Additional lessons learned (or re-learned) in 2010

Here are a few additional lessons learned from our recent work and conversations with some very smart marketers (see previous post).

1. Nail it before you scale it

This age-old phrase is one of those things that we all need to be reminded of from time to time. Since we have already invested blood, sweat, and our egos in our idea, there is a great temptation to just run with it, especially if we just raised some money. So here are the key questions we should ask very early on:

• Do we know who will buy our product?
• Are these people jumping up and down when they hear about it?
• More importantly, how much will they be willing to pay for it?

The answers have to come from real buyers, not our own “make wish” personas. If the answer to any of the above is unclear, we need to go back to the drawing board before we spend any additional time or money on product development, marketing, or sales.

Elementary, but so hard to do…

For more about it, read Early Stage Marketing.


2. Get sales and marketing on the same page (literally)

Salespeople love to complain about the leads they get from marketing. Just as much, marketing people love to complain that sales don’t follow up on the leads they pass to them. The problem is they are both right.

Panaya is addressing the problem head-on with a written contract between marketing and sales that defines what constitutes a qualified lead. The contract is revisited each quarter to ensure that everybody is still on the same page.

There are three functions that help make it work:

• Lead qualification criteria and rules that reflect the contract are built into the company’s salesforce.com system
• Automated lead scoring (using Marketo) is helping everybody focus on the more qualified leads
• But not everything can be automated. Most important in my mind is the sales development function, which identifies real decision makers and opportunities, then passes them to sales.

See here for more ideas on marketing and sales alignment.


3. Use content to fuel the marketing machine

All the companies we know that are doing a great job generating a consistent stream of sales leads have one thing in common: they all invest in generating quality content.

The content is used to engage potential buyers and keep the conversation with them alive, through both outbound and inbound marketing. It doesn’t have to be related to the solution; but it does have to provide value to the reader.

The concept is simple: offer high-quality, broad-interest content to attract new leads and re-engage existing contacts, then feed these inquiries into the “lead machine” described above (lead scoring + a lead development team) to qualify and convert into sales opportunities.

According to SAManage CEO Doron Gordon, the importance of having lots of content is evident from the path visitors take on the company’s website. Visitors usually start with the blog and can visit as many as ten different pages before they register for a free trial or another offer (SAManage provides SaaS-based IT Service and Asset Management).

Some good content offer examples:

• Smart Questions For Your SaaS Vendor offered by SAManage
• SAP Salary Survey offered by Panaya
• Real Estate Investment Operational Challenges Survey by Resolve Technology

Any lessons you can share? Feel free to comment or send me a note.

Lessons learned from our clients: When is it time to change your demand generation strategy?

Panaya is a great success story. The company’s SaaS solutions help SAP customers automate their ERP upgrades and save thousands of hours in the process.

When Panaya first started marketing its solution, the challenge was to get the word out as quickly as possible, says Chief Marketing Officer Amit Bendov.

Amit and his team orchestrated an aggressive direct marketing program, using rental email lists that targeted SAP directors. A highly qualified phone sales team was hired to follow up on the leads generated.

Panaya’s value proposition is extremely compelling. Not less important, it is really easy to prove, and the solution requires near-zero implementation effort. With these assets in place, the number of deals closed kept growing at a double-digit pace quarter after quarter.

By the beginning of 2010, the company had several hundreds of customers. Despite these impressive results, Amit knew that sustaining this growth would require a different approach.

Realizing that going after the low hanging fruit could not support Panaya’s growth targets forever, Amit has refocused his team on a new strategy. With a well-defined target of SAP customers, the Panaya team has reoriented itself to methodically reach the 30,000 companies that make up this universe.

Instead of working on Leads, the Panaya sales development people now work on Accounts and Contacts. Within each account, contacts are classified into three categories—decision makers, influencers, and irrelevant.

“We had so many leads we couldn’t see the forest from the trees,” says Amit. “Once the list was reorganized into accounts and contacts, we could see which accounts we were missing or where we didn’t have the right level contacts.” A research team is now focused on identifying the missing accounts and contacts so they could be added to the house list and targeted by the sales team.

“With this systematic process in place, we can clearly see how many accounts we are touching each week and what is our level of engagement at each account,” says Amit. “We have much better visibility into our entire sales and marketing funnel from the very early stages. We can have 20 different leads from one account, and each one on its own may not be qualified enough. Now we can see that 20 people from the same company are showing interest, so we can take action on that.”

What Panaya is doing makes a lot of sense. They are not the first company to employ an account-based strategy. What I find notable is that they didn’t wait for things to get bad. They had the insight to recognize that their success had brought them to a new growth stage that required a different approach, and they acted on it. Way to go!

Related article: Reverse Engineer Your Marketing