image credit: G. Schmelzle

I received the book as a gift from Momenta Systems CEO Peter Fillmore a few months ago (thanks, Peter). So here are my thoughts about this volume on how these companies “grew themselves.”

Building a Huge Following

Taking the simple philosophy of Seth Godin: “ideas that spread…win” Viral Loop showcases the power of the “pass-it-on” strategy. The film “The Social Network” by Aaron Sorkin gives a good illustration of how an application can use something that people want to share (in Facebook’s case, it was a person’s ego-inspired updates for friends to see) to help that application spread far and wide (since their friends had to sign up for Facebook prior to seeing that person’s updates).

He also cautions us about the dangers of scalability and growing too fast. He explains that company IT staff must constantly rebuilt their architecture as usage scales up. Failing to do this could result in another situation like MySpace and Hot or Not, which faced user exoduses when they couldn’t keep the servers up or gave their users too much strategic control.

Margin between Success & Failure is 1

Viral growth (really another way of saying compound growth) of course can be explained through the childhood riddle that asks: would you be better off if I gave you a million dollars today or a penny today, doubling it each day for the next 30 days. We all know the penny is the wiser choice because it has a high growth rate. Companies that ‘bake in’ a viral factor (peer-to-peer networking or stacking on top of others’ sites) can count on this same principal for gaining users. Penenberg calls this a viral coefficient and says it must be above 1 and preferably close to 2. A coefficient of 1 means each user tells, on average, 1 other person who ends up using it, for linear growth (1,2,3,4,5,6,7…) With coefficient = 2, growth is exponential (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128…)

Why the imperative for viral growth these days? Penenberg feels it because that’s how we the market are treating all the companies and product offerings we interact with: “Because we are almost constantly communicating with friends, family, and colleagues over  a vast viral plain, our written self-expressions, whether they be forwarded emails, ideas, jokes, links or memes, spread virally.”

All in all, I think this book can flesh out people’s understanding of what companies should strive for when making user-centric products. This book gives a good grounding on the technology companies that have led the way here, without expecting the reader to be a Silicon Valley insider.

As a criticism, I fear that Penenberg has the journalist’s penchant for dwelling too much on the human side of these companies’ stories. Afterall, Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University. So if you’re just looking to pull out the ideas viral growth, you’ll have to sift through parts of the book that have irrelevant details.

Another large part of discussing viral companies is monetizing users, which is largely missing in Penenberg’s book. I’m not very hard on him for this, because most of the companies he profiles haven’t cracked this nut either.

image credit: Hyperion books

Many technology firms developing products are perplexed about knowing if their product is ready for the mass-market. I’ve found a good test for this is to ask the question, “does this product meet substantially all of the client’s needs?” Another way to ask the question, according to Brian Giese, is “what is the single, obvious benefit your product provides to improve or replace an existing expense that is already in your buyer’s budget?” Whether your product goes direct or through channels will hang on the answer to the above question. If your product doesn’t fix ‘substantially all’ of the client’s needs, only OEM’s, rather than end-users, will tend to buy it. But if you’ve figured out the client’s full set of needs, you’ll be able to bypass OEMs and sell to end-users. Sure you may need to integrate your product with other components, but you’ll make that up in higher margins you can make by selling a ‘substantially all’ solution.

Be diligent when asking how your product is used; it can reveal insights into what ‘substantially all’ means. Suppose you make an application that processes and records some type of transaction. To determine how it’s used, you watch your client for days on end, but all you ever see is it being used to process transactions. However, at the end of the month, you notice that they export the whole month’s data into a spreadsheet, run a series of pivot tables, reformulate the results and import that into another system that uses the data to set their pricing. They haven’t done substantially all of their job until this monthend exercise is done. That means that your application hasn’t met ‘substantially all’ of their need until you incorporate an embedded reporting tool that can do the data extraction, translation and loading for the client. Once this piece is integrated, clients will consider your solution something worth buying.

One of the best symptoms of falling short of people’s needs is when users make modifications (or mods) to the product. Companies must pay attention to this, for it gives clues about what’s missing from the ‘substantially all’ formula. This is especially true with technology. A famous example of using an add-on product came from Sergey Brin & Larry Page, who back in their Stanford days needed to link many computers together while keeping them cool. They used Lego blocks to stack their servers – the contraption is now on display in the Google museum. Maybe this is where computer makers learned to sell their servers complete with rack-mounted cabinets.

Strategies for making the whole product

How do you know what prospects and clients need out of your product? You ask them. Chris Brogan, co-author of the book Trust Agents, points out that customers are listing their Skype, Twitter and LinkedIn coordinates on their business cards. They are listing their social media usernames to connect with peers and swap helpful intelligence, maybe even share their opinion of your product. You should at the very least use web 2.0 to listen to what they have to say. You can even approach them with up-front questions about how your product could do a better job of solving their problem (without trying to sell them something).

As your clients’ needs change over time, so the ‘substantially all’ definition changes. Failing to understand how clients use your technology is risky, because if you’re not developing towards these emerging needs, clients will abandon your offering to products that do. This shouldn’t be left to guesswork, because in very real dollar terms, a miss is as good as a mile. So be vigilant in collecting user requirements, then work them into your roadmap and share the roadmap with them.

Not all products are made to meet ‘Substantially all’ client needs

Note that not every industry is structured to solve ‘substantially all’ a customer’s needs. Cars can’t work without tires, but tires are such a matter of individual choice, they are sold separately, through aftermarket channels. Typically, where subjective tastes largely influence the buyer’s actions, they tend to fall outside the ‘substantially all’ definition. As well, if you’re in a B2B setting, The tendency is to think that user is the authority on product requirements. Know that the one making the purchase decision is the one who chooses what features you must have to say you meet ‘substantially all’ of their needs.

Another strategy to use is to look for products with large user bases and create accessory products that address deficiencies. Many software programs like Net Nanny and anti-virus utilities were built to help the large Windows OS user base do things that Windows didn’t do. There are many examples from outside of the technology arena that have add-on products, including: automotive aftermarket parts, fabric sprays like ScotchGuard, Cartop cargo carriers and clip-on sunglasses.

There are many good moments in Ron Howard’s 1995 movie, Apollo 13. My favorite is a scene between Flight Controller Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris and Seymour ‘Sy’ Liebergot, played by Clint Howard. Sy was responsible for the electrical and environmental systems (EECOM, for short) onboard the Command Module. This scene takes place just after an explosion rocked the ship, but before we learn that all its main functions are being lost and that Apollo 13 won’t be going to the moon.

I like this scene for quite a few reasons:

It’s a good case study of organizational behavior; management should base decisions on facts it has gathered from the bottom-up, not on political expedience. The decision to shut off the cells, though politically damaging for NASA, saved three lives and boosted the reputation of the mission control team.

As a lowly analyst, Sy may have felt that studying valve pressures did little to help the overall moon mission, but his diligent reading of his instruments helped him discover something the rest of mission control had overlooked. He understood that they’d need to rethink how they used the fuel cells if they were going to save the crew. We generalists heckle specialists for getting too bogged down in the details, but we don’t know how the details can impact us. They do. That’s exactly why we need them. What we don’t know CAN hurt us!

Finally, it shows us why we should follow our gut feeling on subjects we’re familiar with.

There’s a lesson here for sales &amp; marketing staff. Working on marketing initiatives, I’ve felt like Sy many times. I’ve collected metrics and watched them until I’ve developed a sixth sense for how to tackle a certain marketplace. Management then comes crashing in, demanding that I tell them why we’re not getting more/better/faster/cheaper results. They say things like ‘This upcoming quarter, we want to improve our results by (insert percentage here).’ Of course, they have no clue as to how they will actually achieve it. At that moment, I’ve either chosen to shut up and accept their arbitrary goal, or I’ve worked up the courage to tell them the subtle changes I’ve detected that would make their marketing truly effective and lead to KPI’s (key performance indicators) that knock the lights out. Now when these moments arrive, I always ask myself “what would Sy say?”

image credit: Euclid vanderKroew (flickr)

The next book in my 3-part series is Borrowing Brilliance.

Is it OK to take someone else’s idea and use it to solve your own problem? David Kord Murray says it’s not only OK, he says it’s critical to any achievement. The main point of his book is that it is quite natural to borrow inspiration from others. As a matter of fact, if you look closely, you can see that borrowing happens all the time.

If you think Murray is nothing but someone who’s just skilled at copy-and-paste type jobs, think again. He’s quite accomplished in his own right. He:

• Built a company that became worth $50M
• Worked on some early engineering specifications for the International Space Station
• Spearheaded Intuit’s first TV and Internet marketing campaigns
• Launched an internet startup that H&R Block bought.

One great innovator Murray cites is Isaac Newton, who said, “if I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Another scientist he draws from is Einstein, who said, “the secret to good creativity is hiding your sources.” This kind of borrowing is so common in science, people like James Burke have made a career of tracing the Connections. George Lucas, James Cameron and Quentin Tarantino are the best examples of directors whose movies borrow from other people’s movies.

Solution Depends on How the Problem is Framed

He stresses how the way we solve a problem has a lot to do with how we frame the problem. he gave the example of automotive engineers tasked with developing a solution to the problem of lost keys. The engineer who frames the problem narrowly will think of ways to put a fob on a key ring that chirps when needed, using solutions that weigh down the keys or make them obtrusive so they’re not lost. All of these, of course, are solutions that presume that a physical key needs to go in a physical door lock on the car. The engineer who frames the problem as securing a vehicle while allowing its owner to get in, will ask why keys are needed at all. This engineer is able to come up with a keyless entry locks that rely only on the owner remembering a code. This is truly an innovative solution, yet it’s easy to come up with this solution once you frame the problem properly.

The central thrust of the book is his six step process for how you can come up with creative solutions, by borrowing from the creativity of others. Here is a quick summary of his six steps for borrowing brilliance:

1 Defining – How you define a problem will determine how you solve it.

2 Borrowing – Look close, then far away from your field to see how others solve similar problems

3 Combining – Connect borrowed ideas in different ways to see how they can fit your situation.

4 Incubating – Give your ‘gut’ time to think about creative ways to use the solution.

5 Judging – Turn a spotlight on the idea, looking positively at it as well as negative criticism.

6 Redo – Go through this process over again to germinate or further refine an idea.

An Ironically Original Book

The main distinction this book makes is between borrowing and outright plagiarism. You don’t have to feel guilty for gleaning ideas and perspectives from other places. Murray reinforced my belief that there are many ways that disciplines are connected to each other. I refer you to the novelist Tom Robbins, who’s quoted as saying,”Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It’s a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them.”

Murray’s own up and down in the business world are woven into the book. In between his business successes, he dealt with alcoholism, divorce as well as the ego-bruising experience of pushing a company into bankruptcy. This injects some humanity and realism, as personal crises predicated some of Murray’s best ‘borrowings’ – necessity is the mother of invention.

What did this book do for me? It cemented my belief that ideas cross-pollinate. That has long been my justification for trying to be as well-rounded as possible, since the thinking that I do in one area can my thinking in all other areas of my life.

I was speaking with a company owner who was obsessing over how to brand his offerings. I explained to him that while he could have one or more brands, he didn’t need to figure out up front what these brands said about him, the marketplace would do that for him. I told him that the phenomenon of customers branding products can be seen at work in our everyday lives. It’s a three-step process which vendors should examine step-by-step if they hope to get it working for their business.

STEP 1: You (the vendor) stake a claim

The vendor is always the one who starts the brand-creation process: they do it by claiming to be good at something. This is even harder to do with technology products, which may be evaluated according to how fast they are, how light, how revolutionary or even how colourful – there’s little way to anticipate this. It basically comes down to fully understanding the customer’s needs and having the courage to determine what’s useful about a product. When in doubt, ask your existing customers, even ask your prospects.

Once your brand stakes a claim, please do whatever it takes to live up to it. You may even need to spend money to verify your product performs as claimed, as Intel did when it first introduced the Pentium chip and had independent tests done to confirm clock speeds. The good news is, if you’re first to make this type of claim, it’s very hard for subsequent products to come along and unseat you using the same claim – that’s because the marketplace gave you permission to be there first.

That’s not to say that you can’t use some good positioning to establish the unique attributes of your product. David Aaker is an advertising pioneer who did this successfully with products like M&Ms, using the tagline “melts in your mouth, not in your hands.” He successfully got the public to differentiate coated-chocolate candies according to how they behaved as you poured them out of the box. The marketplace agreed with Aaker’s positioning (see Steps 2 & 3 for how this happens) which made M&Ms the most-bought brand of its type.

STEP 2: The buyer puts stock in your brand if you live up to your claim

Whenever you go to buy something for yourself, do you run out to Brand X’s store and buy every product they make? No sir. Instead, you do your homework, comparing what different brands offer against what you really need. This is what you do when you go to a restaurant, you ask yourself whether you’re mildly hungry or famished, how much you feel like spending, if you’re in the mood for something new or favour something familiar – you do all of this before you pick up the menu. Your brain has to know your underlying needs, otherwise, how would it rank competing choices that all claim to meet slightly different needs? This introspection enables you to decide that having the soup by itself isn’t going to fill you, the lobster costs too much and you’re not up to trying foie gras for the very first time tonight. Only when you’ve narrowed it down to a product that fits your need can you ante up your cash in the hope that it will meet your need.

I recently witnessed this when I bought a brand-name computer (which brand I bought is beside the point). While I politely listened to each manufacturer’s positioning pitch, I found myself listening even more carefully to my inner voice about what I needed. The only vendor I ended up buying from was the one whose brand embodied the solution to my particular needs.

STEP 3: Word of the brand spreads through the marketplace

When a number of buyers personally benefit from a brand experience and tell others it’s a good brand, the impact can be tremendous. In the case of restaurants, certain dishes become perennial ‘house specialty’ items that are kept on the menu and sometimes become the dishes that a restaurant is known for. Did these restaurants know from the outset which items would make them famous? Not on your life! Most of this process happened outside of their control. Yet this shouldn’t worry vendors, because the marketplace isn’t fickle; it’s a very good gauge of how buyers collectively evaluate brands. Another way you can help your marketplace choose you is by making something interesting. If a product is boring, nobody will get excited about it and if they can’t get excited about it, they won’t talk about it with peers or other prospects. The best part is that once a brand builds buyer loyalty, it’s nearly impossible for competitors to lure these buyers away.

To recap, you as the vendor get the ball rolling by making a claim about your product that you hope buyers will agree with. Then it’s up to them to try out the product. If their needs are met by it, your customers will think of it as a strong brand…and they’ll start spreading the word for you. Soon the strength of your brand will be cemented in the minds of the whole marketplace.

So if you’re caught up with the ways you can brand your business for this vertical or for that, or wonder which product feature should really ‘speak for’ your brands, don’t become paralyzed by these choices. Rather, put your brands out there, the way a restaurant puts an entrée on a menu and see what the marketplace says.

image credits: Via Flickr – Popham, Analia Manetta

Small is the New Big, by Seth Godin

Do you want to know how to be very effective at marketing? Read Seth Godin and then do what he says. I’ve read many of his recent titles, but I took a trip back to some of his early blog posts, which he expanded and published in his 2005 book “Small is the new big”.

A few Seth-isms can give people a flavor of what they will find in his books. He says that competence is the enemy of change, he hopes that organizations will maybe-proof themselves, he encourages us to be pliable in how we look at problems – a talent he calls “zooming”. On the marketing side, he advocates reaching out to the customer and making remarkable products – in essence, the same sentiment as ‘make what you can sell, don’t just sell what you can make.’

Here are five of my favourite posts that became chapters in the book (although the online versions are the abridged form of what you will find in the book.)

Picky Cats

The wise observation in this post is that a consumer of the product and the buyer are not always the same thing. Seth grates on cat food packaging, which describes in precise detail the preparation, aroma and flavor of the food; all in ways that only matter to how humans evaluate food. If it weren’t for fancy packaging that lists foods WE think cats like, food would be a hit with CATS if it were simply mouse flavoured!

A Warning About Ostrich Farming

Never one to take himself too seriously, Seth slams folks like himself in this blog, to encourage us to sell products that are intrinsically valuable to the buyer. Ostriches, like blogs, can be useful in two ways. Both can be tasty morsels for the end consumer, but both can also be tilted towards peer groups (other ostrich farmers, or bloggers as the case may be). Problems arise when the seller gets too preoccupied with reaching intermediates and trying to be oh-so-clever in front of their peers, rather than serving the end-customer. In the case of the farmers, this led to a dangerous bubble a few years ago where Ostrich farms persuaded so many to get into the Ostrich farming business, they outstripped the demand for ostrich products by a huge margin. Those inside the internet/social media/gadget-toting bubble need to be careful that they don’t repeat this mistake by losing the general business audience they should really be serving.

Don’t shave that yak

This post is about a crime that we are all guilty of – not finishing a task because we get sidetracked by another task. The yak-shaving reference is a variant of the old shaggy dog stories; someone starts off innocently enough, putting down something they started to do something else that is sort of related, then reaching the absurd task of shaving a yak, because they didn’t stick to their original mission.

Torchbearers, or “and now from the Russian Judge”

I probably value this piece the most of all the things I’ve ever read by Seth. It originally came out in 1990 as a “Fast Company” article. He explains the psychology that happens as people go from being everyday Joes to becoming leaders. It’s not what you might expect, ego has nothing to do with it. He contends that most people who become passionate about something come to a point where they see a dire need and realize that if they don’t address that need, nobody else will. Oddly, the role of the leader is not hotly contested; it’s usually a vacant position, waiting for someone to fill it. Will you be that someone?

Playing by (and losing by) the rules

This post gives a beautiful sense of Seth’s world view. His message: do your own thing even if it means bucking “the system.” It’s less risky than assuming that “the system” will serve your needs. So much of his writing has this ribbon running through it. Still, I never tire of hearing Seth praise the virtue of thinking for one’s self. He manages to take the scare factor out of being unconventional while insisting that if we’re not bending or changing the rules, we’ll eventually box ourselves in by rules that end up holding us back, rather than helping us out.

image credit: Portfolio Press

I’ve always liked to see parallels in stories, and technology stories are chock-full of episodes that have historical parallels. This post will detail some of the brilliant product marketing done by RIM early on, but to show how strategically smart they’ve been, I’ll show where these exact manoeuvres were used by another powerful entity – ancient Athens.

The ‘RIM’ of the Ancient World

It seems inevitable today that Athens was destined to become the hub of power and civilization in Greece. But this wasn’t apparent when the city first formed on a natural hill-top fortification, the Acropolis. While this natural wonder provided defense for the surrounding lands, the Acropolis’ drawback was that it was 6 kilometres away from the sea, making Athens landlocked in a time when sea power meant everything.

Athens spread its troops sparsely around both the city and remote harbours, but this proved to be too large an area to defend. All an enemy would need to do was come ashore and overwhelm Athens’ forces and they’d be able to go unchallenged right up to the city walls. Having a foothold from the sea meant an enemy could also choke off the city’s supplies and quickly bring it to its knees.

Together with allies from across Greece, Athens held off the conquest of one enemy, the Persians (yes, the ones in Frank Miller’s ’300′). But Athens had been heavily damaged in the process. The Athenians knew there would be other attacks and they knew that something had to be done. So when the city began to rebuild around 480BC, it looked out to the sea for its future, specifically the Aegean Islands. There it found resources with which it could feed, bankroll and defend itself. By increasing its sea power the city was able to maintain access to the plentiful offshore colonies. But they were still vulnerable because of the 6 kilometre gap. Several strategies could have been taken to strengthen Athens, but in the end one peculiar idea proved to be the best way to defend the city.

An Athenian named Themistocles proposed having “Long Walls” to preserve the 6km link to the sea. They were built over five years starting in 461BC. The western wall connected Athens with the harbour town of Piraeus, which became its port; the eastern wall continued from the south of the city to another natural harbour. Between the two walls, a large triangle of land was used for agriculture. Even a small force posted on the Long Walls could defend Athens, the large swath of land and port, enabling crucial supplies borne by Athenian ships. To quote Plutarch on the Long Walls, “Themistocles did not only knead up, as Aristophanes says, the port and the city into one, but made the city absolutely the dependent and the adjunct of the port, and the land of the sea, which increased the power and confidence of the people.”

While it wasn’t the most obvious answer to the city’s security needs, the choice to build the Long Walls served the city well. Athens remained free from enemy attack for many years. This historical example of military genius does have a connection with the world of modern technology.

Modern Parallel

This same kind of innovative thinking was used to propel one small technology company to becoming a worldwide market leader. Going back just 10 years or so, you’ll recall that handheld computing was heating up. There was a race to develop THE handheld device and the leaders were Apple (the Newton), Palm and offshoot company Handspring as well as Casio with the Cassiopeia.

It wasn’t clear at first what features and design PDAs would have. Some PDA makers felt that people would use these to assist them, keeping them on top of their schedule. Most in the PDA design game were working on touchscreens with styluses, using OCR-like handwriting-recognition as a way of inputting data. Some thought it needed to be a mini-computer, which docked with a desktop and had a fair-sized screen that carried trimmed-down PC applications.

If you looked at the device made by Waterloo’s Research in Motion, you would have called it a longshot in this race. It was called the Inter@ctive Pager, whose addressable market was workers who spent all their time in the field. Around 1996 RIM made some key changes that moved it into a much larger market space.

RIM, who had perfected its radio modem to push a text-page decided to move to pushing emails wirelessly to the device. Email at the time was thought of the way snail mail still is: you read it when you’re at your desk and only when you’ve got spare time. Nobody at the time imagined that emails could be written with the expectation of an instant response, wherever you were. Firms like HandSpring dismissed the idea as too radical, so they went on designing their PDAs which were only updated when they were docked with desktop PCs.

While it mimicked other vendors by having synchronization, RIM did something counterintuitive by building a server that intercepted emails destined for the desktop, pushing them to the device. This altered the idea of slaving the device to the desktop by repointing the device to a server connected via a wireless network. Though this requirement of running a 24/7 email network can bring headaches like blackberry service outages, this brilliant stroke awoke users to the possibilities of an always-on device. Other devices at the time were shipped without modems, let alone any central server that could push them data.

RIM’s early displays only had room to show the contents of a short text-page, barely more screen area than a LCD calculator. These weren’t touch screens and the only function they performed was displaying/outputting data. To handle user input, RIM had the idea of squishing a QWERTY keyboard into the small device. While it forced people to type with their thumbs, it gave them assurance that (unlike stylus-writing) the device would capture exactly what they had typed.

In 2002 (6 years after the first Blackberry email device shipped), RIM incorporated a cellphone, which put even more distance between them and the pack, also cementing in our minds the concept of a smartphone.

Strategy…Then and Now

RIM’s decision to leverage their network-tethered, keyboard-driven pagers to hold email, phone and organizers is analogous to Athens decision to build the Long Walls. The common thread here is their willingness to think outside the box. When you’re thinking about how to get your technology past your competitors and to a market-leading position, look beyond the obvious tactics. Follow the parallel examples of these innovative thinkers. Instead of being resigned to your fate, think of how you can change it…and you might even change history.

Image credit: http://forumancientcoins.com

Last week was interesting; I did something I haven’t done since my teenage years, I headed back to camp. Mind you it wasn’t the overnight camp we traditionally think of. This was the kind of camp that usually happens in the software space, where grown-ups collaborate on ideas and applications. Last week’s camps both happened in downtown Ottawa.

StartUp Camp

Let me first tell you about the larger of the two, StartUp Camp, held over the weekend of Oct 23-25th. You can read the blogs about it by the Rick O’Conner of The Ottawa Network, or by Ottawa tech blogger John Duff. But StartUp Camp was essentially a low-commitment way of experiencing start-up life by throwing together a collection of engineers, financiers, marketers and entrepreneurs. It started on Friday night with entrepreneurs pitching ideas for businesses, trying to get everyone else to ‘pick’ their idea and form a team around it.

I decided to join a team looking at a new use for Digital Picture Frames, an idea my teammate Randy Whitcroft has detailed on his site. In working sessions over the next two days, our 5-person team applied our own expertise to the idea to flesh out a business case. After many hours and several passionate arguments, we delivered our final business model Sunday afternoon in front of a jury of accomplished veterans in the local startup community. We didn’t win the $5000 prize aimed to jump-start the most promising company but I think we were all glad to have experienced it.

Demo Camp Ottawa

A few days before that, I’d been involved in DemoCamp Ottawa 12, held October 19 at the ClockTower pub. The night is a giant show-n-tell by people who present either a prototype product or a fun project and exchange positive feedback with the audience. The individual presentations at DemoCamp 12 have been well covered by other local bloggers; but you may want visit the sites of those brave souls who presented:

Treena Grevatt: Betidings

Darcy Whyte: The Squirrel

76 Design: Battletwip

Chris Schmitt: Twegather

Roy Periera: Shiny Ads

Reflections on the camp experience

Though the events were quite different, I can sum them up by their similarities. I found it interesting how our team quickly formed. Our team wasn’t formed by executive placement experts, rather a pseudo-random process. Even so, within a short time we’d developed communication styles and functional team dynamics. That’s pretty much all you need to start a company, people. That’s basically it.

I was surprised by how creatively we tackled the problems and by how deeply we drilled down into the business model. But the flipside of this is that we sometimes got too far down into the details, forming opinions about the market that may not be valid. It soon becomes hard to maintain objectivity and you find yourself dismissing external research or viewpoints that don’t support your viewpoint. Startup Camp’s mentors were able to provide course corrections, but in real-world situations, management has to guard against this dangerous tendency.

DemoCamp gave me a glimpse of others who are inside startups. They’d gone through the actual process that Startup Camp simulates. They fearlessly displayed beta (and even alpha) versions of what they’d been sweating over for a few weeks or months, earning admiration from most of us in the room.

It was fun to briefly explore the child-like fun that the camp atmosphere gives. These events are part of a serious effort to bolster high-tech in Ottawa, a sector which (along with the economy in general) has had a brutal year. I came away very encouraged by both events and would recommend them to those that are debating taking the plunge. I see very bright prospects for those in Ottawa who jump into these events, most come away brimming with creative juice to pour back into their vocations.

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle (with thanks to Treena Grevatt)

If you’re with a technology firm that completely understands your sales team and the best way to motivate them for results, then skip this post.

Since most of you are still reading, you know that it’s hard to sustain a strong sales force; many of us feel ho-hum, even let down by them. When we grumble about sales, we need to ask ourselves whether we have realistic expectations of them. Do we really know what makes a good salesperson? Here are two preconceived notions about salespeople that we need to reexamine.

Perception: All you need is a salesperson with a big rolodex; ideally, someone who came from a big competitor.

Reality: When I meet a salesperson who’s come from a large company and claims to have lots of contacts, I question whether their ‘contacts’ were buying from them because they were effective in selling or because of the large company which they represented. True sales practitioners don’t need to have big rolodexes in your vertical; you and your service team are the ones who need those relationships. The salesperson’s value is in having meaningful interactions with prospects, so they can relate to your product and eventually relate to (and buy from) you. There’s a cause-and-effect behind a big rolodex: Not everyone who who has a big rolodex can do that, but those who can have meaningful interactions usually end up having a big rolodex.

Perception: The best salespeople are extroverts who win sales through personal charm and their ability to wing it.

Reality: In a tense sales discussion, where one wrong word can ruin the momentum, winging it is the last thing a good salesperson should do. Also, some of the best sales performers I’ve met are actually reserved, soft-spoken people. I think their placid personality helps them concentrate on what the prospect is saying, instead of being distracted by inner thoughts that are often emotional and unhelpful to their present objective: helping the buyer sell themselves.

Your Sales Rolodex

Here are some sales resources you can have in your rolodex to help form and cultivate great salespeople:

Training/Assessment:

Trevor Wilkins, Holis & Associates

Susan Enns, B2B Sales Connections

Brian Jeffrey, Salesforce Assessments

Recruiting:

Eliot Burdett, Peak Sales Recruiting

Diane Johnson, Johnson Executive Search

Podcasts:

The Advanced Selling Podcast (Caskey & Associates)

Sales Guy Quick & Dirty Tips (Jeb Blount)

image credit: flickr Rain Rabbit

Let me first say that I’ve never ever done Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing. The other day I was speaking with a non-marketer about what “B2B marketing” is. He kept trying to understand it by comparing it to slick consumer marketing tactics he’s seen. I found myself repeatedly saying “No, B2B can’t do that because it costs too much,” or “B2B hasn’t caught up to that level yet.” But as I thought more about it, I came up with many B2B tactics that have revolutionized our jobs. Here are a few of them.

Remote Sales

15 years ago, I was a marketing analyst for a services company in which ‘sales calls’ involved several people disappearing from the office for several days. Now the need to connect in-person was, is and always will be a vital step for B2B sales, but that’s not the way one software company sold me. I’d called them about their statistical analysis program and received a floppy disk (!) in the mail. Shortly after, an inside representative called and asked me to run the program. In that one call, we walked through some demo data and ran some reports; I echoed his actions and he magically described everything on my screen. Well since then, web-demos, demos using real-time data and mobile apps have all become standard staples for B2B teams. But looking back, we should be amazed at how far we’ve come and how much we can accomplish without meeting in-person.

CRMs

Say what you will about it, but the adoption of Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) has improved client service and prospect engagement. Years ago, when you ordered something from a Manufacturer, you needed to know your customer #, the catalog SKU, your receiving department’s particulars and your PO number. It was once commonplace for several sales reps from the same company to hassle you – sometimes VPs tacitly encouraged this practice. Thank goodness CRM’s have made these problems a thing of the past. CRMs have now burgeoned into profiles, which allow users to generated content that they share with their vendor as well as with other like-minded members. Constant Contact and WordPress have forums that are banding users together and slashing support costs all at the same time. I can’t wait to see where online interaction will take us next.

Online Dialogue

In the corporate world, most people who use (or are candidates to use) a product make themselves known to vendors. This trend, called opt-in communication nowadays , began when companies started opening their email systems to ‘outside’ senders and started sending out permission-based marketing emails. Judging by the number of corporate newsletters, RSS feeds, listservs and forms of social media that exist now, I’d say this development has been largely positive. In my own experience, I can point to email communications that brought in a major upsell, drove a sudden change to a user conference that was weeks away and re-opened talks with a client who wouldn’t talk to our sales rep. There are still improvements to be made in segmenting and personalizing emails – our bloated inboxes demand it, but the technology to do this is now within almost every business’ reach.

So getting back to the conversation I had yesterday, I ended up upholding B2B marketing as every bit as potent in reaching its market as B2C is in reaching consumers. It seems that marketers, regardless of their target audience, are being put on a level playing field. There’s no longer two camps of marketing competing for dominance, but this levelling has put us all into one big training camp where all marketers can sharpen their skills and learn from best practices – no matter where they originate.

Nowadays it’s almost impossible to come up with a totally new idea. The problem is that we were conditioned in school not to plagiarize someone’s work or even copy small parts of it. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t reflect the reality that much of the imagery & design today is borrowed from earlier work. The example in this post’s masthead is of a reused design shows Collective Soul’s 1994 “Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid” (left) and Sondheim’s 1979 Musical Sweeney Todd (right).

So if you don’t have a totally new way of telling a story, do the next best thing: take an old story idea and put a unique spin on it. Stories are reincarnated all the time. As proof, take “Black Beauty,” which retells the story of Alexander the Great and Bucephalus. In movies…Jaws is derived from Melville’s Moby Dick, Castaway – Robinson Crusoe, Sean Connery’s Outland – Gary Cooper’s High Noon, Meet Joe Black – Death Takes a Holiday, Sleepless in Seattle – An Affair to Remember. There are also the countless reuses of stories from Shakespeare and the Bible. And on and on it goes.

How Marketing Uses Stories

So what does this have to do with marketing and advertising? Terry O’Reilly, of CBC’s Age of Persuasion program, recently said: “Advertising doesn’t create a picture of society, but rather reflects one back. Advertising is accused of creating stereotypes and cliches, the fact is, advertising never ever has that luxury. What it does do is embrace stereotypes and cliches as a means of relating to you in familiar terms, as quickly as possible. And I’ll let you in on a secret, when casting an ad, I often embrace cliches.”

When you need to market something new and unknown, it just makes sense to start from the known. For marketing to work, it must translate new information into something you already know. Once that’s done, you can reproduce the essence of that new information in your own words so others can understand and act on it. I’ve personally practised this many times and one example will show why it’s such an effective communications tool.

I was creating a mailpiece once, but couldn’t come up with a good message for it. It concerned shipping software that came with a 30-day expiration; I wanted to maximize conversions by reminding every trial user that their software use was about to run out. I told my father-in-law, who works in a completely different field, about this impasse. He listened to me tell him how much time the users saved with the software, since they could reuse every scrap of data they’d entered into it. I didn’t want any users scrambling to create a shipment, only to find the software locked because the expiration date had passed. when I told my father-in-law this, he said ‘that sounds just like what happened to Cinderella at the stroke of midnight.’ That was it. Trial users shortly received postcards with a glass slipper and the heading “You already have the perfect fit – don’t let it slip away!” (I’m a sucker for puns). Well, trial conversions went up 33% and though it wasn’t just the postcard, I’m so glad I listened to his advice. I learned that a complicated concept can be conveyed in a small space with a simple analogy.

How to Properly Retell a Story

I’m not advocating that we directly rip-off other ideas, rather I’m encouraging us to build on their great contributions. I believe that reusing old motifs extends their life-span. Resurrecting them makes a more powerful impact by rekindling their memory, it avoids the appearance of plagiarism that you get when you copy a recent work. Finally, make sure you credit the original work, if only as a courtesy and do your homework to see if it’s in the public domain or under creative commons license.

So to fellow marketers: if it’s your job to take one engineer’s new technology and translate it for large audiences, try basing the message on a story they already know. The world is full of good stories…so use what’s already out there.

image credit: Hippiehead via Cheezburger.com

Each quarter, I look back at my twitter feed, seeing what’s worth repeating in this blog. It was a great time to be a marketer in Ottawa, with a half-dozen must-see events. There were also notable changes in the Google front affecting search engine marketing and other online applications. Here then, are my marketing, technology and Ottawa-related tweets looking back over the last three months.

20 Dec RT @benkunz: Reminder: In 2011 the word “infographic” expires and you’ll have to go back to calling them “charts.”

19 Dec Was at 2 great Ottawa events, which @techally posted about (thx!): @cc_chapman http://bit.ly/fRuXos & @DTurnerIBM http://bit.ly/eWoa7p

16 Dec How Twitter Users Changed in 2010 http://flpbd.it/twVT

10 Dec RT @wolever: 25 computers were destroyed in making this video: http://bit.ly/hLO62n v/@dgou, @OdeToCode

9 Dec RT: @OCRI It takes two years of SoMe participation for most organizations to get it right says @DTurnerIBM @ #zone5ive

8 Dec Thx to @ryananderson @roblane + @schen for organizing biggest-ever #SMBOttawa with #CC_Chapman

8 Dec RT: @jbreeze_PR #SMBOttawa Insight inspires originality… Content drives your story

5 Dec Post by Ottawa Chamber of Commerce chair Tim Redpath “5 Reasons NOT to get a marketing consultant” http://bit.ly/eo6KlS

1 Dec @storylinePR People & Relationships – never heard that explantion of PR, but I like it. #communications http://bit.ly/i6VQuS

29 Nov From @knealemann “Anyone demanding ROI on social media requires a long honest look at what they’re prepared to invest in order to…get a measurable return. And we both know that investment is much more than what’s in your wallet.” Full post: http://bit.ly/dNjSfO

19 Nov Jim Donnelly of @obj_news take on last week’s #DemoCamp he & I attended. Share his +ve view of Ottawa’s #tech scene. http://bit.ly/bRcCkQ

10 Nov New Post: SWIX Gets a Feature on Gigaom http://goo.gl/fb/ocXuz

6 Nov from @Obj_news DAMA lauches Ottawa Chapter http://bit.ly/awkw4P #technology #datamanagement

4 Nov @scottannan Thx for inviting 50 of ur closest friends to DemoCamp. you take bold steps that help this town’s tech/creative types!

3 Nov Good tips from @irenecrosby on SEOing PDFs & Video http://bit.ly/d0zYBh #marketing

28 Oct Content marketing is doable, especially for companies with engineered products, as they always have new prod enhancemts to talk about.

26 Oct Google411 is being discontinued (at least in Cda) – another one that recedes into Lab-land #backtothedrawingboard

23 Oct Just learned that IE9 won’t support Windows XP. Guess any sites for consumers have to hang back on IE8 standards for a while.

21 Oct DragonWave, Protus & Bridgewater make the Deloitte Fast 500 #tech #Ottawa

19 Oct RT @wandac: RT @cactuscommerce: 8 #mobile loyalty tactics to help build awareness & improve customer loyalty http://ow.ly/2VV2z #retail

19 Oct RT @4deck: Insightful comments by @KentonWhite about tech companies that rely on R&D assistance http://bit.ly/aRp0vP

14 Oct @OCRI Corien Kershey says use your community to validate marketing assumptions – channels, pricing, delivery, support #zone5ive

10 Oct Sales advice fr @knealemann Most people you speak with won’t want to buy from you, today. It’s a process. <-True!

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

Click here to watch the DISTIL Interactive Case Study (2:48)

From @ottawacitizen Carleton running program that teaches mobile app development http://bit.ly/a7sE4M

Good post by @ireneCrosby on tracking the ROI of marketing events, indeed any mktg activity. http://bit.ly/9fy15s

From @obj_news Carleton alum Wes Nicol pledges $1 million to school for entrepreneurial initiative. http://bit.ly/9Dl1GG

Zone5ive hearing Jenn Markey of Protus talk about segmentation. #ocri #ottawa

Enjoying slideshow on the Holy Trinity of Technology Mktg: http://bit.ly/5Cg02J #marketing

RT @bessiambre: Milestone Alert: The Speed Anatomy apps have generated 1 000 000 downloads today. <-belated congratulations, man.

Read about NoNotes in @ottawacitizen http://bit.ly/bfD4go #startup #Ottawa

Talking channel partner strategy with a colleague. Know any sites with good advice/best practices?

Could your company be on the Branham300? Application form’s now available and deadline is Nov 25. http://bit.ly/cjzA8f

At Fresh Founders, hearing about startup financing. http://www.freshfounders.com

RT @ProfBruce: Face it, u are going to have 5 or 6 different careers in your 21st Century lifetime so most important skill is adaptability.

RT @elliotross: “Google Instant means no one will see the same web anymore, optimizing it virtually impossible.” http://bit.ly/a8Mnfo

@TeamCampOttawa I’ve posted my talk: Tech Entrepreneur’s Guide to Mktg http://slidesha.re/d9CrWG Viewing time: 63 min (thx for extra time!)

Great mtg @charlescrosbie and comparing notes on running our respective biz’s. Watch for big annc’mts from him this fall.

@OttawaBlackBird Always like seeing entrepreneurs succeeding; I’m sure you do too.

Good Beg to Differ post by @denvan – When “About Us” goes wrong, they’ll find the bodies http://bit.ly/cA0gRm

RT @mekki: @fosslc (@ProfBruce) Marketing = science; Sales = applied science. Need both to succeed but differently minded people doing ‘em.

As a longtime Librivox user, want to congratulate Mtl’s @hughmcguire on it’s 5th anniversary. Keep the great publishing ideas coming.

Reading @wired The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet. http://bit.ly/9BpHmo

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

Every three months, I give a recap of items I’ve tweeted that relate to technology, marketing and Ottawa. The picture here is from that last category – a group shot from Blog Out Loud Ottawa (BOLO for short, I’m the one indicated by the red arrow). Here are my tweets from July and August; September’s will come in Part 2).

Must admit I’m racing to keep up with the blistering pace of change in the web marketing sphere. #analytics #video #LBS #mobile

RT @pfromthev: Steady Gains in Blogging by Mktrs @eMarketer predicts nearly 2 in 5 companies will be blogging by next yr.

Seth Godin: Anxiety is practicing failure in advance. Stop being anxious.

Gitomer: Success goes to the best prepared, self believing, self taught, responsible person who sees the opportunity + will take a risk.

On the prowl for topics to blog about. If you have any marketing questions, DM me & I’ll put it in an upcoming post.

Did you know that summer sales phone-campaigns actually catch a fair number of people at their desks? #goodtoknow

@DaveCHale point to examples of CEO’s who are bold, revenue-oriented & have sights set on US. these CEOs break the Canadian stereotype.

I won’t have a coffee with you, unless we can come away with action items that’ll make use of our connection. You good with that?

Sooo impressed w @shopify and their online contest (results at http://bit.ly/dAYFGa). You guys are Marketing Jedi Masters!

From #Ottawabusinessjournal Goldak lands research fellowship grant http://bit.ly/bjGpNU #software #startup

@scottica Congrats on getting listed in ITWorldCanada’s 10 Cool SM tools. That’s worth buying you a beer next time I’m in the mkt.

Aug 28 is Mobile Developer Day in Ottawa, with a full slate of speakers. Details at: http://www.startupottawa.com/?p=2699

Great list of Ottawa Tech companies: http://bit.ly/aEd6zn

Make software? Be either 1st your category or else you better reinvent the category by being 1st on a new device. #tech

RT @michelfortin: The Temptation of “Testiphonials” | http://bit.ly/c8bQ1H <-Marketers must adhere to ethics when flogging a product.

Brought a big smile to a client’s face today. Yes they represent revenue to my firm, but that pales vs. bringing a client satisfaction.

RT @freebalance: Experts Agree: #GenY Won’t Grow Out of #SocialNetworking. Duh, like #babyboomers didn’t grow out of TV http://viigo.im/49Rp

Handy PDF with what to ask before your company chooses a marcom or a creative consultant (c/o Up Inc.) http://bit.ly/aaco4C

RT: @spydergrrl @Ms_CL #BOLO is http://bolottawa.wordpress.com/ a forum for bloggers to meet and read their posts

IDC names Telepin & Seregon on its Top 10 companies to watch: http://bit.ly/d0V3o2 http://bit.ly/az2fCF #Ottawa

photo credit: @DaniGirl

At the heart of all great ads are products with a story. One campaign that does this well is Apple’s “Mac vs PC” series. The “PC” is represented by a bland guy in a suit, who boasts about his utility, while the “Mac” is characterized by a hip jean-wearing guy who can not only do the same things, but do them EASILY. Notice that the PC character’s pitch lacks soul, but everything about the Mac persona says style, confidence and coolness. Promoting yourself with facts makes you end up looking like the PC whereas crafting your story can make your product as likeable as the Mac.

Advertisers use an abbreviated form of storytelling because they know it’s too hard to create a new concept in the mind of a client. What’s easier and more effective, as advertisers know, is reinforcing those ideas which already exist.

Ideas-in-story-form is popular in today’s bestselling books. Books on convoluted social phenomena rarely make for bestsellers, yet three of Malcolm Gladwell’s books (Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers) have all been #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. Perhaps one explanation for this is his excellent knack for storytelling.

Communicators in all mediums have achieved success by using stories. Here are some famous story-based creations, each using a different medium, that suited the message their author was conveying:

Stories engage our brains. If you read an instructional book and a work of fiction, you may fully appreciate both of them, but if I asked you to tell me what they were about, you’d find it simpler to explain the fictional book. Why? because it contains universal themes and plots with patterns that our brains instantly absorb and retain. Since that’s how our brains are wired, it only makes sense to create messages that use those principles to get our ideas planted into our audience’s minds.

Our brain’s right hemispheres are made for stories. When the left side of the brain takes in data, it simply makes intellectual connections, but the right hemisphere of the brain isn’t concerned about sorting fact from fiction, it doesn’t know or care about the distinction. Whatever the right hemisphere connects to, no matter how fantastical, it looks for emotional connections. When it finds them in a story, it gives that story much thought and better commits it to memory. That’s why stories are more memorable.

Stories provide whole information when there’s only partial understanding. The work of explaining technology seems to be helped by storytelling because it doesn’t describe complex product but rather tidy and comprehensible concepts, such as the concept of a tool. Once that’s done, it ties the concept to a universal story theme, like problem-solving. People get a sense of the product (as a tool that solves problems) and can later go back and better understand the detailed information of how it works, since the story already gave them a general idea of what it aims to do. In education, this concept is called “Instructional Scaffolding” and it’s widely used at the beginning of many courses of study.

I’m not the only person who says stories are good. Here’s some other books touting the use of narrative and creatively expressing ideas:

• Borrowing Brilliance – David Kord Murray
• The Political Brain – Drew Westen
• All Marketers are Liars – Seth Godin
• Jim Signorelli’s StorySelling Blog

image credit: JunkbyJo on Flickr

As summertime ends, I thought I would write a post that adapts the back-to-school spirit to the topic of technology marketing. So whether you are back into work-mode or not, get your hand on your buzzer and take this refresher as you think about for your fall marketing plans.

No matter what you make, try to design with the end-user in mind

Just as most farmers don’t know who is eventually going to be eating their produce, technology is integrated and bundled until it (or its products) are consumed by customers. If you’re a tech company that sits way up the chain, you still need to think about the end-user, just as a farmer needs to consider how to make his produce appealing so it ends up on someone’s kitchen table. The reason you need to do this is because the end-user is on your client’s (or your client’s client’s) mind. By building in features that matter to the end-user, you secure the interest of every channel partner, whose business relies on pleasing those further down the chain. If you do this, you also benefit by understanding the true value of your offering to the end-client, which can allow you to build more margin into your price. Many times, those who make widgets with no specific use, sell it at a commodity price to resellers who mark it up because they understand its value to the end-user. Avoid this mistake and you will maximize your profit.

Tailor your writing towards who you’re writing for

If you deal with decision makers, influencers and gatekeepers, you need to give each audience their own distinct marketing message.

A headline like “Download [insert your chosen product] to achieve 20% higher ROI” works on decision makers because they build-in the presumption that action should be taken. Decision makers want to act on rather than study issues; you can convert them by appealing to them this way. Note that influencers are the opposite, so a headline like “How your CEO sees [insert your chosen product] – see our survey results on what they value” will work better on them, as it can give them ammunition. Gatekeepers respond best to messaging that’s simple yet arresting, such as “Hear from leading analysts why more companies are using [insert your chosen product].” These messages convince gatekeepers that they should make their decision makers aware of the need to act.

It’s important that you know who buys your technology. Your message to a technical buyer will include details on how the product is made – that’s what they care about. Your message to a non-technical buyer will be different, since they only care about the economic value your product offers. If you’re not sure who your real buyer is, you can derive it by asking for titles on your contact form. If your product is sold by a direct sales force, they should ask prospects which function they’re in so they can message appropriately.

Final Jeopardy Question

In summary, I hope I have provided some pieces of wisdom to help you reach your market. Continue to look for answers on how to best get your message out there – as they say on the TV show, “please phrase your response in the form of a question.” By continually questioning how your technology is marketed, you’ll find out how to beat the competition.

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

Mitch Joel – Six Pixels of Separation

The central theme of Six Pixels is “personal branding.” The notion is that you should be front and center for who you are and what you can provide. He writes to the business owner and explains that your brand is the sum-total of who you were before you started your business. While you can put thought and design into the process of branding yourself, the brand is something that is formed in the mind of the person who is evaluating you. Want proof possitive that this is how branding works? Do what the prospect does and Google yourself. It doesn’t matter what you say about who you are, it’s what Google says you are. They’re forming their own opinions based on that.

He contrasts traditional advertising with web based communication, the move away from interrupting to engaging audiences. It’s still possible in the digital age to push out messages, but for an audience to make them viral, you have to continue to engage with them so that they can genuinely believe in the value that you have. He urges people to share more text, audio/video is also encouraging people to let go of controlling their products or services and to listen to what the community wants to see happen. It’s crucial to take the community’s feedback to heart, as those are the best pieces of information that can guide any of your content and enhance your business strategy.

Joel doesn’t claim to have the exact set of tactics for how to develop your online presence, but he explains the rights and wrongs. He tries to illustrate the best methods for building a following online and from that standpoint, you can learn why you want to act certain ways and make it second nature. While Six Pixels stays fairly high-level, that aspect is what will maintain its usefulness for longer than most social media books that are all about tactics. They are out of date by the time they are printed.

Seth Godin – Linchpin

Linchpin starts off with what feels like a secret history from the Industrial Revolution forward. His notion: our socioeconomic apparatus was set up for workers who follow instructions, play it safe, subvert their identity and aim for uniformity with all other workers. But we’re not in an industrial economy anymore; as most of those who have been in the workforce over the past 10 years can attest, the system has broken down. We’re now in an economy that needs individuals who figure out for themselves what to do next. Who best fits this description? Artists. The hitch is that artists overcome the urge to keep their creativity bottled up; they ‘put it out there’ at the risk of public criticism. Seth says taking risks is the hardest but most necessary quality we need to have as we emulate artists.

My first comment about the book is that its theme doesn’t as much get developed in the book as it gets restated. So if you’re crunched for time, you’ll be OK if you just read some of it. Secondly, be prepared for Seth’s use of allegories. Here’s one excerpt from the book’s conclusion,

“The only thing keeping you from being one of [the] Artists is The Resistance, the loud voice of the lizard brain, telling you that you can’t possibly do it; that you don’t deserve it; that people will laugh at you. We don’t have a talent shortage, we have a shipping shortage. Anyone who makes the choice to overcome The Resistance and has the insight to create the right map can become a successful linchpin.”

If you don’t pay attention when he introduces these terms, you’ll most certainly be lost when he throws them around like he has here.

Chris Anderson – Free

Being the Editor-in-Chief of Wired must mean being exposed to many radical ideas. Anderson’s idea that we can make money by giving things away at first sounds radical, but as he takes us through many examples of where it’s done today, the idea of free becomes more and more logical.

Anderson argues that unlike the “bits” economy where physical goods that carry hard costs were sold, it’s now “atoms” that get shipped. He invokes Moore’s Law and the fact that the cost of bandwidth, storage and processing is halving every 18 months as the chief reason why costs are moving to zero. He phrases it this way, “products are becoming too cheap to meter.” This can help you judge when something that’s nearly-free for you to distribute might as well be free. When you do this, you should give something away and concentrate on how to parlay the value of what’s free into something people will pay for. You have to think creatively about how to convert the reputation and attention you can get from free into cash.

He delves into several ‘free’ business models, including gifting (i.e. blogging for reputation), piracy, freemium, third-party payee and cross-subsidy. But be prepared to do some work as you go through “Free.” It runs through some involved microeconomics. It’s not exactly light reading, but it’s very thought provoking.

These books wouldn’t have been published if it weren’t for the ascendancy in the last few years of Web 2.0. These authors argue that we should all be contributing; which we now have the means of doing thanks to SaaS, mobile apps, social networks and blog/podcast/video platforms. If you are looking for inspiring ideas on growing your company or yourself, reading any of these six books should help you think about how you can go about doing it.

Summertime is always good for book reading and I try to do my fair share. In this and the next post I’ll outline six business books that I have recently read and give some opinions on what they have taught me and whether I think they deserve to be read by others.

Emanuel Rosen – Anatomy of Buzz Revisited

This book was re-released in 2009 with many revisions to cover all of the new social media tools that help generate buzz. Rosen makes a few points on how to virally market your product. While they seem intuitive once you use them, they don’t spontaneously spring to mind. He insists that you provide goods/services that delight your clients before you try getting word-of-mouth going. Only when your clients love your offering and are chattering about it, will you see fruit from your efforts. He encourages finding ambassadors for your product who keep large followings and like being authorities on your type of product. He says not to worry too much about tracking word-of-mouth efforts, most of the action happens between your clients and prospects and measurement really isn’t in your control. Finally, he encourages experimentation and creativity, citing anecdotal examples where companies (many of them Canadian, I might add) used these traits to their success.

Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start

Guy Kawasaki is one of the best known personalities in technology today. His Wikipedia entry rattles off his main tech-related initiatives: founder of Silicon Valley VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures; early employee at Apple who marketed the Macintosh; head of web-directory Alltop and also a well-known blogger. His 2004 book, The Art of the Start, takes a healthy West Coast attitude on building a startup company. Guy’s main advice is to just get in there and get started. His chapter on trying to raise capital puts the reader at ease, for he describes VCs as folks who are really just making educated guesses. Don’t assume they have any better clue than you do about where technology is going. I found it covered entrepreneurial etiquette a little wider than I would have liked. I didn’t need a lesson on how to write a nice Thank-you e-mail from this tech industry giant. That’s been covered quite well by other authors.

Terry O’Reilly/Mike Tennant, Age of Persuasion

Many Canadians will know this duo from their weekly CBC radio show of the same name. Their book provides a lot of good historical background on how advertising came to be such a dominant part of our lives. In his day job, front man Terry O’Reilly is a creative director in the advertising sector. As such, you would think that he defends everything advertisers do, but he is quick to criticize and call out those who have made interruptive, patronizing ads. Together with partner Mike, they show how each medium can be used to sell specific products. They run through how copywriting, music, visuals and artistry can work together to provide truly transcendent marketing. I really like this book for telling the story behind the people, places and things that are part of the media landscape. They clearly know their field.

As you can see, the common thread among these books concerns that highly variable “vision thing” that every company must have. It has to be audacious enough to command the majority of your time [Kawasaki]. It has to excite clients enough that they will tell their friends about it [Rosen]. If it is marketed by others that get the vision, it can be communicated in a way that compels prospects to desire it. [O'Reilly/Tennant].

In my next post I’ll review Mitch Joel’s “Six Pixels of Separation,” Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” and Chris Anderson’s “Free.”

image credit: Glenn Schmelzle

There’s a big difference between good press and bad press.

Corporate PR and communications professionals in large companies and government organizations are always working to get traditional as well as digital media coverage. These same personnel are also tasked with scanning news media, clipping articles where their company is mentioned and assembling briefing books for senior executives that say what all of this coverage means. The Internet has provided some great tools for monitoring media, especially outside of a local media market, so now anyone can be alerted whenever their company is being mentioned.

The problem is, with so many publications and social networks in this age of information, PR people can’t keep track of where their story gets picked up nor can they make sense of the media spin put on each story. Sure, they can use Google Alerts, but receiving alerts all the time doesn’t help them summarize these individual mentions and get the overall gist of what’s being said about them.

MediaMiser helps organizations tell whether they’re getting good or bad press and helps them get the big picture of what is being said about them. MediaMiser collects and measures media coverage, sharing it with clients via a web-based solution. This solution frees clients to focus on analyzing the coverage and responding to it.

MediaMiser’s in-house team of media analysts gives buyers the option to outsource their news clippings and analysis. Alternatively, customers can opt to use the software-as-a-service product themselves. With its easy-to-use design, MediaMiser Enterprise becomes a hub that can be leveraged for individual departmental use (PR) or benefit an entire organization.

The Enterprise product works well for both on-going or ad hoc analysis on a specific crisis or issue. Imagine you are the CEO of a company who has to hold a press conference in reaction to a product recall, a labour disruption or alternatively, a new product launch or a new plant opening. You need to know how your message is being received in the media so that you can be “in tune” with what’s going on around you. Software from MediaMiser can brief you with charts and graphs showing both how prominently you are being covered as well as the tone of the coverage. Enterprise can do this with the help of weather-related icons assigned to articles: good coverage gets tagged with a sunshine icon and bad with a thunderstorm. Toning can also range from -5 to +5. Only when an organization has this information can its PR and communications team respond effectively.

Stories are like weather systems, you need to track them to see if they are getting bigger or smaller, better or worse. Media and PR people also need to see if they are getting covered enough to evaluate media relations efforts. Which influential writers do they need to pitch to get more coverage? What angles do those people need to receive in order to keep writing about an event or issue? MediaMiser Enterprise provides trends of news in Canadian publications that can be tracked on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

MediaMiser’s Unique Model

MediaMiser entered this marketspace in 2003, which at the time was dominated by large clipping services. Thanks to cheap bandwidth and storage, they can start gathering data on a prospect from the first day sales meets with them. In the next call, MediaMiser proves its value through a demo that is both personalized and topical. This gives MediaMiser a definite advantage over clipping services who would have to assign manual resources at their own cost to do this.

MediaMiser’s business model calls for both a product and professional media analyst services. This follows one of co-founder Brett Serjeantson’s core principles, that a human element is still needed for accurate analysis. A room full of media analysts also provide optimal “beta testers” for the development team, so the product is always getting better.

Marketing & Selling to the Whole Enterprise

MediaMiser sells its Enterprise product in the same way that Cognos positioned its business intelligence software; both companies aim primarily at mid-level managers. In Cognos’ case, middle management put in data and created dashboards which they showed to senior management. MediaMiser sees this same phenomenon happening with its clients, where mid-level managers are the heaviest users. Even computer-averse senior executives are using the tool in these organizations, because it’s an easy way to get views from across their organization on a news story. All those views are compiled, of course, in MediaMiser Enterprise, which arms these top executives with information that can help them make critical decisions.

How does MediaMiser market itself? In addition to generating leads through trade shows and traditional campaigns, it builds a community through its always-active blog, Turning News into Knowledge, which most of the staff contributes to. MediaMiser runs internal contests to promote writing for its blog. This team-based approach helps them keep timely updates on the site.

MediaMiser also makes inventive use of some well-known media stories, like “United Breaks Guitars” or Vancouver 2010 pre-Olympic coverage. It shows people how its tool tracks an issue in the news, highlighting how quickly it gets picked up by various print or digital media and how long it stays in the public consciousness. These reports are put out freely to show off the tool and drive home the point that companies need to pay attention to news coverage about them, or ignore them at their peril.

What’s next for MediaMiser?

Now that MediaMiser has gained traction with clients and has been positively growing, it’s shifting its focus on itself—having staff using the software for its own company monitoring and analysis. They are “eating their own dog food,” as the saying goes. This shows them where they get written about so they can take deliberate actions to raise awareness about their own company.

It’s no secret that the emergence of social media and web journalism has radically transformed where news can come from. To respond, MediaMiser is adding social media searching to its Enterprise solution so that companies can now see how they are being described on twitter, blogs and other social network sites. This Ottawa startup has many more innovative plans for serving the PR and communications needs of large organizations. Stay tuned.

I went to my local magazine rack today and took a look at the Profit top 100 for 2010. Profit Magazine’s listing ranks Canadian companies by annual growth.

Looking down the list for Ottawa firms, I noticed that there were no product companies(see *) listed. I quickly tried to excuse their absence by thinking that they didn’t make the list because they are private companies. Well, Profit’s list is only private companies. I tried to rationalize the absence by saying that no software companies made the list. Strike two. Varicent Software of Toronto ranked #1 overall. So then I imagined that the Ottawa technology companies must simply be below the fold, so I jumped ahead to the rankings of the companies between #101 and #200. I was wrong again. There wasn’t a single Ottawa-based vendor in the second tier either. So the entire Ottawa region has failed to produce one technology company to match the achievements of companies in cities like Vancouver, Calgary, Waterloo, Halifax and St. John’s. That’s pretty shameful and I think we should take a good look at ourselves before we just shrug off this demoralizing statistic.

So what are other Canadian technology companies doing that we are not doing? I lived in Toronto for many years. I worked with product-based technology firms headquartered there as well as ones stretching from Vancouver to St. John’s, so I can shed some light on how they focus their efforts. Let me take a few guesses at what they have done to achieve such fast growth.

They are publicly sharing their successes.

Profit and other media outlets compiled their lists from the submissions that companies make. If an Ottawa-based company never shares any news about their growth, they could condemn themselves to obscurity, which almost inevitably leads to a LACK of growth. If we are worried about giving away our secrets, we should first ask the companies that have stood atop these lists whether this practice has been detrimental to them. I doubt it has.

They aren’t waiting to ship.

I may be generalizing, but I believe these firms went looking for customers before completing their product, rather than the other way around. In technology, where you can code anything, it is crucial to find a living, breathing customer who can tell you what kind of coding they would bother to pay for. In one situation where I was the customer, a vendor made the searingly short remark: “without you, there’s no me.” The point being, your survival depends on one person’s opinion – the customer’s.

They didn’t try to do it all.

I wonder whether the startups on Profit’s list assembled their products using open-source components, customizations on top of existing platforms or widgets licensed through third parties. All of these approaches share one thing, they are all faster ways of getting to market than building a standalone product from scratch. Ottawa may have plenty of smart programmers, but no amount of intellectual horsepower can create a component as quickly as you can source one from off-the-self. A smart engineer can write code, but a really smart engineer knows when it’s time to use someone else’s code. Until proven otherwise, I’m going to assume that our counterparts in other parts of Canada have figured out how to grow quickly by making use of what’s available.

I am completely confident that we can take our rightful place on the Profit 100 list. It will take adopting some of the tactics I’ve outlined and probably others. I’m going to do my part with the companies that I interact with to make sure they are running their shops as well as the fastest-growing firms. We must get to work now. Before we know it, next summer will roll around, and with it 2011′s Profit 100 list. Let’s be sure Ottawa makes the list.

* Note: the closest Ottawa-based firms on the list are Panacis (product design services – #22), ThinkWrap Solutions (custom development services – #18) and the Pythian Group (database implementation services – #150).

image credit: Canadian Business/Profit magazine

Just as the people on the bus and the police saving the bus didn’t know they would have to jump a 50 foot gap, technology companies often run up against challenges that are hard to foresee. Have you ever met a prospect who likes your technology, but who unloads a brand-new requirement as a precondition to buying from you? How about that tradeshow you just found out about in a vertical you are just starting to explore? Can you convincingly use your existing booth and collateral to sell to this new audience? These are only a few examples of a gap in the road that you could face. So I’ll ask you, by shamelessly reusing Keanu Reeves’ words, “What do you do? What do you do?”

Settle on a Mix of Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Some say you merely need to be present in the places where your users hang out – that they will find you when they need you. This is called inbound marketing and the tools that make it up (SEO, PR, blogs, trade shows, social media, online content offered via forms, etc) are good, but by themselves won’t help you crack new verticals or generate leads within short timeframes. Outbound marketing activities such as: eNewsletters, direct mails, webinars, open houses, targeted promotions and contests, on the other hand, will indicate among people that you pitched, the percentage that responded.

Bruce Firestone recounts on his blog how Kevin Rose and his partner did outbound campaigns to get Digg off the ground (sorry for the pun): “They wanted to start Digg with at least 3,000 committed contributors. That’s a large number but when you break it down, it becomes more doable – If Kevin and his partner each made 30 calls a day for 50 days, they could reach 3,000 people in less than two months. That is what they did.” This campaign augmented their inbound tactics well because they found out over the phone whether or not enough people needed what they were offering – and that enabled them to become a leader in the category we now know as social bookmarking tools.

Have Branding that Anticipates Directional Changes

The engine that got the bus over the gap was installed long before anyone knew it would one day need to make that jump. Similarly, your marketing needs to be given regular attention so that when called upon, it can meet the challenge. If you could conceivably need social media one day to get your message out, now is the time to start building your network. If your technology looks like it will one day be serving different verticals, start understanding the benefits you bring to each vertical now and start naming your products so that they can eventually be tailored by edition or by vertical. Try to plan ahead, so that when you have to make that jump, you’ll be as prepared as you can be.

Bring Value to Prospects Before you try to Sell Something

New barriers are always being invented to help buyers block out messages from people like you. Call screening, pop-up blockers, e-mail filters, protected tweets and Captchas are all meant to slow down or thwart your marketing efforts. The problem is, you’re trying to get in front of prospects before they begin their evaluation process – from here on, you can no longer informally educate them on your product. Rather than place your hope in the prospect reaching out and finding you, you should try to find ways to initially contact them and see if they’re interested in some of your lead nurturing messages. You have to keep thinking ahead, both for the sake of the prospect and for yourself.

If you adopt these tactics, you will have the best odds of meeting and surpassing that next unforeseen marketing hurdle.

image credit: Twentieth Century Fox

If you’ve ever recorded your voice or been part of a radio show [did this myself for the first time recently], you know that you don’t get the same feedback that 2-way conversation gives you. This also happens when doing new things in your marketplace: launching that product you designed, selling with a never-before-used channel, etc.

Let me share what Christopher S. Penn and John Wall from the Marketing over Coffee podcast have said on starting new initiatives. They point out how there are zero case studies on companies that copied somebody else’s idea. Only after a company undertook a new initiative did someone write a case study about it. If you wait for a case study or empirical proof that supports what you want to do, you’ll only be copying this company. By the time you do this, the company you’re copying has not only benefited from the first campaign, it’s forging ahead with it’s next new campaign. If you’re only following someone else’s lead, you will never manage to differentiate yourself in the market.

Olympic Torchbearers

Seth Godin’s June 2000 article in “Fast Company” talks about the need for people to act as torch bearers in their everyday lives, “there aren’t nearly enough torchbearers around” he laments. He compares leaders to the runners who carried the Olympic flame from Athens, Greece to the site of the Olympic games. “It’s one runner, one flame. If the torchbearer falls, it’s a big deal. If she doesn’t make it to the next runner she lets down everyone ahead of her in line, as well as all of the runners who carried the torch before her.”

Which part of the organization is supposed to step forward and take a stab at reaching future customers? I believe it’s marketing. Is marketing a leading function in your company? Who else is going to find out what’s inside the mind of the customer and draw up the map plotting the course that will reach the customer? If you are involved with marketing, you should know your company is depending on you for this.

Clearly, this is uncharted territory and metrics can’t help much here but the good news is that when you reach out, customers will respond warmly. They have likely been waiting for someone like you to come along; since they never heard from any of the companies that “played it safe.” You may not be comfortable going in a direction where no one has been, but if you do, you will be acting as a Torch Bearer, in every sense of the word.

Roger Bannister

Until 1954, experts, athletes and the general public felt that the absolute fastest a human could run a mile was 4 minutes. No one thought that a sub-4-minute mile was physically possible. That all changed when Roger Bannister broke the record in May 1954. Before he came along, it’s as if every runner ran slower than a 4-minute mile because they considered running over 4 minutes as good enough to win races. Roger Bannister wasn’t running against other runners as much as he was running against himself.

Another blogger, George Ambler, has explained the aftermath of that 1954 record this way. “Bannister had shown that breaking four minute mile was possible. Often the barriers we perceived are only barriers in our own minds. Previous runners had been held back by their beliefs and mindsets.” When the barrier was broken other runners saw that it was possible. By the end of 1955, 16 runners also broke the barrier and now hundreds of people have run a mile in under 4 minutes.

On your Mark, Get Set, Go

It’s unnerving when you don’t know how well your message comes across on the listener’s side, but you must still start the conversation. I’m here to tell you to get comfortable with that feeling, it’s a sign that you are on the right track. To bring this back to business development, you sometimes have to forge ahead into uncharted territory without data that supports you. You won’t always have a business case proving that the sales & marketing you’re doing will work. So what! It’s not an exact science. The best advice on this comes from a none other than a scientist, Albert Einstein, who said “Not everything that counts can be counted.”

image credit: Flickr’s Phoenix Dark-Knight

Kids, don’t play with Matches, Pans & Pure Alcohol

How can you tell when someone pitches you a marketing idea just for the sake of experimentation or one that doesn’t actually fit your business needs? Here are some telltale signs:

• I’d be worried if the first thing a marketer suggests is the creation of a corporate brochure. It might be the right thing for your company, but compared to what you need right now, it might be the least important marketing activity they could spend their time on.
• I’d also get skeptical if a marketer set down to work without first asking what your objectives are.
• If your field reps are using their own home-grown collateral and presentations, instead of what marketing produces, alarm bells should be sounding in your head. Sales reps use materials based only on one criteria: whether or not they work. So if they’re not using it, marketing has somehow failed to convey your message.

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Accept no Imitations

Here are some ways you can distinguish marketing consultants or internal staff that truly want to gain traction, not just burn a lot of your money for nothing:

• You can tell that marketing’s initiatives are purpose-filled when they ask strategic questions: are you in a growing or declining market? Is your share of that market growing, shrinking or flat? Where is your product innovation vis-ŕ-vis your competitors? What strategic objectives, do you need to reach this year? The answers to these questions should be repeated back to you when that person pitches you with their favoured marketing activities.
• Wise marketers divide their goals into short, medium and long-term time horizons. We all have fast-approaching deadlines, but marketing is supposed to look over the next hill and see what can be prepared today that will not only satisfy today, but will also address what you need tomorrow. I once worked with a client whose focus didn’t extend for longer than a week. When the idea of a marketing calendar was first suggested, he couldn’t see the point of it. After working together for a while, he became so fond of using it that we couldn’t plan something until we had assigned it a date and and saw how it worked into the timeline. That’s called looking ahead on the horizon!
• Smart marketers view work in terms of projects. By working backward from large deliverables, they know what small items need to be put in place to satisfy key project goals. For example, a sharp marketer will determine where in the sales funnel the need for marketing help is greatest. So if sales opportunities are suffering at late-stages in the funnel, they’ll recommend case studies that help prospects overcome fear/uncertainty/doubt. If your urgency is in grabbing attention and raising awareness, they’ll focus on materials that introduce your solution and give calls to action.
• If you ask why a particular tactic is being used, capable marketers will give you plain-English answers that make sense. Poor marketers will refer to the fact that this tactic worked well at the last few companies where they worked well or they’ll say (in a dismissive or patronizing tone) ‘you wouldn’t understand it’. These aren’t acceptable answers, marketers worth their snuff leave their egos (and their hammers) at the door.
• Marketers that are selfless should be open to feedback from sales. They may have to endure sales’ harsh criticism of their collateral, but then they can usually count on sales to then tell them how the materials can be fixed to move prospects through the funnel.
• In a B2B context, marketers should be able to visualize how a customer uses your offering and how your clients make money or save money with it. Some clever person at a bank I deal with figured out a way to display on the website how much money it has paid its clients in interest! To people inside the bank, this would have been just another statistic, but to a savvy marketer, it represented proof of the value it posed to every customer with a savings account.
• Reality is, it takes time for good marketing to work. So let a marketer have a set amount of time in which to perform and at the end of that time, ask to see results. It takes patience to do this, but if you prematurely stop someone’s effective marketing, you’re taking a gamble with someone else’s idea and that dissonance caused by a switch in message will be reflected in your sales funnel for some length of time.

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I think that the last line of Elliot’s blog post sums up my post too: “The business problem to be solved could just require a screwdriver.” Mediocre marketers should heed his warning and put away their hammers. I have been told that I’m the type of marketer that produces the right tool for the job.

One Bike; Two People

For the sake of my analogy, I’ll liken Marketing’s job to that of the one steering the bike, with sales providing most of the locomotive power. You might imagine that as marketing rides the bicycle, its chief focus is on where the bike is going, while sales is more interested in how quickly the bike is getting down the road. Marketing is holding a compass, sales is using a stopwatch; no wonder it’s hard for both of them to agree on how well they are achieving their targets.

We can see right away how the relationship can get dysfunctional: if either side starts to argue about who’s in which seat, the bike won’t go anywhere. Neither side is helped by bringing their ego into the argument, because regardless of who wants to steer the bike, the fact of the matter is you can have only one person steering. So with marketing taking the front seat, the hitch is that they are expected to think not only about where they’re taking themselves but also where they’re taking sales.

One of the most important things that marketing can do to be aligned with sales is to understand the economic environment that sales is working in. This becomes critical when we look at how these two groups act when they ride together through the hills and valleys that are the phases of the business cycle [to stretch my metaphor]. The fact is, marketing rarely changes with the business cycle, while sales acts completely differently in good times than they do in tough times. Marketers would be wise to sense which type of economy sales is working in and to react appropriately.

In Good Times and In Bad

In good times, sales makes a concerted effort to grow new business. During this phase, marketers should support their efforts by cranking up their lead generation programs. Sometimes, the efforts of sales and marketing works so well that sales can’t maintain effective contact with all the leads that are out there. Lead nurturing programs built by marketing, can shore up this deficiency and keep the prospects warm until they are ready to engage with sales and sales has the cycles to engage with them.

Management guru Tom Peters, in his new book, The Little Big Things, says that when business is down 30%, our sales and marketing teams can still bring in revenue by working together. Even in this kind of situation, we should bear in mind that 70% of the customers are still buying from us. Imagine if marketing focuses on increasing the company’s share of each of those customers’ wallets, it wouldn’t take long before the 30% gap is made up.

Another time that sales relies heavily on marketing is when a new product is launched and they are told to focus on a particular part of their product line. If you haven’t been in this position as a sales person, you don’t know how scary it is. Sales people learn quickly to concentrate on the products that they can sell and it’s risky for them to take time away from that to focus on new offerings that they haven’t verified as being a sure-fired way to close sales. Marketing’s job here is to ‘sell’ sales on the product. Marketing not only needs to convince them that there is a need for the product, they need to show them in practical ways how saleable the product is. All the buzz marketing can generate with a product launch is meaningless if they don’t bring sales into the equation.

Reaching the Winner’s Circle Together

So going back to my bicycle built for two metaphor, let’s remember that sales and marketing are dependent on each other. Even though they have two very different functions and that one’s measuring success with a compass and one’s measuring it with a stopwatch. I never expect sales and marketing to be completely aligned, but knowing how the world looks from the other person’s perspective can take us a long way towards working together to achieve our company’s overall goals.

image credit: North West Tandem Racing

June 25: SalesView: we’ll give you data from SM without U needing to have any SM accounts. For me, one-way access defeats the whole purpose of SM!

June 16: Had a good chat today with a tech company about pairing your positioning with your pricing, + vice-versa, esp when selling an intangible

June 13: RT @theC100 C100 in the Ottawa Citizen. Great interviews given by C100 co-founders Chris Albinson & Anthony Lee. http://bit.ly/cwXcog

June 2: If your online presence isn’t 5X what it was 10 yrs ago, you need to get there. There’s 5X more people online vs 10 yrs ago #smbottawa

May 30: Wholly agree with Age of Persuasion episode saying that Negative Advertising is ineffective. I’d rather keep the attention on my product.

May 27: When you’re writing marcom, whether it’s by vertical, job, application, keep your focus on your audience…that’s how segmentation starts.

May 26: Ottawa Software Cluster: when you demo, must highlight aspects that align with their pain. You’ll never do same demo twice, but you’ll sell

May 22: @irenecrosby Thanks for finding that post on “Scalable & Repeatable” biz models. That is so critical for a strtup. http://bit.ly/ajioGY

May 21: Post from @dannystarr on “My Thoughts on Starting Out in Sales…” http://bit.ly/cYtdbk

May 17: Hearing podcast about book ‘Full Brain Marketing’ by D.J. Heckes. Good explanation of how strategy has to twin with your co’s growth stage

May 14: @digitaljoy Content creators have to keep development costs in check, and tho it’s lowest common denominator, the web is THE platform

May 11: Susan Enns: such small % of your prospects are inside buying timeframe, you must pre-qualify them ruthlessly. #sales #spo

May 6: @scottslater You can check out the Tech twitter list (as it stands) at http://twitter.com/heyglenns/tech-companies/members

May 6: RT @CouchAssociates Trying to get more out of your Analytics? Google just launched G.Analytics Application Gallery @ http://cot.ag/bWbfEM

May 3: @marketingsherpa states getting high-quality leads is marketer’s #1 concern this year. Chart at http://bit.ly/bjYOyy

Apr 30: Acc. to @ProfBruce “face to face is the best way 2 sell, 2nd is phone, email & social media are a distant 3rd & 4th.”

Apr 26: RT @kittenthebad Great example of reaching out to potential customers via twitter – http://bit.ly/bDnd8M /via @tgrevatt /by @davefleet

Apr 23: Dear tech companies: Are you tracking every single marketing message through to a sales outcome? You should. #justsaying

Apr 7: Not another pointless tweet: @krusk shows why tweeting about mundane things is worthwhile. http://bit.ly/9U8wkZ

Apr 6: Staying pliable is key to mktg new products. Keep one eye on market’s current concerns & the other on where your product roadmap leads.

The most brain-enlarging moments for me on twitter occur when I’m interacting with people in real-time. Whether it be goofy trending topic banter like #LesserBooks or a serious #B2Bchat, being in the moment with others help me think new thoughts at a pace I’d never be able to manage on my own.

image credit: twitter

While I may not be popular for saying this, even great marketing programs draw a small portion of their target audience to take action. The percent that respond is almost always in the single digits. I want to state as clearly as possible that response rates like this are normal. Just as it’s normal for those working in the sugarbush to collect 40 litres of sap in order to produce 1 litre of Maple Syrup.

This is a numbers game; get over it. Some call them ratios, odds, predictions or yields but no matter what you call them, you must accept that campaigns can be successful when 1 out of every 20 people reached becomes a prospect. Lets put marketing campaigns in context with other activities that are also governed by statistical probabilities.

Being accepted into Stanford (assuming you meet the academic requirements): 1 out of 10
Winning a straight up on a single number in roulette: 1 out of 37
Being born a twin (without fertility drugs): 1 out of 90
Having a child that’s classified as a genius: 1 out of 250
Being at a Baseball game and catching a ball in the stands: 1 out of 563
Playing golf and hitting a hole-in-one: 1 in 7,707
Finding a four-leaf clover: 1 out of 10,000
Owning an object that gets a high appraisal on the Antiques Roadshow: 1 out of 60,000
Dating someone who’s a supermodel: 1 out of 88,000
Getting a royal flush in five-card poker: 1 out of 649,740
Finding a pearl in one oyster: 1 out of 900,000
Creating a YouTube video that gets 1,000,000 views in 1 month: 1 out of 3,100,000
The fertilization of an ovum by one particular sperm: 1 out of 12,000,000,000
Having a meteorite land on your house: 1 out of 182,138,880,000,000

I hope I’ve shown here that, like everything else, marketing and sales rely on percentages. Acknowledging and tracking these probabilities helps you evaluate payback, informing the decisions you make on which marketing activities you do.

There is one statistic that explains why, in business, marketing and all other endeavours are worthwhile…
The odds of failing if you don’t try anything: 1 out of 1.

image credit: chiot’s run on Flickr

This bootstrapped company got started when Patti’s college course ‘Transition to Marketing Professional’ got a curriculum update. The husband-and-wife team initially thought students could build profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook & Myspace, but these ‘walled garden’ sites expect visitors to first register, deterring many employment recruiters from ever seeing student profiles. As well, while sites like LinkedIn have the potential to help people promote themselves, few students had enough experience to fill in LinkedIn’s work profile. They also knew that today’s students use social media constantly, but that didn’t mean they know how to use it to promote themselves in a business setting.

Andy & Patti decided that to give students something whose usefulness would extend beyond their college days. They needed to create an online place where students could profile and brand themselves. A few weeks later, they launched the alpha version of whyhire.me as a working pilot at Algonquin College.

Building a brand with social media, without leaving the safety of the classroom

whyhire.me eases students into the practice of documenting their abilities and building portfolios that become their online resume which they can use as they start their careers. Their profile can incorporate photos, videos, school assignments, blogs and links to related information on social networking sites. It also helps them highlight things that actually enhance their hiring potential.

whyhire.me makes each student’s personal URL open to the web. A nice offshoot of this is that their work is automatically readable by search-engines. One student entered her profile information into whyhire.me to such a degree that Google ranked it #1 when anyone searched on her name. It also helps students consider the career implications of what they put online. Another female student confessed that prior to the whyhire.me program, she didn’t realize that Google was indexing all her online activities on social networks, including entries that could negatively impact her as a job candidate.

By building a personal brand and telling a focused story about himself/herself on whyhire.me, the student gains a leg up in the workforce. The more they add to whyhire.me – say a blog post about an issue facing their chosen industry – the more career-minded and committed they appear to others in the profession.

Unlike ‘walled gardens,’ whyhire.me profiles are open to anyone. The profile is structured in a way that plays up the the student’s professionalism, while still showing outside interests, leaving the overall impression of a well-rounded job candidate.

A win for instructors as well as students

whyhire.me’s founders also knew that their college couldn’t be the only one struggling with this problem. Schools state that their programmes help students reach the long-term goal of finding a job, but they offer little in the way of concrete tools students can use to profile their scholastic achievements. whyhire.me wisely offers an ROI for both the buyer (institutions) and the user (students). They’ve managed to treat the two groups separately…and it’s working for them.

They have done this by gearing the solution to academics’ needs, by offering 8 hours of blended learning, rubric, a 70-page eBook and instructional reporting. The instructor uses the learning modules to teach personal branding, with assignments that lead students through the process of creating their online profile. As students bring their knowledge of social media to their whyhire.me sites, the instructors also gain knowledge on today’s tools.

Sold as content, not technology

Now that it has been in place for a year, a ‘pull’ phenomenon is starting to be seen in these institutions. In some cases, friends of students who took the whyhire.me course have enrolled so they can use the product; in other cases, the students and instructors have started to ask the school to buy more licenses and make those available to a larger number of students. I believe that as students go through the program and some snag awesome workplace gigs, even more students will ‘pull’ whyhire.me through the institutional channels.

Watch for more exciting things to come from whyhire.me

The talks throughout the weekend focused on how to get ideas across via the digital communications that are all around us. But the speakers kept repeating the same two focus areas: the first was about how to be the person producing content and the second is the audience that the content reaches. Here’s my summary of what the speakers had to say on those two topics:

Producing Content and Communicating it

Professional Media Advisor Barry McLoughlin made the point that when you’re presenting, writing or otherwise conveying information: share your vulnerabilities, people will connect more deeply once you do.

Many people shy away from putting information about themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter or other sites because they’re afraid their employer will frown on them for having personal views. Dave Brodbeck, who’s workplace is fairly buttoned-down, freely presents a no-holds-barred version of himself online. His was a conscious decision – he’s a tenured Psychology professor at Algoma College – but he adds “If you’re speaking about something outside of your work, you’ve got to think about criss-crossing personal and corporate online identities.” The safest way to handle this is to have separate work and personal accounts for your blogs/podcasts/tweets, but Bob Goyetche, who works at IBM, said he has a single account where he airs both work and personal views. He simply states up front whenever he’s not speaking for his company’s but rather speaking for himself.

Making information into content is hard, but it was made more intelligible by Adele McAlear, who described it as nothing more than telling a story. She drew terrific parallels of these new digitally-made stories with the older ways people shared personal stories (letters/postcards, conversations, home movies). She reminded us that the only thing that has changed is the media by which we tell them. Sue Murphy, who spends much of her time in the video production world, compared content creation to framing a photograph or a camcorder shoot. When composing a shot, everyone focuses on the foreground – the subject you’re focused on – but she urged us not to forget the background and the surroundings, because they give the subject its/his/her context. If you think about this the next time you write an email or a blog, record a YouTube clip or post something to Flickr, you’ll end up adjusting your approach…and make your message more compelling.

Building and Engaging an Audience

Long-time podcamp luminary Whitney Hoffman spoke about the social contract struck with the audience. For people presenting information, she said: “Ask yourself: what do I want my audience to know, do or feel?” Then she said to explicitly tell them what they should know, do or feel. Don’t hide it.

Sue Murphy, in her talk, made the case that you play an active part in conveying something to your audience, because even though you’re not talking about yourself, “your stories will speak to people because you’ve woven them yourself.”

Mike Tennant, of CBC’s Age of Persuasion, said that to build an audience, you must go for the long haul, consistently putting out content. Great messages juxtapose ideas, giving the brain an incongruity that forces it to analyze an idea. It’s not just an attention-grabbing gimmick, it’s how our brains work to keep us aware of our environment. As a marketer might say, do something out of the ordinary to get noticed. Finally, he said that making ideas that resonate means you need to appeal to the left and the right sides of the brain. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.

Business strategy consultant Nancy Morris told us not to second guess ourselves: what we have to say is relevant to an audience by virtue of the fact that they’re listening to us. This is a reminder not to be distracted by the nagging doubts in our heads when we’re sharing ideas with others (the good news is they can’t hear those nagging voices).

The ideas from Podcasters Across Borders is relevant to businesses, including those of us in sales and marketing, because if we want someone  to take action on something, they first need to absorb a piece of information that persuades them to act. You have to know what effective digital communications is because it’s now our main way of communicating. Be it an app you want to sell, a lecture point you want to convey or a joke you want people to laugh at, you’re in the communications business.

• Thanks to iPads & smartphones using 3G networks, people are getting accustomed to using the internet wherever they are. They just assume access is pervasive; they don’t even stop to ask whether they’re somewhere that has wi-fi.
• The use of a browser and the proliferation of apps has enabled people to do their work on their mobile devices, not just check emails while they are away from their computer. Many are now using their device as they used to use their computer – they’re doing most of their work on it. Though I wrote this blog post on a laptop, I could just as well have written it on a Netbook or an iPad. In the same way, people could be filling out a form on your website from a coffee shop or the golf course.
• Mobile devices can receive much more than text information; they can handle all kinds of media. Many mobile devices have built-in recorder, GPS, speakers and a touchscreen. With a Slingbox or DivX player, you can watch movies, TV shows and youtube videos on whichever device you want. Are marketers taking advantage of this?

So how are marketers, particularly those in high tech, supposed to use this new medium? I’ve put together several strategies they can make use of in light of everything going mobile. This free PDF download, called “Marketing technology using mobile technology,” is available in the Resources section of my site. Go there and provide your email to get access to this and several other How-To guides.

If you have a mobile marketing story to share, feel free to contact me and I’ll share it in a future post.

image credit: Gracie Films’ Say Anything

There are many social media ‘experts’ out there – but let me say I’m not one of them. I’m just a regular guy who started using twitter a while back, who now follows (and is followed by) around 1000 ‘tweeps.’ More importantly, I’ve built relationships that have led to discussions (which I bet will lead to some sales). If you aren’t sure of how twitter can help you market yourself in your career or your business, let me share what I’ve found that works.

I try hard to respond to anyone’s questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll point them to the twitter-user that would know the answer – even if they’re a competitor. If I do solve a simple problem, the person who asked is more likely to contact me when they have a bigger issue. As well, others can see that I’m helpful and they also may ask me to help them with their problem.

I follow and exchange tweets with competitors. This seems counter-intuitive, but it’s a good way to acknowledge others who share my passion for what I do. It’s also a good way to get found.

Some believe that you need to separate corporate from personal twitter accounts. This is not as easy as it looks because the fact is, companies are run by people. I have just one active account that speaks both for me and my company. I don’t have to split my identity or worry about whether I’ve tweeted from the correct account. If you use just one account, refrain from tweeting too much about yourself. While we all have interesting things going on in our personal lives, prospective bosses/clients won’t care that we just brought a new goldfish home. Keep the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio high.

When someone follows me, I almost always follow them back and I send a direct message that thanks them and says something regarding their profile. I may point out that we’re in the same town, know the same twitter users or refer to a recent tweet of theirs. Our brains are wired to better remember those people who acknowledged our existence or our environment.

The last piece of advice I have is to be yourself. No one can keep up an act forever and there’s no point trying to make your online persona different from you. In most businesses, people end up meeting you offline. If you’ve embellished what you can do when online, you’re bound to give yourself away sooner or later. Rather than pretending to be anyone else, from your very first tweet you should simply say what comes naturally.

image credit: twitter

You might think that it’s good to gauge how interested prospects are in talking to you. It might be a good ego boost, but that’s not why you should measure lead quality. This is because when several leads come in at the same time, it’s impossible to tell which leads are the best opportunities. The real goal here is to gauge how interested you should be in them. How do you evaluate the how interesting a lead is when you don’t know anything about them? Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, you already know a lot about them.

A word of advice for sales: Don’t use this information to decide who you need and don’t need to follow-up with. Follow-up with all leads, but use this data to guide how you follow-up. For example, on top of the phone call that you make to all leads. You can pitch an in-person meeting to your high-quality leads (compared to a phone demo) in order to speed up the sales cycle with those prospects.

Lead Quality

OK, Let’s examine what’s known about a lead, going by their explicit actions on your site. If the visitor came through a referral (look in Google’s Traffic Sources tab) that’s an independent authority in your field that usually counts for more than a visitor who merely clicked one of your PPC ads. It’s also a good thing if they came direct or from a search engine after typing in your company name – means they already know you and are returning to your site after deciding that they’ve done enough research and are ready to act.

Once a visitor conversion, commonly known as a Contact Form, comes in, sales can take a quick review of their visitor history, such as how many times they have been on the site, giving a good gauge of their interest. (This is available in Google Analytics for converting visitor’s who act as their own ISP once Goals has told you their ISP, go to Visits>Service Providers and then drill down on that visitor). You’re not only able to measure website traffic, but emails and PDFs too with google’s event tracking code or a service called ReadNotify). If the prospect is high-quality, you should notice that they open and use the content you send them.

If you don’t have giveaway content for people that fill out your contact form, you can sense their quality by how they crawl through your site. If you have written your ‘meatiest’ web pages well, they should have low bounce rates. If you already have some information, this makes building a progressive profile on them even easier. You should also see if they looked at a combination of pages that suggests to you that they would be keenly interested. For example, beyond the product page, did they also look at the roadmap page and the integration services page?

Turning to implicit measures of lead quality, we can also add some intelligence on implicit aspects of the prospect – facts about who they are. Once you know their domain, pair it with information on Hoovers, D&B, LinkedIn and other company databases, you’ll be able to see how well they fit your ideal prospect profile. You should set up objectives, then translate them into outcomes (KPIs), then work back to activities. So if your objective is to give sales more leads, make your outcome a higher conversion rate and dream up activities that drive more visitors through the conversion page(s) on your site.

In conclusion, no single metric will give the ultimate marketing ROI number, but used together, they can tell most of the story. I hope that you see how concepts like Engagement, Lead Quality, Visibility aren’t airy fairy concepts. They are a useful way to describe objectives that can be boiled down into KPIs. Every industry is different, so ask yourself what you should be measuring. We all know that it’s easy to measure marketing activities and hard to measure outcomes, but I’ve hopefully conveyed that with so many metrics to roughly gauge outcomes, we have to try.

image credit: Sebastian Tonkin

In the first post on this topic, I covered analytics around the concept of marketing visibility. In part II I’ll talk about measuring how effectively you reach visitors that are roaming around on your website.

Conversion

In the main Google Analytics menu, the whole Goals tab is dedicated to measuring conversions (advanced users will also track conversions with time metrics, etc). The first thing to know is that you need to set up goals; if you need convincing, visit Google’s Conversion University – goals are very important. Web designer Paul Boag takes the extreme view that, until you’ve nailed conversions, there’s no point bringing new visitors to your site.

Once you start seeing visitors reaching a goal, say by completing a contact form, you’ll see that you can view the ‘Reverse Goal Path’ – the sequence of pages they hit before they crossed the conversion threshold. This can be a great indicator of which pages pack the most conversion punch. Be sure to make more links to that page or to use its design and calls-to-action on other pages. In time, their performance should match the conversion rates your first page had. Analytics’ ‘Navigation Summary’ also helps. Ask whether the converting visitors came to your form the way you expected or not. Are there other paths you could tweak that also drive conversions for you?

When you have quite a few Goal conversions, you can view them in aggregate to answer some broader Marketing questions. For example, if your conversion rate averages 10%, you can work backwards from stated sales goals (i.e. 12 client closes this quarter) to see that you need to reach 120 conversions each quarter to make the close numbers sales is expecting. Steven Woods from Eloqua is a great proponent of the concept of setting different goal values. He suggests that you stratify this by each conversion’s level of commitment. Say you have a whitepaper that you give in exchange for an email address, in Google Analytics you can set a value of 0.25 while the value of a full contact form is 1. Using this 4 to 1 multiplier on contact form conversions reflects the fact that you put more stock in’sales-ready’ prospects, just as your reps do but it also helps them see that gathering early-stage leads will help them over time as they near the ‘sales-ready’ stage.

Engagement

While engagement isn’t as easy to measure as conversion, it can convey how well the prospect is absorbing your communications.
The best vehicle for tracking engagement, according to Avinash Kaushik, is a blog. Reading his post about this helps ensure that any corporate blogger puts the majority of their effort into the areas that the metrics have indicated yield the highest success. Avinash is a proponent of tracking a blog’s Technorati rank, but I think it’s usefulness is limited to popular blogs. I favour tracking Feedburner subscriptions and simply seeing if your subscription base is growing.

For those who don’t have blogs, I’d point to David Z Orban, who says engagement can be approximated through time-on-site, but you must put healthy amounts of content on your site to give this metric any meaning. He says the prospects spending a lot of time on your site are trying to determine whether or not they feel comfortable doing business with you. Reason being, according to David, “they will want to know how likely it is that you are able to actually deliver on your product or service.”

Stay tuned for Part III, which will talk about Lead Quality. In the meantime, check out Elliot Ross’ post “IT In Marketing: The Next Step” to see at a fundamental level why analytics matters.

Click here to watch the Actuate/pbviews video (2:12)

Marketing what’s new helped this local and state/ provincial government software maker to gain market share. Focused sales materials, as well as client events and trade shows were used to maximize marketing impact. This solution-based approach delivered highly effective results for CSDC.

Click here to watch the CSDC video (1:35)

All our services have the goal of giving you predictable and sustainable lead generation. We only offer these services to the technology industry – it’s our sole focus.
                

We optimize both the content and conversion aspects of a campaign – which may mean working on your advertising tactics, the back-end of your website, your CRM tools or overhauling your lead management process.
 

Our engagement isn’t over until you are seeing a reliable stream of sales-ready leads from your your marketing campaigns.

Contact Glenn Schmelzle directly

Identifying the Need

One Director of Sales would tag-team on calls with his reps’ most difficult clients. He’d go into the call knowing what the rep pitched (in this case, point solution software) but he’d move the client in a much different direction. Once he’d sensed the client’s true pain, he’d instantaneously come up with a proof-of-concept installation or data cleansing project BUT he’d name a price that required some commitment on their part. Then he would conjure up a solution that took away the pain and pricing scheme to fit it. Off-script? You bet! Did it work? You bet!

Mid-Funnel

I knew a channel rep who religiously followed B-A-N-T. He didn’t explicitly talk about it with prospects, but you saw him put it to use whenever the prospect got sidetracked. All of a sudden he’d revisit these milestones in the form of questions. He’d start off with something like “Your CFO has approved the budget and my team’s agreed to provide the solution at that price, right?” Then he’d hit them with, “So if nothing’s changed since we last spoke, it means you’re ready to go ahead with this solution, right?” and he’d stay with this like a dog with a bone until the prospect either brought new facts to light or succumbed to his irrefutable logic and said yes to the sale.

Our software company had just lost to our main rival on a Government RFP, which meant in a month they’d finalize a contract and start implementing the system. Our rep got right in touch with his contacts, who told him the contract had been signed without any discussion. The vendor began working and the rep still kept in touch with the Government, dropping helpful guidelines. Relations with the vendor started to sour; guess who the Government turned to for help?! He knew all along that the Government’s contract would pose trouble for our rival; he knew they’d end up in breach. He just stayed a step ahead of things and maintained good rapport. In fact, the Government felt proud of going with us, their #2 choice, because we paid attention to their contracting process.

The Closing Game

True sales skills can be seen in how well someone closes a sale. Most reps belly-ache about how they could only secure another meeting, that the time ‘wasn’t right’ to get the close. Worse yet, some would shrug and say that the sales’ status is ‘up to the client.’ I’ve worked with a few reps who knew when to make an assumptive close. At some point, they’d just ask for the business and you know what? It usually worked? They also had the good sense to end the conversation as soon after as politeness allowed. No victory hoots or idle chit-chat at that point, just a thank-you and goodbye.

So along with saying ‘Thanks’ to the anonymous reps I’ve recounted here, I hope this has convinced you to rely more on their insight and actions. After all, they are integral to your success.

Just because our product’s got brilliant technology under the hood doesn’t mean that’s the reason our customers buy it.

Just because our past performance has been mediocre doesn’t mean our future has to be.

Just because we tried an idea that flopped doesn’t mean we would have figured it out by doing nothing.

Just because you’ve single-handedly created a brilliant marketing initiative doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon by others.

Just because you’ve laid out exactly why people should buy from you doesn’t mean they will.

Just because you assume salespeople use only ‘tried-and-true’ approaches doesn’t mean you should abandon creating new products and new approaches.

Just because prospects don’t respond to one marketing campaign doesn’t mean they’re to be written off from future campaigns.

Just because prospects need your product doesn’t mean they’ll neatly follow all the marketing breadcrumbs you lay out for them.

Just because you’re in the front office doesn’t mean you can ignore problems in your back-office – they’ll eventually come back to bite you.

Just because you see yourself as better than competitors doesn’t mean they share that opinion.

Just because marketing tactic X is used by bigger/smaller companies doesn’t mean you should use it.

Just because they’ve always bought the competitor’s product doesn’t mean they’re happy with it.

Just because your main client contact loves buying from you doesn’t mean they’ll continue if they face internal criticism, price-hikes or service issues from you.

Just because you’re slightly skeptical about my claims doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider their merit.

Permission Marketing – Seth Godin

This book has held up well in the 10 years since it came out. It’s central point makes so much sense: target your marketing message to receptive prospects, not the whole world. It’s arguable that Godin’s book made marketers realize that their old ‘interruption’ techniques wouldn’t work on the web. It’s also shown us how inbound marketing can work for our own purposes. I draw a lot of my philosophy of marketing from this book.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing – Al Ries and Jack Trout

This short work has easy-to-explain concepts and examples from companies we all know, such as FedEx, Apple and Coca Cola. Note that the book doesn’t tell you which of the laws apply to your situation, but it will supply ammunition to help you defend your chosen strategy to non-marketers.

Unleashing the Killer App – Larry Downes, Chunka Mui

Though published in 2000, it continues to be so highly respected that it still serves as a good litmus test for how great technology products can be identified and nurtured. It bears similarity to Geoffrey Moore’s ‘Crossing the Chasm’ but it also outlines small ways you can improve how you market products.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott

While I don’t agree with everything in this book, I feel there’s too much good usable information in it to hold back recommending it.

Marketing Metrics – Farris, Bendle, Pfeifer & Reibstein

This is a reference book that I open when it comes to defining success for a marketing initiative. It contains over 50 formulas and many more explanations of the financial factors at play when we consider return on investment.

If you regard a marketing book highly, please let me know about it!

The Case for Incremental Change

I’m a big fan of making incremental changes. For me, the old saying, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good enough” could be re-written to say “Don’t make wholesale change the enemy of incremental improvement.” For most companies I’ve served, I just fixed what needed to be fixed, rather than throwing out every word of copy, stock image and campaign piece they had.

Why do I do this? Essentially it comes down to project management. Every project has dependencies; marketing projects have oodles of them. To prevent work in one area from paralyzing some work in another area, I’ve found it helpful to break them apart. I consciously choose which changes will happen today and which will be done in phase 2, 3, etc. It is possible to pile a bunch of changes into one massive phase, but that puts so many activities on the critical path, the GANTT chart gets stretched out, resources get worn out and the project manager usually falls out of favour with everyone!

The table below shows standard marketing activities and the kind of incremental change I prefer. It also shows the wholesale way to do that activity, which I propose is riskier and costlier.

The Case for Wholesale Change

Here’s the flipside to the case for making incremental changes. There are times when wholesale change is needed, but how do you know when? In reality, there should be ONLY one main catalyst for making wholesale change: the status quo isn’t working. If you’ve correctly identified what’s broken (the easiest situation is where everything is broken), you can usually pinpoint which direction to take to ultimately be able to fix it. Once wholesale changes start, there should be disincentives to turning back and few on-the-fly changes until all of the changes are in effect. Embarking on these changes means making trade-offs on cost, time and quality. So if you are going to revamp entire marketing programs, you should ask yourself questions like:

- Would my marketing peers agree that this needs to be done?

- Is it important enough that I’m willing to siphon budget away from other things to do it?

- Am I ready to deal with the interdependencies? You know what I mean if you’ve ever tried to switch logos, ferreting out everywhere your old logo appears.

- If going for wholesale change takes longer than the quick fix (it almost always does), what impact will it have on sales outcomes and is it worth the wait?

- Is this going to be worth the political flack needed to push it through?

If you’ve said yes to most of these, then you’ve got good reason, maybe even an obligation, to make wholesale change.

Change is the only Constant

No matter which way you go, you’ll feel better for having solid reasoning behind your decision. One last thing, don’t construe anything here as endorsing the status quo, that’s an opinion I’ll never change.

1. Are you testing new campaigns instead of committing full-spend on them? It’s less expensive (and less embarrassing) when you learn on a small scale. Many marketers fall prey to the “but I have to produce results right away” philosophy, but if this month’s campaign has an underlying problem that dooms it to fail, you won’t be producing any results with it anyway. You might as well learn it in a sampling test rather than wear down the prospect’s attention-span until you’ve got a campaign that really works.

2. Planning ahead with suppliers. A good way to save on printing, for example, is to run a current print piece together with the next piece you’ll need. The economies of scale can bring down the cost of each piece by half, maybe even more!

3. what can you do without this quarter? Have items slated in the budget for this quarter actually come into play or could you defer the costs?

4. What software tools are you paying for? Are there any open source equivalents? General applications may be IT’s perogative, but you may be surprised what you can do with free marketing tools out there. Before you scoff, remember that many Google tools are built with the same features available in pricey counterparts.

5. Are you matching invoices back to P.O.’s? You should, even if your accounting department does it as well. When there’s an overage, do you research why and catalog it so it’s not repeated?

6. Watch that management layers don’t creep into your staffing. Even the most well-meaning person thinks they need more resources when they know deep down that businesses are premised on resource scarcity.

7. Are you only paying for the mobility (airtime charges, inter-office travel) that you need to? Sometimes staff can be more productive when they know certain things can ONLY be done at the office or in a single meeting.

8. If marketing bought something that’s benefiting other areas, such as subscriptions to online services, be sure to apply chargebacks. They may not be popular, but they give accounting a truer picture of your costs.

9. Compare what you spend on branding/awareness to lead generation – are they balanced? In most B2B situations, the buyer makes it their business to know what’s out there, so watch that you don’t pay to make them aware of something they already know.

10. Be wary of time-sensitive opportunities, such as print or trade-show sponsorships. They may seem urgent at the time and the vendors may apply pressure tactics, but remember that they weren’t in your marketing plan. There had better be a compelling reason why you would change your mind now.

BONUS: Evaluate purchases according to their shelf-life. This idea comes courtesy of Suzy Welch, who’s book 10-10-10 asserts that we ask “What will the consequences of my options be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?” If today’s deliverables are a brand identity and a trade show giveaway, spend your time accordingly.

That’s the list – note that I’m not saying you should stop spending on marketing. The aim here is to not overspend OR underspend, it’s to spend exactly as much as you need. Also notice I didn’t say to scrimp on staff. Your people are your most valuable resource and it’s safe to assume that in the area of human capital, you get what you pay for. Though it could be hard to dollarize, we intuitively know that it pays to have smart, talented people on your team.