Online Lead Generation Blog

Google in the Software Sales Business Now

Pete Caputa — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:59:00 GMT

This is a really big move. Google just officially launched their Google Apps software product. At launch, they already have 1.75M companies using the software. Who knows how many of those are using the free "standard edition" vs a paid one. Regardless, that's a ridiculous install base which will upsell themselves when they add new employees.

This is aimed squarely at Microsoft's sweet profit spot. No doubt Google will continue to add capabilities to the suite. Unlike Microsoft, Google has no monopoly on desktop software to protect. So, while Microsoft continues to tell themselves that people want some strange integrated version of desktop software + online services, Google will eat their shorts.

The lesson for any business (not just software businesses) is that Google started with a free version of all of these products for consumers. This drove massive adoption. They, then launched a freemium version of Google Apps which again drove massive adoption. Now, they're launching the paid version in full. This process lowers the barrier to trial and the time between trial and satisfaction. This reduces so much friction in the marketing and sales process.

This is a model for business building.

Their cost of customer acquisition (COCA) must be next to nothing. Their lifetime value (LTV) must be through the roof. And their cost of support is probably minimal.

Although this is classic Innovator's Dilemma product management (entering the established market), I think this is the smartest move Google has made since they cloned and improved their Overture with Adwords.

What I find really interesting is that they actually let people contact sales reps. (In the screenshot above, you can see it says "contact corporate sales". (It's notoriously difficult to ever get a person on the line at google, even if you're spending thousands of dollars per month on adwords.)

Not that Google has a reputation for rewarding sales professionals as much as their developers, selling Google apps is probably one of the few jobs I'd consider other than the one I have now.

Are You Tapping the Collective Wisdom of Your Users for the Rest of Your User's Benefit?

Pete Caputa — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:48:00 GMT

You should insert customres, clients, etc for "users" in this article. It's easier to apply these lessons to your business if your a software provider. But, I'd argue that every company should be thinking about how to create or use software to capture processes between customers and your company. In short, everyone should be thinking like a software company. I bet there's a software company in your industry that is thinking about this stuff.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how software that faciliates a processes by lots of people can be used to extract massive amounts of data that can be used to further improve a process or make reccomendation for other users.

In other words, as we move our processes to web based software that is used by 1,000s or Millions of people, can the data be used strategically?

As an example, Google has a really interesting new solution to Captcha (Definition of Captcha.). Whenever, you're completing a form on the web and you're asked to enter a string of letters that are usually very difficult to read, that is Captcha. Lately, those strings of letters are becoming harder and harder to read. In fact, I've given up several times lately, as some have become nearly impossible to read.

Google has a really interesting solution to that. They've taken their vast libary of photos and ask people to orient them upright to prove that they're a human. This alone doesn't seem all that genius. It's kind of a natural obvious idea. But, what's really interesting is that they are quickly creating a library of photos with directional information attached. Again, not too crazy cool. Most people probably publish photos upright when they publish them to the web. However, what google has discovered is that with many photos, people don't always agree what is upright. For many photos it's impossible to tell which is upright. So, Google is tapping the collective wisdom to determine which photos have obvous orientation and which don't.

Again, this might not be all that useful beyond the purposes of creating a very cool and easier to use Captcha system. But, it certainly demonstrates the point about how data from user input can be aggregagated from a large number of people and used to make an application easier or more powerful for the next person that comes along to use it.

This isn't too far from what Google has done to rank websites. They take the liknks embedded in the web by humans to determine what web pages are most authoritative. But, with this system, they are building data that isn't available to anyone with a crawler, like links are. In fact, just like their ad network that determines what ads to display based on click through rate, this system takes user data to improve the system. This creates a competitive advantage for the system. It could even be called designing "lock-in" into a system.

I believe that data aggregation of user behavior and the lessons extracted from that data to improve the system will be a significant competitive advantage in next phase of web based software.

Do you have any interesting early proof of this in other systems?

ROI on My Time

Pete Caputa — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:10:00 GMT

I'm still alive.

This might be the longest stretch of time that I haven't written on my own blog.

I've been writing over at the HubSpot Online Marketing Blog pretty much weekly. Not that I don't love all of you, but the audience is much bigger over there: 10,000 readers. And no matter how bad my articles are, they usually get a handful of comments. Since I love the attention and the instant feedback, I'll continue blogging over there.

The real reason that I haven't been blogging over here is because I'm trying to maximize the ROI of the time I spend.

I've taken on two new roles at HubSpot. I'm still in the sales group, but I'm our first sales engineer; helping our 25+ quickly growing sales team when they need technical support, as well as making sure that we're properly setting expectations before passing a client over to our customer team. I'm also managing the creation of our partner program for internet marketing agencies, which involves working across our customer, sales and marketing teams. Both of these activities represent high potential for me and HubSpot. And both are pretty much full+ time gigs.

Although I'm itching to do something on my own again (I have a really good idea about a book), HubSpot offers too much opportunity right now. Not only are we adding customers and growing our team, we're really helping small businesses generate an ROI from their online marketing activities.

Should You Bother Accepting Referrals If They're Not From Clients?

Pete Caputa — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:02:00 GMT

I was thinking about this the other day. Recently, I've been getting a bunch of referrals from people who are not my clients. For one reason or another, they haven't become a client yet. However, they are in love with what we do at HubSpot, recognize the value we provide and continue to refer people. I'll call anyone that has expressed a need or interest in my service. However, these referrals are rarely as qualified as a referral I receive from a client.

A note that Rick Roberge wrote to a prospect about "referrals from clients" caught my attention:

You asked yesterday how you could help me. Honestly, you can't. We met through an introduction, but the intro came from my client. Client's can refer. If you made a referral and they asked you, "What has Rick done for you?" What can you say? "Nothing. I don't need him." "Nothing. I can't afford him." "Nothing. I don't like him." I refer my clients and they refer me. I become an integral part of my client's business. We over-help each other and we deserve it.

It's very true. People who aren't your clients aren't really equipped to refer you the right prospects. Why do you think that is?

Hiring Sales Professionals

Pete Caputa — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:07:00 GMT

I asked Tony Cole, sales development expert, to answer a few questions about hiring sales people. He recently launched a webinar appropriately named "How to Avoid Salespeople Hiring Mistakes."

1. Why is hiring sales people so difficult?
Hiring sale people is not hard. Hiring the right ones is hard. Why? Too
few good sales people. Poor processes in place to separate pretenders from
contenders. Desparation to hire somone. Wrong profile used for the actual
role.

2. Do people tend to hire salespeople that are like them? If they were
successful, why is that a bad thing?

Success is not always duplicatable based on why one person is deemed
successful. You have to look at criteria to succeed currently and then
determine if the successful person doing the hiring achieved success based
on that criteria or did they get lucky or have an unfair advantage.

3. Are there ways to predict whether a salesperson will perform without
interviewing them?
Certainly a pre hire assesment will help. But it is not a substitute for
all the other steps required in an effective hiring process.

Making Link Building A Lot Sexier For Small Businesses Since 2008

Pete Caputa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:40:00 GMT

A lot of small businesses never get started link building. I wrote a post the other day on the HubSpot blog which describes different methods for link building. Since not all link building methods deliver the same amount of results and since some link building methods are slightly out of reach for newbie internet marketers, I described how a newbie link builder can go from 9th, 10th, 11th and senior year by gradually adopting all available link building methods.

The article got a lot of great comments and a bunch of people said they really liked the high school grades analogy. The article was selected as a top seo/sem blog article for September by the Small Business Search Marketing blog.

So, what does this have to do with link building being sexy?

Go watch this video and skip to 20:12 (20 minutes 12 seconds)

You Want Success? You Must Lead!

Pete Caputa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:37:00 GMT

I don't read Seth Godin's blog. He already gets too much attention. But, Rick Burnes shared this with me in google reader.

From Seth's blog:

Everyone isn't going to be a leader. But everyone isn't going to be successful, either.
Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn't mean they're in charge, it doesn't mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we've got.

When I ran my own company, it was easy to lead both internally and externally. A big reason I started my own Company was because I was frustrated with the company I was working at. I left a large bureaucratic company because I knew that it'd be 15 years before I could accomplish anything... maybe. The Company was too busy protecting what it had and that resulted in people protecting what they had. I'll never work for an organization like that again.

As part of HubSpot, the dynamics are much different than running my own bootstrapped startup or working at a large old company. Since I feel that we are changing the way the world markets, I am a part of creating something bigger than I ever could have created before. On the other hand, I don't get to make decisions. I still strive to lead where I can by helping my clients, people on my sales team and picking projects where I know I can affect significant change both for the company, clients and partners.

Like Godin, I believe that leadership is granted when an individual takes initiative to change things. Small successes along the way add up to amazing opportunities.

Should Social Media Marketers Be Required to Get a Certification?

Pete Caputa — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:45:00 GMT

From Ghennipher:

Some social media marketing detractors speak against the need for a professional standard to this medium since its ruled by customers. But as a consultant, I look at things from both the business' and the customer's viewpoint. Businesses are completely like a fish out of water and frustrated when they see customers lamblasting their brand all over social networks. So they generally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their interactive agency to create more digital advertising, or bravely create social network accounts and sometimes anonomously get involved in a negative discussion about their brand and try to change opinions - unknown and with no authority, so often to be found out - heaping even more dirt on a struggling brand. Don't think this won't happen with you or your clients - some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine (Speaking at New England Business Expo)

Pete Caputa — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:36:00 GMT

I'll be speaking at the New England Business Expo. About 3k people from all over Central New England attend the show w/ 150+ exhibitors. I'll be giving a talk titled, "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Online and Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine"

You can register for it on the New England Business Expo website.

If you are a CEO or sales manager, I recommend you attend Frank Belzer's talk, "Are your salespeople driving you crazy?"

Tailored to women, I recommend you attend Deb Penta's "Create Your Personal Brand" and Jeanne Worrick's "Sell Like a Girl"

Social Media Doesn't Matter

Pete Caputa — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:29:00 GMT

Considering that I've been passionate about social software since 2004, you wouldn't think you'd ever see a headline like that on my blog, ha?

Via a tweet from Ellie Mirman, I read an article written by Chris Brogan, a force behind adoption of social media in business.

His article was about how social media isn't that important... in the scheme of things... in most people's lives. And that the people living in the social media world need to remember that.

A specific paragraph in his post inspired me to echo his sentiments:

I met a master salesman this year who sells products that cost more than double my annual salary. He's reasonably new to social media and the web, but he could teach me more about qualifying, prospecting, nurturing, and closing a sale than I could about blogging.

I totally agree with Chris. In most people's worlds, social media doesn't impact them. It probably won't impact them significantly for atleast another year or so, even if they adopt use of it today.

If they don't adopt now, though... when their buyers become the 25 year olds of today, they'll be in trouble then. But right now it's not that important.

What is important is that smart people like the salesman mentioned above adopt and use these sites and technologies and can teach us how to apply hard won business lessons to them.

There are many inexperienced "entrepreneurs" that I know first hand, who seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of social media, trying to make a quick buck. They'd be served well if they took the time to learn that their MBA and youthful energy will be unlikely to deliver them Zuckerberg status. They'd be well served by learning how to "help people solve real problems" and "to act always in the best interest of their clients" like I'm sure the salesman mentioned above knows how to do.

Link Building is Hard

Pete Caputa — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 08:24:00 GMT

Link building is hard. I think it is the hardest part of a successful internet marketing strategy.

I wrote a few new articles on link building on the HubSpot blog. The first one talks about how to construct a good inbound link and why link building is so important. The second one talks about what methods to use to build inbound links to your site. Both articles link to a lot of other authoritative articles about blogging written by other bloggers. The first article has a lot of great comments from HubSpot blog readers who shared some link building success stories and ideas. With these two new articles, there's now a good amount of link building articles on the HubSpot blog, giving a good overview of link building best practices.

Are You a Luddite Idiot Who Still Cold Calls All Day?

Pete Caputa — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:57:00 GMT

There was some very colorful non productive banter in my recent blog article, Cold Calling is 280% More Effective than Inbound Marketing.

In short, someone called me conceited for writing the post the way I did:

I should be able to stop here and have you see why I called your post sophomoric, but in case you don't yet understand I'll add a little more here.

Consider your statement "I talked to 3 people today who have a decent sized sales team who spend their entire day cold calling. Yes. Cold Calling. All day."

You seem to think you have it all figured out because you know what works for one little corner of the world. You don't yet understand that there might be a lot of reasons that things are done a certain way. The sales manager at these companies that you mention might be luddite idiots -- or you might be the carpenter who thinks the solution to any problem is a hammer. In any case, you can't deny that there was conceit and arrogance in your statement "...who spend their entire day cold calling. Yes. Cold Calling. All day."

HubSpot, in our quest to make people feel really bad for relying on cold calling to build their sales funnel, has filmed a slightly more humourous and less insulting way of getting the point across:

I fully expect my sales training development expert readers to have some constructive and thoughtful feedback.

Introducing HubSpot Owner: Integrated Online Marketing and Website Platform for Small Businesses

Pete Caputa — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:27:00 GMT

Preface: These are my thoughts and things from my perspective and don't necessarily represent the views and experiences of others at HubSpot. I'm guessing that people, especially our founders and management, from HubSpot will add more perspective in the comments.

When I joined HubSpot in November '07, I was extremely excited. HubSpot was a perfect fit for my passions at the intersection of online marketing, small business marketing services and software as a service. I had a conversation with Auren Hoffman shortly afterwards telling him what HubSpot was doing. He remarked, you really are attracted to business models that help small business owners grow their business. I hadn't thought of it in that light. But, he was right. I love helping small business owners with what is usually their most pressing problem: lead generation.

Being in a fast growing business in a rapidly evolving industry, however, I quickly grew a bit concerned about some of the sentiment internally about selling our services to small business owners. Every decision HubSpot makes is based on analysis and numbers. And the first few months, while I was there, a larger % of small business owners had cancelled their subscriptions (even though it was only a small number and usually because they were going out of business or changing direction). Also, previous to joining HubSpot, the majority of the sales team had sold larger products to larger companies. So, they all pretty much preferred selling to marketing teams with established budgets, instead of small business owners that needed a lot more education and had to decide between buying HubSpot and taking their family out to dinner each month. The marketing team was also making large strides at attracting marketing professionals to our site and converting them into sales ready leads. They recommended those leads get priority in our queues and most of the sales team happily obliged. Further, the development team was developing more advanced inbound marketing capabilities like closed loop marketing and lead scoring and focussing less on solving the problems of small business owners. We even starting requiring small businesses to start paying for a year long subscription in advance, to ensure that they were committed.

In short, it seemed like we were raising hurdles that prevented us from helping small businesses, while shifting the company focus up stream towards larger small businesses.

A few months into my time at HubSpot, though, things started to change.

I started selling our content management system to small business owners as a primary reason why they should start with us. I specifically remember some early clients like Dr. Edward Kwak, Darcy Cook and Dave Lima where HubSpot had an immediate and extremely positive impact on their lead generation and business growth because they now had control over their site.

A few months later, we instituted an internal scoring system to determine our most successful, most engaged and most improved clients. In aggregate, my clients, many of them small businesses were getting the highest scores.

Around this time, the numbers were crunched and it was determined that small businesses who use our Content Management System (CMS) were almost always successful.

Things started to turn around internally. Management realized that we could serve both small and mid sized businesses successfully. But, it was quickly becoming apparent that they had different needs.

As a result, on September 1st, HubSpot Owner and HubSpot Marketer were launched. HubSpot owner is a complete system for small businesses to manage their website, blog, traffic acquisition and lead capture. It also includes our internet marketing training program which teaches internet marketing practices in SEO, PPC, blogging for business, social media marketing, etc. It includes all of the SEO tools, social media marketing and blog analytics tools, marketing analytics, lead intelligence, etc. It sounds a bit complex to the average small business owner, but the brilliant thing is that this is all they need to make the web work for them. It actually makes the process simpler by putting everything into one package.

Altogether, HubSpot Owner provides a complete low cost turn key lead generation system for small businesses, as long as they are willing to dedicate the time to making it work. It removes the need for a technical webmaster. It removes the need for external costly custom web development. It lessons the need for hiring external marketing resources that most small businesses and solopreneurs cannot afford and who rarely generate a measurable ROI. It makes it possible for small businesses to be in control of their website, online marketing, their online lead generation and ultimately the growth of their company.

As you can tell, I'm pretty excited. By the end of August, we signed on 155 new clients bringing us to 750+ clients in total. When I started in November '07, we had <100 clients altogether. It's been an absolutely amazing ride. We're helping so many small businesses generate leads. I'm very confident, with the new product streamlined for business owners, we'll help many many more in the future.

You Wouldn't Write a Book Report without Reading the Book, Right?

Pete Caputa — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:25:00 GMT

Of course, in my day, there were many high school students that just read the cliff notes to do a book report. I am sure that today, kids just browse the web and cut and paste a report together. Either way, it's a shortcut that most teachers will quickly detect.

Readers of your blog, or the lack of readers of your blog, will know when you don't read other blogs too.

You shouldn't write a blog unless you read other blogs. Reading, commenting and linking to other blogs are more important parts of growing your blog readership than writing great content is.

Get yourself an account at Google Reader and start subscribing to some blogs. Read them for inspiration. If you're human and you know how to relate to people, leaving comments and linking to other blogs will happen naturally. Guess what will happen next? People will start reading your blog, linking to you and leaving comments. Then, you'll have a successful blog. Kinda like getting good grades helps you succeed too.

What Would Seth Do?

Pete Caputa — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:31:00 GMT

I met Chris Baggott at the Inbound Marketing Summit, where I also saw Seth Godin speak in person for the first time. I twittered Seth's whole speech here. I have followed Chris's blog for a long time as he founded Exact Target, an email marketing software as a service company.

I don't have as much of a man crush on him as he does on Seth, though. The video above is clever bordering on scary stalker dude. But, it has a great lesson about blogging. Anyone starting a blog should watch it.

Sales Pick Me Ups

Pete Caputa — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:28:00 GMT

Two great blog posts.

Tony Cole shares the story of his son's heart attack and brain injury.

Al Turrisi shares a story about a man that wrote a book by blinking the letters.

Being sales experts, both of them drew the parallels between life's adversity and how we react to it and selling adversity and how we react to it.

Shut Up and Sell More

Pete Caputa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:06:00 GMT

Craig Klein left a comment on my blog this morning. I checked out his blog and saw a great post that I had to point people to. Here's an excerpt from the full article:

Bottom line: Recent experiences like this one show me that too many sales people still haven't gotten the message - sales is not about talking, telling or teaching. Its about listening.
Your goal is to continue to ask the prospect questions about their world. Understand what's working for them, what challenges they face, where they think they're heading and most importantly, what are the greatest risks they see in the current world or in the future. What are they afraid of.
Why? Because people buy for emotional reasons. Especially in business, people buy things because its a piece of a vision in their head or they buy because they're afraid of something. Either way, if you know what that is, then its easy to show them how your product or service can be a crucial part of the vision or protect them from failure, cost overruns, etc.

Worcester's Best Chef 2008.

Pete Caputa — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Online Event Registration - Powered by www.eventbrite.com

What Kind of Idiot Runs a Business without a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?

Pete Caputa — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:18:00 GMT

IF business owner = idiot WHERE business DOES NOT HAVE CRM
THEN 80% OF business owners MUST BE idiots.

Most small businesses do not employ a CRM. Many "have one" but don't use it. I'm not saying it's easy. But, it's necessary for any small business that wants to be bigger or more profitable someday.

Here's a great list of questions about CRM that you should ask yourself.

Do you know who your most profitable customers are, and what they purchase?
Are you aware of the current sales opportunities your sales team is working on?
Do you know which opportunities are at the beginning, middle, or end of your sales process?
Can you list the marketing campaigns that generated revenue and which ones failed?
Do you know the reason for the successes? How about the failures?
Employees only need to go to a single database for all business information, right?
Employees never have to enter the same information in more than one database or spreadsheet, eh?
Do you provide your sales people with current customer account status to avoid wasted time?
Can you easily control information access for each employee?
Do you have a trail of: Communications with your clients, problems reported, and solutions implemented?

Whether you use Sage CRM, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, Landslide, Zoho, or Sugar CRM, it doesn't really matter. You need to start implementing.

Who are the Top Twitter Users?

Pete Caputa — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:29:00 GMT

Dharmesh and the HubSpot internet marketing software development team launched another free tool the other day.

As companions to the free SEO tool, Website Grader, and the press release SEO tool, Press Release Grader, Twitter Grader analyzes a Twitter users influence.

Unlike the other tools, Twitter grader has a leaderboard which shows the highest scoring users. Of course, it's only evaluating the users that have evaluated their Twitter profile via Twitter Grader. But, as of today, that's atleast 20,420 people, including Barack Obama, who comes in at #1 right now.

Dharmesh is hard at thought about how to help small businesses and marketing professionals leverage the social mediasphere to market their businesses more effectively.

There are some new features in the main HubSpot software which help businesses improve their blogging (Blog Analytics) and identify social bookmarking entries (HubFeed) that are related to their products and services (so they can participate in the conversation). I've started using these tools to generate greater returns on my time spent blogging and leveraging social media sites.

Twitter Grader is more of an experiment at this stage. And probably more of a "we think it'll be cool" application than anything.

However, any thoughts about how Twitter Grader could help a company better leverage Twitter are welcome. HubSpot is listening.

When is LinkedIn Grader coming, Dharmesh?

I Can't Believe You Still Spend Money on Brand Awareness

Pete Caputa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:50:00 GMT

It's absolutely ridiculous that the marketing departments of soooo many b2b companies are not developing online lead generation processes that produce sales ready leads; that they don't practice measurable marketing.

Historically, sales has always had a funnel. Marketing should have a funnel too. Brian Carroll has a great post about building a marketing funnel:

Most organizations don't have a marketing funnel; they have a sales funnel that looks more like a bucket with lots of holes in it where leads leak out. Marketing needs to create its own funnel to understand whether leads are sales ready or not.
The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring leads into one spot and qualify them. By qualifying them, I mean that the leads are ready to talk to someone from a sales perspective. Then there is the hand-off process between marketing and sales. I find that connecting the marketing and sales funnel together is really a big challenge. You have to understand your sales process to know at what point the sales team views a lead as an opportunity and begins actively pursuing it.
Lead generation really is about building relationships. It's how can I help my sales team build relationships with the right people and the right companies. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren't sales ready.
The bigger and better you make your marketing pipeline, ultimately the bigger and better you make your sales pipeline. In the end, this isn't about generating more leads; it's about generating actionable leads.

A company where the sales teams and marketing teams work together, should have a combined funnel. It should look something like this:

For those of you who do better with words, you should know exactly how many visitors to your website convert into leads; how many of these leads your salespeople convert into opportunities; how many of these opportunities your salespeople convert into clients. You should also be able see at a much more granular level... what marketing activities, campaigns and referring sources those customers originated from, as well as what marketing activities made them "sales ready". That's closed loop marketing.

If you're a b2b marketer and you're not trying to figure out closed loop marketing, I personally believe you should be fired. You should be fired today, if you're still asking for $ to build your brand while your sales team is primarily cold calling prospects. It's absolutely amazing that more CEOs don't demand a measurable ROI from their marketing teams. It's absolutely amazing to me that marketers don't demand that their organizations committ the time and resources to create compelling content and participate in the conversations happening in their marketplace on social networking sites.

Brand awareness should be a side effect of a great product, great marketing and great customer service.

However, your marketing activities should be measured based on leads generated, leads qualified and customers acquired. Not some fuzzy notion of brand awareness.

Email Marketing Sensationalism: It's Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Pete Caputa — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:48:00 GMT

This is a guest article by Kelle Sparta of Sparta Success Systems.

Last week I received an email containing a link to Frank Kern's video on The Rubberneck Effect in marketing online. I watched the video and decided to try out the premise. So I immediately sent out a letter to my mailing list with the same subject line ("bad news...") that he had suggested. What I found was very interesting.

I found that my open rate did increase rather dramatically, in fact almost twice as many people opened the email as normally do (27.9% vs. my normal 13%-15%). And the percentage click through rate (the number of people who clicked on any given link) was about average for any mailing - which means about twice as many people as normal clicked through overall since twice as many opened it. But my opt-outs (people who asked to be removed from the mailing list) were more than double (0.7% as opposed to my normal 0.3%).

I also included access to a free 10-part audio training on my real estate training website (this was my real estate list that I sent this out to). I got a 32.6% click through rate and 55.8% of those who clicked through actually signed up for the auto responder program with the training. That's better than any other free item I've ever offered.

In looking back at my open rates, I realized that only one email I've sent out has come close to these statistics. Interestingly, it was the one I sent on Valentines Day this year with the subject line "You Are Loved". I can't compare click-through rates for you since I did this email as a pure deposit in the emotional bank account of my readers and didn't ask for any sales or even offer any links on the page. Interestingly, the opt-out rate was still only 0.3% which is average for a mailing for me. Although none of the people who opted out reported me as spam whereas 4 people reported me on the "bad news..." mailing.

So it would seem that telling someone they are loved is just as attractive as indicating there is bad news. But there's more to the story. The text of the Valentines email was:

"I just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know how much I love and appreciate you.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Love always,
-Kelle Sparta"

Well, I got a large amount of emails back from this message. About half were positive and expressed appreciation in return or gave thanks for the message. The other half of the respondents were angry and/or skeptical asking how I could possibly claim to love someone I hadn't met. It was a controversial subject and clearly divided respondents into two very disparate camps.

In contrast, I received only three emails from the "bad news..." email. One had also gotten the link to Frank Kern's video the same day and was impressed with the speed of implementation that I showed and amused to see it arrive in her mailbox. Another emailed me to thank me for the article from the previous week and to tell me she had forwarded it to a friend who was in need of help in dealing with her fears. And a third came from Peter Caputa, a friend and fellow internet marketer, who said that he had felt a little betrayed when he saw the inside vs. the subject line. He felt I might end up with the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome if I wasn't careful about how often I used these messages. (And I agree with him.) But there were no angry messages from my actual customers.

So, I think I can conclude from this two things about open rates:

Sensationalism certainly does increase open rates. The Rubberneck Effect as described by Frank Kern does work - after all, a 27.9% open rate with a 54.5% click through to watch the video certainly doesn't suck.
Positive, emotionally charged comments that are out of the box also work though. "You Are Loved" returned a 25.2% open rate - not quite as good as "bad news..." but certainly not shabby in the overall mix of things. Whether the click-throughs will be equivalent with the positive message to those in the negative one, I can't say yet. I'll test that next.

And, sadly, I think I can also conclude that we are more open to hearing that something has gone wrong than we are that someone loves and appreciates us.

So, for now, I think I'll go back to my pattern of talking about the positives. Perhaps I'll start looking at the emotional content of my subject lines a little more to keep my readers intrigued more often. But, thankfully, I think I can leave the sensationalism behind in favor of a more positive approach. (Which is really what I wanted to do anyway.)

Kelle Sparta is The Business Shaman and Consciousness Consultant to corporations and small businesses. Kelle is the founder of Sparta Success Systems, a consulting and coaching company that provides tools, products, and training to empower business owners, managers and employees to create lives and businesses they can love. For more information, visit her website at http://www.kellesparta.com

LinkedIn's Power Move in Hosting the B2B Conversation

Pete Caputa — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:41:00 GMT

LinkedIn is about to make a power move.

I've been using Facebook a lot more lately. It has some powerful features that enable me to initiate conversations with people. LinkedIn, by comparison is very sterile. However, LinkedIn is where business happens. I think too much play still happens on Facebook. Business happens on Facebook. But, I don't think 40+ serious business professionals (outside of the marketing world) will ever really adopt Facebook as a business networking tool, atleast until the kids just graduating college are 40+.

So, what's LinkedIn's power move? For a few years now, people have been building groups on LinkedIn about all kinds of topic. There was very little benefit to the members of the groups. Owners of the groups, could of course, send emails to the members. (Not many marketers caught on and I expect to see the controls tightened on the ability to download email addresses.)

I also expected for a long time that LinkedIn would launch functionality to enable the groups to interact via the site. The first thing they're launching is forums, which is an obvious idea, albeit nothing that new. What'll be revolutionary about it, I presume, is that when users post to different forums, their contacts will probably be notified via their feeds. LinkedIn Answers already does this, making it possible for people to tap the collective wisdom of their network and the wider linkedin network very quickly. (Answering questions is also a good promotional tool.) I bet their forums will be used more frequently and will draw in all kinds of conversations.

Here's the official announcement from LinkedIn (from an email):

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.
This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:
Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.
We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

What do you think of the new move? About time? Implications?

Are You Walking the Marketing Marathon?

Pete Caputa — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:37:00 GMT

This a guest article written by Shannon Golladay of Paragon Wealth Management.

It is race day and you are about to run your first marathon. You have two choices... you can run the race and do something you've never done or you can back out and cheer on the sidelines.

If you decide to run, it will be difficult, and it will take time to get to the finish line, but your reward will be great.

If you decide to stay on the side lines and watch, you might have fun, but you'll be doing the same thing you've always done: just watching people get further ahead.

This situation is similar to ours at Paragon Wealth Management as it relates to marketing. For over 20 years we stayed on the sidelines. Our business grew gradually by referrals and it was successful, but it never really took off... until now.

We decided to do something different. Our services are unique compared to the typical money manager so we decided to do something completely unheard of in the investment industry: online marketing.

Most businesses in our industry build their businesses solely by referrals. They may do an ad in a magazine or newspaper here and there, but most grow by referrals. This method does work, but it isn't the best method.

I started working at Paragon last November 2007. I was hired to do public relations and to help us "run a marathon" to grow our business.

My background is in public relations. In school I learned the traditional ways to pitch the media with story ideas. I had used these methods for several years. They worked, but nothing like the new way of doing public relations.

The first thing my boss, Dave Young, did when I started my job was give me a book to read called, "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" by David Meerman Scott. It is - by far - the best book I've ever read about public relations and marketing. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of marketing Paragon.

In the book I read about David Meerman Scott's blog and then I learned about Hubspot, an internet marketing company, which is outstanding.

We signed up for Hubspot and started implementing the ideas in David Meerman Scott's book. We started two blogs, Money Managers Live and a blog on our website. We also redesigned our website to make it easier for people to learn about us. We submitted press releases online with links in them. The list goes on and on.

The moral of the story is that we had great Personal Wealth Management Services, but not many people knew about them. We were sitting on the sidelines just watching the marketing marathon - doing the same thing each day.

We decided to start training for the marathon by making some changes and getting help from great resources. Now we are running the race as fast as we can.

So what's your story? What are you doing for marketing or public relations? Are you on the sidelines watching or are you running the race?

Shannon Golladay is the Public Relations/Marketing Director for Paragon Wealth Management, a registered investment advisor. Paragon takes a dynamic and proactive approach to investing and has over 20 years experience working with both good and bad markets that can be difficult and constantly changing. They are client centered and have a fiduciary responsibility. Shannon also writes and edits articles for Paragon's blogs Money Manager's Live and Paragon's company blog.

Instantly Measuring the Success of My Clients

Pete Caputa — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:46:00 GMT

A news release with some HubSpot milestones was just published.

My favorite part of the press release, from a quote from our fearless leader, Brian Halligan:

"During the month of July, our customers in production saw an average of 20% monthly growth in website traffic and 25% monthly growth in leads"

Since HubSpot is software as a service, we not only have a pulse on the growth of our own business, we can instantly measure the success of our clients, individually and collectively.

There's got to be some interesting and powerful implications there that are yet to be discovered.