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?
Posts categorized "Weblogs"
July 28, 2007
July 25, 2007
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.
July 09, 2007
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.
July 03, 2007
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.
June 28, 2007
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....
June 26, 2007
Jon Miller States that 80% of Your New Customers Think They Found You
Jon Miller's Marketo Blog has some great information regarding Lead Nuturing and Lead Generation. If you are a Sales and Marketing Executive, I would suggest following the blog and starting a trial on Marketo. Basically, Marketo helps you optimize your B2B lead generation efforts by optimizing your spend based on actual results and ROI. John discusses the decision making process below:
According to MarketingSherpa’s Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08, 80% of decision makers who made a technology purchase believe that they found the vendor – as opposed to the vendor targeting them.
This is an amazing statistic that proves just how much the Internet has transformed B2B marketing. Nobody questions that the Internet transformed B2C industries, such as travel (Expedia), car buying (Edmunds), or house hunting (MLS and Zillow). I wouldn’t think of buying an airplane ticket or car or home without first doing my research online. It is clear that B2B buyers trained to search online for their personal purchases are now using the same strategies for their business purchases.
As a result, the B2B marketer’s job must change as well. Interruption-based techniques where the marketer searches for customers no longer work. What DOES work are techniques which smooth the process of customers searching for you. In other words, since the buyer controls their buying process, the B2B marketer’s job is to synchronize the company’s marketing (and to some extent sales) activities to the buyer’s process.
MarketingSherpa lists some tactics that are now critical to your marketing mix:
- SEO and pay per click management so prospects find you when they search
- White paper syndication on the third-party sites prospects use when researching
- PR, blogs, public speeches, awards – so your brand appears wherever prospects are reading
- Consistent brand awareness efforts so they’re aware of you when they make their short list
- Focus on client satisfaction to encourage referrals and word
To this list, I’d add landing page optimization so you have the best chance of converting prospects when they do find you. I’d also add post-click lead management: if buyers are seeking you out, you’ve got to be able to follow-up with the promptly and accurately.
Download a PDF excerpt of MarketingSherpa’s Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide.
Sponsored by: Get a 30 Day Free Trial of Marketo’s Pay Per Click Software.
June 25, 2007
Do you find social networking tools effective for reaching executive decision makers?
Now that all sales and marketing executives have a wide variety of networking tools available, it is time to analyze them to understand whether or not they are appropriate for enterprise software sales. There are obvious solutions like Spoke and Jigsaw that provide contact details in return for a fee or fewer leads in return for sharing your own details. Unfortunately, the information published on these sites is often out of date, and this is even more the case when dealing with c-level contact details. More restricted sites such as LinkedIn require a higher level of permission to contact people in the network. The question is whether or not it is acceptable to leverage the network for lead generation. On the one hand, it is a great way to access people who are otherwise difficult to access. On the other hand, it will ruffle a few feathers in the network. I think that LinkedIn and the other networkng tools need to be treated with the same amount of professionalism required with all referrals.
June 22, 2007
Search Engine Optimization for the Sales Executive - Who cares right?
Mike Schinkel's blog on Search Engine Optimization may not seem like a good topic for "Enterprise Software Executive", but SEO is an important part of sales and marketing for enterprise software companies. I have included a section of Mike's Blog below:
For those unfamiliar with Google’s core algorithm for determining its search engine results, you can read this article to learn about PageRank in more painstaking detail. Here, I’ll just try to explaining the aspects of PageRank as it relates to URLs. Note also that my explanations are simply meant to be a conceptual guide and not exacting details. The founders of Google did publish their initial algorithms but have since made tweaks that are as closely held a corporate secret as the formula for Classic Coke!
Popularity is the key
PageRank ias essentially a popularity rating, and a page’s PageRank is determined by the inbound links from other pages on the web. A PageRank can be as low of almost zero (0) to as high as ten (10). Google’s algorithms determine a page’s PageRank by dividing the PageRank for each of the inbound linking pages by the number of outbound links on each of those pages, factoring in each page’s PageRank, and then summing the results for all inbound links. Clear as mud, right? It’s easier to explain with an example, but let’s cover a bit more ground first.
Like voting company shares
PageRank considers each link a ‘vote’ for the page linked to. But unlike in a democratic “one citizen, one vote” society, Google’s algorithm more closely models the shareholders of a corporation voting their shares; the votes of those with “more” (PageRank or shares) have a greater influence on the outcome. So a link from a page with a PageRank of 7 is more valuable than a link from a page of PageRank 3; probably many orders of magnitude more valuable, as you’ll see next.
The old 80/20 rule, on steroids
Because of the nature of the web, a small number of pages have a huge number of inbound links, and vice versa. So those with more links get more PageRank, but the value of PageRank is on a logarithmic scale thus it increases exponentially. Assuming[1] that the base were five (5), the value a page would get to vote based on it’s PageRank would look like this:
PageRank Value 0 0 1 5 2 25 3 125 4 625 5 3,125 6 15,625 7 78,125 8 390,625 9 1,953,125 10 9,765,625 An example:
Assume a site somehow manages to get a persistent link from MySpace’s home page (www.myspace.com). At the moment contains MySpace’s home page contains about 70 outbound links and has a PageRank of seven (7). Let’s also assume that there are a total of 50 other inbound links, and let’s say the average PageRank for those pages linking in is three (3) and those pages have an average outbound link count of 10. From this, let’s calculate PageRank:
- MySpace’s Available PageRank per outbound link:
- 78,125 / 70 => 1,116
- PageRank value contributed by 50 other sites:
- 125 * 50 / 10 => 625
- Total PageRank value:
- 1,116 + 625 => 1,741
Looking it up in the table, the resultant PageRank for the home page is four (4).
The Three ‘P’s of Inbound Links
As with the three ‘L’s of real estate, the three ‘P’s of inbound links are: PageRank, PageRank, PageRank! [2] Note how in the prior example the 50 inbound links of PR3 offered less PageRank than the one (1) inbound link from MySpace with PR7! Of course we don’t know the logarithmic base [1] but Phil Craven says 5 or 6 are what many people believe it to be.
Here is what it would look like with base two (2) through ten (10) (download the full calculations here as a zipped Excel 2003 file [4kb]):
Logarithmic
BaseValue from
PR3 * 50 / 10Value From
PR7 * 1 / 70Total
ValueResultant
PageRank2 40 2 42 5 3 135 31 166 4 4 320 234 554 4 5 625 1,116 1741 4 6 1,080 3,999 5,079 4 7 1,715 11,765 13,480 4 8 2,560 29,959 32,519 4 9 3,645 68,328 71,973 5 10 5,000 142,857 147,867 5 So depending on the logarithmic base, PageRank fluctuates between four (4) and five (5) for this hypothetical example. However, starting with a logarithmic base of five (5) the one MySpace link overpowers the 50 others! And because pages with a PageRank closer to 10 are listed higher in Google’s search engine results page among competing pages, people focused on SEO are always trying to increase their page’s PageRank, often via unscrupulous means.
Of course nobody outside Google knows the exact formula or base exponents used, but hopefully this post illustrates the value of links from high PageRank pages.
Don’t game the system
However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that a single-minded focus on inbound links is fraught with peril, not the least because it might cause your pages to removed from Google’s index! Just as there are people selling weight loss products they claimn don’t require dieting or exercise, there are people offering ways to inbound links that don’t require having real people link to you. However, Google considers these shortcuts to be gaming the system is ever vigilant to discover those cheaters. If caught cheating, Google will ban your pages from their index without notice.
The best way to gain inbound links for your key pages on your website is to do the hard work of creating a site with great content that people want to link to.
Architecture Matters
So as an epilogue, getting inbound links is clearly necessary for high PageRank and thus good search engine results, but all those inbound links can be squandered without a good architecture and site management plan. To ensure that a site’s great content and popularity get reflected in appropriately high search engine ranking it’s critical to optimize the architecture of the site, the pages, and the URL structure as well as make plans for how the URL structure might change over time.
The most under-realized aspect of SEO
Personally, I think the most under-realized aspect of white hat SEO [3] is the lack of attention paid to URL planning and design, especially for larger websites. There are very few tools [4] besides the low-level and effectively simplistic URL rewriters like mod_rewrite for creating and maintaining a URL plan, very few articles [4] that discuss URL design, and no articles [4] I am aware of that discuss URL planning.
However, I believe website owners will see huge improvements compared to their prior rankings if they focus on URL design and create a URL management plan. The good news is that URL design is mostly a one time endeavor assuming site maintainers adhere to the management plan, at least until there is a full site rearchitecture.
But all of the whys and wherefores regarding URL planning and design are beyond the scope of this post, and instead will be the subject of many posts in the future. Stay subscribed!
For Further Research
And, as I stated at the start of this post you can learn more the PageRank formula here, and you can also google for PageRank to get a large list of other resources.
Footnotes
- But remember it’s a secret, so we can’t know for sure.
- There’s more to search engine ranking than just PageRank, like applicable content, but PageRank differentiates pages that compete competitive for the same keywords.
- To those SEO-haters of the world, please note that I’m referring to those things that you can do with pure white hat techniques, things that if not done can result in a great site being given less credit by the search engines.
Over time, I plan to address the lack of such articles and tools for URL planning and design.
June 14, 2007
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