Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Christmas Came Early

By Jason Stewart  - September 26, 2007

I was out of the office for 4 out of 5 days last week, but came back to discover something wonderful in my mailbox. The BtoB Magazine 2007 E-Mail Marketer Insight Guide.

I’m not going to recap the whole guide for you, of course. You can go read it for yourself, either as a PDF download or by individual article. I did particularly like the “10 Things to Avoid in B-to-B e-Newsletters” and the pieces on deliverability and bounce management. Other topics include strategy, analytics, list management, general best practices and more.

Ellis Booker mentioned something worth thinking about in his editor’s note. He says “…while improved filters have helped clear my inbox of unexpected, unnecessary, unwelcome spam, I now confront a thornier problem: picking among the dozens of targeted and relevant messages I receive every day.”

Really?

This made me take a closer look at my inbox. I just started here at Demandbase in June, and I think it takes a good 9-12 months with a new email address before you get fully immersed and exposed to the email marketing hurricane. So I’m not there yet. I just went to a big event, signed up for another one, and have subscribed to a few publications so it should hit full speed soon. But all in all, even looking back to my last job, I think he might be right. I do get less spam and more stuff I actually read. Wow. So the big question is….why?

Is it the filters? Are the can-spam regulations working? Booker suggests that improved analytics and integration with CRM systems have helped email marketers to do their jobs better and more effectively. “Targeted Marketing,” after all, has become a popular phrase in the space. This could be all be true. Or maybe I’m just lucky.

That being said, there is still plenty of room for improvement. For example, Booker also suggests that so much time and effort has been spent on improved deliverability and the content of the messages themselves that some very obvious things are slipping through the cracks. For example, where do you send people after you get the coveted “click-through?” Is it connected to the email you just sent, or are you simply dumping people on to your home page to bounce away when they don’t see what they expect. People have learned about the importance and relevance of landing pages for the Google ads, but have not yet applied the same logic to their email campaigns or direct mail pieces.

One interesting point that is touched on in the magazine, but really hit home for me personally was a content question. Demandbase recently spent a fair amount of time and effort on an email template that looks fantastic when the images are enabled in Outlook, and still good (and readable) when the images are not enabled. I sent a test, and it looked great. Then I saw the email on my new phone, as I recently took the plunge and got a BlackBerry. It was bad. The amount of scrolling required before I got past the headers and links and URLs was painful. I was committed to reading this thing, and I still got bored and almost deleted the sucker.

I had seen articles dedicated to this in Marketing Sherpa, and (of course) knew it made sense, but until I actually saw it on my own device, it never really hit home with me. Combine this with the number of people I saw at a few various events last week who were working on their smart phones, and I will never run a campaign without first testing how it looks on my BlackBerry. Lesson learned.

Dreamforce Day Three: Five Things to Make Dreamforce Better

By Jason Stewart  - September 19, 2007

Another great Dreamforce come and gone...but what could make 2008 even better?

First things first, this was a great event. Tom Wong, this year's chair, deserves an extra week of paid time off after this one. The tracks were informative (and in many cases standing room only) and the keynotes were smart, entertaining and fun to watch. Day three is always sort of anticlimactic -- there are some great tracks but no organized, general session events like the previous two days. That being said, here are five suggestions to improve upon an already great event.

Why are developers the only ones with a lounge?
There is a space called the Developer's lounge, where the speakers from the track sessions often gather after their talks for one on one conversations. There is seating, special giveaways and activities (like a big screen set up with a Wii to play on). I'll be honest. I have lounge envy. I want one. I think every track should have their own. A perpetual "birds of a feather" area for conversations after the breakout sessions and a quiet environment to network. And a place to play Wii sports bowling. That game rocks.

Limit the general sessions to one per day
Hey, I get it. Those platinum sponsors are important, you got to pay the bills. And an event of this magnitude can't be cheap. But that second session on the first day? You know the one...where the big dollar paid sponsors get the podium for two hours. Cut it. Or shorten it. Or make it optional. Leave the expo hall open. Move it to the third day. Or move it to the second and put the big name guest speaker (your Colin Powell and your George Lucas) on day three, which needs something more in it's corner. Do something. Everyone knows those companies paid for the privilege to speak, and everyone is okay with that because without sponsors like those Dreamforce would suffer. But two in one day is a lot to ask of us. That's why the second session on day one is the session people cut to get caught up on email. With a little effort you could turn it into another can't miss event, like the opening keynote or the big guest speakers.

Create a new track: Guerilla Salesforce.com
Bigger does not necessarily mean more interesting. At the keynotes, and at the awards, and in the breakout sessions the customer references and case studies are overwhelmingly dominated by big customers. I understand. Big customers are cool. But last time I checked, the vast majority of customers - heck the vast majority of partners - all have less than 100 employees. I was in one marketing track where the speaker asked how many attendees worked in marketing departments with less than five people in them. Most of the room raised their hands. Here's what you do. Create a track dedicated to best practices and creative ways to use Salesforce.com without a lot of extra development, and without a single App off the AppExchange that you can't download for free. I think it's great that there are S-Controls and Apex code, but if I asked my VP of Engineering to borrow some programmer time for this cool idea I had that would save me a little time every week he would look at me like I was crazy (no offense, Larry). And there is a ton of incredible stuff put out by Salesforce labs available for free. Let's hear more about it. And create an Appy Award that a customer with less than 100 seats has a shot at winning. "Most Creative Use of Salesforce.com Without Spending a Penny."

Don't forget your roots
Force.com is a great step forward for the company. It is a ground-breaking platform that is going to revolutionize the way we do business. But it is not why I love Salesforce.com. CRM and SFA is what still what keeps me logging in day after day. As more and more time at every event is dedicated to the platform, that means less and less time is spent on the product. Force.com is great. But so is Salesforce.com.

Make it easier for the locals
I run the local user group for Salesforce.com...for a little while longer, anyway. I need to step down, as Demandbase is a partner now. But anyway, as the local user group leader a few people asked me why the local attendance is low at events like this. The biggest reason is that going to Dreamforce lowers our quality of life. We get up at 5 to leave the house by 6 to get there by 8. Then we get home late, only to repeat the process the next day. Help us out. Maybe offer a shuttle to the BART or MUNI station to ease a little time off the commute. Also, a lot of us (and not just the locals) still need to work, even though we are at the event. Just look at the people sprawled out in the hallways and corridors sucking up the wireless bandwidth. As a local, some of us are still even expected to make an appearance at the office. That means we have to leave the site, and with travel time we may miss one or two breakout sessions that would have maybe helped us do our jobs better. How about a dedicated, quiet area set aside with decent seating so we can get some work done and don't have to leave? A lot of work has been done to make Salesforce.com "sticky" so we don't leave, make the event the same way. Make it okay to stay. Keep us on site.

Okay, then. Please don't think this is a negative post. Dreamforce is the gold standard for events of this type. I have gone for four years, and plan to go next year. Keep up the good work, guys.

Dreamforce Day Two

By Jason Stewart  - September 18th, 2007

The Dreamforce Day Two Keynote is typically kicked off with a message dedicated to corporate America’s responsibility to the community. Last years speaker was Colin Powell, one of the best speakers I have ever seen. The main thrust of that talk was corporate responsibility to the community, but I will always remember his take on the differences between flying on Air Force One and taking a commercial flight. “I’m Colin Powell. How hard could it be?”

This year’s speaker was George Lucas, head of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. He also directs and produces movies.

Delivered in a conversational format with moderator Robert Thurman (Buddhist Monk and father of Uma), it was a thoughtful, articulate message about making education more interesting to kids. Don’t teach them something without also letting them know how they are going to use it in later life, maybe introduce it in the form of a project. Ask them to build something, and they will learn the math and science necessary to make it happen, because they understand why they need to know it and become engaged. Go to www.edutopia.org to learn more.

After that, it was back to the usual keynote fare, with executives from important partners and customers participating in a variety of panels. The panelist from Linden Lab (makers of the “Second Life” virtual world) seemed a bit out of place though. As he was talking, these animated Second Life characters in very tight pants were wandering around on the screen behind him. I was half expecting Marc Benioff to don one of those headsets my nephew wears when he plays Halo and start blasting.

There was a great film shown playing up the role of salesforce.com as an innovator, though, featuring a great shot of someone typing salesforce.com into Google and then clicking on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. My personal highlight, however brief, was when the CEO of Adobe showed Demandbase as an example of a stellar application developed using the Adobe Flex tool. Demandbase was also a finalist for the Appy Award for "Breakthrough App of the Year."

The first breakout session of the day was “Campaigns to Cash,” featuring Demandblog’s Kirk Crenshaw. Some great tips here focused on utilizing the campaigns tab to track return on investment of your marketing campaigns. An interesting point was the standardization of the information you collect from lead forms in order to better utilize formulas to automatically score leads as they enter your Salesforce.com.

I also attended a breakout session led by Omniture and featuring a customer case study from Red Hat. Really interesting stuff, homing in on the point that sheer number of leads generated is a faulty metric for marketing to base success on. Some of the metrics highlighted in their anayltics tool seemed worth checking out.

Something interesting touched upon in both of these breakouts was best practices in tracking campaign involvement throughout a lead's lifecycle. The two most important campaigns to track are the ones that brought the lead to you first, and the last one they touched before they became a customer. If there were 6 in between, they just aren't as important to remember and track as the first and last.

More tomorrow.

Dreamforce Day One: May the Force.com Be With You

By Jason Stewart  - September 17th, 2007

Forgive the Star Wars reference, but since they (officially) announced Force.com today I wanted to be one of the first to make a Jedi joke honoring tomorrow’s keynote, George Lucas.

Force.com is Salesforce.com’s new platform for application development, “platform as a service,” complete with some pretty cool flexibility with regard to advanced control over the UI. With that flexibility comes the ability to easily develop applications for a variety of platforms, including tablet PCs and even an iPhone. I don’t know if I see any companies rolling out iPhones to their field teams yet, but when someone does Force.com will be ready.

All in all it was really fascinating stuff, especially if you are a developer…but I’m not a developer so I was actually more intrigued with some of the new marketing enhancements coming in the Winter ’08 release. Specifically, the ability to create campaign hierarchies (think easily rolling a multi-channel marketing campaign featuring email, telephone and direct mail pieces into one easy to track campaign “family”) and some advanced reporting. Overall, very nice.

And of course, everyone’s number one requested feature, the ability to edit single fields in Salesforce.com without having to go to a separate edit screen. Winter ’08 is going to be a big release, and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

For the breakout sessions I went to see Salesforce.com’s Kraig Swensrud talk about best practices in utilizing Salesforce for Google Adwords. I’ve seen him talk before, but he is just so knowledgeable with regard to pay-per-click it is always fun to hear him speak about it. I cornered him on the Expo Hall floor, and he agreed to come speak to the San Francisco User Group in November. If you have any questions about tracking your Google performance in Salesforce.com or best practices with regard to landing pages he’s your man.

I also went to a lead management discussion, with the highlight being Bluebird Marketing’s Tricia Reilly speaking about some familiar topics to readers of this blog…lead scoring, communication between sales and marketing, and data quality. Check out her blog here.

Overall a great first day. Come back tomorrow for more highlights.

The Exhibit Floor is Not for the Weak

By Jason Stewart - September 12, 2007

I am once again contemplating my game plan while running the gauntlet – aka the Moscone Center Expo Hall at Dreamforce.

I’ve been a dedicated Salesforce.com user for four years now. One of the things I really love is the flexibility to not only create your own custom applications, but also to dip in to the growing library of pre-built applications via the AppExchange – Salesforce.com’s online marketplace for applications. As a matter of fact, Demandbase just completed certification and posted to the AppExchange on August 30th. Check it out here.

But anyway…I came across this report recently on the Salesforce.com Partner Success Blog, “Getting to Know Salesforce.com Customers.” It starts out with some basic demographics of their customer base and talks about adoption, but it gets really interesting when it digs in to what people are looking for when they go to the AppExchange, and what they would like to see more of. I love this kind of stuff -- that sanity check to see if other people are having the same problems I am. Turns out they are.

Out of the “Top 10 On-Demand Apps of Most Interest,” five were related to sales operations, four to marketing operations, and one was related to support (customer survey tools). Number one was “email campaign execution,” which totally makes sense. There is little that compares to being able to look at your leads and contacts and see at the individual level who opened, clicked or unsubscribed from your email campaign. I’m a big fan of Vertical Response for this, and they happen to live in the top three downloads from the AppExchange almost every week. Their pay-as-you-go model rules. And they just added integration with my Google Analytics, which also rules.

I suppose it makes sense that sales and marketing operations make up nine of the top ten. One thing that surprised me was that data quality didn’t rank higher. It comes up later as an area of interest “in the next 12 to 18 months” but it wasn’t in there for the current stuff. I’ve attended a ton of these types of events and their requisite “birds of a feather” discussions where you get together with people of similar interests. Data quality is always a top discussion point. Dupes, dupes, dupes -- the database marketers nightmare.

Back to Dreamforce...I brought up the AppExchange stuff because those companies with applications available for download are going to be the ones lurking in the exhibit hall, ready to give you a free pen in exchange for two minutes of your time. I love the expo hall. And not just because I am a hero when I get home and present my kids with all the tchotchkes I collected. I love the expo hall because l learn just as much in there as I do at the sessions.

Nothing against the breakout sessions, there are some excellent ones. Kirk Crenshaw, my co-contributor here at Demandblog is actually delivering a talk on Tuesday called “Campaigns to Cash: Best Practices for Tracking Campaign Effectiveness,” so be sure to check it out.

I would love to see more of the smaller companies that make up the vast majority of the Salesforce.com customer base better represented as speakers, though. It simply is not relevant to me to learn how Fortune 1000 Company X engaged with Consulting Firm Y over a period of nine months to scope out a problem, and then purchased software from Vendor Z and ended up hiring several dedicated personnel to address it. I may have the exact same problem, but the solution they share in that case study is so far removed from what I can do (or what 90% of the people in the room can do) that it is ridiculous. As a smaller company that doesn’t help me. I'm more interested in learning how that 20 person company addressed the problem with limited resources and no budget.

In the Expo Hall I get to hear about what lots of different vendors have done to address some of the issues I have been tasked to learn more about, not only as a marketer but also as a general interest CRM administrator. Integration with financial systems, email campaign management, project management, content management, expense tracking, SEM analytics, and so on. If I can’t find something to help me with a problem, I still get a lot of ideas just by looking at how these vendors have tackled some very common issues.

It’s exhausting (for the vendors too, I'm sure) because there are more partners there every year. That means more square footage to cover and more descriptions of your business you need to share with more vendors. Seriously, you need a protein bar and a Red Bull by the time you get past the platinum sponsors areas. The exhibit floor is not for the weak! But every year (and this is my fourth Dreamforce) I learn more there than anywhere else at the show.

Plus, I get to be “Superdad” and bring the kids home the slinkies and foam footballs that find their way into my complimentary Salesforce.com laptop bag. Which is nice.

Quite Possibly The Perfect Telesales Dashboard

By Jason Stewart  - September 5, 2007

What are the most important metrics for your telesales efforts?

Over the years I have worked with a number of third party companies that have specialized in setting appointments and generating leads for my senior sales teams, with varying degrees of success. The hardest part of the process is not really any different than when you have your team in-house -- keeping track of progress and getting visibility into the day-to-day dials so that you can spot problems before they end up blocking the flow of leads. Are my reps calling in at the right level? How’s the pipeline? Do I have enough new names for them to call? What objections are they facing?

One firm I had the pleasure of working with, AG Salesworks, had these metrics nailed down, and quite honestly showed me one of the best dashboards I have ever seen. Run out of their Salesforce.com system, and designed specifically for weekly review of the team’s progress, it flies in the face of conventional dashboard wisdom by only featuring one graph or chart -- but still provides an excellent summary of the previous week’s events. They were kind enough to share an example:

LEAD INFORMATION and LEADS PASSED Very straightforward, simple line item listings of recent leads and overall history of the calling campaign. A summary of the new leads passed to the sales reps during the past week, as well as a listing of initial meetings that were scheduled to occur and what’s on deck next week. Aside from reporting success for the week, it also prompts conversations about whether the meetings occurred, how they went, and what can be learned from them.

DATABASE DETAIL This section features the only graph on the dashboard, a bar chart showing the overall status of all prospects in the database your reps are working from. A great chart that shows you instantly what percentage of names have been dialed, who has been contacted, and how many fresh names have yet to be called. Also see who is interested, not interested, not a fit, etc. No more running out of names because you can see when the reps are running low, and can then go out and purchase a new prospecting list. Below that is a line item glimpse into the pipeline to see how many contacts are close to booking that first appointment, as well as a view into the reasons some of your prospects are not interested in taking that meeting. Extremely useful, not only for coaching your reps on how to handle common objections but also to spot trends in your target industries that might affect overall sales.

CONVERSATION DETAIL Yet more line item charts, detailing the outcome and the prospect title for every single “connect” (live conversation) over the past week. When I was working with them, I was especially fixated on the titles. We had a few “sweet spot” titles we liked for them to dial (Controller, VP of Finance, etc.), but it was always interesting to see where we got directed at these companies after someone “in the know” heard our pitch. As the groups who make purchasing decisions get bigger and bigger (fewer single decision makers!) it was always helpful to understand who was being pulled in to learn about new projects and vendors.

I was so impressed with the AG Salesworks dashboard that I replicated it for use monitoring some of our overseas telesales teams, which were not outsourced. There were some custom fields that needed to be created and reports that needed to be fine-tuned. The hardest part was the coaching on the workflow side, making sure the reps were tracking what needed to be tracked. Adoption is key. Decide what is really important to monitor, make sure your reps are comfortable entering the information you need (drop downs are great -- less typing), and then build your reports.

Before long your dashboard may be the envy of the sales and marketing departments.