January 26, 2010
MarketingSherpa recently published a nice chart about lead conversion rates (Note: they give open access to the full article only until Feb 19th). According to their research (147 responses) you need about 10 qualified leads to close one sale.
When sharing the chart with my co-workers the responses were varied, from “Great! Now we have the baseline we needed to set our goals!” to “Gee, I guess we should change our lead generation plans” and even “What exactly does this mean?”.
All valid points, for sure, and before trying to interpret the chart how about asking:
- What industries are represented?
- Is it B2B or B2C?
- What are the sales cycle of the respondents?
Those are just the 3 first questions I would ask, followed by a handful more. I did send MarketingSherpa questions trying to get more information and haven’t gotten any response yet.
And how about all the other metrics we see out there (a nice post from Market2Lead about Sirius Decisions Lead Waterfall comes to mind)? Should you take MarketingSherpa’s metrics as the de facto guide or combine them with some others?
The lesson here is to be very, very careful with data presented to you without any substantiating information. Nice charts abound on the Internet and you can find one to back any story you wish. So before you go start changing your marketing plans, calculating how you compare against the “industry average”, and spend countless hours pondering over the meaning of the data, remember that sometimes it just doesn’t matter.
If you can’t compare apples to apples, you might as well just eat the fruit and forget about it! 
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Lead generation, Marketing Planning | Tagged: Lead generation, linkedin, Marketing Planning | 
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Posted by Daniel Kuperman
January 11, 2010
Who’s the best email marketing company/software?
This question on a recent LinkedIn discussion thread for the Technology Marketing Community reminded me of when, a couple years ago, I delivered a presentation at the 2008 MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit. Titled “Managing the Vendor Selection Process”, it talked about my experience in selecting a new email marketing software for my company. Slides can be seen below.
The Selection Process
As the Director of Marketing, I had been pressing the company to replace our internal, archaic email system with something that was web-based (an “ESP”, or Email Service Provider, as the industry calls it) and that would reduce the time it took us to prepare, send, and evaluate email campaigns. The process we went through is not necessarily the best or the only way to do it, but it certainly helped put some metrics in place that we could use to evaluate each vendor. With so many options out there, having some kind of analytical basis to back your final choice can help get approval for the new system.
The Vendor Selection Matrix
I created an Excel file to consolidate all info from the vendors we selected so that we could do an analytical evaluation. The matrix helped us focus on how vendors compared on each feature and also gave us the ability to rank vendors based on weighted scoring. Why? Well, because there were some features we considered more important than others and so should you. Just because a vendor has a great way to create dynamic content for newsletters, it won’t matter if you don’t usually send out newsletters. You get the point.
Excel Template for vendor comparison: you can download and use my template as a starting point.
Note: if the download link doesn’t work for you, contact me and I’ll email the file to you.
How to score vendors using the comparison matrix spreadsheet:
- List features
- List vendor names
- Decide on a numbering system for each feature evaluation (if you have multiple people helping you select and evaluation vendors, make sure everyone agrees on what constitutes a “meets feature fully” versus “meets feature partially”). This is to help you differentiate between vendors that offer a similar way to accomplish something but one is clearly better (because it’s easier, or gives more options, etc.)
- Decide which features are more important (here’s where the weighted score comes in… give higher numbers for features that are more important)
- Score vendors
The best email marketing vendor?
Ha! Good question! This is a question that only you can answer:
- Decide what is your goal with the email marketing software
- Define key features you really need
- Score vendors
- Chose the one that most closely matches your needs
How about “soft” qualities?
Yes, the excel matrix may help compare features vs. features, but falls short on so-called “soft” features like technical support, quality of service, and the all too common “gut feeling”. Make sure you take those into consideration, especially on tie breakers. Vendors that score very closely may have some clear differentiators that are not easily measurable. The important thing is to lead with the analytics side before throwing the qualitative evaluation into the mix.
Good luck in your email marketing selection process!
1 Comment | Email Marketing | Tagged: Decision Making, Email Marketing, linkedin, Presentations | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
December 22, 2009
Pressured to join the social media scene and start tweet-link-face-blogging? Hold on a minute, because first you may want to read what some experts have to say.
In one word: LISTEN.
Before letting everyone know you’re there and that your company or product is great, find out if people will care and, more importantly, find out how to engage them so that in the future they may care. Not wanting to rehash what has already been expertly written, here are some great starting points:
- The Six Free Listening Tools You Cannot Do Without, from Debra Askanase, is a great compilation of free tools that can get you started. Also, worth checking out is her recent post on “the case of 4,000 indifferent twitter followers“.
- Another good list of tools to use for listening into social media sites is given by Clay McDaniel on this MarketingProfs article.
- But before you go after all the shiny new tools, make sure you ask yourself the Five W’s of Social Media Listening, courtesy of Jason Falls.
There are countless other sources on the web, but I thought these are a very good summary of the basics. If you have come across other great tools or advice, please share!
Leave a Comment » | Communication, Online Marketing, Social Media | Tagged: Communication, linkedin, Market Research, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
December 14, 2009
What do you do when the meeting is over?
l have learned the hard way that unless I take good notes during a meeting, I cannot be very effective afterwards and therefore the meeting ends up being a big waste of time. When discussing a new campaign, the direction that the new ad should take, and the pages we need to update on the website I have to be able to identify the following items after the meeting:
- What was discussed
- What decisions were made
- What action items were decided
- Who will do what by when
The best way to turn meetings (which are, unfortunately, inevitable) into productive time spent with the team, is to take effective notes. During note taking I try to write only key pieces of information (and not to simply transcribe what was said) and place symbols next to each one that helps me easily and quickly identify what is important.
Here are my identifiers:
- The letter “i” in a circle: Informational only. Something that was told to give context, specific background information or other piece of data that I don’t have to do anything about.
- An empty square [ ] (empty checkbox): Action item assigned to me.
- An exclamation point “!”: Important information or decision made that I have to remember or that affects an action item.
- Someone’s initials: Action item assigned to someone else.
- “FUP”: something I need to follow up on. Usually a task assigned to someone in my team that I need to check the status.
These are the most commonly used symbols during my note taking, and sometimes I add a couple more (asterisk, pointing arrow, circles, etc.) depending on the note. The key for me is to be able to review my notes and act on what needs to be done.
When I have to create meeting minutes, this system helps me to go through my notes quickly and identify things that should be in the minutes versus superfluous stuff. For the action items assigned to me, the first thing I do when I get back to my desk is open my Outlook and create Tasks for each one. This way I capture all my to-do items quickly and am ready for the next item on my agenda (usually another meeting).
Since I use a tablet PC (currently an HP Pavillion Tx2500), my notes are electronic and I can easily go back to them and search for them. Below is a sample meeting note with my system, I hope it gives you a better idea of how I use it.
What is your system? Please share!
Example of how my symbol system for note taking works.
Leave a Comment » | Communication, productivity | Tagged: action items, Decision Making, effective meeting, linkedin, marketing tasks, time management | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
December 8, 2009
I love the internet. Free stuff abound and sharing is easy. But there is so much out there that deciding on what to read is a job in itself. That’s why I liked when the Modern B2B Marketing blog posted a list of must-read B2B marketing ebooks. It is worth checking out, you have your work cut out for you.
What else is out there, you may ask. Well, here are a few great places to go:
- Inbound Marketing University: http://inboundmarketing.com/university
- Pragmatic Marketing Resources Page: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/resources
- Chris Brogan’s “Best of” list contains precious gems of wisdom: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/best-of/
- Hubspot creates free content like no one else, check it out: http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/
- Lyris has some concise and to the point how-to guides: http://www.lyris.com/resources/
- Elolqua also has a good selection of free eBooks and webinars focusing on lead generation and email marketing: http://www.eloqua.com/resources/
- AdWeek has a page listing a variety of whitepapers from multiple vendors. Quality varies: http://whitepapers.adweek.com/emerging-marketing/social-networks/
Can you recommend other resources for free marketing knowledge?
Leave a Comment » | Marketing Training | Tagged: linkedin, Marketing Training | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
November 16, 2009
Presentations can be boring. Yes, I believe you are nodding as you read this. You have sat through your fair share of hour-long PowerPoint displays that were accompanied with a not so good speaker. What if you could change all that and have the message, whatever is was, delivered to you in six minutes and forty seconds?
Welcome to the world of Pecha Kucha.
I recently attended the Business of Software conference where I participated in a Pecha Kucha competition. The rules are you have to present 20 slides with 20 seconds for each (total of 6:40). Sounds easy and I thought so too when I signed up for it, but is far from a walk in the park.
To present well in this kind of format you have to rehearse very well. More than your typical “and in this slide I will talk about X”, because since the slides are automatically timed, your delivery has to be on time all the time. What if we could change the way our companies treat presentations and just give everyone six minutes to tell their stories? We would certainly have shorter meetings and maybe better content.
So next time you prepare a presentation, think about how you’d do it if you had only 6 minutes. What is essential? What is just fluff? How can you present in a way that will engage the audience? Less is sometimes better.
Are you ready to present? 3…2…1… Go!
Leave a Comment » | Communication | Tagged: Communication, linkedin, Presentations, public relations | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
November 6, 2009
In an earlier post I wrote about ZL Technologies lawsuit over Gartner Group’s Magic Quadrant, over what it considered “multitude of illegalities”.
And not surprisingly, the judge dismissed it.
Gartner’s comment about the decision focused on them being an independent research organization and denies they use “pay for play” in the publication of their reports.
So this should be the end, right? ZL lost and will go back to its corner. Well… not so fast! The way I see it, ZL had a minor victory here. Let me explain. Had the judge sided with them, the win would surely have been better but I have to think that they knew they didn’t stand a chance. So why go through the trouble? Because ZL can use Gartner’s arguments against itself and now have it documented by a judge to prove it. As they had stated on their website they were hoping to use the proceedings to get :
- Fair Disclosure on Conflicts of Interest
- Fair Disclosure on Evaluation Scores
- Better Oversight
They won’t get better oversight (and that was a real stretch) but they did get from the arguments (which are now documented) that the Magic Quadrant is nothing but Gartner’s opinion about the market and not “hard facts” as some might believe. In recent emails they have started using this as proof that “(…) the market should take note that the defense on which Gartner prevailed was its argument that its reports contain ‘pure opinions,’ namely, opinions which are not based on objective facts”.
So how’s that for a comeback? I see as a great opportunity to market themselves and when talking to CIOs and decision makers that bring up Gartner’s MQ, they can simply point them to the result of the lawsuit and say “listen, as much as you like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, it is pure fabrication based only on their opinion. No hard facts. They said it themselves! So forget about it and let me show you the demo….”.
But how will ZL be viewed in the market? Can their tactic backfire? It seems that some people have already tweeted to this effect. Now is time for them to be very, very careful with the community they target.
Keep tuned because ZL can still come back to fight the court’s decision.
Leave a Comment » | Communication, Marketing Strategy, Social Media | Tagged: Communication, linkedin, public relations, Social Media | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
November 6, 2009
Who doesn’t like to see a big giant fall down on its face, especially if it’s in public? We all like stories of companies that mess up and in the process of trying to clean up their act end up messing up even more. And now with social media, there’s no telling who will be the next United to see its market cap hurt because of a blog post or youtube video.
A recent article (When digital marketing strategies go wrong) from Revolution Magazine, a UK publication, reviews some of the most interesting social media mishaps. While I still believe that social media is not for everyone, those who decide to go this route should at least learn from others mistakes.
What stories or lessons learned do you have to share?
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Posted by Daniel Kuperman
November 4, 2009
Did you get anything done today? OK, maybe is still too early in the morning, but how about yesterday? If you are anything like the typical worker, you can probably list a few things you’ve accomplished such as:
- read emails
- responded to emails
- sent emails
- deleted emails
See a trend here? If sometimes it feels like email is running your day, then you are not alone. The BBC reported that one third of office workers suffer from email stress, which I find interesting because email doesn’t really cause stress. It is how you deal with it that is the root cause.
On a previous post, I discussed some productivity boosters for those trying to manage the daily flood of emails, and this amusing chart (below) from HR Management reminded me of the constant struggle we all have when it comes to increasing our productivity while keeping our stress level low.
Stress vs. Productivity from www.hrmreport.com
If your office is anything like mine, your colleagues send you Youtube videos, web links, and other stuff that although very entertaining doesn’t help you get your projects done on time. Have you ever tried simply not checking email? The chart above shows in a funny way that you sometimes feel more productive when you are checking email, and that you may turn to it if you get bored, and from personal experience I have felt the same way.
Think back to your daily activities. When are you usually checking email? Is it the first thing you do in the morning? Right after lunch before you decide to finally tackle that week-old project? Are you using email to get your adrenaline up like a junkie?
Just close, shut down, disconnect and ignore your email for about 1 hour. If you are feeling extremely brave, then try going for 2 straight hours. That’s right, and no peaking! Ignore the email and focus on work. I bet you can get some stuff done today.
Some of my favorite tips on email productivity are:
What is your stress level today? Close the email and ask yourself again in 1 hour.
Leave a Comment » | Communication, Marketing Management, productivity | Tagged: action items, Email, linkedin, Outlook, productivity, time management | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Kuperman
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