David Cummings on Startups

Category: Sales and Marketing

  • Basic Search Engine Optimization Tracking for Startups

    Search engine optimization (SEO) is a core part of most startup web marketing strategies. The content marketing component is talked about frequently with people cranking out blog posts, articles, white papers, ebooks, webinars, and more. Along with content marketing is the SEO work for on-page and off-page factors, inbound links, etc. To understand the results and progress on these efforts it’s important to do some basic tracking of data.

    Here are some basic search engine optimization tracking items for startups:

    • Keywords – the search engine ranking position (SERP) of the most important search terms should be tracked for your site on both Google and Bing/Yahoo
    • Competitors – common information like the number of Google indexed pages, the number of inbound links, traffic rankings, and more should be tracked for your site and your competitors’ sites
    • Keywords of Competitors – how the competitors’ rankings compare to your rankings for keywords as well as the keywords competitors rank well for should be tracked

    There are an unlimited number of data points that can be tracked around SEO but focusing on keywords and competitors is a good, simple start.

    What else? What are some other basic search engine optimization items that startups should track?

  • Thinking Big or Thinking Small

    Earlier today I was talking with a friend about startups. He commented that most entrepreneurs have a tendency to think small in the grand scheme of things. The context for this part of the conversation was scaling a sales team from 10 sales reps to 100 sales reps. Often, an entrepreneur that currently has five or 10 sales reps sees 100 sales reps as massive, and to them its thinking big. If Groupon had stopped at 100 sales reps they wouldn’t have grown nearly as fast.

    Today, Groupon hires 100s of sales reps per month and has several thousand sales reps on staff — all hired in the past couple years. Think about it for a second — Groupon believed that the market opportunity was large enough, and growing fast enough, to support a literal army of sales reps. Alibaba, based in China, has one of the largest direct sales force in the world with tens of thousands of sales reps — that’s thinking big.

    The next time you’re dreaming big, ask yourself if’s truly big, and take it out to a magnitude (10x) larger and see how that feels. Are you thinking big or thinking small?

    What else? What are your thoughts on thinking big or thinking small?

  • Quick Sales and Marketing Metrics

    One common question I get from entrepreneurs is best practices around sales and marketing. There are so many stats out there, especially vanity marketing metrics, it’s important to focus on the most important numbers.

    Here are some quick sales and marketing metrics to track:

    • What percentage of unique site visitors fill out a form and become a lead?
    • What’s the cost per lead?
    • What’s the cost per marketing qualified lead?
    • What’s the cost per marketing generated CRM opportunity?
    • What’s the return on marketing investment for the most common campaigns?
    • What’s the average sales cycle length?
    • What’s the average deal value?
    • How many demos do you need do to create a CRM opportunity?
    • What’s the close rate of CRM opportunities?

    Metrics are important to baseline results and look for ways to improve. These simple metrics should be tracked on a weekly or monthly basis and constantly evaluated.

    What else? What are your thoughts on these quick sales and marketing metrics?

  • Sales Reps Without Territories for SaaS

    One of the more common strategies associated with sales reps is assigned geographic territories. Territories make sense when field sales are involved but with the growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), more and more sales are done over the phone and internet. A major downfall of territories is that in a fast-growing startup every additional sales rep that’s hired  shrinks someone’s territory, and shrinking territories is tough on morale. With a modern marketing automation system or CRM system there’s a better way.

    Here’s one way to have sales reps without territories for SaaS-type sales teams:

    • Score and grade all inbound leads automatically and route them to a market response rep
    • Route sales qualified leads to a queue that distributes leads in a round robin fashion to the account executives
    • If there’s a particular source of lead that is sales qualified but even more valuable, like from a test drive, route those to a second queue of the same account executives (the idea is to have equitable distribution of the regular qualified leads and the best leads)

    With one or more round robin lead queues, reps are assigned leads in a straightforward manner that is minimally dilutive when an additional sales person is added.

    What else? What are some other ideas around sales reps without territories for SaaS?

  • Startup Marketing Needs to Answer WIIFM

    Entrepreneurs writing marketing copy have a tendency to focus too much on features and not enough on benefits. There’s another aspect of startup marketing that needs more attention: what’s in it for me (WIIFM). WIIFM, pronounced “whif em”, is key for any persuasive message.

    Let’s look at some startup marketing WIIFM examples:

    • Website personas whereby website visitors select which type of user they are to receive more specific content
    • Marketing copy that talks not only about the company benefits (ROI, efficiency, etc) but also individual benefits (increased personal recognition, skill set/resume enhancing, etc)
    • Referral initiatives whereby if you refer a friend you get more storage space or an Amazon.com gift card

    The next time you read marketing content ask yourself what’s in it for the company and what’s in it for me. WIIFM is more important than you think.

    What else? What are your thoughts on startup marketing needing to answer WIIFM?

  • Arc of Decision Making for Sales and Marketing Alignment

    In the art of persuasion there’s a methodology called the arc of decision making that outlines five steps someone must go through to act. These steps are readily aligned with sales and marketing so as to understand where people and technology fit into the process. Here’s the arc of decision making with sales and marketing alignment:

    • Unaware – Outbound sales and marketing required (inbound marketing fails here because if they don’t know about it they won’t search for it)
    • Aware – SEO and inbound marketing work well
    • Understand – Educational content marketing like white papers and webinars
    • Believe – Content marketing plus consultative sales
    • Act – Sales rep asks for the deal when the prospect is ready to buy

    The next time you contemplate a sales or marketing improvement, ask yourself where it fits on the arc of decision making to tailor your message and approach.

    What else? What are your thoughts on the arc of decision making for sales and marketing alignment?

  • Sales Prospecting Tools for Startups

    Contrary to popular belief cold calling and sales prospecting still works. Certain markets and brands suffer from a lack of market awareness, meaning people aren’t proactively seeking out what they’re selling even though they potentially need it. Things like SEO, PPC, and other mechanisms work well when there’s a market actively looking for the product or service, but inbound marketing fails when there isn’t existing market demand. Prospecting via cold calls and acting like a missionary out in the field educating people one-on-one works great.

    Here are some tools for sales prospecting:

    • Refractive Dialer takes a list from Salesforce.com and queues it up in a conference call-like manner so that sales reps can make significantly more phone calls in the same period of time.
    • Rapportive, recently acquired by LinkedIn, is a Gmail plug-in that takes the email address and shows additional information about the person. This is especially useful if you don’t know the person’s email address as you can make guesses and Rapportive will confirm when you’ve found the correct one.
    • Data.com, owned by Salesforce.com and formerly called Jigsaw, has crowd-sourced information about millions of companies and contacts making it easy to find and search information by categories like company size, geographic location, and job title.
    • LinkedIn almost always has the most current information on a professional and is a great resource to find prospects to call on as well as to confirm information found in Data.com.

    Ideally, the prospect is just about to start the buying cycle upon first contact, so that the sales cycle is short and there’s maximum value for sales and marketing effort. In reality, prospects are at all different stages resulting in the need for marketing to help educate and nurture the lead so that a sales rep can take over once the prospect has entered the buying phase of the relationship. Sales prospecting works for B2B startups and I recommend it.

    What else? What are some other sales prospecting tools for startups?

  • Startups Should Approach Everything as Marketing

    Startups are great because they have a clean slate for all aspects of the business. While daunting, it’s also empowering in that there aren’t notions of “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” One theme I’m a fan of is the idea that startups should approach everything as marketing. Everything? Yes, everything.

    Here are some examples of everything as marketing:

    • Awesome customer service so that clients love the startup and tell their friends
    • Amazing product interface and user experience that sets the tone for the brand
    • Quality sales people that are infectious with their passion
    • Enthusiastic team members in all aspects of the business

    Marketing is defined as: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services (Webster’s dictionary). For startups, the product is the entire startup, not just the product that’s sold. The operative word in the definition is “promoting” since all interactions, whether digital or personal, are promoting or detracting from the startup. Startups should approach everything as marketing.

    What else? What are some other examples of everything as marketing?

  • Benchmarking Data for Startup Marketing

    When having lunch with the CEO of a prominent Atlanta software company five years ago, I asked for advice about marketing. One of his suggestions was to do primary research and publish it. Journalists, prospects, customers, and partners love to read new information, especially if isn’t something recycled.

    Earlier today David Skok, a VC with one of the best blogs out there for entrepreneurs (ForEntrepreneurs.com) tweeted that ZenDesk’s new Satisfaction Index is a great marketing idea:

    http://twitter.com/#!/BostonVC/status/163748555423617024

    Startups, especially successful ones, have an abundance of valuable data that is confidential to each customer. In many cases, this data can be aggregated and anonymized in order to provide benchmarking information to help customers compare their results with the average as well as for marketing purposes to generate awareness for the startup.

    Startups should provide benchmarking data as part of their marketing strategy.

    What else? What are your thoughts on benchmarking data for startup marketing?

  • Startups Don’t Lose a Deal Over One Feature

    Recently an entrepreneur was telling me about a customer he lost due to a missing feature in the product. The customer absolutely had to have this feature, and without it, wouldn’t be moving forward. Naturally, the entrepreneur was depressed thinking he needed to add this new feature right away. Hearing this I asked a few quick questions:

    • Do 80% of your ideal customers need that feature?
    •  Is that feature the highest priority?
    • Was your relationship with the customer strong enough that they were telling you the whole story?

    That last question is the most important.

    Most customers that point out a single feature for leaving are doing that as a nice way out. 

    The reality is that more times than not the customer was sold by the sales rep of a competing product. It’s true, the competing-product sales rep provided talking points to the customer and gave an easy way out with competitive intel — being outsold is never fun but it happens all the time. The next time you hear that your customer is switching because of a missing feature, remember that your company got outsold by a competitor.

    What else? Do you agree that when a customer leaves for one single feature they were sold by a competitor’s sales rep?