Dear God, there are Curators in my Inbox!

Folks, email is making a comeback!

Well, sort of. Actually, for me, it’s making a comeback as a source of excellent content. I know, it sounds strange. Most of us are used to think of email as the mule that carries our work burden. For excellent content, we turn to our preferred blog or magazine. Or the Economist. Or we browse our social feeds and follow through the links. And just as in the real world, we seek to follow those who can guide us in the meta-world of words, images and moving pictures, and show us around the best of the stuff.

Otherwise, we find ourselves in the endless slums and dreary neighborhoods of the great metropolis of content that is the the web.

Now, following such guides on Twitter is a great way of discovering content. But the <140 characters (u need to leave a few for the shortened link) rarely make it easy to decide if the link is worth the click. Plus, there’s something non-committal about it. OK, so I follow Steve Rubel on Twitter. Great, me and 68k other people. It never feels personal when his posts appear on my feed. And really that’s how it should be. This is the medium.

But I’m looking for something else.

So in comes, of all things, email. I’m increasingly discovering that my favorite way of consuming and discovering content is via a select crop of the newsletters I subscribe to. Now, I subscribe to quite a few, and, to be honest, most of them are quite bland. They leave little impression. But I also found a precious few that, believe it or not, make me anticipate their appearance in my inbox. So I’d like to share a couple of them with you.

NextDraft / Dave Pell.

Dave Pell does a brilliant job in several fronts. He curates good stuff. He comments on it in the kind of easy, candid tone of someone who appreciates the potency of words but is never intimidated by them. His aesthetic sense is just awesome. I mean, take a look at his signup landing page. You have to admit, this is one of the best landing pages you’ve seen. And the newsletter itself is as aesthetic as the signup page: clean, well spaced, shows obvious care for the reader’s attention and time. And did I mention he’s a great curator? enough compliments. Go sign up, and if you like NextDraft, stay signed up.

OmSays / Om Malik

That’s kind of a no-brainer and a yes-brainer at the same time. I mean, Om has got to be one of the most prolific, most read commentators of the tech scene, so of course his newsletter is awesome, right? well, that’s not so obvious. Many bloggers and professional content producers use the newsletter to rehash the highlights of what they’ve already published on their main venue. What I like about OmSays is how Om uses it as an inherently different medium than his GigaOm blog, so the content is not only presented differently, but is also different in its essence. This is where Om shares, usually right before the weekend, stories from around the web that are worth reading. The selection is always quality stuff, and I trust it to always deliver at least one or two pointers that make me wish everything was long form again.

Know other quality curators with newsletters that are just as well done? do leave a comment and share the love.

On Pitching to Bloggers

My fortune teller told me yesterday that very soon I will be able to write on this topic based on my own experience. Until then, I humbly refer you to this great post on how to pitch to bloggers, written by Amit Knaani of Vikido.

If, like Amit or myself, your job description includes writing to people you don’t know and who don’t know you, in the hope that such lack of knowledge won’t stand in the way of them giving you a minute of their busy lives, not to mention the even slimmer thread of hope that what you have to tell them would be interesting enough for them to tell others about – then (a) congratulations, you’re an entrepreneur, and (b) thou shalt knoweth the truth of what Amit has to say.

As for me, I can definitely say that of all the outreaches I’ve recently attempted, the ones that elicited responses shared the following common properties:

1. I learned enough about the recipients prior to pitching to them, so my message was personalized and relevant
2. I was very clear about what I wanted from them
3. They were all jolly good fellows!

One more thing: although Amit clearly says “No Templates”, I do use them when I work with Tout, a brilliant pitching assistant web app. Though, if I’m perfectly honest, none of my successful pitches were ever template-based.

How to use LinkedIn to Size a B2B Market

B2B marketers often need to know the size of their potential market, also known as the addressable market. Typically, this involves crunching numbers coming from analyst reports, market research sheets and other data. But what happens when those resources are not readily available?

While launching and marketing our iPhone app Lead Qualifier, we ran into the same problem. Specifically, we needed to know, roughly, the total number of sales and business development persons in a given country who are are also iPhone owners. Since we didn’t want to spend any dollars on expensive market research firms and reports, we had to be creative about it. Luckily, there’s a great free tool offered by LinkedIn, albeit for a different purpose, yet with a bit of imagination, it does the trick. Sure, it’s not scientifically accurate data, but it beats the normal top-down numbers one tends to come up with when there’s no hard data around.

The steps below provide the background for the research, and then a detailed description of the steps. This is pretty standard calculation for B2B marketers, the main novelty here is the availability of the raw data.

The Offering & Audience

In our case, it’s an iPhone business app for sales persons, which lets them easily and very rapidly create and share lead qualification summaries. The target audience we tried to quantify thus comprised sales persons and, by inclusion, persons in business development positions.

The Research Question

Essentially, we needed to know how many persons answer all these three criteria:

• located in the US
• are in a sales-related position
• own an iPhone device

note: if your go to market is selling to businesses and organizations and not necessarily to individuals within them, which is our approach, then the process described here may not be exactly what you need. Granted, you will still gain a view of the number of potential individuals within firms and businesses that make up the addressable market you need to reach, but you won’t get a result such as ‘X number of firms’ in your market segment.

The Research Tool

LinkedIn Ads. Specifically, the campaign creation pages within LinkedIn, where you go through a wizard to create an ad and launch it on the LinkedIn network. The great thing about this tool is that you can go through the whole targeting exercise very rapidly and of course without committing to and budget.

Here’s the process we used to answer our specific research question. Naturally you will use different values when making selections, but the concept holds.

The Process

Step 1: Finding the number of US sales persons listed on LinkedIn

1. Start LinkedIn ad creation wizard. First, you will be required to sign in to your LinkedIn account. Then you will see the ‘Create Your Ad Campaign’ page.
2. Follow the input instructions. Enter any information you want. You’re not actually launching an ad campaign, our goal is to get to the next step.
3. You will next see the Targeting page. This is where the magic happens.
4. Check the Geography box, and select North America, then click the link and check only US (sorry Canadians, this is just for simplification purposes!). See the Estimated Target Audience number on the right? should give you a number around 54M. note it down, you will use it later.
5. In the Company drill down, make the relevant selections. You’re limited to ten industry segment selections across all industries, so try and be as general as you can. For example, for our particular purposes, I left it unchecked.
6. In the Job Title drill down, select the ‘select categories of job titles’
7. Check the Job Function box
8. Check the relevant job functions. I checked the ‘Sales’ and ‘Business Development’ boxes.
9. If your offering is relevant to certain ages, use the Age drill down to further finetune. I didn’t.
10. Look at the top right. It should give you the Estimated Target Audience number for your selections. Mine, per the above selections, was close to 4M. A good start.

Step 2: Extrapolating the number of US sales persons

Remember the 54M number we noted in step (4) above? now we will use it. Here’s how:

1. The size of the US population is 312M. However this is not the right number to use for market size calculations, because the overall population has certain segments not relevant to our context, like children. I used a number I found on wikipedia of about 206M for the age bracket 15-64, both genders. It’s the closest I could find. If you find a number matching the 21-64 bracket, do share.
2. Using this population size, we see that LinkedIn has a penetration rate of 54/206 in the US, or 26%.
3. Applying this rate to the 4M number I got, I get a total market size of about 16M. (remember, it’s not about being exact anyway so don’t worry and round up or down your numbers as you need.)

Still,

• I could have tuned the number further by industry categories (step 1.5 above) and arrive at a more refined number, but this will do for illustration purposes.
• Consider that LinkedIn may have an even greater penetration rate within the specific sales segment, as sales persons are generally more aware of the importance of professional networks than most other job functions. This should result in a somewhat smaller market size, but for now we’ll ignore it, to keep things simpler.

Step 3: Finding the number of US sales persons who own an iPhone

The only thing left to do is apply the iPhone penetration rate in the US to our population. If you’re marketing an app for other platforms, find their market share values and apply. If you have another type of business, decide whether and what equivalent step would be required in your case.

1. According to our research, iPhone has 27% (!) market share in the US.
2. Thus, 27% * 16M = ~4M

That’s it! now we know roughly the size of our addressable market in the US! I emphasized ‘roughly’ again because while it’s obviously not accurate data, it’s close enough to give the marketer a general idea, which is useful when planning and budgeting marketing activities for a given product, in a given geography and a given industry or segment.

Hopefully you found it useful, if so please feel free to share and leave some feedback.

The Power of Mobile to Transform B2B Marketing & Sales

This post was originally published as a guest post I wrote for b2bmarketinginsider.com and is being republished here with permission.

As an up-and-about professional, there’s likely little need to convince you that mobile is where the current wave of consumer product and behavior innovation is all headed. This should be cause for concern for sales and marketing professionals seeking to assimilate these innovations into their practice; if the past few years on the web have taught us anything, it’s that enterprise and business applications tend to lag, sometimes by several years, after consumer-centered innovations within the same medium. In this post I will try to demonstrate that although the same delayed evolutionary process is likely to recur in the B2B marketing and sales mobile apps space, there are reasons to be hopeful, especially if the right breed of entrepreneurs steps up to the plate.

The Lateral Evolution of Business Apps
Since the rise of the web, business application innovation has often manifested itself in the following sequence:

1. consumer service, feature or user experience paradigm goes mainstream.
2. business apps adopt it.

This type of business apps progress, which for classification purposes we shall call ‘Lateral Evolution’, has plenty of merits. The consumer space offers a convenient benchmark for the popularity of an app, or the usefulness of a feature. And since every business user is also a consumer, user experience paradigms that prove successful for consumers stand a good chance of becoming popular with business users.

Once you know what to look for, the lateral evolution trail is quite hard to miss. When daily deals were the hot dish of the net last year, B2B daily deal offers were bound to appear. Check-ins are en vogue? here come geo-location social-aware services for businesses. Well after Twitter became all the rage cameYammer, the business version of the popular real-time information delivery network.

The problem with lateral evolution? it’s reactive. and being reactive, it’s delayed. The enterprise collaboration space was stagnant for ages until the large social networks took hold with consumers, and business tools like SocialText entered the scene. To me, all these examples boil down to the simple fact that there are significantly more minds bent out there on inventing and revolutionizing the consumer space, than there are people working in garages and entrepreneurial hubs on solving for the enterprise. And this is where we come back to mobile.

Mobile Open Up Massive Opportunities to Innovate B2B Practices
A lot of brain power, coding mojo, and investment dollars, not to mention countless pizzas and other innovation-enhancing snacks, go into new mobile apps and services. The imagination almost reels with the options that today’s smartphones make available to the alert entrepreneur: location-awareness, still and video camera, always-on connectivity, touch interfaces, push notifications, motion-awareness. The list goes on and on.

Trust developers everywhere to take all these wonderful raw materials and use them to build stuff that revolutionizes the way we do things – all sorts of things – in our lives. From reading magazines, to playing casual games, to tracking our lifestyle habits.

Now, wouldn’t it be great if this huge wave of innovation could also lead to small (or large, why not) revolutions in the way we, B2B sales and marketing pros, execute our practice? Do we *have* to wait for the next popular consumer service before we can apply it to our work? God knows there are enough problems to solve in our practice. Almost every process and sub-process related to marketing or sales could benefit hugely from the same type of innovative focus that transforms consumer markets almost in front of our bewildered eyes. Think about such classic processes as lead generation or lead qualification, sales activity tracking and management, and so forth. Each and everyone of these can be simplified, better rationalized or merely presented in a different, more productive way (compared to the way it’s presented in the web or desktop app that normally supports it) using a smartphone platform and the right app. Consider the following example.

Managing and prioritizing the sales pipeline is a basic activity for B2B sales professionals. The majority of them are on the road for a large part of their time, and will appreciate having a productive way to view, track and act on their pipeline deals using their smartphone or tablet device. There’s plenty of room to innovate a pipeline viewing interface, in making it actionable and less of a static view, like most CRMs do it. Imagine a deals view that reacts in real-time to sales actions like calls, email or short messages to leads and clients, and provides immediate visual feedback to the sales person. Apps like this pipeline visualizer, are a good step in the right direction. I’m sure you can sense how much room there is for more like it.

I used the example above because to me it represents the ‘low hanging fruit’ of mobile innovation options for B2B sales and marketing processes: take a classic process, cut it out of the CRM or marketing automation system, create a wholly new user experience for it on a mobile device, preferably leveraging the latter’s advantages, connect it back to the relevant business system through its APIs, and then package and serve it to the business user as a useful, enterprise-aware, consumer-grade app. In the mobile enterprise app developer cook book, that’s a recipe for success.

What do you think? Are you also prowling the mobile app stores for the next original B2B app winner? Or do you think the standard course of lateral evolution is the right approach?

Photo credit: corelinetheblue

4 Things You Won’t Hear the End Of while in Dreamforce

Image from Dreamforce 2010 courtesy ofadria.richards via Flickr

The town criers are abuzz. The couriers run amok. The end-of-summer air is filled with electricity and anticipation (or with flies, depends where you are, really). Yes, friends and fellow clouders. Dreamforce 11 is upon us, and the entire Salesforsphere is converging on the west coast, where the earth hasn’t quaked and no Irene is knocking the shores. Utterly disparaging if you want to be there but can’t. Awesomely great for those who want, can, and went.

The latter should expect, beyond solid networking, a breath of San Fran air and that weird excitement one usually feels in the presence of large crowds coming together for a single, non-violent purpose, to finish this week completely exhausted from hearing and seeing a gazillion pitches, speeches, videos and presentations that all revolve around the following four themes:

Social

Trust me, come Thursday you will have no clue how ANY business or organization can run without a social media strategy in place. You will imagine gaping, desolate holes in your dashboard interface where a social monitoring dashboard should be. You will run 234 searches of your brand name on Twitter to gauge “sentiment”, and call your customer service manager to tell him to get on Facebook, stat. And from that day on, you will forever frown upon any enterprise app that hasn’t decreed itself Social, or isn’t Salesforce, for that matter. As you should, infidel!

iPads

By the time you leave Moscone Center, you will be convinced that iPads are a life support necessity. You will see so many of them, that the whole notion of using a screen that’s connected to a keyboard (aka a laptop) will suddenly seem quaint. Odds are, you will participate in 17 raffles that promise iPads to the winners, which other people will win. You will then leave the conference with your feet leading you, subconsciously, to the nearest Apple Store, where you will either buy an iPad or get your spouse to buy you one as a birthday present, despite the fact yours was last week. Enjoy it!

Clouds

Here’s a fun exercise. Walk the conference floors, and count how many clouds you see, in logos, in roll-ups, in booth decorations, in the sky, on people’s shirts, in fliers. What you’ve just experienced is the world’s largest collection of graphic design works whose brief included the sentence “must have a cloud in it, because we’re a Salesforce partner/ISV/iOS developer”. Case in point: our app iPhone icon (see on right)!

Collaboration

Repeat after me: Chatter is the best thing to happen to my organization since they sacked that guy from accounts who used to steal people’s lunch boxes. Really, it is! I predict more case studies that show how Chatter changed a business than the number of clouds and a tenth the number of iPads you see around you at any given time. And you should believe all of them – I’m sure that if we had started using Chatter in our business right away, we’d have by now enough revenues to actually attend Dreamforce this week.

Whatever you do, see or hear and whoever you meet this week in Dreamforce 11, we wish you safe travels and a jolly good time all around. Feel free to tell us how off or on we were in our “predictions”, and don’t forget to check our Salesforce apps for iOS out when you get a chance, as we’re giving them away free this week.

Seesmic goes mobile crm

Seesmic, best known for its Twitter client, has recently diversified into the mobile enterprise apps market. In this post, they explain why they’re going mobile CRM:

• CRM is going mobile, whether businesses and enterprises want it or not
• A mobile business strategy is no longer a luxury
• People want their business apps to be as easy and fun to use as their consumer apps

This is exactly our vision in appXtrm, and how we came up with Lead Management for Sales, an iPhone app designed to be simple, specific and CRM-connected. And why we think similar apps, like Salezmine, are where the future of mobile enterprise lies, i.e., in nimble, enterprise-aware mobile apps that are fun to use and a breeze to adopt.

Mobile Apps for the Enterprise? Gotta Think Different

The triangle of IT Consumerization , mobility and cloud computing is shaping a new reality for professionals everywhere. The tools of the trade for this evolving breed of mobile web workers are predominantly the smartphone and the apps running on it. This is doubly true in the case of sales persons who are often on the road and depend to a large extent on their smartphone to manage contacts, schedules and conversations.

And yet when looking closely at the selection of apps available to this professional population, one cannot escape the perception that it is greatly underserved. Yes, the business categories in the various app stores are flooded with to-do list managers, professional networking utilities and business card scanners. But when it comes to “real” business utilities, ones that tie directly into customer relationship management and sales automation practices and converse with the respective enterprise systems that govern them, the selection definitely becomes sparse.

Many business apps, few fit sales professionals CRM needs

Hold on, one might claim at this point, there are surely many CRM apps out there in the app store. And they would be right. There is indeed a large crop of CRM apps on, say, the Apple App Store. 91 results are returned, by my count, upon searching the keyword ‘CRM’. Yet a closer look reveals an interesting picture. Almost all CRM apps on the iPhone app store fall into one of the following two categories: mobile clients of established (server-based) CRM platforms; and stand-alone CRM apps.

Now, mobile CRM clients tend to mimic the behavior of their server-based, typically web-based, mothership product and represent little more than the porting of it to a mobile device. As for standalone mobile CRM apps, apart from being irrelevant when enterprise-level or business systems are already implemented, they similarly suffer from what I call the ‘bloated app syndrome’:  install any one of these CRM clients or standalone apps, and you get, usually, the equivalent of an elephant in a VW beetle – 200 CRM features that you’ll never use. Let’s be clear about it: sales people don’t need mobile CRM; they need specific functions of customer relationship management or sales force automation available to them while they’re on the go, i.e., in context of their sales activities.

To explain why this is so, let’s talk for a second about how people really use their smartphone. Do they use it to edit a documents? no. To scan-view it, yes. To edit a worksheet? Surely not. But to forward it to colleagues? yes and yes. How about to prioritize the weekly schedule for sales calls? No no. But to check directions to the next sales meeting? You bet. Exploring sales performance analytics? No. Checking pipeline status? Yes.

See the pattern? Smartphones are ideal for short burst actions, the kind that takes seconds or brief minutes to complete and does not require careful reading or extensive text entry. Think searching for a contact; placing a call; checking in on Foursquare; reading tweets; sending a text message on whatsapp or sms; taking a photo and sharing it on instagram, etc.

To serve mobile pros, stop thinking like an enterprise software vendor

For CRM mobile apps to be truly useful for sales pros, their developers should avoid thinking like enterprise software developers and think like, say, a Twitter mobile app developer would, namely: how can I build an app that’s both fun to use AND useful, in that it implements the most important processes that the platform enables? To illustrate, I use TweetDeck, a popular iPhone Twitter client, not only because it’s a joy to use, but mostly because I prefer its implementation of the Twitter platform capabilities over those of the Twitter native client, or of other clients for that matter.  Obviously the people in Twitter itself thought the same, since they bought TweetDeck a little while ago. But I digress.

It’s important to elaborate on the issue of platform connectivity here. For sales persons to adopt a mobile enterprise app, of any kind, it’s not enough for it to offer a mobile-optimized experience that is bloat-free. It must also interact well with the relevant enterprise system of record, e.g. in the case of sales force automation, that’s the CRM system deployed within the business or organization. This is where the cloud comes in. Today’s modern web-based (or cloud-based) enterprise applications, such as Salesforce.com, have APIs that enable mobile app developers to create nimble apps that interact with them in meaningful, useful ways. The novelty here is that developers don’t need to go through the enterprise IT anymore. They can develop (and market) direct to the enterprise or business consumer, and rely on the enterprise system API to provision them with the necessary security and authentication measures.

Where it all leads: the rise of enterprise-aware, specialized mobile apps

IT consumerization, cloud computing and smart mobility are far beyond buzzword status. I believe we will see, in the immediate future, a growing demand by mobile web and enterprise workers for tiny, smart mobile apps that truly capitalize on the strength of the smartphone platform while interacting intelligently with the enterprise cloud. The combination of enterprise processes or sub-processes, such as CRM sales automation processes (such as lead qualification, pipeline deal prioritization, etc.) delivered as mobile-optimized apps that are highly specific and maintain system-of-record integrity, is truly a powerful proposition for busy professionals, and I expect more and more developers will recognize – and address – these needs.

Related articles

• Why Mobile CRM? (seesmic.com)
• 50 Best Practices For Implementing Mobile CRM (customerthink.com)

On B2B Lead Qualification and Scoring

Here’s a great list of B2B lead qualification criteria by Mac McIntosh. A useful source for people developing lead qualification and scoring programs.
On B2B Lead Qualification and Scoring

Hacking the Sales Process

Hackers, cinematic convention tells us, are pizza-guzzling, cola-drinking, anti-social anarchists who dabble in coding wizardry and master a dark realm of fringe technology. Salespersons, on the other hand, are almost always depicted as their polar opposites: smile-wearing, tie-sporting types who can finesse their way through any awkward social situation and are masters of the no-less-darker realm of human motivations and desires. So if I were to ask you to imagine a sales hacker, you’d probably be hard pressed, right?

 

Not necessarily. See, taken at its broader meaning, hacking should really be interpreted as a systematic breaking of conventions to achieve results that normally would require going through cumbersome, bureaucratic or otherwise limiting channels.

 

Taken as such, it’s actually easy to think of top salespersons as hackers. Instead of hacking into secured network, they hack into their customer’s buying process. And while they don’t work through cryptic lines of code, they certainly are masters of the subtleties of human communication and can hack their way into the thought processes of their worst ‘enemies’ in order to turn them into accomplices.

 

But more concretely, good sales persons simply know how to hack their way through all the different obstacles, internal and external, that stand between them and the commission that awaits at the far end of the sale. These could be productivity hacks, designed to help the sales person overcome bad habits and achieve an optimal use of their time – you can easily find scores of these in a simple search on the net. There are also relationship hacks, represented by all the shortcuts and inroads a sales person knows of in order to affect the buyer’s decision process. And there are, increasingly so, technology hacks – devices, online services and cool tricks that help sales persons hack their way through a deal.

 

Social networks represent one class of the latter kind. Tweets, Facebook updates and Foursquare check-ins all provide hints that sales persons are rapidly learning to pay attention to, as ways of collecting informal inputs about the mood, attitude or simply the location of their prospects and contacts.

 

Hint: for a great supply of tech hacks for sales, check out Miles Austin’s great blog Fill the Funnel.

 

Smartphone devices represent another class of the kind. The iPhones and Androids and their multitude of apps offer numerous opportunities to the savvy sales person for hacking the sales process. This could be as simple as using an iPad note taking app during a sales meeting to collect and share notes almost instantly with all attendees. Or it might mean using the device’s camera to capture a whiteboard’s content and transmit it to the back office during a break in that crucial sales meeting, so that answers to questions and other inputs may be swiftly collected from the back-office smarts and instantly leveraged.

 

Hacking the sales process is really what we had in mind when we conceived of Lead Qualifier, our first iPhone app. We sought to identify specific processes and sub-processes of the sales cycle – in this case, lead qualification – and to provide a ‘hack’ for completing them. Hence Lead Qualifier, an iPhone app that cuts down the common process of recording the qualification data related to a given lead into a 30-seconds process, vs. the usual 5-10 minutes it takes to write the whole thing down or log it within the sales force automation system.

 

What sales hacks do you use?

On Benioff as Master Disruptor

This is quote is from one of the top quoted media pieces in the Salesforsphere this year

Benioff is a disrupter in the classic Clay Christensen sense: By bringing business software to the Web—an idea ridiculed a decade ago—Benioff upended Siebel Systems (later acquired by Oracle Systems) and built a company on track to reach sales of $2 billion in fiscal 2012, ending Jan. 31. Its “innovation premium” of 73% earns Salesforce the top spot on the list of the world’s most innovative companies. Meanwhile, the industry is following Benioff’s lead in taking software from disparate servers inside companies to the cloud.