The Startup Marketing Blog

Startup Marketing: The Land of Carnies and Rubes

As a marketer at a startup, I am always looking for ways to get our product in front of potential customers in a way that is repeatable, not annoying, scalable, and affordable. Along the way I’ve tried just about every kind of advertising, lead generation program, lead guarantee whitepaper syndication, webinar…..the list goes on. Because of that, I’ve found several insanely outdated, arcane practices that are just accepted by marketers. I hate that.

So this list includes things that need to die in startup marketing:

1. Lead Guarantee Programs That Refuse To Screen Leads Based On Qualifying Questions – Allow me to explain. I’ve done several lead guarantee programs with large technology vendors, and they typically will syndicate a whitepaper across their network, require a registration form, and will then give me the info from the registration forms. Many of them will allow us to add a qualifying question (in our case: “Do You Use Google Apps at Your Company?”). But rather than just paying for those leads that answer in the affirmative (which makes them qualified), some vendors make you pay regardless of the answer. They’re basically making you pay for leads that – by definition – are not what you want.This doesn’t apply to all lead generation vendors, as I’ve worked with a few that will only count those leads that pass qualification criteria. Just recently a large vendor pitched me on a program to get our whitepaper in front of our target market and the price was decent. I said “I only pay for the leads that answer yes to my qualification question.” There was a long pause on the line and I was told this is impossible. Okay. That’s fine. We can’t work together.
2. Overused Buzzwords and Meaningless Terms – “The leading provider of”, “a one-stop-shop for”, “disruptive PAAS as a service”, the list goes on. You’re not being paid by the word, and no one has ever bought a startup’s product based on the verbosity of its website.
3. Ridiculous Costs At trade shows – The cost of renting a chair at a major tradeshow? $150. The cost of buying that same chair? $100. It’s amazing how we just expect to be extorted at trade shows when we’ve already paid $10K to buy a booth. When renting a piece of equipment for 2 days costs more than buying, we have to ask why. This system is broken.
4. Unacceptable Minimums – This might come off as a whine, but as a startup, you have to account for every marketing dollar spent. Because of that, it’s nearly impossible to justify a gigantic spend the first time working with a vendor. Back to the lead guarantee example: jumping into a $30,000 program to deliver qualified leads just isn’t doable. And when I ask to do a $1,000 test spend, I’m told it isn’t worth the vendor’s time. To me, that’s a good way for a vendor to say they don’t stand behind their product. If you won’t do a small program where the program’s success would result in a large spend, you have no confidence that you can deliver what you’re selling.
5. The Kick-Back Threshold – My hand is shaking trying to write this. A while back I worked with a company that wanted to host our whitepapers, and deliver us 100 leads that sign up and read our whitepaper. Fine. As part of the contract, we specified that leads have to answer affirmatively on a qualifying question, and they had to be from companies with 500 or more employees. Sounds like a plan.When they started sending me a weekly spreadsheet with those that have signed up and read our stuff, I noticed something: 99% of the leads were garbage. A simple Google search showed that these leads were from either very small companies, companies that didn’t exist, or “ABC123”. Every week I’d send the garbage back, and the vendor was getting angry at me! They told me “Normally we have a 10% kick back threshold but we value your business so we will take these out.”

   A kickback threshold is the vendors way of saying “We know that at least 10% of the leads we send you are garbage. That’s not in your contract. In fact, we told you we’d only charge you for qualified leads. But because you aren’t blindly accepting these obviously worthless leads, I wanted to let you know that everyone else automatically assumes that 10% will be garbage. We’re really annoyed that you’re calling us on our bullshit, and just want you to know that you’re being a real pain in the ass by asking for what you paid for and not wanting to pay for junk.”

   To say I was steaming mad would be an understatement. It’s amazing to me that there are so many built-in processes to rip people off, and they’re not even questioned!

Okay, rant over. Feel free to add your own.

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