Bluebird Blueprint

Summer Marketing Ideas Webinar

2008-07-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

I was invited to co-present on VerticalResponse's Sizzling Summer Webinar Series earlier this summer. It's mostly relevant for small businesses focused on consumers in industries like retail, spa/salons, restaurant and hospitality, e-commerce, etc, however there are some good B2B ideas in there as well. The webinar features ideas on how to acquire new customers and boost the loyalty of existing ones through the use of tried and testing marketing techniques like email and postcard marketing, online surveys, word of mouth marketing, and more. Enjoy!

Video: VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference

2008-06-27T12:42:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I was invited to speak at VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference back in April on the topic of Getting Started with VerticalResponse for Appexchange. The VerticalResponse for Appexchange product enables salesforce.com's customers to integrate email and postcard marketing, as well as online surveys with their salesforce.com account. The event was a huge success with over 300 people getting together to share ideas, exchange best practices, and really learn more about how they can get the most from an email marketing solution. Here's a clip of my presentation with Alex Scalisi, Director of Sales for VerticalResponse, on the importance of using an email service provider to ensure high deliverability and to maximize financial outcomes.

Speaking at VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference, SF April 23

2008-03-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

I'll be speaking at VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference 2008 in San Francisco on April 23rd. Early Bird pricing ends Monday ($99) and the event is filling up. If you're wondering why the heck you should attend, here are a few reasons:

There will be a ton of email and direct marketing experts there to share ideas, pratical tips, and best practices.
You'll get to hear me blather on about how you can get started with VR for salesforce.com, to track email marketing from within your CRM app. Sweet.
They're going to announce a cool new product.
Network like a fool with 200 or so business folks. You’ll also meet the VerticalResponse team - good times.
You need a day away from the office.
In celebration of Small Business Week you'll be fed breakfast, lunch, and a few cocktails on VerticalResponse. Need I say more?!?!

Salesforce Ideas for the Rest of Us

2008-02-20T16:49:00.000-08:00

One of the really cool new features that salesforce.com has made available with their Spring '08 release, is Salesforce Ideas. They launched salesforce ideas to their customers last year, and have been using it to drive development priorities ever since.

Now salesforce's customers can leverage that same functionality for their own employees, customers and partners. Post features or products that you're thinking about building and let the market dictate the prioirity level for each of them.

It's only available to Enterprise customers and above, since you'll need to enable the customer portal and/or partner portal to allow your constituents to log in and vote. But it's another great reason for Professional users to consider an upgrade.

I think the plan is to eventually allow non-customers and partners, i.e. the general public, to use it but I still think it's a cool feature.

Salesforce User Group Meeting - Bay Area

2008-02-07T11:49:00.001-08:00

UPDATE - SLIDES POSTED - CLICK ON PRESENTATION HYPERLINK!

Today marked the first ever Salesforce.com Bay Area User Group meeting to take place in the morning, and it was a big success. Hosted by VerticalResponse, in their SF office, it drew a crowd of 40+ users from a broad range of industries (both commercial and non-profit) and edition users (group, professional, and enterprise).

Following an introduction by Jason Stewart, the Bay Area User Group leader, I kicked off the morning with a presentation on creating web-to-lead forms and auto-responder emails.

On behalf of our host, Alex Scalisi took the floor and touted the benefits of working with an email service provider like VerticalResponse to drive increased deliverability and ease of use. Jason was followed by Andrea Wildt, Sr. Product Mgr Salesforce Marketing, from salesforce.com, who demonstrated how to create advanced workflows for marketing. For instance, triggering an HTML email offering a total cost of ownership whitepaper one week after a lead is archived due to a lack of budget. Pretty powerful stuff.

There were lively debates over the virtues of HTML vs. plain text emails, with a focus on deliverability and trackability implications. The issue of designing emails for Blackberry users arose as well with the key takeaway being less image and text at the top of the email are key.

There was a lot of interaction and with only one sponsor presentation, it allowed for a lot more audience participation. Overall, it was a great event!

The Unsubscribe Mystery Resolved!

2008-02-05T17:20:00.001-08:00

Have you ever had someone respond to an email marketing piece asking you to remove them from your list and complaining that they'd asked to opt-out numerous times, only to look them up in salesforce.com and find out that their opt-out box is ticked?

Well you're not alone. This was happening to me periodically with one of my clients and I couldn't figure it out. So of course the first thing I did was check my report criteria to see if opt-out was equal to false (which of course it was). Then after a lot of research, it finally hit me.

The person, who was a contact in salesforce, had been converted from a lead which meant that they were showing up on my lead report, and my contact report. Even though you can't get to or edit a converted lead, it still appears when you run a lead report! The lead hadn't been opted out, so the report was still picking them up. So if you're sending an email blast to a lead and a contact report, you could run into this issue.

The good news is that there is a super easy fix. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy over at VerticalResponse who pointed out that you can simply set your lead report criteria so that you're only getting unconverted leads. It's as simple as Converted is equal to False. Et voila!

Lead source vs. lead action - the saga continues

2008-01-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

When we last left our hero, she was talking about the importance of tracking the true source of leads. Often I find that B2B marketers confuse the "how you found me" with the "what did you do once you did," resulting in lead source values such as GoogleAdwords and Webinar. Now I don't know about you, but generally I don't randomly show up for a Webinar unless I:

1) Saw a banner ad
2) Received an email or printed invitation
3) Cruised someone's website and found the listing
4) Received some kind of information from a friend or colleague

So it seems to be that a Webinar attendees true lead source would be one of the above. OK, now let's move onto the "what they did when they found you" aspect, or what I like to call Lead Action.

Lead action is a handy field which I use to track what someone did once they came in contact. That can be a Webinar Registration, Whitepaper Download, Contact Request, ROI Calculator, or even a Quote Request. If you're using salesforce.com for campaign and lead management, you can easily create a custom field on the leads tab to track this.

You can either make this a field that isn't to be over-ridden with new data, or make it a multi-select field so that each time they do something new, you can update that field. This would enable you to run reports to see of leads with converted information, which lead actions had they completed which could be very useful when determining which types of demand generation offers to go with for your next marketing campaign.

Tracking the true source of your leads

2007-12-10T17:26:00.000-08:00

As most marketers are looking forward to 2008 through their budgetary planning process, chances are they're also looking back at how well certain activities performed. How can you plan for 2008 if you don't know what types of marketing activities worked in 2007?

I was chatting with a peer of mine recently about lead source and the hows and whys of tracking where your leads are coming from. Here's a recap of our conversation and my thoughts on the topic:

1) Lead source should tell you how the lead found you - Did they click on a paid search engine listing or cruise by your booth at a tradeshow?
2) It should be limited to 20 or so high level categories which cover the most common types of ways that people find your organization - e.g. Paid Search, Organic Search, Banner Ad, Tradeshow, etc.
3) Report on your lead source values and how they're performing at all phases of the conversion funnel, e.g. conversion to qualified lead, opportunity and closed business.

I know a lot of people want to create a new lead source everytime they launch a new campaign, especially people who are using salesforce.com's Professional Edition and who don't have campaigns, however I urge agaisnt this.

Consider instead creating a custom field called Campaign source. Make sure you use a consistent naming convention like YYYY QQ Campaign Type - Creative version, e.g. 2007 Q4 Email - Candy Cane. Makes reporting a lot easier later.

Finally, the lead source shouldn't necessarily tell you what they did, but how they found you. It's just as important to know that they came from a paid ad, as it is to know that they signed up for a free trial. My peer disagreed with me - she thinks that if they came from a Webinar, then the lead source is Webinar, whereas I wanted to know how they found out about the Webinar as well as the fact that they registered and attended. I'll leave it up to you to determine how you use lead source in your demand generation program.

Next up...lead action - tracking how your leads interacted with your company, and how that differs from lead source.

Lead scoring Q&A with Manticore's VP of Marketing

2007-11-15T15:54:00.000-08:00

Lead scoring is being discussed more and more in the world of B2B marketing and demand generation best practices. I've asked Manticore Technology's Vice President of Marketing, Christopher Doran, to shed some light on the topic.

Q: Christopher, a lot of people are talking about lead scoring, but not a lot of people are doing it. What are the benefits of using lead scoring?

A: Lead Scoring is all about identifying leads which are most likely to buy today and sending them over to sales, while those that aren't quite ready stay in the marketing realm for additional nurturing until they're ready to buy.

It's quite the hot topic with B2B marketers right now.

Q: How do you recommend someone gets started with a lead scoring program?

A: There are three steps to getting started with lead scoring.

First is sales and marketing agreeing to a definition of a qualified lead, in effect identifying the point at which a lead from marketing is sent to sales. It's absolutely critical that sales and marketing agree on this definition. Get granular in your definition. Look at characteristics like industry, departments, titles, and willingness to buy, budget, need, and timeline for purchase.

The second step is looking for a lead scoring platform that will allow you to turn the characteristics you've defined into numeric values that will be calculated for leads as they exist in your pipeline.

Third would be indenting the numeric threshold at which a lead is qualified. Leads with scores above this number are owned by sales while leads below are further nurtured by marketing until they are qualified.

Q: What kind of characteristics should I be looking for in a lead scoring platform?

A: When choosing a lead scoring system - I recommend a couple of things. First - look for a system that you can easily modify on the fly. Lead scoring is an art - expect your scoring equation to develop over time. Your solution should easily evolve with you instead of requiring re-deployment with every evolution.

Second - look for a system that offers a free trial of the software. In this SAAS world we live in, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to kick the tires on a system before you buy it.

Q: What if a lead has a low score initially but over time would score differently because you’ve qualified them or they’re finally ready to talk to a sales rep? How do you make sure that the good stuff floats to the surface?

A: Think of lead scores as dynamic creatures that are always rising and falling as more is learned about each lead's level of interest. When configuring your specific lead scoring equation, define what actions leads need to have taken in order to be qualified. Is it downloading a whitepaper? Or downloading a whitepaper, viewing a webinar, and requested a demo?

Your lead scoring system should be tracking these actions to ensure that your hottest leads rise to the top.

Thanks Christopher!

Measure the true impact of your campaigns

2007-11-13T08:35:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been frustrated with the fact that the leads and contacts associated with your campaigns aren't always associated with the opportunities that eventually are created? Are you struggling to prove marketing's impact on closed revenue?

Well you're not alone. The ability to demonstrate marketing's impact on business results and return on marketing investment (mROI) is becoming more and more critical to survivial in the corporate jungle. Here's some ammo for potential boardroom warfare...

Although custom report types for salesforce.com were released back in the Summer '07 release, I hadn't had a chance to play around with them until a client asked me how we could see the status of all activities associated with opps whose contacts were members of a campaign. Four joins?!?! OK, I knew this was going to take a little elbow grease.

So in case you haven't heard, custom report types enable you to join various objects in the database together like you've never been able to previously. Go to Setup, Build, Report types, and pick the Primary Object you want to report on, say Opportunities. Then one by one add the additional objects you want to report on as well and where the report type should be housed, and hit Save.

When you click back over to the Reports tab, you'll find under the section you saved the customer report type, e.g. Opportunities, your custom report type! Now you can grab fields from all of the objects that you've joined together.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1) Status & comments of all activities associated with opps whose accounts have contacts who are members of my campaign
2) Opps whose accounts have contacts who are members of my campaign
3) Stage of Opps with Products

Happy Reporting!

All things Salesforce and getting caught up!

2007-11-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of postings lately, but things have been pretty hectic since Dreamforce for the Bluebird. Let's get you caught up...

I gave an interview with Marketo's VP of Marketing on the topic of lead management, a topic which I also spoke about at Dreamforce. You can view the presentation that I gave, along with Scott Keane from salesforce.com and Tony Siconolfi from MySpace.

Check out my Vertical Response "woman on the street" interview from Dreamforce below. If I look like I'm about to crack up, it's because there was a member of the hospitality crew staring at me from behind the cameraman and it was really unnerving! It also features local salesforce power users Jason Stewart of DemandBase and Kirk Crenshaw of RevCatalyst.

Last night I attended the SF Bay Area (North) Salesforce.com's User Group event. They gave an update on the Winter '08 Release which includes some killer features. For marketing, they're releasing the long awaited Campaign Hierarchies which enables you to create parent/child relationships for integrated campaigns rolling up campaign stats to the parent. Now most of you savvy power users had created custom fields or look-ups to manage this years ago, but still for newbies it's a great feature.

Next, they've built a sharing model for Marketing, so you can share access to Campaigns across groups. In the past, if your role was Marketing User, you could see everyone's campaigns. Now, you'll be able to make campaigns visible/invisible based on groups. I couldn't imagine why you wouldn't want everyone in your company to have access to your Campaigns pages, but I guess this was a deal breaker for some big Financial Services firms.

There are some other really cool features for sales and marketing alike, but I'll let you read the release guide to find out for yourself.

Kraig Swensrud, Senior Director of Marketing Products at salesforce, talked about Marketing in the Google era and the importance of your website as a lead generator and sales person for your company. A few interesting pointers and factoids about Google AdWords:

Initial caps in URLs get higher click thru rates (e.g. SalesForceAutomation vs. salesforceautomation). Has to do with readability.

Calls to action should be specific to what you want them to do - Learn more - Free Trial - Download a whitepaper, rather than simply 'Click here.'

4 out of 5 Salesforce for Google Adwords users are pointing their ads to their homepage! This is a major no-no people. Best practice is to send people to dedicated landing pages, which might not be visible on your external site (i.e. you can't navigate to them).

OK, that about does it for me, next up...Campaign reporting. Stay tuned!

Viral Marketing through YouTube

2007-08-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

The guys and gals at VerticalResponse are at it again. In the lead up to salesforce.com's annual user group conference, Dreamforce, VR has released a new music video promoting their email marketing services.

They'll be officially launching it the week of Dreamforce, but since it seems to be making its way around the Internet via viral marketing, I thought I'd do my part to spread the word.

What I love about this (and their previous video) is that it really shows the company's culture (fun, playful, down to earth), at the same time that it delivers a clear message about their value proposition, in an entertaining way.

Most people know the words to the original track, so it's fun to see how they work their sales message into the beats. Enjoy!

Is SFA for widgets only?

2007-07-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

I was working with a client in the transportation industry (think freight, shipping, etc.) last week and we were brainstorming on how best to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns targeted at existing customers (what high tech folks might call installed base marketing). All of the sudden it hit me.

Most SFA applications are built for a widget-oriented market.

In B2B marketing, we're so used to talking about finding new leads and converting them to opportunities, that we forget that there are millions of businesses out there that have a specific set of accounts that they're trying to grow over time.

For instance, let's say you're selling printing services. You might have one-off projects that you bid on (which could equate to a specific opportunity in the traditional sense). However, you also have a set of accounts that use you for their on-going printing needs. So you run a campaign to your active and inactive accounts in an effort to reactivate them or get them to send their print jobs to you more frequently.

There's no new lead to create, no opportunity to be converted. Just an increase in overall account billings in a given timeframe.

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales data

If your bookings data is stored in your SFA/CRM this might not be too difficult to measure. We’re talking about joining four objects (campaigns, contacts, accounts, and bookings) but it’s doable. If not you might need some kind of on-demand external business intelligence tools now being offered by companies such as LucidEra to help you make the connection between marketing responses and actual sales data.

But what do you do if your financial data isn't stored in the CRM application where your marketing campaign responders are housed? How do you know which campaigns are truly driving repeat business and increased share of wallet and which ones are just costing you money?

How to measure marketing’s impact in a services world

First, you’ll need to split your activities into new business lead generation, and existing-customer focused campaigns. In the case of new business lead gen, once you “win” the business (let’s say the client gets a specific rate for your printing based upon anticipated volume), then you can estimate the total annuity for the lifetime of that customer, thus enabling you to calculate a marketing ROI for that campaign.

In the case of customer-focused activities, it’s a little trickier. One way to measure the impact of customer marketing activities is to track marketing influence on overall sales. For instance, if you’re running a big promotion in Q3, set up a dashboard which shows responses over time, and bookings over time – side by side. Depending upon your sales cycle, you might find that three months after you launch a campaign you see a spike in bookings. It’s not an exact science but if you’re tracking this data over time, you should get an idea of what’s working and what’s not.

Have any ideas about how you’re tracking marketing campaign effectiveness in a services or annuity-based world? I’d love to hear them!

Data hygiene: Keeping your lists clean

2007-06-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

I received two pieces of snail mail this week from companies who were attempting to reach me at old email addresses, requesting that I update them with my new email address.

Granted, they were B2C organizations (FasTrak and a winery), so there was a good chance that I was still at my physical address. However, with database quality degrading at a rate of approx. 2% a month, it got me thinking - How can B2B marketers leverage similar techniques to keep their databases clean?

Here's a few things to ponder:

1) With mergers and acquisitions, companies often change domain names, while employees might still be in the same cube.
2) Increased spam issues can force users to change their email address - let's say from a hotmail account to a gmail, or even their corporate email from trish @ domain dot com to treilly @ domain dot com. (Keep in mind that a lot of business people use personal email accounts for research - think whitepapers, articles, webinars, etc.)
3) If you're frequently getting bounced emails and not doing anything with them, chances are you're wasting money attempting to email and/or mail them. Why not send a quick postcard and ask them to get back in touch? Or better yet - pick up the phone and call them to see if they're still at that company, and if not, who has replaced them.

Finally, your marketing campaigns are only as good as your lists. As much as we marketers tend to focus on creative and messaging, the response rate almost always comes down to offer and list. So, invest in your list. Have a plan for dealing with return mail and bounced email. It's sure to pay dividends.

An Open Letter to American Airlines Chairman Gerard Arpey

2007-06-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt of a letter I wrote following an abysmal experience I had with AA. There are a lot of lessons for a B2B marketer in this (summarized at the bottom). Enjoy!

Dear Mr. Gerard J. Arpey,

Since I read in American Way (your in-flight magazine), that you wanted to hear from customers about how you’re doing, I thought I’d share my story.

My outbound flight from San Francisco to Boston was just as I like it, uneventful. On time, pleasant, and rather unremarkable. I wish I could say the same about the return. After what seemed like quite a long time with no pre-boarding announcements, I went to check the monitor only to discover that my flight to Chicago (where I was to catch a connecting flight to San Francisco) had been cancelled.

As word spread amongst the awaiting crowd of passengers, a single flight attendant arrived with no information. She politely informed me that she had just found out and was going to try to find some information. At this stage, all of the passengers were becoming incredibly nervous and agitated. She returned approximately ten minutes later with pieces of paper expressing the airlines apologies for the cancellation and a phone number to call to rearrange travel.

I made several attempts to reach your call center via this 1800 number only to be further disappointed by the fact that your speech recognition system wouldn’t allow me to speak to an agent by pressing zero or saying “agent” until I had provided it with various pieces of information.

I was eventually able to get through to a call center agent who was sympathetic and tried to get me on a USAir flight via Las Vegas, only to have the line cut half way through the process.

Finally, two ground agents arrived. Given the fact that the flight was full, I would suggest a few more than two ground agents to deal with the now angry mob (see photo attached). When I finally reached the desk along with a fellow San Francisco-bound traveler (at the end of the line consequently because I had stepped out of line to better hear the call center agent!), I was not greeted by an apologetic representative of your airline, but rather a rude and somewhat unpleasant person.

Now I will admit that my own attitude was not 100% helpful at that stage, but I was the one being inconvenienced! If you are going to work in a service role, you are going to have to expect that people are going to be less than thrilled when you tell them that first of all they aren’t going to get home anywhere near the time that they had intended to and secondly that because it is due to weather it is “not the airlines fault” and therefore your accommodation will not be covered.

I arrived back at the airport the following morning, boarded a direct flight to SFO, and finally made it home around 24 hours later than I had initially planned.

So following are my suggestions for how to handle these types of incidents in the future (by the way these hold true for a lot of businesses!):

1. Deliver bad news personally. Your passengers are customers and should be treated as such. It’s a relationship – if you have something bad to tell me, cowboy up and have the decency to send a human person to deliver the news. If you don’t have enough info yet, then don’t post the news. (If you're a B2B marketer, this means your customers should get bad news from you directly, not the 11 o'clock news, WSJ, CNET, etc.)

2. Make sure your customer service reps are prepared to deal with angry people. Telling a passenger whose flight has just been cancelled and who has requested that you call a flight (which is leaving in five minutes) and asking them to hold it “You must be kidding me,” is not acceptable. You have to expect that people who have personal and professional lives which are being impacted in ways you cannot imagine are going to make ridiculous requests. All that your staff can control is how reasonably THEY react. But snide remarks like that have NO place in a customer service interaction.

3. Get your stories straight. If the party line is, “Bad weather in Chicago,” then make sure that everyone is getting that message. It’s disconcerting to be told one thing and then another. It feels like you’re being lied to, and we don’t like that.

4. Try to do something to help your customers out. I don’t care that it’s not your fault that the flight was cancelled. You have an obligation to at the very least try to help me out. You could have easily had one customer service person make a few calls to nearby hotels and ask that they extend a discount rate to everyone who shows their boarding pass upon check-in. I mean, you’re an airline for crying out loud. You have relationships with hotels near the airport and all over Boston.

5. Amend your voice self-service system or have an alternate number for cancelled flights. I find it comical that your call center only allows speech recognition. I mean the people who are probably the most in need of speaking to an agent are the ones for whom the speech reco system will not work, because they are in a noisy airport! I realize that this is all a cost cutting measure (and I used to work for Genesys who probably sold you the software), but you have to have a reasonable response to an issue like this.

6. Add some peanuts back to the flights! I know that you sell sandwiches now, but come on. It’s a six hour flight – you can’t at least throw me a bag of peanuts. Unbelievable.

And one final note – your customer relations site online only allows 1500 characters for email submissions! Definitely not enough space to write this whole sad story. You might want to change that.

So that’s my feedback – do with it what you will. But keep in mind, your customers are people. We understand that stuff happens. But it’s how you handle the stuff that really defines who you are as a company and a brand. I’ll definitely remember this interaction next time I go to book a flight anywhere and think twice about flying on AA.

Sincerely,

Tricia Reilly

eBay Live! 2007 in Boston

2007-06-21T12:44:00.001-07:00

Solutions Center Floor
Originally uploaded by reillytricia2003

I got back yesterday from Boston where I attended eBay Live!. If you're not familiar with eBay Live!, it's eBay's biggest event of the year, gathering thousands of buyers and sellers from all over the world for three days of education, entertainment, and networking.

I'm not a big eBay user, but as I have worked on the demand gen plans and creative process for the event over the course of the past 8 months, I really wanted to see it come to life. And with guest speakers like Andy Sernovitz and Seth Godin, there was really a lot for a B2B marketer to make it a worthwhile event.

So here are my key takeaways from Andy Sernovitz's session:

Be remarkable and give people a reason to love you - The whole idea of Word of Mouth marketing is to give people a reason to talk about you and make it easy for them to do so. Think of the beautiful wrapping paper on a gift from Red Envelope, or free samples at Kiehl's.

No one talks more than a lover scorned - Piss off your customers and they'll tell five times as many people as they would if you had done something to delight them. With the permanent record that is the Internet (reviews, blogs, etc.), users have the ability to tell the world about how wonderful or awful your product/service is. So make sure the good stuff is going on your permanent record.

Marketing is what you do - not what you say - As B2B marketers, we tend to focus on the message when in reality the customer experience IS the brand. How professional are your sales people's emails? How does your call center treat a prospect? Is your company easy to do business with? All of the advertising in the world is not going to overcome the fact that your business isn't customer focused.

Find the people who tell your story and engage them - The "talkers" for your business might not actually be customers, but merely fans. Make sure that they are opted in to receive information from you (email, blogs, etc.) and get them to spread the word for you. If they are blogging, join the conversation but not with the intention of "selling." Dinner party rules apply here - speak if you have something to add but not to jump in merely to self-promote. Ask them to tell a friend.

Seth Godin's presentation on Flipping the Funnel touched on similar topics such as permission marketing, being "remarkable", and knowing when to quit. He talked about the "superstar shortage" and how you need to be an expert in your field. Once you get started there's a cumulative advantage which means that once you have a bit of a headstart, Google and the network effect will propel you ahead of your competitors. Here are a few of his nuggets of insight:

Flip the funnel - Marketers love the 100 to 1 rule (100 leads will result in 1 deal), but what we need to do is make the funnel a megaphone - focus on your happiest customers and let them tell your story for you.

Create a story about what you do - We are all selling to people, even in B2B, so tell a story about how your product works, how you came up with the idea for your newest product feature, etc. It helps people to connect with your brand.

If you're not blogging, start now -Blogs are given the highest ranking in Google's algorithm so it's a great way to improve organic search results. And the Facebook generation doesn't want to know about email, so you have to be prepared for what is coming next. Don't stop emailing just yet but Seth predicts that in three years, email marketing will be dead.

More Salesforce Google Coverage

2007-06-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

Check out the interviews with various Salesforce for Google AdWords customers and partners. Scroll down and check out my interview. :-)

Salesforce and Google Announce Group Edition with AdWords

2007-06-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to start my blog about business to business marketing and sales enablement for some time now, and I thought yesterday's announcement about salesforce.com and Google forming a formal partnership was the right opportunity. I was privileged to be invited to the launch event, which was a small gathering of customers, partners, and employees. The biggest news of the day was the launch of Salesforce Group Edition, which will replace Team edition, and comes complete with Salesforce for Google Adwords built-in.

Group Edition is a great way for small businesses or start-ups to get up and running with Leads, Google Adwords, Opportunities, Contacts, and Dashboards. Erin Jacobs, Director of Marketing at TFC Inc., a Salesforce customer, commented that implementing Group Edition is the equivalent of the first sales and marketing hire, which I thought was an interesting perspective for small business owners. Because they wear so many hats, they need a CRM system which will automate a lot of the intial interactions with customers, before they are ready to pick up the phone.

The product is targeted at small business, but no doubt enterprises will benefit from an improved UI and tighter integration between the two solutions. It seems that they are also working on additional technology integrations such as the Google One Box, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and intend to work together to help non-profits.

When I asked Marc Benioff and Sheryl Sandberg of Google if the Group Edition roadmap included plans to integrate Google Analytics, he gave me the usual corporate response that they were looking at a number of different features and that they had a lot of ideas. It seems like the plan was to get this product out the door and figure out what comes next based on customer feedback and requests, which tends to be Salesforce's development MO.

Another downside is that at least for now, Group Edition doesn't appear to include access to the AppExchange, Salesforce's marketplace for on-demand applications which integrate directly with their platform. So if you're hoping to get AppExchange services like email, landing pages, data tools, etc. you might have to upgrade to either Professional or Enterprise or wait for it to be added to Group. Although not all apps are available to Professional users. All in all, it's good news for B2B marketers. And at $10 per user per month (max 5 users), it's a no brainer.