Next Generation CMO

Lifelogging round-up (gamification of life)

2010-09-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

It all started with reading a blog about "instrumenting Truman" after I searched for "instrumenting real-life" in the context of gamification of our life (a very hot topic in marketing):

The original blog series is here: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/instrumenting-truman.html and http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/socializing-truman.html

Since I have a background in large-scale logging and data management, you would expect that I get excited when it comes to "logging" stuff - in this case our everyday actions (so that we can then count and be rewarded for those actions).

I am just learning and thought others might want to piggy back on this round up of stuff. I am of course VERY interested to get your links and lists of other ways to record automatically what we do in everyday life.

Seems the center of activity is around: http://www.quantifiedself.com/

Gary Wolf on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self.html

Bay Area Quantified Self meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/quantifiedself/ (event coming up on Oct 6)

Videos from the meetups: http://vimeo.com/groups/17842/videos

track your life (true 'lifelogging')

http://thecarrot.com/

http://themineproject.org/

http://personalstats.nl/

shopping

http://www.shwowp.com/

food

http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/iphone-calorie-tracker/

http://www.fatsecret.com/connected/android

energy monitoring

http://www.wattvision.com

Google Energy Meter

fitness

http://www.wahoofitness.com/

http://sweat365.com/

http://beta.mapmyfitness.com/

http://www.fitbit.com

health

http://www.patientslikeme.com/

http://www.curetogether.com/

https://www.keas.com/logon.html?destination=index.html

location services (many)

http://location-labs.com/

finances (many)

www.mint.com

Time for disruptive innovation in the venture capital industry – some ideas

2010-03-10T22:51:00.000-08:00

I have long believed that the venture capital industry itself is ripe for some seriously disruptive innovation. I believe there will be a firm in the not so distant future who will unseat the likes of Sequoia and Kleiner from their thrones. Too much of the success of the big firms is now a self-fulfilling prophecy (a house of cards): these firms are successful (IMHO) because every entrepreneur goes there first and thus these VCs see more and better deals and have more complete information to base their investment decisions on. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no true unfair advantage. If entrepreneurs can get a much better deal elsewhere, they will go … taking with them the very foundation of the competitive advantage (superior deal flow and superior information).

I haven’t seen anything truly disruptive yet, but here are some examples of new ideas. The first signs of innovation in the venture capital industry:

1) Passive investing

Correlation Ventures, a new firm that would use an algorithm to passively invest in VC deals led by other firms. Basically a quant approach to venture capital. From PE Hub:

- Correlation’s debut fund target is $150 million;

- Cornerstone limited partners are Morgan Stanley AIP and BGI Growth Partners;

- The portfolio is expected to have between 50 and 75 companies, with average investment sizes of between $1 million and $4 million;

- Typical investment decision time will be just two weeks;

- Average annual management fees will be just 1.4%;

- Correlation has held “recent GP deal-flow meetings” with 48 U.S.-based venture firms;

- The firm’s quantitative director is J.D. Opdyke, former president of DataMineIt.

2) Super Angels

Super Angels don’t have a new model at all. They are taking the industry back to its roots and beginnings focusing on deals that are too small for super-sized funds. It is interesting though that Business Week found it worthwhile to dedicate an article to the (re)-emergence of Super Angels, making this officially a ‘trend’. Some of the firms mentioned in their article include: First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Maples Investments, and Felicis Ventures. Business Week article on the subject here: http://bit.ly/bSseZu

3) Andreessen Horowitz

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their inaugural fund with some fresh ideas. Such as great flexibility in how much money to invest: less up front to build product, but more to scale in global markets: their investments can range from $50,000 to $50 million. Also, the firm has an explicit, and somewhat rare, bias towards technical founders and specifically towards supporting technical founders as the long-time CEOs of their companies. Recently, they have also endorsed the Seed Stage Documents, a free set of legal documents to be used by entrepreneurs – http://bit.ly/cgyG3u. Marc’s inaugural blog introducing his new firm in more detail is here: http://bit.ly/clYhkq

4) Early Exit

The Founders Fund – trying to create an exit for founders and early employees even before the company has been sold or gone public. Others, such as Industry Ventures are focusing on secondary stakes, mostly buying out fund shares, but sometimes also buying shares from founders or early employees. Article on The Founders Fund here - http://bit.ly/9XHnd7 and article on Industry Ventures is here - http://bit.ly/asHJ0T/.

“Specifically, it will continue its practice of offering start-up founders Series FF stock, that can be converted to preferred stock during following rounds of funding (more on FF stock, here). Preferred stock can let founders sell a portion of their stock while still running their companies. The firm also says it gives entrepreneurs additional voting power, to help them maintain direct control of their companies as additional investors are brought on board.”

Now this is starting to get interesting! As a founder, I certainly welcome the additional liquidity options! It would be even more interesting if I could share in the success of other portfolio companies, thereby creating some portfolio diversification and some true incentives on the part of the entrepreneur/CEO to help other portfolio companies.

Passion, Accountability and Focus: Ten Founding Principles for Start-Ups

2010-02-16T13:53:00.000-08:00

Being on a (part-time) sabbatical allows me to formulate some of my beliefs about starting great businesses. This is my first attempt to distill my start-up experiences into ten tips. I am sure there will be future iterations. I welcome your comments!

Passion & Respect

1. Love what you do
o Be passionate about building a great company and great products
o Have some fun along the way

2. Respect each other
o This includes employees, customers, competitors and shareholders
o Honesty and integrity cannot be compromised for any reason

Clarity & Accountability

3. Set clear objectives
o Set objectives and methods as a team, then agree (or disagree) and commit
o Translate company objectives into team and individual objectives
o Empower front-line employees to make decisions

4. Encourage creativity and innovation to achieve objectives
o The best companies excel not only in what they do, but also how they do it

5. Measure results, not efforts, to determine success
o Work hard, play hard

6. Review progress and results regularly as a team and adjust methods as needed
o Communicate good and bad news promptly to avoid surprises
o Never shoot the messenger

7. Rely on leading, rather than lagging indicators
o Invest in superior information systems for near-instant feedback

Focus

8. Focus on one thing only, and do one thing very well
o Align all your wood behind one arrow
o The company and product names are synonyms

9. The customers always comes first
o Solve such a pressing need, that customers pay for an early proto type
o Remember that technology is a means, not a goal
o Bring in customers first, and investors later

10. Create a new market, not just a new product

The un-conference; can it work as a virtual event?

2009-11-12T17:27:00.000-08:00

A couple of thoughts on conferences for B2B marketing – events like:

User conferences
Trade shows
Educational conferences

Virtual events show great promise.

What my CMO club video comments on the topic here:

“I believe the virtual trade show was successful because prospects received a superior experience as compared to the physical alternative. Just like a physical conference, they found all vendors in one place and could speak live to company representatives to help with their short-list and purchasing decision. Better than with a physical conference, they can actually speak to technical product managers and other experts who do not regularly fly into physical trade shows.”

Some examples:

Freescale 3-day virtual user conference
Cisco Virtual global sales event (19,000 sales people globally came together virtually in September 2009)
Buick Lacrosse virtual product launch
Biggest virtual sleepover targeted at teenage girls
Virtual event live from Trinidad
The worlds largest cruise night
Virtual Forbes.com investor conferences

Advantages:

Have multiple experiences – including hands-on experience (lab) with product
Ask questions from multiple people while listening
Costs savings
Feedback – complete insights into attendee activities (feed lead ranking by time spent)
More details on attendees than in physical events (very detailed registration questions)
Get more senior audience than with physical events – and more senior presenters
You can bring dream team to answer questions – people can get through to experts that they otherwise wouldn’t speak to

At CMO Club’s Thought Leadership Summit in San Francisco RIM shared some of their experiences with virtual events:

BlackBerry has a history of 14 city road show 150 attendees at cost of $250 per attendee
Three years ago went vertical and created the BlackBerry Technical Seminar
Results: 21,000 registrations across 4 virtual events
30 countries spanning 24 time zones – 19,000 hours spent in environment
From December 3, it’s an ongoing event that is open 24/7
Average cost per registration was $23 ($45 per attendee)

Un-conferences show great promise.

I recently met Dave Nielsen, one of the people behind the popular Cloudcamp un-conferences. Dave has been able to create engaging conference experiences where attendees learn most from other attendees. Un-conferences are still too few and far between in the IT industry. Even the CMO Club’s Thought Leadership Summit, which is aiming to create conversations between Chief Marketing Officers, is still being organized using a traditional speaker and panel formats.

Now what if the un-conference could go virtual?

I would love to hear from any of you who have experiences with un-conferences, virtual B2B events or the combination or a combination of both of these.

Just when you thought social media replaced traditional media ...

2009-08-27T23:44:00.000-07:00

I have been bragging that we have re-directed a considerable percentage of our PR spending from traditional public relations to social media and community based activities. We did this after analyzing the source traffic to our website. "Traditional media" (meaning the online publications of business and industry magazines) drive only a very small percentage of overall traffic (less than 5%). The majority of web visitors find out about us in the real world (and type or URL directly), via Google (and to a much lesser extend the other search engines) or via a variety of niche blogs and (not so) niche social media sites (such as Twitter and LinkedIn).

Then ...

Today I am reading about one of those new aged technology companies OpenDNS.

Of course I turned to wikipedia first to read:

On July 10, 2006, the service was covered by digg, Slashdot, and Wired News, which resulted in an increase of DNS requests from just over one million requests on July 9 to 30 million on July 11.

Those are some pretty amazing results for traditional (but not so traditional) online PR.

A thirty fold increase!

Customer self-service in B2B, cloud and enterprise 2.0 pays big

2009-08-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

SolarWinds is a pioneer in customer self-service selling: prospects see literature, see a demo and download free trial software before a sales person ever reaches out.

The returns are worth the effort: SolarWinds gross margins stands at a whopping 96% compared to industry average (80%) and even better than super-stars like Adobe (93%), Checkpoint (90%) and VM Ware (88%). Operating margins are also exceptional: SolarWinds stands at 48%, compared to industry average of 27%! Only Check Point has better operating margin (51%). Even Microsoft has operating margins of "only" 37%.

The ingredients to success can be summarized as:

Software only model (no professional services) results in high gross margins
Efficient offshore R&D model (10% of sales compared to industry average of 13%)
Low touch model keep sales and marketing expenses at 26% compared to 30% average

This is quite an achievement for a company with less than $100 million in revenues. Conventional wisdom has been that only massive scale can lower cost of sales as a percentage of revenues. Microsoft, SAP and Oracle have sales and marketing costs of about 20%. Industry average for software is 30%. SolarWinds achieves 26%.

Compare this with a company of similar size: ArcSight (ARST). ARST cost of sales and marketing is 41%! Granted, both companies are (for now) addressing very different markets - SWI goes after small/medium, whereas ARST tends to address large/very large organizations. Nevertheless, when I was a venture capitalst, the convential wisdom was that businesses selling to SMB would not be scalable. Sales and marketing costs were assumed "too high" to address the segment.

SWI has all proven us otherwise.

A brief comparison with ARST, another enterprise software pure play, with similar revenues:

Gross margin 81% (ARST), 96% (SWI)

Operating margin 9% (ARST), 48% (SWI)

Cost of sales & marketing 41% (ARST), 26% (SWI)

Cost of R&D 17% (ARST), 10% (SWI)

Can anybody speak about / share the numbers of other late-stage enterprise 2.0 companies and their level of sales and marketing efficiency?

Thanks!

In Enterprise 2.0 The Star Sales Rep Is An Engineer

2009-08-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Colleen Copple left a nice comment on my blog "Social Marketing Means The End of Sales Enablement":

The sales rep is changing, as buyers are now more informed than ever. If anything, it puts more pressure on the sales rep to be at the top of his/her game at all times. Our sales people have really moved from a pitchman to more of a trusted advisor. Yes, I want to know the ins and outs of a product and what others have to say about it, but more often than not, it's not that simple. Most often, whether it's IT or any complex solution, we're having to compare different options that aren't necessarily apples to apples. We might need to be educated on new approaches or concepts to solving the problem, we're considering how this purchase will affect the rest of the organization. We're concerned about risk and ROI. We're weighing pros and cons. We want to be successful. And, we're not just buying the product, we're buying the company and all of its brainpower. It is an absolute waste in my mind to purchase a product and not to take advantage of the great insights these business partners can provide around the challenges they're helping us and dozens of other companies to solve. These aren't simple buying processes.

An interesting metric that I have observed over the years is the ratio between sales rep and sales engineer. In the good old days, one sales engineer would service multiple sales reps. In Enterprise 2.0, every sales rep needs a dedicated sales engineer. At LogLogic we have had several situations where our sales engineers became top sales reps and sometimes are flying solo in a territory (without rep that is). Sometimes this happened by chance - our federal sales rep didn't work out and the sales engineer asked to be considered for the job. He has been to Presidents Club ever since - even though now, three years later, he did receive his very own sales engineer.

My sales engineers now carry fancy titles such as "solutions architect" and with good reason! It is often the sales engineer engaging most deeply with the customer and "making or breaking" the sale. It won't be long and ratio of sales rep to sales engineer will be inverted - not by accident, but by design! Depending on your product, the same can be said for consultants, professional services and even post-sales engineers and trainers! All are in a very good position to advice customers on initial or subsequent purchases.

Reblog: Marketing Is The New Sales

2009-08-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

Amish Jani is a Managing Director at FirstMark Capital, a $2 billion venture capital firm based in NYC and this is a "reblog" of his blog "Marketing Is The New Sales" since I couldn't have said it any better myself:

Many have written about the rise of highly capital efficient companies, the growth of SaaS, the penetration of technology into the SMB community, and the new requirement to deliver value to customers at the time of purchase. Each of these strategies has radically altered the sales process. No longer are armies of sales people sitting in customers’ offices or spending endless hours over dinner trying to forge relationships they can lean on in the sales process. Instead, customers are “pulling” solutions they are interested in, trying them out for free early on, and selecting products that meet their needs. If the best way to do sales is to have customers “declare” their interest, then one needs an exceptionally broad funnel to ensure productive sales activity.

As a result, marketing in this new era is undergoing a rapid transformation. Marketing is no longer about softer concepts like brand building and trade shows; no longer simply providing the appropriate message and collateral for the sales organization; no longer sitting with industry analysts, hoping for positive coverage. Instead, it has become a much more active, tactical, and quantitative function. Done right, it becomes a highly integrated and critical part of the overall funnel.

The next generation of marketing leaders will be fluent in online acquisition channels and implementing a real time, transparent, measurable system. The areas of spend are highly fragmented: SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, Affiliate, Social Media, Community, Video, and on and on, balanced with the traditional channels of PR, magazine and trade shows. Quantifying cost per lead, customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, and value per customer across each of these channels requires significant discipline. Architecting follow up in a highly automated manner and driving to increasing levels of qualification becomes key. Webinars, emails, and free trials are scalable ways to move potential customers along and require minimal touch. Site activity, logins, and usage inform how much deeper customers are getting.

Social Marketing Means The End of Sales Enablement?

2009-08-08T23:40:00.001-07:00

We recently transformed LogLogic from a single-product company to a solution vendor complete suite with five product lines. Thus, I have naturally been focused on "sales enablement". I am also at new (shall I say "Business 2.0") ways to achieve my goal and Forrester encouraged me to look at Kadient and SAVO. But then it dawned on me: does "sales enablement" really matter in a social marketing world?

A picture says more than ...

Whereas in the "old days" a sale would be initiated by a cold call of a rep or an advertisement from Marketing, these days the customer is in the drivers seat. More likely than not, the customer has a needs and "asks" for a solution - by searching Google or by speaking with an analyst. Then a customer collects information from everywhere and anywhere, looking in particular for peer-opinions and avoiding (if possible) the traditional sales pitch alltogether.

Buyers are busy - in an IDC Customer Experience Survey published in February 2009, IT Buyers admit to spending less than 15% of their time in pre-purchase related activities. The information they value least is "the standard sales powerpoint". Rather IT buyers want to hear from peers and colleagues, either via worth of mouth, industry events (in person) or discussion forums, online communities or social network sites. Virtual econferences are also becoming popular and I can testify first-hand how many people show up for these somewhat odd events.

By the time a modern IT buyers speaks to a sales rep he or she may already have made up his mind and likely wants to talk about details related to implementation and scoping for their particular environment. It is not really the sales team that does the initial selling here, but a customer's peers (hopefully your other customers), and whoever engages on behalf of your company in speaking engagements (in person and virtual) as well as online forums. These could be product managers, engineers, customer support personnel etc.

So in a world where the buyer initiates the conversation and everybody in the organization and in the industry is 'speaking' with the customer before 'sales' does, how much does sales enablement really matter? Should we instead be talking about 'customer enablement'?

I would love to hear from you!

You are One Click Away (Below) From Instant Results!

2009-07-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

Online Surveys & Market Research

How to measure (and use) content ROI for B-to-B social media marketing?

2009-07-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

This blog examines how to create compelling social media content for B-to-B marketing and how you can track content performance and effectiveness.

First some statistics:

Over 65 percent of U.S. B-to-B buyers turn to the Internet first when researching technology solutions (eMarketer)
Some 22 percent of global marketing spend ($1.5 trillion) is allocated to content origination, publication, syndication and promotion (Interwoven)
Online content has a moderate to major impact on vendor preferences and selections, say 90 percent of IT buyers and specifiers (CMO council)
Only 22 percent of respondents say they are “very satisfied” with the caliber of technology content (CMO council)

How to measure “content ROI”?

“Content ROI” should reflect your business goals and the metrics should also be readily available. It is important to keep it simple and to avoid data overload, which can be expensive to collect and analyze. Since content in the social media age is so fleeting, metrics should provide a rapid feedback loop. Presumably you are measuring “awareness” and “sales impact” for your products.

Here is one way in which you could measure each:

Sales impact

Web site leads make up the largest percentage of overall leads in many B-to-B companies – more than 50% in the case of LogLogic – a Silicon Valley based leader in log management and security management. Fresh content is available on your website first, in exchange for some basic information about the visitor. It is this registration that will allow you to track downloads and requests. For anything that’s downloadable from your website, you can use your Google Analytics, Salesforce.com and marketing tools like Eloqua to track “content ROI” and for each piece of content you can track:

Number of downloads
Number of qualified opportunities
Number of closed deals
Revenues from closed deals

In order to track the success of an individual blog posting or Tweet, you have to embed Bit.ly links to refer back to channel-specific landing pages (for example, a landing page specifically for Twitter traffic). Each landing page will be defined as a “campaign” for your Salesforce.com and Eloqua tracking. Each Bit.ly link can be used to tell you which specific blog or Tweet was most successful in driving registered visitors.

Awareness

Measuring awareness is about measuring reach of your message:

Number of people following your blog
Number of people following your Twitter channels
Reach of press releases, articles and blogs (how many people might have seen it)
Share of voice in blogosphere (unique mentions of you relative to your key competitors, normalized for the “reach” of those mentions)

What to create “high-ROI content” in social-media land?

Using the metrics above, here are some of the “success factors” observed at LogLogic:

Peer-based perspectives

Customers value the opinion of their peers in the industry. How does the seller remain valuable in a situation where all of one’s prospects are most interested in communicating with their peers? Truth is that as a B-to-B vendor you have unique perspective with visibility across a large number of large enterprise customers. This perspective is hard to obtain for an individual IT practitioner, even more so in secretive pockets such as IT security. So it follows that the more you know about the customer, the more credible you are.

Peer-based thought leadership programs that tap into the “wisdom of the customer” include things like:

Customer polls
Market surveys
Customer case studies
Customer dinners
Community leadership
Customer councils

You can also drive conversational marketing campaigns and build communities and channels of inside access and influence by tapping into LinkedIn and Facebook communities (or to start one) relevant to your industry.

“Freshness”, relevance and integrity (perceived objectivity) is key

It means you need fresh content daily. You have to participate in the real-time stream on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Tom Foremski wrote about how to keep content fresh in his blog “The Pressure Is On When Every Company Is Now A Media Company...” and Mike Yamamoto in his post “can your PR people do this?”. Even as a small company, it really pays to have at least one person internally coordinating the effort of collecting “stories” to be packaged up a friendly way for the different media channels. LogLogic employs a full time Director of Customer Programs, who taps into the “wisdom of the customer” for content (more on that later). It is difficult to outsource this function as others, such as your PR agency, just aren’t close enough to the content. That being said, most other steps in content creation and distribution, such as the video production, web site development and maintaining your corporate Twitter and Facebook presence can be handled by next-generation PR firms. You can ask prospective buyers to register to access fresh and compelling content whcih allows you contact them and subsequently track content ROI. As soon as the content goes “stale” make it available to the public domain (such as YouTube, FaceBook and SlideShare).

Fact-based

Sponsoring industry-research is a great way to produce fact-based content. These are industry-specific surveys. Some examples could be industry benchmarks, such as “state of PCI compliance”, “the cost of security breach”, “healthcare benchmark report on information security”, etc.

Market conversations

Donovan Neale-May, Founder of the CMO Council (in itself a clever marketing move on the part of this PR agency) and president and managing partner of GlobalFluency, Inc., talks about “authority leadership”. Neale-May: “So the whole point of authority leadership is to have an advocacy position, a point of view. Today’s decisions are based on business value propositions, performance requirements and process improvement mandates. They’re not necessarily made from a technical standpoint. So you’ve got to have an argument for why your solution is going to help increase the efficiency, the effectiveness, the competitiveness or the differentiation of a company”. An example could be to participate in the debate on the Cyber Act. Creating or tying in with Twitter hash tags is a great way to tap into (listen and contribute) to market conversations.

Don't marketers market themselves? Send me fun CMO headshots!

2009-07-06T16:21:00.000-07:00

It struck me how badly most marketeers market themselves.

Starting with headshots ...

Most are boring, including mine - this is at LogLogic.com:

Your typical.

Andy Lark's (Dell) is a little better:

And Marissa Mayer (Google) always has a fresh perspective:

Well, mine is a work in progress:

But, as said, I am looking for inspiration! Send me creative ideas!

The impact of social media on web leads

2009-06-29T19:47:00.001-07:00

So this what turned me onto social media as an enterprise marketer:

Google Analytics tells us how people find our website (www.loglogic.com):

48% came from search engines (mainly google organic search)
40% come direct by typing www.loglogic.com (maybe they read my quote in USA Today - but our customer surveys show most found out from Gartner or product reviews/tests)
12% came from referring sites

Of the referring sites, the top origins included:

direct e-mail marketing from LogLogic (#1 with 20%!)
blog.loglogic.com (#2 with 10%!)
partner websites (such as vmware.com)
LinkedIn
various speciality/niche blogs and recommendation sites
Twitter

Only a small percentage (less than 10%) came from the traditional online trade magazines in our business (such as Techcrunch, SCMagazine and businesswire.com). This is when you would of course ask yourself why to focus your PR dollars on traditional media at all ... Fortunately our PR firm (www.pageonepr.com) is with the times and helps us navigate the social media landscape.

Anyway, for me social media (blogs, twitter, linkedin, etc.) is not a fad or fashion - we focus on social media because it is fact-based business sense.

Social content surpasses vendor and editorial content

2009-06-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the findings from a great IDG report by Bob Johnson on the role of social media in the IT buying process:

Takeaway one:
Social content has surpassed vendor and editorial content for IT buyers

How much weight do you give to?
Social content (37%)
Vendor content (32%)
Editorial content (27%)

Takeaway two:
Social networks, blogs and discussion boards are most important

Overall importance:
Social networks (26%)
- Facebook (35%), LinkedIn (27%), YouTube (23%)
Blogs (22%)
- Computerworld (38%), PC world (33%), IT world (30%)
Discussion boards (15%)
Peer to Peer networks (13%)
- Direct Connect (24%), Limewire (20%), Gnutella (16%)
Wikis (13%)
- Wikipedia (54%), wikia (16%), wikihow (15%)
Mashups (6%)
Other (5%)

Takeaway three:
Emphasis is a little different by stage of buying decision but not dramatically
General education – Blogs (26%)
Business case development – Discussion boards (24%)
Shortlist creation – Discussion boards (20%)
Implementation scenarios/evaluations – Social networks (20%)
Final decisions – Social networks (24%)