We are proud to have contributed to the successful launch of yet another innovative product this week!  Our client Eightfold Logic just launched InboundWriter, the first cloud-based social writing application of its kind.   InboundWriter integrates real-time search data and the dynamics of social media directly into the writing process itself to help content creators of all walks – marketers, bloggers, journalists, etc. – to write more relevant online content.  Its mission: increasing audience reach, engagement and conversions.   Put simply, InboundWriter taps into social intelligence to drive productivity and results for its intended user – writers.  

There are a lot of things about this product that make it a poster-child for Schulman+Thorogood.  First, InboundWriter is born of the growing inbound marketing mandate, with the objective of empowering writers to easily draw on the “wisdom of the crowds” to attract the right audience to their content.   It is designed for content engineers™ and will undoubtedly contribute to the momentum of the content marketing movement by redefining how we create relevant content.  Joe Pulizzi, a content marketing evangelist and the founder of the Content Marketing Institute agrees:  “Today’s brands have no choice, to get attention, they must be interesting — that means creating consistent, compelling content.  InboundWriter helps increase relevance, and is one of those ‘of the moment’ products that turns content into a more powerful strategic asset.”

Second, InboundWriter is about increasing audience reach, engagement and conversion through content optimization.  The product enables writers to experiment with different words and writing strategies and observe in real-time the impact to potential content popularity.  This is right in our sweet spot!   After all, we are all about combining left brain and right brain action to ensure creativity can indeed drive business results.  We will surely be blogging about the ROI of relevant content as we analyze reach, engagement and conversion metrics for content “optimized” by InboundWriter.

Last but certainly not least, a social product deserves a social go to market plan – which is exactly what we delivered.  InboundWriter is using one of our favorite pricing models to drive adoption: Freemium.   Similar to some of the most widely used social applications such as Skype, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, the basic version is 100% free.   If the product delivers on its promise, the power of viral marketing will drive hoards of new users to InboundWriter…and a certain percentage of them will opt for the additional functionality and upgrade to the “professional” version.  Already, the TechCrunch article and the slew of additional coverage drove hundreds of sign-ups to the product in just day one.  It will certainly be interesting to see how these “free” users convert to “paid” users and identify any differences in product adoption rates for different segments of writers.   The next several months appear to be ripe with the promise of new metrics for social media marketing success – so stay tuned!

This past week I moderated the Forecasting, Analytics and Compensation Management Panel at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (good event by the way – probably the best one yet!).  My diverse panel included sales execs from ArcSight, LaCrosse Footwear, and GuardianEdge who deployed Sales 2.0-powered sales management solutions from Xactly, Right 90 and Cloud 9 Analytics, respectively. 

Given my marketing analytics background (or DNA as some might say ), I’ve always been focused on making marketing more accountable to and aligned with sales. My personal edict is “You Cannot Improve What You Cannot Measure”, and I practice it religiously to ensure my clients drive the most revenue possible with their marketing dollars, great or small.  What was thrilling about my pre-conference conversations with the panelists was how the Sales 2.0 movement is enabling sales organizations to adopt a similar culture of measurement, bringing in much needed accountability.  Actually according to my panel, it is moving beyond accountability – and shifting sales into a culture of predictability.  Here is how: Sales management solutions, such as forecasting, business analytics and compensation management tools, improve visibility into sales performance with objective, dynamic data.  Better visibility in turn exposes volatility at the aggregate level as well as gives us the ability to drill down to pinpoint and act on the problem areas – whether product line, geo, sales rep, lead source – resulting in overall sales performance predictability.

Think about it:

• Business Analytics improve visibility into the pipeline. With just a couple of clicks, we can see what deals are won, lost, closed, or added to your pipeline, even deals that slipped.  Better pipeline analytics help drive a better forecast and also help alignment with marketing re: driving the appropriate lead gen efforts to mitigate potential shortfalls. 
• Accurate sales forecasting, based on dynamic sales data, can build trust in the forecast for run-rate business as well as new demand, ensuring alignment with production – getting us a step closer to achieving the dual goals of improved profitability and customer sat.
• Smart compensation management can help us incent sales people to drive sales of the “right” products (and you got it, we get to define what “right” means!).  We can now adapt compensation plans to match changing market conditions to better align sales comp to business objectives.

Uncovering volatility and bringing about predictability into sales performance have far reaching benefits. It of course helps with the all important revenue numbers – but also drives organizational alignment between sales and finance, sales and marketing, sales and product management, sales and production… (yep, you get the picture) and improves trust between these often mistrusting departments.   Most importantly, it translates into customer value in the form of a more efficient and customer-centric organization. And, to quote a popular MasterCard ad, “that’s priceless!”

We market and sell in a brave new world where prospects are equipped with near x-ray vision into companies, products and people they are considering doing business with. Attention span crunch has become pandemic, and we now have the mandate of ensuring every customer engagement is targeted and relevant to synchronize buying and selling cycles – or risk being left behind to join the multitude of businesses that simply didn’t make the necessary transformations in time.

It wasn’t too long ago where the norm was for marketing and sales teams to shout insults and pass blame on for not reaching revenue goals: “The leads are worthless!”…”No, it’s the sales reps who just cannot close!!” Fast forward a decade and the rules have changed. Marketing is now measured and compensated more like sales reps on attainment of goals; and our friends in sales are having to think more marketing-like and segment and target prospects with the right messages at the right time to increase conversions. Welcome to the world of sales and marketing 2.0 or “Smarketing”!

The 2.0 approach requires the art of selling and marketing (a.k.a. creativity) to be augmented with a healthy dose of science (a.k.a. repeatability) to achieve the massive productivity gains required. While there are several factors that contribute to realizing these efficiencies, I believe there a few that are paramount to increasing accountability, reducing customer acquisition costs, and ultimately driving revenue.

Here are the four essential steps to grabbing the Sales and Marketing 2.0 brass ring:

• Align sales and marketing organizations around jointly-defined processes, definitions and success metrics. Establish a “system of record” – whether it is your CRM or your marketing automation system or both if they are synched – to ensure you are capturing all customer engagements in one place. And make sure to agree on the definition of sales stages to ensure your lead scoring process is consistent and gives you the necessary data to measure the effectiveness of each of your programs.
• Target the right audience with the right message at the right time. The days of one-to-many mass emails are gone. Launch targeted one-to-few campaigns by segmenting your prospect database. Watch for trigger events in the industries or geographies you are targeting to reach out to prospects with information that’s relevant to their current initiatives and urgent business challenges. Use behavioral targeting based on how your prospect is engaging with your website or your “free trial”.
• If lead scores indicate prospects are not quite sales-ready, nurture them! Educating prospects with whitepapers, tips and tricks emails or educational webinars are great ways to nudge them along the sales cycle (and effectively reduce your cost per lead!).
• And… don’t underestimate the power of continually testing and measuring the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. Is your website attracting and converting the right prospects? Which programs have the highest percentage of converting into sales-ready leads? How do changes in message or design translate into improvements in conversion rates? Remember, you cannot improve what you cannot measure!

Want to find out what we think on next gen demand generation strategies or dig deeper into how you can implement some of these recommendations? Then follow us on our new blog Smarketer. We hope you will join the conversation – and share your own experiences as well!