Category: Sales and Marketing

Inbound marketing and marketing automation are two of the hottest areas in web marketing right now but both still haven’t crossed the chasm and suffer from a lack of mainstream market awareness. On a really simple level you can think of the sales and marketing funnel as follows:

• Top of the funnel – inbound marketing: drive traffic to your site, landing pages, etc through search marketing, blogging, social media, link building, participating in online conversations, and other mechanisms with the goal of generating leads
• Middle of the funnel – marketing automation: convert, nurture, email, track, score, and grade prospects as well as provide insights to sales reps
• Bottom of the funnel – sales: solve prospect problems and turn them into customers

As you might guess, there is some overlap between the top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel, resulting in pieces of duplicated functionality between inbound marketing tools and marketing automation platforms. Will the two eventually converge into one: yes. Right now, there’s so many different features required for each type of product that it’s difficult to do everything well resulting in more specialization with deeper functionality.

Inbound marketing and marketing automation address two different areas of the sales and marketing funnel but provide tremendous business value.

What else? What other thoughts do you have comparing inbound marketing and marketing automation?

Earlier today I was meeting with a successful entrepreneur talking about customer acquisition and more specifically the top and middle of the funnel. Late in the conversation he mentioned that he’d had success advertising on Twitter, so, naturally, I wanted to learn more since we hadn’t done that yet. One of the main ways to advertise (if you get a beta invite) is to do promoted tweets.

Promoted tweets show up as a tweet based on searches of keywords that the advertiser purchases. One niche, but powerful example is to do a promoted tweet with content related to a conference currently happening and then buy the hashtag of the conference as the keyword. More and more conferences have a hashtag (e.g. #Shotput2011) so that people tag their tweet with it and then other people can read all the tweets with the tag to see the collective conversation. Imagine paying for a promoted tweet that is associated with the keyword hashtag. Now, when people at the conference look to read other tweets at their event they’ll see your tweet as well. That’s strong contextual marketing.

Here are some possible promoted tweet ideas:

• A tweet from a happy client (social proof from a third-party)
• A tweet to download a white paper or do a free trial
• A tweet to join a meetup either in-person or via a webinar

This is a great example of where social media will be effective for B2B lead generation and a nice business model for Twitter.

When most first-time entrepreneurs think of hiring their first sales rep the immediate thought is a traditional sales person that will do deals. In reality, most entrepreneurs are better off with sales development reps — a fancy term for cold callers and appointment setters. The idea is that the entrepreneur should be on the phone or in person selling the deal for the first 10 customers with the sales development rep coordinating appointments.

Here are some thoughts on sales development reps:

• Typically junior people that are much more affordable than sales reps
• The goal is to cold call, handle inbound leads, and schedule appointments
• Compensation is typically a base (e.g. $35k) plus variable pay (e.g. $175 per completed appointment)
• Great when paired with an entrepreneur early on as well as paired with team lead sales reps once the sales team starts to grow
• Helps develop a separation of specialties as well as provides a career path to be promoted to sales rep (acts like a farm system)

Sales development reps should be seriously considered by entrepreneurs as a cost effective way to help with sales early on and as a way to more efficiently acquire customers once sales reps are in place.

What else? What other thoughts do you have about sales development reps in startups?

Continuing the previous post on marketing for the top of the funnel (practical PPC tips) an equally important aspect of online marketing, and more specially inbound marketing, is that of blogging. Blogging is a great way to regularly push out new content that builds credibility, inbound links, and a company persona.

Here are five quick tips for effective blogging:

1. Set a schedule for posting new content and stick to it (e.g. daily, bi-weekly, weekly, etc)
2. Look for themes or a series of related items (e.g. house of the week, idea of the day, etc)
3. Incorporate a headline, bullets/numbers, and picture(s) for each post
4. Link to one or more items in each post and participate in relevant discussions online providing links back to your post
5. Distribute your post on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

Blogging is one of the best ways to employ inbound marketing. Creating content can be tough at first but once you get in the habit of doing it it becomes much easier.

What else? What other tips do you have for effective blogging?

We’ve been working on expanding the top of our lead gen funnel to complement our strong middle of the funnel marketing. Meaning, we’re working on driving more visitors and leads at the earliest of stages so that we can nurture them. To help make our PPC efforts stronger we reached out to some local firms and received a bit of free advice from Atlanta PPC firm Relevance Advisers.

Here are some practical PPC tips with Google AdWords:

• Separate “brand” terms like your company and product name into their own AdWords Campaign as they’ll often skew results with such good conversions
• Create more AdWords Ad Groups that group closely aligned related keywords so that your ads will be more targeted resulting in greater effectiveness and lower cost per conversion
• Note that {keyword} is different from {KeyWord} when dynamically substituting the search term into the ad as the later will capitalize the first letter of each word
• Capitalize as many words as make sense in the text of the ad as it makes it easier to read even if it isn’t standard capitalization
• Separate geo-targeting into region-specific AdWords Campaigns so that the text creative and landing page content are applicable to the country

PPC is a great way to generate leads, but should be measured and followed closely as the auction system around bid prices results in continuous fluctuations.

What else? What are some other practical PPC tips with Google AdWords?

This week I had the opportunity to talk with two different startups generating eight figures of recurring revenue and spending seven figures of it on pay per click (PPC) advertising. I knew the companies were a good size, but had no idea how important Google and the direct response online advertising model was to their business. Think about it — spending more than $1 million per year on ads to generate leads for a small business (both under 100 employees). That level of spend shows the power of PPC as well as how a finely tuned sales and marketing machine knows the different levers required to profitably acquire customers (both startups are bootstrapped).

A few thoughts on PPC spend relative to startup size:

• When you think about getting into a market, do research on the keyword search volume and costs to be competitive using the Google tools
• Some startups look like they have a fairly easy product to build but are in reality amazing at customer acquisition, which is harder than building a great product in many cases
• Generating traffic through inbound marketing with blogs, social media, and other methods can be one of the most powerful ways to grow a business, but are often not as predictable as other methods like PPC and sponsorships

My recommendation is to spend serious time thinking about customer acquisition like you do thinking about the product. PPC is an easy, and expensive, way to drive serious traffic and deliver leads.

What else? What other things have you seen regarding startups and PPC spend?

After a startup achieves product/market fit one of the most important next steps is to develop a sales and marketing machine. The sales team should be working towards a reproducible, and profitable, sales process. As part of that iteration, a sales playbook should be at the top of the sales manager or entrepreneurs list of items. A sales playbook is the how-to manual for a sales rep. The goal is to document and categorize as much sales related information as possible in a digestible format.

Here are some items for a sales playbook:

• Corporate information
• Sales pitch
• Elevator pitch
• Market space
• Recent trends
• Target customer
• Types of buyers
• Features and benefits
• List of references
• Sales process
• CRM process
• Competitors and differentiators
• Objection handling
• Glossary

As you can tell, the sales playbook is very detailed covering upwards of 50+ pages. A key aspect is that it should be a living, breathing document that is constantly updated (e.g. a shared Google Doc). Startups should develop a sales playbook.

What else? What other items do you include in your sales playbook?

Lately I’ve been talking to a number of service providers as we continue to expand — everything from office space to marketing firms to recruiting agencies and I’m amazed at how long it takes to get proposals from people. Optimistically, I like to think it’s a good thing — their business is doing well and they’re busy. In reality, I’m guessing they aren’t being prioritized like they should.

Take note: proposals should be sent to the prospect within 48 hours.

Yes, some business proposals are more custom and complicated but the majority are boiler plate requiring less than 30 minutes of customization. For our own sales team — yes it is a product and not a service — we strive to get proposals over to prospects the same day they ask for them. Of the 10+ proposals I’ve received over the past 45 days, the majority took over 48 hours to get back to me and the content didn’t appear to be customized beyond 10-30 minutes of work. Service providers need to sign up customers when they are ready to buy.

What else? What have you seen with proposal response times?

Lately I’ve been using contact us forms on websites for companies that I would have normally called in order to test the effectiveness and response time for their follow-up emails and calls. The results aren’t pretty. Companies must not a) have a process for their online form inquiries, b) get very many leads online, or c) only have the form because the web design firm went ahead and included it.

Here’s my simple research:

• Local tire store – responded eight days later with the quote I requested
• Local dentist – no response at all
• Child swim coach – one hour response
• Marketing vendor – responded 24 hours later and never responded to my email response (has been eight days)

Now, I’m not saying small businesses should drop everything when an email comes in but they should prioritize these prospect inquiry requests, as with inbound marketing, these are usually the most serious leads. A couple ideas for the issue include having alerts for these sent to a special email address that multiple people receive as well as using software to have the phone ring when a form is completed.

What else? What’s your experience been like using contact us forms online?