Enterprise Software Executive

Lead Generation - It's Science, Not Art

Anyone leading a sales team these days needs to be part sales management and part marketing guru.  It isn't enough for a sales VP to understand the basics of pipeline management, opportunity management, and the most popular sales methodology of moment.  Everyone knows that a strong sales funnel is a direct result of an optimized marketing lead generation program.  It is fine to allow marketing to own the lead generation piece of the puzzle, but it is critical that sales takes an active role in the building and management of that program.  Why?  Mainly, it is due to the fact that sales is the customer facing part of the organization.  As a result, Sales will typically receive direct feedback from clients and prospects with regard to what type of questions and solutions are important to them.  By harvesting this insight and building marketing lead generation programs around the prospect/client interests, it is possible to more efficiently deliver this information to prospects.  More importantly, marketing can begin the "dialog" prior to the start of the sales process which ultimately increases the success of the sales team when they finally engage in a buying process or sales cycle.  This is commonly known as "lead nurturing" and Jon Miller's company, Marketo, has developed software to management of this process between sales and marketing.  I would suggest reviewing Marketo's blog on lead nurturing along with linked info on Brian Carroll's thoughts on lead nurturing to quickly enhance your lead generation efforts.

SugarCRM Presents at Atlanta PHP User Group

On November 1st, Steve Kasinetz - WW Director of Sales Engineering and David Gearhart - RVP Southeast & Latin America for SugarCRM presented to the Atlanta PHP User Group.  The Atlanta PHP group connects and unites PHP users across the Southeast, provides world-class support and resources to the community, and advocates the adoption of PHP to local, national, and international businesses.  Steve Kasinetz presented the new SugarCRM 5.0 release and answered questions from the audience for 90 minutes.   Ben Ramsey is the experienced PHP developer who founded and leads the PHP User Group's monthly meetings at the Canadian Consulate in mid-town Atlanta.  If interested, please consider attending the next PHP meeting on December 6th at 7pm which will cover a presentation on Zend Framework 101 featuring speaker Cal Evans, Editor of Zend Developer Zone.  Cal will present a beginner's introduction to the Zend Framework.

E.T. Phone Home....Or At Least Call The Client Back

We all are experienced and professional enough to follow-up on our leads and client requests.  However, with everyday travel, it is sometimes easier said than done.  Although the Blackberry and Treo line of PDA's have greatly increased the sales executive's ability to access email and calendars on the move, they have done very little to assist with lead management and management management.  Sure, some organizations have proactive inside sales reps who will take the time to cut/paste details of high quality leads into an email and shoot it to you, but without quick access to your CRM solution, you are somewhat limited in your ability to do anything more than place a quick call without a full background of info.  More importantly, sales managers often get excuses from field reps who claim that they couldn't get their pipeline submissions emailed because they were "traveling". 

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of viewing a demo of iEnterprises Mobile Edge for Blackberry product.  This post isn't about pushing some software for a partner, my goal is to relay my experience with this revolutionary product that I confidently feel will increase the sales of any sales person in enterprise software.  Unlike other mobile solutions that have mini browsers, this solution includes a small database of records based on the assigned user field.  The solution can be easily extended to include new modules such as contracts or cases, so you can quickly reference a clients SLA agreement, support level, or open cases during the actual sales call. 

I think that every sales executive remembers the first time they received a question in the middle of sales call that they couldn't answer on the spot.  At some point in time all executives learn that they can't possibly know every answer, and they learn the skill of action item follow-up.  Then, there was the first time you used your Blackberry during a meeting or during a break to ask an engineer a question and get a return answer while still at the meeting.  At that point, you realized that wireless technology can reduce sales cycles. 

In a similar way, Blackberry wireless apps like iEnterprises Mobile Edge can revolutionize your access to lead, opportunity, and support data.  You will be better prepared before, during, and after sales meetings.  More importantly, your team will begin to use your CRM solution during the sales process rather than using it as an afterthought on Friday afternoon updates.   

Sales & Marketing Executives Leveraging Buzz Marketing in their Region?

Tonight, I attended a great Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs Meetup event which had an interesting panel of speakers focusing on different ways to promote web businesses.  I attend the group because a lot of the 70+ attendees are future users of SugarCRM(software I sell), so it is a great way to increase awareness in the local market.  However, tonight's discussion around buzz and marketing got me thinking about different ways that the Enterprise Software Executive can increase leads and demand generation with Buzz.  As a software executive, you really need to analyze your target region to determine the primary industries, target accounts, and target prospects.  Once you determine your target industry, companies, and prospects (i.e. individuals within your target companies, you are ready to start the buzz.  The key to buzz marketing at the national or regional level for a software company is to create a pull within your target market.  If you sell HR software to the VP of Human Resources, then you need to create a buzz within the local or regional HR community.  It is important to focus on the VP of Human Resources, but creating an outstanding buzz within HR alone will deliver huge dividends.  Great, how do we do that?  In software, there are so many different approaches that the sky is the limit.  If we take the HR example to the next level, I would suggest that an HR software company should think about using new media + old media to create the buzz.  For example, the old media tactics would include traditional activities that align well with HR/people events --> Run/Cycling/Triathlon Race Sponsorship, newsletters with health/lifestyle info, HR organization sponsorship, etc...the list goes on and on, and we have seen them all.  On the new media side, there are the typical websites, blogs, etc...but when was the last time you saw a youtube presentation online that really cuts through the typical marketing talk and gets straight to the point.  I would suggest creating some podcasts with your local clients interviewed, video's with your clients talking about their benefits, clients guest blogging on your corporate blog, etc....  However, buzz marketing is so much more than traditional marketing events or generic websites and blogs.  True buzz marketing for the software sales and marketing executive involves anything and EVERYTHING.....that is the key, keep working, keep adding, keep building, keep buzzing.

Sales Training - Not Just Dinners and Drinks Anymore

Sales training has been one of the most dreaded annual events for every software sales and marketing exec for the past thirty years.  However, sales training can be productive if approached from the right perspective.  There is not denying that some companies are pulling revenue producing people from the field to do what sometimes amounts to nothing more than a large pub crawl.  Last week, I participated in a sales training that actually included sales info and sales training.  It is a novel idea that most companies fail to understand.  The event was a two day sales training that required all sales and marketing employees to come prepared to learn.  The training was a success mainly due to the expectation setting that occurred the prior week when the agenda was sent out with a prerequisite test.  By requiring everyone to study and test, it got us into the right frame of mind for the training.  For the first time, I arrived at a sales training with my head in learning mode instead of selling mode.  Did some prospecting suffer during the day leading to the event, yes, but I would suggest that the training was effective as a result of the prerequisite activities.  So, lesson learned, make sure that you assign some type of prerequisite learning with a test prior to your next sales training to get everyone's head in the game for the upcoming event. 

Web 2.0 Sites Mirror Dot Com Hype, Will They Crash Too?

With all the recent news about the new players in the Web 2.0 market, I felt the need to go a little off topic with this post and comment on what looks like the second coming of the dot com bust.  Now, I am not talking about some of the larger success stories we all know and love like YouTube, LinkedIn, etc....  I am not a big user of the recent Web 2.0 success stories providing spin-off apps like Facebook and MySpace, but I would agree that they provide a need for a large segment of internet users.  On the other hand, I am somewhat concerned with the feeding frenzy taking place in venture capital over the new entrants looking to launch applications on the back of those Web 2.0 success stories.  I understand the concept of launching a new application on the back of an existing platform like Facebook or MySpace, but many of these applications have questionable value and functionality.  It is hard not to feel like we are experiencing a small scale dot com boom again with all these Web 2.0 companies riding the wave of success created by Facebook and MySpace.  If anyone has any thoughts or insight into why this new wave of Facebook and MySpace application start-ups will perform better than many of the dot com flame outs of the past, please provide your thoughts and/or comments.  Is this just Dot Com Type Hype Part II?

The iPhone for the Sofware Executive?

Matt Hendrickson discusses the iPhone vs. the Blackberry in a recent TechCrunch post that compelled me to comment on the topic for those who are travel sales executives trying to figure this whole iPhone mania out... http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/25/iphone-v-blackberry-side-by-side-two-week-comparison/

First of all, the iPhone is cool looking.  Fine.  However, if you are a heavy traveler who needs email access, please realize that this phone does not have push email.  That means that you will need to perform a manual sync or schedule a sync.  Having worked with phones like this in the past, it is a battery killer!  Secondly, the phone runs on the older version of the Cingular data network called Edge.  To put it in data terms, we are talking about speeds of 70 - 100kpbs compared to typical modern data networks at 400 - 700 kbps second.  When you are trying to send business attachments or via a spreadsheet with phone numbers or status updates, it will not be possible with those speeds.  Forget the fun tools, they will not be fun at those speeds either.

So, hands down, I would suggest ANY phone Blackberry, Treo 750, etc...as long as it runs on a modern 3G network.

SugaMobile by David Gearhart, VP Southeast & Latin America, SugarCRM

Billboards are quite expensive, and it is critical to create brand awareness in the region as it is new and growing.  So, we present the SugaMobile.....

David Gearhart Analyzes Marketo's Thoughts on Lead Nurturing

I am a huge fan of Marketo's products and services, and I get even more excited about the blog posts.  This post by Marketo is worth posting again to get more people to read their wisdom.....

Your demand generation programs are running, bringing lead information into your SFA system or other database. What do you do next? Send the raw leads directly to your sales team to qualify?

Isn't this like throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Instead of immediately handing leads to sales, marketing should make it a practice to nurture the leads, setting up a program of activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. Sending and tracking the response of successive lead nurturing activities also lets the lead self-qualify. You can assume that the more information requested, the stronger the lead.

Entire Post from Jon Miller's Marketo Blog: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/lead_nurturing/index.html

The post continues to outline the different types of nurturing programs.  At SugarCRM, we use several types of nurturing programs, and we have an excellent VP Marketing, Tara Spalding, who really works hard to pull people through the sales cycle via nurturing.  I will run through Marketo's nurturing examples and quickly highlight the value of each nurturing example.

Emails – Email campaigns are an excellent way to nurture your buyers.  Jon Miller once did a speech back at Epiphany where he discussed how absurd it would be to call up a group of women and tell them that they were analyzed based on their propensity to marry and then propose to each woman.  Crazy!  Of course, we all take for granted the concept of dating and relationship building in the human world, so the concept of building a relationship via marketing communication and email in this example is no different.  After receiving several different emails with each one building on the prior email, buyers feel that they have developed a relationship with the vendor.  At this point, the buyers are not ready to "buy", but they do feel that they have entered into a relationship and will be open to listening to further nurturing highlighted below.   

Newsletters & Blogs – Marketo highlights newsletters and blogs.  I think blogs are helpful for SEO, but I am not sure how much nurturing they provide to the vendor lead process.  However, I think that newsletters are very valuable.  Software vendors can continue to nurture via email and direct mail newsletters than contain links to online demos, webinars, and trial downloads.  Newsletters are like a monthly table of contents or site map for nurturing. 

Webinars – I think Webinars are very helpful for selling products and services that are generally understood by the buying community.  However, when Jon Miller and I worked at Epiphany, we tried to educate the market on a product called the Interaction Adviser.  It was a product that utilized real-time decision via Bayesian classification to determine the most appropriate offer.  Most people were familiar with real-time offers based on using Amazon, but they didn't truly understand how the collaborative filtering used by Amazon was basic product pairing compared to true real-time self learning engines.  In any event, the webinars were not very effective in educating the market as the buyers didn't understand enough to register for them in the first place.  Conversely, with products like SFA and Call Centers, the buying community is very aware of the general concepts and capabilities and really wants to understand the unique differentiators of "your" solution.  When selling more commoditized products, webinars are a critical piece to the lead nurturing puzzle.  In fact, at high volume SFA vendors like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, it is safe to say that a substantial amount of the overall sales demo's are delivered via online demos and webinars without the involvement of an actual sales rep or sales engineer.  Now, that is lead nurturing at its best.

Calls – The Marketo list includes calls which is something near and dear to my heart this week as I am performing follow-up calls on leads received.  The most effective lead follow-up will always be a follow-up call, but as email becomes more accepted, I am seeing higher response rates with email on a daily basis.  However, I find the most effective call program to involve a phone call (inevitably a voice mail message) accompanied by a follow-up email.  I always send a short follow-up email summarizing my voice mail as many people don't take down phone numbers and names when they listen and delete voice mail messages.  If I had to guess, I would say that phone/voice mail + email follow-up yields a 50% increase in response rates.  Now, this increase response rate often equates to someone returning your call or email with a "not interested" message.  However, anyone doing prospecting and lead generation will tell you that any response is positive and appreciated.

Custom Landing Pages – I don't have anything to add to the custom landing page overview, so please refer to Marketo's answer.

In summary, the post by Marketo lists all the key areas of lead nurturing.  There are a also few other programs such as white papers and analyst reports which can further nurture the buyers.  All in all, I agree with the post and can speak from experience that lead nurturing is the key to effectively moving buyers through the sales process and engaging sales teams when the buyers are ready to purchase.   

Isn't this like throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Instead of immediately handing leads to sales, marketing should make it a practice to nurture the leads, setting up a program of activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. Sending and tracking the response of successive lead nurturing activities also lets the lead self-qualify. You can assume that the more information requested, the stronger the lead.

Entire Post from Jon Miller's Marketo Blog: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/lead_nurturing/index.html

The post continues to outline the different types of nurturing programs.  At SugarCRM, we use several types of nurturing programs, and we have an excellent VP Marketing, Tara Spalding, who really works hard to pull people through the sales cycle via nurturing.  I will run through Marketo's nurturing examples and quickly highlight the value of each nurturing example.

Emails – Email campaigns are an excellent way to nurture your buyers.  Jon Miller once did a speech back at Epiphany where he discussed how absurd it would be to call up a group of women and tell them that they were analyzed based on their propensity to marry and then propose to each woman.  Crazy!  Of course, we all take for granted the concept of dating and relationship building in the human world, so the concept of building a relationship via marketing communication and email in this example is no different.  After receiving several different emails with each one building on the prior email, buyers feel that they have developed a relationship with the vendor.  At this point, the buyers are not ready to "buy", but they do feel that they have entered into a relationship and will be open to listening to further nurturing highlighted below.   

Newsletters & Blogs – Marketo highlights newsletters and blogs.  I think blogs are helpful for SEO, but I am not sure how much nurturing they provide to the vendor lead process.  However, I think that newsletters are very valuable.  Software vendors can continue to nurture via email and direct mail newsletters than contain links to online demos, webinars, and trial downloads.  Newsletters are like a monthly table of contents or site map for nurturing. 

Webinars – I think Webinars are very helpful for selling products and services that are generally understood by the buying community.  However, when Jon Miller and I worked at Epiphany, we tried to educate the market on a product called the Interaction Adviser.  It was a product that utilized real-time decision via Bayesian classification to determine the most appropriate offer.  Most people were familiar with real-time offers based on using Amazon, but they didn't truly understand how the collaborative filtering used by Amazon was basic product pairing compared to true real-time self learning engines.  In any event, the webinars were not very effective in educating the market as the buyers didn't understand enough to register for them in the first place.  Conversely, with products like SFA and Call Centers, the buying community is very aware of the general concepts and capabilities and really wants to understand the unique differentiators of "your" solution.  When selling more commoditized products, webinars are a critical piece to the lead nurturing puzzle.  In fact, at high volume SFA vendors like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, it is safe to say that a substantial amount of the overall sales demo's are delivered via online demos and webinars without the involvement of an actual sales rep or sales engineer.  Now, that is lead nurturing at its best.

Calls – The Marketo list includes calls which is something near and dear to my heart this week as I am performing follow-up calls on leads received.  The most effective lead follow-up will always be a follow-up call, but as email becomes more accepted, I am seeing higher response rates with email on a daily basis.  However, I find the most effective call program to involve a phone call (inevitably a voice mail message) accompanied by a follow-up email.  I always send a short follow-up email summarizing my voice mail as many people don't take down phone numbers and names when they listen and delete voice mail messages.  If I had to guess, I would say that phone/voice mail + email follow-up yields a 50% increase in response rates.  Now, this increase response rate often equates to someone returning your call or email with a "not interested" message.  However, anyone doing prospecting and lead generation will tell you that any response is positive and appreciated.

Custom Landing Pages – I don't have anything to add to the custom landing page overview, so please refer to Marketo's answer.

In summary, the post by Marketo lists all the key areas of lead nurturing.  There are a also few other programs such as white papers and analyst reports which can further nurture the buyers.  All in all, I agree with the post and can speak from experience that lead nurturing is the key to effectively moving buyers through the sales process and engaging sales teams when the buyers are ready to purchase.   

Atlanta SugarCRM Meet-up Group Is Off to a Sweet Start

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Atlanta SugarCRM Meet-up Group Is Off to a Sweet Start

Atlanta based SugarCRM Enthusiasts Meet Monthly to Share Lessons Learned, Discuss Project, and Eat Appetizers.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) July 2, 2007.  SugarCRM Inc. announces the Atlanta Meet-up group focused on Sugar best practices. The second Wednesday of every month is "Sugar Wednesday," the day that SugarCRM users and enthusiasts from the Atlanta metropolitan area gather and teach each other new SugarCRM capabilities and techniques, swap tips and tricks, and answer SugarCRM related questions at the Atlanta SugarCRM Meet-up group.

Open to the public and is free to join, the Atlanta SugarCRM Meet-up group convenes monthly on the second Wednesday of each month at 6:30pm at Jocks & Jills Galleria.  More information about the Atlanta SugarCRM Meet-up group can be found at http://opensource.meetup.com/72/. 

"SugarCRM has passionate users who look forward to Sugar Wednesdays," Says David Gearhart, Regional VP of Sales for SugarCRM.  “We swap SugarCRM lessons learned and have select speakers provide hands-on instruction.  More importantly, we get a chance to hear how others are using SugarCRM for their business. All skill levels are welcome.”

About SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM’s open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers’ security, integration and configuration needs. 
For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 877 SUGARCRM tollfree in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.

Southeastern Software Association - SaaS Discussion

Last night, I was honored to be a panelist for the Southeastern Software Association's discussion on Software as a Service.  The panel had several members from telecommunications and other areas of infrastructure.  It became clear that there are definitely some solutions that should be considered as SaaS solutions in almost all cases.  One solution that I found compelling was outsourced Exchange Servers managed by USA.net.  David Ramon, CEO and President, USA.net, explained that 97% of Exchange Servers are in-house applications.  Given the ability to map your email domain to a 3rd party who can effectively deliver higher SLA's at a lower cost, I am not sure why you wouldn't consider USA.net to manage your email servers.  On the other side of the equation, I discussed the pro's and con's of SaaS for enterprise applications.  In the CRM market, I suggested that each company really needs to evaluate their needs before deciding to deploy in a SaaS or On-Premise solution.  For very complex integrations with mission critical applications, SaaS has some challenges that companies like Salesforce.com do not want to openly discuss.  For example, if you have ten to fifteen backend systems with multiple customer records in each system, you will need a good process for data cleansing.  Typically, you will cleanse in a staging area prior to loading into your CRM solution.  Although this can be done prior to loading into a SaaS solution, you have already created the IT infrastructure to manage the cleansing process, so I would question your cost savings by outsourcing the application piece given all the other work on your end.  More importantly, if you have a lot of legacy integration points, you will be limited by most SaaS vendors to their proprietary API's.  That means that you will have several integration options based on the SaaS vendors chosen integration methods.  If you have new systems that are all web service enabled, then you are probably fine.  However, if you have some legacy systems that require more expensive methods like many mainframe applications, then you are going to require a significant amount of work to integrate.  Unfortunately, once you integrate and load your customer data into the SaaS application vendors system, you will begin to feel somewhat locked into that solution.  You better hope that they do not change pricing on you in the future because you will have no choice at that point.  So what is a better approach you ask?  Well, I am not suggesting that the above above is incorrect, however, I would suggest that you explore the more open solutions.  Obviously, I am a huge advocate of SugarCRM, but there are other solutions that provide open integration methods that will not create vendor lock-in.  I would suggest that you explore all your options and keep in mind integration, pricing, and long term flexibility when deciding on your CRM solution.  Don't just go for the latest fad which currently is SaaS.  Remember that SaaS is a deployment option, not a software solution....