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Execution for ROI: Aligning the Sales & Marketing Planets.

Published by
Paul Woodhouse
at August 13, 2007 in Coordinating Marketing Efforts and Event Details. 0 Comments

How many of you have had experience of the great stand-off between your sales and marketing teams? Rather than regarding the whole process as being symbiotic, one side will tout itself as being way more important than the other. Three Ways to Bring Marketing and Sales Together stipulates three key areas where you can bridge any divide that exists:

#1 Articulate that each group has different goals.
While both marketing and sales want common outcomes—more sales, market share and customers—the timetables and metrics they rely on are very different. Marketing hopes to develop a brand over an extended period of time; sales tries to develop near-term revenue based on current demand.

#2 Stay on the same page—and “on brand.”
The generation, and passing along, of leads probably creates the biggest gap between sales and marketing. Marketing develops its materials based on its perceived perfect prospect, but sales may simply ignore both the prospect and brand image that marketing worked hard to create to close a deal.

#3 Respect the differences, but realize they’re working at the same “joint.”
Sales personnel greet the customer and serve the burger; marketing folks get the prospect in the joint in the first place. Both are fundamental activities to a successful business, but are managed by people with often very contrasting disciplines, personalities and even educational backgrounds. Sales needs more time to sell and negotiate; marketing seeks more opportunity to analyze and be creative with their marketing strategies—and they both should be paid accordingly.

This is very similar to what Jeff James of Microsoft will be talking about in his session: Execution for ROI: Aligning the Sales & Marketing Planets.

The session synopsis is as follows:

Marketing remains one of the least disciplined organizations within many companies, and CEO’s aren’t standing for it any longer. It’s no longer acceptable to put your finger to the wind, pray the CFO approves your budget, and then hope something good happens.

This session will cover how to

* Understand your marketing objectives so campaigns can be built to achieve them
* Segment and prioritize your most influential customers, your highest potential prospects and other key customer groupings so marketing can be more targeted
* Come to agreement with your top sales executive on what the definition of a quality lead really is
* Measure the impact of marketing that is not directly revenue related such as brand, relationship, and customer loyalty
* Measure the impact or contribution of your marketing investment across various communication channels (web, TV, radio, direct mail, etc.)

Anyone having a hard time justifying their marketing budget requests with their CFO, or feeling the heat from their VP of Sales regarding the quality of leads, should attend this session.

So, you’d better look sharp if you’re particularly interested in Jeff’s topic as he’s first up on Thursday morning.

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Elton John: Irrelevant

Published by
Paul Woodhouse
at August 6, 2007 in Internet and Search Marketing. 0 Comments

Elton John

Well we might as well just go ahead and cancel our conference as Sir Elton of the John has decreed that the Internet should be closed down.

According to an article in The Sun:

He claims it is destroying good music, saying: “The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff.”

“Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision.”

“It’s just a means to an end.”

“We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet.”

“I mean, get out there — communicate.”

“Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.”

“Let’s get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging.”

“I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.”

“There’s too much technology available.”

“I’m sure, as far as music goes, it would be much more interesting than it is today.”

Elton, Elton, Elton. I’ve never particularly held you up as an ambassador of musical or hair-piece decency, but it always comes across as a little bit sad when somebody dismisses everything related to the Internet wholesale.

The fact that people can now control their own means of musical distribution, marketing and production bypassing the big recording conglomerates is the best thing that has ever happened to music. Was artistic musical vision always supposed to be measured by the yardstick of some grumpy old tart who churned out Crocodile Rock?

Elton, you probably have a place somewhere in the vast musical cannon, and it’s most probably as its damp gunpowder, but I wouldn’t dream of wishing music to be closed down for a period of five years just to see what we’d come up with instead of Elton John.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you practiced what you preached. Your whole back catalog is available for download online and you also streamed your gig at Madison Square Gardens over the Internet. This is akin to you espousing vegetarianism and calling for meat to be banned then being seen pigging out on pork chops.

So you don’t like blogging, you think modern music sucks, and your last album wasn’t exactly a hot cake. Perhaps the latter explains your bitterness towards the Internet?

I come across people like Sir Elton quite often. I don’t mean chubby, be-wigged rock behemoths whose star is fading, but people who regard the Internet as being a complete and utter waste of time, effort and space.

For example, the number of people I’ve spoken to who’ve had a Website built only for them to subsequently dismiss the Internet out of hand when they receive no leads or hits is quite a few. The debate as to who is at fault can be left for another day. Imagine writing-off cars as a mode of transport because you failed to put in any gas.

Now, you can be forgiven if you didn’t know you had to put gas in the thing, but not if it’s been well and truly explained in advance that gas was a functional prerequisite.

The whole idea behind Online Marketing: Innovations that Work is to help you not only understand you need gas, but to show you what kinds of gas there are available and how each one can impact the running of your car differently.

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My Engagement Quotient is Bigger than Your Engagement Quotient

Published by
Paul Woodhouse
at August 3, 2007 in Business Blogging and Website Metrics. 0 Comments

I’ve never quite been able to work out why certain bloggers hate the idea of metrics so much. My gut reaction is to dismiss anything that denigrates customers to a spreadsheet of facts and figures. But, I’m also intrigued as to why people do what on a site and the extrapolation of said data.

I’m personally obsessed with my Tinbasher referrals – especially those for “how to get rid of the wife” (fifth one down). I’m also obsessed with where people are coming from, how long they’re stopping for and whether they’ve had a worthwhile experience. When you pour more than your fair share of blood, sweat and tears into something, you like to know whether it’s worth the extra plasma or a salt tablet.

With blogs you get a response from those who really are engaged in your content. And there is no finer feeling. The content I care about or take most time over is the content I am most pleased to get feedback on. And the stuff that I throw up there without a moment’s thought I monetize at roughly 0.23 cents per click through. ;-)

But, just to clarify, it’s a b2b/b2c blog that generates leads. Adsense I experiment with on a few posts and it happens to pay my cable bill.

And I suppose I answer my own question with regards to the measurement of metrics here. If you care about what you’re selling and your business – you know, if you really invest more than money in it, then you will care about every single aspect of its growth and development and will use every single tool available – like your own child. If you’re just in it for the money then you’re just in it for the money. Customer service is an opportunity cost as opposed to genuine feedback and blogging is something you let your PR department babysit – like a red-headed stepchild.

So, I find it rather interesting, that one of the companies who has kindly provided us with a speaker, WebTrends, has just announced a new analytics add-on that measures engagement score:

ANALYTICS FIRM WEBTRENDS HAS A new patented add-on that lets marketers set specific values for each of their Web pages and then calculate an on-the-fly engagement score for each specific visitor.

“Conceptually, it’s brilliant,” said Jim Sterne, founding president of the Web Analytics Association. “Not only is this on the money, this is the money.

“Time on site tells you how long someone was on your site,” Sterne added, “but they might have been on the phone, or they might have been angry or distracted. The deeper they go into your site, the more engaged they are. Now you can see where they come in and where they go and assign a weight to each page.”

Sterne gave the example of a conference Web site that might assign different scores to key pages such as the agenda and the registration. Rather than having to go through a specific user’s path and interpret its meaning, the WebTrends Score tells you who is most engaged.

An engagement score add-on that you could use to measure sign-ups on a conference site?

How come we didn’t get the chance to beta test it?

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Spurious and Curious Reasons to Attend SEM Conferences

Published by
Paul Woodhouse
at August 2, 2007 in Conference News and Search Marketing. 0 Comments

So what are the obvious benefits of attending conferences? Other than rubbing shoulders with the good and the great, a spot of networking and a free feed that is.

Thankfully, Lee Odden has saved me the time and effort of taxing myself with any flickers of free original thought by already discussing his ten secret benefits of attending SEM conferences.

It’s geared more to people inside the industry so I shall cherry-pick just a few points.

Competitive intelligence – As you play the meet and greet game, you’ll undoubtedly run into employees from competing firms. Be sure to ask lots of questions. Smile, be friendly and engaging. Remember how important it is to be a great listener and remember: Loose lips sink ships! Also be sure to get PPTs from direct competitors, especially from their “new” speakers, who tend to want to impress and often include more information than they should. Also, some speakers don’t provide the conference organizer with copies of their PPTs. Don’t let that stop you! What do you think that pocket camera is for?

So it’s obviously quite easy for those of you not in the industry to tell those who are by their inane grins and furtive expressions. It’s similar to those sales folks at trade shows, armed with barcode scanners, whose first line of eye contact is to your nametag. I know that’s what nametags are for, but look me in the eye when you start talking to me. You’re not there just to prove to your head of sales that you’ve got some prospects.

Sales Training – Not really, but sorta. If you’re breaking into an aspect of search marketing that is somewhat new to you, pay attention to how your better versed competition explains themselves, their company and services, I mean advice, during presentations. The fact is, metaphors, analogies and a good story can go a long way towards explaining complex or unique SEM topics when you’re selling. Why bother making up your own when you can steal (argh, I mean borrow) them from the competition? (Reworked with your own information of course.)

Now you’d like to think you’re going to come away from a conference knowing slightly more than you did on arrival. And that goes for everyone. But I know how important it is to use stories and metaphors when talking about to the uninitiated about all that stuff that flies over their heads. Remember – your clients aren’t stupid because they don’t understand your gobbledygook. It’s our job to translate this stuff into understandable palatable chunks.

It’s a Vacation! – Convincing your boss that the next Search Marketing conference will infuse your brain with super secret SEO ninja knowledge might just get you closer to that partially all expenses paid mini-vacation to New York, Seattle, San Jose, Stockholm (don’t you have clients with Swedish sounding names?), Bejing or even London. Pull that off and you’re famous. At least until you get fired because you went to too many parties and didn’t pay attention during sessions.

I would never be so unkind as to ask where exactly Pittsburgh ranks on the vacate-ometer, but the Hilton Garden Inn looked mighty fine as I drove past on my way to Ikea last weekend. Personally, I’m more excited about this type of knowledge reaching slightly different areas. This kind of thing isn’t just for those coast-dwellers y’know.

If there are any other secret benefits you can come up with, please feel free to share them in the comments.

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