The AppExchange Blog - Best Practices Series

• Videocast from SIIA Netgain Panel, "Revelation or Revolution: Putting Users in Control with Social Media"

  Clara Shih Jun 17, 2008

  Here is the videocast from the "Revelation or Revolution: Putting Users in Control with Social Media" panel at the SIIA Netgain Conference, held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on May 18-19, 2008. The panel was moderated by Teri Mendelsohn (President, Mendelsohn Consulting) and featured Dave McClure (Entrepreneur and Blogger), Geoffrey Hyatt (Founder and CEO, Contact Networks), Justin Kestelyn (Sr Director, OTN, Oracle), and myself. We talked about use of social media (such as blogs) by businesses. So this is a blog post about blogging. Very meta.

  
  
  
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• Marketing Secrets from salesforce
  Step 3. Scoring Leads

  Clara Shih Oct 31, 2007

  Once you've generated leads, the critical next step is prioritizing where and how to invest valuable sales and marketing resources. Chances are the 80/20 rule applies to your organization. That is, 80% of your revenue will ultimately come from 20% of your leads. Ideally, you'll want to focus 80% or more of your resources on cultivating and closing this golden 20%.

  

  How does one achieve this? Test different scoring algorithms. What are the criteria being used? What happens when you adjust the weighting? Are you tracking attributes of deals that close versus those that don't? You may find you have powerful levers at your disposal, which will differ for different products and markets. Some inherently require longer sales cycles, but ultimately pay off with larger-sized deals. Overly simplistic or misweighted lead scoring may be worse than no system at all.

  Here are two of my favorite lead-scoring solutions on AppExchange:

  • TrueAdvantage. Helps you define sales triggers on prospect activities and behavior that indicate readiness to buy.
  • ON24 LeadVantage Transfer. Automates transfer of ON24 webcast attendee and activity information into Salesforce, enabling you to assess lead quality.

  What should you do with low-scoring leads? Don't discard them completely. You never know who might come around. The key here is to keep them engaged with less resource-intensive "mass" methods. Perhaps let your rookie sales reps practice on these leads, or try out some new marketing material while saving the most attractive, high-scoring leads for star sales reps and trusted marketing messages. You could create a workflow inside Salesforce to automatically "touch" lukewarm leads every X number of days with different content and offers.

  Lead scoring can become very nuanced with multiple channels of engagement. At a high level, these typically include direct sales, inside sales, reseller, and online channels. (btw, once you've figured out your channel objectives, our PRM product is great for implementing your strategy, managing channel partners, preventing channel conflict, etc.) Google, for example, does a great job of segmenting advertisers across channels, cherry-picking high-potential accounts at each tier and targeting these with higher-touch channel engagement. The online channel in particular has really fueled Google's business with impressive results:

  1. Meet 100% of demand. An easy-to-use, self-service online channel has enabled Google's AdWords business to grow and scale internationally and into new markets at the pace of customer demand rather than be subject to staffing bottlenecks. The upfront investment in building out the online channel infrastructure and superior user experience has paid for itself many times over. Google admittedly still requires a human touch to edit and approve ad copy, but everything that is automatable has been automated.
  2. Reduce cost of sale and capture the long tail. An online channel has near-zero marginal operational cost per additional customer or transaction -- it's all margin. This has enabled online businesses like Google to capture business from the long tail and democratize ad buying. Anyone can buy AdWords -- the local dog walker, a sandwich shop in Dublin, I've even seen personal dating ads.
  3. Test before invest. There is no point in having higher-touch channels if you don't have an effective and accurate means for funneling the right leads to the right channels. Starting with the lowest-cost channel like Google did, however, means they were able to take empirical ad spend data to help assign accounts to channels for future upsell, eg have inside sales reps follow up with the top 10% of online channel accounts.

  Depending on your business, you may want to score and segment along different dimensions -- past demonstrated spend, estimated potential spend, timing/readiness to buy, to name a few.

  Bonus Marketing/Corporate Social Responsibility Tip of the Day
  Do good while doing well by donating your product. Not only are you giving back, but you will cultivate a loyal user base in the community who can provide honest product feedback, testimonials and references, and potentially help you enter new markets and deals through their connections. salesforce.com, for example, donates free licenses to over 2200 registered charities, nonprofits, and NGOs including the United Nations World Food Programme, Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts, and United Way.

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• Step 2a. Lead capture addendum: To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA...

  Clara Shih Oct 16, 2007

  In an ideal world, we would want to capture as many leads as possible, convert them all into opportunities, then closed deals, and so on and so forth. But the reality is that we live in an age of spam. Spam from competitors, spam from hackers, spam from rogue code.

  A major breakthrough in combating web spam is CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"), better known as the distorted images of text we are asked to type in say, when signing up for a Yahoo! email address or Facebook account. Essentially, the way CAPTCHA works is by distorting a text image sufficiently so that only humans can decipher it and therefore making it impossible for automated scripts to spam the service.

  

  Given the pervasiveness of click fraud and web spam, some marketers have considered use of CAPTCHA in lead forms. Is the lead form being submitted by a real prospective customer, versus a computer-generated script from a competitor or hacker? The obvious advantage of CAPTCHA is that it is an easy prospect qualification step for weeding out true interest from the noise.

  On the flip side, it may introduce an extra unnecessary burden for your prospect which could mean fewer leads (including fewer good leads). You may have wowed a prospective customer with a compelling offer, but that additional split-second required to decipher the CAPTCHA may pose just enough of a barrier for the prospect to change his or her mind. For precisely this reason, after weighing the pros and cons, we at salesforce.com decided not to use CAPTCHA on our lead forms, opting instead to "filter out the junk" on the back-end. We do, however, employ CAPTCHA for developer account sign-ups.

  Currently, there aren't any CAPTCHA solutions on the AppExchange, but you can get it for free from the ReCAPTCHA Project run by the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, an early pioneer in developing CAPTCHA.

  In general, I recommend CAPTCHA if you fall under one of these categories:

  • web spam is a serious problem (over 50% of your leads are junk or you are spammed so much that your service becomes slow)
  • you have far more leads than your sales organization can follow up on, and so you wouldn't mind losing a few good leads among the junk
  • your offer is very compelling and/or your product has sufficient market power such that prospective customers are more likely to jump through all the hoops instead of dropping out before clicking submit (eg, the Facebook account or Salesforce developer account sign-up examples discussed above)

  Otherwise, you are probably better off exploring alternative means of fighting web spam.

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• Marketing Secrets from salesforce
  Step 2. Capturing Leads

  Clara Shih Oct 1, 2007

  The art of lead capture is all about compelling landing pages integrated behind-the-scenes with an efficient, reliable way to enter and track leads in your CRM system.

  

  Landing Pages
  Great landing pages make all the difference in whether you'll get the lead. After someone clicks on your search marketing ad, search result, or request for product information link, you have a split-second to win him or her over. Usually, three factors influence this decision: 1) is there a compelling offer, 2) are the message and offer relevant to this prospect, and 3) are you asking for too much?

  Compelling offer. If the prospect is truly interested, the offer doesn't have to be extraordinary in order to be compelling. Here at salesforce, our best-performing offers are generally webinars, whitepapers, demos, discounted event registration, and a free trial of our product. For your business, it may be pricing information, data sheet, free sample or consultation, or something industry-specific.

  Relevance. Most of us run complex businesses -- multiple geographies and languages, multiple products, multiple marketing channels. As tempting as it may be to drive all interest to a single or few number of landing pages, you will greatly improve your conversion if you offer targeted messaging and offers that are relevant to the prospect. If the prospect clicked on a link requesting product information, does the landing page shown focus on benefits and offers for that product? If the prospect clicked on a Google ad, do your landing page message and offer tie back to the ad? Do you show the landing page in the right language based on IP address and the clicked-on ad? Have you researched what types of offers are most successful for each particular market?

  Don't ask for too much. Your landing page could have a terrific offer and perfect messaging but still lose the prospect if you annoy them with too many questions, especially if they don't seem critical for the offer at hand. Some great practices pioneered by the user experience zealots at Google are to make some fields optional, spread fields across multiple pages, and ask for the right info at the right time. Your marketing practice may be to require company size and mailing address for all leads -- but that may seem irrelevant, annoying, and intrusive to someone who just wants a data sheet. The "quid pro quo" social contract applies to online forms too -- give a little, get a little. Want more, give more. For instance, if a prospect is interested in your whitepaper, show them the abstract and comments from others who have read it before asking for an email address.

  Here are a few of my favorite landing page solutions on the AppExchange. But remember -- at the end of the day, the most important thing isn't how your page looks but rather your offer, message relevance, and not to ask for too much.

  • PluraPage.      Popular service for marketers to generate customized, personalized landing      pages and microsites without technical assistance.
  • PageVester.      Create free landing pages with Google Page Creator™ and connect to the      Salesforce Web-to-Lead form in the back end.
  • iCentera.      Portals for Mortals™ -- easy-to-use tool for creating landing pages and      websites.
  • Web CMS. Web content management system for marketers to build and maintain landing pages and websites.

  The AppExchange also offers several solutions dedicated to event registration pages --eg, OnPoint Direct Response, ActevaRSVP.

  
  Lead Capture Technology
  The landing page solutions above all integrate seamlessly with the Salesforce application's built-in web-to-lead functionality (that is, once the prospect clicks "submit", the lead will appear in your Salesforce org and get routed according to any assignment rules or other workflow you have specified).  If you have requirements requiring special functionality above and beyond this, however, you may want to look into one of these solutions:

  • Web2Anything. Just like Salesforce allows you to route data captured from your website into leads and cases, Web2Anything provides this functionality for any Salesforce object, all without any coding. Example use cases include a custom Survey object, a Literature Request, a Candidate object for your recruiting app or an Opportunity.
  • LeadByFone. Speech-enabled, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution that enables you to deploy and manage the real-time capture of caller name and address information directly into your Salesforce org.

  Bonus Marketing Tip of the Day
  Happy customers are a marketer's best friend. Every great product (as yours is!) has customer fanatics. Use them everywhere. Video testimonials, case studies, quotes, analyst and press references, prospect calls -- you'd be surprised what customers are willing to say and do for the products they love.

  Check out these customer reference management solutions on AppExchange -- Boulder Logic Reference Manager, ReferenceStor, Reference-OnDemand with Campaign Integration.!

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• Marketing Secrets from salesforce
  Step 1. Finding Leads

  Clara Shih Sep 28, 2007

  Lead acquisition involves finding leads, and then capturing them. This post focuses on generating "lead prospects."

  
  Of course, a great source of leads is your existing customer base, which presents arguably the best cross-sell and upsell opportunities since, being customers, they've already (literally) bought into your product. For net new leads, however, I recommend one or a combination of three online marketing strategies, depending on your business:
  
  1. Seek them out
  The ease and efficiency of email marketing has meant that businesses are buying prospect lists in larger quantities and greater frequencies than ever before. List vendors offer high-precision targeting, allowing you to slice and dice by industry, geography, role, company, and even past purchasing behavior.

  We have some great partners on the AppExchange for this. Every good marketer tests -- fortunately, all of these solutions offer some free trial or low-volume starter option.

  • Jigsaw. A popular online database of millions of business contacts and company information.
  • Reachforce. Find contacts by company and/or role. Option to pay per project or on a subscription basis (entry price is $5000)
  • iProfile. Database of Fortune 500 company profiles including their IT department org charts. Especially useful for software companies.
  • Demandbase.  Buy sales leads and marketing lists on a pay-as-you-go basis.
  • A+ Lead Finder. Helps you select from the over 50,000 lists out there and manage your lead generation campaigns.
  • Spoke Sales Prospecting. Identify new prospects from a network of over 35 million people at over 900,000 companies. Search for leads by title, company, industry, geography, revenue or other target account criteria. The Spoke Network enables you to find mutual contacts from which to request introductions.
  • Sales Spider. Free business social network for sales and marketing executives that allows you to search by industry and geography for qualified leads, government tenders and prospect lists. Members can also post, review and reply to B2B classified ads.
  • LinkedIn mash-up. Search for user profiles and data on LinkedIn, a popular social networking site for business professionals.
  • Faceforce.  View Facebook friends directly from within your Salesforce account, lead, and contact records. Augment traditional Salesforce fields with rich, dynamic Facebook profile information including photos and mutual friends (Note: I'm biased because I wrote this app :)

  In general, buying lists is more effective for certain products than others, ie those that 1) have an already-established need, such as mature products which don't require much additional education or market development (eg, emailing an expecting mother with special offers on baby strollers) and commodity products where you are competing on price, or 2) have an obvious need, such as new products that solve a critical pain point (eg, new version of popular cookie with zero trans-fat). For these, it's much more compelling if you have a trusted brand (ideally in the product area) and the claim is credible at face value.
  

  It's probably a waste of your marketing budget to cold-call on behalf of any product or service requiring explanation or convincing at the needs level. It also helps if the typical contract duration for your class of products is shorter, since the probability increases that your prospect happens at that moment to be looking to renew or source a new contract.
  

  If you already have prospective contact data and want to verify, update, and/or dedupe, the Data Cleansing section on AppExchange has over a dozen offerings, such as Access Hoover's, OneSource Account Intelligence, DemandTools, Diamond Data, CleanCRM, RingLead Declone, and the solution in my opinion with the best tagline, DataTrim -- your data laundry service.

  2. Let them find you
  Depending on your product, it might make more sense for you to let leads find you instead of spending precious marketing dollars on lists of contacts who send your email directly to their spam folders. Especially in the B2B world, it's hard for marketers to "generate" demand. Either the demand is there, or it isn't.

  The big breakthrough with online search marketing was really about finding prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. Whether you are already employing search marketing techniques or just looking to get started, Salesforce for Google AdWords provides an instant and seamless integration between Salesforce CRM and your Google AdWords campaigns, allowing you to track all of your website activity, associate ad clicks to inbound leads, and measure campaign ROI. Thanks to a strategic alliance announced in June between salesforce.com and Google, this application is free to all Salesforce users and comes bundled as part of the marketing application in all new orgs. For existing orgs that do not have SFGA installed, you can get it with three clicks from the AppExchange.

  If you really want to get fancy, there is a new solution on AppExchange, Marketo Search Marketing (interesting pricing -- 7.9% of your AdWords spend, or $499/month), that takes SFGA even further with tools that allow you to optimize ad bids based on which keywords resulted in opportunities and deals. Marketo also offers “what-if” analysis and forecasting, landing pages, and keyword discovery.
  

  In addition to search marketing, you'll also want to focus on improving your organic search relevance (aka "search engine optimization) -- that is, how high up on the search results page your website turns up on a search for relevant terms. For more on search strategies, check out the Learning Center on our in-house Salesforce for Google Adwords blog.

  
  3. And make sure you know (and respond!) when they try to find you
  Do you know who is visiting your site? What happens when a prospect visits your site? What about your competitors? In the age of spam, web users are increasingly wary of lead capture forms, especially earlier on in the sales cycle. Two innovative new tools on AppExchange help you address this:

  • Domodomain. Identifies website visitors based on a proprietary database of Internet activity tracking and immediately collects and presents up-to-the-second information about the prospect's company.
  • ActiveConversion. Identifies new leads (by company) based on online activity. Tracks the online activity histories of your Salesforce leads and contacts.

  Bonus Marketing Tip of the Day
  Offer a free trial. Get people hooked, and then they'll buy.

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• Secrets from salesforce: five steps to marketing success

  Clara Shih Sep 28, 2007

  So you have your product or service, maybe a few customers. How do you generate leads and manage them to close? Over the next couple weeks, I'll be presenting the "five steps to on-demand marketing success" we follow here at salesforce.com, highlighting some of my favorite AppExchange solutions along the way.
  
  The best part about AppExchange, with so many apps and vendors is that you can choose a comprehensive marketing automation solution for all your needs or mix and match at each step. Plus, all of these solutions come 100% pre-integrated with Salesforce -- whose marketing functionality  by the way just keeps getting better with each release (Did you know: campaign hierarchies are coming in Winter 08!).

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