Category: Sales and Marketing

Today I had the opportunity to talk with Joe Coleman, the CEO of Contently, via an introduction from the founder of the leader in managed Google Apps solutions. Contently is a content as a service company, similar to the idea of content marketing as a service I mentioned a couple months ago.

Joe came up with the idea for Contently while working at his previous company. He understood the value of content marketing to drive traffic through SEO and social media but didn’t have the time to do it well. Contently, as different from TextBrokers/ContentNetwork.com, Demand Media, etc focuses on the higher end of the market with more experienced and more published professional writers. On the call, Joe kept referring to the writers he works with as the ones who make a living as a full-time writer as opposed to others that do it more as a hobby.

Contently in a nut-shell:

• A few blog posts per week for a couple thousand dollars per month
• Highly screened writers combined with a proprietary SaaS app to maintain an editorial calendar, topic ideas, manage blog post workflow, and provide feedback on the writers
• A couple areas of expertise around marketing and finance with more being added regularly

Contently raised a seed round last month and is part of TechStars NYC. I’m looking forward to trying out the service and seeing if it is a good fit for our needs.

What else? What do you think of the Contently idea?

Growing up I was always trying out different business ideas. When I was 16 I became a flea market dealer. The model was simple: I mostly sold new and used CDs, along with a few baseball cards.

To get the CDs in an affordable manner, I ordered them through the BMG music service. The BMG music service was a program where you signed up for an account, received your first seven CDs for the price of one, and then received a new CD every month at full price. BMG’s goal was to build a recurring revenue business with a monthly service. For someone like me, since it didn’t require a contract, I’d get my seven CDs for the price of one and then cancel the service. After doing the service with each family members’ name at different addresses, I had amassed a reasonable number of new CDs. The used CDs came from friends and family that no longer cared about the music.

As for the baseball cards, since I lived in North Florida, there was an arbitrage opportunity around the Atlanta Braves and the Florida Marlins. Those two teams, including players like Chipper Jones, were the most popular in my area so I used the Internet, especially news groups and eBay, to buy regional team players from people in other parts of the country where the cards weren’t as desirable. With those cards in hand, purchased at 40% off the Beckett price, I’d then sell them at the flea market for full price.

After four weekends at the flea market I had had enough. It was a great experience doing retail sales in a heavy negotiation environment outside in the Florida heat. Everyone should do a sales job, and this was my self-made sales job. I ended up making about $200 each weekend — a better hourly rate than my friends working at Publix, but didn’t warrant the effort and inventory risk.

Looking back, I’m proud of my time as a flea market dealer, and while it wasn’t financially viable, the experience was priceless.

What else? What odd entrepreneurially endeavors have you done?

Recently I was talking with a B2B tech entrepreneur who’s starting to get some traction in his business. To date, he’s been running around taking care of details and doing whatever it takes to be successful. Now, with a little bit of revenue coming in, he wants to start tracking more metrics and key performance indicators in the business. He asked what the top three metrics were for B2B startups and I quickly responded:

1. Cash on hand – the only way to go out of business is to run out of cash. Know your cash, know your business.
2. New qualified leads – the main bottleneck for growth, especially with SaaS startups, is qualified leads. Most entrepreneurs build a good product, but that doesn’t matter if you don’t have qualified leads that become customers.
3. Weighted sales pipeline – sales directly feeds into cash, and a weighted sales pipeline is the best way to proactively understand the health of your startup going forward.

Notice that two out of the three metrics are sales and marketing related. My recommendation is for entrepreneurs to plan on spending 3x their engineering costs on sales and marketing. The best customer acquisition execution wins out over the best product most frequently.

What else? What are your top metrics for B2B startups?

We’ve had a number of strange customer/prospect stories over the years. With customers across a number of industries and geographies there’s bound to be some weird and unusual occurrences. Here a few of them:

• A few weeks ago we received notice that our client was closing down, only to later find that their company was fraudulently making millions off NYC and their company founders had fled back to Asia
• Several years ago we were finalists for a deal at a university and the day before they were supposed to make a decision a student went on a killer rampage throwing the project into a tailspin
• One customer was talking to us about spending a normal amount of money and at the 11th hour asked to pre-pay for five years worth of our service creating one of our biggest deals ever due to budget they had to spend now otherwise they’d lose it the following fiscal year
• One customer evaluated our product, chose a different product, spent a quarter million dollars with nothing to show for it, came back to us three years later, spent significantly less, and were very successful
• One customer was bought by another customer which was then bought by another customer — small world

Strange customer stories are bound to happen and these are a few of our more prominent ones.

What else? Do you have any strange customer stories?

Startups love to redesign their website. We did it for one of our sites recently and have another in the works that’ll launch at the end of this month. Effectiveness of our lead generations efforts is measured by our marketing automation and inbound marketing products, but we’re like 99% of other companies online where we can’t tell if the redesign actually made our site better. Prettier? Yes. More modern? Yes. More successful? No idea.

A startup site redesign is like getting a shiny new car. Here’s why:

• You don’t really need a new car because your current car still gets you from A to B
• The new site prettiness is like the new car smell — it’s great but wears off quickly
• Spending considerable time and money on the redesign, much like buying a new car, is usually more ego than necessity

Do I recommend doing a site redesign? Yes, but with one caveat: buy an off-the-shelf theme/design and tweak it instead of creating one from scratch. There are so many good Woo Themes and others out there that you can get that new car smell for significantly less time and money than in the past.

What else? Do you think startup site redesigns are like getting a shiny new car?

In a small, fast growing market (my favorite type) competitive deals take place on a daily basis. Often, competitors will announce new clients via tweets, press releases, and blog posts as a way to develop social proof and help grow the market. Use these new customer signing announcements to your advantage.

Whenever a competitor announces a new customer, go on Google and find all the companies related to that customer and call on them.

The idea is that most companies aren’t leaders but rather follow other companies. Once a company buys a new technology, their competitors will take notice and start wondering if they too should buy it, or something similar. At this point when you call on those related companies you have an edge in setting expectations and differentiating your product.

My recommendation is to target companies that are related to companies recently signed by your competitors.

What else? Have you tried this tactic and were you successful?

Following up on yesterday’s post Business Idea: Sales Intelligence SaaS App, I wanted to dive into the idea a bit deeper. One of the real challenges with the idea is the lack of market awareness that unstructured information found all over the web can be turned into structured, actionable information. This, in turn, can make sales and marketing teams much more efficient. There’s a mind shift that needs to occur to get sales people taking the patterns they already see in customer acquisition and backing into potential data sources that act as sales triggers.

Pros for the idea:

• There are so many channels of content available that several are bound to be successful
• The level of sales rep sophistication to be successful selling to crazy busy buyers continues to grow
• Sophisticated sales and marketing organizations will be able to easily prove the return on investment from the app
• Cloud-based apps make it easy to integrate the new system
• SaaS apps like salesforce.com have built market awareness for low cost tools that aid sales reps
• A clean pricing model that allows for a free trial for X number of records/data before needing the paid edition

Cons for the idea:

• Sales managers typically don’t have budgets to buy tools for sales reps
• Potential customers don’t know that sales intelligence technology is available
• Potential customer workflows and business processes need to be re-engineered to take advantage of the content
• Time to measure a return on investment could be slow making the product sales cycle longer

There are many pros and cons to the idea. With time, I believe a nice market will develop for sales intelligence SaaS apps.

What else? What are some other pros and cons to the sales intelligence SaaS app idea?

Continuing with the previous business idea posts on Prospect Instant Call-Back and Content Marketing as a Service, I’d like to propose another idea around sales intelligence. The proliferation of content online and in social media creates a wealth of unstructured information. There’s tremendous information in there that can be used for sales purposes once the signal and noise have been separated.

Here’s how the idea might work:

• A SaaS app that connects to salesforce.com and SugarCRM to augment existing Lead, Contact, and Account information with additional content, mentions, and relevant links
• A web crawler that looks for new information online in social media, websites, message boards and more. Alerts can notify the sales rep via email as well as inside the CRM. New information examples include recently funded companies that show up on venture capitalists’ websites, addition of new locations for retail chains, change in DNS records, recent blog posts, recent press releases, and many more channels of content.
• Pricing might be anywhere from $25-100/sales rep/month or $100-1,000/content channel/month
• Interface with marketing automation and inbound marketing products to better target marketing activities
• Sell through channel partners like marketing agencies as well as direct to sales and marketing managers

The goal with the SaaS service is to empower sales reps to close more deals with a shorter sales cycle.

What else? What do you think of the sales intelligence SaaS app idea?

Signing the first 10 customers for a new product is one of the most difficult things an entrepreneur will ever do. It isn’t the act of signing the customer but rather everything required to get to that point and the challenge of getting the prospect to take that leap of faith and become a customer. One of the best things to do is to find the early adopters who take pride in using technologies before they’ve crossed the chasm.

Here are some ideas to find early adopters:

• Go to meetups and educational events for the target audience
• Participate in forums and message boards online where enthusiasts hang out
• Engage in LinkedIn Groups around specific topics
• Advertise on niche community sites

Finding the right type of early adopters can be difficult but the results can be incredible. Create a methodical plan and execute it to find and convert the early adopters into customers.

What else? What are some other ways to find early adopters?