Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Google Adwords Editor - I Love This Thing

If you are managing your Google Adwords campaigns, and are not yet using the Adwords Editor, do yourself a favor. Go download it now.

The single best thing I have used it for so far has been easily and instantly moving groups of keywords from one ad group to another. No muss, no fuss.

The only issue is that you need log in the old-fashioned way to go into the ad groups you have moved keywords to and adjust the individual settings on the keywords. Things like preferred ad location are not editable in the Adwords Editor yet, but that's one thing that is pretty quick and easy to update within the product itself.

My wife was a big eBayer for a while, and I remember how excited she was when she discovered their off-line tool for updating large quantities of listings all at once. I understand how she felt now.

This thing rules.

Salesforce.com User Group Community

I just sent out the invitations to the upcoming San Francisco Salesforce.com User Group meeting, and it occurred to me that many of you Salesforce.com users might not be aware of the incredible resource you may have available to you in your own back yard. To see if you have a group near you, click here. You will find listings by geography as well as by special interest.

I run the San Francisco group, but here in the Bay Area there are is also a group in Silicon Valley as well as a Bay Area Non-Profits Group.

If you are a Salesforce.com user in the bay area you are welcome to join us for breakfast on May 15th, from 8AM 'til 10AM. Location is to be determined, but save the date.

The theme this time is Sales Operations. Here's the agenda:

• 8-8:15AM -- Welcome, Coffee, Treats
• 8:15 to 8:35 -- SFDC 101: How to set up automated lead assignment rules
• 5 minute break
• 8:40 to 9AM – Word from our sponsor, Xactly
• 9AM to 9:15 - Salesforce.com User Experience Team
• 5 minute break
• 9:20 to 9:45 – Salesforce.com “Deep Dive” – Best Practices for Sales Operations (Productivity and Data Quality)
• 9:45 – 10AM – Questions, Answers, Discussion and Networking

Hope to see you there!

Even More Fun with Google Analytics

I gave a talk yesterday at the Vertical Response spring marketing conference, which featured speakers on all kinds of fun topics including email marketing, email deliverability, online survey tools, blogging and Web 2.0, direct mail and more. My session was called Advanced Tracking and Reporting From Your Email Campaigns to Dollars in the Bank.

Jeremy Engler from Vertical Response did a great job demonstrating the testing, reporting and integration with Google Analytics baked right in to the VR email system. I talked very generally about Google Analytics and walked through the case study which I described here.

Vertical Response wants to do a webinar with this content, so I will keep you posted on when it becomes available. And thanks to the whole VR team for putting together a great event!

Microtargeting White Paper Coming in May

Demandbase is releasing a white paper in mid-may called Microtargeting: Getting Macro Results from Micro Campaigns. Stay tuned for info on availability. Here's a little taste...

Getting the right message to the right person at the right time is crucial in today’s high-stakes B-to-B marketing game. With marketing budgets stretched to the limit, smart companies are realizing the best way to improve marketing ROI is to improve campaign relevance – and targeting messages to generalized groups just isn’t enough. Instead, B-to-B marketers need to engage in “microtargeting,” where they communicate relevant messages to individuals or small groups of contacts with similar business needs. Highly-targeted email campaigns or focused telemarketing initiatives are a great way to engage potential customers, build brand image, strengthen privacy and dramatically increase sales.

Trade Show Logic

Two thoughts from the ad:tech show exposition floor:

1. Messaging Stinks
Easily 90% of the messaging on the booths told me nothing about what the companies actually do. Is this on purpose, to try and get me to walk up and say "what is it you do?" ... or are companies so afraid of being pigeonholed into a category people are familiar with that they do it on purpose?

I have sat in on many hours of the meetings that shape these messages. Typically, there are WAY too many people in the conference room for these meetings, and one of the side effects is that the output is so diluted by everyone's personal agenda that it often becomes useless.

Ask yourself how you describe your company to your friends. Is it significantly different than your canned corporate description? If so, you might be ready for an overhaul.

2. Make Sure Your Representatives Want to Be There
Well, okay, want to be there might be a stretch...but at least stop sending the third stringers to these events! More than once, I would pause in front of a booth and be baffled by the messaging. I would notice several company reps looking at me, often with their arms crossed, and then NOT APPROACH ME!

Trade shows are expensive, probably the largest single investment you make make over the course of the year. If you are sending unmotivated, uninterested, antisocial loners to man your booth and then wonder why you didn't generate a ton of leads, you need to have your budget revoked. That engineer who knows the product backwards and forwards but may not be the best in front of a crowd? There is no denying that she or he is brilliant, but leave them at home.

You need to treat your expensive investment like an expensive investment. If you are going to jump in, than jump in all the way with a decent booth, good collateral, some giveaways people will use every day and your "A" team of personnel who may not have the most product knowledge but at least know how to get in my face and say hello.

Isn't It Ironic

Thinking about the Salesforce.com and Google announcement yesterday, one of the hot buttons was collaborative work on documents or presentations...

The ironic thing about switching to a SaaS version of your office applications is that while it would force people to work more collaboratively from the latest versions of your most important documents (which is good), the very thing that drives this collaborative work (being forced to work online) will keep it from getting on to the laptops of the road warriors and field personnel who could benefit most from a system like this.

And then, once Google Apps releases the "desktop" version of the product as they have promised which could be what wins over more users, people will go back to their old bad habits of just using what is already on their machine rather than going online for a more recent version of that document or presentation. And then the "collaboration" benefit is gone.

Lead Scoring and Web Forms, Continued

I sat next to Peter Tait, a Marketing VP at Citrix today at the Salesforce.com announcement and he told me an interesting story about lead scoring.

He shared a situation where his sales team told him that leads that scored an "A" after completing an online form were the worst leads coming in, and that the "C" leads were actually performing the best. After some investigation, he realized that people who just plowed through the forms and selected the first item in each question scored an "A" -- when in reality they weren't even really reading the form!

He adjusted the formatting of his forms so that you could only score an "A" if you really answered the questions properly, and voila...his "A" leads were "A" leads again.

Thanks, Peter!

Salesforce and Google Apps ... Is This Really a Big Deal?

The story has been broken already in a number of places, and as Mark Mangano says over at SalesforceWatch.com the web is "atwitter" with people putting in their two cents about Salesforce.com announcing tight integration with Google  Apps.

My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, I am extremely pleased that one of these announcements has to do with improvements or enhancements to the core product as opposed to "the platform." I use SFDC every day for my job, and I feel like the CRM product hasn't been getting the attention it deserves lately.

Also, it is nice to see that SFDC is doing something that will help small businesses and start-ups, which are the ones who are more likely to utilize Google Apps as opposed to Microsoft Office. The big names and big customers get all the press, but it is still the companies with fewer than 100 employees that make up the lion's share of the SFDC customer base.

But on the other hand...Google Apps? Am I alone in not really being moved here?

The last time I used Google Apps was when someone sent an Excel file to my Gmail address...it asked me if I wanted to open it using Google Apps, and when I did it didn't look right. I ended up having to save it to my desktop and open it with Excel anyway.

It sounds good on paper, sure -- and if the word Google is involved the press goes into a fit of collective apoplexy -- but I am just not feeling the love. Tighter integration with a set of applications that neither I nor anyone else I know uses on a regular basis just doesn't get me as excited as I feel like I am supposed to be.

I'm attending the "official" announcement today, and maybe I'll come around. What do you think?

This just in...Fake Steve Jobs has a very funny take on the announcement.  Check it out here. Too funny.

 

I'm Here From Mitch and Murray

Who says sales and marketing don't get along?

I'm a marketer, but I want to point out a really interesting sales blog, Sales Machine by Geoffrey James over at BNET.com.

Start out with the post Ten Common Sales Mistakes, it's a great, quick run-through of a few things your salespeople should probably stop doing.

And how great is it that he has the Glengarry Glen Ross A.B.C. quote right there at the top?

Unreasonable Expectations

I was talking with one of my colleagues the other day about this post from Seth Godin's blog, called Who answers the phone? Godin is talking, once again, about the importance of customer service and the role it plays in brand image. Godin has cited Zappos as the gold standard, and in fact did so just this morning, but in this case he was on the phone with Scharffen-Berger Chocolate (now owned by Hershey's) to complain about how the quality of the product has gone downhill over the past few months.

He relates the story of how the extremely polite representative on the phone offered her apologies and a coupon for a free replacement bar of chocolate, and he goes on to say:

"A replacement of what? More of the same mediocre product I was calling to complain about? ...Shouldn't every single inbound call be answered in one ring? Shouldn't there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website? Shouldn't you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in? Shouldn't you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute? Shouldn't there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?"

Godin is right, of course, but my colleague brought up a very interesting point..."how do you help someone who has an unreasonable request? He wanted someone to change the chocolate back to the way it was....how can you help that?"

How do you help that? What would you have done?

Two side notes...the designer we use had sent out an email to her address book the other day because she was delighted by the outgoing message on Zappos customer support line.  What an amazing strategy...when someone calls you with an issue, get them smiling before you put them in touch with a rep!

Other note...my wife happened to buy some Scharffen-Berger dark chocolate the very day that Seth Godin wrote about it. I tried it. It was kind of waxy and boring.

Maybe I'll call their customer support to try and get a replacement bar...