The debate is polarizing around everyone’s favorite search company. Most business folks are either passionately for or venomously against a little world-dominant company called Google. But now, the corporate giant is bringing more services and social media advantages to the table. And for small businesses, making the switch and “Going Google” could provide some key competitive advantages.

There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

- Bob Dylan

The recent expansion of the search giant’s reach into a variety of online apps over the past few years has all shapes and sizes of business entrepreneurs up in arms. Amidst concerns that include everything from privacy and data collection to mobile advertising, Google has managed to add or integrate an onslaught of product layers that include everything from social networks, video streaming, all types of documents, multi-user calendars, file storage, and even accounting suites.

With Facebook’s earthshaking rollout of Graph Search hitting the web late last month — an innovation that could potentially alter human information gathering behavior forever — Google’s move towards providing free and low costs business-targeted products and services against the vast field of more expensive pay-for-play software competitors seems perfectly timed.

So does Google’s reformation at the hand of Larry Page impact you, the entrepreneurial business owner? You bet, but only if you’re brave enough to step outside the comfort of your Microsoft Exchange Server.

Open the Doors to a More Level Playing Field

For as long as I can remember, Microsoft has dominated the business technology market.

Vast armies of MS certified consultants and firms have helped companies, big and small, to keep their operations moving and productive by enabling simple business functions to run faster and more efficient.

Brands like Outlook, Word, Excel, Exchange and even the widely hated PowerPoint have become commonplace names in the office culture of the information age.

So what’s all the fuss? While the Exchange Server movement has all but engulfed the business world over the last 10 years, it has come at a HUGE cost to the businesses, themselves.

Take this into consideration — a ZDNet article by Phil Wainwright published way back in 2008 details a case study provided by Serena Software. That company cites that it projected a cost savings of more than three-quarters of a million dollars by simply making the switch from their standard Microsoft Exchange environment to the then largely underdeveloped Google apps.

While the numbers will vary for your own business, there’s a very good chance that Google’s social media advantages as an ability to provide businesses with software as a service options will come at a significantly lower cost to your startup’s bottom line than it’s older, local software counterpart.

Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Even the shadow of a promise of lower software and general operating costs, a ton of companies of all shapes and sizes are paralyzed by fear, uncertainty, and doubt when it comes to contemplating a complete migration to Google dependency.

My goal with this article is to simply give you a nudge. Any change creates discomfort, and if you’ve been reared in the age of Exchange Server dominance, I promise you that making this move will take you well outside of your comfort zone.

The question is simple: are you willing to brave the change for the promise of a better, cheaper, faster and easier tomorrow?

If so, keep reading…

5 Real Social Media Advantages of Going Google

First, a primer so that you understand what you are getting into. Watch the video from Google below:

That’s the basics. For more detailed information and additional videos and product demos, you can visit the Gone Google campaign site.

There are five key opportunities to explore when getting started when moving your company to Going Google. Keep in mind that you don’t need to do all of this at once, and you can start by experiment with small, select groups of people as beta testers. Once you’ve figured out how to take your existing processes and modify them with the new features and functionality Google provides, it’s then time to roll out the program to your larger team.

1. Simplified business operations: From calendars, docs and email, Google has designed these foundational apps with a bit less noise. If you’re an Excel junkie or old school accountant, you will probably find your self frustrated by the Google versions of these apps. But, if you’re a basic user who’s strapped for time and just needs to get the job done and move on, Google has done a nice job of trimming off the fat from these corner-stone business applications.
2. Cheap and accessible file storage: Google Drive is a shoe-in winner when it comes to online file storage. Much cheaper than Exchange Server options and much more flexible than low-cost options like Dropbox, Google has made moving your files to the cloud safe, secure and high accessible from your browser. As a reference point, I personally pay $9.99 per month for 200 GB of storage. Google also makes it easy to download and back up your entire Drive anywhere you like and you can also access your Drive from any device you carry.
3. Better team communication and collaboration: We’ve seen Google Hangouts used by brands, bloggers and even the President to talk with constituents following the 2012 Presidential Address. This video conferencing app, along side Google Talk, Gmail, Google+ communities and teams gives you multitudes of ways to communicate on the spot. You can even add Hangouts directly to Google Calendar appointments, and you’ll never have to wait for one more version of GoTo Meeting to download ever again.
4. Free intelligence: It amazes me that more people don’t tap the free research, studies and insights that the worlds largest information company provides. From Google Trends and Keyword Tool to the newer Think.With.Google database, business owners can not only get access to solid and customizable market information, they can do so for free.
5. Multitudes of 3rd party app integrations via Drive and Chrome: you might be surprised to learn that Google actually does NOT own everything — but they probably integrate with it. Sick of Quickbooks and need a good accounting system? Why not try Wave Accounting? Looking for better project management and Gantt charts? Give Gantter a spin. These are merely two examples of the hundreds of useful apps that have been integrated with Google and can store files directly to your Google drive.

Is Going Google something you’ve considered as a means of web-based collaboration for your startup?

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I actually answered a prospecting call the other day. And I’ve got to say, I’m glad I did. The sales rep who made the call did an outstanding job of gaining my attention.

She started the conversation by tying in something I’d written and even mentioned a picture I had recently tweeted. I was so impressed that I decided to hold back on giving her the brush off.

After another minute or so and a few questions, however, it became obvious we weren’t a fit and I ended the call.

After I hung up, I thought for a moment about the research she had done prior to picking up the phone. I realized how personalized, how ‘social’ her preparation had been. This was textbook ‘warm call’ stuff. Yet, from my perspective, it didn’t feel all that different from the standard cold call.

I’m sure the rep felt better about making that dial and dials like it. But to be honest, after my initial interest (Hey! Who doesn’t like to hear about themselves?), the call settled into the typical protocol: I have a finite supply of time – you want some of it.

Who Does Pre-Call Research Really Benefit?

All of this left me thinking — is “warm calling” about the prospect or the seller? Does “warm call” research actually warm up the call? Or does it just make sales reps feel more comfortable picking up the phone?

I think of a prospecting call as an inverted pyramid:

My hunch is that ‘warm calling’ is effective at leveraging that first 20 seconds to earn the next 60 seconds. But I’m not sure it can carry a rep past that point.

Insidesales.com President Ken Krogue is fond of saying “Interest is often the counterfeit of need.” I love that line! Well perhaps, when it comes to outbound prospecting, familiarity is the counterfeit of insight.

Vorsight co-founder Steve Richard also recently shared some excellent advice: “Pre-call research is really about discovering the ‘why.’ Why are you calling, why should the prospect care about you, and why is what you’re about to tell them truly valuable to their business, rather than just any other business.”

That really resonates with me.

Without a hypothesis, without a big idea, without a “save-money, make-money, reduce-risk” insight – simply knowing a handful of facts about the person doesn’t get you to three minutes and beyond.

After all, as a prospect, I already know a lot about me. What I need to learn is what I don’t know (about my business), but should.

What’s your take? Are “warm calling” techniques for the prospect’s benefit or is it just a way for a rep to put off making dials?

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Have you looked around your company and realized that your content is scattered across the organization, with no one truly owning it? With content marketing becoming more and more of a priority (utilized by 91% of B2B marketers and representing 33% of marketing budgets on average), now is certainly the time to build a structure to effectively manage your content and the strategy behind it.

But where do you even start? The first thing you will want to do is hire someone to develop, manage, and implement a cohesive plan behind all of your content marketing. Obviously, you can’t fill that role with just anyone.

Whether it is a managing editor or a director of content, here are four incredible qualities the person stepping into that crucial function must have:

1) Mighty Management Skills

Whether you plan to build an entire content marketing department or need to outsource some work to freelancers from time to time, your first content marketing hire will need to be able to effectively lead a team.

He or she will be providing the leadership and vision necessary to execute a content marketing strategy, and everything will trickle down from them. The ability to communicate and manage is hugely important to ensuring that overarching strategy permeates not only members of the marketing team, but the entire company.

2) Spectacular Social and SEO Savvy

A key element of the role is going to hinge on ensuring your content is shared and promoted as much as possible, so it is important that they are active on multiple social media platforms. They will need to understand the nuances of getting your content out in front of your audience and recognize the value of being immersed in an online community.

The ideal candidate will also need to know a thing or two about SEO, otherwise all that great content will go undiscovered.

3) Clairvoyant Knowledge of Your Industry & Trends

It might seem obvious, but this is a hugely important piece. Having a background in your industry allows new hires to step in and immediately deliver content that is accurate and consumable by your audience.

Conversely, if they are new to your field, it is going to take them some valuable time to get up to speed and become comfortable with the subject matter that they’ll be dealing with day in and day out.

4) Unstoppable Extrovert Prowess and People Skills

The door to your director’s office shouldn’t just be open, it should be off the hinges! In your executive team and employees, you have a wealth of potential resources at your fingertips. These are people who are brimming with content, but you’ll need your new hire to help coax it out of them by establishing a dialogue with the entire company. Many of your employees will want to contribute their stories, but your hire will have to be the one to apply a little grease to the wheels.

5) What Quality Do You Think is the Most Critical for a Content Hire?

These obviously aren’t the only skills your new hire will need in order to overcome content marketing’s biggest challenges and get your initiative up and running. Add your top skill/quality to the list in the comments below!

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Let’s cut right to the chase; stop focusing on being efficient — it’s a waste of time.

Nobody other than perhaps you really cares how efficient you are, but everyone cares how effective you are. Not only do they care how effective you are, but they also care about the effectiveness of those whom you lead. It’s important to remember leadership is a people business, and people are messy. Leadership has little to do with how neat and tidy things are, but everything to do with how successful you are at scaling effectiveness.

Efficient vs. Effective: Which One are You?

There is sometimes a very big difference between these two qualities. So much so, that I’ve really come to cringe every time I hear the word efficiency. It’s not really that there’s anything wrong with becoming more efficient, but far too many executives major in the minors when it comes to efficiency. Stop focusing on optics over outcomes. Don’t worry about how you look, worry about the results you produce.

Let me ask you a question — Have you become so efficient that you’ve rendered yourself ineffective? At an organizational level, have you focused so much on process improvements and incremental gains that you’ve failed to engage people, and seek opportunities to be disruptive? Are you efficient or effective, or do you know?

I really don’t have a problem with increasing efficiency so long as the tail doesn’t start wagging the dog. If you’re a baseball player who has beautifully efficient swing mechanics, but you can’t hit the ball — who cares? If efficiency starts diluting productivity rather than increasing it, something is woefully amiss. This is more than an issue of semantics — it’s become a systemic problem with many individuals and organizations.

Here’s the thing — process in and of itself was never engineered to be the outcome, it was designed to support the creation of the right outcomes.

If you’re not tracking with me yet, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you send an email when you should make a phone call, or worse, do you hide behind the phone when you should be face-to-face?
• Even worse yet — are you the leader who sends a message by proxy when it should have been delivered personally?
• Do your sophisticated screening processes do such a great job of filtering they blind you to new opportunities and critical information?

If your desk is so clean you don’t have anything to work on then you might be focusing on the wrong thing — it might be time to make a bit of a mess (see Leadership Is About Breaking Things).

Moving the Right Needle

What I want you to recognize is sometimes the least efficient thing can lead to the most productive outcome. A great example of this would be carving out time in your already too busy schedule to mentor someone in your organization. Clearly this endeavor will take time, and may not yield immediate results, but the payoff organizationally, relationally, culturally, and in terms of future contribution can be huge.

As I’ve said many times before, things don’t always have to boil down to either/or types of decisions — not everything must end-up on the altar of sacrificial decisioning. With the proper perspective and focus it is quite possible to be both efficient and effective. Efficient process can enable effective resource utilization. The two concepts can co-exist so long as the focus remains on the proper thing — results. Smart leaders don’t just focus on moving the needle, they focus on moving the right needles, at the right times, and for the right reasons.

Bottom Line: Check Your Motivations

When you ever so efficiently cross something off your to-do list, has it moved you farther away from, or closer to, putting points on the board? Better yet, are the items on your to-do list even the right items to begin with? Lastly, I’ll leave you with this reminder — leadership is not about how many emails, memos, and transmittals are sent under your signature — it’s about relationships, service, and engagement.

Editor’s note: This guest post from Mike Myatt originally appeared on the N2growth blog.

Do you agree? Should leaders be more results driven and less focused on efficiency?

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The simple truth is that as companies expand, they naturally become more complex and begin to face an entirely new set of problems. And that reality is something Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of SEOmoz, is very familiar with. Since founding one of the most popular search engine software companies online back in 2004, SEOmoz has experienced explosive growth and encountered a host of new challenges and opportunities.

The lion’s share of that growth has occurred since April 2012, when the company successfully raised $18 million in venture capital. While securing that capital was difficult in and of itself — the company tried and failed to do so for several years before succeeding — the rapid expansion that it made possible resulted in many other even greater obstacles.

In this week’s Labcast, Rand Fishkin opens up on the challenges and transitions that accompany small business growth with the transparency and candor that makes his blog such a must-read for entrepreneurs. Sharing his own experiences guiding SEOmoz from a small startup to a wildly successful software company, he outlines how the company has changed since securing its latest round of funding as well as how his own approach to leadership has evolved. In addition, he explains:

• How companies can prioritize the challenges they face during as the transition out of the startup phase

• Which aspects of the startup mentality no longer apply for those founders who go on to lead growth companies

• How to ensure that your company maintains a thriving company culture and a healthy pace of innovation as it continues to scale

For more insight into the leadership required to guide your company through small business growth, listen to the full podcast below:

Labcast 98_ SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin Explains the Challenges of Growing a Company

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Rachael Logan of AtTask offers ten tips for eliminating “blame culture” in the wake of project management mistakes.

Logan, who pulls her tips from a post by Chris Robinson at the Projects Guru blog, begins by suggesting that you try to ignore the blame culture altogether and employ a “solution-based mind set” instead.

Avoid asking the “who did what and why” questions and look for “the steps required to move from the current position to the desired one.” Keep focused on where you want your organization to move to in the future and avoid looking back at the past. While you’re keeping your eyes firmly focused ahead, ignore the “jibes of others who try to lay the blame.”

Study the rest of Logan’s tips and turn project management mistakes into opportunities to move forward in the right direction.

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If you were to poll every salesperson or lead generator you know and ask them how they feel about cold calling, you’re likely to get a fairly predictable response: It sucks.

The rejection, the monotony, the lack of response — it all feels so, well, cold. Aside from the sheer misery of the practice, however, sales expert and consultant Kendra Lee, founder and president of sales consultancy KLA Group, says cold calling is also a horribly inefficient and ineffective sales strategy.

In fact, by some estimates, cold calling requires 10 hours of work to schedule just one appointment. Yet, many expansion-stage technology companies continue to think that cold calling is an absolute must when it comes to driving a higher volume of new business opportunities.

“Honestly, that’s just not the case,” says Lee, who sat down with OpenView recently to share some insight from her new book The Sales Magnet: How to Get More Customers Without Cold Calling, and explain why cold calling isn’t the only way to drum up high-quality new business opportunities and drive revenue growth.

“If you could do some other things that would take less time than cold calling a prospect list,” Lee asks, “and those activities would make your reps feel more confident, efficient, and effective, why wouldn’t you?”

Sales Magnetism: Laying the Groundwork for Prospect Attraction

Of course, Lee is not suggesting that B2B technology companies abandon phone prospecting entirely. She’s simply recommending that before they have their reps tear through a nameless database of phone numbers, they should be executing some relatively simple prospect attraction strategies.

In a marketing department, those strategies might be called “awareness campaigns.” In sales, they’re likely known as warming techniques. Either way, Lee says they allow companies to cultivate a stronger relationship with their prospects and increase their connection ratio.

“All of a sudden, reps have a reason to call,” Lee explains. “You’re not shooting into the dark and hoping you hit a target. When you call, you’re calling from a whole different perspective in terms of knowledge and confidence level. And all of a sudden the success ratio will go up.”

The Prospect Attraction Trifecta

In her book, Lee offers 14 different prospect attraction strategies, some of which date back to her time as one of IBM’s highest performing salespeople. Those strategies are organized in what she calls “The Prospect Attraction Trifecta,” which is categorized by:

1. Personal attraction strategies: In other words, lead generation approaches that make a prospect feel like you’ve reached out to them one-to-one. This might include leveraging tactics like e-mail, personal letters, postcards, etc., but the idea is to make your first contact with a prospect much more personal.
2. Digital attraction strategies: As you might expect, Lee says these strategies include channels through which you’d use the Internet to reach prospects. For instance, companies could use social networking, e-newsletters, a corporate blog, and content marketing as their first point of contact with prospects.
3. Collaborative attraction strategies: This component of the trifecta includes collaborative tactics like online or local events, offline PR, and alliance partnering, but it could also include using of any of the tactics listed above in tandem with key vendors, partners, or industry influencers.

The best part about those prospect attraction strategies, Lee says, is that it doesn’t matter whether your sales or marketing team executes them. “Both departments can use the same types of campaigns,” Lee explains. “The only thing that will vary is the length and scale of them.”

Regardless of which department is responsible for those campaigns, Lee says companies of all shapes and sizes can also benefit from supplementing their prospecting efforts with marketing automation software.

“When a sales or lead gen rep knows more about their prospects’ behaviors, stages, and needs, that not only makes the conversation more genuine, it gives the rep much more confidence on the phone,” Lee says. “That might sound simple, but it can have a very significant impact on the output of their inside sales team.”

Do you agree cold calling on its own is no longer effective? What other strategies should sales and marketing teams be adopting?

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S. Anthony Iannarino of The Sales Blog suggests examining your leadership value proposition and what it means for your company and for the people who work for you.

Iannarino outlines the elements that make up a leadership value proposition, starting with its vision. He asks whether your proposition includes “some vision of a compelling future” of “where you want to take the company,” or maybe a “vision that inspires your team and gives them something they can get behind.” He also wonders if your value proposition provides the meaning that is the foundation for a company identity and a corporate culture.

Consider the rest of Iannarino’s thoughts on a leadership value proposition and decide whether your company’s executive team is delivering the message needed to inspire.

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OpenView’s latest eBook provides you with the tips and tactics you’ll need to find and leverage your small business competitive advantage to topple your biggest competitors.

If you are an entrepreneur, you may wonder how small companies can compete and win against their big competitors. It can seem like nothing short of a daunting challenge. After all, big companies have more money, more resources, and more market share. But that doesn’t mean they are invulnerable. The trick is to successfully identify their weaknesses and formulate a plan of attack, leveraging a variety of competitive advantage strategies.

You can start by asking yourself questions like: What can you do better than those competitors? What market pain point are they ignoring? What advantages does your smaller, nimbler business have relative to customer engagement, talent management, or new market opportunities?

Your Company May Be Small, But it Can Compete

The reality is that small companies have numerous advantages that, in concert with the right business strategies, they can capitalize on to compete effectively. For example, they are typically much closer to their customers than large companies are, which can be leveraged to create an information advantage. They are also able to be more nimble, giving them a time advantage, and more focused, giving them both a scope and scale advantage. It comes down to understanding the benefits of being a smaller company and making sure that you fully exploit them.

But it’s not just about taking advantage of being small. It’s also about undermining some of your large competitors’ natural strengths. Having great senior managers, well-established customer relationships, and fantastic distribution channels are often among the benefits of being a large company. Yet there are ways that small companies can minimize these strengths and, in many cases, even create an edge. At the same time, there are specific steps that small companies can take to defend themselves against attacks from their larger competitors.

Slaying Goliath: How Small Companies Can Compete Against Their Large Competitors demonstrates that the key to winning against larger companies is to understand your own strengths, identify and exploit your larger competitors’ weaknesses, successfully defend against their attacks, and execute against your goals better — and faster — than most bigger businesses are capable of doing. It stresses that once you develop some momentum, it is important to never take your foot off the gas.

By reading this eBook, you will learn the practical strategies necessary to compete against your large competitors and will gain an understanding of how to best leverage your size to your advantage. In the end, utilizing these strategies will force larger competitors to respond to you, rather than the other way around. That in turn will put you in a position to create opportunities in crowded markets that might have otherwise seemed impossible to grasp. We are not suggesting with this eBook that doing so will be easy, of course, but it’s certainly not impossible. Remember, before his battle with Goliath began, no one gave David a shot. And we all know how that story ended.

Find out more by downloading your free copy of Slaying Goliath: How Small Companies Can Compete Against Their Large Competitors. You can access any of OpenView Labs’ other eBooks by clicking here.

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In 2008, my Virginia-based company — River Swimming Pools and Spas — almost went out of business, despite years of solid growth and a loyal customer base. And the causes of our collapse were almost all out of our control.

The economy was in the tank, the stock market was experiencing a dramatic nosedive, and, suddenly, people were cancelling their orders for pools and new orders stopped coming in. We didn’t have any new leads and we had no marketing dollars to spend. Seemingly overnight, the company was on the verge of shutting down.

And then I discovered content marketing.

Today, our company has the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world, and 90 percent of all of our leads are generated from our content marketing efforts. Ultimately, that’s allowed us to grow in a period of time when so many swimming pool companies are closing their doors, and it’s helped us become leaders of an industry that we care deeply about.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we — and some of the companies I work with through my sales blog, The Sales Lion — haven’t made some common content marketing mistakes along the way. The good news, I think, is that we’ve learned from them.

Here are the three most common issues or challenges that I think content marketers will continue to face going forward, and how they can easily overcome them:

1) Making content marketing harder than it needs to be

As content marketing has become a marketing best practice, many marketers and business owners have begun to turn it into a crazy science, and they complicate something that shouldn’t be complicated at all.

If you break content marketing down to its essence it is simply great teaching and communication. The best teachers and the best communicators are the best content marketers. And those people generate the most leads, highest traffic, and strongest brands.

The golden rule of content marketing should be this: Customers ask, you answer. It really is that simple.

2) Failing to truly leverage in-house resources and talent

Every company — whether it’s a two-person SaaS startup, or a 200-person expansion-stage software company — has intellectual property or in-house talent that can provide fodder for great content. Unfortunately, many companies fail to leverage those resources effectively.

Whether your business is comprised of three founders or a growing team of sales, marketing, and product development people, everyone should participate in the content marketing process. Each person will have unique insight and answers to customer questions, and the more you leverage your staff, the sooner and quicker you’ll have success as a content marketer.

3) Trying to create content that’s too perfect

All too often, content marketers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sound more intelligent than they actually are (or need to be). They waste time creating and editing content that is fit for Hollywood or The Wall Street Journal, which sets the bar so high that everyone involved with the content marketing process is afraid to produce anything less than perfect.

Here’s the truth: Perfection isn’t what wins the content marketing game. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

Content marketers should be saying, “Maybe this isn’t great for everybody, but I am going to put it out there because it teaches people something and it has value to my customers and prospects.” That doesn’t mean that you want to just throw a bunch of garbage against the wall and see what sticks. It means you don’t need to try to win a Pulitzer Prize with every piece of content you publish.

I am sure there are many additional content marketing mistakes that I haven’t listed here, but those are the three that I think marketers really need to start paying attention to.

Have you made some of the mistakes I’ve listed above, or found unique ways to overcome them? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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Dave Aron, vice president in the Gartner CIO Research group, describes the future of talent acquisition in a post at the HBR Blog Network.

Aron writes that clusters will be at the heart of the future of talent acquisition, and they represent “a radical alternative to our traditional notion of teams.”

Clusters are “formed outside a company context, but are hired and paid by companies as a unit, as a permanent part of the company,” despite the fact that they “manage, govern, and develop themselves”

Aron believes that the rise of cloud-based collaborative tools make the move toward clusters “more and more workable.” He goes on to outline the differences between clusters and consultants, as well as four central benefits to companies willing to embrace the future now.

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Change is the only true constant in business, but there is another thing that is unlikely to go away anytime soon: the debate between salespeople and marketers over who actually drives their company’s sales funnel.

Talk to a salesperson, and you’ll get one answer. Talk to a marketer, and you’re likely to get another.

But Bob Apollo, founder and CEO of UK-based B2B sales and marketing consultancy Inflexion-Point and one of OpenView’s Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2012, has an alternative perspective. In fact, in a roundtable discussion at an eConsultancy event recently, Apollo suggested that neither sales nor marketing should claim to own the sales funnel outright.

They own it with the customer.

“In other words,” Apollo explains, “the way we ought to be measuring progress through the funnel is not just in terms of what sales or marketing do, but what we observe the customer doing.”

3 Steps to Building a Customer-Centric Sales Funnel

All too often, however, sales funnels are primarily driven by marketing related metrics and analytics, or by the actions performed by the sales team. While that information is valuable, Apollo says it does not paint a full picture of the buyer’s true journey. “The only way to truly understand where buyers are in the sales process is to model our funnels around the buyer decision process,” Apollo says.

In a recent conversation with OpenView, Apollo explained that expansion-stage B2B software companies can do that by following these three simple tips:

1) Stop Looking at Your Funnel as a One-way Street

While it’s much more convenient to organize a sales funnel into specific stages that follow a linear progression, Apollo says that the reality is that buyers may move up, down, or out of the funnel several times throughout the sales process. If you’re not paying close enough attention to buyer behavior and motivation, then you may end up assigning a prospect to a stage that they aren’t ready for, or have already left.

To be more effective, Apollo says expansion-stage companies should re-thinking the stages that they use to measure progress through the funnel. Instead of having each stage defined by what sales or marketing have done to move a prospect along a sales process, they should instead think about the stages the prospective buyer needs to go through to finalize their buying decision.

2) Merge Your Sales Stages with Your Buyer’s Stages

For example, one of the stages in many B2B sales funnels is sales proposal “delivered”. Once that stage has been completed, salespeople tend to naturally advance their prospects to the next stage in the funnel, often without considering whether the buyer is really ready to move forwards.

Apollo says the best funnels are those that combine sales activity and qualification criteria with a deep understanding of what the customer is actually thinking or doing. “If one of your stages is associated with the delivery of a sales proposal, then you shouldn’t move a prospect down the funnel until the prospect has reacted to your proposal and confirmed that they are ready to move to the next stage,” Apollo explains. “Otherwise, you are making assumptions that are likely to be premature.”

3) Conduct a Content Audit

Unless your sales funnel has always been couched in customer-centric terms, it’s likely that your sales content was never explicitly designed with specific buying criteria in mind. Conducting a content audit to examine which pieces of content are truly valuable to your customers at specific stages in the decision process can help you weed out the fluff that has little impact.

“We encourage our clients to think of three interlocking elements,” Apollo says.

• What are the key elements in our sales process?
• What are the key elements in our prospects’ buying decision process?
• What are the key deliverables that are most relevant to each stage in the buying process?

“Prospects typically have different information needs at different stages,” he explains, “the content they consume can give you a better handle on where they are likely to be in their buying process, and what else you can deliver to help them move down the funnel.”

Is Your Sales Funnel Customer-Centric?

Apollo stresses that creating a customer-centric sales funnel is not necessarily about abandoning traditional sales and marketing metrics in favor of buyer behavior analytics. In fact, the most effective sales funnels are a combination of both.

“You don’t want to rely wholly on the buyer to dictate the flow of your sales funnel,” Apollo says. “But you should certainly be observing what they are actually doing and factoring that into how you react.”

Do you agree neither sales nor marketing truly own the funnel? What are the pros and cons of being more customer-centric?

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Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEOmoz, offers tactics for winning a content marketing arms race in a video posted to his company’s blog.

Fishkin begins by acknowledging an explosion in content marketing across a wide range of industries in the recent past, which has upped the proverbial ante for marketers.

For SaaS companies, Fishkin recommends going beyond blog posts and white papers to formats like webinars, slide shows, and videos. He also lists several points that any company entering a content marketing arms race should focus on: high quality graphics, easily digestible charts that assemble relevant data, and interactive tools for prospects to play around with.

Another way to get an edge in your war is to “share what others are unwilling or unable to share.” If your company is ready to “share data” from your campaigns or networks, then you can immediately capture attention. Watch the rest of Fishkin’s advice and consider adjusting your plan of attack.

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Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point offers insight into the joint effort required of marketing and sales teams for B2B social media.

Writing for his company’s blog, Apollo offers “seven simple steps that could help the whole organization to come together to fully realize the potential” of B2B social media. Start by integrating social media into your CRM, he says. It’s not enough to use business social media channels like LinkedIn for researching prospects. Apollo suggests that “the value is compounded by integrating social media information directly into the CRM platform” and keeping that information up to date. Next, make sure your salespeople maintain “a consistent, positive, and professional message” in their social media profiles. Be sure that the marketing department is keeping them armed with “a stream of interesting and relevant content to share,” and your sales team will be seen “as expert advisers and credible problem solvers in the markets you are addressing.” Read the full post for more ways to maximize your return on B2B social media investment.

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The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from initial traction ($1 – $2 million in annual recurring revenue, plus 100% year over year growth, plus 50% of new customers from zero-cost marketing) to the next phase — initial scale.

Inevitability in SaaS comes around $10m in ARR, plus or minus. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business. Will you get from $10 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $100 million ARR? I don’t know. Is an IPO in your future? Not sure. But once you hit $10m in ARR or so, you cannot be killed by anything. That’s the power of compounding SaaS revenue. At $10m in ARR — this is when it really gets fun.

The real challenge is getting from $1 million to $10 million in ARR.

Challenges Getting from Initial Traction to Initial Scale

Getting those first 10 unaffiliated customers is hard. In fact, for most MVP’s, it doesn’t happen. In the end, getting these first 10 customers — it’s magic. It’s chutzpah.

Next, getting from 10 customers to $1 million in ARR — that’s basically impossible. So, if you’ve done that — a big congratulations, but also, some bad news: magic and impossible sound hard, but as it turns out, the hardest part of the journey is this next phase: the “Possible, but Painful.”

That’s where you’ll be after $1 – $2 million in ARR. Seeing the early signs of success, but in pain. Why? Because you have too many things you absolutely have to do to make it — with too few resources:

• You’ll have real customers — plenty of them by number, if not yet by revenue — but not enough resources to serve them. You’ll almost be overwhelmed with their needs and in-bound requests.

• You’ll have a real sales team — at least the core of one — but not a large enough one to experiment or add redundancy or management layers. Sales ops? SDRs? Lead qualification reps? You want it all, but it doesn’t seem like you can afford them here. The math doesn’t pencil out yet.

• You’ll have a strong product, but it won’t be anywhere near feature complete. You’ll constantly be struggling to meet just the bare minimum requirements of your real customers, and in some ways, given all the new customer demands, it will feel like your product is further behind than Day 1.

• You can’t take a hit. If your VPE, head of marketing, or someone key quits — you’re almost dead. There’s no fat on the system. You lose one key resource and all that hard work, all that momentum you are building can almost disappear overnight.

• The next phase is loooooong. Yes, you can see $10 million in ARR if you squint. But it seems so far away, so hard.

This is the Phase When Exhaustion and “Overwhelmedness” Sets In

Especially as founders, you’re now doing just too much with too few people. You can’t hack it anymore. You can’t do it all yourself. But you’re not big enough (50+ employees) to get all the real help you need to fill all the necessary key roles, unless you are extremely well funded.

The thing is, you have to fight through. Because it will get so much better once you are at scale — say $8 – 10 million in ARR, 50+ employees. You’ll get all the help you need then, or at least enough help.  It will be easier — I guarantee it — when you get to the next level, and are able to add the next level to your team.

And also, you need to fight through it because you can now see success, true success. In fact, as soon as you are at Initial Traction, you can build a simple model, like below. Take your MRR/ARR, add your trailing compounding rate, and just see when it gets easier. When you hit $8 – 10 million in ARR. When you hit Initial Scale:

In this model, the cavalry is coming. Help is on its way. It’s just probably 18 months out or so.

So first, buck up. Second, take some steps to make it easier. Because as long as you continue to invest, hire the right people, and make the right decisions — if this initial success doesn’t kill you — you will make it to scale as long as your growth rate is sufficient. And then, your life will be easier.

On that note, here are a few things to do on the journey from $1 million+ (Initial Traction) to $10 million+ (Initial Scale) ARR:

1) Raise a Few Extra Bucks

If you are raising money, raise a few more dollars. Say 15% more than you were planning. This will take some stress off. And/or raise some debt. You can easily pay it back later at Scale.

2) Hire Someone to Share the Load, maybe an Ex-Post Facto Founder

You’re going to have to hire a bunch of great people in this phase. Try to hire at least one who goes even further, who can take some of the founder load off your shoulders. It could be a COO. It could be a VPS or VP Product. It doesn’t even matter. What matters is they go above and beyond the job, above and beyond excelling, and take on some of the load of being responsible for the whole company. That will help. A lot.

3) Spend a Few Extra Bucks

I know you’ve probably been scrappy to get to $1 – $2 million in ARR, but now you need to open the coffers — at least a little. Of course, don’t be stupid about it (that can wait until you are at $10m in ARR). But if you are on the fence on an expense — a marketing program, a hire — that you think will pay off, but you just aren’t sure, go for it. Don’t screw around any more at this phase. Don’t think small.

4) Get Admin Help

Some of you may be against an executive admin. That’s fine, but seriously, get one or two inexpensive resources to help — everyone. Do you really want your best engineer waiting at home for the cable guy? Of course not. That’s terrible, negative ROI at this phase. Get someone to help everyone. It’s time to stop taking out the garbage yourself, my friend. You just don’t have the spare cycles anymore.

5) Get More Advisors

This is the phase when sometimes, you are so busy, so tactical, and now know so much about your nascent but real business, you stop seeking out new mentors and advisors. That’s wrong. In fact, a little help here — perhaps more tactical than strategic — can help more than ever. Get help from folks who have been here and done it.

6) Don’t Make a Bad Key Hire

This is perhaps the most important one, by far. A bad senior hire (VP level) can kill you here. It can set you back so far on this journey to $10m in ARR that even though you could still make it in theory, the goal line gets moved out another 6 – 9 months. You simply cannot afford this.

Whatever it takes, don’t make a bad senior hire now. Get help. Have your advisors review your picks. When in doubt — don’t do the hire. Find someone better, no matter how hard it is. Because this is the phase when a huge setback will kill you. There’s no fat on the model from Initial Traction to Initial Scale.

Just Get to Scale

Whatever you do, build the model above, and stay true to it. This is the gritty phase, when you fight it out to get to scale.

Scale has its own issues. Politics begin to creep in, and you can’t be as loose and fluid as you were back in the day. Releases take longer, and things can seem less nimble, post-scale. But it’s much, much easier as founders when you’ve got 50+ strong folks working with you to make it happen, on top of a engine that’s humming.

Just get there. And your success will be inevitable.

Editor’s note: This guest post from Jason M. Lemkin originally appeared on his blog, SaaStr.

Do you agree getting from $1 million to $10 million in ARR the most difficult stage in growing a SaaS company? What other specific challenges do they face on the path to growth and scale?

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