So as a young company we feel incredibly honored to be selected as a finalist for this award.

The conference has had some interesting sessions for entrepreneurs and there are lots of words of wisdom from Alex Vieux, the Founder, Chairman & CEO at DASAR as well as the Owner of Red Herring, including some from this morning. “You only live one life,” he said. “So be sure to pay attention to and take care of your family.”  This is right in line with my personal priority system which is quite simple: family first, job second, hobby third (But you have to do all three).

Alex focused his remarks yesterday to remind CEOs to focus on the customer.  This was interesting to me because it is also completely in line with our company values:

Customer Success
Truth
Team First
Balance
Financial Success

A final highlight for me was an interview with Asheem Chandna, a fantastic venture capitalist from Greylock. In the interview Asheem recalled a recent Harvard Business Review article which explained the 3 rules for building a successful company.

How to build a successful company:
Rule 1. Focus on top line growth
Rule 2. Focus on what you do better
Rule 3. There are no other rules

Signing off from Monterey.

The results may surprise you. One of the things that makes Force.com development challenging is that there is the possibility of interaction between workflows, validation rules and other “declarative” programming elements, and any Apex code and applications in your system. So it is very possible to have a unit test that passes when deployed to production, that later fails after someone adds a new workflow or validation rule.

Here’s a simple example of how this can happen. Let’s say a unit test exists that verifies an operation on account objects. To do so, the unit test will typically create a test account. Later, someone adds a new validation rule that requires an account field to be set. Now the unit test will fail – because the test accounts it creates won’t meet the validation rule.

Why does this matter?

First, because a failing unit test can prevent you from performing code updates until the problem is resolved. This can cause delays and unexpected costs when developing or updating code as it becomes necessary to analyze and fix unit tests before deployment.

So clearly it’s a good idea to run your unit tests after every change to your org configuration.

But there’s another reason you should do this.

About every four months, Salesforce performs a major software release. Have you ever wondered how they make sure that their updates don’t break your existing code? One way they do this is using a test called the hammer – they literally run every unit test on every organization and compare the results on the existing code against the new version.

If you have failing unit tests, they won’t count during the hammer test – as a failure on the new version of Salesforce won’t indicate a change in behavior. But if your unit tests pass, but fail during the hammer test – Salesforce will know that there’s a problem with the new version, and they’ll fix it before it goes to release.

So run your unit tests on a regular basis and after every configuration change and help keep Salesforce the reliable platform that we’ve all come to count on.

Hint: Under Apex Test Execution options,  always select the option “Disable Parallel Apex Testing” – it eliminates false errors on some applications.

Your company’s entire Sales and Marketing database (hopefully) is stored in your CRM solution and your MA solution will initially have to pull information from there to populate its own database.  If they are not synced properly you could get corrupted or incomplete information from this process.  Also as you run campaigns in your MA solution you need to be able to send complete and accurate campaign information back to your CRM solution.  This helps you understand how all your leads and contacts progress through your Marketing and Sales funnels, enabling you to determine if responses need to be sent back to the top of the Marketing funnel or if there are bottlenecks in the hand-off between Marketing and Sales.

Additionally you need to make sure that the numbers in your MA solution match up with the numbers in your CRM solution.  In many companies Sales and Marketing already have a contentious relationship (this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone).  However this gets exacerbated if Marketing can’t prove the effectiveness of its campaigns to Sales, Sales is unhappy with the quality of leads coming from Marketing, etc.  If Sales can’t see accurate Marketing numbers inside your CRM solution there is no way they will go looking for those numbers in your MA solution.  You need to have accurate marketing metrics in your CRM solution that reflect what is actually happening with your programs so Sales can Marketing can get on and stay on the same page.  Like your Sales and Marketing teams your CRM and MA solutions need to be in constant communication, exchanging information about what is happening with your customer and prospect database, and tracking and measuring the results of your campaigns.

The bottom line is this: integrating CRM and Marketing Automation solutions is a critical step towards creating a complete demand generation lifecycle that generates lots of net new responses and drives revenue for your company.

My key takeaways from this event (of course attending the regular sessions goes without saying):

• Network, network, network.  Whether you are a sponsoring company looking to generate new leads for your business, an attendee sent to find one of these solutions, or just someone interested in the presentation topics this conference is literally full of industry experts of a myriad of topics across Marketing and Sales.
• Check out the customer case studies.  These are a great way to learn how companies that are probably dealing with many of the same problems as you are were able to solve their issues.  You might even learn some best practices in running and measuring demand generation programs as well!
• Don’t ignore the sponsor booths.  Yes, we had a booth at the conference but that is not why I am mentioning this.  As a company sponsoring the event we found it very useful to walk around and talk to the other sponsors and this is in fact how we found one of our key partners, Bulldog Solutions, at the 2012 event.  If you are an attendee this is a great way to possibly find some great solutions that can help with your marketing or sales efforts or even just learn about some cool new technologies.

This year was truly an impressive show.  The organization and structure, as well as breakout sessions and events fostered a great opportunity for education and networking opportunities.  It afforded us wealth of new opportunity across our organization and we look forward to the opportunity to attend again next year.

• Peer based selling and reference selling is the most effective way to accelerate deals through the funnel.
• Sales Enablement  is becoming increasingly relevant with 30% of sales time actually spent selling and 70% of the buyers journey completed before sales is engaged
• Persona based content - with more than 70% of company content never used by sales, it is important to feed sales and ultimately prospects with relevant content segmented by role, industry, etc. based on what buyers want to buy, not on what you sell.
• Pivot toward business accountability and insight from not just producing more leads to producing tangible business value.

You should definitely check out his post on Eloqua’s blog to get into more detail about those, but the point that sticks out in my mind the most is his last one about business accountability and insight.  Understanding which Marketing and Sales campaigns generate the most revenue, bring in the most net new names, etc. is critical to enabling companies to hold their Marketing and Sales departments accountable for demand generation.  If a company can’t properly track and measure its demand generation efforts can it really hold its Marketing and Sales teams accountable for the numbers they generate?

SiriusDecisions has developed a great methodology for measuring this with its new demand generation waterfall.  If you can figure out a way to leverage this by creating a measurement system in your CRM solution that tracks volume, conversion rates, and velocity through your Marketing, Sales, and Telesales funnels (shameless plug Full Circle CRM does this for salesforce.com) then it can go a long way in creating a culture of accountability and aligning your Sales and Marketing teams to drive more revenue.

A couple takeaways from this session to help bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales:

• Sales and Marketing need to have access to the same data and be able to speak the same language
• The initiative to re-examine business process and train the Sales team needs to come from Sales leadership, not Marketing
• Marketing and Sales need to work together as early as possible in the strategic process so it is a complete team effort that works for everyone

Aligning Sales and Marketing can be tough, but if you are tenacious and stick with it the benefits can be staggering.

Looking forward to more exciting sessions today!

SiriusDecisions took this idea to a whole new level with their new demand generation waterfall methodology where they break out all of your demand generation efforts into marketing, sales, and telesales funnels.  Tracking all this data can be tricky since most CRM and MA (Marketing Automation) solutions are not set up out of the box to do this, but with Full Circle CRM’s Marketing Performance Management application enterprise companies are now able to completely operationalize and measure the new SiriusDecisions demand generation waterfall right inside of their salesforce.com instance.

Don’t believe it?  Well let me introduce you to Bulldog Solutions.  Bulldog has successfully used our application to do this exact thing right inside of salesforce.com.  You can read more about this in a recent blog from Denis Pombriant discussing the use case, in a review Bruce Brien, SVP of Client Success at Bulldog Solutions, wrote on TrustRadius, in our press release today announcing the launch of this, and this blog post written by our CEO, Bonnie Crater.  The point is the ability to implement this methodology is actually here and as a marketer I am very proud and excited to be a part of the company that is paving the way to make this happen.

We are thrilled to be part of the 2013 SiriusDecisions Summit in San Diego this week, so swing by our booth and also check out our customer case study with Mashery in breakout room 14 on Wednesday either at 9:50AM or 10:45AM about how we helped them implement and measure the SiriusDecisions waterfall inside salesforce.com.

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships”.

Every Sales executive wants to win games (closed opportunities), but the goal is to win championships (drive more revenue for the company).   To win championships we need to know what’s working in Marketing, in Sales Development, and across all our Sales teams to generate demand.   We want to replicate successful campaigns and quit spending time on ineffective campaigns.  Good sales leaders are always asking questions to win championships.  What campaigns are driving the most revenue?  Are multiple Marketing and Sales campaigns influencing a sale?  What about email campaigns from Sales Development?  Should we spend more on specific sales campaigns?   How can we drive more revenue?

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to answer these questions when using marketing automation systems or working within Salesforce. Marketing Automation systems can be an important component, but they assume that all leads are from marketing campaigns.  Those of us in Sales know we often have to execute our own Sales-driven campaigns to fill our pipelines in Salesforce.   And it isn’t always clear what campaign influenced the sale.

We are able to answer these questions accurately using Full Circle CRM from within Salesforce.  Our Marketing and Sales teams make more accurate decisions about demand generation.  We review sophisticated Marketing and Sales campaign influence reports, detailed response and waterfall analysis.

Marketers typically purchase Full Circle CRM, because they see the gaps in data and process between Marketing Automation systems like Marketo and Eloqua, and CRM solutions like Salesforce.  But many Sales leaders are also using Full Circle CRM to make better demand generation decisions to drive more revenue.

I can only fantasize about having Michael Jordan-like success, but I do like to win games – and championships.

For me this is a landmark announcement.  I have been a Salesforce user since January 2000 and a proponent of accurately measuring marketing’s contribution to revenue since 2003. Sadly I only recently learned of SiriusDecisions, but have a high level appreciation for their contribution to standardizing best practices for B2B marketers.

I really like the nuance of what Bulldog did with the modeling.  Instead of one funnel (aka waterfall) that includes deals sourced by marketing, sales and telesales, they split it into three separate funnels so they could compare the efficiency of each source, find the bottlenecks and gain insights on increasing velocity.

Full Circle CRM is the secret sauce to all of this and is the product I always wanted as a VP of Marketing. We use Full Circle CRM at our company and it’s exciting how we’re helping other companies do the same.

See you at the SiriusDecisions Summit next week!