Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Dreamforce 2008 Session Recording: Secrets to Email Campaign Success

One last recorded presentation from Dreamforce...Secrets to Email Campaign Success.

I was on a panel with Charlie McKinney from McKesson talking about email marketing and focusing on various topics like deliverability, targeting and audience, content, tracking, email marketing analytics and best practices for follow-up. Charlie was talking about ExactTarget, and I focused on Vertical Response, two email marketing partners of Salesforce.com.

Here is the abstract from Salesforce.com:
Don’t waste your marketing dollars -- or your credibility -- on email campaigns that don’t produce results. Our panel of email marketing experts shares the secrets of success and answers your questions on list-building techniques and email marketing. Hear the latest trends, evolving opinions, and newest strategies -- and take home tips for improving your email response rates today!

Access the recording (no registration required) here.

Dreamforce 2008 Session Recording: Lead Management 101

The recordings are up!

Here is the session I did at Dreamforce on Monday, November 3rd: Lead Management 101

Dreamforce abstract: Do you understand your entire lead lifecycle? The experts at salesforce.com are here to help! This session features best practices for lead management, such as how to route leads to the right sales teams, build effective qualification and conversion processes, capitalize on workflow automation, and plenty more.

I spoke specifically about the differences between leads, accounts and contacts in Salesforce.com, lead scoring, landing pages and workflow rules.

Access the recording here.

Top Three Best Changes at Dreamforce 2008

Dreamforce has always been a fantastic event, but there were three things this year that set it apart and made it quite simply the best event of its kind. None of these three things have to do with the first-rate content of the "break-out" sessions (I plan on writing about some of the content tomorrow) or the big announcements which were, as usual, artfully unveiled with all the bells, whistles and flourishes we have come to expect from Marc Benioff and his stellar marketing team. What made Dreamforce really great this year was the level of attention they paid to the comfort and convenience of their attendees.

Dreamforce 2008 was the most user-friendly event that I have ever attended.

The reality of attending events these days is that more often than not, the people attending them are still expected to fit their regular work responsibilities in while leveraging their attendance at the event for learning, networking, and finding the tools to help them do their jobs better. Locals are stretched particularly thin, as they are often expected to hit the office either on their way to or from an event like this.

Salesforce.com took this to heart and made three changes that really illustrate their understanding of the needs of their customers and the on-demand workplace.

1) Completely Open WiFi Internet Access
This may sound like a no-brainer, but I have been to many events over the past year where this is far from a reality. I went to one event where WiFi was available for free...if you happened to be a guest of the hotel that the event was held at. A steep fee was required if you were not. Other events make you hunt down a password. Some allow it in the common areas, but not in the session rooms. Still others offer some cut-rate version that doesn't allow secure VPN access to your corporate networks. At Dreamforce I could log in no matter where I was, with no password required. Awesome.

2) The Attendee Portal
Sorting through all of the breakout sessions, finding the ones you like, and then applying them to an event calendar so you know exactly where you want to be and when. You could also schedule time to go and see any specific vendors you might be interested in. It was simple to use, convenient and a tremendous help in making sure I got to see everything I wanted to see. Because there was a TON of great stuff to see.

3) The "Cloud Dine" Lounge
I harped on the need for an area for attendees to comfortably sit, work, meet and unwind last year, and was so happy to see it executed. Lounge is a grossly inaccurate term for what it was, though -- basically, they left a huge area set up with hundreds of tables and chairs and left it open throughout the conference (rather than just at lunch time). Dreamforcers were able to comfortably sit and work, or meet with colleagues whenever they had down-time or simply needed to get caught up on email or voicemail. Gone were the days of wall-to-wall people trying to find an open patch of carpet at Moscone to get some work done, or trying to find a quiet corner to have a meeting or make some phone calls.

As much as many event planners would like to believe that their event is the most important and impactful thing on their attendees lives while they are there, the reality is that the event itself is just one of many things competing for attention. By taking these three simple steps to acknowledge that the other stuff is important too, Salesforce.com made it possible for people to remain at the show rather than waste valuable workday time dashing back and forth from hotel, office and event. It's like Salesforce.com took the best practices of its own software to heart, creating a sticky, friendly, easy to work in environment that does everything that it possibly can to make sure that you have no need to leave. Well done.

Dreamforce 2008: Notes from the Keynote

There’s a full house today for Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce 2008, the Salesforce.com annual user and developer conference in San Franciso. Considering the fate of most event marketing budgets during tough economic times I am hoping that it is a sign that things are not so bad, rather than the possibility that the market crashed after the final date to get a refund came and went.

Software as a Service and “Cloud Computing” (the utilization of servers and services hosted by third parties to handle your business needs) proponents will no doubt claim it is a direct reaction to a struggling economy, and they could be right. Some of the first words out of Mr. Benioff’s mouth were “There has never been a better time for cloud computing!...” And, of course, he could be right on the money.

Big Announcement One:
Force.com Sites. Salesforce.com customers can now host their websites on the Force.com platform. Existing Salesforce.com customers (Group Edition or higher) have generous page allowances for this service included in their subscription price.

Big Announcement Two:
Force.com integration with Facebook. "A new class of Business apps that leverage the social graph." Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg joined Benioff on stage to share how this is going to work...more and more businesses looking to understand and utilize social network marketing. Creation of Facebook Apps on the Force.com platform could be a great introduction to this, and a great way to capture info from those apps and quickly and easily get it into your Salesforce.com instance. The example the shared was a recruiting app that works on Facebook and sends the captured information into a Salesforce.com recruiting object. They also shared the example of Starbucks pushing their "My Starbucks Idea" site to Facebook, using Force.com. Slick.

Big Announcement Three
Integration/partnership with Amazon Web Services. Applications built and hosted on Amazon can be displayed on Force.com sites with easy integration into Salesforce.com. The example they used was an application called "Card Lasso" which allows you to take a picture of a business card, upload it at a Force.com site where it gets processed on an Amazon Web Services back end, and then the text from the business card gets populated into your Salesforce.com instance where you can actually use it.

Big Announcement Four:
A little anticlimactic, but still interesting...more and more companies running their businesses exclusively from the "Cloud" -- CRM, HR, ERP, Financials, Email, Office Productivity, etc. etc.

Rock legend Neil Young then took the stage to talk about...electric cars. Neil is involved with a company called LincVolt, which apparently has its website running on Force.com. For the big finish, they rolled out Neil Young's vintage Lincoln Continental which has been converted to run on 100% electric power with a very long range. It was a thing of beauty.

For the rest of the conference I’ll be looking for B2B marketing tips and best practices to share from the breakout sessions, and of course I'll be sharing details from any interesting partners and vendors with marketing functionality. I will share my personal favorite keynote moment, though - waiting for the speeches to begin, watching the dancing “NO SOFTWARE” button working the stage like a deranged college mascot, staring at the back of Scoble’s head two rows in front of me.

Dreamforce 2008 Partner Preview: ActevaRSVP

I was treated to a sneak preview last week for ActevaRSVP 2.0, an event management tool from Acteva built specifically for Salesforce.com  and available on the AppExchange. Although ActevaRSVP has been around for a couple of years now, they are debuting this new version at Dreamforce on November 3rd, and I strongly recommend a visit to their booth for a demo while you are there -- especially if you have anything to do with events, meetings, webinars or corporate training.

Traditionally, if I have an event or webinar I use either my email vendor or my Salesforce.com email tools to handle the notification duties, and RSVP tracking would be done manually. This is not a complicated process, but it is time consuming and prone to error, which could be especially problematic if I needed to monitor attendance due to limitations of the meeting space, webinar tool, or food ordering requirements. I ask people to "please reply to this email if you would like to attend" and then file the responses into a folder in my Outlook for tracking.

Subsequent emails would ask people to "please RSVP if you have not already" but I invariably receive multiple notes from people I have already heard from, requiring me to go through each reply individually. And if I asked any questions in the email, even something as simple as "Do you want chicken or fish?" I would also need to tally that individually. And then there are the emails where people mention they will be bringing four of their colleagues. And they want two chickens, one fish and one macrobiotic vegan meal that wasn't on the menu.

I suppose I could use a survey tool, but that would involve setting up the survey in addition to the email - and then putting the details in the email, and tracking the results at multiple locations, and then updating my Salesforce.com campaign to make sure costs and ROI are being monitored, and on and on. In short, a real pain in the neck.

Acteva has been working on a really elegant solution to take the pain out of managing your event follow-up. It lives in your Salesforce.com instance, and has the tools in place to not only create and email the invitations to your webinar or event, but also to:

• Track RSVP's
• Create surveys and track results
• Synch and update any corresponding salesforce.com campaigns
• Easily segment responses for follow-up emails
• Track capacities and limitations of Event venues
• Build and host stand-alone web pages for event registration

That last piece has me very excited, as here at Demandbase we plan to much more aggressively market webinars over the next few quarters. I plan to link to ActevaRSVP event registration pages not only from our website, but also from any email campaigns I will be running in order to capture new leads and monitor registrations and RSVP's for these events. ActevaRSVP offers email delivery for their invitations, but with these stand-alone pages you can use different tools for email delivery -- such as lead nurturers like Marketo or Eloqua or Manticore (note: a reader in the comments section indicated Eloqua has demonstrated some good event management capabilities). I can simply insert the link for the registration page into the email and still get the benefits these tools offer. Double dipping at its finest!

Here at Demandbase we use Marketo for lead management, which has email delivery capabilities in addition to the lead scoring and nurturing that led us to them. Vertical Response has been an email service that I have personally used for years, at multiple companies. None of these tools give me what ActevaRSVP does, and the RSVP tool has evolved into something that not only works very well on its own but also complements these other tools I already use. In short, if you do events, you need ActevaRSVP. Pricing is reasonable at $65 per month for 5 event organizers/users and unlimited invitations, events and registrations (which should be plenty of room for most companies).

This is looking like the must-have application for event managers or corporate training teams using Salesforce.com. If you are going to Dreamforce, you should make a special trip to their booth for a demo.

One of the First 500 ... I Hope ...

Well I did it, I signed up to take the test to become one of the "first 500" certified Salesforce.com administrators. Talked a bit about it in my post here, and I'm making the trek down to San Mateo to take the test next week. 60 multiple choice questions of Salesforce.com goodness. I downloaded the study guide, checked out the sample questions...and promptly had a minor heart attack.

I've been a "power user" for 4 years, built custom apps, implemented from scratch at one company and helped with a few others. I'm the guy people call with Salesforce.com questions...and I usually have the answers! But maybe this certification won't be the piece of cake I thought it was...and that kind of makes me want it more.

One of the beauties of Salesforce.com is the ease of use. When you understand the way it works, and how things relate to each other, it is easy to accomplish so much with very little further instruction. Or, there are easy to find hints or recommendations within the help and training section. I feel like if the exam were a "practical exam" which set me in front of a browser and asked me to accomplish things there would be no problem. But that's not how it works. There are 60 multiple choice questions, and you need to get 67% of them right in 90 minutes to pass.

Here is a sample questions from the study guide:

• Which of the following is a standard profile? (Select all that apply.)
• A. Sales User
• B. Marketing User
• C. Invoice Manager
• D. Contract Manager

Umm...Sales User, right? After all, Salesforce.com was born as an SFA tool and the majority of users are sales users so they should be set up right out of the box....and yes on Marketing User, but not the other two...I don't know, it's been a long time and I've created a ton of my own profiles, which ones did I create and which ones came with? Um...A and B?

WRONG! Sales User is not a standard profile.The answer is B (Marketing User) and D (Contract Manager). 

I exchanged an email with a colleague with some connections at Salesforce.com regarding the exam last week, and her suggestion was to beware of the nitpicky questions like "how many custom fields are allowed on a record in Professional edition" and to prepare by downloading and printing out the user guide and making notes in the margins. The full user guide is 1700 pages long! I've never used Professional Edition! Holy cow!

I need to go study. Any tips or tricks welcome. Please post below. Please. ;-)

"Guerilla" Salesforce.com

I gave a little bit of background on the Salesforce.com user group community in this post a few months ago, and I wanted to bring it up again and send out a special request to the SFDC community at large out there...

I'm looking for recommendations and examples of great tools and reports and dashboards that you Salesforce.com power users and junkies have downloaded off of the AppExchange and use for free. I'm not interested in tools that have a "free trial" or tools that have pay-as-you-go features -- I am only interested in honest to goodness free tools. So, anything from the community that has been posted to the AppExchange, anything from Salesforce Labs, any reports or dashboards you have found on the AppExchange...let me know in a post down below.

The next San Francisco Salesforce.com User Group meeting is on Thursday, September 18th and the theme is "Guerilla" Salesforce.com -- since much of the Salesforce.com user community is from companies with sales or marketing departments of less then 10 people, it is always interesting to see how much these small groups can accomplish with limited resources and limited budgets. Hence my interest in what users have been able to accomplish with the free tools available to them. I'd love to hear some stories. Let me have them!

We'll also be talking about Dreamforce and sorting the the tracks and sessions, with alumni sharing thoughts on sessions that are being brought back and exploring all the new stuff coming up in November. If you are in the Bay Area and are interested in attending the meeting on the 18th, register for the San Francisco user group here.

Selling Power Interview

I did an interview with Selling Power for their Salesforce.com newsletter, talking a little bit about Demandbase, Vertical Response, and general ease of use and the depth and breadth of partner applications available for Salesforce.com users. Registration is required, but it's free. Here is the desciption from the newsletter:

CUSTOMER INTERVIEW: How Demandbase Uses AppExchange to Increase Lead Generation Efficiency
Customer: Jason Stewart Title: Senior Manager, Demand Generation
--
SP: What is Demandbase all about?
JS: Demandbase is an online, pay-as-you-go marketplace for business contact information. We've partnered with some leading data providers, such as Hoovers, D&B, Business Watch Network, and LexisNexis to create a place where B2B salespeople can purchase business contact information (often including email address) without a subscription and without a minimum purchase....read more.

Isn't It Ironic

Thinking about the Salesforce.com and Google announcement yesterday, one of the hot buttons was collaborative work on documents or presentations...

The ironic thing about switching to a SaaS version of your office applications is that while it would force people to work more collaboratively from the latest versions of your most important documents (which is good), the very thing that drives this collaborative work (being forced to work online) will keep it from getting on to the laptops of the road warriors and field personnel who could benefit most from a system like this.

And then, once Google Apps releases the "desktop" version of the product as they have promised which could be what wins over more users, people will go back to their old bad habits of just using what is already on their machine rather than going online for a more recent version of that document or presentation. And then the "collaboration" benefit is gone.

Salesforce and Google Apps ... Is This Really a Big Deal?

The story has been broken already in a number of places, and as Mark Mangano says over at SalesforceWatch.com the web is "atwitter" with people putting in their two cents about Salesforce.com announcing tight integration with Google  Apps.

My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, I am extremely pleased that one of these announcements has to do with improvements or enhancements to the core product as opposed to "the platform." I use SFDC every day for my job, and I feel like the CRM product hasn't been getting the attention it deserves lately.

Also, it is nice to see that SFDC is doing something that will help small businesses and start-ups, which are the ones who are more likely to utilize Google Apps as opposed to Microsoft Office. The big names and big customers get all the press, but it is still the companies with fewer than 100 employees that make up the lion's share of the SFDC customer base.

But on the other hand...Google Apps? Am I alone in not really being moved here?

The last time I used Google Apps was when someone sent an Excel file to my Gmail address...it asked me if I wanted to open it using Google Apps, and when I did it didn't look right. I ended up having to save it to my desktop and open it with Excel anyway.

It sounds good on paper, sure -- and if the word Google is involved the press goes into a fit of collective apoplexy -- but I am just not feeling the love. Tighter integration with a set of applications that neither I nor anyone else I know uses on a regular basis just doesn't get me as excited as I feel like I am supposed to be.

I'm attending the "official" announcement today, and maybe I'll come around. What do you think?

This just in...Fake Steve Jobs has a very funny take on the announcement.  Check it out here. Too funny.