Optimizing the Online Experience: the Next Frontier for Modern Marketers

One day in June, Adobe announces a new “Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management.” The very next day, Oracle announces that it has entered into an agreement to acquire FatWire Software, “a leading provider of Web experience management solutions.”

And just like that, the market for customer experience management, Web experience management and what FatWire likes to call “online engagement optimization” has just gotten much hotter. I prefer the term “online experience optimization” (“OEO”), a type of “extreme personalization” and a spin on the widely touted promise of the early World Wide Web: “mass customization.”

Whatever you call the strategy or paradigm, successful OEO requires that every company answer four key questions.

1. Do you know what customers, competitors and competitors' customers are saying about your company online?
2. Do you know whether or not your Web site is equally accessible, navigable, compelling and persuasive on an iPad, an iPhone or an Android tablet as it is on a PC?
3. Do you know how customers, partners and prospects really perceive your company online?
4. Do you have solid, defensible evidence for all that you know?

Complicating the answers to these questions is the need to follow and delight customers, partners and prospects, wherever they are and however they choose to interact. Especially online, given the continuing growth of mobility, social networking and new and different access devices.
Customers, partners and prospects are, in effect, the most important example of what my Constellation Research colleagues and I like to refer to as “the mobile, social cloud.” And the mobile, social cloud makes clear what many already know. Current processes and solutions for OEO, especially content creation, delivery and management, are inadequate, especially given the explosion in the number and types of networked access devices.

For users and buyers, effective OEO, like effective modern marketing, requires answering some key questions about content, conversation, consistency and conversion (as outlined in my blog post "The Four C's of Content Marketing" at TheCMOSite.com). And when looking at candidate vendors and solutions, those users and buyers should focus on four key criteria.

• Completeness: can the vendor deliver solutions that address all of users' key challenges to OEO success, organically or via truly strategic alliances?
• Continuity: can the vendor deliver solutions that “look and feel” like logical, operationally non-disruptive extensions and evolutions of previous offerings and incumbent tools?
• Connectivity: can the vendor and its offerings “play well with others” in ways that let users maximize the business value and ROI of their incumbent and future investments, without requiring “heavy lifting” by IT experts?
• Convincingness: can the vendor cash the checks its mouth is writing?

OEO is clearly not your parents' marketing. It isn't even last year's Web content management or user interface design. It's all of these, plus more. Fortunately, processes, best practices and solutions are emerging to enable OEO and extreme personalization without tears, fork lifts or teams of technologists. And I and my Constellation Research colleagues will be opining about these and related issues increasingly during the next few weeks and months. Stay tuned...

Yellowbook + Microsoft = A New Marketing Force for Small Businesses

Google has advertising and search-empowered marketing offerings for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

So does Microsoft.

Google has online search tools that are popular among users and buyers, and among at least some advertisers. So does Microsoft – more so now that it has partnered with Yahoo! in select arenas.

Google has online applications growing in popularity among SMBs and larger enterprises.

So does Microsoft.

But now, Microsoft has something Google doesn't have, at least not in the same ways. What? Here's a direct quote from the relevant news release, issued June 14 by Microsoft and its new partner, Yell Group, owners of Yellowbook among other related resources.

“Thomas Hansen, vice president of SMB Worldwide at Microsoft, said, 'Yell Group has one of the largest dedicated sales forces partnering with small and medium sized businesses and provides customers with valuable, locally focused internet directories that see over 50 million unique visitors per month. We are very excited about our plans to form a strategic alliance with Yell, as it offers us a way to better reach and serve small and medium sized businesses across the globe.'”

Here's another quote from the same release.

“Yell currently provides print and digital marketing services to over 1.3 million customers across the United States, United Kingdom, Spain and Latin America. Capitalizing on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and the growing consumer audience of Bing and Yahoo! Search, Microsoft and Yell will join forces to offer compelling search, mobile and local advertising solutions to small and medium businesses and to make the most of emerging business models delivered through the cloud. Under the plans, Yell will also offer the full suite of Microsoft’s SMB productivity and business software and cloud services, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and emerging SMB-focused communications solutions. In addition, Microsoft will assist Yell to accelerate its new cloud-based services, which will provide Yell’s customers with access to these new digital offerings.”

Yell already offers a number of interesting, sometimes innovative marketing and advertising services through Yellowbook in North America and other divisions across the globe. Now, Yell Group reps will have a new, different and growing portfolio of advertising, marketing and business support services to offer.

The day after announcing the Microsoft alliance, the company announced a strategic partnership with Bazaarvoice, provider of cloud-based solutions designed to enable businesses to manage and monetize online customer conversations and communities. The day after the Bazaarvoice announcement, Yell announced a completely new corporate strategy. The company is now focused on evolving from a provider of advertising services to the outsourced marketing department for millions of SMBs.

This means SMB decision makers may soon be able to buy services for contact, lead and customer management (CRM), email marketing, online data backup, Web conferencing and other unified communications (UC) options and more from a single Yellowbook rep. Which could give those decision makers some interesting, valuable options not easily available elsewhere.

Now, Google, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and others offer all kinds of platforms, add-ons and plug-ins intended to enable all kinds of business service combinations. But at most SMBs, one of the first questions to which they want answers is about interoperability with...Microsoft Office. So why not start with offerings that come from the source, so to speak? Especially for those SMB decision makers already doing business with Yellowbook or some other Yell Group entity? After all, "the cloud" is still basically a wild and poorly mapped environment, making the value of a known, proven guide pretty darned high to those users.

Speaking of which...

If your company already works with Yellowbook, you and your rep should be having a heart-to-heart talk very soon now. You should ask about everything from what services will be available and when to how and whether you can move and share spend dollars across multiple online and offline opportunities. You might want to focus a few questions on how Yellowbook + Microsoft might help you to offer more and better local and daily deals.

If your company does not do business with Yellowbook but does work with one or more of its competitors, you might ask your rep what their company plans to do in response to Yell Group's moves. Meanwhile, keep a close eye on what Yell and Microsoft do, and on what Google and others do in response.

Marketers: Save Public Media – and Build Your Brand, Too!

So are you underwriting any podcasts or programs on your local public media outlet yet? If not, you're missing some great opportunities to do well while doing good.

My wife works for Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County, one of the many charitable agencies facing possibly significant cuts in federal funding. (President Obama specifically mentioned the Community Action Partnership network, started by President Lyndon Johnson as part of his "war on poverty, as one of the programs it would pain Obama to cut.) The Sonoma County CAP agency hosts the local edition of the annual LunaFest fund- and consciousness-raising festival of short films by, for and about women. Funds are shared between the Breast Cancer Fund and local charities chosen by the local hosts. For LunaFest Wine Country, the local beneficiary in 2010 was Sonoma County's Sloan House Women's Shelter.

As in past years, my wife's agency surrounded the showcase of films with auctions of locally produced goodies, VIP events and tickets, and other trappings typical of such charity events.

All well and good. Except that pre-event ticket sales weren't that great in recent years.

At around the same time pre-event publicity was gearing up for the 2010 edition of LunaFest Wine Country, KRCB-FM, my local public radio station, was having a pledge drive. The team there had previously come up with an "Activist" membership level – $200 for a year, payable monthly via credit or debit card. It buys you membership and attendant goodies, AND a professionally recorded and produced public service announcement, broadcast 10 times during morning and evening drive time.

(Morning and evening commute hours are when radio listener levels tends to be highest, for those of you too young or otherwise distracted to understand how radio works, to paraphrase Firesign Theater's "Nick Danger, Third Eye," itself stellar radio theater. You're welcome.)

But all of the announcements I'd heard ended with wording along the lines of "This announcement is brought to you by a KRCB listener." So I asked if I could have an announcement about LunaFest Wine Country recorded, produced and broadcast, ending with something like "This announcement is brought to you by KRCB member DortchOnIT.com."

And the fine folks at KRCB-FM said "Yes." And they did it. They also mentioned the ticket sales Web page I built for the event at BrownPaperTickets.com, a "fair trade ticketing company" I first heard of on KRCB-FM. The station also invited the event organizer and the host of our VIP event to appear on two other locally produced programs, adding to the reach of my 10 "Activist" spots.

And LunaFest Wine Country pre-event ticket sales were better than they'd been in years. And I got some great local publicity that I'm in the process of turning into business and additional charitable opportunities. And all in all, it was probably the best money I have ever spent and perhaps will ever spend on marketing myself, given the combination of business publicity and good will.

Right now, even as I type this, public media funding from the federal government is in danger of being completely eliminated. If your local stations are anything like mine, which basically run on shoestring budgets, this could mean a sudden reduction in funding of anywhere between 25 and more than 45 percent, according to published reports.

Are you working? Imagine if your income were suddenly reduced by 25 percent to 45 percent. If you're paid weekly, this would mean between one and two out of every four paychecks, gone. You'd probably have to make some pretty serious budget cuts and some pretty hard choices. That's what public radio and television stations across the country are contemplating right now.

(Even if your local stations are pretty flush, their abilities to produce local content could take a serious hit. As could their incentive to produce investigative programming that questions or challenges the federal government and/or corporations that are or could become major donors. And besides, I think you might appreciate living in a country governed by people who see real value in helping to fund the sharing of culture, fact-based news reporting and local events and organizations. But maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, there's a local public radio or television station near you right now, trying to deliver value to its constituents while fighting for funding every day. And the people who consume the content those stations deliver are likely customers or prospects you're already pursuing…or should be. And public media underwriting opportunities are numerous, affordable, locally targeted and highly appreciated.

So tune into your local public media outlet(s) if you don't already. Find a podcast to sponsor, or a program to underwrite (and/or to appear upon). Take out an ad in the station's program guide, in print or online. Your brand will benefit, and you'll feel better. (And if you need more specific guidance or advice to pursue these opportunities, I know a guy who'd be glad to offer you a complementary initial consultation...)

Nimble: A New Take (from Some Old Hands) on CRM

UPDATE: Nimble Contact available for free as of 02/28/11 -- www.nimble.com to register!

You may recall or be sufficiently motivated to look up the nursery rhyme, "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick / Jack jump over the candlestick." With all due respect to Jack and his candlestick-traversing powers, it is often better to be nimble than quick. That's especially true for SMB decision makers who have not yet taken the plunge into customer relationship management (CRM) software – which is apparently most of them.

"Approximately 60% of CRM buyers are first-timers and most of those first-time buyers come from the small business community. What are these businesses using for CRM today? Many use some combination of Microsoft Excel and Outlook with some CRM process hacks thrown in….To the extent small businesses are using CRM, many are using [10-to-20-year-old] systems like ACT. It's hard to find a market that's readier for a technology refresh."
– Scott Albro, Founder and CEO of Focus, in an online discussion of opportunities for SMBs to succeed with CRM. (You can view and join that discussion at http://dortchon.it/FocusOnCRM4SMBs.)

So why aren't more SMBs using more CRM yet?
1. CRM's too hard – which means that solution providers have neither delivered nor sufficiently explained enough business benefit to persuade most SMB decision makers.
2. CRM's too expensive – which means that not even cloud-based CRM solution providers have delivered solutions that are sufficiently affordable, easy to deploy and use and beneficial to the business to persuade those decision makers.

And for those who were quick to adopt CRM software, many are likely now finding varying degrees of difficulty in adapting those tools to deal with perhaps the biggest thing to hit CRM since CRM itself – social media. How best to track and manage the social exploits of your customers and prospects, or to engage them meaningfully via these new channels?

Enter Nimble, founded in 2009 by Jon Ferrara. In 1989, Ferrara was a founder of GoldMine Software, developers of pioneering, multi-award-winning CRM and sales force automation (SFA) software for SMBs. GoldMine CRM, now available from FrontRange Solutions, claims more than a million users. So Jon and his team at Nimble know their way around the challenges of delivering compelling software solutions for SMBs.

In a recent conversation, Jon said two things that really resonated with me. One was that "humans want to help each other, but modern tools don't really enable us to do that." The other was that "the [relationship management software] market has not fundamentally changed in the 10 years since I left it [and sold GoldMine.]

In response to both drawbacks, Nimble combines the experience of Jon and his team with social media savvy and support, cloud-based delivery and usability that parallels that of popular Web-based resources such as Gmail, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Invitees to the current private beta test of Nimble, including yours truly, are asked to say nothing about the solutions features, functionality or look and feel until Nimble becomes publicly available. So I won't until then. I will say, however, that conceptually, the goal of Nimble is to tie together all of the contacts, calendars and communications that help to define, manage and optimize the relationships that matter most to an individual, a team or a business.

A key design goal, according to Jon, was to accomplish all of the above in ways that do not interfere with how users use the tools they use now. (A digressive mini-rant here. Do users of some CRM solutions really have to remember to send a blind copy to those solutions of every single e-mail they want those solutions to track and remember? Really? In this day and age, when rules-driven software has been around a long time?? And people wonder why more SMBs aren't yet using more CRM? Seriously??) To meet that design goal, the Nimble team first built a software foundation with robust application programming interface (API) support. The user interface I can't discuss came after that.

So Nimble promises to consolidate all relevant, actionable information about all each user's contacts, their social and professional online network connections, all messages and all activities. And to bring together internal collaboration and external listening and engagement. And it promises to do so in ways that users and administrators will find to be better, cheaper and easier than competing CRM offerings. Based on what I've seen, these are promises Nimble can likely keep, if the company can build and maintain a superior ecosystem of partners, developers and other stakeholders and contributors. Which I think it can.

Nimble the team and the company promise much more, however. For starters, the first offering, Nimble Contact, designed for individual users, will be free. Follow-on offerings will include additional features to support teams, sales forces and full-blown CRM. Pricing will likely range from approximately $10 to $30 per user per month, depending on the edition chosen. (For comparison, Salesforce.com currently charges $5/user/month for its Contact Manager for up to 5 users, $25/user/month for up to five users of its Group edition and $65/user/month for its unlimited-user Professional edition.)

If you want to see what a strong contender for the future of CRM, social and otherwise, looks like – one that users can and will actually use – visit www.nimble.com and sign up for a free Nimble Contact account. If it works for you, you can use it to start building the future of CRM at and for your business. Nimbly, of course.

PointClear's Dan McDade: Lead Generation and Beyond -- a 3-Q Interview

Dan McDade is President and CEO of PointClear, the prospect development company that helps business-to-business (B2B) companies drive revenue by nurturing leads, engaging contacts and developing prospects until they're ready to close. The Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) named Dan one of the 50 most influential people in sales lead management in 2009. So I thought I'd ask his opinions about lead generation, management and nurturing. Those opinions follow almost immediately.

Q1: What's the single biggest challenge facing companies trying to succeed with lead generation, management and nurturing right now?

A1: The lack of effective targeting. Many companies target too broadly. These companies do not take advantage of segmentation to the degree that they could and should. And, for whatever reason, the same company that will spend $10 on a “lumpy mailer” will balk at spending $1.00 per contact name [for] a decent list. (Well, there is no such thing as a good list [available for purchase] – but you have to build a base list, and then develop it over time on a prioritized basis). Effective targeting is 60 percent of the battle in most marketing programs and most companies do not do a good job of targeting prospects correctly.

Q2: What's the single biggest challenge facing companies trying to sell solutions and services related to lead generation, management and nurturing right now?

A2: MarketingSherpa recently published their 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report and in that report they document that the number-one most pertinent challenge marketing departments face is generating high-quality leads. At the same time, many if not most marketing departments are measured on the number of leads and the cost per lead. The marketers I talk to stress about having to produce more leads each year with reduced budgets. Do you feel that this might be one reason why fewer than 50 percent of sales reps are making their quota this year, according to CSO Insights?

The other challenge marketers face right now is that marketing automation (MA) is being touted as the Holy Grail – put e-mail addresses in one end and out the other end come freshly minted leads. Not even the MA vendors believe this, but it is hard for them to migrate users from a "black box" mentality into a more sophisticated “MA is a tool, not a standalone solution” mentality. The biggest problem facing those of us who sell high-end, quality solutions is that though companies say they want [high-]quality leads, many won’t pay for them and they default to forcing their sales force to do what it least likes to do and does poorly – prospect.

Q3: What's the "next big thing" in lead generation, management and nurturing for which decision makers at user and provider companies should be preparing right now?

A3: “The next big thing” in lead generation, management and nurturing for B2B companies is actually “the same old thing” for sophisticated, B2C [business-to-consumer] direct marketers – it has been around for 30-plus years. That is a data-driven approach to prospecting with a lifetime value approach to measuring ROI. The more companies measure themselves on quarterly results, the more they are mortgaging their future. I recommend that companies stop the carousel on dollars going out without any realistic hope of getting those dollars back in ROI.

Dortch's Recommendations

Dan is incredibly good at talking about lead generation, management and nurturing in ways that seamlessly tie those critical topics to what should be the larger goals of every business. You know – things like investing in necessary resources wisely, tracking actions, developments and their effects accurately and consistently and balancing short- and long-term goals optimally. Those kinds of larger goals.

I am naively optimistic enough to believe that these and other large, short-term and long-term goals are best achieved by focusing on making every customer successful and happy. This approach, I believe, provides the highest likelihood of sustained success and happiness for everyone else in the customer's value chain. Critical to success with this approach is identifying, engaging, managing, nurturing and converting the highest-quality leads available. Because that's how you maximize the value of every effort and resource you invest in each and every one of those leads.

And how do you maximize the quality of your leads? I recommend that you start by taking an approach to the challenge pretty much aligned with Dan's comments above. (You might also take a look at what Dan's company does and how they do it, as potential partners and as a guide to what to look for in other vendors and solutions you consider.)

It may also help to encourage a view of leads as more than just chunks of data on a list. They're actually people who have needs and goals, same as you and your business. This could help to accelerate progress towards a more holistic, conversational and consultative relationship with each lead and customer, and with the marketplace you're in more generally. Which as I understand it is how much marketing's evolving these days. I'm not necessarily recommending; I'm just sayin'…

By the way, Dan's new book, "The Truth About Leads," should be at or near a purveyor of books near you sometime soon. I also recommend it. Highly. I got to read an advance copy, and felt a lot smarter about the whole lead thing afterwards.

Get Satisfaction: Turning Customer Communities into Bigger Business Benefits

What's the most important thing to your business? Its customers, because without them, your "business" is likely just an expensive hobby. (This is equally true for non-profit organizations, but they serve two groups of "customers," the ultimate consumers of the services the non-profit provides and the people and organizations that fund those services.)
So what's the most important business resource your organization is probably under-leveraging or not measuring, tracking or paying attention to at all? Generally, it's what your customers think and feel about your organization and its offerings. More specifically, it's the engagement and passion of your best and happiest customers.

Those qualities are probably the most effective tools you have for recruiting and acquiring new happy customers. But you absolutely need the best available information about your customers – who's happy and why, who's unhappy and why and everything related to those questions. That information is crucial to your efforts to identify your most positively engaged customers and to leverage and amplify their engagement and passion.

Of course, your organization should already be tracking what customers think and feel, using everything from social media monitoring to periodic proactive outreach NOT intended to sell anything. But how best to go one step beyond, closer to the encouragement and leverage of actual customer communities?

I recommend a close, careful look at Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction helps companies to leverage and monetize pervasive, passionate engagement of those companies' customers. (I've run this admitted mouthful past a few Get Satisfaction executives, and they say it captures what they do pretty well, so I'm sticking with it.) It does this via a combination of really cool software and effective, field-proven processes and practices that it makes available to its customers.

Pricing starts at $19 per month for all the tools you need to build and manage a basic community. For $49 per month you can add support for a team of community managers and Facebook integration. At $99 per month you get additional community customization, analytics and Web site integration features. And at $289 per month you can add integration with customer relationship management (CRM), help desk and other systems as well as enhanced support from Get Satisfaction. Free trials and options for full customization and rich branding are available as well.

There are other customer community management and feedback collection solutions out there, to be sure. (Three of them are discussed briefly along with Get Satisfaction in a November 2010 article at Inc.com.) However, none that I've seen offers the combination of flexibility, functionality and economy available with Get Satisfaction.

Also, Get Satisfaction's founders, management and corporate culture are, to put it mildly, intently focused on empowering customer-led communities that deliver real, measurable business value. This is reflected in everything I've seen them do, say and deliver so far, and strongly complements the strengths of the company's core offerings.

Your customers are your market. The more you can empower your customers to ask questions, share ideas, provide feedback and form communities, the more you know about what your customers really think and feel. The more such information you have, the better your marketing, sales and customer care efforts can become. If these things matter to you, you should explore Get Satisfaction. Now.

Free Webinar: Synchronicity abounds – Lane Becker, a co-founder of Get Satisfaction, will be the featured speaker in a Focus.com Webinar entitled "Think Like an Entrepreneur: Lessons for Businesses of All Sizes." It's sponsored by GoToMeeting, another tool you should be using if you're not. I'll be moderating. Should be an interesting and valuable conversation. I hope it will include you.

The live event takes place on Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010 at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET. It will also be available on demand later, if you can't make the live version. For more information or to register, please go to http://dortchon.it/f32uR8.

Find New Customers – Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers: the Dortch on Marketing 3-Q Interview

Jeff Ogden is a lead and demand generation specialist and  a self-styled "Fearless Competitor." He's also the president of one of the best-named companies I've ever encountered: Find New Customers. But enough of what I think. Here's what Jeff thinks.

Q1: What's the single biggest challenge to companies seeking new customers today –technological, operational or otherwise?

A1: To quote sales expert Jill Konrath, prospects are crazy, busy today. So your messages must adhere to her SNAP approach:
1) Simple - very basic and uncomplicated
2) iNvaluable - focused on their needs and not yours
3) Aligned - don’t talk about A when they care about B. You need to talk about B when they care about B.
4) Priority - You need to focus on what's at the top of their to-do list.

But the interesting thing about this challenge is that solving it requires deep buyer intelligence. Buyer personas are critical today. Deep knowledge leads to finely honed and effective messaging.

Q2: What's the single biggest challenge to companies seeking to sell solutions to companies seeking new customers today -- technological, perceptual or otherwise?

A2: The biggest challenge for companies selling solutions like marketing automation is commoditization. To prospects ears', they all sound alike – Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, Pardot. The average business person cannot see a difference. Vendors need to do a better job of demonstrating unique value and ensuring success. Chances are this will come from a different selling approach, rather than a product.

Q3. What's the "next big thing" coming in the continuing search for new customers for which users and vendors should be preparing now?

A3: Buyer empowerment. Vendors will need to become more value oriented and recognize the need to be everywhere (Twitter, Facebook YouTube, iTunes, etc.) with a clear, concise and consistent message.

Dortch's Recommendations

Pay attention to how your buyers buy, whether you're selling marketing automation solutions or anything else. When I look at Jeff's answers collectively, what I take away is that differentiation enhances competitiveness. Oh, and that the only differentiation that matters to buyers is differentiation that demonstrates alignment with buyer goals, needs and priorities.

Be where your buyers are, and pay attention to, capture, aggregate and leverage what they say and what they do. Employ IT-empowered solutions that help you to do these things effectively and consistently. That's how you'll find – and keep – new customers.