Technology enables us to get more done, faster. And technology is practical. Concrete. It’s not about ideas; it’s about execution.

This is certainly true in sales environments. It’s almost impossible to propose any initiative without prompting the question: is there software for that?

In sales environments, the answer to that question is yes. There is always software for that. In fact there are many thousands of software applications promising to automate every step in the sales lifecycle, from the generation of sales opportunities through to the provision of management information.

Broken promises

The dirty secret of sales environments is that, with few exceptions, this technology has done nothing to improve productivity. Nothing!

After a generation of investment in sales (and marketing) automation technologies, sales environments look (and operate) essentially the same as they did 20 years ago. There is little credible evidence that the tens (or, more commonly, hundreds) of thousands of dollars that a typical firm has spent on sales technology has caused a rise in revenues, a reduction in costs or even an improvement in customer-service quality^[i].

This chapter addresses three critically important questions:

1. Why is technology failing to produce the productivity improvements in sales that it has in other parts of the organization?
2. What role should technology play in the design and operation of the sales function?
3. What are the practical technology requirements of an organization transitioning to the new model?

At the end of the chapter we’ll tackle another more fundamental technology issue. We’ll explore who in the organization should accept which technology responsibilities and, more critically, which responsibilities should never be outsourced.

The sales software system

If the multitude of sales-related software applications was a planetary system, the sun around which all other planets would orbit would be called CRM. CRM stands for customer-relationship management. A CRM (application) is designed to automate the numerous workflows that exist in and around the sales environment – and to store the data that’s generated as a result of those workflows.

These workflows include the generation of sales opportunities, the prosecution of sales opportunities and the management of customer issues.

The other software applications that orbit the CRM in the sales system are dependent on the CRM, either because their reason for existence is to feed it data (new contacts, perhaps) or because they leverage the data that sits within the CRM to perform specialist functions (email broadcast, report generation and so on).

CRM is a subset of a larger class of software, known as ERP (enterprise-resource planning). ERP is the software that manages operational workflows in the organization as a whole. Things like the generation of orders, the scheduling of the production environment, the management of inventory, the processing of payables and receivables, and so on.

Although ERP and CRM are now intertwined, the two technologies had quite different beginnings. ERP evolved out of inventory control systems in the 1960’s. And CRM evolved out of contact-tracking applications in the 1980’s. Contact-tracking applications (like Act!) were software equivalents of salespeople’s day-planner calendars.

Although the two technologies have grown together over the years, their usage has not. In the modern organization, ERP is pervasive – if you removed it, the organization would simply cease to function. This is not the case with CRM. In fact, in many organizations, the removal of CRM would actually unencumber salespeople and increase their productivity!

What’s wrong with CRM?

Consider the list of standard promises made on behalf of CRM by CRM vendors:

1. CRM will increase salespeople’s productivity
2. CRM will cause an improvement in customer service quality
3. CRM will drive a tighter integration of sales and marketing
4. CRM will provide management with better quality information

As I mentioned earlier, most organizations have invested a king’s ransom in CRM but few have seen any (let alone all) of these promises realized.

Technically, however, there is nothing wrong with CRM!

As we’ll shortly discover, CRM has the potential to unleash enormous productivity improvements in sales environments. The problem with this technology is that it has been designed around the requirements of a sales environment that doesn’t actually exist.

It’s useful (and somewhat amusing) to understand why this has occurred.

A candid history of CRM

It’s arguable that the first contact-tracking applications solved a real problem for salespeople. These applications simplified the tracking of the numerous interactions between salespeople and their customers (appointments, phone calls, proposals and other tasks).

I say arguable, because salespeople’s legacy tool (their day-planner calendars) was actually superior to these applications for a couple of reasons:

1. Calendars were (until very recently) much more portable than computers and did not take five minutes or so to switch on
2. Most salespeople did not share their calendars with management – meaning they could make whatever entries they saw fit, without fear that the information would be used against them

Understandably, because contact-tracking applications provided salespeople with some (but not a huge amount of) value, salespeople purchased them (but not in particularly large numbers).

This incursion of technology into the sales environment was observed with some interest by two groups of people: management and technologists. Managers were excited because they had witnessed the profound productivity improvements that had been delivered to production environments by ERP. And technologists were excited too: they had seen the unimaginable wealth generated by the ERP pioneers.

In fact, the only party in the organization that wasn’t particularly excited by CRM was salespeople! After their experiences with contact tracking, they were nonplussed by the breathless promises of management and technologists.

It took technologists only about 15 years to transform those simple contact-tracking applications into technology that is as mature as ERP applications in almost every sense. And, every step of the way, the technologists’ progress was cheered by management, who fell over themselves to purchase each new iteration of the technology – despite the lack of any evidence of returns on their expenditure to date.

Unlike ERP – which evolved around the requirements of real users – CRM has never really been embraced by users in any meaningful sense! Absent useful user feedback, technologists have had no choice but to design the technology around their vision of what a sales environment should look like.

Hence my claim, previously, that CRM has been designed around an environment that doesn’t actually exist.

The good news – and who’d have thought this story would end well – is that the environment technologists imagined is disarmingly similar to the environment evangelized in this book. Specifically, technologists imagined an environment where actors work as teams – rather than as autonomous agents – and engineered CRM around this idealized vision of reality.

I don’t think this fortunate outcome is the result of incredible prescience on technologists’ behalf – although, they do tend to be pretty smart critters – I think it’s more that CRM has naturally inherited the architecture of ERP, which has collaboration in its genes.

Invalid premise

This short history lesson should make it clear why CRM has consistently failed to deliver on its promises.

All those promises were premised on the existence of a team environment in sales:

The 360° view of the customer – available to anyone in the organization – is of no value to anyone at all if the salesperson is working hard to monopolize the customer relationship (often with the customer aiding and abetting their cause).

The technology to tightly-integrate sales and marketing is of no value to anyone if sales and marketing are fundamentally distrustful of one-another – and even less so if the two departments are held accountable to metrics that propel them apart.

And, the ability for management to have visibility of salespeople’s effort and outcomes is of no use if salespeople have the power to flavor the data they enter into CRM, along with huge incentives to do so! (These incentives emerge from the bizarre game that sales managers and their salespeople play where both pretend that it’s possible for salespeople to simultaneously be team members and autonomous agents.)

Sadly, many (perhaps, most) salespeople have come to despise the software that originated as their productivity tool. The refrain, CRM sucks, is one that’s frequently heard in the modern sales environment!

How technology can add real value to sales

Despite the many (well publicized) problems that large organizations have had with the adoption of ERP, this technology has become indispensable to the modern corporation.

The reason is that it facilitates the division of labor. It enables data to be shared across geography and departments in real time. It allows repetitive processes to be automated. And it allows management to extract information from oceans of data and, as a consequence, to make better decisions, faster.

These are exactly the benefits that CRM (and associated technologies) can provide to sales environments.

Sharing data

In the new model, it’s critical that data is shared across both geography and departments.

As discussed earlier, clients expect a single conversation with your organization. Of course, this conversation has multiple participants (often in both your organization and the clients’), and those participants are in different locations and in different departments.

For example, in a complex sales environment, the conversation might consist of the following interactions:

1. Your field-based salesperson and your prospect’s commercial decision makers
2. Your salesperson’s sales coordinator and your prospect’s executive assistants
3. Your project leader and your prospect’s engineering team
4. Your customer service team and your prospect’s operational people (assuming the prospect is an existing account)

The availability of data is a necessary condition for the synchronization of these interactions into a single conversation – but it’s not a sufficient one. Sufficiency requires that each participant in this conversation is presented only with relevant data – and that this data is presented in a meaningful way.

For example, a salesperson, on their way to a meeting with one of your account’s senior executives does need to know the general status of that account – however, they do not need a log of every transaction your organization has had with that account this year!

CRM can assist with both of these conditions. Because the heart of the CRM is a giant database, the sharing of data is easy. But the CRM also makes it possible for you to provide different people in your organization (and even people in your client’s organization) with custom views of the central dataset.

So, in the example above, customer service representatives will see your account’s discrete transactions, but when your salesperson scans their calendar in your client’s reception area, they will see just a brief summary of sales volumes, categories of products purchased and your organization’s on-time-delivery performance.

Automation

Like all software, CRM is brilliant at the automation of repetitive operations.

At a basic level, the sharing of data (discussed above) is an example of automation. A single data element can be entered once and viewed by multiple parties in different locations without additional (human) effort.

Where promotion is concerned, there are more dramatic examples of automation:

1. A prospective customer who completes a form on a landing page, can be automatically subscribed to one or more automated communication programs, and the data they volunteer can be used to automatically populate company, contact and opportunity records in your CRM
2. With the push of a single button, personalized invitations to an event can be broadcast to thousands of contacts on your house list

It’s worth noting that the benefits of automation tend to be over-hyped by the vendors of CRM. In a complex-sale environment, the automation of the opportunity-management process is the responsibility of a sales coordinator – not of the CRM. If you have humans involved in the prosecution of sales opportunities (salespeople) it’s safe to assume that that it’s impractical for this part of the overall sales process to be managed by a machine.

Management information

We’ve already hinted at the distinction between data and information – and at the ability of CRM to convert the former into the latter.

This distinction is particularly relevant to management. The design of the modern organization puts management in the position where it wields tremendous power – but this power can only be put to good use if management is presented with the right information at the right time.

CRM stores data in a structure that makes the provision of this critical management information relatively easy and CRM (if it’s used sensibly) gives management access to real-time reporting (eliminating the requirement for anyone in your organization to have to prepare standard reports).

Your general technology requirements

Beware the all-in-one solution

Your technology requirements start with CRM, but they probably don’t finish there. In all likelihood you will need a number of technologies to power your entire sales function.

While many CRM’s are billed as all-in-one solutions, it generally makes more sense to assemble a small collection of best-of-breed­ technologies. This is because (at time of writing) all-in-one solutions tend to suffer either from missing functionality or from hideous complexity.

CRM

The power of CRM is its ability to model the complexity associated with both sales and customer support.

The standard model looks like the following. At the base level, we have our house list (accounts and potential accounts). We then have initiatives that we perform that involve those accounts (each initiative is a workflow). And each of those workflows consists of a sequence of events (phone calls, appointments, proposals, and so on).

While other relationships tend to be supported, the most common CRM approach
is to associate activities with initiatives, and initiatives with accounts

All CRM’s have this basic model hardwired into their architecture – which is a good thing, because this is exactly what reality looks like! This structure makes it easy for team members in various departments to enter and retrieve data – and it makes reporting easier too.

Website (content-management system)

Years ago, your website was a static document (brochure-ware).

Today, your website needs to be integrated (not necessarily in a technical sense) with many of your business functions and, for this reason, you need the flexibility to manage your website internally (rather than relying on a design firm). This means that even the simplest of websites should be built within a content-management system (CMS).

Where sales is concerned, your website will make a significant contribution to the generation of sales opportunities. Your website (in conjunction with search engines) will doubtless generate some sales opportunities organically but, more importantly, most (if not all) of your promotional activities will drive prospective clients to your website where they will complete forms on custom landing pages.

These landing pages are likely to be among the most frequently edited content on your website.

Lead-management (marketing automation) systems

In recent years, a particularly valuable class of software has emerged to bridge the divide between your website (or, more specifically, your landing pages) and your CRM.

Lead-management (or marketing automation) software consists of a class of web-based applications that provide the following functionality:

1. The design and hosting of forms (the forms that appear in your landing pages)
2. The management of contact lists (the data that’s collected when prospects submit forms)
3. Auto-responders (sequences of automated email messages)
4. Mass email broadcast

Applications that bill themselves as marketing automation tend to target the enterprise market with total solutions that include things like website analytics, landing-page hosting (rather than just forms) and the ability to build quite sophisticated automated communications around a range of prospect behaviors (web pages visited, links followed from emails, forms completed, etc).

Management information system

Your next requirement is for a management information system (MIS). Most CRM’s come with reporting capabilities but in many cases it makes sense to use a discrete MIS because:

1. More often than not, you will want reports that merge data from multiple sources (e.g. CRM, ERP and web analytics services)
2. Each level of management will have quite different information requirements
3. Less is more (it is not beneficial for a manager to have to browse hundreds of reports to find the two or three that are relevant to them)

Choosing specific technologies

I’m sure you wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t make some specific technology recommendations!

However, because this advice will age quickly, it will undoubtedly be worth paying more attention to the reasons for my recommendations than the recommendations themselves.

CRM

In line with my earlier comment about the danger of all-in-one solutions, my first piece of advice is to avoid purchasing the CRM that is provided by your ERP vendor.

You should avoid this for two simple reasons:

1. You will likely make significant sacrifices in the areas of functionality and (importantly) useability
2. The tight integration that your vendor promises will come at the expense of terrible complexity

It’s important to stress that, in the new model, tight integration of ERP and CRM is not required. This is because your division-of-labor means different people will require different data or different views of the same data. As mentioned earlier, your salesperson (for example) doesn’t need access to transactional data, they just need a summary view of this data.

The only data that does require (relatively) tight integration is address book data – and this can certainly be achieved without purchasing an all-in-one solution. Similarly, your other integration requirements (like the salesperson’s transaction summary) can be achieved either at the reporting level or with low cost add-ins.

My second piece of advice, where CRM is concerned, is that the core technology is relatively mature, meaning that the differences between CRM’s are minimal – and are tending to diminish with each new release.

For this reason, I recommend that you give special consideration to:

1. The size of the support community (and the availability of third-party plug-ins)
2. Ease of customization
3. Price

With these considerations in mind, let me tell you our three current recommendations:

1. Vtiger. This is an open source application – meaning that you need only pay for hosting and that customization is very easy. It has a decent-sized support community, it has tons of functionality and it’s very easy to use. The downside is that it’s not the prettiest application and it lacks some cutting-edge (but not particularly useful) features (like Facebook-style comment streams).
2. Salesforce. This has every feature known to mankind and an enormous support community. It’s also a beautiful and very user-friendly application. The downside is that it’s expensive – really damn expensive – particularly if you want to integrate it with third-party services!
3. Microsoft CRM. This is the obvious choice for those organizations that have made a big commitment to the Microsoft enterprise environment because of its out-of-the box interoperability with SharePoint and other MS services. It’s a feature-rich and user-friendly application (particularly for users who are used to the MS environment).

The new model does make two critical requirements of CRM that you should be mindful of:

1. MS Exchange or Google Apps integration. Because field salespeople spend all their time in the field, it’s critical that your CRM pushes appointments into your salespeople’s mobile devices (not just into their Outlook calendars). This tends to require either MS Exchange (not Outlook) integration or Google Apps integration. Be warned, most CRM salespeople are less than truthful where this requirement is concerned!
2. Batch-generation of sales opportunities. In the new model, sales opportunities are generated by promotions and not by salespeople. Because promotional campaigns tend to target batches of prospects, it’s important that your promotional coordinator can generate a sales opportunity against each campaign recipient. MS CRM is the only CRM that I’m aware of that comes with this functionality. Ballistix (a company I founded) has written plug-ins for Salesforce and Vtiger to achieve this.

Website (content-management system)

The choice here is easy.

The most popular content-management system with the biggest support community and the richest feature-set (by a country mile) also happens to be free! Like Vtiger, WordPress is open source.

Do not, under any circumstances, allow a web developer to sell you their in-house CMS or (worse still) to build you a custom website from the ground up.

Even if you have special requirements (like the integration of operational data into your website, for example) you’re still better off building a website on the WordPress platform and then integrating your operational data at the few points where it is really required (in many cases this can be achieved by pasting a snippet of JavaScript into your WordPress page editor).^[ii]

Lead-management (marketing automation) applications

As mentioned, these applications are all web-services nowadays.

You have the services that bill themselves as lead management (our pick of these is Aweber) and those that offer the full marketing-automation solution (a good example of these is Marketo).

My advice is to start with Aweber and avoid the (expensive) marketing-automation applications until you are convinced there is a good business case for upgrading. If you use Aweber in conjunction with WordPress, Google Analytics (see next section), and a 3^rd-party CRM plug-in, you’ll find that you can enjoy most of the features of a marketing-automation application at a fraction of the cost.

In case you’re wondering, I’m suggesting Aweber, rather than MailChimp and other contenders because Aweber has an invaluable feature that enables you to create multiple sequences of automated emails and then automatically move prospects from one sequence to the next as they complete forms on your landing pages.

For example, you might have a first-time visitor watch a video and prompt them for an email address one-third of the way in (there’s a WordPress plug-in for this!). The receipt of that email address might trigger a sequence of automated emails that encourages the visitor to request a document of some kind – and each email would provide a link to a new landing page the visitor can use to do so.

When the visitor requests the document, they would be automatically unsubscribed from the first email sequence and subscribed to a new one. This new sequence might encourage the visitor to express interest in a conference call with one of your salespeople – and, again, provide a link to another landing page the visitor can use to accept this offer.

As an aside, I would encourage you to mark automated emails as such. The reason is that the most effective emails are the ones your prospect could easily believe you custom-generated for them. Best to aim for the most effective emails possible and to simultaneously ensure that no one will be deceived.

Management information system

Those who love purchasing new technology will be disappointed by my recommendation here.

In my opinion, the most valuable reporting tool – by a country mile – is Excel. Or more specifically, the Pivot Table (and Pivot Chart) functionality within Excel.

To convert Excel into a full-blown management information system, all you need to do is:

1. Find a way to import the data on which you wish to report into Excel
2. Show management how to drive a Pivot Table (or Pivot Chart)

Fortunately, both are relatively easy.

The most elegant way to achieve the former is to organize for a technical person to make the data on which you wish to report available to you as (password-protected) XML feeds (one feed for each dataset). Excel can easily digest these feeds and provide you the ability to manipulate them to your heart’s content in a Pivot Table (or Pivot Chart).

Conceptually, Pivot Tables are difficult to comprehend but managers tend to take to them like ducks to water once they see them in action. This is because they are incredibly powerful and because you can quickly assemble the reports you want with a combination of drag-and-drop and trial-and-error!

Imagine Mary’s colleagues have requested a report that compares her firm’s return-on-investment on LinkedIn and Facebook advertising.

She will request access to three datasets from IT. Cost-per-click data from LinkedIn and Facebook (these can easily be merged into one table). Opportunity data from CRM (this will enable Mary to see the opportunities generated from online campaigns – as well as whether or not they go on to become clients). And, monthly client expenditure data from ERP.

IT will provide Mary with an Excel workbook with each of these datasets in a table on its own sheet. Mary can then generate a number of Pivot Tables, each referencing one or more of those datasets (Excel will prompt her to identify common fields in each dataset that can be used to join the three tables.)

Mary might start by creating a pivot table that lists customers that originated from each of those promotional sources. She can then create a second table that compares Facebook and LinkedIn expenditure with the total sales generated by customers originating from those sources.

Mary’s pivot tables, along with the raw data (from three sources)
she used to create them (with minimal help from IT)

The beauty of this report is that, once Mary has access to that raw data, she can answer most questions without additional recourse to IT. This is in contrast to alternative approaches to management information, which tend to make management dependent upon the IT department for every change they wish to make to their reports.

The importance of in-house technical capability

As you may be starting to suspect, I’m a big fan of open-source applications. Obviously, the fact that most of these applications are free contributes to my enthusiasm – but this is only the beginning.

I believe that open-source applications make a lot of sense for two more important reasons:

1. With any major application (ERP or CRM) you will save enough on license fees to employ a full-time developer to work on the application for you
2. These applications are extremely easy to modify and to integrate with other applications, meaning that your in-house developer will enable you to get incredible mileage from your limited technology expenditure

Now, it’s quite likely that you may not find the idea of employing a full-time developer appealing. It’s tempting to conclude that it will make more sense to purchase a commercial application from a (value-added) reseller – who can then provide you with ongoing technical support.

In my experience, where small-to-medium enterprise (SME) is concerned, this conclusion is wrong. The harsh reality is that, to extract real value from enterprise technology, you simply must have in-house technical capability. In almost every case, those organizations I work with that depend on third-party technology providers, discover that their enterprise technology becomes an incredibly expensive bottleneck (which is the exact opposite of the intended outcome).

The problem is that the economics of a technology services firm (in the SME space) prevent those firms from developing a detailed understanding of their clients’ businesses and prevent them from being as agile as is necessary to really add value.

Embracing technology

But there’s another reason why my position on open-source makes sense. And that’s that building your own in-house technical capability is the third step in my three steps to embracing technology.

It’s worth pausing for a minute to consider the role technology plays in business in general.

One view is that technology allows us to simplify or automate activities. But this view would lead us to conclude that technology is a tactical consideration only. And this conclusion would be wrong.

Throughout history there have been a number of advances in technology that are so significant that they fundamentally change the way business is conducted – as opposed to simply automating an activity or two.

In recent times, information technology seems to be resulting in these fundamental changes occurring at an increased rate, as is evidenced by the impact of Amazon on retail, iTunes on music, Etrade on stockbroking and so on.

The result is that it’s exceptionally dangerous, in my opinion, to make strategic decisions without a sound understanding of technology. And, if you’re the business owner (or a senior executive) it needs to be you with that sound understanding – not a board member, partner or employee.

Your understanding of technology needs to be deep enough to enable you to appreciate the implications of technology implicitly – and deep enough to enable you to communicate effectively with technical people.

If you’re not sure where you rank, where tech-fluency is concerned, I’ve composed a set of three questions you can use to make your own evaluation. To answer these questions, you need a reasonably deep understanding of technology – rather than just the ability to decipher a technical acronym or two.

Here are those questions:

1. What is a relational database – and what would a non-relational database look like?
2. What is multi-tier architecture – and what problems does it solve?
3. What is the essence of the Agile approach to software development – and what is the alternative?

If you struggle to answer these questions, I have a solution for you – in three steps. Sadly, it’s not a quick fix – it’s more of a journey. But, I do think it’s a journey that’s well worth embarking on. Remember, software engineers have a history of mastering business faster than business people tend to master technology!

Here are those three steps:

1. Read about the history of technology. This is a great way of gaining an appreciation of technology fundamentals (which rarely change). Read biographies of Alan Turing and John von Neumann; read about the history of Xerox PARC; and about the history of algorithms.
2. Get your feet wet. Create a simple database-based application for yourself – from scratch. Use Microsoft Access or Zoho Creator to create a personal expense tracker, a catalogue of your wine collection or an application to track your exercise or food consumption. MS Access and Zoho Creator are great because you can make good initial progress with simple drag-and-drop functionality – before (inevitably) you’re forced to write a line or two of code. (Yep, I’m serious, I’m actually expecting you to write some code!)
3. Get some in-house development capability. Now you’re attacking your neophytism in a pincer move you can strike a decisive blow by employing your first developer. If you’ve taken my advice and installed one or more open-source applications, you can employ an engineer with broad experience in the LAMP stack (Google it!). Otherwise, it might make more sense to employ a technical project manager and have them outsource your coding requirements. If you’ve never managed a development specialist before, you’ll discover that this is no small undertaking. Nonetheless, it’s a lesson that needs to be learned. By the way, if you have a third-party technology service provider, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to have this firm recruit your in-house person and assist you with the management of them. This will be money well spent! Oh, and one more thing; if you are a SME, and you have a IT systems administrator you should definitely keep systems administration at arm’s length from software development (these two functions have radically different world views and they tend to be antagonistic).

I hope I’ve sold you on the point that technology is an executive leadership responsibility – not something to be delegated, in its entirety. Either way, our discussion of technology has delivered us at the feet of management: the subject of our very last chapter.

^[i] At time of writing, a Google search for “ERP productivity improvement” returns a link to 21,000 references from scholarly articles, followed by numerous vendor case studies citing measureable productivity improvement. A search for “CRM productivity improvement” returns numerous vendor articles promising productivity improvements but few (if any) citing quantitative outcomes. Amusingly, the second entry in those search results is a link to an article entitled Why CRM sucks!, by yours truly!

^[ii] By the way, my advice doesn’t apply if you’re a retailer and you need an Amazon-style website that is essentially a front-end for an ERP system. I’m assuming that not too many retailers will be reading this book.

Andrew Warner is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and, every day of the week, he interviews a founder with a story worthy of note.

Typically, these founders have built (and very often sold) successful tech companies. Other times, they just have a particularly interesting story to tell.

The unbelievable thing about Mixergy is you can subscribe to Andrew’s site for free and watch each of his interviews as he posts them (all are live for a week before disappearing behind a paywall).

If my last story about Mixergy didn’t compel you to get over there and subscribe, you should probably do it now.

But first, maybe you should take some time to watch Andrew’s interview with yours truly on September 26!

In almost an hour and a half (yep, it’s an in-depth interview), Andrew covers a lot of ground. From my first vocation (ballet dancer) to my introduction to business (selling insurance) and the long story of Ballistix, including the four pivots (as they’re now called) that have lead us to our current model.  I think it’s a great interview (but I’m biased, of course).

Oh, and a big thank you to Maria Sipka (who has her own exciting start-up) for recommending me to Andrew.

The finest day of my life

In case you’re wondering why it took me so long to post news of the Mixergy interview, I have more news I feel compelled to share.

I don’t normally share personal stuff but this is so momentous, I’ll have to ask you to humor me.

On October 3, on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland (Australia), Bo and I were married.

I met Bo at LAX about four years ago. We were both checking baggage and we got chatting about software development and quality assurance (Bo leads the quality initiative at Guthy Renker).

Obviously, with such a gift for casual conversation, we couldn’t stand to spend much time apart – and so we’ve chosen not to!

(As I write this, Bo is working on a little Ruby on Rails application for Ballistix and I’m pestering her with unwanted advice on system architecture!)

The results

In a previous post, I told you how we build our list (generate new relationships).  And I shared how our overall lead-generation machine is self-liquidating (the revenue from Solution Design Workshops  is more than the total costs associated with the generation of the sales opportunities for these workshops) – meaning that it costs us (less than) nothing to generate sales opportunities for our Outsourced Sales Operations engagements.

What I didn’t tell you is how we convert new relationships (people who have requested an extract from The Machine) into sales of Solution Design Workshops.

The key to that is webinars.

I’ll explain the why and how of webinars shortly. First let me share the results.

Since March this year, we have run 9 events.  Roughly half have been run in the morning (LA time), to suit our US subscribers and the other half in the evening, to suit our Aussie audience.

Across those nine events, 797 bookings have yielded 380 attendees and 116 requests for Best Practice Briefings. A Best Practice Briefings is the intermediate step before a Solution Design Workshop.

That means our conversion rates from booking-to-attendee and attendee-to-briefing are 48% and 31% respectively.  Actually, in recent times, we’ve pushed both conversion rates up to almost 50% which is much better than standard rules of thumb.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the following chart shows our numbers across all nine events.

And, in case you’re wondering, here’s the breakdown across each event type.  These numbers are of limited value because we have promoted the Death of Field Sales event more heavily than the other two. (We did this because the Death of Field Sales headline outperformed the others in tests we ran with pay-per-click advertising.)

Why webinars?

I hear two criticisms of webinars – generally from executives who don’t run them!

1. I don’t attend them
2. They are not as effective as physical events

It’s easy to ridicule the first criticism (um, that’s a sample of one, isn’t it?), but there’s a grain of truth here.  Most people don’t attend webinars – and that’s quite okay.  We’re happy if 20 people attend one of our webinars every couple of weeks.  Our expectation is that our house list is large enough to yield those kind of numbers indefinitely (especially considering that we’re continually growing that list).

It’s also true that webinars aren’t as effective as physical events – and that’s okay too. What you lose in intimacy you gain in:

1. Lower costs: the marginal cost of our events is exactly zero! (We already subscribe to the necessary email and web-conferencing services.)
2. Flexibility: I can conduct events for delegates in any part of the world from my home office, here in LA

How do we run them?

We conduct webinars using a service called ClickWebinar. I prefer this to GoToWebinar (the obvious contender) for one simple reason – it allows you to broadcast video from your webcam (in addition to audio and slides).  I really do believe this is a valuable feature because it makes the event feel more live – particularly as some organizations are taking the easy-way-out and broadcasting pre-recorded events (we will never do this).

Here’s picture of a webinar in full flight.

Recently, I’ve put some effort into improving the webcam image quality.  I’ve been able to make big strides here by:

1. Mounting the webcam on the wall, between my two monitors
2. Suspending a backdrop behind me
3. Placing two tripod-mounted LED lights (with diffusers) on either side of my desk

We promote these webinars with two emails to our house list (the second is a reminder).  I’m sure you’ve seen these emails already but, in case you haven’t, here’s an example.

We use Eventbrite to handle bookings for our webinars. Because there’s no charge for tickets, this service costs us nothing. And we’ve written our own little application that merges data from Eventbrite and ClickWebinar for import back into CRM.

If you’d like to know more details about any of the above, you’re welcome to use the comment section below to ask questions. A better idea, however, would be simply to attend our next event.  If you’re not on our house list currently, you can remedy that by clicking the SUBSCRIBE tab at the top of my blog.

On the one hand it demonstrates that organizations can implement SPE without the assistance of Ballistix.

On the other hand it suggests that we’ve made huge progress in our efforts to codify and communicate both the principles and the practice of SPE.

Aside from reading our books and attending our events, Daniel Dunsford had no help from Ballistix. But that didn’t stop him from following our prescription (almost to the letter), and, as a consequence:

• Slashing his sales-related costs
• Boosting his sales revenues
• Multiplying his firm’s profitability

Daniel is the principal of AR Cash Flow, a provider of receivables financing, based in Sydney, Australia. One of the things that I found striking about this interview is that Daniel made the correct call on a number of tough decisions:

• From day-one, he established the critical 1:1 ratio between sales coordinators and salespeople – and scaled-down his sales team to make this possible (rather than under-resourcing the sales coordinator role and rendering the transition impossible)
• He saw the light and eliminated sales commissions right away (rather that allowing them to cast a pall over the team-based structure)
• He bit the bullet and took-on the business development role himself – until he had proof of concept (rather than relying on indirect feedback)

Anyway, that’s enough from me. Here’s Daniel telling the story, in his own words.

No help from Ballistix: AR Cash Flow goes it alone and multiplies profits

• Would customers be happy dealing (by phone, rather than face-to-face) with account managers who were located in another region?
• Would customers tolerate the requirement to interact with multiple specialists – rather than with a single generalist?
• Would customers be comfortable with the idea of an assistant scheduling meetings for a field-based salesperson?
• Would telephone contact be as effective as face-to-face in most selling situations?

Today, only a few months on, the results are in. And, without exception, the answer to each of the questions above is YES.

Something had to change

As Andrew explains in the video below, the decision to reengineer sales was not one that the Megara management team took lightly. The team was well aware of the magnitude of the changes – and the associated risks – the new direction entailed.

But, there was no question that the standard model was broken. Attempts to grow revenue by building-out the sales team (11 salespeople and an experienced sales manager) had failed. In the wake of that failure, the maintenance of the status quo was starting to feel like a more radical option than the Sales Process Engineering message espoused in the workshops the Megara team had been attending!

Video: Andrew Rundle (who leads Megara’s packaging division)
discusses the SPE journey with Justin Roff-Marsh

New model

Today, in place of 11 field-based salespeople (and one sales manager), Megara has the following specialist functions:

• Inside sales: a team of head-office based account managers (all accounts and opportunities are now owned by internal personnel)
• Business-development manager: in the near-term, this (field-based) role will be filled by Andrew, who will dedicate two days a week to new-account acquisition

• Sales coordinator: essentially the business-development manager’s executive assistant
• Field-based project leaders: these are technical experts who support both the inside sales team and the business-development manager
• Estimating: while this wasn’t in our original plan, we quickly discovered that the volume of RFQ’s warranted a team of dedicated estimators
• Customer service: issue management and the processing of simple transactions

Economics

The length of that list disguises the effect that the transition has had on both headcount and payroll costs.

Megara’s sales and sales support team has actually reduced in size by 4 people. And payroll costs for the sales function have reduced by around 30%! Furthermore, Megara has, as a result of the changes, been able to close two regional offices.

Of course, all this is a pyrrhic victory if the reduction in costs is associated with a reduction in sales activity (or customer service quality). But the opposite is the case.  In all areas of the business (except business-development) there has been a marked increase in sales activity (in absolute terms). And every indication is that customer service quality is up too.

What didn’t work?

As the opening of this story suggests, in our initial planning, we made a lot of good calls. But we made a few bad ones too.

Estimating is a good example.  We started with some assumptions about the estimating load and we quickly discovered that we had under-stated it. So, we did a time-and-motion study to determine the extent of it – but, even then, we got it wrong.  At one point it felt like every person in the organization was estimating (some of them, 24 hours a day)!

Eventually, we were forced to recognize that the problem was much bigger than our incremental approaches to solving it. In response, we took two of Megara’s most valuable inside sales and technical resources and turned them into a dedicated estimating department. That solved the estimating problem, almost overnight, but it left the account-management team a little thin on the ground.  Fortunately, resourcing-up this function turned out to be easier than we expected.

We had a slow start with Project Leaders too. On day-one we assumed that most of their work would relate to business development and, consequently, had them working closely with the Sales Coordinator. This instantly overwhelmed our Sales Coordinator and caused new-account acquisition to grind to a halt. We solved this problem by converting Project Leaders into a field resource for the account management team (on call for business-development, when required) – but the cost was a slow start to business development.

Another issue (and this is a common one) was that we underestimated the effort associated with the commencement of promotional campaigns. It’s not that any of the parts of promotion are particularly complex – it’s more that there are so many parts and they all have to move together.

You need offers and creative. You need lists – and, in most cases, you can’t buy these, you have to research them. And you need special technology: landing pages, email broadcast capabilities, the ability to run complex queries on your house list and the ability to batch-generate sales opportunities, just for starters! Then, when you have all the parts, you need people with the focus – and time – to execute the long sequence of tasks, stretching from the origination of an offer to the scheduling of field appointments.

The future

And that brings us to the future.

As Andrew mentions in the video, new-account acquisition is our current focus now that the rest of the machine is in place and operating well. The good news is that we have proof of concept for all of the components of this initiative. At the start of the transition, Andrew seized the initiative and stepped into the business-development role himself for a little while. As a consequence, he proved that splitting sales tasks between a field representative and a sales coordinator works great. Also, some of our halting promotional experiments over the last few months have been surprisingly successful – suggesting that the promotional challenge is, to a large part, mechanical!

If you haven’t already done so, watch the video above. If you have questions, ask them in the comment section of the blog post.  I’m sure Andrew will be happy to weigh in with answers. And, while you’re at it, be sure to thank Andrew for sharing his story so openly, as I will now.

Thank you Andrew!

That post was well received so this one is an update. Actually, it’s more than an update: it’s a review of our entire US lead-generation machine. I hope it provides you an idea or two – or, perhaps, the courage to run some of your own promotional experiments with new media.

So, back in February 2011, I talked about how we launched our US operations at the depth of the recession and struggled to generate sales opportunities the way we do in Australia. The problem was that, in Australia, we had a house list containing many tens of thousands of executives – and in the US, we didn’t (and still don’t)!

I talked about how, when we launched here, we squandered a small fortune on PR, tradeshows, traditional advertising and traditional direct mail campaigns. And I related some encouraging results we were getting using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (predominantly on LinkedIn) to give away reports and, in so doing, generate sales opportunities.

Since then we’ve done quite a bit of additional experimentation and automation. Here are the results. (If any of this doesn’t make sense, it’ll pay to read – or re-read – Chapter 9 of The Machine, which I posted last week.)

Offers

We tested a number of offers early in 2011 and the clear winner (by a ridiculous margin) was a sampler of The Machine (the first three chapters).

Of course, I love the fact that this offer is our best-performing because it means that we’re building the audience for the upcoming book at the same time we’re generating sales opportunities.

Because this is our best performing offer, pretty much all of our campaigns over this period point to versions of the one landing page, offering copies of The Machine (the sampler), along with a DVD containing a copy of my first book, a 2.5hr luncheon presentation and other good stuff.

It makes sense to have all campaigns point to the one ultimate offer as we have done because it simplifies opportunity management and enables you to automate your lead management to a greater degree.

On that note:

1. We use AWeber  to automate our lead-management process (form generation, auto-responders and list management)
2. We have automated the import of sales opportunities into our CRM
3. We pay a person I found here in LA (on Craigslist) to do all of our mail handling (she mail merges letters direct from our CRM and uses stamps.com to generate postage labels)

Audience (media)

The following chart shows most of the sales opportunities we have generated since January 2011, broken-down by campaign category.

You can see that PPC advertising on LinkedIn turned out to be a winner. It’s not our least expensive form of promotion (in terms of cost-per-opportunity) but it’s certainly the most scalable.

You can also see that we’re getting great value from this blog (with SEO referrals increasing steadily over the period) and from referrals. The Fortune Summit entry exists because Verne Harnish was kind enough to invite me to the stage to speak about our approach to sales commissions after Dan Pink’s presentation last year.

Creative execution

One of the great things about PPC advertising is that the creative component (words and pictures) is easy. Most media (e.g. Google, LinkedIn and Facebook) provide you with a limited amount of space and strict controls on how you can use it.

Here’s a sample of one of our many LinkedIn ads. (We have many because we’re regularly trialing new versions and because the response to individual versions fades quite quickly.)

The other creative component of these campaigns is the landing (or squeeze) page. You can see a sample of one of them above.

Here, creative execution can make a big difference. For example, we recently more than doubled our on-page conversion by adding a video of yours truly, imploring visitors to request the book.

The results

Let me tell you the results of just our LinkedIn activities. It makes sense to focus on LinkedIn because it’s the source of more than 50% of our opportunities and also because it’s the one media that we can readily scale.

Here’s a chart of our sampler requests over the period.

It’s important to note that much of the variability in these numbers comes from us running experiments and – in many cases – deliberately throttling-back our LinkedIn expenditure, either because Charlene (my sales coordinator) is overwhelmed or, more recently, because we have run out of delivery capacity here in the US (we’ll be adding more shortly).

Okay then, enough with the pretty pictures; let me show you how all this activity translates into money!

The economics

Over the period we’ve spent $29,071 with LinkedIn. From 24.3m impressions (showings of our ads), we’ve generated 5,687 clicks, at a cost of $5.11 each.

An average of 11% of these clicks have converted into sampler requests (this rate has risen markedly in recent times), meaning that we gave away 607 samplers (and generated the same number of sales opportunities).

It has cost us a little under $8 to fulfill each book request, meaning our total LinkedIn-related promotional expenditure is $33,927.

Now, this may sound like a lot but we need to compare it with the income we expect these opportunities will yield over time. Understandably, I wouldn’t give you this number even if I knew it, but I am prepared to admit that the lifetime value of a new client is significant enough to easily justify all this expenditure (and more).

The interesting thing in our case (and many of our clients have followed our lead here) is that we sell a Solution Design Workshop as part of our engagement process (i.e. before we ask for the ultimate order).

This means that our opportunity-management process generates income as well as incurring costs. This also means that it’s possible – at least in theory – to build a self-liquidating opportunity-management process and drive the overall cost-of-sale down to zero.

In our case, over the period in question, we can attribute at least six Solution Design Workshops to our LinkedIn campaign. These have generated an average (net) income of $6,160. If divide our total LinkedIn-related promotional expenditure by six you can see that it has cost us $5,654 to sell each of these workshops.

In other words the promotional cost of each is negative $500!

There’s no question in my mind that this analysis grossly undervalues our LinkedIn campaign. It ignores the Solution Design Workshops we have yet to sell to the 607 new people we’ve added to our house list. It ignores all the income we will earn over the years by introducing a percentage of these people to our Outsourced Sales Operations engagements. And it ignores the audience we are building for my upcoming book – and all the knock-on benefits that will ultimately flow from that.

But I have little interest in trying to quantify any of that right now. After all, a couple of years ago we were bleeding red ink in the US and struggling to generate any sales opportunities. Now, our constraint has shifted to where it belongs (our consultants), meaning that we can knuckle-down and focus on replicating the simple model we have operating right now.

I must admit that, moving to the US and starting here without a captive audience (outside of the TOC community) has forced me to learn lessons that I could have learned back in Australia, but probably wouldn’t have. If you’re not running these kinds of promotional experiments now I encourage you to do so – while you don’t need to!

If you’re in the latter category, this chapter will introduce you to the magnitude of the promotional challenge ahead and explain why (fortunately) moderate success is probably more than sufficient in the early stages of your transition to the new model. It’ll also walk you through the process of creating your first set of promotional campaigns.

Now, if it sounds like I’m trying to recalibrate your expectations at the start of this important chapter, then you’re absolutely right: I am!

In my experience, most managers underappreciate the magnitude of the promotional challenge and, consequently, fail to make a sufficient commitment to it. Campaigns are launched with unrealistic expectations and then initial successes are overlooked. The end result is that promotion is regarded as a black art and management places occasional bets on whatever happens to be the promotional flavor of the month, motivated more by a sense of obligation than by any real expectation of results.

This, of course, is a vicious cycle. If we’re to break the cycle we need to replace the sequence above with this one:

1. Engineer a sales function that can operate quite comfortably with little more than your existing organic opportunity flow
2. Run small promotional experiments and evaluate all outcomes objectively
3. Iterate rapidly, but be prepared for the development of an effective promotional function to take many months (if not years)
4. Steel yourself for the journey by reminding yourself, regularly, that a sales function without a scalable source of opportunities is not much of a sales function (just as a business without a scalable source of sales is not much of a business)

Why promotion is either easy or really, really difficult

It’s instructive to examine those rare businesses that find promotion easy. I think it’s fair to say that these organizations tend to find themselves in this enviable position for one of two reasons:

1. They have invented a breakthrough product (the proverbial better mousetrap) and the world genuinely is beating a path to their door
2. They have invented a space in the mind of the market and, within that space, they are regarded as the thought leader

It’s easy to see that promotion will be easy if you are a product or thought leader (think of Apple after the launch of their game-changing iPad or HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing method).

However, if you’re not in one of these categories, it’s also easy to see why promotion is difficult. Absent a breakthrough product or a position of thought-leadership, you lack either a compelling message or an attentive audience, or both.

That’s not to say that you can’t emulate the promotional activities of Apple and HubSpot. You can: you just can’t expect those activities to yield the same results.

The thing is, if you have established a leadership position in your market, then your promotional activities need only communicate that good news. However, if you lack this leadership, then your promotional activities are the news. Consequently, they will be less effective and more likely suffer from rapidly-diminishing returns.

A bitter pill

In case you’re wondering, there’s a reason why management tends to underappreciate the magnitude of the promotional challenge. Under the standard model, the responsibility for the origination of sales opportunities rests with salespeople. Management may recognize some responsibility for tilling the soil via marketing activities but the general assumption is that prospecting (as promotion is typically called) is just part of selling.

In the new model, this responsibility is transferred inside – leaving management no choice but to confront the challenge head-on.

Now, here’s a bitter pill. If you find yourself in the position where promotion is really difficult, it’s likely that you will need to look outside your marketing department for a solution to this problem (in the long run). Without a leadership position (product- or thought-), your promotional activities are severely handicapped – meaning that you will struggle to find campaigns that generate better than marginal returns.

What I’m suggesting then – lest there be any confusion – is that, in the long run, if you are not currently either a product or a thought leader, it’s easier to become one than it is to attempt to compensate with acts of promotional gallantry.

Of course the development of either product or thought leadership is outside the mandate of this book. Both require innovation – and this innovation must be driven from the very top of the organization. And both require initiatives that cross many divisional boundaries – involving engineering, sales, production and finance.

Why moderate success is more than sufficient

Fortunately, there is good news!

If your organization is typical, it will be possible for you to make the transition to the new model – and to generate a meaningful increase in sales performance with only minimal promotional effort.

This is because the standard model is so terribly inefficient! Specifically, the standard model tends to result in both accounts and opportunities being seriously under-exploited.

Accounts are under-exploited because salespeople are too busy with customer service (including the processing of repeat transactions) to dedicate much attention to business development. And opportunities are under-exploited because salespeople insist on only engaging with qualified opportunities.

For this reason, it’s likely that you will be able to generate all the opportunities you need to at least double your current volume of sales activities (field appointments and business-development calls), simply by:

1. Pitching new service lines to existing accounts (rather than simply processing repeat transactions) and engaging with all existing accounts more frequently – particularlythose that are not already heavy users of your services
2. Eliminating qualification – and engaging with everyone who is a genuine prospect (capacity permitting)

It’s important that you remember that your initial objective is only to double your current volume of business-development activity. And, as we discussed in Chapter 7, it’s critical that you ensure that your sales team is no larger than is required to service this volume of opportunities.

So, if you have sized your sales team correctly and if you fully exploit both existing accounts and your existing opportunity flow you should have no need for additional promotion (over and above what you are doing now) – on paper at least!

In reality, however, it’s likely that you will still be tempted to engage in some additional promotional activities; perhaps to compensate for quieter periods or to raise your quality of opportunities. And that’s okay. Because, in these scenarios, your requirement for opportunities is low, you should be able to make do with short-term, tactical campaigns – deferring the requirement to tackle some of the bigger promotional challenges.

Getting prepared

Two definitions

As you may have noticed, I’m using the word promotion to refer to the origination of sales opportunities.

So, in my book (and this is my book!) promotion is anything we do to generate (or originate) a sales opportunity – and that’s all it is.

The term (sales) opportunity refers to a prospect with which salespeople are engaged. It’s important to note that the term does not infer any kind of value judgment. If a salesperson is engaged with a prospect, that prospect is an opportunity – irrespective of the likelihood of a sale.

We can expand the definition of promotion now: promotion is anything we do to generate an engagement between a prospect and a salesperson.

These two definitions are important because they provide us with an objective framework for the management of the promotional function.

It should be clear that promotion is a procedure that takes prospects and converts them into engagements (with salespeople). Prospects – the input to this procedure – can either be existing accounts or they can be members of the general marketplace.

Promotion refers to the conversion of prospects
into engagements with salespeople

Campaign ingredients

Promotional initiatives are called campaigns and all campaigns have three fundamental ingredients:

1. Offer (the basic proposition the campaign presents)
2. Audience (the set of individuals to which the campaign is targeted)
3. Communication (how the offer communicated – the creative execution)

These ingredients are listed in order of significance. Item one has roughly an order of magnitude more impact on the effectiveness of the campaign than item two and, item two, an order of magnitude more than item three.

To illustrate the relative significance of these ingredients, let’s consider a simple scenario. We’ll assume that you have a nice car – a late-model, BMW M3, perhaps – and that you are determined to dispose of this car in a hurry.

Assume that you park your car on a busy street and paint the following in white paint on the rear window: FOR SALE $15,000.

There should be no question that this campaign will quickly draw a crowd. At best, you’ll sell your car quickly. At worst, you’ll cause a traffic jam and get arrested for causing a public nuisance!

The value of this scenario is that it makes the relative importance of the promotional ingredients obvious. It’s clear that the size of the traffic jam you create will primarily be a function of the desirability of the car, in conjunction with the price you paint on the rear window. The offer, in other words.

Audience is important, but not nearly as important as the offer. If you really are selling your late-model M3 for $15,000, you can park your car on a quiet street in the middle of the night and word will still get out! And it’s clear that this campaign is not super-sensitive to creative execution. You can communicate your message effectively with two words and one critical number. In fact, I suspect the market will even forgive you a spelling mistake or two!

A failure to appreciate the relative importance of the offer is at the heart of many promotional problems. It’s certainly convenient for managers to assume that their product is inherently desirable and focus, instead, on the fun stuff – pretty pictures, snappy prose and clever videos.

A more prudent approach is to consider creative execution only after you have developed a truly compelling offer. And an offer can be considered compelling only after it has demonstrated its ability to pull a crowd in real-world tests.

Until such an offer has been developed, it is safer to ignore the other promotional ingredients altogether. More correctly, you should confirm that (a) your offer is clearly communicated and, (b) your campaign is being exposed to individuals who match the profile of existing clients. If you can tick both these boxes, then you are free to focus exclusively on the offer.

Campaign structure

A novice could be excused for presuming that a promotional campaign is a single event. This, however, is often not the case.

Campaigns are similar to opportunities in that they often consist of series of activities, or steps.

If we imagine that we are attempting to generate opportunities for the sale of enterprise software, a single campaign might consist of the following steps:

1. A pay-per-click advertisement, encouraging viewers to view a video detailing enterprise-software horror stories, directing viewers to …
2. A landing- (or squeeze-) page, containing the video as well as a pitch for visitors to request a software buyers’ guide, the dispatch of which will be followed by …
3. An email campaign directed to readers of the buyers’ guide, inviting them to attend a webinar, then, finally …
4. The webinar itself, designed to up-sell to a business-process-modeling workshop (we’ll assume that those who register for the workshop are classified as opportunities and handed-off to the sales coordinator)

Campaigns have multiple steps for the same reason opportunities do. Namely, it is often unrealistic (or uneconomic) to pitch the ultimate objective at the first point of contact with the market.

A testing-based framework

Smart marketers know their limitations.

It’s simply not possible to design a successful campaign: you need to evolve one through a framework of trial and error. And, at the heart of this process, we have the AB test.

In an AB test you simply test two (or more) variations of the one campaign to determine which performs better. The real magic is not the test itself but, rather, the iterative framework that encapsulates the test:

1. Assume your current campaign (the control) is sub-optimal (always!)
2. Create a variation of the controlcampaign
3. Test the variation against the control (ensuring the test is statistically valid)
4. Establish the winning variant as the new control and repeat from Step 1

A marketing genius is someone who accepts that they will never truly understand what the market wants (and how it thinks) but who is committed to an ongoing process of testing and refinement.

The first question is, what to test?

And we know the answer to that question already. Because, the offer has disproportionate influence on the performance of a campaign, we should test the offer first – and most frequently. The next thing to test is the audience. (In practice, this means running your campaign in different mediums.) The third thing to test is creative execution (communication).

The second question is, how to test?

The theory is simple. To test, you run two versions of the one campaign in parallel and determine which produces the better return on promotional spend. As well as testing discrete campaign elements, you can (and should) test different campaign structures.

If you are running an online campaign, testing is likely to be easy. Most providers of online advertising allow you to create multiple versions of a campaign and then serve these versions randomly to site visitors. Additionally, there are services that enable you run AB tests on your landing pages and on various components of your website.

With the exception of email and direct mail campaigns, testing can require much greater effort offline. The problem is that traditional media (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc) do not allow you to present two campaigns to the one audience at single point in time. To compensate for this, you need to run multiple tests to compile meaningful data. For example, to test a newspaper advertisement, you will need to run two versions of the advertisement in different papers on day one and then repeat the exercise (switching ad versions) on day two. This will allow you to control for the two different audiences and the two different days.

As mentioned, it makes a lot of sense to develop a testing-based framework for your entire promotional function. The value of testing, however, is not confined to promotion. In recent years, an iterative approach to software development (Agile) has spread to the development of entire businesses, spearheaded by the publication of a book called The Lean Startup. While The Lean Startup deals primarily with technology companies, many of the ideas within it can – and should – be applied to traditional businesses as well.

Your first campaigns

Okay. Time to take all that theory and figure out how to apply it in practice!

Rather than talking about campaigns in the abstract, let’s discuss actual campaigns you might run as you transition from the standard to the new model.

Here’s a list of likely campaigns (in the order you might run them):

Time for a coffee

Your first campaign should be a very simple one. Your initial objective should simply be to get the entire sales machine moving. After all, with even the simplest campaign imaginable, there are still quite a few moving parts that must be coordinated:

1. Of course, you need an offer, a target audience and creative (the email, in this case)
2. You need to build a list and broadcast the email to that list
3. You need to generate one opportunity for each campaign recipient (ideally in a single batch)
4. You need to transfer those opportunities to a sales coordinator (or direct to an inside-sales team)

In this case, we intend only to have our sales coordinators schedule visits between salespeople and existing accounts. We have no real offer because we can probably assume that your existing accounts are happy to meet with a salesperson.

Now, you’ll probably hear the argument that no email is required to preempt such a simple call. That’s true, but you should send one anyway. After all, you’re putting your entire sales machine through its paces and promotions is an essential part of this machine.

Additionally, there are two more reasons why it makes sense to institute a policy that all outbound opportunities originate with a pre-approach campaign. (An outbound opportunity is one that you initiate, rather than one resulting from an inbound inquiry.)

1. A pre-approach email will reduce the amount of time your sales coordinators need to spend on the telephone (the call becomes essentially a scheduling call)
2. Pre-approach campaigns force the integration of your promotional coordinator and the rest of sales and, consequently, result in more forethought and greater management visibility

Your very first promotional campaign (an email) is likely to look something like the following):

You’ll probably notice a few interesting things about this email:

1. Even though it is the first interaction between Bob and Susan’s new sales coordinator, it doesn’t highlight Jennifer’s addition to the team (in our experience, this is simply not necessary)
2. Even though this meeting has no formal objective (which is not normally the case) the email does set an agenda and hint at a client benefit
3. The email does not look like a promotional email (it contains no advertising-speak, no pretty pictures and no unsubscribe link)

Logistics

Because this is the first promotional campaign you’ve run under this new regime, it’s worth detailing the steps required to execute the campaign and transfer opportunities to sales coordinators:

1. Your promotional coordinator should create and save a filter (or view) in your CRM that contains a list of all contacts that are eligible for this campaign (in this case, all primary contacts associated with active accounts)
2. They should then select a small subset of this list (enough to represent a few days’ worth of work for a single sales coordinator) and associate this smaller list with a new campaign
3. They should then broadcast the email to that list and, immediately the broadcast is done, generate a sales opportunity for each email sent (the opportunity should be associated with the account to which the contact belongs – and not directly with the contact – and the opportunity ownershould be the sales coordinator)
4. Your promotional coordinator should then monitor the size of the sales coordinator’s queue of open opportunities and only trigger the next broadcast when the queue falls below a pre-agreed threshold (this concept is discussed in detail in the next chapter)

Reconsider? An irresistible proposition

Now that you’ve got your machine working and accustomed your salespeople (and your accounts) to the idea of working with a sales coordinator, you’re ready to progress to a campaign that incorporates some salesmanship.

In this case we’ll reach out to those opportunities that said no to you recently and see if we can get them to reconsider. This campaign is interesting because it provides us an excuse to grapple with the concept of discounting.

First, however, it’s worth noting that a simple campaign like this can be extremely effective. You’ll likely discover that a small percentage of lost opportunities can be reactivated – and subsequently sold – if you are prepared to make a small concession (a better price or some other benefit with purchase). And this incremental sales lift can have an out-sized impact on your profitability over time.

When discounting makes sense

Now, discounting is a sensitive subject because we’ve all been brainwashed by business authors into believing that discounting is always a destructive activity. Here are the dangers we’ve been warned about:

1. Discounting reduces your profitability (and the revenue increase required to recover that lost profitability is the inverse of the discount)
2. Discounting trains clients to alter their behavior so that they can consistently purchase at lower prices
3. Discounting triggers a price war – leading to a race to the bottom

These are all valid concerns however they don’t tell the whole story.

For example, if the campaign I’m proposing causes you to win a sale that you would otherwise have lost and if that transaction does not place an additional load on your current system constraint, then it causes no reduction in profitability (in fact, the opposite is the case).

Additionally, if this offer is only made for genuine sales opportunities (as opposed to transactions) then it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on customer behavior. (Remember, we’re using the word sale to refer to new accounts or new lines for existing accounts).

As far as price wars are concerned, your discount (or benefit with purchase) should always have strings attached. In other words, I’m suggesting that you should never offer a discount without imposing a condition or two. If you ensure that your discounts always have strings attached, then you should be able to prevent your competitors (and your customers) from converting a one-off offer into a general price reduction.

Here are some examples of the kind of conditions you should attach to discounts (or benefits with purchase):

1. Valid only for first-time purchases of particular service lines
2. Valid only if delivery is between July 15 and July 22 (to take advantage of a temporary hole in your production schedule)
3. Valid only if you will allow us 6 weeks to deliver

And here’s an example of a possible pre-approach campaign.

Webinar: a DIY guide

This next campaign is more ambitious still.

It consists of four steps:

1. Send (email) invitation to webinar

2. Call sub-set of prospects to encourage them to register

3. Conduct webinar and up-sell to best-practice briefing (sales meeting)

4. Call to schedule meetings

Invitation

The creation of the invitation is where 90% of the decisions for the campaign as a whole get made.

In fact, it makes a lot of sense to create the invitation and then design the webinar content based on the invitation (rather than the other way around). This maximizes the likelihood that you will end up with a compelling event!

Your webinar should be a do-it-yourself guide to solving a problem you’re convinced is afflicting a significant percentage of your target clients. It should not be a sales presentation.

For example, if you are attempting to sell project-management services to local government, your webinar invitation might look something like this.

Subject:

Webinar: meticulous planning – the enemy of public works projects

Body:

Why meticulous planning is guaranteeing that your public works projects will run behind schedule Free webinar shows how Northern Rivers was able to deliver 94% of works projects on time last year Brenda Conventional wisdom is wrong. Beyond a critical level of detail, more granular planning will guarantee that your projects run late. What’s more, your contractors know this and are conspiring to use your meticulous plans against you! This webinar will introduce you to a radically different approach to project management and share the recent journey (and impressive results) of Northern Rivers county. Plan big: execute small In 45 action-packed minutes, you’ll learn …

Registration calls

Once you have the invitation, you can go ahead and broadcast it to your list. Actually, what you should do is create a couple of variations on the invitation, send each to small sub-sets of your list and then broadcast the best-performing one to the balance of the list.

It’s now worth selecting another sub-set of your list and performing follow-up calls to see if you can secure registrations. This activity can be either performed by your inside-sales team (if you have one) or temporary labor.

If you have a small list, these calls may be necessary to populate your webinar. Either way, it’s worth running the test so that you can calculate the impact of follow-up calls.

Webinar

As soon as you have sent the invitations, you need to create the webinar itself.

Specifically, you need to create an auto-responder sequence (a series of reminders) for registrants and a slide-deck for the presenter.

The starting point for the latter is the offer. At this particular step in the campaign, you’re up-selling to a Best-practice Briefing (a meeting). First, create the slide for this briefing, be sure to spell-out a detailed agenda for the briefing to make it clear that this is not a thinly-veiled sales presentation.

If you don’t spell-out the value delivered in your post-webinar meeting,
attendees will assume it’s nothing but a sales pitch

The briefing slide should be inserted in the middle (and at the end) of the presentation. The primary pitch for the briefing should be in the middle of the event, not at the end. This is because people will start checking-out of your webinar the instant they sense that the primary content is drawing to a close.

What you leave out of your webinar is probably more important than what you put in. Be sure not to include:

1. An introduction to your organization and the presenter (these can be included in the pre-event materials and, anyway, people are more than capable of inferring your professionalism from the quality of the event)
2. Instructions on how to use the webinar facility (you can include a link to these in your auto-responder sequence)
3. Small talk and meaningless verbiage (e.g. in this fast-paced business environment …)

Your webinar should start with a promise (how the attendee will benefit) and proceed directly to the meat and potatoes.

The key to making the content compelling is to ensure that you are teaching attendees something that they genuinely do not know – and that you are presenting this knowledge in plain-English, so that they can (at least in theory) take it and apply it that very day.

Remember, you gain nothing by holding back knowledge. Your methods and practices are more valuable when you give them away than they are when you try and sell them. By giving them away, you demonstrate your mastery of the subject matter and convince prospects that they are better served leaving the execution to an expert.

As mentioned you should pitch your offer (in this case, a best-practice briefing) in the middle of the event (right before some particularly juicy content). After mentioning the exciting content that follows, you should click to a slide that describes the briefing in detail (i.e. presents the agenda for the meeting). You should then ask attendees to express interest, either by responding to a poll or by entering the word briefing in the chat window.

Call to schedule meeting

In most cases it makes sense to generate opportunities for your sales coordinators in two batches. Those attendees who expressed interest in a briefing (these can be scheduled right away) and everyone else (these can be called and offered one anyway!)

eBook: top-10 reasons …

I hope you’ve noticed that all the campaigns, thus far, have been directed at your existing house list (accounts and prospects). It’s critical that you exploit the value in your existing list before you invest money in the acquisition of new prospects in the cold market.

However, at some point you’ll be keen to take the next step and tackle the wider marketplace.

My suggestion is that you initially decouple your cold promotional activities from sales. In other words, focus on campaigns to build your house list – rather than to directly generate opportunities. I recommend this because your first experiments with cold campaigns are likely to yield highly-variable results. The last thing you should be doing right now is injecting this uncertainty into the front-end of your sales process.

Of course, as you build your house list, new prospects can be converted into opportunities either via simple two-step (email then phone) campaigns or, better still, via webinars (or traditional events).

Now, you build your house list by compelling prospects to provide you with their contact information. You should attempt only to gather that information that you intend to use right now. In other words, if you intend to communicate with new prospects by email, you should ask them only for their first name and email address. An attempt to gather any more information will significantly reduce your return on promotional expenditure.

In order to get prospects to provide us their contact information, you must first attract their attention and, then, provide them some kind incentive (an offer) to take a risk on you (prospects are well aware that the cost of divulging their contact information is an increase in their volume of inbound email).

The best way to do this is to give away something of significant value, absolutely free of charge!

Offers that fit this bill include product samples and packaged information (books, videos, etc). The advantage of the latter is that they can be fulfilled electronically – meaning there is zero fulfillment cost.

In this campaign we are planning to give away an eBook, which belongs in the second category. It’s important, however, not to underestimate the potential of the first category.

Claude Hopkins is regarded by many to be the father of modern advertising. He also popularized the practice of sampling.

In his classic 1923 book (still as relevant today as it was 90 years ago) he waxed lyrical about the benefits of samples. Two of the benefits he noted back then are that offer of a sample can significantly increase the readership of your advertisement and that prospects, when requesting a (physical) sample, will provide you their physical addresses and (in almost every case) their phone numbers!

One of our silent revolutionaries (a manufacturer of flexible heaters) offers its prospects a coffee warmer in kit form. Prospects assemble it and, more often than not, give it pride of place on their office desks!

eBook content

Your eBook can be a whitepaper, a report or an extract from a traditional book; and it can be delivered in PDF, Kindle or any one of a number of other digital formats.

The one thing it can’t be is a document that resembles the sort of brochureware that’s typically churned-out by marketing departments and PR firms all over the world! If it isn’t the kind of document that you’d be prepared to pay for, don’t even think about using it as the offer for this campaign.

One way to discipline yourself to write interesting copy is to start with the least complimentary (working) title you can possibly imagine. For example, if you are selling accounting software you might commence with the following: The top-10 reasons why the best accounting package is the one you already own.

You’ll almost certainly find that 15 pages of copy, begging readers not to waste money on unnecessary software will do a better job of selling your application than 100 pages of marketing prose (assuming, of course, that your product solves a legitimate problem)!

Advertising

Now you have your eBook, the next step is to give it away. This requires two creative elements: an advertisement (to grab people’s attention) and a landing page (to capture visitors’ contact details)

There are numerous places you can run advertisements: everywhere from your local cinema (which is not a great idea) to the New York Times (which can be a great idea, once you know for sure you have a winning campaign on your hands).

If you trust me (and I’m sure you do by now) you’ll avoid cinemas, national newspapers, billboards and skywriting and go direct to online advertising – or, more specifically, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

There’s a bunch of reasons why it makes sense to start here:

1. Online is where your potential customers are
2. You can start with a very small budget (realistically, as little as $500)
3. AB testing is easy and you can collect meaningful results within hours
4. It’s easier online, than it is in any other medium, to identify the source of sales opportunities

For all the reasons above, PPC is the very best environment to fine-tune your offer. Even if it ultimately makes sense to advertise in local papers or on television (which it may well), you should still keep returning to the Internet to test alternate approaches.

As I write this, Google is the best-known source of PPC advertising – but not necessarily the most economic. My favored source of PPC advertising for business customers is LinkedIn (followed by Facebook). However, because things change fast online, you should not rely on this book for placement advice.

A mock-up of what your PPC advertisement might look like
(this ad is superimposed on a Google search-results page for context)

Your PPC advertisement should point to a landing (or squeeze) page. The landing page will be a long and detailed advertisement for the book. Ideally it will contain extracts from the book, testimonials from past readers and even a video encouraging the visitor to provide their details now (so that they can receive your eBook in their inbox within seconds, of course!). Importantly, the landing page will also contain the form that visitors will use to request the eBook.

Slow and steady

In describing your first promotional steps, I’ve deliberately targeted campaigns that are relevant to a range of organizations and that are relatively simple.

None the less, it should be clear that even these four simple campaigns involve quite a bit of work – particularly for organizations that have left the generation of sales opportunities up to their salespeople.

As I’ve stressed, a slow-and-steady approach to promotion is prudent. The process of trial and error required to arrive at effective offers and overall campaigns is time consuming but, when you factor-in that truly effective promotions will likely require changes to the fabric of the larger organization, then an over-zealous approach can do enormous damage to your sales-improvement initiative.

Cold calling is dead

On the subject of damaging your sales-improvement initiative, it would be remiss of me to end this chapter without discussing cold calling as a means of originating sales opportunities.

There is a small number of (quite vocal) salespeople (and sales managers) who continue to champion the cause of cold calling. Additionally, there are telemarketing bureaus who add voices to the choir.

The harsh reality, however, is that cold calling is dead. And it’s been dead for years!

If you examine those salespeople who trumpet the effectiveness of cold-calling you’ll discover that they spend an enormous volume of time on the phone to generate very few opportunities. You’ll also discover that their prospecting work is so unpleasant that few (if any) of their colleagues are prepared to replicate it.

If you talk to those salespeople who receive sales opportunities that have been originated by cold calling, they’ll tell you that these are their lowest-quality opportunities. On many occasions prospects are hostile because they feel that they have been pestered and strong-armed into accepting appointments.

If you examine the books of (outbound) telemarketing bureaus, you’ll find that their average customer tenure is shocking low (as low, in fact, as their internal staff turnover is high!).

The problem with cold calling is that it simply doesn’t make sense for your customers. You can take-in a number of advertisements along with your primary search results on Google (for example) with negligible incremental effort. Imagine, however, that rather than placing those ads with your search provider, all those vendors were to ring you at work – one after another?

Of course, this used to happen. For this reason, most organizations have hidden their executives behind executive assistants and phone systems that force callers to announce themselves by recording a short message.

It may be true that good-old Bob can cold call to generate all his sales opportunities. But if you can’t recruit other Bobs – and if no one else on the salesforce is capable of, or willing to, replicate Bob’s practices, then you must face reality. Cold calling is dead.

* * * *

You now know how to generate and manage sales opportunities – the lifeblood of your reengineered sales function.

Like the circulatory system, opportunity-flow is necessary, but not sufficient. There are other processes required to keep the organism alive and healthy. The last two chapters tackle two of them: technology and management.

The authors divide (B2B) salespeople into five groups and argue that, of the five profiles, one significantly out-performs the others – and that one under-performs, to a similar degree.

Here are the five profiles (in the authors’ own words):

Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.

Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.

Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.

Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.

Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.

The authors’ research suggests that while salespeople are distributed evenly across these five categories, 40% of high-performers are Challengers while only 7% are Relationship Builders.

While this study’s methodology is questionable, it does remind me of an interesting (and painful) story from our own history.

A real salesperson

Years ago, I decided to experiment with the addition of a professional salesperson – someone who could free me to start work on the book that I’m in the process of finishing currently.

I was in two minds as to the nature of the individual who we should employ.

One option was to employ someone like yours truly. Someone who was naturally skeptical of the status quo. And someone who enjoyed conflict – who viewed it as a necessary and healthy ingredient in the problem-solving process.

The other option was to employ someone who fitted the mold of what I (at the time) regarded as a real salesperson. Someone who was agreeable and inoffensive. Someone who who would love customers into buying from us (as opposed to terrorizing them!)

I chose the latter.

I really wanted Arthur (not his real name) to succeed. I gave him my executive assistant – along with the promotional support required to fill his calendar with 15-20 sales meetings a week.

And I travelled with him for weeks, demonstrating to him exactly how I went about selling.

The conversations we had between appointments were interesting. Arthur would scold me for being demanding, abrasive and aloof in meetings – and I would agree with him that my conduct was somewhat heavy-handed and reflect on the fact that everything would be better once Arthur was firmly in the driver’s seat. We both concluded that we were making sales in spite of – and not because of – my boardroom antics.

When Arthur was firmly in the driver’s seat, everything proceeded to plan – except for the sales, that is! In the five months Arthur was with us, he sold only one engagement (and that was with my assistance). Aside from that, he sold NOTHING.

During this period, I managed to stumble across 10 or 12 new clients, in spite of the fact that I was doing my level-best to avoid selling (and stay home and write a book).

I’m ashamed that it wasn’t the total absence of sales that convinced me to get rid of Arthur. It was the steadily-increasing volume of calls from potential (and existing) clients complaining that Arthur added no value whatsoever in his meetings.

The message from the chorus was clear. They didn’t need a good-looking, personable, well-dressed fellow to warm a seat in their boardroom and agree with everything they said. What they really wanted was someone with a critical eye who’d challenge their base assumptions and compel them to think differently.

“This”, and I heard these words over and over again, “was what attracted us to Ballistix in the first place.”

Obviously, a single data point adds no weight to the argument above but, in my experience, at least, it’s true that selling is NOT about relationships.

The death of field sales

You may have already gotten word that I’m presenting a webinar in a couple of weeks with this title.

There’s more than a touch of hyperbole in the title, of course, but I will  be arguing that, in many cases, organizations should be moving the sales front-line inside.  I’ll present both an economic and an effectiveness argument for this.

The link is here: http://ripfieldsales.eventbrite.com/

The initial batch of tickets for this event sold-out overnight but I’ve upped the capacity of the webinar service and released more tickets. If you miss-out, please join the wait list and we’ll either up the capacity again or we’ll schedule another event soon.

“A good sales growth for us … in the industrial glove market … would be 5%. But, even through the recession, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic increase in sales. This year we’re about 25% up in our sales over the previous year.

“I think some of that is the economy but some of it has to be attributed to the sales process [engineering] as well”

Below you’ll find a link to an interview with Joe Geng of Superior Glove. Superior Glove distributes gloves throughout North America from its home base in Acton, Ontario.

In the interview, Joe discusses both the successes and the challenges they’ve faced implementing SPE. What’s particular interesting is the discussion of salespeople’s reaction to the radical changes in their operating environments.

Enjoy!

Justin Roff-Marsh interviews Joe Geng of Superior Glove

New SPE blog features simple design and discussion forum

I’ve been busy over the holiday period redesigning and rebuilding my blog.

You’re looking at it right now!

The change I’m most excited about is the addition of a forum (integrated with the the existing commenting system). The problem with comments is that, traditionally, they’re attached to posts – meaning that all the discussions are disconnected from one another.

Well, my blog now has the best of both worlds. You can still comment on posts, but comments also appear in the forum, along with all other discussions. I’m hoping to recreate some of the lively discussions that used to occur before I transitioned to the blog from a Yahoo Group.

So, please humor me. Take some time to participate in the couple of existing discussions (including the one attached to this post) – or go ahead and start your own discussion by posting a new topic. If you want to register (so the blog remembers you for future visits) you can do that but it’s not required. You can participate just fine without registration.

Trust me: you’ll be so glad I blogged about this.

A one-hour interview with a founder, every day of every work week: totally free!

Every day of the (work) week, I listen-in on a one-hour interview with an entrepreneur.

Since I moved to LA, I’ve listened to shockingly-good interviews with founders, business owners and business luminaries – people like:

• Tim Ferriss (who wrote the 4-Hour Workweek and who invests in numerous Bay-area start-ups)
• Gary Vaynerchuk (founder of Wine Library TV and author of Crush it)
• Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia)

I listened to these interviews on a site called www.mixergy.com. And, amazingly, I’ve paid nothing for the privilege.

Andrew Warner interviews Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)

The sole purpose of this post is to encourage you to go to Mixergy – to encourage you to start listening to Mixergy interviews – and encourage you to develop a daily Mixergy habit, just like mine!

Please understand that this post is a no-holds-barred endorsement of Mixergy – but it’s NOT a paid endorsement. Andrew Warner (the founder of Mixergy) has no idea I’m writing this post – and I stand to get no benefit whatsoever (other than sharing what has, for me, been a life changing service).

And frankly, I prefer it that way. Absent any commercial relationship, there’s no need for me to pull any punches. I can literally plead with you to take the time to discover Mixergy.

So, I’ve given you a hint of what Mixergy is about. A free one-hour interview every day of the (work) week with a founder. But that’s not the half of it.

Three things that really make Mixergy special

There are three more things you really need to know about Mixergy:

First, the high-profile interviews I’ve mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg. Of the 658 interviews Andrew has on his site – and of the ~200 I’ve listened to – the greater majority are total strangers. And that’s part of the magic. Every week I hear stories of people I’ve never heard of who’ve tapped into markets I never imagined existed and who have built businesses that turn over millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

The second thing you need to know about is Andrew Warner. This guy is a seriously good interviewer. He’s gentle and understated like Larry King. But he has an ability to dig for the key ideas – the root causes of founders’ successes – that is simply unequalled. Part of Andrew’s magic is that he’s a founder himself. Hi built and sold a $38 million online greeting-card company before starting Mixergy. This means that has the credibility to put his guests on the spot from time-to-time and challenge them to justify their positions. This makes for a subtly different dynamic between Andrew and his guests that you simply won’t experience elsewhere.

You also should know that most (not all) of Andrew’s subjects are founders of tech start-ups. Obviously, as someone with a tech bias, this is very appealing to me. But, it I think it should be appealing to you too, even if you are not technically inclined. This is because the tech industry is in a period of rapid growth unlike any other industry. It’s also because the tech industry attracts some of the world’s brightest entrepreneurs – who compete unrelentingly to be on the cutting edge of all critical business functions.

Benefits I’ve received from Mixergy interviews

In the year or so I’ve been addicted to Mixergy, I’ve learned so much about just so much!

I’ve learned a lot about online marketing – about PPC, SEO about analytics, about aggressive media buying, about the optimization of landing and squeeze pages and so much more.

I’ve learned a lot about funding growth – about the pros and cons of taking outside investment, about cashflow management, about taking on partners and so much more.

And, I’ve even learned a thing or two about traditional operations – inventory management, creating productive vendor relationships and more.

Plus, I’ve picked-up so many tips that have delivered immediate benefit to our business. One example: we used to buy an SMTP service from www.smtp.com. Then, one day, I heard an interview with the founder of www.sendgrid.com – a competitive service. I was impressed with the founder so I checked-out the service. Bottom line, I switched to a much more advanced service with a laundry-list of features I didn’t previously have and much better service. And, I cut our monthly SMTP bill almost in half!

That’s just one example. If I sat down and thought about it, I could probably identify (literally) 20-30 similar instances. And I pay NOTHING for Mixergy!

Nuts and bolts

Yep, it costs nothing to listen to Andrew’s interviews. You can watch the videos each day as he posts them or you can set up your podcast catcher to download the audio for you (I use iCatcher on my iPhone).

These interviews are available free for everyone for seven days. After that they disappear behind a paywall. If you want to listen to past interviews you can get access to all Andrew’s content for $199 a year.

I haven’t actually subscribed to Andrew’s paid service yet – I will shortly. But, I’m not suggesting you do that on day one.

Here’s what I am suggesting:

1. Get over to Mixergy now and watch one of the current interviews: www.mixergy.com
2. If you like what you hear, download one of the numerous free podcast catchers to your mobile device and subscribe to Mixergy from that application
3. Whenever you’re in your car – or on a plane – listen to a Mixergy interview – in place of the radio

That’s the process I followed. It took me about 10 days to go from casual interest to fan to total addict. I’ve already introduced Mixergy to a few of our clients, here and in Australia, and they report the same experience.

So, as the great Molly Meldrum used to say, do yourself a favor, get over to www.mixergy.com, and start listening.

And have a very Merry Christmas!