Wade Appelman — Blog and Website

Over the years I’ve supported sales teams ranging from 2 guys to over 1,500.  I can tell you it’s not much different supporting either of the two groups. 

It seems that besides the typical personality/stereotypes that exist in all teams (i.e. “the shouter”, “the paranoid one”, “the CEO favorite”, etc.) there is one thing they all have in common … they want personalized, individual sales tools that match their exact selling style, territory/customers, and that are ALWAY’S current.

The web with electronic publishing has taken us a long way since the days of 1000 brochures organized in the trunk of the car and literature rooms that took three people to manage.  Today (and really since Web 1.0) we have electronic product briefs, web based document management systems, and just a few paper brochures that you hand to customers which really serve as a way to remind them of your web address.

One thing I found, however, is that printing these materials really sucks!  Sometimes you really want a hard copy to send or show.  It is still more professional and like a snail mail thank you card has a lasting impact.  The problem with printing today is cost vs. quantity and of course the wide range of quality options not to mention shelf life of the piece as everyone is spolied by “electronic updates”.

I recently had a client that wanted to distribute a white paper and a series of product shots with high quality graphics and illustrations.  We toyed with creating the typical web page and .pdf white paper … but decided to go the old fashioned way.  Custom, Printed … BOOKS for each individual sales team member (about 25) AND targeted to the prospect.

After talking to Kinko’s (and about dying at cost for fairly low quality) I went on to discover MyPublisher.com after reading a Wall Street Journal Story about them.  We were able to very quickly create 25 custom books (11×15 full color bleed) with mat cover and send them to the sales force in less than 24 hours !!  I expect that now that we have a system in place we will deliver these types of materials on a regular basis.  Oh and by the way … no professional graphics person, agency, or admin personnel involved here.  Only the marketing and sales team members!

The team couldn’t believe it (actually neither could I …) and most importantly the customer reaction was fantastic.  I actually got a call from a fellow VP of marketing from one of our customers who was shown the book and wanted to know how we did it and the budget (less than $200).

Pretty cool example of how marketing in the Web 2.0 world has gotten to be pretty personal.

How many times have you composed a great email, embedded links to your fantastic website, combed your contact list for just the right contacts, hit the send button … AND WAITED?

• Did the spam filter kill your email before they saw it ?
• Did they open it and ignore it?
• Did they hit your links?
• Which links did they hit?

And the list goes on. 

It kind of reminds me of junior high school when you tell a friend you like the girl in the science class and are going to ask her out if she gives you “the vibe” you hinted you wanted to see (no one likes to be turned down … so you are of course cautious). So you wait and wait … NO SIGNAL.  Same type of questions as today with business email, did she get the message or was she just ignoring you ??  

Well I’ve just tried a new Web 2.0 service that I’ve been waiting for since I first started doing emails 20 years ago … if I only had it 30 years ago in Jr. High I may have actually gotten that date with Mary S!

The tool is called Sales Genius and basically it tracks if the email you sent is opened by the recipient, what links they went to on your website (assuming they follow the main link you provided in the email), and then notifies you the SECOND they actually hit the site or open the mail.  The cool part is that it is very transparent to the recipient, easy to set up and send directly from Outlook, and sold as monthly service … so low cost. Now an inside sales rep can prioritize his calls to the contacts that have seen the mail, clicked the link, etc. No more guessing !!!

 IS THIS REALLY NEW?

Yes …  these tools have been around for a while if you were a savvy software guy, got IT and marketing support, and had days to create bulk mails … frankly they were never easy enough for an individual sales guy to use — so they were not. 

This one is and thats the key.  Continue reading →

It is one of the hardest thing to do for a marketing guy. 

How do you talk about all of your customers and market momentum in a way that is intuitive, innovative, and plain and simply — not just a boring list of names and stats? (i.e. “30 of the fortune 50 use our product”, or a web page with 1000 logo’s on it … yawn)

We all know the age old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” — but again how do you do it with customers, and in many cases those that for a variety of reasons don’t or can’t be mentioned?  One great way to show this is through a demographic map.  Political campaigns have been doing it for years by coloring towns, counties, and States with their respective parties color as they get poll data to suggest voter preference.  But again, without costly polling and surveys how does a company use data it has to project real-time maps of its customers.

 Well I came across a really interesting idea when researching this problem.  Sun wanted to show momentum for its free Solaris O/S program and created a visual map to show all of the SYSTEMS that were using the product. It hit me over the head — wow 80,000 plus users and it was interactive so I could see which neighbors and regions were in fact using the product.  In other words … they sucked me in.

To do this they used a mapping tool that superimposed a red dot every place an installation occurs … right down to the street data (for privacy the really only show it to a zip code level).  You can then scroll out for a world view or zoom in for a specific regional view.  It even does the math to tell you how many systems are represented in a given view.   What is truly innovative is how they automatically track the users by correlating subscribers to their software update service to the mapping system — providing real time/automatic charts.

This is a great example of using data your customers are willing to provide (when they register for a download or auto update feature), applying web technologies to graph the data, and then use cyberspace (in this case Suns CEO blog) to tell the world about it.

For more details on how this map was created they cover it here. 

Again, another great example of using technology to tell a marketing story that is simple, powerful, and best of all something that people will remember.

Like the web there has been a constant migration in terms of best practice and even the tools for companies marketing departments to buy and use to get out the message and track success. But UNLIKE the web application space — I’m not convinced that most marketing groups have really spent the research time to uncover how to really USE these new tools. I think the majority of the teams just kind of muddle along and try bits and pieces of the new ideas but never master it. It kind of reminds me of people with TiVo that never figure out how to use the “Season Pass” feature and record their favorite shows weekly …MANUALLY (if you can imagine that )

Or for a more realistic example — spend tons of time putting in SalesForce.com — but never use the campaign features or report writers to really SEE the customer pipeline. They simply use it as an expensive contact management and to-do list tool!

For example — to show the evolution of marketing teams using the web in a very basic fashion — In 1995 it was simply cool to create a web page. In 2000 it was all about driving traffic to your site and getting a mention here and there in a few of the top print publications and then linking to those articles as a virtual on-line library. Hey it was pretty cool back then that you didn’t care when the story ran (it could even show up in the 4th of July edition … ) because it was now searchable by that new fangeled search engine “Google” and you could prominently display the story on your website forever!

Well a lot has obviously changed in the last few years. In fact I think more in the last two years (2005 & 2006) than in the previous three as it relates to new marketing tools and best practices for getting the PROPER message out to your TARGET customers. It is no longer acceptable to post a few pages on the web, do a press tour, create an advisory board, do some trade show events, and call your company “Successfully Launched”. Same with products. Same with success stories.

The game has changed with Startup Marketing 2.0. Now the question is where to start and how to use the new fancy car you’ve just been given so that nobody gets hurt!

SO WHERE DO WE START?

Sure there are tons of ideas floating with concepts surrounding blogs, Podcasts, YouTube product demo’s, Webinar’s, event wiki’s, and my new personal favorite the “un-conference” where event participants decide on the format for the event as evidenced by the BarCamp event and even one sponsored by Sun recently called Startup Camp.

Continue reading →