Working with a new client is always fun. There is an inevitable apprehension about newly launched marketing plans. Once the results are in, seeing the skepticism giving way to sheer excitement is a very satisfying moment.

A couple of weeks ago I helped a client put together their first ever webinar. They were concerned whether their audience would tune in to this media. The results exceeded their expectation on every metric – from invitation open rate (over 40%) to the number of registration and attendance rate (over 55%). Moreover, Over 30% of the registrations were highly qualified NEW prospects.

It gets even more exciting.

The webinar took place Tuesday. On Friday morning we sent each person who registered to the webinar a follow up e-mail from the salesperson in charge of their account. By Friday afternoon I got a call from a salesperson telling me that he received five responses to the e-mail, all of them interested in learning more about the software.
Can it get even more exciting? You bet!

One of the e-mails was from a prospect he has been working with for a couple of months and was trying to close as a Q1 deal, but the guy has not been returning e-mails or calls in the past few weeks (I’m sure you’ve been there…). The e-mail said “come over and get a check for a 1/2 of the cost, we’ll pay the rest next quarter.” The date: Friday, March 31st.

This doesn’t happen very often, so the point of the story is not to create the impression that webinars are good deal closers.

The point is that you need multiple touches to move a prospect through the sales cycle. A salesperson can use marketing help in creating these touches by providing information that is of value to the customer. In many cases, these will generate better response than a sales call. And once in a while, it can even help seal the deal.

That’s fun!

This is one of the best marketing posts I’ve ever seen . It shatters the value/word meter.

The Spark This blog entry hit my e-mail box as I was listening to a client presenting to a prospect and thinking to myself “why do they talk so much about themselves - who cares?!”

Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Just check out how many website homepages are about the company, its vision, its founders, its offices, etc, just not what it does for the customers!

Marketers beware - marketing myopia starts here…

Maybe the problem is in how we call them. Salespeople. Good salespeople put the “people” first, then the “sales”. Here is another reminder on the topic from the Revenue Journal’s authority Kristin Zhivago. If you don’t have time to read the article in its entirety, read at least the four points at the bottom.

There is nothing better than a good body massage. Naturally, I was excited to hear about a new masseuse that came highly recommended. The masseuse introduced herself as Olga and went right to work. There wasn’t the usual “what bothers you” and “how do you like your massage” questions I was used to being asked before getting a massage. Olga went straight to business. After about five minutes, I thought my back was about to crack. I was too shocked to even say a word, and barely crawled away from the massage table. I was bruised and sore for the next couple of weeks.

Sometimes I suspect that many in the software industry came from Olga’s school. We tend to forget to ask our customers what they really want. Owen Thomas writes about it in an excellent article titled What Silicon Valley can learn from UPS. This is true not only for engineers, but also for those that are supposed to be our best communicators – marketing and sales people.

Take lead generation, for example. A prospect downloads a white paper and, what do you know, a few days later a salesperson is calling assuming the prospect is actually interested in buying a product. At the same time, prospects who are really interested in buying may be waiting weeks for someone to call and help them buy.

Some forward-thinking marketing departments have embarked on ambitious efforts to avoid these problems by using sophisticated lead scoring models, attempting to assign an objective score that will tell salespeople which leads to follow up with. To be honest, I am not sure we need to go that far. Just like Olga, we fail to ask our customers a simple question: “How much pressure do you like?” As a matter of fact, we don’t really need to ask. The answer is there, but we fail to listen.

Let me explain.

If you walk in front of a store and there’s a guy standing at the door yelling how great his product is and trying to hand you a pamphlet, you’re probably going to walk a little faster to get away before he grabs you. But when you walk into a store and look at a product you’re interested in, you would probably appreciate if someone were available to answer some questions.

We appreciate responsiveness and care, we run away from pushy salespeople. So do our “leads”.

When a prospect registers to a webinar, all she’s saying is “I’m interested in learning about the topic.” The follow up to the webinar registration should acknowledge the interest and gently check what else might interest her. A white paper? A case study? Perhaps a product demo? Jumping ahead and talking about the product or asking about project and budget is like trying to grab a person walking in front of your store. All you’re going to do is make her run.

A well-designed marketing campaign will present the prospect with a number of options that can tell us how ready the prospect is, if we just listen. Instead of worrying about lead scoring, let’s look at leads as people. Ask them polite and relevant questions, be there to answer their questions, and listen carefully to what they are telling us.

In short, I believe the formula is rather simple: marketing’s role is to provide opportunities for starting a dialogue; the role of the sales team is to use these opportunities to take the dialogue one step forward, and follow the queues of the prospect as to how fast the dialogue can develop.

What do you think?

Annraí O'Toole, Chief Executive Officer of the small Cape Clear Software is taking on IBM in a battle for the future of SOA.

O’Toole is joining the ranks of other CEO’s of software startups anticipating the demise of Big Blue and other industry giants. Another example that comes to mind is Salesforce.com’s outspoken Marc Benioff, who has taken on the established enterprise software regime with his “end of software” rally cry (check out Benioff’s latest response to Bill Gates’s memo on Internet Software Services and the Microsoft Live announcement).

So far, Benioff has been able to marshal the success to back his rhetoric, but for every successful modern-day David like Benioff, there are hundreds of software CEO’s that lost their battles against industry Goliaths, burning through many millions of VC dollars in the process.

What makes one successful and others fail? Had I known the answer, I would probably be as rich as Benioff, so I am still hoping you can help me figure it out… One thing that separates Benioff from many others is that Salesforce.com presented a real paradigm shift in the way software is used.

Perhaps even more importantly, Salesforce.com made it easy for users to test out this new paradigm. While Benioff presented a grand vision for his “no software” approach, Salesforce.com started out with a small and simple SFA application. It kept expanding the solution in small increments with quarterly updates of the software. This was a brilliant way of taking advantage of the Software-as-Service model to add new functionality in an incremental, non-intrusive, and easy-to-digest fashion.

I am a firm believer that ease-of-adoption and ease-of-use could either propel your software to greatness or spell its doom. You may point to SAP as an example of successful yet tough-to-use product, but let’s not forget that SAP made its big market push as a replacement to IBM and other legacy systems, which were even more difficult to use, implement, and maintain.

The push for small, simple, and modular software grows as computing becomes more and more distributed, decentralized, participatory, and collaborative.

I don’t know enough about SOA to tell whether Cape Clear provides such a solution, but if you asked me to bet on the success of a newcomer taking on the reigning gorilla, these are the questions I would ask:

First, I would ask, is it a real paradigm shift or just a slightly better product that does the same thing as IBM? Second, and not less important, is the solution easy to try and adopt?

If it’s not a real breakthrough, you’re going to run into the “why bother” roadblock; if it’s not easy to try, you will hit the “who has the time” roadblock. There are additional roadblocks that must be conquered on the path to beating Goliath, but if you cannot get past the first two, I would suggest you find yourself a weaker target to take on.

Good luck!