The Brilliance of the Marketo Community

by Nathan W. Burke on December 7, 2011

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Marketo’s user community, and the company has created a full week of activities and prizes to celebrate. I think there are a few takeaways to note around building a community, becoming a central hub of helpful information, and motivating users to promote your brand.

The Marketo Community

In case you’re not familiar with Marketo, it is a company and product focused on marketing automation, or as Marketo refers to itself “Revenue Performance Management.” Basically it is web-based software that manages a lead from anonymous visitor throughout the entire sales and marketing process (registration, email nurturing, sync with CRM systems, workflows, etc.). If you’re a marketing professional for a B2B company that does lead acquisition online, you’ve likely used a combination of tools or a Marketo competitor to do the same tasks.

The Marketo Community was launched last year, and the goals were:

“The online Marketo Community was created for customers and partners to collaborate with each other, learn best practices, share tips and tricks, and forge new relationships,” said Heather Watkins, senior manager of customer communities and programs at Marketo. “We could never have predicted the community’s first-year growth would keep pace with Marketo’s own terrific numbers. Through the Marketo Community, businesses of all sizes learn from one another and help us continue to innovate the Marketo product suite.”

Let’s unwrap that from a couple of different perspectives:

  • As a marketer – The community helps answer questions about using the Marketo software and gives marketers the opportunity to exchange ideas about topics broader than simply using the software.
  • From Marketo’s Perspective – The community lets users find help in a self-service model rather than simply contacting support, gathers feedback for their product roadmap, and creates loyalty through creating experts on their own community site. Brilliant.

Becoming A Central Hub of Helpful Information

A proponent of the “create gobs of useful content” inbound marketing strategy, Marketo is constantly adding content to their site. And rather than simply creating content that asks the questions that their software answers, Marketo spends a good deal of time on content that doesn’t just explicitly plug their product. For instance, they do studies on email deliverability rates. Sure, that’s tangentially relevant to their product, but it’s not a shameless plug. Instead, it gives data to a question that every marketer wonders “Are my emails getting to my leads?”.

Using the community site, Marketo is then able to quickly disseminate their content to those members that are looking for the data. Rather than looking around for information in many locations, community users simply log in, and the discussion forums and articles are available in one spot.

I think this is a huge takeaway for marketers in early stage and emerging companies: don’t just create content focused on the immediate sale. Think of your own buying behavior. If you’re going to buy a big ticket item, you’ll probably spend some time looking around and doing research. In this phase, you’re probably not ready for the hard sale yet, but you’d definitely be willing to look at content that answers the questions you have that are related to the problem you’re trying to solve.

In the Marketo example, they’re trying to build content for marketers rather than building only content for marketers looking for marketing automation software. Sure, they have that. But they understand that not everyone is ready to buy this second. Because of that, they’re willing to give you information you can use that second, and maybe you’ll come back over and over again. And maybe you’ll remember them when you’re actually looking to buy.

Motivating Users to Promote Your Brand

This is the Holy Grail of Marketing: getting your customers/users to promote your brand for you. And it is so hard to do and so easy to seem manipulative and inauthentic. In fact, the only real way to do it is by creating something they want to share with others.

In general, Marketo has done this by creating content worth sharing and giving users motivation to do so. For instance, in the birthday promotion, they’ve offered prizes to the most retweeted tweet (motivation for viral sharing), the most creative video (users creating content for the brand for legitimacy), and the best blog post (more content talking about the brand). And they’ve got some pretty nice prizes for a promotion that is timed to coincide with the holidays:

To Sum It Up

If you’re a marketer at a startup that is looking to build a community, look at what Marketo has done to build a community, establish expert members within that community, motivate users to promote the brand, and give them reasons to create promotional content.

If you’re a marketer using Marketo’s software, take a look around the community; there’s more than just stuff about using the software (but there’s helpful info on that as well).

Disclosure: this post was submitted as an entrant in the Marketo Community Contest described here.

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Inbound Marketing For Startups: Video With Rand Fishkin

by Nathan W. Burke on December 2, 2011

Just found this on Hacker News and it’s definitely worth sharing. In this video, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz.org talks about how startups can get traction via inbound marketing.

In the presentation, Fishkin describes the difference between interruption marketing (when marketers distract you from what you want to do in order to sell you stuff) and inbound marketing (where marketers give you the information you need when you’re looking for it).

Here’s the slideshow:

Gaining Traction: Inbound Marketing for Startups
View more presentations from Rand Fishkin

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A Great Example Of Using Personalization and Personality

by Nathan W. Burke on October 26, 2011

I got an email yesterday that compelled me to write this post as a great example of using both personalization and personality to get someone interested in you and your startup:

Subject: CloudLock Logo’d Stuff

So this is probably one of the stranger emails you’ll receive today, but I’m sending this because we thought you’d be a good fit for a new idea we’re testing out.  Because you’re at a super cool company and you are (I hope) involved with handling some of the logo’d merchandise for it.

I’m sure you’re busy, so I’ll sum it up real quick:  The way you’ve always had to order swag in the past completely sucks.  Thus we’re going to do it differently.  Here are 200 items that you can order JUST ONE of. With your logo.  And it will ship within 48 hours no matter how much or how little you order. So now if you want to apologize to a co-worker for saying something offensive or inappropriate for work (as I do on a daily basis), you can give them a work appropriate logo’d item to say “I’m Sorry”.

Plus, of course, over 100,000 of the usual suspects you’d expect to see on a swag website.  The pens, mugs, hats and bags that made this country great.

But wait there’s more.  In addition to all the normal shirt (I said shirt. with an “r”) and mug type stuff, we have also “finely curated” a very small mix of truly unique and ultra hip products. Some of these have minimums, but we’ve separated them out into a different part of the site.  It took us forever to find stuff this awesome and get the various retailers on board. Most of them didn’t get how the game is played in our industry.  Now they do.  And now you can enjoy the fruits of our labor by ordering them for your giveaway, gift, and employee recognition needs.

While obviously it would be particularly awesome if you actually bought some stuff, I would just as much appreciate any feedback/suggestions/ideas you have about this little idea.

Let’s break it down.

1. Introduction

She doesn’t know me. I don’t know her. She’s trying to introduce me to her business favorably and take action. I’m in the middle of a meeting and want to see if there’s anything for me to do with this email other than deleting it. So how does she get me to read all the way through without deleting the message?

The subject line is subtle, yet perfect. CloudLock is the name of our company, and “Logo’d Stuff” is something that EVERY marketer at a startup has to deal with. Whether it refers to tee shirts, graphics, conference swag, logos for journalists, etc., your company logo is something you deal with daily. Though the sender’s name isn’t familiar, there’s a 100% chance I’m going to open this.

The opening line is a challenge “So this is probably one of the stranger emails you’ll receive today…”, and it is a great ice breaker. Rather than passively reading, a line like this makes you sit up and read with curiosity.

The next thing any reader asks is “What do they want from me?” and “Why am I getting this email?”. Both of these are answered right away with an ask that doesn’t require a big commitment: “I’m sending this because we thought you’d be a good fit for a new idea we’re testing out.”

At this point I’m interested even though I have no idea what the company does. You can’t ask for more in an opening paragraph of an email.

2. Understanding the audience

The second paragraph demonstrates an intimate understanding of the target: marketing people that deal with getting stuff printed with the company logo on it. It immediately addresses the #1 problem of the target: lack of time. It then moves on to commiserate and identifies a universal problem among marketers: the fact that you have to make a big commitment and print, say, 100 tee shirts rather than just doing a handful to make sure the quality is there.

In addition, the narrative stays consistently humorous:

So now if you want to apologize to a co-worker for saying something offensive or inappropriate for work (as I do on a daily basis), you can give them a work appropriate logo’d item to say “I’m Sorry”.

The tone is dead on.

3. We’re on the same team

A lot of marketers understand their target market and can write in their language. This email takes it a step farther and makes me feel like Joy is more like a colleague than a vendor. Here’s why:

It took us forever to find stuff this awesome and get the various retailers on board. Most of them didn’t get how the game is played in our industry.  Now they do.

These two sentences act to point out an external source of frustration, and talks about solving the problem for “us”.

4. The personalization

If the email stopped here, it would still be a very good one. But the personalization piece really solidifies the email and effort as great. Take a look here:

Oh and one more thing (to borrow a line from a genius who will be sorely
missed) – we set up a completely custom store just for CloudLock.  Check
it out: http://cloudlock.[redacted].com.

They’ve set up a custom store that already has our logo superimposed on the items they sell. I can’t tell you how much more interesting it is when you see your actual logo on the pieces rather than a sample logo, and they’ve done this for everything they sell.

Awesome email. Just awesome.

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Need A Custom USB Drive For Your Company? Here You Go.

by Nathan W. Burke on October 12, 2011

This is a customer service success story that has to be shared.

We (CloudLock) are going to be presenting at the Gartner ITXPO in Orlando next Wednesday, and although we originally decided not to get conference schwag to give out at the show, we changed our minds last Thursday. We’re a startup. It’s our right.

Anyway, we decided we had to get custom USB drives that have our logo and PDFs of our case studies, whitepapers, etc. They had to be cool. And we needed 100 of them by this Friday. No, wait. 200. No, 100 is fine. My colleague Ann did a few google searches, and found Flashbay.

From the moment she spoke with them, she was impressed. They had great designs, could get them to us before our super aggressive deadline, and responded incredibly quickly each time we had a question.

And they did one other thing that impressed us: they told us that we’d have them by 10:30 AM on Thursday. They showed up a full day early. That’s what they call over delivering.

Here’s the final product:

Note: I have no affiliation with Flashbay whatsoever. I don’t know anyone there. But I like sharing stories about customer service done well, and if you’re a company that needs flash drives, these guys are awesome.

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Selling the Dogfood: Startup Marketing Before & After Product/Market Fit

by Nathan W. Burke on September 17, 2011

I’ve been fortunate to both work with and see presentations done by Mike Troiano before, and today’s FutureM session was amazing. Mike is one of those guys that irritates us mortals who see someone that is so natural at presentations that we say to ourselves “I’ll never be able to charm a crowd like this guy.” He’s just that good.

Mike’s presentation is all about finding the One Simple Thing ™ that describes what your startup really does. A simple idea that is supremely difficult to actually do. In his framework, he describes what startups need to do in order to let the market know:

  • What the company actually does
  • How they’re different from the competition
  • Why prospective customers should care
  • How they can emotionally connect with what the company offers

My favorite thing from Mike’s presentation is his definition of the role of marketing in early stage startups: To corrupt the company’s vision with the external reality. Think about that.

His presentation:

Selling the Dogfood: Startup Marketing Before & After Product/Market Fit
View more presentations from Holland-Mark

If you’re a startup in the early stage, look at this presentation every week. If you’re a startup looking to move past your “B round” and want to ramp up your business by getting a great agency to help you hone your message, hire Holland-Mark. Mike is just that good, and he’s assembled a team that will get you there.

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8 Marketing Secrets of Successful Startups – FutureM

by Nathan W. Burke on September 16, 2011

The following post is from my notes from the FutureM session “Marketing Secrets of Successful Startups.” I’m paraphrasing on each of these, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

8 Marketing Secrets of Successful Startups

Summary: The increasingly higher expectations put on agencies and marketers have created a Darwinian environment where only the scrappy and creative can thrive. Some of the most effective and efficient marketing campaigns are run inside stealthy startups. Join us for an inside look at how successful startups do customer development and marketing. You’ll learn practical marketing hacks, some of which have never been shared before from a top-notch group of entrepreneurs and startup marketers.
Speakers
Adam Berrey, Formerly of Allaire, Macromedia and Brightcove.
Chris Hulls, Founder & CEO, Life360
Chris Savage, Founder & CEO, Wistia
Christopher O’Donnell, Director of Product Management, Hubspot
Dave Balter, Founder & CEO, BzzAgent (Dunn Humby)
Sarah Hodges, Director of Community Marketing, Runkeeper
Sim Simeonov, Founder & CTO, Shopximity
Stephanie Shore, VP Marketing, Zipcar

Speaker bios are here.

Intro

This session was based on Sim Simeonov’s belief that some of the most creative marketing campaigns come from startups. When you don’t have a lot of resources or cash, but have the same marketing responsibilities as large corporations, you have to get creative. Rather than simply speaking in generalities, the focus of the presentation was on giving the audience usable advice that can be used daily.

1. Produce Content. Lots and lots and lots of content:
Christopher O’Donnell from Hubspot/Performable

The first speaker was Director of Product Management at Performable which was recently acquired by Hubspot. Hubspot went from 0 to 5,000 customers in 5 years and gets 45,000 leads/month.

What’s their secret? Content.

The takeaway: Don’t be afraid to start having a presence before you have a product. Hubspot started generating brand awareness before they had anything to sell. By starting to engage the market early, you’ll be able to vet your idea, and you can start establishing thought leadership and legitimacy. And that comes in handy when you’re trying to get coverage when the product is ready.

An interesting note: 20% of all searches are for local businesses. But how many local businesses have updated blogs and twitter campaigns, etc.? Find your niche and bang out lots of content, and the world will come to you. Easier said than done, but a universal truth nonetheless.

2. Make something people want to share, and make it easy to share them
Sarah Hodges Director of Community Marketing, Runkeeper

RunKeeper started as mobile app to keep track of fitness and was one of the first 100 aps in the app store, giving them a “first mover” advantage. They built the app first, then built out their site

RunKeeper has over 6M registered users, and the company does not pay for user acquisition. Instead, all signups are based on word of mouth. They haven’t spent a dollar on user acquisition.

How did they do it?

People want to share their accomplishments (like training for and racing in marathons) and RunKeeper built sharing into their product to allow for that. It works. Over 90% of new users come in through social media or direct search. Users have shared over 4 million activities to Facebook and twitter.

The takeaway: Give people something that makes them look smarter/healther/funnier/etc., and they’ll share it. Make it easy to share, and even have the content they share hook back to your landing page.

3. Have a Point of View
Adam Berrey

Establish a position with a strong point of view. He calls this “Point of View Marketing”. In his anecdote, Berrey recalls his time spent selling to IT people, who were “pudgy and horrifically boring.”
Next he started working at a company that was developing a product for “TV on the Internet”, and before they had a product, they started telling the “The Interenet is going to kill TV” story to media executives. By taking a strong point of view, and telling a consistent story, they got coverage on the NYTimes, WSJ, etc. even before having a product. Having a point of view got them attention in the marketplace and PR coverage
The takeaway: Have a strong point of view. Have stats to back it up.

4. If Your App Is On A Marketplace, Understand How Rankings Work
Chris Hulls, Founder & CEO, Life360

I’m going to do this speaker a huge disservice, as I don’t understand what his product really does, and I’m probably highlighting a minute detail of his presentation, but it was interesting to me.
I believe Chris said that their company is trying to turn smart phones into OnStar. Their goal is to get moms to download their app. The application is listed in both the iPhone and Android App Marketplace, and the two are decidedly different.
In the iPhone App Store, users generally browse for apps. Since Apple moderates each category, users stick to going through categories and rarely search. Rankings are done solely through the number of gross downloads. Because of this, the goal should be to get as many downloads as possible regardless of whether the download is a good one (regardless of whether they’ll ever convert to a paid app, etc.). For instance, tapjoy leads are not going to buy your product, but they’ll install your app just to get credits in the games/apps they already use. Because of this, it’s worth advertising there simply to inflate your gross download numbers.
Conversely, the Android Marketplace weighs reviews, the number of downloads, and the number of uninstalls to determine an app’s ranking. So in this case, tapjoy-like leads can hurt more than help, and should probably be avoided.
The takeaway: If your app is listed in a marketplace, figure out how the rankings work and take advantage of that knowledge. It’s much easier to keep a high ranking than it is to get there in the first place.

5. Build a story factory in 5 easy steps
Sim Simeonev

Why stories? They’re a unit of communication and sharing. They produce low-cost repeatable inbound marketing.
Sim’s 5 easy steps to building a story factory:
  1. Pick a theme – relevance over time + scarcity. You want to produce what others don’t know about, keeping you both relevant and unique.
  2. Create a template – The example used here was Visible Measures and their top 10 viral video Ad chart.
  3. Get the data – Extending the Visible Measures example, they already have the data on which ads are performing the best. But in the absence of having the actual data, there’s always external info and surveys.
  4. Produce the story (humans + machines) This one is pretty self-explanatory.
  5. Distribute – Share value  and create heroes. Again, Visible Measures produces that chart, and AdAge distributes it and gives Visible Measures attribution. Win win.
The takeaway: Once you have scarce, ongoing, relevant content, the world will come to you.

6. Create Early Advocates
Dave Balter, Founder & CEO, BzzAgent (Dunn Humby)

Balter details 4 tools for creating early advocates by asking: What makes customers share?
  1. Generate Status: Balter asked the audience “How many of you checked in on foursquare when you came into this room?” Several people raised their hands. “Why?” he asked. It’s all about the badges, which are perceived third party status validators (ok, I made that up). Think about Twitter followers, linkedin connections, Facebook friends, etc. People do this for status (badges).
  2. Offer incredible value: This may sound obvious, but it isn’t. In this context, Balter is referring to short term deals that focus on creating a rush of exposure based on a ridiculous discount. For instance, he gave the example of a Denny’s Ad that told people to show up at a certain time for a free meal. There was a line around the block to get in, making people think “hey, I should go to Denny’s some time. Look how many people are lining up to go in there.” More examples: Starbucks free iced coffee. KFC running out of chicken. Create a false supply and demand ratio, and that will artificially inflate demand. Groupon’s entire model is based on this.
  3. Make it Scarce – if something is going to run out, we better get it. Apple is the best at this….they’ll inevitably run out of iPads and iPhones despite having the capability to make plenty of them. Another example: McRib. They couldn’t sell it before, but now that they bring it back in limited release, people go nuts over it. There’s even a McRib finder. Seriously. McDonalds took a dog of a product (I’m not saying they’re made from dogs. It’s an expression) and made it popular by making it scarce.
  4. Provide Exclusivity (or Access): Create something that you have to qualify for. Example: AMEX black card. Because it’s so exclusive and only a select group qualifies for it, people want it. Smartbargains changed to RueLaLa, and the only thing that changed is the fact that they added exclusivity. Mass market to exclusive is what makes $$. C
The takeaway: Understanding what motivates people to want something emotionally, and bake that into your offering.

7. Create a sense of community among users
Stephanie Shore, VP Marketing, Zipcar

I have to admit that I couldn’t really hear her presentation, and I was battling intermittent internet outages, so I’d like to toss this one over to the fine folks at BostInnovation, who said the following about Stephanie’s presentation:
Stephanie Shore, VP of marketing at ZipCar sat down with Simeonov for a Q&A session on the momentum her company has experienced in recent years. For ZipCar, Shore said their success rests in creating a sense of community amongst users. Despite geographical boundaries, Shore explains how ZipCar plays up users’ common interests and unites them with stories, photos and even crowdsourcing activities. Getting customers invested in your brand and invested in each other is a huge part of startup marketing, Shore explains.

8. It’s all about the tee shirts
Chris Savage, Founder and CEO, Wistia

This was the most surprising presentation of the day, as I thought “seriously? A presentation on Marketing Secrets and giving out tee shirts is the topic?” Yep. I was wrong.
Chris shows how Wistia, a video hosting and analytics platform for B2B customers, gives tee shirts to customers and prospects to enhance their word of, well, shirt marketing. They buy the super soft $22 apiece American Apparel shirts in bulk, and get the price down to $15 total including shipping and printing.
When they send the tee shirt to the prospect, the response is amazing. The shirt is accompanied by a hand-written note and is signed by the entire team, thanking the prospect/customer for being a friend of Wistia. Take a look at their twitter feed, and you’ll see scores of people thanking Wistia and sharing photos of the shirts. Savage went on to provide stories of customers calling their Wistia Tee their “favorite shirt” that they wear every weekend. It’s a great way to make a potential customer happy and spread the word at the same time.

Additional Coverage

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Future M: Bringing Science to the Art of Marketing: Consistent, Compelling Brand and Customer Experience

by Nathan W. Burke on September 13, 2011

From the FutureM site:

Summary – It’s no secret that marketing is much different today than it was even just a couple of years ago. This session showcases how changes in consumer behavior and expectations are giving CMOs and senior marketing executives a unique opportunity to radically improve how they optimize and automate marketing processes, better utilize a wealth of client data to make smarter business decisions, and steward the end-to-end customer experience in both B2B and B2C environments.
Event Partner -IBM
Speaker- Kristen Lauria, Vice President, Marketing, IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions

This session s definitely focused on CMOs at megacorporations, and it’s really interesting to see things from that perspective (obviously this is very different than marketing in startups).

One of the main things I’m hearing here and have heard from marketers at very large companies is the fear of losing control of their brand’s perception due to social media. Since I’ve never spent time at a company that was used to doing things the old way (back when you actually could control your message), this is a strange concept to me.

This slide just came up:

“Harness the power of customer insight to create seamless, engaging and relevant multi-channel interactions”

Whoa. Translation: Listen to what your customers want and give it to them in every interaction. And don’t be boring.

Listening to the layers of terms applied on top of things that seem common sense is making me realize something:  marketing at a giant corporation that still hangs on to the idea that you can control your brand’s perception must be nearly impossible. Spending time creating a process to define what you can say through the company twitter account sounds like a nightmare to me. I totally understand the concept that you want to have a consistent voice and want to be able to communicate without tripping over each other. I understand why it has to be done in a megacorp. It just doesn’t sound like fun.

And that’s it. Short presentation, but again, really interesting to see the processes from the other side.

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Banner Ads: A Matter of Trust or Hey, Let’s Throw Money In The Street

by Nathan W. Burke on August 22, 2011

At my current company, we do a lot of things to try to bring leads into the top of the funnel. We spend a lot of time on the inbound side, creating content that goes after search traffic. We do a few whitepaper campaigns with vendors, all with specific criteria (companies with over 500 employees, etc). Like just about any other company out there, we also run AdWords and facebook ads.

And then there’s banner ads. One of these things is not like the others.

I’ve never been a big fan of banner ads for a number of reasons, most dealing with trust.

When you do a banner campaign, you have to blindly trust that the vendor is actually showing your ads. Where you’re paying for clicks on an AdWords campaign, banner campaigns are based on impressions: the number of times the ads are shown.

And who is to say that your ads are being shown?

The inspiration for this post is an email I received this morning from a vendor that is making my blood boil. Though I’d like nothing more than to write the name of the company, I’ve decided to wait it out. Here’s what happened.

The Campaign Begins

We wanted to do a trial campaign with a nationally-known company with several web sites that hit our target market effectively: C-Level IT Execs in large companies using Google Apps.

We decided on a campaign that was half whitepaper leads, half banner ads. It took us a bit to get our ads together, and in the meantime we started running the whitepaper program.

Not surprisingly, the leads from our whitepaper program were highly qualified. I’d say that 70% of the leads we received were legit (when you subtract people using fake email addresses, fake company names, etc.). That’s not bad. And each time I’d send back a garbage lead, the company would give us another credit to replace the bad lead. So far so good.

When we sent over our banner ads and started the campaign, I immediately started seeing an uptick in registrations for a trial of our app. As we always do, we created a unique landing page for the ad campaign. This way, the only way someone can arrive at that landing page is by clicking the ad (we don’t link the page anywhere else on the site). Additionally, the form is unique to the campaign.

The only problem is that every signup we saw on that landing page was garbage. Literally 100% of signups were junk. That was a red flag. If the only people that came to this page were doing so after clicking a banner ad, then what percentage of our banner impressions were being showed to spam bots? 100%?

After a few days of running the banner ads, I asked the vendor to both pause our ads and give us metrics on our campaign performance. I also sent them the list of leads that had signed up on our site from the ad campaign (showing the garbage we received).

After a couple of weeks, the answer I got: “Nothing is wrong. Your ads were shown on our site, and we recommend that you add a captcha to your form. We use a 3rd party ad server, and they have confirmed that your ads were shown correctly.”

Rather than giving information on why 100% of the traffic coming to our site from the ad was spam, they instead give us tips on how to stop their spam traffic from signing up on our site? It’s the equivalent of saying “We’re going to show your ad to a bunch of spam bots. If you don’t want them to sign up, here’s how you can make it more difficult to fill out your form. We’re still going to waste your impressions on spam bots rather than people, but here’s how you can remedy that pesky junk signup problem.”

The Resolution

After a call on Friday where we asked for a full credit for what we paid on questionable impressions to be applied to new whitepaper leads, I received an email this morning. My sales rep told me that his boss agreed to a half credit, as our ads were served properly, and were seen by the right audience.

Again, my knee-jerk reaction is to bash the company, but that’s not for me. Instead, I want to shine a light on the bigger picture: the fact that there’s no accountability and no proof when it comes to banner ads. It’s all about trust, and there’s no transparency whatsoever.

Anyone can throw together a spreadsheet that shows xx,xxx impressions and xxx clicks, but how can you rely on those numbers?

There’s not much that I can do at this point other than accepting the offer and never doing business with the company again. While it would have been ridiculously easy for the company to give us a credit, knowing that we would continue working with them moving forward, they’ve decided to go the other way. It’s a good lesson to learn early.

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Using Google Spreadsheets for Prospecting

by Nathan W. Burke on August 9, 2011

After reading that Google has made it easier to use functions within Google Spreadsheets, I thought I’d try out some of the functions that may make my life easier. The first one I saw was GoogleLookup.

From the GoogleLookup help page:

Using the Web, the GoogleLookup function attempts to find the values for straightforward facts about specific things. Keep in mind that while the GoogleLookup function knows quite a bit, it doesn’t know everything. Although not all of the formulas you try will work, we encourage you to experiment.

Hmmm. Interesting.

Let’s say I want to find companies that have over 500 employees out of a list. For instance, here’s a random sample of company names from a list:

Now let’s say I want to get the number of employees from each of these companies. Using the GoogleLookup function, I can find the number of employees each of these companies has*

The function:

To use the GoogleLookup function, enter the following formula in the desired spreadsheet cell:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”) where “entity” represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and “attribute” is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

Some examples:

Here are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names (some entities won’t have all these attributes, and some will have more, so feel free to experiment):

  • Countries and Territories (like “Burkina Faso”): population, capital, largest city, gdp
  • U.S. States (like “Tennessee”): area, governor, nickname, flower
  • Rivers (like “Amazon River”): origin, length
  • Cities and Towns (like “Chicago”): state, mayor, elevation

So in this case, we’d want our formula to be something like: =GoogleLookup(“Company”;”employees”). Easy. And in this case, we want to use a formula to grab the contents of the cell and add “employees” as well:

In addition, when the list has loaded, Google Spreadsheets will show you the source of the information along with other sources:

Why is this a big deal?

If you’re in a company that has strict prospecting criteria, this can really save some time. For instance, when it comes to prospecting, I’m interested in identifying companies using Google Apps that have over 500 employees. While identifying whether a company is using Google Apps is much more manual, automating the company size fetching is a huge time saver.

Additionally, I run stats each week on leads that have signed up for a trial of our product, and want to see the size of their company as well. You can’t really trust user input from a form, and if you can remove one field, that’s excellent.

Data Quality

Looking quickly at one company, it looks like the data sources are pretty good. For instance:

Though the first link is dead, the second and third are live….if a little bit dated. So for my purpose the quality is enough, as I don’t really need something granular.

Summary

If you’re looking to automate finding company size while prospecting, Google Spreadsheets can really save you some time.

* at least what Google think they have.

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The Secure Cloud Bundle: Teaming Up To Go To Market

by Nathan W. Burke on June 16, 2011

Today I’m proud and excited to announce the launch of the Secure Cloud Bundle, the first bundle of products from the Google Apps Marketplace. This project has been my baby for the last 2 months, and it feels good to finally put it out there.

We (CloudLock) teamed up with Backupify and LTech to offer three top Google Apps Marketplace apps together for one price, and at a big discount. Buying each separately would be $27 per Google Apps user per year, but when purchased together in the bundle, the price is only $9 per Google Apps user per year.

Why A Bundle?

1. Real Estate – Since we are a company that sells a product that is only relevant to Google Apps customers, we’re somewhat limited as to where we can market to potential leads.

One venue is the Google Apps Marketplace, which is a great source of highly qualified leads. The issue here is that we have no control over whether we’re featured on the home page, and we don’t control Google’s search algorithm. Though we’re very highly rated within the security category, there’s not much more we can do there to promote ourselves more.

Aside from the Marketplace, we have our own site(s) which are completely under our control. And adding another site for the Secure Cloud Bundle gives all 3 companies yet another customer acquisition source. It’s another door to get interested people in our (virtual) door.

2. Promotion – This one is a no brainer. When you have three companies working together to promote something, you have three blogs, three twitter accounts, three…..you get it. You have three times the resources to promote the same initiative.

3. Coverage – Getting three companies together to pull off a project like this is getting us coverage, and that’s not something you can get every day as a startup. Unless you’re Google or Facebook, there’s a good chance that the media doesn’t care about the new feature you’ve added to your product. You really have to do something big to get good coverage, and this fit the bill.

4. Revenue – An important part of any business, we want to make money. And offering a deal like this makes it easier to justify the spend if you’re in a small company that is strapped for cash. Even before we “officially” launched the bundle, a handful of companies found the site and bought the bundle.

And now for an image representing the bundle:

What’s In The Bundle

From the press release:

The Secure Cloud Bundle includes the following:

  • CloudLock – enterprise-class data protection, access controls and security for any organization looking to retain control of their data while gaining the collaboration and cost-savings benefits of the cloud
  • Backupify – secure, automatic daily backups for Google Docs. Backupify provides the peace of mind IT administrators need knowing their data will always be available
  • LTech – advanced IT management and end-user capabilities including macros, user templates and email monitoring

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