Thanks to everyone who participated in the TMA marketing survey. We received 33 completed responses during the April-May survey window. In general, the majority of respondents cited a positive outlook in 2008 as evidenced by increased marketing budgets, increased outsourcing of marketing services and cautious optimism about the economy.
I've summarized some of the highlights for you here.
- 48% of respondents said their marketing budget is more than 10% higher this year than in 2007.
- Almost half of respondents (48%) indicated that their biggest challenge is hiring the right people. Numbers two and three on this list were Aligning with Sales Initiatives (45%) and Seeing a Return on Investment (33%).
- TMA members are feeling bullish on the economy. Approximately 42% describe themselves as optimistic, with 33% feeling cautious. Only 18% say the economy is limiting their ability to execute on their marketing plans.
- 67% of TMA respondents claim that they'll be outsourcing more to agencies and freelancers this year.
- The most frequently outsourced tasks are public relations and design work (both 61%), followed by SEO/SEM (42%) and Website design (39%).
- The election is not seen as a contributing factor to marketing strategies; 79% of respondents say the election will not affect their marketing strategies or plans at all.
- The demographics of the respondents: 64% startup or small business, 18% mid-market and 18% large business or publicly traded companies.
If you're interested, take a look at the entire report.
If you have any questions about the survey, don't hesitate to reach out to Elizabeth Shea. Thanks again for your participation.
Why do software companies have marketing departments? When I meet prospective employees, I like to ask some variant of this question. The answer is usually pretty telling about the candidate. While I've heard some, er, interesting responses, most marketers will say something about helping to increase revenue.
But what does this really mean? Functionally, marketers can help increase revenue through developing great strategy, building market awareness, providing insightful competitive analysis, generating qualified leads, or communicating clear product differentiation. Clearly it's all of these things and many others.
But to my mind, creating a truly valuable marketing function means working closely with Sales. Contrary to the typical business school approach, revenue isn't a line item on a spreadsheet. It's the sum of the wins of hard fought street fights executed by your sales team. It's our job to put our sales teams in the position to win these fights quickly and decisively.
For what it's worth, here is what I've learned.
- When considering a top marketing job, interview the top Sales executive and his or her management team. Understand how they think about Marketing, how they'd like to work with you, and how their organization works. No matter how good a marketer you are, you will fail if your counterparts in Sales aren't effective. I've been fortunate enough to work with some outstanding Sales professionals - and it's made all the difference.
- Once you're aboard, get to know the Sales executives, directors, managers, and reps. It would be easy to just work with top sales management and let them represent the needs of their reps. This is necessary, but not sufficient to be successful. Go on calls with key reps, take time to listen to what they're hearing from customers, be clear about your priorities and plans and ask them for their feedback. You don't need to act on everything that's suggested, but if you don't listen, you'll miss a lot.
- Build a sales driven culture in your marketing organization. Ask your team to think about how their decisions, plans, and programs will ultimately impact sales. Make this point regularly and reinforce it through your own actions.
- Get on the same page about Sales priorities for marketing by being completely transparent. In my company, we maintain a ‘marketing plan of record' that tracks what the various marketing groups are working on along with delivery dates. This gives us a useful tool for discussing priorities with Sales management. If one of your sales directors wants a new competitive document, you can have a rational discussion about where it fits with existing priorities. You can also use this document to enable the Sales VP to help you load balance across the priorities suggested by his or her subordinates.
- Jointly define measurement criteria. Clearly agree on key terms like what constitutes a "lead" or what would make any given lead "hot". Marketing and inside sales are both part of a process akin to manufacturing. We provide the raw material (leads), inside sales enriches it to build pipeline. If you don't agree on the definition of good raw materials, you are unlikely to get the desired result out of the factory. Once you have terms defined, create a dashboard in your salesforce automation system, and use it to jointly manage the process. If it's appropriate, publish the dashboard to all the relevant sales reps and marketing programs managers. In his outstanding newsletter, The Taber Report, David Taber has written extensively about managing the lead process.
- Accept that parts of your work are more likely to be valued more highly than others. For instance, most sales reps will value lead generation over PR or industry analyst relations. That does not mean that these activities won't ultimately help them to be successful or that they aren't critical. It just means that the line between A and B isn't as clearly understood. Without being defensive, have an open discussion about why you're doing what you do.
- Use plain English. Always. Prospects rarely ask your reps for a "market beating end-to-end integration solution for the enterprise." Explain your product in clear terms that your reps will be able to use credibly with their prospects. This goes for presentations, press releases, whitepapers, and everything else.
- Ask for feedback. Often. From all levels of Sales. Without being defensive.
- Provide feedback. Sales and Marketing should be working towards the same goals, working from a well understood priority list, and using common metrics. All of this provides executive level marketers with the foundation to provide candid, constructive feedback to Sales leadership.
- Maintain a regular dialogue with your sales counterpart. I talk to our VP of Sales most every day. I understand her world and she understands mine - warts and all. Our running dialogue makes it easier for us to support one another. It also makes conflicts easier because we both know that we're both coming from a place of respect and desire to do what's right for the business
One of the key ingredients in our marketing recipe at Sourcefire is Eloqua, an online demand creation software application. With Eloqua, we are able to not only generate and manage leads but study each lead's digital body language. This gives us the insight into what they are doing online, what they are most interested in, when they are ready to buy, and, most importantly, when and how we should pursue them.
Eloqua offers a great deal of automation functionality reducing the time needed to complete inefficient manual activities. We have tapped into various areas where automation is available including lead scoring/rating programs, event promotion automated programs, and automated lead nurturing programs.
Need to better manage and prioritize your database for your Sales Team? Try implementing an automated Lead Scoring Program. Our automated Lead Scoring Program gives a lead a score based on both implicit and explicit criteria. Implicit criteria would be visiting our site, filling out a form, clicking through an email, searching for us on Google, etc. Explicit criteria include such things as a lead's title and profile type. The score is then put into a rating (A, B, C, D) for the Sales team to view for each of their assigned leads. This rating allows our Sales team to prioritize leads and spend their time more efficiently.
Do you host or participate in lots of events each year and find it challenging to effectively market to your contacts by getting them to attend the events and then follow-up with them promptly after? Consider using Eloqua's automated event programs. We host seminars throughout the year and have found Eloqua's event programs immensely helpful in automating when invitations, reminders, and follow-up emails are sent. Once the emails and program are set up, the program can be relied upon to deliver on time and with minimal effort. You don't miss a beat! You can increase attendance rates, increase follow-up activity, and get those prospects one step closer to buying your service/product (and sleep better at night because you just did all that).
Do you have inactive contacts in your database? We all do. At Sourcefire, our sales cycles tend to be long (on average, 6-9 months) so it is imperative that we keep moving leads along and do not lose them due to inactivity. We have always nurtured the existing leads in our database through mostly manual means but now we are implementing an automated lead nurturing program that will touch leads that have become inactive for six months or greater. The program sends the leads customized emails and moves them through the program until they perform an activity and let us know they are actively considering Sourcefire again. Then, their lead score increases and they are removed from the program and delivered to the Sales team to reengage.
Have you tapped into the search engine marketing craze? More and more consumers start their research online at a search engine. This trend that is expected to continue and increase over time so if you haven't tapped into it, you're missing out on capturing great leads! Our search engine marketing generates high quality leads which are tracked in Eloqua. We can tell what word a contact searched on, what pages they visited on our site and when (and can have automated email notification sent to Sales to let them know their contact is on our site), what forms they submitted and view all their responses, and much more. This tracking helps us best understand each contact's digital body language which, again, is crucial for us to be effective with our marketing and prospecting. It also helps us tweak and optimize our search engine marketing efforts.
Considering a marketing tool like Eloqua? We highly recommend Eloqua and would happy to discuss it with you.
The Web is a perfect medium for understanding your customers and prospects. The amount of data available on visitors to your site is incredible. The challenge is finding the priceless needle of insight in the haystack of raw data. Google Analytics is a great (and free!) tool for sorting through all of that data so that you can improve your site performance.
In his book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, Brian Clifton offers the long-awaited look into the bells and whistles of Google Analytics. As the leader of the Google Analytics team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, he is well qualified for the task.
Clifton's writing style is very easy to follow and the concepts of the book will be familiar to everyone in the TMA. The book does contain some examples of HTML and JavaScript. Don't let this scare you if you're not a technical person. Clifton explains everything pretty well and, even if you can't read the code examples in detail, you'll come away with a much better understanding of what's possible with Google Analytics. The most technical material doesn't start until chapter seven. Up to that point, Clifton describes how to get started with Google Analytics, walks through the major features and explains the most commonly used reports.
Even if you're already using another web tracking software package, I recommend looking into Google Analytics. It's easy, free and well integrated with Google Adwords. This book is a great place to start.
If you don't follow presidential politics, perhaps you should. Any of the 2008 campaigns - from stumbling Fred Thompson to insurgent Ron Paul to I'm-not-a-quitter Hillary Clinton to damn-the-torpedoes McCain to yes-we-can Barack Obama - are each clinics in influence strategy and no less applicable to technology marketers.
Take the campaign of John McCain, detailed in our "Plays for the Presidency" blog and podcast. However confused his effort is today, he wouldn't have come close to his presumptive GOP nomination were it not for a single a decisive play he ran in April 2007 at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA. McCain's move was what I call a "Crazy Ivan," a discreet attacking play based on a risky submarine maneuver. He didn't shy from his many anti-Iraq war detractors. He rushed them. And in one news cycle his Straight Talk Express took the position that the extremely unpopular Iraq military surge is right and that it'll work. It almost killed his campaign, but over time, it was shown to be (at least) marginally true and, thus, gutsy and oh-so Presidential.
So what's the connection for marketers of on-demand solutions, open integrated enterprise database solutions, and mobile-based design support systems, blah, blah, blah? It is simply that no player in a marketplace should shy away from what it knows to be true and what drives its beliefs. Brands and reputations that are "not" rooted in such things lack resonance, richness and constructive controversy. They are uninteresting and thus tougher to market. Think of the differences between Google and Microsoft. One is solidly connected to innovation and has something to say. The other doesn't.
For my money, no better political marketing game is being played than by the Barack Obama. Crisis consultants should be taking notes; so should tech companies with particularly aggressive competitors. How so? The Illinois Senator is doing something fundamentally different in his battles with conservative playmakers. Like McCain, he's running attacking plays but of a sort I call a "Preempt." If Obama is criticized, he's not deflecting or ignoring the sharp point. He's confronting it. Say what you will about his handling of the Rev. Wright, the elitist "bitter cling" gaffe or his hesitation to wear American-flag lapel pins, he's not been shy to discuss them and to take preemptive action. In other words, if someone says, "Hey Barack, your ears are kinda big, aren't they?" He says, in effect, and in the same news cycle, "Actually, they're huge!"
You get the idea. Where once our politicians operated in the mode of avoidance and denial, Obama is moving the game to the other end of the influence strategy spectrum, using his shortcomings and exposure points as fodder and foils to nip bad news in the bud and move his messages along and on-strategy.
What's the lesson for technology marketers? If you're missing a feature in your solution. If you're missing a solution in your feature. And someone's calling you on it...don't blink. Acknowledge the matter categorically so as to control it and, while you're in the spotlight, make something of the matter. Moments of public recognition are not to be designed so much as they are to be exploited and modified for competitive advantage. Just ask our future President.
We're about to wrap up the organization's second year, and as we sit at 150 marketers strong we wanted to harness our collective ideas by launching a TMA Member blog. It's been a great run since we began, and the momentum shows that marketers need a community forum - an excuse to lift our heads up, look around, and connect with peers.
Our last speaker, Dan Solomon, author of Media Rules!, discussed how technology has forever changed the jobs of marketers. Some of us have felt it directly as we scramble to realign our marketing departments to manage social networks, while others are still wondering what technologies will truly change our businesses. It struck me that this is why TMA is so important. In times of change we need to share our wisdom with each other, in real time, so we can all advance as a collective discipline.
This blog is one way we're leading the charge. TMA members will be blogging here on a regular basis about their own marketing successes, challenges, learning, and questions. Take time to read the blog, comment on the blog entries, and in general, join the conversation.
If you're interested in writing, send an email to us. Marketers are rich on ideas; let's share the wealth.
