The training here sucks……ever hear that?

Nothing irks me more is when new employees are brought into any organization and the hiring manager does not train them on people and process within the current organization. Then months or even a year later, the new hire wanting to do something which is a basic function of their job is seeking out help to learn how to do it.

Software marketing is hard enough. Learning the product and the marketplace are tough. Knowing the competitors and positioning is tough. Understanding where to advertise and bring in leads is difficult. Heck, the last thing that should be on a software marketers mind is how to navigate the people and process of the current organization. I blame management for people who are not prepared to understand process.

Know this….I am not a perfect manager by any means. But I will tell you that I as a manager have a deep dedication to training my current hires on the people and process first so when they learn everything else, they are not left with a blank stare on their face when they have to execute.

Its a simple concept everyone…..train the hire first and train them right. Get them to crawl and understand the process, then make them leave the nest to learn to walk and run in the big bad corporate marketing world. As a hiring manager you have an obligation to see your employee succeed within the organization. Without the right tools and understanding of the corporate process you are failing yourself and the individual. Lastly, don’t expect that others will train them for you. In my eyes, that is weak management and no matter how good you are at other things in your job, you suck at on-boarding a new person.

Take the time to do it right the first time…….

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Small Marketing Organizations

Small marketing organizations have challenges as well.  You wear a ton of hats, are over worked (sometimes underpaid) and you have to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.  You cant hire that SEO specialist unless they come with a ton of other talents.

Small orgs run by the seat of their pants. Often the pace is hectic and it seems like you are always searching for that next big idea to reinforce, brand or push product. Your burn rate could be high, your budget and resources could be low and you are dog tired at the end of the day.  You are committee of one and sometimes what you do is often scrutinized heavily by everyone. You run a huge risk of utter success or dismal failure.

There are a ton of other things to talk about in small and large marketing orgs, but I think most of us get the idea.

What sort of person are you and where do you fit in?

Large Marketing Organizations

I have noticed over the recent years that the larger a marketing organization gets the harder it is to do actual marketing. People beget process. Process begets training. Training is self reliant. People get into silo’s and the true marketing sometimes stops.

There are political battles, jockeying between people, pigeon holing and eventually you say to yourself – Where do I start and what is most important? Marketing loses focus when all you have is a ton of people defining and learning process. There is no growth in learning new ways as people become stifled.

Suddenly the good ol days of having fun, brainstorming and being a nimble well oiled machine become replaced with meetings, powerpoints, strategy sessions and endless he said/she said, I want/they want, lack of resource,project planning, “I cant tell you for your own good” type of environment. People become rooted and rutted into muck. Change in process and training is slow and with so many people in the org it becomes a hassle to keep up with the new and exciting methods to market.

Purple Cows are viewed as noise makers and idea’s need to be run by committees of people.

As I see it people in large marketing organization have 3 choices: 1. Adapt and become one of the masses 2. Leave or 3. Be the purple cow (if you can be one) and live dangerously.

Of course large marketing organizations has their advantages as well. You can get lost in the masses and do a semi-ok job and go about your business a bit below the radar. This is great if you are a below the radar type of person. So the choice is up to you.

Tomorrow is small marketing organization.

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Holiday SEO Poem

My good friends over at Webbed Marketing have this funny as heck holiday SEO poem that is a must read. It’s scary to think that my inner dork comes out and laughs at this stuff. For all you SEO nuts out there this is for you.

I will reprint some of it for you guys, but its best to go to their site and check it out for yourselves:

Twas the night before an algo change and I’m at my house
My laptop is on and I’m clicking my mouse
My title tags are crafted from keywords with care
In hopes that the Googlebot soon would be there

My keyword density was optimized to the specs
While my homepage featured rich visible text

With ma pouring link juice and me in whitehat
I’d just uploaded a new Google site map.

When out on the web there arose such a clatter
I checked my page serve time to see what was the matter

Away to my toolbar I typed on a mission
Searched on my keywords and checked my position

My site pages were slipping – it must be a new algo
Page two, three, four and five, and some further below,

When, what to my site should suddenly crawl
But an indexer, a bot, spider, a combination of them all

Rolling across the web with a new algo so hot
I knew in a moment it must be Googlebot

More rapid than eagles the SEOs they came,
And he crawled, and indexed, and called them by name;

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Spice up your touchpoint emails

I am working on a project with a certain business unit in my organization whereby we are re-writing all of our auto-respond emails for our most popular assets. Right now, they are boring, unorganized and cannot be measured.

I view auto-respond emails (or touchpoint emails as I like to call them) as a vital or first lifeline to your customer. Its the first interaction that the client has with your org and if your touchpoint communication sucks or looks funny, imagine the impression that you give to the outside world. Most marketers would not even think to use this platform as a way to engage in a conversation with the client. Most don’t see it as an opportunity to begin a nurturing relationship with them. Most see it as a nuisance or necessary evil to business. Heck some marketers are so focused on “getting more leads” that they miss this as an opportunity to fulfill that requirement.

If you take the time to provide a useful and relevant experience for the user via touchpoint marketing, people will want to come back. If you think of them as just another lead and don’t see this as a viable marketing activity, then quit your job as a professional marketer.

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Don’t pay any attention to this post…….

How often do you pay attention to industry sites ads? Ya…I thought so………I have been hearing alot lately about how online ad budgets are either flat or slightly increasing next year and I am wondering if the money that software companies pour into online advertising is worth it? Do they have an hard ROI on the leads that they generate or are they pie in the sky numbers? What if a company were to find out that they poured $500k into ads for a particular product, generated a ton of leads, but the sales folks got no where with them? I wonder how much the company would be willing to invest in more ads the following go around.

Often marketing departments are so focused on bringing in the leads and looking that the CPL that they tend to lose site of the big picture of what it truly cost them to get that lead in and what happened once it got there. Yea yea yea…age old closed looped issue right?

How about instead of sitting around and talking about it, more companies begin to put a plan of action in place to either eliminate or curb the spend of online ads until they can be truly measured. Sounds deceptively simple huh?

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Periodic Table of Differents

On page 174 of the book “The Big Moo” there is a great periodic table of functions in big company vs. start-up’s and one stood out to me. It was pitching. In the big company it was labeled at “60 slides, 120 minutes and fourteen point font” and in the start up it was “10 slides, 2o minutes and thirty point font”

I once was told this at my current organization. Wait….”XXXX only thinks in ppt, so you need to put together a presentation”. What? How can someone think about concepts in power point? What ever happened to just a pitch of a concept without a presentation? Why must everything be put into power point?

Perhaps I live on the edge…or perhaps I will never make it “big” in software business, but I promise that I will never become a person who only thinks in ppt. Heck…some of best concepts are written on cocktail napkins or on your arm….In my opinion, I don’t care who are….but you are never so far removed where you cannot think of things or concepts that are old school. People abuse ppt and people think the cannot live without it…..

Simple is better.

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Software Marketing for Idiots

So you work in software marketing right? Here are a few simple rules to live by if you are a product marketing, PR/AR, internet marketing, eCommerce or anyone related to marketing the product

1. Keep it simple. (make the message simple and make it stick.)

2. Make it easy to understand.

3. Don’t ask for much

4. Success is not dictated by the amount of leads you generate

5. A new relationship is harder to make, than trying to keep the existing one going

6. Watch, learn and listen to those around you.

7. Hear what others have to say about you in the marketplace. Reach out and respond

8. Try something new.

9. Talk to your customers.

10. Don’t undermine those that have expertise in their respective areas.

I can go on and on and on…………………perhaps for more posts down the road.

Top 5 Promises not to make in email marketing

5. You want to blast the entire database for your seminar in Chicago? Sure..I am sure some of them want to fly there for a 3 hour presentation

4. Sure we can embed the video and send a 500K pdf attachment….it should get through

3. I will be more than happy to send out that email on Christmas Eve, we might even get a higher response

2. Targetting the CIO or CEO’s inbox is a great idea, I am sure they read their email

1. Nah…..I am sure we wont get on any blacklists if we send it this way..

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Top 10 Promises never to make in marketing

Throughout the years I have been in marketing (and even when I was in sales) I have learned not to make to many promises that I could not keep. Here are some of the classics as I would like to call them in software marketing

10. Sure…lets add one more profile question…we can use that data

9. We absolutely can run this as a closed loop campaign

8. Targeting IT Managers is not a problem…not many people do anyway

7. You want to purchase a list of SAP install customers who didn’t buy Peoplesoft running Tomcat in a heterogeneous environment so long as they aren’t running Sybase….sure..let me look into that for you.

6. You want me to create an email with a video embedded so as it delivers it plays automatically and oh…you Mr. Salesperson want to sent it in outlook…hmmm..let me check into that

5. I can certainly look in switching our current email structure to send out all pdf files rather HTML

4. You want more “flare” on the webpage…can you describe “flare” and let me look into it

3. I can certainly look into creating buzz for your event (wish I knew what they were doing)

2. I can have it for you next week

1. Let me whip something up for you.

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Social Media: Online Marketing 101 by Cord

Cord has a great post today about explaining what Social Media is all about. Glad to see he is going back to the basics as we all could use a good “101” class again. Great stuff Cord.

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Survey for SQL Server

If you are involved in SQL Server in anyway, my current organization is asking for 2 minutes of your time to fill out a survey to shape the future of our SQL Server offerings.

Alas….if you fill out the survey you will be entered into a drawing for a BenQ 20 inch monitor. Please take the time if you are working with SQL Server to fill out the survey as I know that it will be valuable to our development teams.

You can access the survey here

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Branding For a Software Company

John at Duct Tape Marketing has a great definition of branding that I would like to share:

“Branding is the art of becoming knowable, likable and trustable”

So with this definition in mind, how can something like this statement above apply to any software company of any size? Does Microsoft or Oracle need to brand their software anymore than they already have? Some people trust and like Microsoft and Oracle and some people don’t. I think more where this applies to is company’s who have a multitude of products or services and are well known in the marketplace for some piece of software.

Branding takes alot of patience, time, money and creativity. You cant just buy a Super Bowl Commercial and expect that it will instantly brand you. (ok..maybe GoDaddy is a bit of an exception) Buying the back cover of trade magazine is a good start but for some is expensive. I feel that in todays transparent world, a great way to brand yourself is to open up the doors, knock down the walls and show the IT community that you are all about collaborating and solving the pains of their world as well as being a thought leader in your respective marketplace. You can have the best products in the world, but if you play the secracy game with the public, branding will be difficult.

Here are a few (yes a few) ways to build a good brand in software

1. Start a blog. A good blog..not a chest pounding advertisement, but one which adds value to your expertise

2. Hire an evangelist.

3. Build a wiki or a community centered around pain and have that evangelist dedicated to fostering both

4. Educate educate educate through as many new mediums as you can (podcasts, video, white boarding sessions etc….)

5. Do a super bowl commercial (kidding)

6. Do things that are fun for your audience…show them that you are real

7. Monitor your reputation online and comment and acknowledge people that talk about you and your industry.

This is just a start, but if you manage to do the above you are well on your way to branding your organization

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The abuse of email in software companies

Hi..I am Joe Blow and I recently downloaded a piece of trial software from your company. Within minutes, I got a crappy autorespond email thanking me for the download as well as my trial key. (some other software companies say in the crappy autorespond email that I will be contacted by a salesperson in order to get my key). Within the next few hours, I get a phone call and email from my sales rep asking me if there is anything they can do for me. I politely decline as I have not even unzipped the file yet.

Every so often I get a ping either from the sales rep by phone or an email asking me what is going on with my trial as it nears the end of the trial period. I get emails to go to demo’s, take part in surveys and go to seminars all from the same company. In fact I just got an email the other day indicating that since I download the XYZ product trial, I might be interested in this FGH trial….and since I have not finished XYZ trial yet…it all seems a waste.

Wow..then I noticed from this software company a really cool white paper on the same subject matter as XYZ product and decided to download it. Another crappy text autorespond, another follow up from the rep both by phone and by email and more emails I am sure to come. When I finally decide that the XYZ product has some legs, I get contacted by the sales rep to do a demo and I get scheduled for a demo, get more crappy emails confirming the confirmation of the demo. I then get a form crappy email thanking me for the demo when its done, another crappy email to fill out a survey about the demo and a thank you email thanking me for taking the survey.

Too bad….I lost budget and cant buy XYZ product…but I get an email once a month from the sales person, who has now switched twice since downloading it. I get about 2 or 3 emails a month asking me to download other white papers and other trials and of course to attend that precious breakfast seminar to talk about how the XYZ product, that I cant have can solve all of my problems.

This fictitious company and email onslaught depiction was brought to you today by a concerned software marketer who knows your pain and understands that in today’s world email can be abused by all. It can be used as a shroud, a wall, a sales tool and even an abuse tactic not only by overzealous software folks, but by many companies in general.

We live in a digital world where email is king. We live in a world where marketers use email to promote everything and anything. We live in a world where marketers dont treat the customer base or prospect internal database as a precious resource that needs to be nurtured with relevant content. We live in world where marketers need to come to grips that the user is in control of what they see and want to see. We live in a world where Marketing 3.0 is taking over.

Marketing 3.0 lesson 1 – The User is In Control. Identify, adapt and overcome……or be left behind.

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Cool Dork/Geek Stuff

I am always a sucker for cool dorkwear…..and this item is no exception.  Sounds like a pain to clean/wash, but who cares right

Travel travel travel

This week marks my 5th out of the last 7 weeks on the road. I have been in meeting after meeting and training after training and I cannot wait to get home and just be there for more than a week. While I love to get out and travel every once in a while, it can really wear thin on you and I don’t know how the true road warrior can have an semblance of a work/life balance.

Oh well….one more day and I am hopefully home through the Holiday’s.

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Email Marketing by the Num8ers

I just picked up the book “Email Marketing by the Num8ers” by Chris Baggot. Read 3 chapters in like 40 minutes and so far its one of the best books I have read in the last 2 years. As a professional email marketer for over 6 years, it is always nice to see another individual who so closely aligns with what I have been preaching to my organization for years, which is relationship building over email.

If I could give everyone I work with a book for Christmas, it would be this one. Stay tuned, I should have this puppy finished by Tuesday morning.

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Online Communities – IT or Marketing?

I was speaking with a close colleague yesterday and she is faced with an interesting situation in her organization. Her organization is a medium sized software company with about 5 online communities. There is a raging debate within her organization about who should own the online communities: IT/R&D or Marketing. Marketing has a clear path for growth of the communities in that they want to make them more issue based as well less branded (yea…go figure..a marketing person who wants to brand what they do less). She would not disclose with me what the goal/future plans are of the IT organization.

There have been numerous meetings with management of both sides and no decision has come as a result. I have done some preliminary research on this subject and have my own opinion, but curious as to what you have to say. Let me know what you think.

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Happy Aniversary to Me

Today marks my 7th anniversary with Quest Software. It’s not too often that you find someone in the technology space who has been with their organization for 7 years.

Tenure perhaps? A sabbatical? Yea….I think not.

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Email Formats: SMS

There was a great article that iMedia Connection published today about the 3 different types of email messages being sent today: promotional, newsletter and SMS.

At my current organization we spend plenty of energy on sending out promotional emails, a fair amount of time on the newsletter end but very little if any on the SMS types of messaging. I am currently writing a email marketing strategy brief for 2008 and am particularly interested in solving how we can start to adapt to sending messages to mobile devices. Aside from the plain text aspect of mobile messaging, is there any technology out there that is specific or meant for mobile SMS messaging? We currently run lyris in house and send all of our messages in MIME format, but I am thinking that this is not enough. When I see our messages on my Blackberry and messages from other sources, there is still work to be done in my opinion.

Any advice would be appreciated.

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