Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Dreamforce 2008 Partner Preview: TimeDriver

After my post about ActevaRSVP I was contacted by another Salesforce.com partner that is going to be at Dreamforce. Dave deBronkart, Marketing Analytics director for TimeTrade Systems called me for two reasons … he really likes to talk about marketing in general, but also thought I might be interested in their TimeDriver product and a promotion they have going on at Dreamforce. He left a message I didn’t get back to right away, but he also sent an email.

I was immediately fascinated by a single line nestled within his email signature…

To schedule time with me, click here: 15 min | 30 min | 60 min

Huh.

I had gotten that voicemail from Dave, and I halfway/kinda/sorta listened to it that first time but not enough to remember exactly what he said his company did. Sorry Dave, not your fault – I was having one of those days! But then I saw the email signature and remembered that he had mentioned something about having a time scheduling application I might like. So I did what any curious marketer would do. I clicked on the link to book 15 minutes with Dave.

I was taken to a landing page with some simple, clear messaging and Dave’s picture, asking me if I wanted to check Dave’s availability for a meeting. Yes, I do! I was greeted with a simple-to-navigate calendar view, complete with Time Zone preferences showing me when Dave was available to talk.

I picked my time, entered some information on how Dave could contact me and what I hoped to talk about, and was able to save it to my Outlook calendar (or Google calendar) right from the confirmation page.

How cool is that!

The immediate, obvious use is as a great addition to the email signature line of a salesperson who is looking to book appointments - but who may be frustrated with the back and forth it usually takes to find a time that works for everybody. But as a B2B marketer, I was also struck by how amazing it would have been to incorporate this simple link into an email campaign I had just sent out to 7000 members of my house list, hoping to drive appointments to our inside sales team. The email had performed well, but how many more appointments might I have booked with a simple scheduler like this, that synchronized with the calendars of choice for my whole sales team?

When I spoke to Dave (who called me promptly at the appointed 9am at the number I provided) we talked a bit about that. He mentioned an A/B test he ran to his house list, half with the link and half without. They booked 56% more appointments from the emails with the link.

Granted, this is Dave running an email campaign against his house list and not Marketing Sherpa running the analysis - but let's do that math on that with a hypothetical  situation. Let's say you sell a product that costs $10,000. If it takes 100,000 emails to generate 15,000 opens (15% open rate) to generate 375 clicks (2.5% click-through) to book 20 appointments (5% conversion) of which 4 end up as sales (if you're lucky!) that's $40,000 in revenue. If you could increase the number of appointments booked by 50% with the same message, your new revenue number would be  $60,000. Not bad at all.

Do you want to hear the best part? It costs less than $30 per user. Per Year. With a 90 day free trial. Subscribers can open up their calendars completely, or they can set specific availabilities for TimeDriver-fed meetings.

Check out the TimeDriver Dreamforce offer here (start by clicking on the "Click to Schedule" Button), and stop by their booth to learn how it integrates with Salesforce.com.

Thanks, Dave!

Marketing Sherpa Summit San Francisco: Highlights from the Keynote

Attended the first half of the Marketing Sherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit this morning in San Francisco. Stefan Tornquist, the Research Director for Marketing Sherpa shared some findings from recent research...lots of good information here, but what really struck me was that according to Sherpa Research, the only two areas where B2B marketers plan to expand budget in this economic climate are:

1) Email Marketing to their house list 
2) Social Network Marketing

Social Network Marketing looks like a big topic this year. It's the new Viral.

Stefan went on to point out the top 5 things that need to be "all the rage" in B2B marketing.
1) Optimize existing traffic (yay! check out Demandbase Stream)
2) Focus on customer retention (keep those subscribers happy!)
3) Focus on house lists (they already know your brand, now close them!)
4) Spend on SEO (if you build it *properly* they will come)
5) Spend on Email (especially to your house lists!)

He also stated that smaller companies (less than 1000 employees) are actually more likely to increase marketing spend in this economic crisis, but more importantly executives at larger companies are saying that marketing budgets are not the easy target for cuts that they used to be...I wonder if it is because of all the advances in B2B marketing and the ability to track ROI at the campaign level?

Dreamforce 2008 Partner Preview: ActevaRSVP

I was treated to a sneak preview last week for ActevaRSVP 2.0, an event management tool from Acteva built specifically for Salesforce.com  and available on the AppExchange. Although ActevaRSVP has been around for a couple of years now, they are debuting this new version at Dreamforce on November 3rd, and I strongly recommend a visit to their booth for a demo while you are there -- especially if you have anything to do with events, meetings, webinars or corporate training.

Traditionally, if I have an event or webinar I use either my email vendor or my Salesforce.com email tools to handle the notification duties, and RSVP tracking would be done manually. This is not a complicated process, but it is time consuming and prone to error, which could be especially problematic if I needed to monitor attendance due to limitations of the meeting space, webinar tool, or food ordering requirements. I ask people to "please reply to this email if you would like to attend" and then file the responses into a folder in my Outlook for tracking.

Subsequent emails would ask people to "please RSVP if you have not already" but I invariably receive multiple notes from people I have already heard from, requiring me to go through each reply individually. And if I asked any questions in the email, even something as simple as "Do you want chicken or fish?" I would also need to tally that individually. And then there are the emails where people mention they will be bringing four of their colleagues. And they want two chickens, one fish and one macrobiotic vegan meal that wasn't on the menu.

I suppose I could use a survey tool, but that would involve setting up the survey in addition to the email - and then putting the details in the email, and tracking the results at multiple locations, and then updating my Salesforce.com campaign to make sure costs and ROI are being monitored, and on and on. In short, a real pain in the neck.

Acteva has been working on a really elegant solution to take the pain out of managing your event follow-up. It lives in your Salesforce.com instance, and has the tools in place to not only create and email the invitations to your webinar or event, but also to:

• Track RSVP's
• Create surveys and track results
• Synch and update any corresponding salesforce.com campaigns
• Easily segment responses for follow-up emails
• Track capacities and limitations of Event venues
• Build and host stand-alone web pages for event registration

That last piece has me very excited, as here at Demandbase we plan to much more aggressively market webinars over the next few quarters. I plan to link to ActevaRSVP event registration pages not only from our website, but also from any email campaigns I will be running in order to capture new leads and monitor registrations and RSVP's for these events. ActevaRSVP offers email delivery for their invitations, but with these stand-alone pages you can use different tools for email delivery -- such as lead nurturers like Marketo or Eloqua or Manticore (note: a reader in the comments section indicated Eloqua has demonstrated some good event management capabilities). I can simply insert the link for the registration page into the email and still get the benefits these tools offer. Double dipping at its finest!

Here at Demandbase we use Marketo for lead management, which has email delivery capabilities in addition to the lead scoring and nurturing that led us to them. Vertical Response has been an email service that I have personally used for years, at multiple companies. None of these tools give me what ActevaRSVP does, and the RSVP tool has evolved into something that not only works very well on its own but also complements these other tools I already use. In short, if you do events, you need ActevaRSVP. Pricing is reasonable at $65 per month for 5 event organizers/users and unlimited invitations, events and registrations (which should be plenty of room for most companies).

This is looking like the must-have application for event managers or corporate training teams using Salesforce.com. If you are going to Dreamforce, you should make a special trip to their booth for a demo.

Event Time Is Here - A Song For You

I was riding the bus in to work this morning, thinking about the Marketing Sherpa event I am going to next week, and the Salesforce.com event I am speaking at the week after, and I was inspired to write this song for you....sung to the tune of "Christmas Time is Here" from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.

Events time is here
Giveaways and gear
Fun for all
But marketers call
Their hardest time of year

Commerce in the air
Booth babes everywhere
Demo times And clever rhymes
To prompt prospects to share

ROI just fair
And proving it’s a bear
Sales are rare, Marketers glare
Was it really worth the fare?

Events time is here
Expo's end is near
We wish that we could simply see
If our budget’s blown this year…

Yet More Recessionary Marketing...

Just a quick thought, bubbling up from reading this blog post: How are you planning to manage the coming reduction in your marketing budget?” Hear what the CFOs are saying… at Wider Funnel...

And after attending this webinar: Twitter for Marketing by Hubspot ...

As Marketing budgets are going to get cut during this economic crisis, two things are going to remain unchanged. Salespeople are going to need leads, and prospects are still going to be looking for information about the goods and services they need. Here's the thing though...you are going to have less control over the content they see, because you won't have as much money to put your content in the places you expect them to look. They'll still find out about you, though, and you won't have any say over what they see.

There is an unmeasurable amount of information out there on "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0" and some of it is positive - like the Twitter webinar. Some of it is negative, with withering critiques on the business applications of social networks and often erroneous and unreliable user-generated content (see here, for a very funny example).

Either way you slice it, though, salespeople are going to be trolling through your groups and tweets and forums looking for love because marketing is going to be handcuffed. They are going to be there because there will most assuredly be people tweeting or blogging or posting "Can anyone recommend a fill_in_the_blank?"

How are you going to handle it?

Here's some advice, just for starters...

• Set up Google Alerts on your brand and your market so when stuff gets posted out there you will know about it
• Open a Twitter account and set up an RSS feed on the search terms relevant to you
• Check out relevant groups in communities like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Would love to hear your suggestions for more...

Tweet Tweet Twitter

So I watched a webinar this morning from Hubspot called ""Twitter for Marketing and PR" that was extremely interesting on two levels...

First, the content was really good - short, sweet, direct and interesting. Very informational and compelling, and not the thinly disguised product pitch that so many webinars degenerate to.

Second, and maybe even more importantly, there were a TON of people on the webinar in spite of some horrific technical issues at the beginning involving the conference call/audio feed. They eventually had to abort the meeting and create a new one, and rely on everyone in the room to see a message (no audio!) pointing them to a new URL for the meeting login. Seriously, as a marketer my heart wept for these guys. We've all been there...I was imagining the tension in the room as they were trying to figure out what the heck was wrong. I felt bad...at least until I got to the new meeting room and saw it fill up to capacity (1000 attendees) in a matter of seconds. Wow.

Note to self: marketing via Twitter is a topic to be reckoned with. I may just arbitrarily say the word Twitter in this blog Twitter a few times Twitter to see if it shows up on more searches. Twitter.

Seriously though, it was a great discussion (kudos, Hubspot) and here are some highlights:

• Consider both a personal Twitter account in addition to a corporate one. In this day and age, your personal brand could have some credibility to boost your own network as well as your corporate one.
• If you do create a corporate identity, be sure to fill out your profile and page with relevant content.
• Find the thought leaders in your industry, follow them on Twitter and see who they follow as well.
• Monitor your keywords on Twitter, you will likely find some discussions that are really relevant to your business goals.
• Follow people who follow you -- a really interesting example was Barack Obama vs. Hilary Clinton. Obama's twitter team follow everyone who follows them, Hilary follows no one (which makes her look more like a broadcaster rather than a communicator, a really subtle but telling distinction).
• Follow your brand in conversations!

This last one was really interesting, and they brought up the example of Comcast. Apparently, Comcast has a "Comcast Cares" identity on Twitter to monitor their brand. If someone says negative stuff about Comcast on Twitter, they are in a position to rapidly address the issue and see if there is anything they can do to help (in a very public way).

Overall, bravo, Hubspot. Inspired me to create a personal account on Twitter ( jasondemandbase ) and consider some sort of corporate identity if our VP of Marketing is game. I'll post a link to the recording in the comments here when and if it becomes available.

UPDATE:
The video for the webinar is now up: http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-for-marketing/