The Best Cars Gallery: January 2009

Trucks and Conveyer Belts; Lead Management in a Manufacturing Metaphor

(David Armano wrote an inspiring post last week challenging us to "Think Visually" - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/01/thinking-visually.html. He makes a great point, so I exhausted my very limited artistic talents to come up with visuals for this week's post. Hope they make the point clearer)

One of the things that I often discuss with B2B marketing clients is the details of the process for handing leads from marketing to sales and then bringing them back again if sales is not interested. It's an area not to take too lightly as it can derail a tremendous amount of great work in both sales and marketing if the handoff is not done extremely well.

The most common handoff I see is the Excel spreadsheet of leads. This terrifies me.

I liken this to a manufacturing operation where the production is done in two separate buildings, and half way through the manufacturing process, the product is shipped, via truck, from one building to another. It functions, sort of, but will not give you a strong business.

First of all, speed is critical in responding to leads. This has been talked about many times, including my post a month ago here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/high-noon-at-web-form.html. The essence is, you have a very limited amount of time (hours, not days) to act on a sign of buying interest, before your chance of connecting drops precipitously.

So, why does the truck (Excel spreadsheet) model fail?

Trucks work best when they are fully loaded. You would not send a spreadsheet with one or two names in it, any more than you would ship a truck with one or two parts in it.

Too many trucks clog the roads. In the same way, tt becomes unworkable to be emailing back and forth more than a few (2 or 3) spreadsheets of leads.

Trucks are loaded by people. People have other things on their plate, they take breaks, they take vacations, they get distracted. The same thing holds for Excel spreadsheets

All three of these problems lead to a similar trend. The Excel spreadsheet of leads becomes less frequent and larger. The exact numbers vary, but a once-per-week distribution of leads is not uncommon in many organizations.

The problem with this is that it becomes a downward spiral. We send the leads over to sales, and whereas they might have been well qualified at the start, now that a few days have passed, the prospect's interest has moved on to other things, and the chance of connecting with them has decreased. As sales tries to connect with these leads, they realize that they are not getting through, and therefore sales treats the leads with less urgency adding even more delay to the process.

The only way to break this cycle realistically is with automation, in much the same way that conveyer belts revolutionized manufacturing. The lead qualification, handoff, and clawback must be done with the appropriate sense of urgency. Marketing and sales need to work together to build the agreements, SLAs, and processes so that a prospective buyer is responded to quickly and efficiently. To do this requires allowing each lead to flow through the process as soon as they raise their hand. This requires removing any trucks (Excel spreadsheets) from the flow, and replacing them with conveyer belts (automation).

Automating your lead routing may seem like a small optimization, but like in manufacturing, changing the way a process is managed can have a massive impact on bottom line success. Dell and Toyota demonstrated this with electronics and automotive manufacturing. Now, this operations mentality has shifted to Marketing, where the organization who can best serve the needs of the prospect will win. Read More...

The Four Dimensions of Personalization

I did a webcast radio show for the AMA a few years back, and I remember that one of the hot topics was content personalization. At the time, I tried to broaden the topic to include other areas of personalization as well, but I am not sure many people understood what I was trying to articulate.

Recently I have started to see examples of what I would call "The Four Dimensions of Personalization". Most people tend to focus only on content (the "What") personalization, and we often forget that the other dimensions may have as much, and sometimes more of an effect on whether you get a response.

Who, When, How, and What - Personalization

Who is sending the communication? is it a salesperson, the CEO, the VP of Marketing? often this will determine whether I view, read or spend anytime looking at your message. Agent personalized campaigns have resulted in up to a 30% increase in opens, and up to a 300% increase in click-throughs, as often the prospect recognizes the name, as someone they have either talked to, or heard a voicemail from the sales rep.
When am I receiving the communication? Did I just visit the website, have I just attended a webinar or trade show? Or has it been weeks since I even thought of your company or offering? A MIT study on lead management (http://www.leadresponsemanagement.com/mit-lrm-study) indicated that follow-up calls within the hour dramatically increase conversion to qualified leads - why wouldn't it also help with marketing communications?

How am I receiving the communication? Am I the type of person that answers my own phone? Do I look at all my Direct Mail personally or have my assistant throw out anything she doesn't recognize? Debbie Hemley made a great comment on the resurgence of direct mail in her post here http://www.impressionsthroughmedia.com/?p=949 - it might be worth considering.

And of course What am I receiving? Is this message targeted at my current need or pain? Have I just searched on "marketing and sales alignment" on Google and now am receiving information on Lead Scoring?

“Campaigns that target based on Website user click-stream data outperform untargeted broadcast campaigns by nearly 4 to 1.” - Forrester Research (Jupiter)

Make sure you think of all four of the aspects of personalization when planning your next campaign - as content (the "What") is only one of them.

My attempt at art...

I've entitled it "Walk with daddy" simply because thats what they were doing.

Our first playdate

We had our first playdate this weekend with the daughter of a dear friend of mine. Laura and I met in college at BYU our freshman year and we've seen each other infrequently over the past 15 years...it seemed like we were always on different sides of the United States and until the stars aligned and the continents were in sync we just never were able to get together. Then...I moved to Arizona and if you can believe it...we're only a little over an hour away from each other. So, Laura brought her daughter over this weekend for Bella's first playdate.

Kalea (I hope I'm spelling her name right!) is so much more active than Bella...she crawls and grabs and Bella just kind of watched her...thenwould burp or spitup to show she got the gist of what Kalea was doing. Then Bella would wave her arms or coo and it would stop Kalea in her tracks. She'd just turn and stare at her. She also wasn't too happy to see her mama with another baby in her arms. Regardless, Laura and I are of the opinion that since we are such good friends these two will be also. They are only 5 months apart...isn't that just perfect!

Kalea showing her mature 7 month oldness while Bella throws a little fit...

She's their biggest fan...

Have I mentioned yet that they are doing a second tour???

Twitter, Chris Brogan, and Black Swans

Chris Brogan asked an interesting question the other day on Twitter, and it got me thinking. He asked "Why do you try to acquire followers? Meaning vs just building relationships?" It's a great question because we've all seen people on Twitter aggressively trying to acquire new followers. Why? Past about 500, it's virtually impossible to have a meaningful relationship.

Peter Kim wrote a great piece on this a while ago, that describes it as an "Ego Trap". The piece was brilliant, and a fun read, and it describes the various social tools "counting" mechanisms, and the trap we all fall into to have the most followers/friends/etc.

http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/11/ego-trap-social-media-ranking-tools.html

But then, the underlying question is; why does that even work. We are all smart enough to know that these numbers are not meaningful in themselves.

I just finished reading "The Black Swan" from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and he has an interesting theory that might apply. He calls it "preferential attachment", and the idea is that for some systems, the dynamic is such that the more of X there is, the more of X there is likely to be. Think of things like personal wealth, the population of a city, bacteria populations, and project overruns. It's an interesting dynamic with interesting effects.

I was curious, so I pulled some data off of Twitterholic that looks at the 1000 Twitterers with the most followers to see whether the Twitter follower counts followed a pattern that would suggest they obey that dynamic. The raw data is above, and you can see an interesting Long Tail on it. Think about things that don't follow this pattern to realize how this is interesting. Things like human heights and weights would fall off extremely rapidly after about 7 feet, and there are none over 12 feet.

Looking at the data another way, the chart on the right shows the number of users who have more than a certain number of followers. With 35,812 followers, there are 25 people out there who have as many followers as Chris Brogan or more. Guy Kawasaki at 51,506 is among only 10 peers, and Barack Obama caps the list at 144,000.

This gets very interesting, because follower counts are what is called "scale invariant". The chance of someone having twice as many followers as someone else follows the same ratio whether the two users being compared are in the low follower counts or the high follower counts.

If we look at some of the ratios, you'll see what I mean. If we compare the number of people who have more than 5k followers with the number who have more than 10k (a 2x ratio), there is a 3.1x reduction in the number of users. If we compare the users with 10k and 20k followers (again, a 2x ratio), it is a 3.0x reduction in numbers. Between 20k and 40k, and between 75k and 140k, the numbers are again very similar at only a 4x reduction in user counts.

(*Note that this data is ONLY the absolute top end of the scale - just the top 1000 - but I would be willing to bet that the same trend is followed throughout the population.)

But so what? Well, to get back to Chris's original question, why do we all try for followers? Because followers attract more followers according to the theory of preferential attachment. That's why the big names on Twitter become even bigger names on Twitter. That's why Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki are who they are.

I'm absolutely not saying that (a) content and integrity have nothing to do with it, and (b) the mighty cannot fall. Similarly, great cities can crumble if they neglect the things that make them great, the wealthy can become poor if they do not invest wisely, and large bacteria populations can die off for a multitude of reasons. However, the dynamics of the system are such that all else being equal, having more followers will lead to having even more followers.

**Data from Twitterholic - http://www.twitterholic.com/ - January 22, 2009**

2 month shots

Ok...so people should be banned from talking about traumatic baby things when new baby mamas are around. I'm on a stepmom site where someone posed the question about vaccinations and its link to autism then proceeded to tell a story about a 2 month old that got vaccinations done and then almost immediately after started exhibiting signs of autism and now has been fully diagnosed.

Bella was scheduled for her 2 month vaccinations today. So, when I went into the immunization clinic on base I grilled the nurse about what she thought. She said it was very rare, the link between the two was an opinion with no factual basis and that she thought Bella should have the shots.

So she did. And those needles were HUGE for a baby. She cried...that open mouthed sobbing scream and that made me cry...so there we were in the little exam room and the poor nurse trying to comfort me and I'm trying to comfort Bella...

We survived the 2 month shots, but I can't believe I have to do this again in 2 months. Gaaaah! Read More...

You can't build your own television network

I was in a long conversation the other day trying to explain the importance of social media in the world of marketing, as I suspect many of us have tried. Given that I'm originally a techy and an engineer, I tend to approach things in a certain way, so my explanation went down that path also.

Regardless of whether messages are consumed via push or pull, word of mouth or television, social media or mass marketing, there's a fairly simple structure. You, as a marketer, want to get a message out, you have a "messaging infrastructure" to communicate that message, and you have an audience who you would like to receive (or discover) and digest your message.

Social media, and its broad set of tools and platforms is a way in which your message gets out to your audience. Mostly this is through through them discovering the message, rather than receiving it directly from you, as it is passed on through various nodes in the social networks that each recipient is a part of.

There have been a lot of posts about the growth rates in social media, and the way in which people consume their information. You get that. At some point in the future, "investing in social media" will have to be a key part of everyone's marketing plans. Right now it's not; some are investing in it, some are not. So the question is, why invest in it NOW, rather than wait to see how it evolves and what investments make sense. The current arguments on the proven ROI of social media are, to be frank, a bit anecdotal.

However, I think that the analysis is thinking of things a bit incorrectly. In the world of mass media, you are essentially renting the messaging infrastructure from an established provider such as a TV station or mailing house. You pay a certain amount and your message gets delivered. You measure the return of this investment on a single message basis - what effect did one advertising campaign have, for example.

Social media is VERY different, each message you send has two aspects you need to care about; the message itself, and its effect on building or deteriorating your network. You cannot effectively buy your messaging infrastructure in social media, you must build it yourself, and this is a fundamental change in the way many of us think about getting a message to an audience.

So why invest NOW? The answer comes by looking at what it takes to influence an audience with a single message. Influencing an audience has two key aspects to it, getting the message to the audience (Distribution), and having them pay attention to it (Strength). In mass media, this is accomplished by acquiring a large distribution for your message using a media buy (television, radio, print), and developing an impactful message to deliver, through great creative, a compelling offer, and elegant copy. Success on both dimensions is roughly determined by how much you spend (many counter examples of expensive campaigns that flop miserably, notwithstanding).

Social media is very different. You are building a network, and it is not a network that you can acquire (note the controversy even in sponsored posts with Chris Brogan's now infamous (but well handled) controversy: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/advertising-and-trust/)

If you look at what drives our two key dimensions of influence in social media, strength of message and distribution, it could not be more different. Strength of message, as we all know from our own lives, is governed by the source of the message more than anything. I was looking for a new receiver a while ago, and I asked Chris Dias, a friend of mine, who happens to be a guy I trust on the topic of A/V equipment. He said "buy the Pioneer Elite, it's good". I bought it. Nothing to do with the creative of the message, everything to do with the source of the message.

Chris enjoys his status as the guru of A/V equipment in our social circle, and he maintains it by being knowledgeable, helpful, and usually right about the topic. Social media is no different.

Influencing influencers comes down to providing them with content of high enough quality that they find it useful to the groups they influence. Providing this high quality content, over time, in order to build credibility with the right influencers takes time, effort, integrity, and insightful content.

Then there's distribution. Social networks evolve over time, and as they evolve, they develop an ability to manage message retransmission through quality filters. Clay Shirky, one of my favourite writers on social media, puts it well in saying that it's not information overload, it's filter failure. (http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/4817) If you think of Aunt Maud's (everyone has one) constant forwarding of those rehashed joke emails from the 90's you'll know what I mean about filters. The message may be received, but won't make it past the filter.

For a message to pass through a social network, it has to pass three milestones:

Received: the message comes from someone who is a connection

Filtered: the message passes the filter criteria; either actual system rules (TweetDeck), or engrained habits (reflexively deleting Aunt Maud's emails)

Retransmitted: the message is interesting enough ("remarkable" enough, as Seth Godin would say) to be passed on to colleagues and friends

The key thing though is that the paths in a social network are strengthened by traffic. A source providing quality content will be a source you view more credibly later. Being viewed as a quality source in the network for a single message will translate into being seen as a quality node in the network in general.

The way to grow a network in size and strength is to steadily and reliably contribute high quality, remarkable content to it.

Investing in social media is not the same as investing in TV advertising. It cannot be measure in the same way as the return on investment in a single message as an ad campaign can because of the fact that the network cannot be acquired, it can only be grown. Each message that passes through the network will be judged on its own merits and will increase or decrease the quality of your overall network and your ability to influence the influencers. The organic nature of this growth means that time is a critical factor, and one that cannot be expedited.

Unless you have fundamental doubts that social networks are likely to be one of the most critical information sources for prospective buyers in the coming years, there's every reason to begin your investment in social media sooner rather than later, to allow sufficient time for your network to grow and mature.

First full day back to work

Today was my first full day back to work. It was harder than I thought it would be to concentrate on what I needed to do. Bella was really good. She slept a lot...I probably over-nursed her to help keep her happy... and she learned to love her swing just a little bit more.

I ended up having to spend quite a bit of time on the phone so she's also getting used to more noise than normal for her naptime. How long do you think my boss will find it "cute" to hear baby squawks when we are on the phone? Anywho...I tried to lay her down in the bedroom so she could sleep in relative quiet, but she'd wake up and fuss after about 3 minutes...maybe she sensed that something was different and she just needed to be near me a little more than normal...at least thats my story and I'm sticking to it. :)

The pink dress...

Oh she just looked so cute I couldn't resist taking pictures. She is a model for a photographer tomorrow AM...this photographer wants to take photos of babies to practice for when her sister delivers in a few months. She's from Portland and just moved to Ft. Huachuca...just like us!

I'll post the other ones tomorrow, but until then...feast your eyes...

Just a little grin for you.

Showing off my tootsies

Is it just me or does my hair have red in it?

See my pretty blue eyes?

This is me asking if we're almost done with this photo session...

Holding the toy that big sissy Maddie gave to me. Its so snuggly!

C'mon mom...you can do better than a burp rag as the background...even if I am Spitup McGee.

Driving Value for Sales: The Art in the Science

With Woods out of office last week, somewhere in the Caribbean, with limited WiFi (editorial) access, I thought this would be the perfect time to write my first post.

Let me start by saying I love salespeople. It takes a certain type of person, to get up every day and get hit in the face by a hammer over and over again, and come back for more.

As marketers, one of the best things we can do for sales is provide quality leads on an ongoing basis, and then get their feedback regularly to improve the quality we are providing. There are many strategies and tactics in demand generation to deliver on that promise, but what I have found in working with customers is that sometimes there is "art in the science" in ensuring sales gets the full value of everything that marketing is doing.

Let's talk about a few principles that will help you drive more value for sales.

1. It's all About the Deltas

There is nothing better than change in a stalled sales process. In the life insurance business, sales people talk about tracking "life events" - getting married, having a baby, etc. as critical times to engage a client to sell them more insurance. Well in B2B the concept is the same, but sales people track "business events" instead of life events.

Make sure when setting up lead scoring dashboards, or campaign reports that you focus on the changes that have occurred instead of an overview
It is better to error on the side of showing less, but everything is new, than showing more and only 10% have changed

2. Help Make Them Look Good

With all of the conversion analysis, website tracking , and Co-dynamic lead scoring algorithms out there, you sometimes forget that one of the best things you can do for sales, is help them deliver messaging in a professional and relevant way to their prospects. One of the best tactics to do this is to use Agent Personalized email campaigns - that brand the campaign as if the sales person sent it themselves. Sure, statistics show that you will get a 30% increase in opens and up to a 300% increase in click-throughs, but here are two other benefits that will really help you with sales:

They stay top of mind with their prospects with value-add content, which will lead to more phone connections or call-backs
And get this - they will get inbound calls. Forget web visits, forget form submissions, they will actually get inbound calls which lead to qualified opportunities. Now that is something that sales will get excited about

3. Match the Salesperson's Routine

If you are planning on sending real-time alerts, or lead reports to a salesperson, it is important to allow reps to receive this information based on their own daily or weekly routines. Matching a salesperson routine will drive rapid adoption of valuable information. Reports sent to them too frequently or infrequently, quickly are ignored - so spend the extra time to find out what will work best for each rep.

Looking for an Outcome - Testing in B2B

I was watching Tamara Gielen's video of Jim Sterne from the EIS keynote (http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/2008/12/eis-keynote-cro.html), and it got me thinking about the challenges of testing in B2B. It's a tough exercise because of one fundamental challenge. Testing of marketing involves defining an outcome you're looking for so that you can say that option A did a better job than option B of driving that outcome. The trouble with B2B marketing is that those outcomes make a quick jump from irrelevant to immeasurable.

What do I mean by that?

Well, in B2C marketing, you can often define the outcome of a marketing campaign as purchase revenue. Send an email, observe how many people buy and how much they spend. You can then test against that outcome to see which copy, creative, subject, or list drives more of it and that's your best marketing option.

In B2B marketing, your sales cycles are often much longer - months if not quarters or years - and the sales cycle is often concluded off-line by a sales rep getting a signature on a contract. This means that any testing you might want to do against the ideal results - the driving of revenue - are both extremely difficult to tie together, and require more time to elapse than is practical (if you have to wait 3 months to see enough results to determine which marketing campaign to launch, you've likely missed your window).

Similarly, if you look at things that can be easily measured in B2B, they are usually not significant enough to guide decisions; opens, clickthroughs, and form submits are not great indicators of revenue. If you are testing against which campaign drives more of these activities, you are likely going to find that free iPod giveaways perform fairly well, but as we've all seen, they are not likely to turn into good leads for your sales team to follow up with.

Luckily, there is an interim outcome that you can test against, does correspond to revenue potential, and is quickly determined; the qualified lead. With a definition in place of what a qualified lead is, you now have a measurement of what outcome your campaigns are trying for.

Note that what we're talking about here is leads qualified based on their interest (implicit scoring) rather than who they are (explicit scoring), as your marketing campaigns are unlikely to change the titles or industries of your audience. (for a deeper discussion on dimensions of scoring, see here:

http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html)

The advantage of this approach is that it can test more than just a single-point communication such as an email. In B2B marketing, we are often looking to test one sequence of communications against another (let's say it's a 3 step program for post-webinar follow-up and we're testing two different messaging options, or an all-email version against a multi-channel version using email, direct mail, and voice). If you're doing that, you have even more need to use an abstracted outcome like qualified leads to be able to look at the overall effect of one sequence over another.

I look forward to you comments on what has and has not worked in your testing efforts against longer sales cycles. Read More...

To work or not to work...

I got the nicest compliment today. Because we lost our Oregon contract I have been pretty unsure about my employment status. Well...Monday the pink slips went out the door to the 7 employees left in OR. The only exceptions to this layoff were myself and the Portland office manager.

Today, I had a long conversation with my boss about options. I laid it all out on the line for him...moving to Germany, possibly not being able to travel, having the baby around, etc...

He said, "Listen...I'll be as flexible as I possibly can. If I can keep you as an employee that is my number 1 goal. I can't guarantee anything, but I don't want to lose you."

WOW...I guess I can count that as a positive vote of confidence in my abilities as an employee.

So, I've got some info I'm waiting to hear back from HR on, but it looks like I'm getting the BEST of both worlds. I stay employed at my current salary, etc., but I get to take as much time off as I want/need for Bella AND he sees this lasting through a move to Germany.

Go figure... Read More...

How much is too much? Frequency management and control

One conversation I end up in a lot with clients is the "how many times can I email a person per month?" conversation. Unfortunately, there is not a magic number, and attempting to govern around one can be damaging.

The reason that there's not a magic number is that email is only useful in the context of building a relationship, and in a relationship communication frequency changes dramatically depending on the type of relationship and where that relationship is at the moment. Think of this question in terms of your communications with your friends and family - how many times per month do you communicate with your spouse? kids? Aunt Hilda? Neighbors? Old friends from school days? The answer is that it depends on the relationship.

It's the same thing in B2B marketing. If you are actively engaging with a prospect, and they are highly interested in what you are offering, they will want, and appreciate, frequent communications. However, if you're only lightly engaged with someone, and they have only displayed minimal interest, you will turn them off with more than a communication per month in many cases.

The answer is that you have to manage this from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

There is not a top-down X emails per month number that you can manage to. Instead, you need to understand your audience in terms of how much you have communicated to them and, more importantly, how engaged they are with you, and use that to guide communication frequency.

Use your understanding of your audience's response to your marketing (their Digital Body Language) to segment them into groups. Use communication frequency and response frequency(email opens, clicks, form submits, web visits, etc) to define three segments:

High Engagement: you have sent them many communications, and they have shown great inbound interest

Moderate Engagement: you have sent them some communications, but their inbound activity remains occasional

Low Engagement: you have communicated with them, but they show little to no inbound activity

From here, you can then use these segments to build a bottom-up frequency management structure. Look at your communications and define what category they fall into. If they are a "required" or "all recipients" category, you may not suppress against any of the groups (eg, registration confirmation for events the recipient just registered for, or the quarterly thought

leadership newsletter). If the messages are in an "active interest" category, you may suppress Low and Moderate Engagement segments from receiving them (up to the minute news, detailed product information, etc), and if the messages are in a "moderate interest" category you may only suppress the Low Engagement segment.

This gives you a good bottoms up model for structuring your communications strategy to avoid over-communicating with some of your recipients (causing Emotional Unsubscribes: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/emotional-unsubscribes.html) without preventing the formation of deeper relationships with those who are showing great interest.

I look forward to your comments or experiences with managing communication frequency.

Grumpin'

I am a single mom for the next month or so. Shhhh...don't tell anyone...John's in SPY SCHOOL.

Actually, he's just working really long days AND weekends for the next couple of months and I am a little grumpy about it right now.

OK...got that off my chest. Am feeling better now.

Second grump...I do believe I'm going to be out of a job soon. Things are NOT looking good there. Must figure out my next move. I was supposed to go off disability last week, but that didn't happen...now I've got to have a plan of action...should I play hardnose and DEMAND work since its against the law for them to fire me right off disability?

Probably won't do that...I like my boss too much, but still....I don't want this junkola weighing on my mind. Read More...

Happy 2 month birthday smiley!

Yesterday on Bella's 2 month birthday we decided to take a long walk for a birthday treat. It was 70 degrees outside. I had on a jacket and had to take it off...so, off we go on our walk to the end of the street...when we get there I see a trail that I'd been wondering about. So, feeling adventerous we head out on the trail. This whole time I'm on a conference call for work so I'm not really paying good attention.

On our walk...

Suddenly I realize I have no clue where I am. I'm not totally lost because I can see houses and all that around me, but I'm a little lost because I don't remember how to get back to MY street.

What I see when looking around for the road back home...

So, we improvise and end up coming out of the desert walk in a SCARY part of Sierra Vista. I'm talking about boarded up trailer park houses, large dogs that bark madly at you and strain their heavy duty chains to try and eat you up and back alleys where I was sure I'd find a body...

Boarded up trailer...

So, I call my dear friend Stephiloulou and tell her that if she loses me on the phone to immediately call 9-1-1 and tell them I was on Twilight street. (such a pretty name for a scary place) Then she helped me find my way home...about 30 more minutes of walking...

Our little walk ended up to be a two and 1/2 hour adventure that won me "mother of the year" award as I came totally unprepared to change diapers, feed baby or simply to walk as far as we did. That being said...I realize my little off-road trek was a stupid move that I won't be repeating anytime soon without my manly man next to me to act as body guard.

Now after that charming short story, I ALSO want to wish my sweet nephew Beckham a happy 2 month birthday today. He was born 15 hours after Bella. What fun to have a literal "same age cousin!"

And, to top it all off, I finally had a camera when Bella was practicing her gorgeous grin and I got it on film! She still doesn't have full control of when her little face lights up with this great smile, but she's practicing it an awful lot lately. I LOVE it. See the following 2 kabillion photos as I couldn't choose just ONE.

You want me to what?

OH, SMILE?!!

Sourcefire's Open Source Marketing Ecosystem

One of the great things about writing a book is that you have so many great conversations with leaders in the field. Chatting with Michele Perry and Karin Pindle, at Sourcefire was definitely one of those conversations. They have an interesting challenge as marketers; too many leads. Their open source product, SNORT, is wildly popular in the security space, and leads to large numbers of downloads. The marketing team's challenge, however, is to translate that interest into purchases of their commercial product, Sourcefire 3D.

Here's a case study on their efforts from my upcoming book Digital Body Language, to give you a sense of how the Sourcefire marketing team tackled that challenge:

Sourcefire: Open Source Marketing Ecosystem
As a leader in network security solutions, Sourcefire had both an opportunity and a challenge. Their freely available and popular open source SNORT® intrusion prevention system drove significant awareness and interest, but for their sales team to be most effective, they needed to engage with only the leads who were likely to purchase a commercial offering. To enable this, Sourcefire’s marketing team had to enable prospective buyers to progress through the maturity spectrum and identify those who were ready for sales engagement.

Search engine strategies targeted buyers at all phases of the buying cycle, with education offered to those searching for category-related terms and deeper demos and comparisons targeted at those searching for Sourcefire or a competitor directly. To start the process, Sourcefire created an education-heavy web experience. For those new to the category, analyst reports, case studies, demos, webcasts, and thought leadership were provided for little more than a small amount of information. This enabled Sourcefire to establish themselves in the prospects’ minds as a leader in the space, and engage in the start of an ongoing dialog, while at the same time guiding the prospects’ understanding and awareness of what matters most in security.
When engaged, a rich profile on interests and level of engagement enabled both the scoring of leads and the nurturing of those not yet ready for sales. A four category scoring system looked at marketing source, site activity, title, and company
profile in order to score and categorize leads.
With leads categorized in A, B, C, and D leads, the Sourcefire team did an interesting thing; A and B leads were immediately handed to sales, but the entire lead funnel was opened to them. Sales professionals would occasionally notice a D lead in a key account, and use the non-qualified lead as an opportunity to begin a relationship that would be valuable when the lead matures to a later stage.
Leads that were not picked up were nurtured over time, and with
dashboard metrics on lead population by level, they were moved slowly down the
funnel. Each nurturing campaign was measured on its ability to transition
leads between the stages. With this overall marketing structure in place,
the Sourcefire marketing team proudly points to two key data points as measures
of its success; their sales team has stopped screaming for more leads, and most
recently they achieved year-over-year quarterly revenue growth of 42% in 2Q08
over 2Q07. Both of which, of course, are great accomplishments for any
marketing organization."

Feeeeeeeelings....

I have that old song going through my head...

Feelings, nothing more than feelings
Trying to forget my feelings of love
Teardrops rolling down on my face
Trying to forget my feelings of love

I think I'm just being emotional, but tomorrow I start work again and its tearing me up inside...what if...what if I miss Bella too much. I know I work from home, but I can't spend every minute I want WITH her. What if she needs me and I have work obligations...even worse...what if she doesn't need me and is just fine.

I don't want to miss even one minute of her life...she's growing up so fast. She just graduated from newborn diapers to size ones. Its breaking my heart!

WAAAAAH....

Tell me this is just hormones.

Tagging for 6

Apparently I got tagged to post my 6th picture in my 6th electronic picture folder and I also have to tag 6 friends to do the same...Ila, Jenny, Cousin Jen, my sisters Jenna and Emma and Tina Marie...

Auntie Kris saying goodbye to Bella before she left Arizona and headed home. She's getting deployed soon. We'll miss her!

The Martins came, played and went back to Oklahoma

They were just passing through, but we got the pleasure of my sister and her husband and their two adorable kids as they were on their way back to Oklahoma. Not only did we have a great time just catching up, but it gave Bella a chance to meet even MORE of her cousins and have some auntie and uncle time.

It was just too much fun watching all these little ones together. Margie is 3 and was enamored with "Baby Ella" and Jacob at 18 months was a little frustrated that mommy was holding a baby other than himself. That being said...they brought with them gripe water (apparently the end all to sour baby tummies...I've still got to test it.) and a bunch of good advice such as...hey...you should put up your swing...by the way did you know you can do THIS with it?

Plus mama (me) was saved a blowout diaper change when Auntie Becca just went ahead and took care of it....WOAH...that doesn't ever happen around here with just the two of us normally.

So, that being said...a few pictures to commemorate our time together. **note that the camera is not taking great photos these days...must get that looked at.**

Margie feeding Bella a bottle and Jakey just wanting to be part of the party!

Sweet Margie helping calm down her "Baby Ella" with sweet kisses and whispers

Jakey checking out the swing...he was hoping he was still little enough to fit in it.

Uncle John and Uncle Dan feasting on wings and ribs

Margie chewing on some celery...she kept missing one little string that couldn't seem to make it in her mouth.

Jakey's great smile...

Two pretty girls - Auntie Becca with Baby Bella

Uncle John reading stories before bedtime

Enabling Sales to Thrive - 6 Things B2B Marketers Can Do

In looking at a lot of blog posts and comments from luminaries around the space, there seems to be a lot of agreement on a few of the current trends in B2B marketing. I would summarize one of the main themes as

"The buyers are in control, and the best way to connect with them is to provide
great content, relevant at any key part of the buying process, make this
content discoverable, use it to nurture their interest over time, and then
understand who is ready to buy by understanding their activity."

But that leaves an interesting question. How do you best enable your sales team in this environment, given that their historical control over a "sales process" has disappeared, and they must now shift to a role of guiding a "buying process". Especially for target accounts, or high-value prospects, your sales team will want to be involved throughout the entire process to ensure they are maximally effective.

Many successful B2B salespeople in today's environment act almost as "mini-marketers", and may engage with the right prospect over an extended (many quarters) period in order to build trust, establish a relationship, and educate their prospect until they see that there is an opportunity to engage in a selling relationship.

As marketers, we are in a unique position to enable this by understanding that salesperson's world and enabling them to do their job even more effectively.

Great Content: by providing ready access to the right type of messaging and content, we provide the salesperson with valuable information they can send to their prospects at each stage of their buying process. This is good, insightful, value-add content though, not filled with corporate-speak or highly promotional in nature. Make it available to them where they live - in their desktop email environment - or they likely won't bother with it.

Email Intros For Great Content: the marketing assets that share the valuable thought leadership are necessary, but they are often more valuable if they are passed to the prospect from their sales rep saying "I saw this and thought you might find it interesting based on our last conversation about X". As a marketing team, if you can craft a generic, authentic, email that introduces each marketing asset, and allow your sales team to personalize them to each high-value prospect, you enable your sales team to leverage the marketing assets more effectively.

Digital Body Language: give your sales team a way to see the inbound activity of each prospect so they can understand what their interests are, what stage in their buying process they are at, and how they might want to follow-up. Sales intuition, backed up by marketing data, is more powerful than either alone. Show this data to them in their CRM system; right where they are working.

Notifications: for high-value prospects, notify your sales team when activity is shown; a web visit, a signup for a webinar, a view of a whitepaper, etc. Often this will trigger an opportunity to engage with them to continue developing the relationship.

Scoring: When you have developed both explicit (who they are) and implicit (how interested they are) scoring processes, make this score visible to your sales team so they can understand, at a glance, how receptive the prospect will be to messaging appropriate to the next phase of a buying cycle.

Nurturing: Provide a way for your sales team to add their prospects to automated nurturing programs that keep them warm over time. I wrote more about Giving Sales an "Out" here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/giving-sales-out.html

For your sales team to thrive in today's buyer-controlled environment, they need to do many of the same things you do as a marketer. Providing great content, to the right person, relevant to where that person is in their buying process, and then understanding when they are ready for a deeper level of engagement is a challenge shared by marketers and sales people alike. Only the breadth and depth of the challenge differs. By repurposing your content, nurturing, and scoring systems for the narrower, yet deeper, relationships of a sales person, you enable them to thrive in today's environment. Read More...

One of my resolutions is a walk a day with Bellina. This is supposed to help me get back in the swing of exercising...taking the baby for a walk in the stroller is a good start...gets us out of the house...which also means I have to actually get dressed AND she loves being outdoors!

Yesterday I took Bella to the local park to check out Christmas - Sierra Vista style. They have all these wooden Santas up in the park. I was really glad they hadn't taken them down yet as I really wanted to see them up close. It was FREEZING cold. I bundled up in my coat and Bell in about 700 blankets and we walked around looking at them. These were a couple of my favorites...

Kadient: Blogging About Internal Processes Connects With Buyers

Transparency is a great approach to marketing, even when you might think that the internal workings of your organization might not be of any interest to your audience. Heather Stokes and Heather Margolis at Kadient found this out when leading bloggers took note of their internal efforts to develop user personas. The personas were being used to best focus their development efforts for their Sales Enablement products, but the effort Kadient had put in to understand their users (including life sized cardboard cutouts of Anya and Luke, two of the personas) won them recognition, awareness, and credibility with potential buyers in the social media sphere of influence.

The effort resulted in traffic to the Kadient site and an increase in credibility for their products and company. As with many investments of this nature though, it can be hard to measure the economic return. What are your thoughts as B2B marketers? Are these "inner-workings" efforts worth doing? Have you measured them successfully?

Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

Kadient: Blogging About Internal Processes Connects With Buyers

Kadient’s move into Software as a Service (SaaS) brought with it a fundamental shift in their marketing to connect more deeply with their buyer and user audience. A company-wide effort to develop and use buyer and user personas sparked numerous discussions on exactly how “Luke” or “Anya”, and several other personas, would use the product in his or her daily life, and how it should be built, marketed, and sold in order to best connect with him or her.

As they focused more on connecting with their buyers, Kadient fleshed out the personalities with increasing detail. Hobbies, personality traits, and even cardboard cutouts were created to provide insights into Anya and Luke. When a development or marketing meeting was held to discuss the market, the discussion would always focus around their buyer and user personas.

This effort was then noticed by David Meerman Scott, an influential industry blogger and writer, who highlighted Kadient’s efforts in his online forum. Although the main topic of the writing was the use of buyer and user personas, Kadient was identified as a leader in their field. Anya and Luke were highlighted in detail, allowing any reader of the blog to identify with their goals and challenges.

Two other industry bloggers, Charles Brown and Scott Sehlhorst of Tyner Blain, quickly picked up the story, and added their own commentary, further establishing Kadient as a company intently focused on the success of their customers. A Google blog search for Kadient shows these blogs highlighted at the top of the results, adding credibility to any buyer considering Kadient’s solutions. The combined traffic of these blogs was estimated at more than 20,000 regular viewers.

A 37% spike in web traffic to the Kadient site corresponding to this discussion on the blogs highlighted to the Kadient marketing team the importance to their prospective buyers of a company dedicated to continual understanding of the buyers’ needs. Although this was not an effort that generated direct sales leads, the value it provided in awareness and credibility was tremendous, and the cost was essentially zero.

Lexi's trip to Arizona in pictures!

We had the great pleasure of Miss Lexi Loo coming to visit us all by herself for a whole week after Christmas. She did get snowed in and her first flight cancelled, but managed to fly out of portland about 24 hours later. We had such a great time with her.

The first thing we did when she arrived was made her open her Christmas gift...

Then, of course we put her to work bathing the baby...actually, she asked to do it. She was so excited to see her little sister again!

We had to take her to Tombstone...only the most famous of old west locations...funny that she'd never even HEARD of boot hill...what do they teach kids in history class these days? Am I really that old?

Ain't she the cutest ever in this fur hat?

The best part is you can't tell where Lexi's crazy hair ends and this pelt hat begins. We had a good laugh over that.

Errrrr....madame mustache? Weird.

Lexi took this picture for us. We had a wonderful time in Tombstone.

I think Miss Lexi Loo gets her personality from her father. They didn't plan the pose...they both just DID it. Thats a little scary.

One of the few things Lexi had on HER agenda was eating at Buffalo Wild Wings. We had lunch there and played the trivia games. Notice the top three? That would me ME in first place, John in second and Lexi in third. Woohooo

SE Arizona is full of old ghost towns. John and I had never been to any so we decided to take Lexi on a trip to Gleeson. After driving for what felt like HOURS down an old unpaved road we finally happened upon it...

I'd be surprised if there are still 100 people left in this town. We only saw signs of habitation in one or two spots!

Ruins in the ghost town.

We had to take Lexi to our favorite little artistic town called Bisbee. An old mining town built into the side of a mountain...Bisbee has narrow one way streets, hidden niches and is full of charm. The townspeople...well as Dick, the curator at the local historical society, said, "We don't have hippies anymore. They have all turned into ARTISTS."

Wahoo...the big B on the hillside means Bisbee.

In our favorite Bisbee shop - the metal works place. They have lots of interesting sculptures....like this skeleton chair. Wouldn't it look smashing in our living room?

A beautiful goddess image on one of the historic home sites

Daddy and daughter walking up a small street in Bisbee

The town is supposed to be haunted, but ghost love?

The copper mine

John and Lexi went to see a sanctuary built into the side of the hill near Sierra Vista. Its a beautiful location - of the Catholic persuasion - and quite interesting to visit and to see the various artifacts, relics and "stations of the cross" that they've built.

The Chapel, giant cross and giant Mary statue

Lexi taking a picture of a pretty tiled decoration

The day before she went home we all headed up to Old Tucson. We stopped in at Miss Kitty's Christmas show, ate some BBQ, watched the wild west shootout, walked around the park and then headed home early. Between the hot 70 degree weather and the long fun week we'd had everyone was ready to head home for some rest and relaxation.

What are they looking at?