Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
January 12, 2009
It is my favorite time of the year – budget time. We are looking at all the wonderful ways we spend money communicating with prospects and customers. As a small company, we take every dime we spend very seriously. Last year, we attended 5 conferences. As we plan this year’s budget, we are asking the hard questions about whether conferences are really worth it or not.
We all know they types of conferences I’m talking about. They include SalesForce DreamForce, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, user conferences, Demo, etc. These conferences can be very costly. In addition to the steep fees they charge to sponsor them, the travel and prep costs are potentially significant. The amount of time we spend on collateral, prep, logistics, etc. is a big investment money aside. Once we get to the conference, we usually find the time is worth it. We end up demoing to a large group of people who appear genuinely interested. We usually end up with a handful of customers by the time we work through the sales process so there is ROI there.
However, when you add it all up, I’ve come to the conclusion the ROI may not be worth it. Could we have spend our time and money on more fruitful endeavors? Maybe. There are ancillary benefits to these conferences. We usually meet writers, analysts, etc. so we get exposure and PR, but it is usually hit or miss. The other big factor to consider now is the economy. I believe attendance at the conferences is going to fall sharply over the next few years. Companies are not going to spend the money to send people to them unless absolutely necessary. The CES conference dropped 30% this year for example.
Even if you do find the right conference and they manage to pull in a decent crowd, the main problem with sponsoring conferences like these is that the bulk of the attendees aren’t usually there to find new solutions to buy for their companies; they are there to learn, network and have fun (all of which I vigorously support). This is the key to deciding which conferences to attend, at least for us. It is all about push or pull marketing. If people are coming to a conference who are very likely there to buy, it is a good conference to attend. If we are going to be pulling them in versus pushing ourselves out, I love it. If we are just there among a crowd of other booths and companies to display our wares, then no thanks. This will be the main criteria we use to pick which conferences to invest in – are the attendees real buyers with real budgets? It sounds simple but I think you would be surprised how few companies really look at conferences this way. What do you think?
Tags:GroupSwim, Enterprise2.0, Marketing, SalesForce, DreamForce, Conferences
Posted in Enterprise, Random, Trends | 3 Comments »
September 11, 2008
As you probably know, we are gearing up for a major release of GroupSwim next week. I thought you might be interested in the things we do to prepare for this event.
- Testing, Testing, Testing – Did I mention we test? In all seriousness, it is the most important component of the process. Quality and customer success are critical, so we try to avoid any and all bugs. We also learn about the software by everyone pitching in on the testing process. We often tweak designs and the user interface based on what we learn. As good as our initial designs are, nothing trumps rolling up the sleeves and playing with the software. As someone who sells and demos GroupSwim every day, I find there is no better way to learn it. The engineering team takes the bugs we find and turns-around fixes overnight. We are a well-oiled machine, but it takes time and effort.
- Technical Tasks – Rolling out a major release involves important technical tasks. Once we take the system off-line to do the migration, we perform back-ups, checks, software migrations, queue-up requests, redirect URLs, and a host of other activities. Since GroupSwim is a SaaS application, it requires a different set of tasks (and mindset) than traditional software. We aren’t migrating one customer; we are migrating 1,000s. The engineering team does an amazing job in a very short time frame. We do mock go-lives and test with copies of production data to make sure we are as rigorous as possible.
- Training and Help – When we roll-out software of this magnitude, we update everything. The list of stuff we change includes but is not limited to:
- The website. This particular release will touch almost every page
- Marketing collateral
- Online help. This is a big task when we add so many features
- Seed content for new sites. These are the discussions, documents and wikis we put in every new site a customer creates to give them a running start
- Videos
- Update the Pool. This is our own customer community, so we put announcements, tips and tricks and other content on it
- Demo sites
- Marketing Activities – When we create software of this magnitude, we want to tell the world. Marketing takes a significant amount of effort. For starters, we do the following:
- Write and distribute press releases
- Email past and present users
- Reach out to bloggers and analysts
- Email campaigns to leads and contacts
Every time we release software, we learn something new. I’m giddy about this next one and look forward to a new stage in our company’s evolution.
Tags:GroupSwim, Release, Marketing, Software, testing, User-Interface, Training, Collateral, Website, Help
Posted in GroupSwim, Technology | Leave a Comment »
September 3, 2008
This is cross-posted with ReadWriteWeb where I will be occasionally writing on the Enterprise Channel.
A growing part of the software sales process involves offering trials or try-before-you-buy programs. Buyers love it but it puts pressure on the vendors to deliver during this important process. I recently trialed software from Vertical Response. They offer self-service email marketing services. I needed a way to create, send, and analyze our email campaigns. First off, I signed up. They did a great job across the board so props to them. Here are some lessons learned going through the process as a buyer.
Product
- Product worked well - I can’t emphasize this enough. I know it seems obvious but we all can list examples of the opposite. Be very careful putting software out to the world to try if it doesn’t work. You have one or two chances to impress someone, so you better nail it. Very rarely will the trial customer stick through a bad experience unless you happen to be in the enviable position of offering software someone has to buy and has no other options.
- Ease of use – the product is very easy to use. It is simple and straightforward. Plus, they provide lots of videos to teach users how to use the product. I find this particularly helpful. It is great to have user manuals if you want to go deep, but a handful of simple, short videos is an awesome way to train new users with minimal effort.
Process
- Rules of the game – they did a very good job designing what the pilot includes and what I would be able to do. In their case, I received 500 emails to try the product (I signed up through SalesForce AppExchange). There were no limitations on features or number of campaigns.
- Provided true product experience – the trial provided functionality for the whole product suite and all features. I was able to fully understand what I would be purchasing and what I could do with it. I think other companies that provide trials, but only expose a percentage of the product features, are making a big mistake. In the case of Vertical Response, they make their money based on volume so it fits nicely in their model.
- Sales person was awesome – I received a very polite phone call and email asking if I needed any help. When I talked to him, he invited me to a weekly webinar to learn about the product. (Small aside – this is a great strategy and one I plan to start with our company). He did a great job on the webinar and really helped me get the most of out of the product.
- Make it easy to sign-up – Once I decided I wanted to use the service, it was very easy to enter my credit card and get started. It isn’t always so easy with business software, but it should be to take as much friction out of the process as possible.
Marketing
- Word of mouth – I had heard of this company from some of our customers, so I was already inclined to give them a fair shot. I can tell from my trial experience that they take care of their customers based on their responsiveness. Granted I was in their sales process at the time but I’m assuming the same responsiveness will apply as a customer. Bottom line – you HAVE to take care of your customers and delight them. If you pull this off, your customers start selling for you.
- AppExchange – they have done a nice job of promoting themselves on AppExchange. It is very noisy in there, and tough to figure out which solutions to use. I thought they were able to rise above the noise effectively through their write-ups and obvious success.
Have you trialed any software lately? Any lessons learned you would like to share?
Tags:Free, Marketing, SaaS, Sales, SalesForce, Trial
Posted in Enterprise, Random, Trends | Leave a Comment »
August 19, 2008
We are gearing up to market more aggressively here at GroupSwim, and I’ve learned some valuable lessons over the past weeks that I thought I would share. These are in no particular order of importance:
- Marketing is hard! In business school and in my professional life, I don’t think I ever appreciated how much work it really is. There are so many details to track and manage.
- LinkedIn advertising is not a good option. We’ve run a couple of ads and the click through rates have been horrible. While I’m man enough to admit I may have written some crap ads, I don’t think they were that bad. My guess is people are not paying attention to ads at all when on LinkedIn (or ever in my case), which is a shame because it could be a great resource. The benefit is you can tune your ads to appear to very specific categories of people i.e. industry, role, etc., which on the surface is great and I was really hoping this would be a good marketing investment. However, the ability to tune the message and impressions didn’t result in clicks, and that is the name of the game.
- SalesForce is a good tool but not great. They withhold critical functionality at the lower subscription rates like Group and Professional, which limits some of the things I want to do. The Enterprise license fees are expensive but they almost force you to upgrade at some point to do sophisticated marketing. The other thing about SalesForce is it is hard to set-up. For Joe Schmoe sales guy or whoever, logging in and using it isn’t a big deal. However, automating the process for linking Leads to sources and other kinds of configuration are no easy feat. You almost need to have a programmers mindset to do some of this stuff. You add fields, set-up queues, configure rules, etc.. I must admit it is almost fun in a geeky kind of way, but takes time and practice.
- Based on the point above, there is a whole eco-system around Salesforce based on the pricing above and lack of functionality; they call this the AppExchange. We are using Vertical Response for email campaigns. It is a great tool and does one or two things really well. I would have assumed/hoped that SalesForce would do some of this based on their market position and price, but this isn’t the case. One thing that is lacking amazes me. SalesForce gives you a flag on a Lead to indicate that person wants to opt out of emails, but it doesn’t integrate with their email capability.
- Trial and error is the key. There is no one answer to marketing. You need to constantly tinker and play with things like messaging and copy. When you find something that works, build on it. This will be key as we start to do Google ad words.
Let me know what you think of these learnings and if you have any to add.
Tags:BestPractices, Best_Practices, LessonsLearned, Lessons_Learned, Marketing, SalesForce, VerticalResponse
Posted in Methodology, Random | Leave a Comment »
June 3, 2008
We are in the process of refreshing our website, sales materials, presentation for Enterprise 2.0 (more posts on that later) and find ourselves in an interesting situation. Our product provides value for many different economic buyers. For example, it is great for sales teams, professional services, marketing, customer support, external customers, etc.; you get the picture. It isn’t easy describing and marketing a solution to such a wide constituency of groups who all have different business issues, every day problems, compensation plans, and the like. It is a conundrum (I try to use this word once a day if I can pull it off) because you don’t want to describe your offering so broadly that it doesn’t resonate with problems people are facing in their business or customer lives. On the flip side, you don’t want to focus so keenly on one group that you ignore and potentially miss others.
Our plan is to focus on one internal group for our collaboration product and one for our Forums product for customer collaboration, nail those, and then take what we’ve learned and start adding other groups. The product features and solution will still cover all types of groups, so this is more about how we market and to whom.
Seems logical. What do you think?
Tags:Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Posted in Enterprise, Random, Strategy | Leave a Comment »
