From time to time on this blog, I write about market exit strategies and provide market exit positioning tips based on case studies from the M&A market.

As you probably know by now, yesterday, Yahoo!’s board approved the acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1B. This is the latest (and biggest) in a series of recent purchases that Yahoo! has made under Melissa Meyer over the last few quarters. Since Meyer took the reins at Yahoo!, it has been clear that one of her strategies was to use the M&A market to help reposition the company for future growth.

Tumblr has had its eyes on Yahoo! and has been positioning itself for this market exit opportunity for several months (if not longer). This blog post examines the acquisition to see what other startups and expansion-stage companies can learn from Tumblr’s market exit positioning.

Here are six market exit positioning takeaways that startup and expansion-stage companies can learn from Tumblr’s market exit success story:

1) Focus on Building a Committed User Base

Tumblr has a very committed user base and is home to a younger and cooler crowd that does not typically frequent Yahoo! This made it a very attractive audience for Yahoo! to bring into its aging audience umbrella.

2) Target Key Users Who Are Attractive to Potential Acquirers

Acquirers are looking to populations that will help them grow their business. Younger tech-focused audiences are an appealing crowd as they spend lots of time online and will be the future of the internet for many generations to come.

Tumblr focused on selling to this younger and cooler crowd, and that made the platform very appealing to Yahoo!, which has struggled to expand its reach past a much older audience that is not going to sustain itself in the long-run. Yahoo!’s traffic has been on a precipitous decline for sometime now, and the hope is this acquisition will help reverse that.

3) Build a Culture that Big Companies Aspire to Bring into the Fold

Changing any company’s culture is difficult, but doing so in an established enterprise is even harder. Look at the backlash Meyer took for suspending Yahoo!’s work from home policy a few months back.

Having a cool startup culture that a company can acquire and slowly integrate into the fold is very appealing to more mature companies. Bringing in a cool startup culture with a younger vibe will help Yahoo! in the long-term with dealing with retention, which is an area the company has struggled with for some time.

4) Build a Monetization Model that Will Easily Fit into Your Target Acquirer’s Business

Tumblr has a very committed user base that generates significant traffic, but it has not been able to convert this traffic into revenue very well to date. In fact, this was even a problem for them when they first reached into the private funding markets during their last funding round.

Tumblr set itself up for an acquisition by Yahoo! or another company that is heavily dependent on ad revenue generation since it demonstrated dependable high volumes of traffic that is difficult for companies like Yahoo! to reach.

5) Immediate Revenue May Drive Exit Value, But Sustainable Growth Limits the Risk an Acquirer Perceives

Like many of the social media websites Tumblr, has struggled to monetize the traffic its committed user base brings to its platform. Rather than push too hard trying to convert their audience into revenue, the Tumblr executive team opted to maintain and build its user base commitment and actually leverage this traffic for revenue and leave the monetization move up to its acquirer.

This was a great move on the side of Tumblr’s executive team, as stepping on the gas to try to monetize traffic often leads to a shunned user base. By leaving this up to Yahoo! they removed a huge risk factor in growing their business before they exit the market. Now the company can let Yahoo! figure out how to monetize the traffic and leverage its more than 20 years of doing so to maximize this opportunity.

6) Prepare Your Executive Team to Be There for the Long-Haul

Most acquirers would like the acquired company to operate as a separate division or entity at least for the first couple quarters after acquisition (if not for the long-run). The last thing an acquirer wants to have to do is immediately integrate a company before it is ready to do so, or swap out leadership and disturb its acquired user base.

Tumblr positioned itself well for this exit by assembling a strong executive team that was built for the long-haul — not to just propped up for a dog and pony show until their exit.

If you are interested in learning more about market exit positioning, you should read my blog post on accounting for antitrust risk in your market exit strategy and my blog post series on understanding your exit options. Similarly, if you are interested in learning more about early-stage market exit strategy, I highly recommend reading Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors by Basil Peters.

As a startup, have you ever wondered why it may be difficult to attract and/or retain female employees within your organization?

While there could be several reasons why this may be the case, let’s focus on three factors at the top of the list for many women when deciding whether to join or stay within an organization.

1) Focus on Improving Work-Life Balance

Work and life priorities are always evolving and likely to change during an individual’s period of employment. One example of this could be related to the change in familial obligations for both male and female employees. If and when an individual decides to have a family, it is important for the employer to accommodate his/her needs to balance both work and life priorities as they transform over time. This could entail providing them with the option of flexible or reduced work hours and/or the ability to work from home. It could also entail reinforcing that a 9am – 5pm workday is perfectly acceptable.

If there is any doubt about whether these measures are effective, an important question to ask is yourself is whether you would rather have:

• a) the employee continue to contribute and work for you on a part-time basis/under a flexible work schedule
• b) the employee leave your organization permanently

Although the benefits of reduced work hours or flexible work schedules may not always appear to be favorable or even effective from management’s vantage point, it is very possible that it will result in a drop in attrition rates. No employee appreciates being forced to prioritize work over family life. Why not make it so they don’t have to choose?

Tip: Set a Good Example from the Top

In addition, providing a healthy work/life balance can lead to others viewing your organization in a positive light and encouraging them to explore opportunities with your company. Providing an employee with a more flexible work schedule could also incentivize him or her to operate at optimal productivity levels during the time that they are working.

It is important to keep in mind that simply implementing these policies in the workplace is not enough. In order for employees to be comfortable utilizing them, the bar needs to be set by senior level members of the organization. For example, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook chooses to leave the workplace at 5:30 pm on a daily basis, thus setting an example for the other female employees at the company.

2) Create an Accommodating and Inclusive Workplace

What does it mean to make an organization more inclusive or accommodating for female employees?

A simple way to determine this is to conduct a survey of current employees and ask them to rate what is most important to them. Additionally, conducting exit interviews can also allow you to analyze the top reasons employees choose to leave your company. If you notice similar patterns or reasons pointing to an unaccommodating workplace, this could be an important factor that needs to be addressed.

Google as a Case Study

Using Google as an example, according to an article in the NY Times “In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women”, executives determined two key factors that were leading to female attrition as well as lower acceptance rates of job offers by females. With regard to female attrition, they noticed that females who had infants or young children were twice as likely to leave the organization. Changes have since been implemented with the company’s maternity leave policy being extended from three to five months and going from partial to full pay. The attrition rate has since decreased by 50 percent, signaling an effective policy change.

Additionally, the findings related to lower acceptance rates of job offers by females suggested this was closely tied to limited female interaction during the interview process since most of the interviewers were male. As a result of the changes, now all women who interview at Google have a chance to meet with other female interviewers. This has increased the rate of offer acceptances amongst females.

Tip: Discover What Matters Most to Your Employees

When deciding on the types of policies and adjustments that are best suited for your organization, it is helpful to understand what is important for your employees. Some primary factors to consider are:

• analyzing maternity/paternity leave policies
• determining the need for having childcare facilities at the company’s offices or within close proximity
• offering a “mother’s room” in the workplace (as mentioned by my colleague Devon McDonald in her recent blog post “What Every Expansion Stage Company Should Know About New Mommy Etiquette”)

If your company is still in its early stages, a room can be designated for the private use of all employees on an as-needed basis (e.g., new mothers, health, religious reasons etc.).

3) Offer Opportunities for Professional Development and Mentorship

A recent article in Forbes, “More Women in Tech, More Women Mentors,” highlights the finding that women tend to lean towards companies that are led by women. Statistics indicate that companies with female leaders have a higher number of females at the executive level (24.3%) in comparison to other companies (12.2%).

But on a different note, another study that surveyed 1,000 female executives shockingly indicated that only one in five women have a mentor. Organizations need to creatively determine how to change this statistic.

Tip: Set the Stage for Active Mentorship at Your Company

One such solution could be to implement an internal women’s network within the organization that fosters collaboration and interaction among women at all levels. Examples of this could include networking sessions, workshops, and community related events.

Have you thought about what you can do to make your startup a workplace of choice for women?

Learn why an asset package is such a crucial tool for outbound lead generation team training, especially for getting your reps prepared for selling into a new market.

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of blog posts explaining the importance of training your outbound lead generation team, and what should be included in a new hire onboarding program. However, outbound lead generation team training shouldn’t stop after onboarding.

I was recently reminded of this when we helped one of our portfolio companies develop an asset package to help them market their new product into the CPG and major retail market segments. Whenever your company is moving into new market segments or selling new products training the team on the details of the market can make a big difference in how they sound on the phone, and how successful they are on that campaign.

Developing an Asset Package for Your Sales Team

An “asset package” is the name that we at OpenView Labs have given to the set of assets provided to the sales and outbound lead generation team when our expansion stage portfolio companies test and explore new market segments. The materials in the asset package are specific to the buyers that your outbound lead generation reps are going after.

The goal of an asset package is to turn your reps into mini-experts on a particular target market in a few days. The more narrowly focused your target is, the easier this will be to achieve.

An asset package should include the following information and resources:

• Buyer profile guides for your target buyers
• Conversation guide(s)
• Email series
• Customer examples and use cases
• Objections and FAQs
• Key competitors in the target market segment
• Industry blogs/publications/LinkedIn groups

However, in many cases it may make sense to add additional materials to an asset package to help outbound lead generation reps better familiarize themselves with the market segment. A few other items we have tried include a glossary of segment lingo, an org chart illustration to show how departments are structured in complex organizations, and an outreach process that shows what is the best way to get in and penetrate an account.

What materials do you provide your sales team with to prepare them for selling new products or into new market segments?

Make your employee development process more effective by focusing on furthering your employees’ natural advantages.

In a recent session at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago — where I have been commuting every Saturday for the last two years pursuing a degree in Management — I picked up on a new approach to employee appraisal and development: Identifying and amplifying strengths.

This can sound counter-intuitive to traditional HR practices, where employees’ skills and capabilities are evaluated according to some spectrum of competency, and the focus of performance management and appraisal is on addressing “weaknesses” or “areas for improvement”. However, research has shown that compared to these traditional programs, programs that focus on furthering areas perceived as the employees’ strongest capabilities can in fact result in much more effective performance enhancement, success, and promotion to higher responsibilities.

I think this is particularly applicable in organizations that employ knowledge or highly-skilled workers and expect them to excel and constantly renew their skills and abilities. And of course, those are the hallmarks of the fast growing expansion-stage technology companies we work with.

How to Encourage Employees to Shoot for the Next Level Rather than Just Hitting the Bare Minimum

It is true that the employee appraisal process must establish a minimum level of competency for each position in an organizational chart, and the employees at those positions need to satisfy these basic criteria, whether they are specific technical skills, domain knowledge, managerial skills or teamwork ability. However, in a team that is aiming to be best-in-class, if the recruitment and on-boarding process is any good, the team should already have those prerequisite skills and therefore should focus on excelling and taking themselves to the next level rather than ensuring that the minimum bar is met (you can read my 7 Tips for Developing an Employee Development Plan here).

This leads to the essential employee development question: Given their individual skill sets, what should employees be putting their time against to further develop themselves? If they have already met the minimum skill set required by the position, how can they determine the types of skills or capabilities they need to reach the next level?

The Case for Grooming Highly-Skilled Specialists Over Generalists

If we consider an economic model of a competitive market where workers are competing to offer their skills for new positions or promotions, then the best course of action for employees is to emphasize and further their current advantages. After all, that helps to set them further apart from other jobseekers, and makes them more valuable to the employer. In most cases, it is clearly better to be an expert than a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Given the existing advantages in certain skills, employees tend to gain far more in developing those skills than if they invest the same amount of time and efforts in addressing competencies where they are not as strong.

This approach ultimately allows organizations to develop exceptional domain knowledge experts and leaders who are at the top of their respective fields, and who are happiest and most gainfully employed because they are doing what they do best.

Employee Development Challenges

Building a workforce of highly talented specialists is not something easily accomplished, not only because of the tendency of traditional HR already explained above, but also because of the three following challenges:

1. Employees may want to transition: Management still needs to consider individual employees’ preferences. Some people want to make a move into a field or a position that they are not familiar with or not assumed to be strong with, but they are passionate about it. While this is arguably not efficient in the short term, the employer does have the responsibility to be flexible and accommodate this attempt at transitioning by allowing the employee to explore these options and invest time and efforts in acquiring the necessarily skills.
2. Employees do not always recognize the extent of their own opportunities and potential: Even if an employee is happy in a current position and is using skills that he or she has an advantage at, he or she might not be fully aware of other latent talents that are even more valuable and can provide even better opportunities. Making employees aware of this requires a skilled team manager or talent spotter who can recognize the potential and encourage a shift in the developmental direction, in a subtle and sensitive manner.
3. Specialists are not always the best team players: This development approach will create organizations with very strong individual contributors, but not necessarily the most cohesive of teams. For example, a development team might be very strong in technical skills but weaker in collaboration practices. Organizations with this problem will need to seek out and develop the “glue” — individuals uniquely talented in bringing people together and coordinating projects. These are also special skills that need to be recognized early and developed, just like technical or analytical skills.

If you like this topic, check out my previous blog post on employee development programs.

One of the biggest complaints about Millennials in the workforce is that they are “job hoppy” and leave their first job very quickly to move on to bigger and better things.

I’m here to tell you, it’s not entirely their fault. In fact, you may be to blame.

A recent Accenture study found that recent grads — and Millennials in general — actually plan to stay in their first position for a long time, with 22% responding they expect to stay 10+ years, 21% responding five years, and 18% and 17% responding with two and three years, respectively.

The problem that Accenture found was that, while the young employees want to have longevity in their careers, their employers are expecting too much out of an entry level hire and are not providing any training or opportunity to learn new skills.

Yes, you need employees who can do the job — and yes, that is what you hired them for —  but new grads are new to the workforce and will most likely need training to be able to accomplish what is expected of them. They also will need certain things from you in order to stick around and provide your company with the return on investment that you are looking for from employees. After all, no company wants to be the town’s “best training facility” for other companies to pull from.

3 Tips to Boost Your Millennial Employee Retention Rate

1) Train Them!

Train them on systems, train them on day-to-day responsibilities, there is no such thing as too much training (even if the employee may think there is).

My first job stuck me in a conference room for a full week before letting me into the meat of the job; and that was for recruiting. Seasoned professionals will not (well, should not) need much training, but recent grads do!

2) Be Clear with Expectations

Especially at first, make everything as clear as possible until they get into the swing of things —deadlines, desired outcomes, everything. Clarity will lead to a job well done, while ambiguity will lead to a lot of questions.

Millennials aren’t stupid, but they also haven’t been working with you for years to know how you like things. Provide them clarity and watch them amaze you.

3) Nurture Growth Potential

Employees new and old all want growth potential, but Millennials and younger employees especially are looking to build a career. They don’t want to be in an entry level position forever — if they think they will be, they will leave. Provide them with growth potential and more responsibilities, opportunity for additional trainings, etc. They will stick around.

This was proven by the story of Hill Holiday’s new CEO, who started there in 1982 as a receptionist. She was provided room for growth and now she is running the company.

Bottom Line: Millennials Want to Succeed with You — Empower Them and They Will

Millennials want to stick around. No one likes the stress of finding a new job. They want to be with a company that will foster their growth and value their contribution. They also want to be with a company that will provide them with the tools to succeed. Do this and you will have employees that stick around and provide a huge return on your investment.

Do you have any recent challenges/successes managing Millennials? I would love to hear about them!

I wrote a post recently on the one and only law for SaaS. In it I described the one law and the many freedoms that you have for SaaS. The idea is that you basically can build whatever you want as long as it supports your business growth strategies.

In this post, I want to offer some guidance on what you should be considering in building your expansion-stage SaaS product strategy based on the trends in the industry that I see.

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” — Wayne Gretzky

SaaS product strategists need to follow Wayne Gretzky’s advice. A good product strategist meets today’s customer market needs. A great product strategist sets up to capture tomorrow’s needs!

Tomorrow’s Needs are Today’s Trends!

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the significant market trends for SaaS companies:

1) Mobile

You are using your mobile device more and more. You pick it up when you stand in line for Starbucks, check it in the elevator, keep it on your bedside table, and often you can’t keep a conversation going because you are increasingly sucked into the device. This is happening with your customers, too.

What are you doing about it with your product strategy?

• Do you have a mobile-first strategy with your browser-based user interface?
• Do you have a simple mobile app?
• Are you using push notification technology to connect with your users?

2) Speed

You are developing ADD with all of the multitasking you are doing and shortening the time that you devote to everything. Meetings are shorter, conversations are shorter, and you have a shorter attention span. Again, this is happening with your customers, too.

What are you doing about it with your product strategy?

• Do your users have to think too much to find, install, and configure your product?
• Do your users have to think too much to use your product?
• Do they have to click too much or run through too many screens to do what they want to do?
• Are you providing lightning-quick response to your users interactions within your product?
• Are you tracking your speed from your customer’s perspective and constantly work to improve your speeds?

3) Availability

You absolutely hate it when you try to use a product and it is out-of-order for whatever reason. It used to be okay when SaaS products broke, as the category was early. But when SaaS products break these days, you really get upset. It may be the most frustrating experience that you have. What is wrong with the company that put out this product? Like picking up the phone, you expect your SaaS products to work. Your customers feel the same way.

How are you adjusting your product strategy? 

• Do you have maintenance windows that your customers experience?
• Do you have redundancy in your infrastructure?
• Do you have the proper release testing so that new builds don’t break your product?
• Are you tracking availability from the perspective of your customers?
• Are you helping your customers get through any outages that you still have?

4) Integration

You use 2-3 applications for most of what you do. Perhaps 7-10 if you are a real technology geek. Finding, downloading, and using a new application is a pain-in-the-a$$, so you are really careful about what new things you try.

When you need to enter a lot of information that you already have in other products before you get any value, you pass. Even if you try something new, you are not likely to use it again. It’s too much work. It all goes back to speed. And if you’re feeling this pain — you guessed it — your customers are, too.

So, how are you taking the need for integration into account with your product strategy?

• Do you have an API that makes it easy for you to integrate with other products and make it easy for other products to integrate with you?
• Do you integrate with the other products so that your users can get the benefits of your product through the interfaces of the other products?
• Even better for you, do you allow your users to use your interface to access the functionality of others?

5) Social Networking

You use social networks because you get great satisfaction out of connecting with interesting people, and you are working hard to build your network with great personal and professional contacts. Some of the products you use are making it easier for you to communicate with others within their own products and you are loving it! It’s likely your customers would love to see more social capabilities in your product, too.

What are you doing about it with your product strategy?

• Do you help your users connect with other users inside or outside their companies who can help them?
• Do you facilitate approaches that allow them to interact while leaving the important results of that interaction within your product so that it can be useful in the future?
• Do you allow and facilitate community formation in your product?

Social networking is not about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — it is about connecting people to each other in any setting in any domain, business or personal!

6) Insights

You make a lot of decisions every day, and with each week it seems like you have to make more. You don’t like to think deeply about every single decision, as it takes too much energy and you have too much to do. You really appreciate it when you use products that give you information that makes your analysis and decision-making easier. You love it when some products offer suggestions on what to do next so that you can get on with it. And, yes, your customers love those product features, too.

Now, how are you going to let that guide your product strategy?

• Do you understand all the decisions that your customers need to make?
• Do you save data, analyze it, and offer suggestions back to your customers?
• Does your product consider past decisions that your users make and offer up new suggestions based upon them?
• Do you add outside data and analysis that your customers would find useful?
• Google has an “I’m feeling lucky” button. Do you?

7) Rewards and Recognition

You love making progress and love feeling recognized for the work that you put into something. You love it so much that you put more work into activities where you get recognized for your work. You may even play a lot of computer games (“if I could only get to the next level!”), check the number of inbound links to your blog posts, or participate in industry shows in order to win recognition. These are things your customers are doing, too.

How are you taking advantage of this desire with your product strategy?

• Do you have a certification program for your users?
• Do you give them scores for doing things well?
• Do you give them badges for unlocking the value of your product?

Gamification is not only for games!

8) Price

You don’t have the budget for expensive products, particularly new ones that you are not sure will work (not to mention the concern the company might one day up and disappear). You don’t mind paying for products that have real value to you, but it is hard to figure out if the value will be there. You also want to make sure you have the best cost structure in the event that the product actually does add a lot of value. Luckily, open source and low price, easy-to-use products are available to help get you started and test out how the category will effect your business.

Most vendors are giving really simple free trials and some even have fremium approaches, so it is getting easier for you to try different categories of software and then decide how to proceed. If these are the types of solutions you are seeking out, why would it be any different for your customers?

How is your product strategy addressing this?

• Do you have an “entry” version of your product that has a low- or no- price point?
• Do you have a land-and-expand strategy?
• Are you making it drop-dead easy for your prospects to start doing business with you?
• Do you have a pricing strategy that extracts more revenue from your customers as they realize more value in your product?

9) Cost to Serve

You like it when your vendors run efficiently. You know that if they are managing their cost structure well then they will be able to continue offering you a better and better product at the same cost, or perhaps even a reduced cost. This is true of your customers as well.

What are you doing about it in your product strategy?

• Are you running on the most efficient infrastructure?
• Are you automating away the labor involved with installing, configuring, training, and issue resolution?

10) Confidence

You know that Salesforce.com (and other long-time and successful SaaS companies) is doing everything it can to keep its infrastructure safe and secure. You don’t see it as a customer in the product interactions, but you trust that they are doing the right things below the water line. You have confidence in their infrastructure, their security, and their people.

In the early days of SaaS, this maybe wasn’t as important to you, but you have more and more SaaS vendors and you expect your vendors to make you confident in them. Your confidence in Salesforce.com has been built from years of working with them, the company that they keep, and the messages that they deliver. If they have a major security breech, outage, or other issue, this may change, but for now you are confident that they will deliver what they have been delivering. You sleep well at night because of this and your customers deserve to catch the same peaceful Z’s.

How are you addressing security concerns with your product strategy?

• Do you have a chief security officer?
• Do you have security and infrastructure audits?
• Do you have certifications and are you working to get the next certification?
• Do you have customers who are known to do great diligence using your product?

You are a young, small company, so you have to do a lot more to deliver confidence. Delivering it as a product strategy is difficult, but doable!

11) Product-Market Specific Trends

Of course, users in every product market want a product that creates the outcomes that are the most valuable for them, and this remains the single most important aspect of your product strategy for the customers you serve. In a lot of ways, this is the kernel of your product, and the points above wrap the kernel.

You need to understand your customers and users as well as the trends in their jobs and lives in order to position that kernel of your business where your customers and those trends (the puck) is going.

For example, if you sell a SaaS marketing automation product to marketers, you better make sure that your product supports mobile marketing in addition to your marketing customers accessing your product through mobile devices!

Since the details of these trends are product-market specific, I leave it to you to figure out where to place the kernel so that the puck hits it squarely. You need to spend a lot of time studying your users and possible users!

A Bonus Future Trend

Finally, while it is probably too early to put it on the trend list, I suspect that portability will become a trend in the next few years. I wrote a post on SaaS portability here, and suggest that you at least think about it at this point.

I wrote the trends above from the perspective of your customer, as your product is what your customer sees, feels, thinks, and says it is. Some or all of these trends will impact your product category over the next few years. The first product strategist who clearly sees where the puck is going and gets to it with the best product and the best competitive advantage will win, so consider these trends and what you can do to capitalize on them!

I’m interested in your thoughts on the list above. What did I miss? What would you change?

The view from the Spredfast office. Not bad!

Austin, Texas, is a city of cowboys and hipsters. River and concrete. Texas barbecue and vegan cafes. The people, the food, the music — everything simmers together to create a unique breeding ground for creativity and innovation. It’s no surprise that Spredfast — an advanced social media management system (SMMS) and OpenView’s most recent investment — is located in the heart of it all.

I recently had the pleasure of spending an afternoon in Austin at the Spredfast offices, meeting the team and exploring the platform. Over the course of the visit, two things became clear to me:

1. Spredfast employees are awesome.
2. The way we use and measure social media is changing in a big way.

Social media rebels.

After attending a wedding in San Antonio the weekend before, I drove to Austin on a Monday morning (the two cities are only about an hour and a half away from each other) and headed to Spredfast. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that I’m a social media junkie, so I welcomed the opportunity to experience Spredfast in person and receive platform training from the on-boarding team.

I met Brittany Edwards, Marketing Manager, for coffee before visiting the office, during which time she prepared me for the fact that it was the entire team’s first day in a new office. While I was surely in the way, they made me feel nothing but welcome. It was perhaps telling that although the office was still being settled, a pirate flag had already been hung from the ceiling.

I wandered around for a bit, introducing myself to the team and receiving some excellent Austin restaurant suggestions in the process, and then met with Meghan Brindley, Social Training Manager, and Unji Udeshi, On-Boarding Manager, to learn my way around the platform’s posting and measurement capabilities.

Blocking Spredfast’s view of Austin.

Allow me to preface my assessment with an acknowledgement that OpenView is an investor in Spredfast, but I’ll follow that with the sentiment that I can see why. Spredfast is the most comprehensive social media management system I’ve experienced — as Meghan put it, clients tell her they’re both excited and slightly intimidated by the platform’s capabilities. The Spredfast team breaks it down into five key areas of focus, allowing users advanced functionality around:

1. Organization: Spredfast allows you to create and manage multiple social initiatives, assign appropriate permissions to users, and coordinate actions and approvals across teams.
2. Daily Engagement: You can schedule and publish across multiple channels while monitoring engagement and responses.
3. Enterprise Repository: Spredfast is an information powerhouse. The platform lets you share content internally, keep records, and meet compliance needs.
4. Social Platforms: Spredfast syncs with pretty much everything: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Blogs, you name it.
5. Analytics and Reporting: This was the most impressive part for me. The system integrates with Google Analytics and Omniture, and performs in-depth analysis to help you understand who is interacting with your content, when they’re doing it, and how best to reach them.

Megan: “Pose, but act natural!”

I was amazed, but not surprised, by Spredfast’s extensive service offerings. Social media is no longer being viewed as an option or a “nice-to-have” for most organizations — it’s a necessity, one to heavily invest in.

Organizations aren’t winging it anymore, either. They want to understand the impact of everything they’re doing and how it’s helping their vision and brand. It will be software like Spredfast’s that revolutionizes the social media industry and how we determine the much-discussed (but little understood) “social media ROI.”

Thanks to everyone at Spredfast for their hospitality and kindness (and the barbecue recommendations). I can’t wait until my next visit to Austin!

The whole office was cool, but the lobby chairs were one of my favorite parts.

I recently was working with a hiring manager on a search. As we were going over the job description, he chimed in “4+ years of commercial software experience should probably be removed from the description.”

In reality, it wasn’t the precise time frame that mattered, but rather the candidate’s proven ability to produce quality production software in a Ruby-based language. Whether that meant the candidate for that particular position had two years or 15 years experience wasn’t important.

To me as a recruiter, that makes sense.

In a line from his recent post for TLNT titled “Want a Candidate to Succeed? Define What It Takes to Be Successful,” Lou Adler, President of training and consulting firm The Adler Group explains that when asked how much experience he thinks a person needs to be successful his answer is, “enough to do the work; some people need more; some need less; and the best people need the least.”

Why Defining Performance Objectives Is Vital

Unfortunately, many job descriptions list the competencies and skills, but not specific performance objectives. As a recruiter, you need to turn those competencies and skills around on the hiring manager. It is vital to define performance objectives and expected outcomes. This is important for two reasons:

1. Those involved in the hiring process can interview and score candidates based on these performance objectives once they have been outlined.
2. Recruiters/hiring managers can set performance expectations for the candidates. If a candidate does not know the performance objectives and expected outcomes, how can he or she be successful in the role?

Turn Routine Position Requirements into Meaningful Performance Objectives

How do you turn requirements and qualifications to meaningful performance objectives? For each search, recruiters and hiring managers should work together to determine the competencies, skills, and profiles that a top performer will need to be successful in the position. While creating this guide for your search, do a deeper dive into why each competency and skill is necessary to be successful.

Ask hiring managers these two questions:

1. What specific performance objectives will a top performance achieve?
2. What are the competencies and skills that a successful candidate will have based on these objectives?

Examples:

• Candidate should be highly analytical, metrics-driven
• Performance Objective: Implement, manage, measure, and analyze marketing campaign performance and continuously refine programs for optimization and growth based on these results.

• Process-oriented and experienced in defining processes and measures for scalability
• Performance Objectives: Define and implement KPIs, and track trends on a monthly basis. Implement innovative operational models and enablement processes to ensure effective monitoring and management of sales process and operations.

• Highly self-motivated and driven
• Performance Objective: Make 75+ phone cold calls per day to major brands and retailers to build pipeline for the sales team. Meet/exceed quarterly individual metrics quota of 100K per month

The work that a person is responsible for in a specific role defines what skills and experience are necessary to succeed in the role. In recruiting, look beyond the work and into the successes that you expect this person to have in order to define the true skills, experience, and competencies for someone who will be successful in the role.

In order for a hire to be successful, clarify what successful means in your eyes.

Define these expectations with specific performance objectives that are expected to be achieved prior to beginning a talent search, and clarify these expectations with candidates throughout the hiring process.

Do you have any qualifications/requirements you need help turning into performance objectives? Let me know in the comments below.

If you find yourself working internally in a recruiting function or even as a hiring manager, you may find a trend of hiring similar or identical roles year over year.

Once the initial hire has been made for these roles it may take less time to find candidates with a similar, closely aligned skill set. This is most likely for several reasons:

• The initial hire may have a network to reach out to and refer qualified applicants. If a referral is hired, they may have additional qualified referrals for the role, creating an domino-like effect.
• You have spent time understanding the marketplace and overall landscape of hiring for this role, therefore you know what to expect.
• You can refer back to a target company list, or other resources you have spent time putting together to aid in recruiting for the role.
• You recognize the necessary hard and soft skills it requires to be successful in the role and how to screen for them.

Another strategy that can be helpful when hiring for multiples of roles during the year is to build a pipeline of candidates.

Pros and Cons of Building a Passive Candidate Pipeline

Building a pipeline of candidates means you are reaching out to and networking with qualified candidates for a role that may not necessarily be open at the moment, but will be opened over the next several months. This way, when the position is ready to be recruited for, you have a list of candidates who are ready to interview, rather than starting from scratch.

Pro: Reducing Time to Hire

This can be a smart recruiting strategy to implement in order to build out your candidate options and cut down on time it takes to fill a position.

Con: Engaging Passive Candidates May Turn Them into Active Job Seekers

As Glen Cathey writes in a post for his blog, once you reach out to a passive, currently employed candidate, there’s always a risk that the gears may start turning and they may begin checking out other opportunities.

By speaking with you and learning about another exciting position, it is likely the candidate will begin contemplating what other interesting opportunities are out there waiting for them. Not only will they be more open to recruiters reaching out to them, they might even start to actively seek employment on their own by applying.

By the time the position opens up at your company, it’s possible this formerly “passive” candidate you thoughtfully engaged with and carefully placed into your pipeline will have accepted another position.

Staying Connected with Candidates and Keeping Your Pipeline Up to Date

To combat this, be mindful of this candidate behavior. Consistently check in with candidates in your pipeline to inquire about any other interview activity. You cannot prevent a candidate from seeking out other opportunities, of course, but it is best to be aware ahead of time when you’re about to lose a candidate in your pipeline so you can gather information on the details and make updates and fill his or her space, accordingly.

Do you think building a passive candidate pipeline is counterproductive? Or are there ways to maintain it more effectively?

And yet, effective content promotion seems to be a recurring challenge plaguing many of the content marketers I talk to. They put huge amounts of effort into publishing informative eBooks, visually stunning infographics, and compelling reports, but then for some reason drop the ball when it comes to promoting their content effectively. The result is that they’re left scratching their heads wondering why their great content flops and never drives the business value they expect it to.

I just want to reach out and shake them, saying, “Did you really think just posting your content to your site would be enough? Did you think that by tweeting it once and posting it to your LinkedIn page that you were going to get any traction?? Get real!!”

The truth is that content promotion is just as important, time-consuming, and strategic of an aspect of content marketing as content creation is (a point that I’ve made many times before when writing about content factories). You can’t do it half-assed or willy-nilly. You need a comprehensive, scalable, and systematic approach to promoting every piece of content that you create, regardless of whether it’s your one thousandth blog post, a bestselling book, or anything in between.

So with that in mind, this week I’m offering up some of the content promotion tactics that collectively make up our strategy here at OpenView:

Take Advantage of Content Sharing Sites: Unless you’ve got a high-traffic site that garners millions of page views every day, publishing your content on it will only take you so far. Sure, it needs to be there, but publishing content to your own site is really just table stakes — the absolute minimum you can do.

What you also need to do is publish your content on other sites where people go for content, that are searchable, and that get the high volumes of traffic I was talking about (think SlideShare, Scribd, and YouTube to name a few). By doing so, you dramatically increase the chances of people finding your stuff. And, you can do so in a way that still directs people back to your site. For example, if you’re posting an eBook on SlideShare, consider just including the first few pages and then making the last page a link that directs people to your site where they can download the full version for free. It’s a win-win. You get more people exposed to your content and you still have the ability to drive them back to your site.

Hit Social Media Hard: By now we all know that we’re supposed to Tweet out our content and post it to sites like LinkedIn and Google+. But, what I find amazing is just how passive we are at pushing content out through these social channels. If you’re only tweeting your new blog post, eBook, or video once, you’re crazy! If you’re only posting to your company’s LinkedIn page, you’re missing a huge opportunity! While you certainly don’t want to spam the world with self-promotional tweets and shares, you can be more aggressive than you think. For example, when I’m done writing this blog post, here is how I’ll be promoting it socially:

• Posting to Google+ (which at a minimum tends to help give it a little boost for search)
• Posting to 3-5 relevant LinkedIn Groups
• Posting to Pinterest (it does include an image after all)
• Tweeting four times (eight hours apart) after publishing and then up to 10 additional times over the course of the next 90 days (pre-programming all of these Tweets using HootSuite makes this a breeze)
• Sharing my post on Triberr

The point is that there’s a lot you can and should do to promote even small pieces of content. Bigger pieces, of course, merit a proportionally larger social push.

Get Influencers to Help You Out: Never underestimate the power of expanding your reach by turning to influencers to help you promote a piece of content. One easy way of doing so is by getting them involved in your content creation efforts. For example, you might ask influencer A to provide a quote for something you’re working on or reference influencer B’s new book in another piece of content. Either way, by involving them in your content, you can make a good case for getting them to promote it to their followers. The net result is that you’re producing richer content (because it reflects ideas other than just your own) and you’re able to distribute that content to a much broader audience.

Engage the Media: It’s not hard to write a press release, but doing so for your big pieces of content can make all of the difference in the world when it comes to promoting them. The fact of the matter is that journalists are looking for things to write about and your new content might give them just the right opportunity to create an effective piece. Do yourself a favor if you’re not already, and take the time to draft a press release citing your content’s key findings and conclusions. You never know where it might lead.

The bottom line is that content promotion has many prongs and you need to come up with a holistic strategy that you follow to help promote every piece of content you create, scaling it up or down as needed. Remember, creating great content isn’t good enough. You have to be equally good and promoting and distributing that content so that it’s getting in front of the right people at the right time.

What content promotion tactics have worked best for you?

Airbus Jet Family Courtesy of the Dubai Chronicle

How to Create a Product Family to Maximize the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

In some of my previous blogs I’ve often highlighted case studies of killer products from Lexus and upstarts like ClearVue. These were instances where the company needed a standout product to get their ventures started. However, once they establish themselves, what happens next?

Business Growth Strategies: Two Options for Maintaining a Competitive Advantage

1) Ride the Hot Hand

Clearvue did this successfully by targeting a market segment where they could maintain a competitive advantage and avoid confronting national brands. Their primary strategy was to maintain a loyal customer base.

For B2B SaaS companies out there, this is not the best strategy. The shelf life of any innovation in the SaaS space is too short to rest on your laurels. You could iterate and improve your product, but then you’re limited to one market and the applicable segments.

2) Seek Growth by Building Out a Product Family

Companies have a few options when it comes to this route.

a) You can offer tiers of the same product to allow for scalability: Airbus has followed a similar formula which has contributed to their success. While they started with the short haul A300, today they have a full product family of aircraft from the A320 to the super jumbo A38o to meet the full range of their customers’ needs.

In the technology world, this might be the easiest option: Offer a “Lite” lower-cost version of your product to get the smaller customers, along with a normal “Enterprise” level offering for everyone else.

b) You can offer complementary products to build out a “one-stop shop” for your customers: General Motors had a “Step Up” product strategy. The goal was to use Chevrolet to bring young buyers just starting out into the GM Family. They had numerous brands (GMC, Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Cadillac) that would serve their young buyers as they matured, got married, had families, and grew in affluence.

GM also offered more than scale, they offered different types of products (Car, SUV, Truck) to keep their customers in the family.

This is the harder more long-term option. Given the product lifecycles in the technology world are short, it will take significant financial resources to keep multiple product lines fresh and competitive.

So, What is the “Best” Option?

The convenient answer is, “It depends.” What is certain is that it is crucial to maintain a comparative advantage: What does your company do best? And what customer segment can it serve best? That should be the core of your product planning.

Once you’ve established yourself in a specific segment and product class you can then take steps to branch out. What are your customers asking for help on? What core competencies can you leverage in your organization to address those needs?

The next question is: How do you best address those needs? On approach is to seek partnerships and white label their product, or you can develop your own solutions.

Each organization has to weigh these questions and develop a product strategy that makes sense specifically for them. It could be that either one of the options that I laid out above might work, or a combination of the two.

What questions do you have about creating a product family for your customers?

1) Money Burns a Hole in Your Pocket

When I saved enough money to buy my first car at age 17, I fell in love with a used MG Midget (it was an early roadster). I took my mother to see it and was ready to make the purchase. But she told me that when you have money, sometimes that money “burns a hole in your pocket.”  In other words, you get eager to spend it. She told me to be careful about that.

This principle is part of the reason that I tell founders to be careful with how much money they take from investors. If you have the money, you will burn through the money, but will it ultimately help you dominate your markets?

2) Something Better Always Comes Along

My mother also pointed out that the MG Midget was the first car that I had looked at. She told me not to be too eager to purchase it, and that “something better always comes along. If you have the time and the patience, you will always find something better.”

I took that advice on faith, and I didn’t buy that car that day. Ultimately, I ended up purchasing a 1967 Ford Mustang (a hot muscle car) that ultimately was better for me given that I barely fit into the MG Midget, anyway.

I use this principle to keep a level head when I look at investment opportunities that I fall in love with. I only have the time to work with a few companies at any given point, so it’s a good thing to remember and I spend a lot of time thinking about my fit with each company. I tell companies that getting a VC investor is like getting married — you spend a lot of time together for a long time. Let’s make absolutely sure that there is a good fit!

I also pass this principle along to hiring managers when they have candidates they really like: “Yes, this person looks really good, but someone with a better fit will always come along if you wait. The key question is whether this person is so good that you don’t want to wait for that better person.”

3) Follow Your Core Competencies and Passion

I was always good at math and enjoyed it, so my mother started pointing out careers that used those skills, including accounting, being an actuary, or being an engineer. I chose engineering and made my mother proud. I also learned that it is not necessarily work when you are both good at and are passionate about what you do.

That is advice I pass along to every young person I meet, usually by asking them what class they enjoyed most and least in high school and what they enjoy doing most. It usually leads to a lively conversation and gets them to think. (I also point out engineering as an option to just about any high school student I meet who is good at math, which drives my artist wife crazy.)

The idea works more broadly for your career and your business, as well. What are you good at and what do you enjoy doing? Perhaps you should do more of that!

4) Keep Moving Forward

When I was young, my younger sister died. It caused a lot of stress with my parents and my guess is that it was the root cause of their divorce. My mother raised my older sister and me for several years as a working single mom. I can’t imagine how difficult that was on a teacher’s salary. My mom just kept moving forward. Like most people, she has had other setbacks in her life, but she has always handled them with grace and keeps moving forward.

Startups have many down periods when founders wonder whether or not it will work. All you can do is keep moving forward and see what happens next!

5) Assets and Low Costs are the Way to Go

My mother knows more about financial management than anyone I know. She managed to turn a career in teaching in California public schools into a great retirement with two houses and more money than she needs via keeping her costs low and investing wisely for many many years.

Given my background as an investor, she often calls me for investment advice, but when I give it to her she goes into great detail about all the implications associated with every choice and I usually end the conversation with “it sounds like you are thinking about all the right things.” I am never quite sure that I add any value to her thinking.

The most important thing that she taught me at a young age was to turn income into assets and to keep your costs low. This advice is obvious for most start-ups: “turn your capital into revenue, company value, and competitive advantage, and keep your costs low.”

6) You Need to Find a Smart, Capable Partner Who Challenges You

Before I got married, I had several long-term relationships. My mother always told me that she was indifferent to a woman’s race, color, and religion, but that she wanted me to marry a smart, capable woman who challenged me. And I did.

At some point, I also realized that there are many smart capable women who are great to work with. Ultimately, I figured out that all other things being equal, women are better in every position in a company (my hypothesis is that this comes from cultural factors that generally require women to be that much better to get to where they are, but who knows?).

Want to get something done in your business? Hire a smart, capable woman who challenges you!

One More Thought

I didn’t include this in the list as it is not really business advice, but my mother also says “you need to call more often.” I don’t talk to my mother enough, and she lets me know it most of the time that I talk to her (she is right and I will try harder, Mom :).

From a professional perspective, we all have mentors who have nurtured parts of us and we probably don’t keep in touch enough. Don’t forget to take the time to call them and let them know how you are doing! They will appreciate it and you will enjoy it.

I have learned a lot more from my mom than the lessons in the list above, but this is what came to me as I reflected on my mom’s influence on me and how it relates to business.

We have all learned a lot from our mothers, so please let me know what you learned from yours!

More specifically, what every senior manager at expansion-stage companies should know about appropriate etiquette with pregnant women and new moms in their offices. 

(Disclaimer: Dad’s of course have rights, too! But it’s Mother’s Day, and that’s my focus here — so don’t be offended, please!).

At the expansion stage, many companies do not have HR in place. They are growing so rapidly that things like developing policies around maternity leave and office etiquette with parents and soon-to-be parents is often put on the back burner.

Not paying attention to legal matters like this can be detrimental to your business.

To avoid legal repercussions, and also to create a quality culture at your company, here are three things that executives and senior managers need to be understand about their employees’ legal rights that may not be so obvious.

3 Must-Know Policies Concerning New Moms at Work

1) The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is a federal law that requires many employers (with more than 50 employees) to allow their employees (both male and female) 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth or adoption of a child.  

• FMLA also requires employers continue to pay health insurance while the employee is out on leave, and they must allow the employee to return to his/her position or a similar position with the same compensation package at the end of the 12-week period.
• To understand more about whether your company falls under FMLA, and what the act entails, here is a great resource. And here is the .gov page.

2) The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which was passed in 1978, makes it illegal to deny promotion to a pregnant employee, and/or reduce responsibilities based on a woman’s pregnant status.

• To understand more about this act, and to make sure that the managers within your company are acting appropriately with soon-to-be mommies, here is a great resource, as well as this .gov article on the topic.

3) Employers are required to provide an appropriate space and reasonable break time for nursing mothers.  

• …and bathrooms don’t count! Employers must provide a private room in the office with a door that locks for their new moms.
• For more information here is a great resource to make sure that you are following code in your office. Here is another great article that Bloomberg Law Reports put out.

Depending on what state your company is located in, there may be other important laws to pay attention to. For example, California has a Pregnancy Disability Leave Law which allows up to four months of pregnancy leave and can be taken at any time within a one-year period.

Get your policies documented, and make sure that your employees have access to this information. 

Legal issues aside (and please consult your attorney if you have further questions about policies, etc. — I am not claiming to be a lawyer!), it is really important that expansion-stage companies pay attention to these issue to make sure that they are building a culture that embraces and respects women.

Most recently Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo (who has made more than a few controversial moves in her first year in the role) increased the company’s paid maternity leave policy from 8 to 16 weeks. I’m not saying that every company can/should do this, but the more that women in your office are made to feel embraced, respected, and accepted, the more likely you will have employees who are proud to work for your company, and will continue to work hard to scale your organization.

Happy Mother’s Day!

A strong corporate culture leads to lower turnover, which equates to lower hiring and training costs, higher productivity, better customer relationships, greater customer loyalty, lower marketing costs, and higher sales. These were the findings of a study by Harvard Business School professors emeriti James L. Heskett and John P. Kotter, which also stated that up to half of the difference in operating profit between companies is due to their corporate culture.

In my last blog post, I discussed the core of what a corporate culture should be built around — your company’s values.

Once you are ready to move past defining your company’s values, here are seven tips to get you on your way to building a strong corporate culture.

7 Tips for Creating Corporate Culture

1) Create a Mission Statement

This ties back to your core values, but goes further to convey your company’s goals, philosophy, and unique differentiators in just a few sentences. This will serve as a reference point for further developing and maintaining your corporate culture.

2) Take Responsibility, but Don’t Do It Alone

A strong corporate culture arises consciously and is shaped by the CEO and management team, while weak corporate cultures evolve accidentally. That said, all of your employees should be involved in fine-tuning your mission statement and determining the type of culture they want to be a part of.

3) Keep It Real

Your corporate culture should be a natural extension of your company’s values and mission, your customers, and even your employees’ personalities. It requires work to create and develop it, but don’t try to force a culture that isn’t authentic to you and to the business.

4) Hire for Cultural Fit

This is not to say that everyone should be similar; in fact, diversity is incredibly important to building a successful team! Hiring for cultural fit means each employee needs to be able to understand and truly get behind your company’s values and mission.

5) Create Rituals

Rituals and rites of passage can help to sustain your corporate culture by building morale. It can be difficult to tie these directly back to your mission, but whether it’s hitting a gong after closing a big deal or celebrating customer renewals with pizza, rituals are an opportunity for team bonding and celebrating the successes which turn into business results.

6) Express It

Be proud of your corporate culture and express it in everything you do — from the design of your office, to your marketing collateral and content, to the way you interact with customers. Actively displaying your corporate culture not only helps engrain it into your company’s DNA, it also helps to get the word out about the values and mission your company is built around, which should lead to greater business results and more referrals for your open positions.

7) Check It and Change It

As your company grows, your values and mission may also need to evolve. Continue to check your corporate culture and make changes to improve it. It will never be a finished project — just like your company, itself, you’ll need to continue to innovate in order to achieve long-term success.

What factors have played into you developing your own company’s corporate culture?

photo: TOKY Branding and Design

Several years ago, while applying for summer internship positions during college, I recall scouring through all the job postings on my campus career page as well as many other job search websites and applying to any relevant positions that piqued my interest. I vividly remember performing this task each day and waiting for my phone to ring with the hope of potentially receiving a call for an interview.

What I failed to do, instead, was utilize the more powerful tool of networking. What I know now that I wish I’d known then is that networking can potentially open up many more opportunities to jobs that aren’t made available publicly on any of these websites.

Is Applying for Jobs Outdated?

Today, the concept of “applying to jobs” has interestingly become one of the last resources for job seekers and employers alike. Job seekers now rely on other methods such as networking and referrals for opportunities, and employers have also been searching for other methods to recruit top talent into their organizations.

One example has been the creation and/or expansion of employee referral programs. Job seekers use such programs to communicate their interest in obtaining a job in general or within a specific company, and employers utilize referrals when seeking talent to fill their open roles.

If you are an employer and uncertain about the benefits of employee referral programs, here are some interesting facts to consider.

Benefits of Establishing an Employee Referral Program

• Hiring through referrals versus career sites results in a higher employee retention rate after one year (46% vs. 33%). Source: Implementing an Employee Referral Program in Your Organization

• Referrals may lead to higher quality hires in comparison to other recruiting methods. Source: Implementing an Employee Referral Program in Your Organization

• “67% of employers and recruiters said the recruiting process was shorter, and 51% said it was less expensive to recruit through referrals.” Source: Why Employee Referrals are the best source of Hire

• Referrals appear to be a better cultural fit, as employees tend to refer those that are most similar to them.

Before building an employee referral program at your company, there are many factors to consider. These include assessing the benefits, identifying your target employee audience (all or select departments), reward types and practices, ROI etc. I will cover these in more detail in a future blog on how to implement an employee referral program.

Using Your Network to Hire/Apply Smarter

As a job seeker, rather than using the more traditional forms of job searching, it would be advisable to tap into your network either through LinkedIn, or by contacting individuals you may already be acquainted with either professionally or personally. There are several benefits for utilizing this method of job seeking:

• It is especially helpful when seeking opportunities at organizations that are difficult to get into, or that receive a large amount of applications.

• Having a contact person at the employer of your choice will give you an opportunity to ask them questions related to their personal experience at the organization, the company culture, the position, etc. This will enable you to be better prepared if you are asked to participate in the job interview process.

Now that you have more clarity on how employee referrals can benefit your organization or your own job search efforts, why don’t you take some steps in implementing a program at your company or reaching out to someone who may be a valuable asset at a company of your choice?

Do you think networking and employee referral programs will ever replace standard job posting and application?

In my days as an equity analyst, I would occasionally be asked to give my opinion on a financial corporation that my portfolio manager was considering as an investment.

Image provided by: The Car Connection

Almost every time, my answer was, ‘don’t invest.’

I didn’t take that position because I believed it was over-valued, but because I simply had (and still have) no idea what the vast majority of financial companies are worth. For an investment bank with 20x leverage, the difference between being insolvent and compliant is a change of just 5% in the value of its assets. A clever and adequately unprincipled accountant can easily — and legally — fudge assets by 5% using inflated carrying values on illiquid assets. If I can’t tell you whether the company is or isn’t insolvent, I definitely can’t tell you if it’s worth more or less than $16.45.

Instead of giving an answer in which I had virtually zero confidence, I abstained on the financial sector altogether, saving my brainpower for all the companies out there that are transparent enough to analyze.

I feel the exact same way about marketing.

Marketers have all sorts of options for how to promote their product, both online and in the tangible world, and each and every one of these options has the potential to drive sales. But a marketer’s job isn’t just to drive sales. They’re also charged with:

1. Generating a positive ROI from their marketing efforts
2. Increasing their ROI over time by optimizing their spend

Without the possibility of calculating marketing ROI with some precision, a marketing channel to me is just like a financial stock. You know it’s not worthless, but you really have no idea how much it is worth. And if you can’t measure the value it brings to your company, then you can’t calculate an ROI or compare it to other campaigns. You’re better off not playing.

A perfect example is billboard advertising.

I’ve long thought of billboards as the single hardest ROI to calculate in the marketing world, so I found a SlideShare presentation that makes a valiant attempt. I’ve excerpted the page where the author calculates the ROI of his/her Honda billboard campaign here:

Seems pretty reasonable. But there’s a big assumption here, which is that the billboard was responsible for 8 car deals. How did he/she come up with that number?

There’s another slide for that:

Here’s where it gets messy, for three reasons:

1) Survey tactics matter

The ROI is basically derived from a survey question, and how the survey phrased that question matters A LOT.

For example, asking the question, “Did seeing our billboard influence your decision? (y/n)” will get a much higher positive response rate than a long picklist of sources, especially if the “billboard” entry is buried in the list. Entrants who saw the car in multiple places before purchasing it may just pick the one they come across first. Suffice it to say that number could easily have been either 2 or 4 if the tactics were different. It’s not a simple binary fact.

2) Tough sample size

When the number of positive responses is this low, the confidence interval is not kind. At a 95% confidence level, the number of actual responses out of the 189 total buyers is somewhere between 3 and 13. Not all that precise.

3) Intangibles to Consider

The fine print at the bottom of the slide hints that there is hidden, intangible value in the campaign from partial credit and brand perception/awareness. That’s good for the value of the campaign, but how good? We have no way of knowing.

So returning to the campaign return slide, the true numbers are really:

Plus, of course, the intangible benefits, which we have no way of measuring. 

So, the campaign delivered somewhere between zero and a 6x return, or in other words, it either barely broke even or was outrageously successful.

In a vacuum, I’d probably pull the trigger on this campaign, because there’s a low likelihood that it actually loses money. But if I’m also asked to optimize my marketing ROI, these results are not nearly conclusive enough to compare against other options and therefore don’t allow me to do my job.

I’m not writing this to pick on this author (who I think did the best he/she could), or even billboard advertising in general. Technology is not a silver bullet, and I actually think many online marketing channels face a similar problem.

If you’re a B2B company with a long-cycle sales process, a prospect may be evaluating your product for months on the internet, asking their peers about you, and interacting with salespeople, so it’s not always obvious which campaign was responsible for bringing them to your website or converting them into a customer. Even if it is technically possible to do so, many companies lack the time or expertise to properly attribute leads to the right channel.

My advice is, if you can’t measure it, don’t invest in it. You don’t have to take advantage of every marketing channel, so stick to the ones you can actually analyze, even if that means sitting out on some logical-sounding opportunities.

Do you agree you should never invest in a marketing channel you can’t accurately measure?

Cut through the smoke and mirrors to find a truly great web designer for your next web design project

Good Web Designers Stick Together

Good designers tend to gravitate toward one another online. If you’re looking for visually stunning designs that function well I suggest taking a look at the following online communities, which tend to have better quality results than a standard “web design nearby” search.

Dribbble.com

Dribbble is a community of designers sharing screenshots of their work, and gaining feedback on their projects. The best designers work can be often be found under the popular shots section. Google, Facebook, Foursquare, and other well known companies routinely recruit skilled designers from this site.

Behance.net

Similar to Dribbble, Behance is a network for designers to showcase & discover creative work. You can filter design submissions by type, for example Web Design. You can also sort submissions by popularity and most appreciated.

Sortfolio

Sortfolio is a public directory of web design agencies created and curated by 37 Signals. It’s a great tool to use for finding web design agencies, freelancers, and development shops in your area.

Zerply

Zerply is a public directory of web “makers”, and is similar to Dribbble but caters to a slightly different audience.

Put The Word Out

Sometimes it’s best to have good web designers find you, especially if you’re looking to hire one permanently in-house. There are many specialized job sites created specifically for finding web design and development talent. In my experience, finding talented individuals using these tools is much easier than broadly searching through sites like Craigslist.

Smashing Jobs

Smashing Jobs is a job board featured at Smashing Magazine — a magazine that has more than 4 million monthly users and is known to be one of the most successful magazines for creative professionals.

Coroflot

Coroflot is one of the top web design job boards on the web, and some of the best web designer flock to it to look for opportunities at businesses small and large.

Dribbble Job Board

Dribbble has created a Job Board that speaks to it’s enormous community of skilled designers. This is a great place to find a good web designer that’s actively looking for opportunities.

37 Signals Job Board

37 Signals Job Board is a job board created by 37 Signals, makers of the highly successful SAAS project management tool Basecamp and creators of the popular web framework Ruby on Rails.

Authentic Jobs

Authentic Jobs is a specialized job board created by Cameron Moll, a very well known web designer, speaker and author. Since 2005, qualified candidates have been applying for great opportunities at Apple, Facebook, ESPN, Sony, The New York Times, and many other companies big and small.

Job Boards: Process With Caution

If you do choose to use a job board, I suggest sending your candidates to an application quiz. This will help you weed out the people that aren’t truly qualified. A tool like Wufoo or Google Docs should make the form creation and data collection process simple, coming up with the quiz questions is the hard part. Here’s a

Designer Evaluation Tips

Now that you have a list of good web designers that you think are you great, let’s look at how to evaluate their skills to determine if they are a good fit for your web design project.

Screening Web Designer Job Applicants

If you do choose to use a job board, I suggest sending your candidates to an application quiz. This will help you weed out the people that aren’t truly qualified. A tool like Wufoo or Google Docs should make the form creation and data collection process simple, coming up with the quiz questions is the hard part. Here’s a rough set of questions I’d suggest using:

1. I highly recommend that you customize the quiz to make sure that it tests the specific skills you need the designer to possess.

Evaluating Web Designers on the Phone

If you’re reaching out to good web designers you’ve found directly I suggest obtaining the following details to determine if they really are as good it seems.

1. A great portfolio. Do they have a stunning portfolio filled with work relevant to your project? Look for details about what this person actually did for a given project. A website might look beautiful, but if they only contributed to the development process you need to know.
2. Real-world examples of work. Portfolio pieces should be design and development work that is used in the real world today. You should be able to see and try the products that this individual has contributed to, and you must have a thorough understand of what they contributed to that website.
3. Testimonials and recommendations. Who is recommending this person, and how trustworthy are they? LinkedIn recommendations, website testimonials, and references are great resources for finding out.
4. An ability to write. A great designer thinks about content and determines the best way to convey a message to a given audience. Make sure the designer you’re considering can write concisely and has is generally good at expressing themselves.
5. Strong code. Have a skilled developer view the source code on the individuals portfolio projects. Understanding HTML5, CSS3 and the latest technologies generally lends itself to talented individuals.
6. Ambition & passion. What has this individual done on the side for fun? Do they treat design and development like a job, or a lifestyle? I know this sounds cheesy, but people that are truly passionate about what they do often have projects that they’ve done in their spare time. Quite often, these projects provide very raw examples of the individuals design and coding skills, because you know they are responsible for all of it.
7. Experience in your industry. If you have a technical product, in a technical industry, then it helps to work with someone that is familiar with your product offerings and your target audience.

In Conclusion

Finding a great designer is a daunting task, and is pivotal to the success of many modern businesses. Knowing where to look, how to put the word out, and how to evaluate candidates is crucial in making the right choice. Hopefully this article help’s you understand how to find a good web designer for your next project.

Other Ideas on How to Find a Good Web Designer

1. Hiring a Web Designer: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Web Designers
2. How to Hire a Web Designer

This has been the source of many frustrations for recruiters, but in fact, most recruiters don’t know how to put one together, either.

A good job description attracts the right audience and gives prospective candidates an idea of what they will actually be doing in the role. We can no longer skirt by providing candidates with the “Minimum Requirements” and expect to have top talent apply.

Case in point, here is an example Sales Director job description taken from Monster.com’s templates:

Sales Director Job Description

Description: Sales Director

 Sales Director Job Purpose: Sells products by implementing national sales plans; supervising regional sales managers.

 Sales Director Job Duties:

• Determines annual unit and gross-profit plans by implementing marketing strategies; analyzing trends and results.
• Establishes sales objectives by forecasting and developing annual sales quotas for regions and territories; projecting expected sales volume and profit for existing and new products.
• Implements national sales programs by developing field sales action plans.
• Maintains sales volume, product mix, and selling price by keeping current with supply and demand, changing trends, economic indicators, and competitors.
• Establishes and adjusts selling prices by monitoring costs, competition, and supply and demand.
• Completes national sales operational requirements by scheduling and assigning employees; following up on work results.
• Maintains national sales staff by recruiting, selecting, orienting, and training employees.
• Maintains national sales staff job results by counseling and disciplining employees; planning, monitoring, and appraising job results.
• Maintains professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops; reviewing professional publications; establishing personal networks; participating in professional societies.
• Contributes to team effort by accomplishing related results as needed.

Skills/Qualifications: Meeting Sales Goals, Negotiation, Selling to Customer Needs, Motivation for Sales, Sales Planning, Building Relationships, Coaching, Managing Processes, Market Knowledge, Developing Budgets, Staffing

This job description is bare bones, but it is very common for companies to use something to this affect and assume that it will do the trick. Even if we were to add few more personalized phrases to the above job description it would still tell me nothing of why I would/should be interested. Bottom line: This is a bland and vague description that does not do your company justice.

To improve your job descriptions, make sure you’re writing them to accomplish these three things:

1) Get the Right Audience’s Attention

By posting minimal requirements (even if they are not marked as such) you are going to get candidates who do not meet that criteria, but who are applying for a next-level position, or a challenging role. Frame your requirements so that is clear that the position is for an individual who already possesses the skills you are looking for.

2) Identify the Challenges

I am not sure about you, but I am not interested in a job that would be lateral or worse — not challenging. Point out the challenges involved in being successful in the role. You won’t scare people away by doing this, you will actually be appealing to your desired audience who is up for the demands of the position.

3) Illustrate How to Be Successful

This is key. The best job descriptions will call out how the candidate will be successful in the position and will impact your company’s value proposition. I cannot stress enough that this is what makes the difference between an okay job description and one that actually gets candidates interested in the role. Show the value of the position!

For more information on creating a valuable job description, read Carlie Smith’s blog, Stop Posting Boring Job Descriptions!

What are tactics your company uses to create a dynamic job description?

While I was on maternity leave in Q1 of this year, Christy Weymouth, who started ExactTarget’s first outbound prospect operation in 2005, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about her experiences building a sales team (a wildly successful one at that), and the lessons she learned along the way. Oh, and she is also incredibly thoughtful and sent my daughter, Grace, an ExactTarget onesie and teddy bear. Love it.

For those of you who weren’t aware, ExactTarget went public in 2012, and OpenView’s Senior Managing Director and Founder, Scott Maxwell, sits on their Board of Directors (ExactTarget was an Insight investment and OpenView spun out of Insight Venture Partners in 2006).

For the companies in OpenView’s portfolio, and for the broader expansion-stage B2B technology community, Christy’s team can surely serve as a role model worth emulating.

DM: Why did ExactTarget originally decide to launch this team? Did it start under marketing or sales? Where is it today?

Christy Weymouth, Senior Marketing Manager at ExactTarget

CW: We started the team in June 2005 under marketing. We reported under sales for a couple of years, and now we’re back under marketing and have been for the past four years.

There are advantages to reporting under either department. When you report under sales, you are closer to what your customer/sales wants from you. When you report under marketing, you are closer to the marketing calendar of events and brand awareness. This gives you an advantage in providing prospects with the latest thought leadership content, subsequently enabling you to be the most relevant and creative in discussions.

DM: How is the team broken down? (How many reps are on your team? How many closing sales reps does each rep on your team support? Is it territory-based? Segment-based?)

CW: We are currently a team of 20 and growing. On average, most lead gen reps support approximately 4-5 closing sales reps. We support them on a combination of territory and segments/target accounts.

DM: What are your primary responsibilities when it comes to the management of this team (i.e. percentage of time spent where, what does a week in the life look like, etc?)

CW: The role of manager is to make sure an opportunity goal is set each month and quarter. My advice is to not wait for a goal(s) to be delivered down to you or the team.

In addition, as manager I provide the team with the tools/resources, encouragement, and incentives that ensure they stay driven to hit this collective team goal. Their success is really my success. I work to make this goal obtainable but always a stretch.

We prioritize everything we do around two key initiatives:

1. Providing value to prospects/customers
2. Generating sales opportunities for our sales organization.

I spend lots of time meeting with sales reps, sales/marketing leaders, potential team members, existing team members, product marketing managers, and sales enablement to ensure that we stay focused and enabled to achieve our goals.

DM: What are your reps’ goals (daily, weekly, quarterly)?

CW: The four primary goals are:

1. Monthly quota of opportunities generated
2. Contribution to closed business
3. Total activity
4. Collaboration with sales

DM: What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned over the years?

CW: It is imperative to stay on the same page with sales reps and leaders. In lead generation at ExactTarget, we have two primary customers:

1. Customers/prospects
2. the sales reps we support

Our satisfaction comes from providing value to prospects/customers and enabling our closing sales reps to hit their quotas. Focus your daily activities around on these two goals and get rid of the clutter.

DM: How long did it take before your team was able to contribute toward a repeatable revenue model?

CW: Eight months from start of program. I worked the program solo for two years. The experience of starting the program and working directly with sales leadership and reps was crucial in setting a solid foundation for scalable expansion. Knowing what works — with data behind it to prove it — enabled us to build a solid ramp up program that sets lead gen reps up for success from Day 1.

DM: How did you manage executive expectations before the team was generating deals that actually started closing?

CW: I worked closely with the VP of Sales and Marketing to start the program. I had their support and members of their team. They celebrated each and every opportunity to start. As deals started to close from the program, the closing sales reps began to buy into the program more and more.

DM: How do you keep this type of team motivated?

CW: An attractive variable compensation plan is necessary. In addition, we run lots of random incentives to keep the team excited and working towards not only their individual opportunity generation goal, but also a greater team goal.

One month, we ran a program that if we hit a collective team goal of opportunities generated, everyone on the team would receive a Nike ExactTarget-branded hoodie. The team really wanted those hoodies. That month, we set a company record in the number of lead generation opportunities generated in one month. You have to shake it up and ask team members to give you ideas.

DM: What is the profile of the candidate you’d want to have most on your team?

CW: I would break it down like this:

1. Proven B2B cold calling experience
2. Solid verbal and written communication skills
3. A passion for interactive marketing
4. A natural curiosity in solving marketers business challenges

At ExactTarget, we only hire top talent and we have a detailed onboarding process to get them ramped up effectively and quickly.

DM: What advice do you have for a manager who is trying to get this type of team off the ground?

CW: Often, this is considered one of the more junior sales positions in a company. I look at it differently. Someone who is placing calls into executives needs to have a solid business background in order to provide value in conversations and to generate interest for the company. Therefore, it is imperative to hire top talent.

Secondly, you need to make sure you have buy in from the executive team and sales/marketing leadership. It is important they celebrate the success points along the way and hold everyone involved in the program accountable. Lastly, provide lots of different marketing assets, product updates, and case studies to lead generation members so they can be as relevant as possible and provide the most value to prospects/customers. In short, enable and empower lead gen reps to generate interest.

Great advice, Christy. Thank you very much for sharing your lessons and insights!

(And thank you from Grace for her fashionable new orange outfit — you can put the company she will be CEO of in your team’s pipeline for 2043.)

In my last post, I laid out the steps in the planning phase for building a relationship marketing program. In this post, I’ll break down the preparation phase of the program, which covers the integration steps you’ll need in order to launch your relationship marketing program. By the end of this series, you’ll have all of the steps necessary to build your own relationship marketing strategy.

Relationship Marketing Strategy Examples: 4 Steps to Prepare Your Program

There are four basic steps in the prep phase. These steps are as follows:

1. Develop a work plan
2. Build the program
3. Establish campaign benchmarks
4. Create feedback loops

In this post I’ll dive into the work plan, because it’s such a critical part of this phase and warrants its own article. Therefore we’ll cover steps 2-4 in detail in the next post. But as you read through, you’ll notice how the work plan feeds into these later stages, as well.

Step 1: Develop a Work Plan

At a minimum, your work plan should outline each step of the implementation process, by phase and outcome. The goal of the work plan is to ensure the work gets done quickly. It will help keep you and your team on track and provide you with a sense of what needs to be done in order to get to your end goal.

Since a relationship marketing program involves multiple channels, it gets complex quickly, and work plans keep you from getting bogged down. Each work plan will differ depending on the channel. For example, you may have several steps in an email drip marketing campaign and less steps in a social email outreach. However, you can keep the same format for all of your work plans, regardless of channel.

The following screenshots provide an example of a work plan for an email drip campaign.

a) Planning

Steps 1-4 in the planning phase of your channel work plan is essentially a carbon copy of the work you did in the planning phase at the program level. Having this information will focus the work you do within this channel.

b) Development & Performance Testing

This stage entails developing the creative — email, forms, images, PURLs, etc. — for the first email in your campaign. You will then load them into your marketing automation platform or email service provider and perform A/B and/or multivariant testing. Make sure to run your deliverability tests first to ensure your email renders correctly, is not flagged as SPAM, and that all the links are working.

Once you have that done, run an A/B test on subject lines (for open rates) on 5% of your contact list. You can also run an A/B test on content for click-through-rates, as long as you don’t get bogged down in trying to create the perfect email. You can always revise (and should revise) once the campaign is live.

The results of your A/B test will give you a benchmark to compare against once your drip campaign is deployed.

c) Prep

Now that you have your benchmarks, it’s time do develop the rest of your creative. You can also plug in the rest of your content into your flow diagram now that you’ve rounded out the subject line and email campaign, which can impact the content in your original flow.

The biggest action item here is to build the entire campaign logic and flow within your marketing automation tool or email service provider. This includes lead scoring, assignment, and creating your lists. I’ll cover more on lead scoring in a future blog post.

Run one last test to ensure compliance and that all links are working.

d) Execution

Ah, at last — time to flip the switch.

The timing of your launch is up to you. In this example, I’ve decided it’s best to run it between Monday-Thursday. The point is to time your launch according to historic data you may have on email open rate.

It is critical to also put a stake in the ground for your first follow up meeting to review the pipeline with Sales. Again, since you ran the A/B tests, you have something to benchmark your campaign performance against.

The goal of the one-week check-in is to also give you more insight as to where in the process your target buyer role is getting hung up. Try to look at each touchpoint in relation to the buyer journey you created to see how you can continue making tweaks to your campaign that actually move them forward to the next stage of the funnel.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series, when I’ll break down the steps necessary to build your relationship marketing program, establish campaign benchmarks, create feedback loops.

Last week, I explained how sample procurement works and what factors will determine if you should be considering purchasing sample for your B2B market research project. This week, I will share how to go about purchasing sample and will break down the key vocabulary you need to know and use when doing so.

Purchasing sample is a very straight-forward process, but it can be intimidating the first time you do it. Sample vendors use a vocabulary set that is often foreign to non-market researchers and the commonly used pricing system relies heavily on terminology.

The Two Phases of the Sample Purchase Process

• Identifying sample vendors and requesting quotes: This is when the researcher identifies vendors that could potentially facilitate their sample needs for the research study and reaches out to them with specs for the research.
• Quote evaluation and vendor selection: This involves choosing a vendor and doing any final validation such as having them run a feasibility assessment to get data to confirm they can facilitate the research request.

1) Identifying Sample Vendors and Requesting Quotes

One of the more difficult parts of this process is identifying the best source(s) of sample for your research. This is because this space is full of specialist vendors and lots of them. A great place to start for identifying an appropriate sample vendor is the GreenBook, which provides a list of 71 online panel providers and short descriptions of the types of panel offerings these companies provide. However, a Google search can also be a useful secondary approach for identifying vendor options.

When reaching out to sample providers for quotes on facilitating a study, you will need to provide the following seven items of information:

1. Qualifying Criteria: These are the requirements for an individual to qualify for the survey. This could include firmographics and/or respondent demographics. It is really important to be crystal clear about the qualifications required for your research study, so that you get an accurate feasibility assessment. If you have the survey screener questions already written it is helpful to provide these questions to the sample vendor.
2. Length of Survey (LOS): This is the maximum expected length of the interview or survey. If the survey or interview contains skip logic, this is the length of the longest track.
3. Field Time: This is the length of time from survey launch to close. Providing sample vendors with a longer time window to recruit respondents will increase the likelihood that vendors can facilitate the survey.
4. Target Number of Completions: This is the number of completed survey responses you are looking for via this survey.
5. Quota Requirements: If your survey has multiple respondent groups, then you will need to specify the target number of completions you are looking to collect from each respondent group. It is really important to provide a very clear definition of the respondent groups.
6. Service Requirements: This is the level of assistance you are looking for with this research study. Specifically, you will need to clarify whether you plan on designing and/or programming the survey.
7. Special Requirements: You will also need to specify if you have any special requirements. For example, if you want to be able to ask respondents if they would be willing to participate in a follow-up interview, then you will need to make sure that the sample vendors can facilitate that request. I know from personal experience that only some vendors will be able to do so. Consequently, it can be an important point to confirm in the initial quote.

The more targeted a study you are running, the larger number of quotes that you should request from sample providers. As a standard rule of thumb, always reach out to at least a couple of extra vendors. Sometimes the turnaround on these quotes will take a couple days and having to wait for the quote will slow down the research process.

For more targeted sample requests, I recommend reaching out to 10 sample providers. For less targeted ones, you should probably reach out to five to seven sample vendors.

2) Quote Evaluation and Vendor Selection

Each vendor will generally send you a quote via email. Sometimes this will be a formal document that lays out the exact formula for how they arrived at the total expected cost. Other times it will be an informal email with the total expected cost and several statistics that are inputs into the estimate.

The key here is to remember that this is an expected cost they are reporting, not an actual cost. It is highly dependent upon the accuracy of their assumptions with the inputs, so it is important to understand exactly what each of these input factors means when evaluating a quote.

Here is a list of terms and definitions you may typically find in a quote:

• Cost Per a Completions (CPC): This is the cost you pay for each completed survey response. This rate is generally contingent upon estimates of the following factors:
  • Incidence Rate
  • Length of Survey
  • Size of Target Audience
  • Difficulty of Reaching Target Audience

  For more targeted studies or ones with more stringent qualifying criteria, it is important to have the vendor run a feasibility assessment to make sure that you have realistic expectations of what the cost per a completion will be.

• Project Minimum: This is the minimum contract size for a sample purchase. Some vendors require a minimum purchase. This tends to be higher with groups who do not maintain their own panels and are leveraging other group’s panels. However, this is not always the case.
• Incidence Rate (IR): The rate that respondents qualify for the survey. This is an indication of how difficult it will be for the sample vendor to reach the target number of completions for this study. It also shows how many people from their panel will need to be invited to partake in the study to reach the completion goal. This is important because sample providers have a max capacity in this regard as their panels are a fixed size and their panelists only agree to take a certain number of invitations per a week.

  The incidence rate is calculated as the number of respondents who satisfy the criteria in the screener divided by the number of individuals that enter the study and complete the screener questions.

• Completion Rate: The rate of qualified respondents that are expected to complete the full survey. The completion rate is calculated as completions divided by qualified respondents.

• Number of Potential Respondents Available: This is the number of respondents that the sample vendor has available for the study. This number will often fluctuate based on the field time.

Knowing the vocabulary and how the sample procurement process works will better prepare you to make the decision that best positions you to fulfill your research study goals.

If you are planning out a research study, I recommend reading my previous blog post on primary research recruitment tactics, as you may find that sample is not the most effective means for primary research recruitment for what you are looking for, and it is important to make this evaluation before you decide to purchase sample.

I also recommend reading my blog post from last year on how to determine an appropriate sample size for your primary research. This post was written for brand awareness research, but the approach applies to any type of B2B market research.

While in turns out I was correct, I did learn that more companies actually gravitate towards other outlets often than I thought. Also, it’s important to remember that LinkedIn has the smallest user-base with Facebook at 1.06 billion, Twitter at 500 million, and LinkedIn at a measly 200 million (others include Instagram at 90 million, Pinterest, at 10 million and Google+ at 100 million).

But it’s who those users are and what they’re using the platform for that makes the difference.

View the full infographic here.

Why LinkedIn is the Best Platform for Social Recruitment

#1 LinkedIn

As far as social recruitment goes, LinkedIn is the front-runner and for good reasons:

1. The site was created for professionals to network, which has easily transitioned into a hub for networking and looking for your next career.
2. LinkedIn is a favorite among recruiters and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Recruit Loop (the company behind the infographic) found that 93% of recruiters use LinkedIn to discover talent and 89% have made a hire from LinkedIn.

#2 Facebook

Coming in second is Facebook, with 66% of recruiters using it for sourcing, and 26% having actually utilizing it to make hires. I understand why Facebook is a decent recruiting option for some — you do have a profile to work with and companies are in fact using Facebook more and more to get their name out there. But it is still very much a personal rather than professional social site, and a lot of people don’t want prospective employers looking at their Facebook pages at all.

#3 Twitter

Third is Twitter with 54% using it to find candidates and only 15% having made hires via it (kind of hard to condense an offer to 140 characters, right?). The constrictions and forced brevity of the platform means you’re not going to get a lot of information as a recruiter or a candidate.

For that reason, Twitter is probably best for marketing job openings and convincing candidates to apply, or marketing your company so that prospective candidates know who you are and what you do.

Instagram and Pinterest

Now, what I thought was really interesting was Instagram and Pinterest – how do company’s use those social media outlets for hiring? My first thought was “maybe they take pictures of job descriptions.” But that doesn’t make sense. So I looked a little deeper.

Starbucks’s Instagram isn’t very active — they post about once every 1 to 2 weeks — but they have over 1.2 million followers. The posts range from congratulating new partners or awards to pictures of coffee tasting. Every once in a while they will post a picture of a new store or a construction site with comments like, “140 new opportunities #tobeapartner coming to our #Augusta Georgia Soluble Plant. Visit ‘Roasting Plant Careers’ on starbucks.com/careers to learn more. #manufacturing #engineering”.

Net-A-Porter’s career page on Pinterest has 60 pins that include the career page on their website and articles about what it is like to work there, recognition they have received, and growth they have experienced.

Okay, I get it, but I would be curious to know how effective this is. These sites are pure social sites — people browse them to get away from work, not to look for new work. I can see them catching some people’s attention to get them interested, so it can’t hurt, but I’m not sure it will ever become as useful for hiring as LinkedIn or Facebook.

We all know social media is taking over the business world – especially in hiring and marketing. If you aren’t using any outlets in your recruiting efforts you should start now!

What platform do you think is the best for social recruitment? Who are the best companies using their social profiles to recruit?

It’s the first Saturday in May and that means one thing: It’s Derby Day.

And what a wonderful, strange, and glorious day it is — a day full of mint juleps, pomp and pageantry, more preposterous hats than you can shake a jockey at, and, oh yeah, a horse race that lasts two minutes.

What has always amazed me about the Kentucky Derby is how something so small gets blown up into something so big. As far as sporting events go, horse racing is absolutely at the back of the pack, and the fact that you can take a long swig of bourbon and miss the entire thing would seemingly be a big strike against it, too.

But the magic trick of the Derby is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If it were just about a horse race the audience would be a jockey-sized niche (last jockey joke, I promise), but the Derby is about so much more. It’s about the build up, the tradition, and the fashion (did I mention the hats?).

That’s why there will be 8.5 hours of Kentucky Derby coverage on NBC and NBC Sports Network today, why 14.5 million will tune in, and why the Derby is the only annual sporting event that draws more women viewers than men.

It’s a remarkable work of showmanship, really, and there are definitely a few branding lessons content marketers everywhere can learn from it.

 3 Branding Lessons Content Marketers Can Learn from the Odd, Irresistible Majesty of the Kentucky Derby

1) Know Your Audience Segments

One of the secrets to the Derby’s longevity and success as a brand (today marks the 139th running) has been its ability to gather a variety of distinct, otherwise incompatible groups under the same figurative tent.

For example, it appeals and caters not only to this audience:

But this audience, as well (ah, the infield):

Those are two vastly different Derby experiences (the stands and the infield at Churchill Downs may only be separated by a narrow track, but they’re a world apart). Yet, somehow, both are offered at the same time, and incredibly, everyone walks (or stumbles) away happy.

Your company likely has more than one type of customer and buyer, as well, and messaging that resonates with one may not be effective or appropriate for another.

Take a page from the Derby — segment your audiences, find out what appeals to each, and offer them different experiences, accordingly.

Related content from the OpenView team:

Tien Anh Nguyen has a great post on segmenting your website to appeal to the right audience you might find useful and Brandon Hickie has put together a series on developing buyer personas that’s a must-read for B2B marketers.

2) If You Want to Stand Out You Have to Get Creative (& Visual)

All eyes may be glued to the horses (bad word choice) for the two minutes they’re racing, but for the rest of the time the Derby is a zoo of strutting peacocks vying for attention. If you want to stand out you better come dressed to impress (or in the case of the infield, show up not really dressed at all).

Just as in the world of marketing, competition is fierce and the bar is constantly being raised. Every year at the Derby the hats get bigger and the infield costumes get more and more wonderfully bizarre. The best find a creative way to be memorable, and as a content marketer that’s your task, as well. Never settle for dull when you can go big and bold.

Related content:

Looking for real-world marketing inspiration? Check out our list highlighting 10 examples of the most creative B2B marketing tactics online. And for an example of a truly visionary content strategy, see my look inside GE’s ecomagination content factory.

3) Make It All about Audience Participation

The beauty of the Derby is that so much of the focus really isn’t on the race, itself, but rather on the audience. And so many of the focal aspects are things we can all participate in from home, too.

Crazy hats? Check. Mint juleps? Double check. Racing the horses? Okay, no, but we can sure gamble on them!

As an event it perfectly captures the three core things YouTube’s Kevin Allocca says are responsible for viral success:

1. Tastemakers (Yep, there’s Zooey Deschanel in a funny hat.)
2. Communities of Participation (the masses are muddling mint as I type)
3. Unexpectedness (that guy who ran across the port-o-potties in the infield was wearing what?)

Keep that in mind next time you’re generating a big piece of content. Make it about your audience, not about you. And make it something they can share, participate in, take ownership of, and make their own.

Enjoy the Derby, everyone. I’m off to place a bet on Goldencents. I’d be a fool to go against Rick Petino at this point, plus my original favorite, Fear The Kitten was scratched (who saw that one coming?).

At OpenView, we talk about company culture all the time because — particularly for expansion-stage companies who are scaling their businesses — it’s critical.

More than anything else — money, titles, MakerBots (OK, maybe not MakerBots) — developing and maintaining a strong corporate culture will help you attract and keep the best possible employees at your company. But how do you do it? After all, culture doesn’t just “happen”.

The task of creating and nurturing corporate culture starts with management teams, and trickles down to everyone else in the company. As a CEO or senior manager, your character, your values, and your style will set the tone for the entire organization. It’s not what you say you are as a company, it’s what you actually d0 — and how you act on the values and priorities you want to promote.

Clearly defining, discussing, and publishing your company’s social and business values (given they are true to who you are and what your company is and wants to be) will help employees embrace them and refer to them when making decisions. In Jim Collins’s Built to Last, he writes that one of the things that successful companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture.”

A properly designed culture often ends up seemingly cult-like (see HubSpot), but it doesn’t start that way. It is built around core business values that are deeply rooted in the company, and when these values are genuine and you’ve assembled a team who is driven by them, it catches on like wildfire. It’s not about offering perks for the sake of perks (though those are certainly nice, and can make the office a more pleasant place to work!), it’s about being provocative enough to change what people do every day.

One Question to Ask to Jump-Start a Strong Corporate Culture

What is it that your company takes truly seriously? Great design? Your customers? Protecting data? If someone outside of your company were to walk into your offices, would they be able to immediately grasp how seriously you take whatever it is that you do? If not, what can you do to make that the case? That’s a good place to start.

Try coming up with concepts around your office design, policies, and benefits that will set you apart from other companies but remain closely tied to your core business values. Although we often hear otherwise, a positive company culture is not about making the office “fun”. In order to attract and retain the best employees, you need to establish the core values that truly drive the business, and build everything else around those principles.

For a terrific inside look into a strong company culture, check out The HubSpot Culture Code below:

What do you think are the keys to a strong corporate culture?

How to make up for poor customer service Source: Forbes

How To Say Sorry To Your Clients: Lessons in Customer Service Conflict Resolution

Everyone has a bad day sometimes. I recently took my car in for service to a dealership that has served me well for many years. As usual, I dropped off my car, handed over my keys, and was given a clean and new loaner car to drive. The trusty service consultant told me to expect a call from him later in the day. He had told me given the nature of the problems I had discussed with him over the phone, I might want to anticipate a few days. The expectation had been set, but soon enough things would start to go south.

A few hours passed, and I was told to keep the loaner for the day as some parts were needed. He had set my expectations, so I was not surprised. The next day I received a call indicating there were some considerable problems with the car and the ignition needed to be replaced. I was very surprised given the car is only two years old. The service consultant outlined the issues and gave me a fair quote for the items not covered under the warranty. He indicated that they were having some issues resolving a problem and that he would keep me updated.

Towards the end of the day he got back in touch to tell me the part they had received was defective and they’d be ordering another one. I was pretty surprised and starting to get frustrated. The next day, I received an email that the car was ready. But I arrived at the dealership and was handed an invoice for double what I was expecting. They had forgotten to inform me about the cost of the original service. Since the car had so many issues to document when it was dropped off, this had slipped.

To add insult to injury, the mechanic had performed an alignment that they hadn’t gotten permission from me for. However, the service consultant recognized my long personal relationship with him, and the dealer immediately gave me a significant discount. He made sure to apologize and spent several minutes speaking with me since he knew I was not happy.

While I finished up at the cashier, the Service Consultant made sure my car was cleaned and ready for me to go. As I walked to my car, he thanked me for my business, and I slid into the seat.

The car wouldn’t start and flashed an ominous message “Service Required.” Before I could say or do anything the service consultant was at my side. He profusely apologized and made sure the loaner car I returned was given back to me. He promised to get to the bottom of this, and said he’d have my car dropped off at my house when it was done.

The next day I received a phone call and an apology from him. He took the time to explain it was a miscommunication between him and the mechanic and discuss the steps being taken to ensure they got it right this time.

3 Customer Service Conflict Resolution Tips

Normally, most customers wouldn’t return to a dealership that made this many mistakes, but I will and here’s why:

1. Constant Communication: Throughout the process, I was kept informed of how things were going. Even after things started to go wrong, I was updated with what the problem was and how they planned to fix it.
2. Strong Relationship with My Service Adviser: I have known him for years, even when he switched dealerships, I started going to his new one because he had consistently surpassed my expectations. I see him more as a trusted adviser who would always tell me the truth.
3. The Service Adviser took Responsibility and had an Action Plan to Remedy the Situation: The service adviser didn’t hesitate to offer a discount, apologize, and make sure I wasn’t inconvenienced any further by ensuring my car would be dropped off at my house when ready.

Mistakes happen, and in any relationship, it’s how the mistakes get handled that matters. The service adviser did an outstanding job of handling the situation, and that’s why I will be back.

Image provided by: sgrouples

Some, like the Ad Man quoted in this VentureBeat article, think the tracking cookie is not long for the world. “It’s going to go,” he says. “I think it will take five years to kill it.”

His reasoning is that people find it creepy and invasive, and given an easy enough way to do so, will opt-out en mass.

If that’s true, it’s seriously bad news for marketers. If the cookie goes, say your goodbyes to Google Analytics. Give your best regards to targeted and re-targeted ads, you won’t be seeing them again either.

Online Marketers Could Be in for a Rude Awakening

For all practical purposes, the death of the tracking cookie puts online marketing back into the stone age, also known as ‘traditional media.’ Without the context of knowing where your visitors have been and where they’re going, you might as well be in the billboard business.

So if you’re an online marketer, should you put in your two-weeks notice now, or take a gamble and wait until next month?

Well, as we all know, the one inexorable truth of new developments in technology is that they always result in more privacy for their users.

Oh wait no… my mistake… it’s the exact opposite of that.

The public’s thirst for sharing minutia about their daily lives seems virtually unquenchable, drawing comparisons by one 28-year-old billionaire to Moore’s Law. Put it this way: if you really hated cookies, where would you rant and rave about it? Right next to the pictures of last night’s dinner on Facebook, right?

Look, I consider myself a fairly private person. Other than the occasional blog post (Jonathan Crowe will come find me if I don’t write it), my online footprint is pretty minimal. It would take a pretty sophisticated algorithm to tell the difference between my Twitter account and a spam bot.

But even I don’t really give a damn if a website tracks me anonymously.

You really want to track me? Great. Now you know that in the past day I read 12 ESPN articles speculating on the Bruins playoff chances, and 1 E! article speculating on the name of Kim and Kanye’s baby (which I totally clicked on by accident). What possible damage could someone do with that information, and what possible motivation would they have to do it?

Compared to the slim benefits of saving basic preferences when I visit a website for the first time, it’s just not worth it to me to disable cookies, no matter how easy they make it.

If technological developments are at all related to the preference of users, and I believe they are, cookies are here to stay for a very long time. You’d better know your way around a Google Analytics account.

Mastering Meeting Management

My colleague Nick Petri did a great job on a recent blog post on ways to avoid having non productive and non necessary meetings. He focused on 4 questions you should consider before scheduling a meeting.

I’d like to add four additional questions to the list that participants should also always consider asking the scheduler/organizer before accepting a meeting invite:

1) Does the meeting have a reasonable agenda?

It sounds obvious, but a meeting needs to stick to an agenda in order to to be productive. The agenda helps set the tone and objective of the conversation, moves the discussion along a timeline, and allows participants to prepare for the meeting itself.

2) Is it a meeting or a working session?

A working session is a particular type of group interaction that is often confused with a meeting. A working session is really a brainstorming, hands-on problem-solving exercise that involves multiple parties. It is not a meeting because it does not need an agenda, it does not need to stick to a timeline, and there is no expectation in terms of output such as agreement, opportunities, etc (except for the output of “work”).

3) How soon does the meeting have to happen?

This is a hard question to ask. Everyone who is scheduling meetings wants to have their meeting as soon as possible to get the issue out of their way. However, there are meetings that really do not have that much importance, and do not need to happen on a specific time or date. If that is the case, then why accept the meeting?

4) Who owns the output/outcome of the meeting?

This is quite similar to Nick’s question, “Am I looking for a discussion, or just an update?” because it also tries to get to the heart of the issue:

• Why is this meeting important enough?
• To whom it is important?
• What outcome should the meeting have?

If it is not clear who owns the output of the meeting, then it’s likely that the meeting is just another routine update that should be eliminated from your schedule.

We still have a long way to go to improve our meetings efficiency at OpenView Labs. We love to meet with people and interact, but as always, learning to be more efficient is one of our ongoing goals. That is the only way we can be more effective as consultants and advisers to our portfolio companies and contributors to the tech community.

Do you agree with these questions? What are other questions you can ask to cut down on unnecessary meetings?

Companies of all shapes and sizes are turning to blogging to drive traffic and establish connections with their prospects and customers. And they’re counting on their employees to make it happen.

Maybe not all of us were born to be bloggers, but the truth is blogging doesn’t need to be a major time-suck, and it certainly shouldn’t be daunting. In fact, anyone can write engaging, effective blog posts in less time than you think.

Here are a few tips to help you simplify your blogging process and learn how to write a good blog post sans the stress.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Nothing is more debilitating than staring at a blank screen or an empty page. Why do that to yourself when you don’t have to? There’s no reason why you should be starting from scratch with every blog post you write.

Here are two tips to help you get a better jump-start on your posts:

• Keep a list of ideas and headlines at the ready: This should be something you’re constantly building on to take advantage of the moment when inspiration strikes. See my previous post on building a pipeline of blogging ideas for five great sources to keep up with and draw from.
• Use a template: Develop a few of these for different types of posts — see a list of 52 (!) options here — or keep it simple and base one off a previous post you’ve written with a good structure you liked. The point is to avoid that blank screen. Working from a template allows you to ease back into writing by replacing text and filling in blanks.

Break it Down

Carlton knows what his audience wants — to see him BREAK IT DOWN.

Setting out to write a blog post is something that sounds simple enough, but we all know how easy it is to get stymied and bogged down, especially if we’re expecting to go from nothing to the final draft of a literary masterpiece with no steps in between. For the vast majority of us, that’s not how writing works (also, come on, it’s a blog post — it’s not going to be perfect and doesn’t need to be).

For your next post, try something different — don’t think about writing a full post, don’t even think about writing a full sentence. Just focus on drawing up an outline, something as simple as this:

• Intro
• Headings/Sub headings
• Bullet points
• Conclusion/Call-to-Action

Start with headings that are clear, concise, and capture the main themes of your post (ex: in this post the headings are Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Break it Down, and Other Tips).

From there, add a layer of detail by including bullet points under each heading. Boom. You have an outline. Now all that’s left is filling in the details, adding a few sentences for each point.

Note: Neil Patel has a terrific post on this process titled “A Simple Plan for Writing a Powerful Blog Post in Less Than 2 Hours” that you should absolutely check out.

I really can’t overemphasize the importance of using headings, bullet points, and numbered lists to break up your text and break down your ideas into digestible chunks. If you take nothing else from this post, please remember…

The beauty of this practice is not only does it streamline the writing process for you, it also streamlines your audience’s reading experience. You should always pack your posts full of engaging and helpful content, but above all you should make sure your posts are also easily scannable. With just a quick glance your readers should be able to immediately understand what your post is about and quickly find the info you promised in the headline.

Other Tips

• Keep it short and sweet: Have you seen how much content is out there? Do you know how busy and overwhelmed everyone is? Unless you’re getting paid by the word do yourself and your readers a favor — make your points and wrap it up.
• Use images and video: Not only can these be extremely helpful in explaining complex concepts and immediately conveying a point, they also inject a little life into your posts by making them more visually appealing and engaging.
• Don’t get bogged down by trying to make it perfect right out of the gate: In my experience, this has been one of the biggest hurdles for getting blogs done quickly and consistently. I’ll turn it over to Neil Patel and another great blogger, Angie M. Jordan, who both have terrific advice for all us perfectionists and sufferers of writer’s block out there.

“Don’t worry about making things perfect, or using correct spelling or grammar, just write. And if you happen to have writers block in one of the outlined sections, skip it and go back to it.”

— Neil Patel, from “A Simple Plan for Writing a Powerful Blog Post in Less Than 2 Hours”

“Keep it simple when writing a blog post, write what you know, what you are passionate about sharing, and what is relevant to your readers. Be honest, be open, be yourself. Not only will it make your writing more interesting, it will allow readers to connect with you and your writing.”

— Angie Jordan, from “How to Write a Good Blog Post…Without Pulling Your Hair Out”

Are these tips helpful? What tactics have you developed to make your own blog writing process easier and more efficient?

Executing a fully integrated relationship marketing program can be pretty complex. Even if you’re targeting just one buyer persona, when you add up the various touch points by channel (direct and indirect) and look at it across the entire buyer journey, it get’s pretty hairy and can trip up even the most experienced marketer when deploying.

If you’re interested in starting your first relationship marketing program or if you’re looking to revamp your current one, here’s some advice: start simple!

Over the next few weeks, I will lay out a step-by-step guide to building a multichannel relationship marketing program — encompassing email, social, and display — that will take no more than four weeks to plan and execute. For those of you who have your target buyer data ready, this program can be implemented and deployed in two weeks.

What is Relationship Marketing?

So before we dive in, let’s start by defining relationship marketing. By relationship marketing, I’m specifically referring to creating a series intelligent touch points, across different channels throughout the buyer’s journey. Each touch point correlates to a conversion event, with the goal of moving the buyer to the next stage in their journey and through the marketing and sales funnel.

This is not a frying pan-over-the-head approach. By intelligent, I really mean an orchestrated series of events that specifically pertain to the buyer’s wants, needs, and preferences over the course of their decision cycle.

How to Build a Relationship Marketing Program in 4 Weeks

Now that we’re on the same page with the relationship marketing definition, each task will be grouped in the following order, with specific outcomes:

1. Planning: focusing on gathering necessary insight to make the most informed decisions about how to best structure your program
2. Preparation: providing clarity, scope, and essentially your blueprint to integrating your program with your marketing systems
3. Execution: ensuring all systems are ready and that you can monitor your campaign and respond quickly

I’ll break down the planning phase in this article and will cover the prep and execution phase in more detail in the next two posts.

Step 1: Planning Phase

1) Discovering Your Buyer’s Journey

In order to start the planning phase, you’ll first need to create a buyer journey. The only way you can accurately create a buyer journey is to FIRST have clarity on your target segment and buyer role. Once you have these two pieces of information, you an start your buyer journey.

The buyer journey provides a framework for you to really hone in on the most critical points within each stage to focus on. By critical points, I mean the touch points that result in the biggest gain for your effort. For example, your buyer might not respond at a particular step in their journey. The more you you know why, the better you can address this and the quicker you can get to a conversion.

If you’re not sure which points are most critical to evoking a positive response from your target buyer, you can gain insights with short surveys and questionnaires to current customers in order to validate which content you should use and through which channel to reach them. Armed with this information, you can start the other tasks in the planning phase.

2) Creating Specific Calls-to-Action

Marketers excel at this part of the planning phase and you can typically sail through this, especially now that you have some insight into which types of content and which channels your target buyer role prefers to be reached through. Here are some examples of calls-to-action, in no particular order:

3) Developing Your Content Inventory & Selecting High-Impact Channels

Unlike a full-blown content audit, you’ll have to reverse your content inventory by matching the calls to action with the specific content types you have. Again, we’re focusing mainly on calls-to-action that have the highest chance of leading to a conversion event. So instead of looking at all of the content you have for a particular buyer role, you should be looking for content to best exploit your main call-to-action.

You can also add your distribution marketing channel during the content inventory process. Here’s a simple example of how you can map the primary call-to-action and channel along the buyer journey using Excel.

4) Create a Flow Diagram by Channel

There are some incredibly inspiring campaign flow charts that I could use as wall art. However, for our purposes, we need a campaign flow diagram to be used as blueprint during the next stage. The problem with combining each channel into one diagram is that it takes too long and nobody else will understand it but you. To get around this, create a simple diagram with each touch point within a channel. The diagram will also illustrate the following key points:

1. Number of touch points: How many times will you push content to your target or expect them to pull it?
2. Campaign logic: If they don’t respond, what will happen next before you end the program?
3. Cadence: What will be the frequency at which you engage with them?
4. Content: Name the specific content you’re using (collateral, infographic, email).

Again, this will serve as your blueprint for the next phase: the integration process. Keep in mind that you once you complete a flow diagram for each channel, you can then combine them into one master diagram, which is easier than starting with a master first.

In the next article, we’ll walk through the preparation phase in detail which will get us ready executing our campaign. In the mean time, please reach out with any questions.

Sorry, Walter. We get our news from Twitter now.

I originally drafted this post just hours after a false tweet from the Associated Press (AP) caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to immediately plummet more than 140 points. The AP’s Twitter account had been hacked, sending out a tweet reading: “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”

The @AP account has over 1.9 million followers, many of whom were sent into panic mode. The tweet was deleted and the account temporarily suspended, but it served to demonstrate a truth that has become very clear to me: Twitter is the first news source for many, but it is also the least reliable. As such, it requires a critical eye and a healthy dose of skepticism that we haven’t mastered.

We’re all on edge right now. Like many people, Twitter became my morphine drip after the Boston Marathon bombings. I watched helplessly as my home was attacked. I saw the streets I knew like the back of my hand streaked with blood. I saw an event that had come to define my country for me more clearly than the Fourth of July destroyed in an instant. I looked out the office window, wondering how to get home, feeling bad for wondering, asking my coworkers what their plans were, were they okay? No one was okay, everyone was confused, so we refreshed our Twitter streams. Over and over. We clung to any scrap of information we could find, anything that could tell us what had happened and why. Why?

Of course, no one knew much of anything that Monday afternoon, but that didn’t stop people from speculating. What we “knew” changed by the second. Zero dead, dozens dead. No more bombs, four more bombs. The explosions came from manhole covers. No, backpacks. No, garbage cans.

On Wednesday, a suspect was in custody. On Wednesday, no suspect was in custody. On Friday, one of the bombers was a missing Brown University student. Then the bomber was actress Zooey Deschanel (to be fair, no one took that one seriously). Then, finally, the bombers were the Tsarnaev brothers, names and nationality frequently confused. It was an exhausting week to be a Twitter user, but I still kept refreshing that feed.

I don’t have any grand insight to offer, no magic bullet to make people more thoughtful and less reactionary on a platform that sometimes discourages both. I love Twitter and I think many of its problems are also its strengths.

In the aftermath of the bombings and during the ensuing manhunt, it helped the authorities keep us informed. X, Y, Z streets are closed. Stay indoors. Street cleaning canceled. Cabs aren’t running. We’re looking for this car, this person. It also helped increase donations for those affected, which have now totaled over $26 million. I kept coming back to Twitter for more because among the misinformation, there were also these reminders of connections and caring that made me feel less alone (especially when we were all on lockdown).

Ultimately though, I had to close Twitter, minimize Boston.com, shut off the TV, leave my phone behind, and sit by myself in the sunshine. Maybe that’s the biggest lesson out of all of this. Twitter works because it makes us feel plugged into the world, but it also gives us a distorted view of it. To maintain the perspective we need to be successful users, we need to be critical users. Perhaps most importantly, we can’t be afraid to unplug when we need to. (And perhaps we should all apologize to Zooey Deschanel.)

Have you felt overwhelmed by Twitter the past few weeks? How do you maintain a healthy perspective?

As an employer, have you ever wondered whether your employees are happy? Although your organization may offer high compensation, career progression, flexible hours, and lots of amazing perks, those factors may not necessarily result in a happy workforce.

According to an article on Inc.com, “Top Reasons Employees Complain About Their Jobs”, approximately 86% of employees within the United States are planning on seeking new opportunities in 2013. This startling number demonstrates the urgency of this issue that obviously needs to be addressed.

Of course, there are various factors that contribute to this statistic as individuals’ priorities and preferences vary by gender, age group, and other segments of the workforce. The findings presented in the article state that a significant number of male employees prefer to have higher salaries (45%) or promotions (39%) versus female employees who enjoy having either reduced (51%) or flexible (50%) work hours. In addition, 49% of Gen Xer’s (aged 33 – 50) prefer to have a higher job title and Millennials (aged 32 and younger) prefer to have more training.

Given that these findings may very well be pertinent to your current or future workforce, what can you do to ensure employees remain happy and don’t leave your organization for reasons that lie within your control?

3 Employee Retention Tactics to Keep Your Workforce Happy

Explore Performance-Related Pay

Although compensation is generally fixed for most roles, incorporating some aspect of a bonus tied to performance for all roles (i.e., not just Sales roles) may incentivize employees to improve productivity levels and achieve individual and organizational goals. Although this strategy may appeal to a segment of your workforce, its implementation needs to be carefully assessed given the associated risks with the measure (i.e., lower morale stemming from employees not achieving targets).

Focus on and Empower Career Progression

Another measure may be to implement a robust career progression program that offers employees an opportunity to visualize their potential trajectories within the organization. This measure may potentially influence employees to remain longer with the organization as they will be motivated to achieve their respective career milestones.

Offer Flexible Work Hours

As ascertained from the study, it seems that in order to retain a larger percentage of the female employee base, employers should be more flexible with their policies related to reduced or flexible work hours. Although this appears to be common practice in most organizations today, I still come across many women who struggle to balance work and family responsibilities. While these women are very driven and motivated to perform well in their respective organizations, they are also equally committed to their family responsibilities.

3 Workforce Segments with Concerns to Consider

When examining the needs of different workforce segments, patterns emerge that can be helpful in focusing your employee development and retention initiatives.

Women in the Workforce

Unfortunately, many women face a growing number of anxieties in their day to day job responsibilities; some worry that because they have to leave at a certain time each day, they feel like their other colleagues who don’t have those similar responsibilities are able to progress more quickly in the organization. Although this may not actually be the case, the perception of this increases their stress levels and leads them to be unhappy in their jobs.

Additionally, many women are also choosing to take the entrepreneurial path after having a family; this option permits them to retain a balance and advance both of their priorities. This by no means is unfortunate, especially if the entrepreneurial path has been an important aspiration for the individual. The implication of this outcome is that the organization stands to lose top female talent for reasons that may actually have been under its control.

Gen X’ers

I have noticed that on many occasions this segment tends to turn down positions simply because the job title does not coincide with their expectations. This has been a recurring issue and I often wonder why a minor adjustment cannot be made to the job title in order to ensure that the best and right candidate is hired for the role.

I realize all of the structural and policy challenges that the organization might be faced with when making these changes; however it’s important to keep in mind that especially with the case of a start-up, job titles can be made more flexible on a case-by-case basis as long as the changes don’t disrupt or challenge the authority of the current team members already in place.

Millennials

I also find it very interesting that Millennials enjoy being in an organizational environment that particularly promotes learning and development (L&D). As an employer, that should be a general priority for your organization, however it is also necessary to focus on the needs of this generation and inquire about the types of L&D opportunities they would like to have in the company.

When speaking with Millennial candidates in an interview, it may be a good time to emphasize what the company is currently doing in terms of L&D, and that you as the employer would be happy to explore other options to enhance this aspect within the organization. If you don’t have an L&D expert at the moment, it may be worth to determine whether you should hire someone or seek advice from a consultant to help with your L&D strategy.

Don’t Just Guess at What Makes Your Employees Happy, Ask Them

Lastly, if you aren’t aware of what truly makes your employees happy, why not create a survey and ask them what they would like. This would demonstrate to them that your organization is taking an active interest in ensuring that you value them and are committed to their happiness and workplace satisfaction.

What employee retention tactics have you tried at your company? Which ones have worked best?

Tailoring the Cloud Computing Message to Resonate With Your Prospects Image courtesy of CloudIt. Net

What are the Business Perceptions of the Cloud? Some Thoughts Based on My Customer Interviews

Since I’ve joined OpenView I’ve had the opportunity to speak to Managers of IT and decision makers across several industries and get their input on the Cloud. For this post I wanted to present some key findings from these calls and offer up some suggestions for how to best educate your customers on how the Cloud can work for them. When it comes to selling cloud solutions, it pays to bring the conversation down to earth.

3 Ways to Educate Your Buyers by Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth

1) Provide Concrete, Practical Examples of the Cloud in Action

The most popular comment I have come across by far has been, “I hear about the Cloud all the time, but how does it relate to my business, specifically?”

The key insight here is that businesses are sold on the Cloud as as the “next big thing,” but they are left wanting for details. Customers need to be educated on how the Cloud works for their business in practice.

If you are designing content, highlight case studies on how the Cloud (whether it be a SaaS product or infrastructure) has benefited your clients, and express tangible results.

2) Produce Industry-Specific Messaging

Each industry has specific pain points that can range from reducing costs and industry-driven technology purchases to compliance issues, so it is important to tailor your pitch, content, and sales presentations to each industry.

It is also important to factor in the importance of industry regulation (ex: HIPAA for Healthcare and FINRA/Dodd Frank for Financial Services firms). If you are pitching to a highly regulated industry, be sure to do some research to find out what laws and regulations apply to the companies you are targeting.

In the Professional Services (consulting, market research, etc.) sector, they may not be bound by direct state or federal regulations, but their clients often are. During my time in consulting, our firms were subject to compliance audits from our clients and there were very specific guidelines we had to follow regarding their data.

3) Create Content Targeted to Typical Cloud Buyer Personas

Each decision maker has a distinct set of needs and potential objections. While we have many blog posts on buyer personas, I want to pass along some quick thoughts on who they are for cloud solutions and what their objections typically are:

• IT directors are often concerned about maintaining ownership of the data and implications of a SaaS application failure. They are worried about risk, integrating with their existing infrastructure, and minimizing the workload on their teams.
• CTO/CIOs take a longer range, more strategic view of the business. They want to see how your application/solution adds value to the bottom line. They place value on being seen as a strategic adviser to the broader business. How does your solution help them achieve their strategic vision?
• CFOs unsurprisingly are concerned with the bottom line. “What is this going to cost and what will I get from it?”

The best advice I can offer is that prospects need to be educated on how your solution is applicable to them, how it will add value, and how it will fit into their strategic goals. Of course, it’s always important to understand the specific needs and pain points of each prospect to best position yourself to make the sale.

Are you selling cloud services/solutions? What tips, opportunities, and challenges would you add to this post?

Bill Gates kept his left hand in his pocket while he shook the South Korean President’s hand with his right. In the U.S., no one would have noticed, let alone found the gesture offensive. In South Korea however, this action is considered a faux pas.

Now, let’s assume that this trip to South Korea was planned ahead of time. Let’s also assume that Gates was well aware he would be meeting with very important people on this trip (the South Korean President, for instance). This mistake could have been easily avoided if research was done prior to the trip and Gates knew basic etiquette and customs in South Korea.

I know that there is a very slim chance that you will be traveling to South Korea to meet the president any time soon, so you are probably asking yourself, why is this story relevant to me? How is this story related to hiring?

Simple — it’s all about first impressions. Whether in an interview, on a sales call, or networking, it can absolutely make or break you. And in order to make a good first impression you need to know your audience.

How to Make a Great First Impression: A Little Background Research Goes a Long Way

Not every situation is about cross cultural (mis)understanding — another example of flubbing the chance to make a great first impression could be as simple as a Harvard alum going into an interview and trash talking MIT only to discover the hiring manager went to MIT. Or it could involve missing an opportunity to connect, like meeting with the CEO of a company that you are trying to break into and not knowing that you’re from the same town, went to the same high school, and both had that same evil calculus teacher.

Before any first meeting, it is a best practice to do some research and find out a little about the person you are meeting with. Make sure you are careful not to do or say anything that would offend them and, if possible, try to find something in common that you both can relate to and use to become more comfortable with each other.

A good first impression will open many doors for you. Whether it be right away or 10 years down the road, that person will remember you. However, a bad first impression can can unfortunately last just as long — not only sinking your chances in a meeting, but damaging your reputation, as well.

Has someone made a great first impression on you lately? What were his or her secrets?

Board meetings are pleasant when the company is executing well, revenue is growing, the value of the business is rising, and shareholders are starting to count their money. In these times, board meetings tend to be relaxed, and mostly focused on the business and its bright future.

But when the going gets tough, board dynamics can change to the worst. And with it, the role and priority of each board member can be accentuated and/or confused.

Investor Board Members

One of the confusing roles is that of the investor board member. When the going gets tough, the company is feeling a cash crunch and conflict arises around the continued funding of the company and its associated valuation — the investor board member may invariably have to wear his or her investor hat when working with the CEO and the board. And that can sometimes create the blurring of the lines in the fiduciary duties of that board member.

Let’s me be clear at this point — the fiduciary duty of the investor board member is always to represent all shareholders and the best interests of the company. Always. Regardless of whether that duty may conflict with his or her VC firm’s interests.

Now that does not mean that the investor board member would not assume the investor role outside the board meetings. But when it comes to board discussions and decisions, the investor board member should always be wearing the company board hat. In fact, he or she is obligated to.

So lets step back and go through the basics of the fiduciary duties of board members.

Board Member Roles and Responsibilities

First and foremost, the primary responsibility of a company’s board of directors is directing, approving, and overseeing the strategic and financial operations of the business. In some cases where the chairman of the board is not the CEO, the board is also responsible for managing the operations of the company and its senior team. In all cases, the CEO reports and is accountable to the board.

Each board member has a fiduciary duty to represent the best interests of the company and all its shareholders. Failure to do so can result in a personal liability to the board member.

There are two forms of fiduciary duties:

1. Duty of Care: This is where the board member makes best efforts to have a solid understanding of the business, be well informed and aware of the strategic and operational goals, and make the time and effort to engage in the evaluation of all the options available to the company before making decisions as a board. In that, board members should solicit the expertise and options of third parties (lawyers, consultants, bankers). Board members should also hold each other accountable to being engaged and making themselves available and informed. 
2. Duty of Loyalty: Each board member must represent the interests of all shareholders over and above his or her own personal or professional interests. The duty of loyalty is one that can be confusing for CEOs/founders, and is the one where investor board members can feel the divergence of interests between their duty of loyalty and the priorities of their investment firm. But when it comes to board matters, investor board members must make sure that they are not allowing their investment priorities to come into play as the board deliberates over company strategies, funding, or acquisition decisions.

These are the basics.

Here are examples of questions that come up in these situations:

• When is the right time to set up a board of directors for an early stage company? I have written a lot about this, and a fantastic resource to check out is OpenView’s Building a High-Impact Board of Directors eBook. The quick answer is you should not wait long. 
• I’m the founding CEO and I have a board. But I own a large percentage of the company and it’s still my company. When the going gets tough, do I have to abide by what my board tells me? Absolutely. Once you set up a real and legitimate board of directors, you don’t own the company any more. You, as CEO, are accountable to the board. You also have the same fiduciary duty to represent the interests of all shareholders, including those of your investor(s). If you are not ready to give up control, then don’t form a board and don’t raise money from an institutional investor.
• How do I avoid having a duty of loyalty conflict with my investor board member? First, make sure that you are setting the right expectations for the company to the investor when you decide to raise money. Conflict with your investor typically arises when the company does not perform to expectations. Second, make sure you never run the risk of running out of money. Third, make sure you are not reliant on one investment firm. Diversify your investor base. One investor is too few. More than three is too many.
• I don’t think my investor has the company’s best interest at heart. What do I do? First, make sure that you have a complete and cohesive board. Make sure that you have independent board members who are qualified. Independent board members can provide more balance to a board, which can alleviate the gravitational force of the investor board member. Second, make sure to give the investor board member that feedback. Be clear why specifically you feel this way, and be specific in your expectations. Before you confront the investor, make sure that the rest of the board shares your concerns. It may be that you are the one guilty of not representing all the interests of all the shareholders.

In addition to the eBook referenced above, here are two additional posts I wrote on boards you may find useful:

The Damage a Board Can Do

Building a Highly Effective Board

You don’t need to hire dozens of writers and editors to be successful at content marketing! In fact, here at OpenView, our content marketing team consists of just three people — not a heck of a lot considering the considerable volume of blog posts, eBooks, articles, and more that our in-house content factory produces.

If you’ve read my blog before, you know that in the past I’ve described the different roles that you could need on a content marketing team, and hopefully you’re duly aware of the importance of hiring a managing editor. You may also remember the value of augmenting your team with cost-effective freelance resources. This week, forget about all of that. Instead, let’s focus on an equally critical aspect of successful content marketing: co-opting all of your co-workers into your content strategy.

The simple truth is that if you’re just relying on your content marketing team for content marketing, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to tap into the inherent talents and expertise of your fellow employees. Peter in sales, for example, may be a great writer who you could get to draft an occasional blog post. Paul, your VP of product, hopefully has a lot of valuable technical expertise and may even be a thought leader. And let’s not forget about Mary in accounting, who just loves social media and has a huge following on Twitter. Why not take advantage of what these folks are capable of?

The point is that successful content marketing teams are ones that find allies across their companies who they can leverage. By taking the time to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your co-workers, where their natural affinities lie, and how to best leverage their time, you can improve the quality and quantity of the content that you produce and distribute.

But how do you get people outside of marketing on board?

Here are four ways to help get everyone in your office to become an unofficial member of your content marketing team:

1) Sell them on the value of content marketing

Content marketing is an effective means of generating leads and gently nudging those leads down the path to purchase by providing them with the right content at the right time. The bottom line is that it’s one of the most effective ways of driving sales, which is fundamental to the success of any company.

2) Help them build their personal brand in the process

The great thing about content marketing is that it not only gives you the opportunity to build your company’s brand, but also the personal brands of individuals within your company. By creating blog posts, white papers, videos, podcasts, and more, individuals can establish themselves (and their companies) as thought leaders, which benefits them just as much as it does their company. It’s a win-win.

3) Make it as painless as possible

This point just comes down to common sense. If you’re not a member of the content marketing team, content marketing isn’t your job. So figure out how to best leverage the time of people who have little to spare. For example, maybe Paul, your VP of product, just doesn’t have time to write your next piece of content. However, could you set him up with a freelance writer who interviews him for 30 minutes and ghost writes the content on his behalf?

4) Motivate them anyway you can

Most people have some sort of competitive side to them. Appeal to that competitive nature anyway that you can. At OpenView, for example, we’ve done so by hosting a weekly competition to see who can drive the most traffic through their blog. At the end of each week, the winner is awarded the highly coveted title of the “blog hog,” complete with statue (see image) and bragging rights for the week. It’s a silly (and free) tactic, but it’s been incredibly effective.

The key to a successful content marketing team isn’t having dozens of people on the payroll. It’s leveraging the people within your organization and putting their skills and talents to use.

Over the past few months I have noticed an uptick in individuals who utilize LinkedIn as their resume, and now it looks as though we need to be concerned about the Twesume. A Twesume consists of stripping your resume down to a mere 140 characters allotted by Twitter. The term was coined in 2008 by Richard Skaare, a communications consultant. Skaare argued, “forced brevity sharpens the mind and quickens the soul.”

Forced brevity does allow for an element of simplicity and accuracy when delivering information — you really need to boil all elements down to the most important aspect. No fluff. No flowery language. These elements I like. But this is no elevator pitch, this is you and your experience in 140 characters. I am not buying it.

Here is an example I came across while researching Twesumes:

“John Smith: Performance Consultant & Corporate Trainer. 20+ years Training & Development experience. Seeking a challenging position in the Contact Center industry.”

Is it just me, or does this read like an objective at the top of someone’s resume? I do not want to click the link to your resume, because in effect, you have given me no reason to. 140 characters is not enough space to show your experience, personality and objective. 140 characters just seems lazy.

Beyond that, here are three additional reasons submitting a Twesume may be a bad idea:

1. It may save you time as an applicant, but it’s actually more work for HR: The advice across the board is to include a link to your actual resume, but whatever happened to applying through a company’s website and including your cover letter, resume, and filling out an application? HR needs this information anyway, so by tweeting your resume you are only adding unnecessary steps.
2. Your Twitter feed may not be the best vehicle for a good, professional first impression: Think about what you have tweeted and whom you follow and the pictures you have up on Twitter — is all that something you want a potential employer to see? You have less control over your first impression when you create your Twesume and tweet it out.
3. The lifetime of a Tweet is measured in seconds: Think about the sheer volume of Twitter traffic. It is much more likely that your Twesume will be buried in someone’s Twitter feed, or overlooked, or deleted.

The Twesume concerns me as much as the LinkedIn resume. It appears the workforce is taking short cuts to attain jobs, and that is personally not a quality I want in the employees at my company. I want candidates who take the time to write a personalized (albeit brief) cover letter that shows me they know what my firm does. I assume — at least to some extent — every other hiring manager would want the same.

140 characters will get you noticed if you are a Kardashian, but not if you are applying for a VP of Sales role. It is important that the workforce continue to create resumes that showcase experience. But if somehow, despite all this, you still have your heart set on creating a Twesume do yourself and the hiring manager a favor and follow up with a regular resume submission to the company website.

Let’s not get lazy here, folks.

What are your thoughts on the Twesume?

Here are thee tips to ensure that your internship program is not only valuable to the student, but valuable to the company and to your team as well.

3 Tips to Improve Your Internship Program and Boost Its Impact

1) Give Interns Meaningful Work

Do your company and your interns a favor and assign them real work that will allow them to use the skills they have, acquire new skills, and work on something that will have a real impact. In doing this, your team becomes more productive and your intern(s) get valuable experience.

You can assign interns backlogged projects or add them to a current project that may need an extra set of eyes — just make sure that you clearly explain how the project will make an impact to the company, the client, or the team.

2) Schedule Check-in Meetings

As soon as the intern starts, get a check-in meeting on the calendar and stick to it. This could be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly — whatever works for you.

Use this time to discuss the intern’s progress, anything he or she could work on, and tasks he or she does really well. Also, be sure to allow the intern to bring any issues or impediments to the table. This should be an open feedback discussion to foster improvement on both sides.

3) Conduct Formal Evaluations at the End of the Internship

Create evaluation forms for both the intern and the company. At the end of the internship, the mentor should evaluate the intern’s improvements and success throughout their time with the company. Additionally, the intern should evaluate the company, the team, and the work he or she was given.

In an exit interview, review these evaluations and discuss any questions and/or concerns on either side. Both parties can use these evaluations to refine best practices and improve.

Bottom Line: Interns Are a Terrific Resource — Make Sure You Fully Appreciate and Get the Most Out of Their Value

By treating interns like real employees and implementing a strong feedback loop, they will get the experience they are looking for and your company will get extra employees for a few months. It’s a win/win situation!

What tips would you add to this list that have helped you improve your internship program?

1. “Why waste a sentence saying nothing?” -Seth Godin, Best-Selling Author

2. “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.” -Leo Burnett, Advertising Executive

3. “Don’t invent a product and then go searching for an audience (‘Accountants will love this!’). It almost never works. Instead, focus on the group of people you want to serve.” -Dorie Clark, Strategy Consultant and Author

4. “First, earn an audience. Second, nurture a community. Third, empower a network.” -Chris Brogan, CEO & President of Human Business Works

5. ”The urgent can drown out the important.” -Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo

6. “Be specific enough to be believable and universal enough to be relevant.” -Ann Handley, CCO of MarketingProfs.com

7. “Value the positive voice. It’s too easy only to focus on the negative. You need to make time to thank customers who love what you do.” -Scott Stratten, President of Un-Marketing

8. “Above all, you want to create something you’re proud of.” -Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group

9. “You most likely have enough content. First look at stopping some things that aren’t working and reallocating those resources to quality content initiatives.” -Joe Pulizzi, Executive Director of Content Marketing Institute

10. “Whether your business is comprised of three founders or a growing team of sales, marketing, and product development people, everyone should participate in the content marketing process.” -Marcus Sheridan, Founder of The Sales Lion

Photos Credits: Seth Godin Photo by Technotheory | Marissa Mayer Photo by Adam Tinworth |  | Richard Branson Photo by Gulltaggen

Do you have any favorite inspirational marketing quotes to add?

What is Sample Procurement and How Does it Work?

Sample procurement is the process of paying a vendor to recruit respondents for a primary research project from one of their respondent panels that they maintain and sell access to as a service. Sample vendors specialize in recruiting and maintaining individuals that can be leveraged by researchers to answer research questions. Each vendor specializes in one or more types of target populations. These can be broader panels like a business to consumer panel (B2C), business to business panel (B2B), and political panels or very targeted specific panels like a panel of cardiologists at public hospitals, a developer panel, etc.

Procuring sample is a simple exercise. The key to success is identifying the best fit vendors for the target audience(s) you are trying to reach with your research. A great place to start for identifying an appropriate panel provider is the Greenbook, which provides a list of 71 online panel providers and a short description.

The only other difficult part is getting your survey programmed and compliant with a sample vendor’s requirements.

6 Factors to Consider When Designing a Survey

1. Most sample vendors are open to you using any survey tool as long as it enables redirects. However, it is important to ask. Having the ability to quota is also a bonus for controlling the number for responses, but it is not necessary.
2. Sample vendors will generally not allow you to require a respondent to provide their name or company name as this violates their confidentiality terms of their panel membership.
3. Sample vendors generally will charge you additional money to ask respondents if they would be willing to do a follow-up with you.
4. Sample vendors charge a per-completion cost which is a function of size of population, difficulty to access, expected incidence rate, length of study, and incentive level.
5. Many vendors will offer to field a test to evaluate the feasibility and/or expected cost of research study. It is a good idea to take them up on this as it will provide you with a better sense of the feasibility and actual cost to complete your study.
6. Having more screener questions will lead to lower incidence rates and higher costs per a completion. It is also important to review the language and test these screener questions for biasing that may cause low incidence rates.

5 Factors to Determine Whether You Should Purchase Sample for a B2B Market Research Project

• Time Horizon: One major benefit of purchasing sample is it generally is a very fast way of getting answers to your research questions.
• Target Completions: The more completions you are looking for, the more difficult it will be to recruit these individuals directly.
• Difficulty Reaching Audience: Some audiences are notoriously hard to reach due to the high level compensation they expect, the fact that they are heavily burdened by research targeting or sales targeting, or because they are simply very busy. These factors will make utilizing sample more attractive because do-it-yourself recruitment will likely have very low yields and become very time consuming.
• Financial Resource Constraints: Purchasing sample can be very expensive. Depending on the accessibility of the target audience, there may be other ways to recruit the target audience in a timely manner that won’t break the wallet. Generally speaking, this will be the case with less difficult to reach target audiences.
• Human Capital Constraints: Recruiting research respondents does not come easy. In fact, it is really time consuming. So you will need to have time to do so if you elect to not purchase sample. It is not a big deal to recruit a handful of participants as you can usually draw from the team’s networks, but it becomes much more difficult as you increase the number of completions or interviews you wish to complete.

Now you know how to evaluate whether or not if sample is a good respondent recruitment option to consider for your B2B research study.

If you decide to recruit your panel independent of a sample provider, I recommend reading an earlier blog post I wrote on 5 tips to improve the effectiveness of your research respondent recruitment.

Passive candidates are those that are currently working and not actively applying to job openings or seeking alternative employment.

When reaching out to passive candidates about a job opportunity through various channels, there are four things you need to keep in mind to tailor your message effectively.

4 Tips for Recruiting Passive Candidates

1) It’s Not About You

“Hi my name is Katy and I’m a recruiter…”

If you open your email to a passive candidate by spewing out info on a company or a job description, chances are the person won’t need to be told you’re a recruiter. Instead of introducing yourself and making the message about how YOU need to fill a position, start off by making it about the candidate from the get-go.

“I noticed your extensive experience working with Java and back-end technologies. I took time to review your portfolio as well, and was impressed with your recent projects.”

By opening with messaging about why you reached out to the candidate, he or she is more likely to stop, read your email, and get back to you. Make sure that your emails and other messaging are personalized and custom-created for each and every candidate.

2) It Is About Using “You”

You have to remember passive candidates are currently working, and it may be more challenging for them to picture themselves at a different company.

When describing the job in your message, instead of being abstract and explaining that, “This person will work with…” try using “You will be working with…”

By adding “You” to the message, candidates will be more apt to see themselves performing in that job function.

3) Close with Confidence

At this point you’ve explained why you reached out, you pitched the company, and you explained what the candidate could do and expect in this specific role. Now what?

Don’t end a great message with a passive, “perhaps we can talk sometime this week.” Try setting a specific time with something like, “Let’s talk briefly this week — how does Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning work for you?”

4) Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up

You’ve strategically pieced together a personalized, specific message to a candidate. You hit send and eagerly wait for the thankful response the candidate is bound to rush back to you with asap. Considering the perfect message you sent, how could they not?

Wake-up call: You need to follow up. Otherwise, the the time and energy you spent reaching out to the candidate will be a complete waste. I usually do a three-strike rule. After three messages sent to a candidate without any response, I can assume they are definitely not interested.

Bottom Line

Creating effective messaging for passive candidates may take a bit more time, but the thoughtfulness will most certainly pay off more than the typical “shotgun” approach. Try these methods to improve your success in recruiting passive candidates.

Have you had success recruiting passive candidates? What tips and tactics have you used?

Many marketers need to face up to it — your marketing department is doing the same old stale marketing activities while the best marketers are producing stunning results.
When you cut down to it, you’re like the emperor who isn’t wearing any clothes, denying the obvious truth that your wardrobe of marketing tactics and strategy lacks any substance or — maybe even worse — is terribly outdated.

Assuming that you have the right whole product, product packaging, and pricing, your wardrobe may in fact date back to the 1990s, comprised of product collateral and data sheets. Maybe you supplement it with a white paper or two a quarter, put up a relatively static website, go to some industry trade shows, and rely on your advertising firm and PR firm to help you to generate demand.

The good news is that your cause isn’t hopeless. In this post, I’ll lay out an updated 8-piece wardrobe that will have you stunning the market in no time!

Here are the 8 critical pieces of a productive marketing framework you need to try on and get fitted for right away:

1) A Firm Grasp of Your Go-to-Market Targets and Your Leverage Points with Them

This includes an understanding of:

• your customer segmentation
• your buyers’ journeys (most importantly their sticking points and your leverage points)
• who influences your buyers
• the best marketing channels you can use to reach your buyers
• the best sales channels you can use to reach your buyers
• the ecosystem partners you can use to accelerate your market development
• the competitive messaging you can use that best resonates with your market targets

Note: OpenView has an eBook on customer segmentation that outlines some basic approaches, and upcoming eBooks on the general topic of understanding your market targets are on the way.

2) A Creative Content Factory

This entails creating compelling content daily, packaging it in different ways (blogs, articles, infographics, reports, podcasts, webcasts, videos, etc.) recycling and creating larger pieces of content (eBooks, e-learning, content sites, free downloads, games, apps, etc.). Most importantly, the content should be created to address a specific go-to-market goal and you should ensure there is enough content created to successfully achieve that goal (the goal for most of your content is to get your targets to “opt in” to ongoing marketing activities, so each piece of content should have conversion mechanisms built into it).

I use the term creative content factory because you need to get creative in order to stun. You need to be creative in your design, visuals, and words, but you also need to get creative in topics, perspectives, how you amplify your messages, the content choices that you have, and everything else that you do with your content!

Note: Keep an eye out for OpenView’s upcoming free content factory eBook. Sign up for our weekly “tips and tricks” newsletter to be notified when it comes out.

3) An Inbound Contact Factory

Simply creating creative, high quality content isn’t enough. You also need to ensure your market targets are able to easily find it by posting your content to inbound marketing channels — your website, search engines, social media sites, forums, and content specific locations such as eBook sites, infographic sites, etc.).  The goal of your inbound contact factory is to be found and for your targets to “opt-in” to your ongoing marketing efforts, so make sure that each contact point has conversion mechanisms built into it.

4) A Real-Time Online Presence

Your content should bring your company to life and help you engage with people who want to interact. This can be as simple as monitoring and responding to social media, but a more sophisticated online presence will have a chat feature on your website that allows your visitors to chat with you in real time. This is a tremendous tactic that many companies have been quite successful with.

5) An Outbound Contact Factory

You put a lot of effort into creating great content. Setting up your content to be found (inbound marketing) in a good first step, but you should also proactively find and reach out to your audience, building relationships with them using outbound contact techniques. These include:

• Outbound marketing to create market target awareness, interest, and, hopefully even sales. This is similar to setting up for inbound marketing, but it generally involves paying to make the contacts with your targets. This is a traditional advertising/events activity and is aimed at stimulating awareness, interest, and getting your targets to opt-into connecting with you and allowing you to market to them. Note: OpenView also has a Marketing Channel Discovery eBook that can help you find some great channels (it can also help you find inbound marketing channels and influencers, as well).
  

• Relationship marketing to your prospects (buying roles). This is one of the best ROI initiatives for marketers, as it is an outbound approach that targets people who have already shown interest in you (tip: another great way to market to people who have already shown interest is to turn on a great remarketing campaign). The industry calls this “lead nurturing,” which is a terrible term in my view. Relationship marketing is all about reaching out to your market targets (who have opted into your program) and sending them compelling pieces of content and special offers that will provide them with value and also help them to move to the next point in their “buying journey”.  

• Relationship marketing to your customers (both user and buyer roles). More advanced relationship marketing programs extend their efforts to customers to help them get more value out of your products and services, assist them in renewing, and encourage them to develop their relationship with you (and perhaps even become customer evangelists). There are several companies that have started developing powerful SaaS systems to help you manage your customer advocates including Zuberance and AdvocateHub. The basic idea is to help your customers become advocates and then turn your advocates into marketers for you!

• Relationship marketing to your sales influencers (influencer marketing). The industry used to call this PR and many PR firms have evolved to do great work with the long tail of influencers who are in every product market. The key point is that there are a lot of individuals that can be “turned on” to your ideas as well as your products and services and who can become marketers for you if you make them part of your community and/or you become part of theirs. They can also help you by creating content for your content marketing efforts and also by giving you feedback on your content as well as your products and services. Note: We put together a great eBook on influencer marketing that explains how to attack this topic.
  

• Optimizing direct sales contacts. This is a more traditional marketing role, but something that is still under-optimized in many young companies. The basic idea is to figure out what material you can produce that will help your sales group at each step in the buying journey for each of the major buyers. The salesperson’s role is to help the buyers buy. The marketer’s role is to help arm the salesperson with the best content to help the buyers buy. A secondary role for each salesperson is to help the marketers by getting their prospects to opt in to your relationship marketing program and also to keep accurate records in the sales contact system so that the relationship marketing program has much more relevance to your prospects.

• Optimizing indirect sales channels contacts. When you use indirect sales channels, there are extremely valuable approaches that the marketer can put in place to support the efforts, including programs to sign up, on-ramp, and support the channel partners, programs to help the channel partners with their marketing and sales efforts, and even programs to market to the channel partner’s customers and market targets. This is pretty specialized for each type of channel partner (very difficult to go into in a single blog post), but if you are using indirect sales channels, you should consider these different angles for outbound marketing to and through your channel partners. Your channel partners generally need all 8 pieces to make them stunning, and you are in a great position to help them and to get them to sell much more of your products!

6) A Friction-Free Conversion-Optimization Lab

If you have the basics of the first five pieces in place, this is a great piece to focus on (note: many earlier companies need to get their basic content and contacts in place before they start fine-tuning).

Essentially, what you are trying to do with every piece of content at every contact point is to move your market target forward in their journey. The further you move them forward, the better. The problem is that you need to understand if you are moving them forward, and you need to understand exactly how changes to your content and changes to your contact (both inbound and outbound) impact that movement.

There is only one way to do this (other than getting lucky) — you need to determine the flow of your market targets through their journey and then you need to measure how that flow is changing as you make changes to your content and contacts. What you are attempting to do is to tune everything you are doing to make it easier and easier for your market targets to get through their journey and achieve the goals that you have for them.

7) A Campaign Strategy that Choreographs and Aligns Your Marketing Factories

The idea is to show the market a regular rhythm, to make the market feel the momentum of your company, and to show the market something new periodically. The ideal rhythm is somewhere between enough to get your market targets’ attention, but not too often to the point that you become boring or annoying.

The simplest campaign strategy for young companies is to have either a quarterly or three-times-a-year product release, and to use the release as a vehicle to coordinate a large chunk of your marketing activities toward a) content related to the release; and b) contacts related to the release.

Other campaign strategies could be coordinated around:

• new large customer/partner wins on a regular basis
• the number of customers that you have each period
• the amount of usage growth for you product
• the revenue growth for your company
• anything else that the market will perceive as interesting so that it will help you amplify your messages

8) A Brand Perception and Competitive Positioning that Makes You Look Stunning!

The best way to gain traction with your market targets with the prior seven pieces is to coordinate them in a way that hits the mark and sets you apart.

Brand and competitive positioning are your coordination vehicles! They get measured based on what the participants in your target market think, feel, say, and do as it relates to your company. The prior seven points are all about content and contact with your targets, so if you want to have a particular brand perception and competitive positioning, you need to:

• know what you are aiming for (your brand and competitive positioning aspirations)
• make sure that all of your content and contact is aligned with those brand aspirations

Clearly, your whole product will also need to be aligned with the brand perception and positioning, as well.

There You Have It: An 8-Piece Marketing Framework / Wardrobe that Will Have You Stunning in No Time!

Note: At OpenView Labs, we spend a lot of time trying to determine the best approaches that our portfolio companies can use to grow their businesses. This post describes our current thinking regarding marketing, which has changed dramatically over the last several years. We would really like to get your feedback on this post, including your thoughts on the following:

• Are there important aspects of your marketing that don’t fit into this 8-piece framework?
• Are there pieces that you think are more or less important?
• Is there a better way of framing out today’s marketing opportunities?

There’s certainly no shortage of metrics to access to measure your blog’s performance. Regardless of the analytics software you use, keeping track of what matters can get tricky. To make it easier, here are three blog metrics that can help you spot opportunities in key areas. The following will shed some light on where readers are coming from, which keywords they use, and what content they find most engaging.

1) Referral Traffic

Knowing which websites drive traffic to your site is important. But what’s really impactful is understanding how each of these referral sites stack up against one another in terms of a specific important activity — let’s say engagement, for example.

Looking at your referral traffic through the lens of engagement (number of page views and/or average time on site) are two filters you can apply to the referral traffic report that will provide you with this valuable information. Here’s how to set up custom goals with Google Analytics.

In the referral report above, you can see referral site, visits (segmented), and a custom goal named “Engaged Visits,” which is a combination of pageviews and average time on site.

This report can help you determine which channels you should be prioritizing and driving targeted content to, accordingly.

2) Keyword Analysis

The queries report in Google Analytics displays a list keywords that are driving traffic to your site. With some keyword analysis, you can also measure pages with the most unique views by search engine and/or keyword, all in relation to custom goals such as the engagement goal described above or a more specific conversion goal like newsletter subscribers.

This report is especially informative because not only can it help illustrate high-value keywords, but it also lets you know if your SEO efforts are on track.

The keyword analysis report above highlights the article and keyword in relation to both engagement and transactional metrics. This report really puts my SEO efforts in perspective and allows me to get more creative with calls-to-actions on pages with high inbound search traffic.

3) Content Engagement

Reviewing content by highest volume of pageviews only tells one side of the story. In order to really know if your content marketing strategy is working, you need to review your blog articles in relation to a given set of goals. It may sound like a no-brainer but without some thought about specific goals, the analytics may not give you the level of measurement you need in order see the big picture.

This next report illustrates specific blog pages in relation to engagement metrics along with a particular conversion goal. Not only can I see pageviews, I can also tell which pages readers find engaging and how my CTAs are working. It also allows me to see if the article is bringing in the kind of qualified traffic I’m looking for.

The report above quickly tells me which content is driving traffic and if that traffic is doing what the content was created to accomplish.

These three blog metric reports will hopefully help you identify how your blog is performing against metrics that matter most to your organization. To get started with integrating these reports in Google Analytics, check out these downloadable customer reports.

Remember, you’ll still need to identify what your goals are and customize these reports in order to fit those goals. However, once you have that, you’ll be well on your way to tracking blog metrics that matter.

What other metrics and custom reports are you tracking to measure your blog’s performance?

This is big news for us here at OpenView Labs, having worked closely with Mashery since OpenView made its first investment in 2011. But the acquisition isn’t just a good sign for us as investors, it’s also a vote of confidence by a couple of old-school companies that the Application Programming Interface (API) is the future of application infrastructure.

In a world where internet access is ubiquitous and more and more applications are being accessed through multiple clients, API’s aren’t just for mashups anymore, they’re core architecture. This has big financial implications on anyone who has hitched their wagon to the standard.

Who is that exactly?

Glad you asked. While there are thousands of companies that offer and consume APIs, really only a handful task themselves with developing and building functionality on top of the standard itself. Some are large companies like IBM with a relatively small API product.

But it’s the pure-play API companies that really stand to gain from Intel’s vote of confidence, and that may see a spike in interest from potential acquirers.

7 Companies in the API Ecosystem Set to Catch a Ride on the Wave of M&A Interest

Apigee

Apigee may not have taken kindly to Mashery CEO Oren Michels’s comments that they are ‘Pepsi’ to Mashery’s ‘Coke,’ but their close competition actually makes Apigee the biggest external beneficiary of the Intel-Mashery deal. They’ve raised capital and grown employee count aggressively in the past year or so, and I have to think they’re looking for a similar result.

Apigee should have plenty of suitors. Many legacy hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell are trying to reinvent themselves as software companies, and are still mostly on the outside looking in at the API movement.

3scale and Apiphany

3scale has been around a bit longer than Apiphany, but I group them together because in contrast to Apigee and Mashery, they’re lighter, self-serve API management solutions relative to the enterprise-level agreements that Apigee and Mashery typically shoot for. While their revenue picture may be a bit behind Apigee and Mashery, the model has great potential as APIs move downstream into the SMB segment.

ProgrammableWeb

As the most comprehensive directory of APIs on the internet and a central authority for API-related news and commentary, PW has not only helped accelerate the API movement but has also been one of the only sources documenting it. For instance, at last count PW’s 8,922-strong directory of APIs is up 56% from the same date last year. It’s not too much of a reach to see PW and its somewhat surprising owner, Alcatel-Lucent, realize some market value from the increased prominence of APIs.

IFTTT, Zapier, and Mashape

All ~10 person startups, this group is the new generation of VC-backed efforts to make APIs more accessible to the masses, blending the flexibility of APIs with consumer-grade usability. By democratizing the marketplace for APIs, they‘ll increase the reach of APIs and the benefit to their creators. They’re very early stage – with the biggest, IFTTT having raised $7m — but appear to be in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the growing use of APIs.

****

Are all of these companies headed for an acquisition on the scale of Mashery? Probably not.

But as the movement continues to turn the heads of big players with deep pockets, the funding and acquisition opportunities available to this ecosystem of companies should continue to strengthen.

I know I’ll be watching.

Make them stop chirping!

I had a dream about Twitter last week. It wasn’t good or bad, just literal, which is the worst kind of dream. I was thinking about something while asleep that I spend a significant portion of my day thinking about while awake and that, my friends, is depressing.

While I hope I’m the only one counting chirping blue birds before I fall asleep, I doubt I’m the only one feeling a little overwhelmed by the volume of social media opportunities and output. What’s the best way to manage the constant stream of information and the myriad platforms available?

To be honest, this is something I still need to get better at (obviously). Social media prioritization and time management can be notoriously difficult — anyone on Twitter or Facebook can probably testify to what I like to call the “social media black hole.” It will suck you right in. You settle in at your computer, cup of coffee in hand, and before you know it two hours has gone by, your coffee is cold, and your eyes hurt from staring at a glowing screen. This is even more difficult when social media is an important part of your job and your company’s marketing strategy. So how do you combat it?

Here are three steps to keep you swimming in the social media ocean without drowning in it.

1. Do an audit of your social media presence and then prioritize.

As with most things in life, you have to understand how you’re already doing before you can get better. A social media “audit” and subsequent prioritization can help you understand how you’re currently spending your time and where you can improve. I think this is especially important if you’re managing social media for your company, since all of the outlets and platforms can quickly feel overwhelming.

An audit can be as simple as a Word or Excel document naming the channels, who manages them, and where the majority of your time is spent. It can then go further, listing the current community numbers, interactions, and site referrals for each. This should give you a good idea of where you should be spending more (or less) time.

A word of caution: just because a social media channel isn’t delivering yet doesn’t mean it isn’t worth your time. Do some competitor research and see where the most robust communities are. Maybe you haven’t been utilizing Pinterest to its full potential or perhaps you need to spend less time on Tumblr and more on Google Plus. Experiment a bit to see what works, but don’t be afraid to reprioritize as necessary.

2. Make the most of lists and groups.

This is something I’ve vowed to focus more on this quarter. It takes time, but I think it’s one of the most effective ways to filter through the social media noise and better target your conversations and content. Break your Twitter connections into lists by specialty and track member tweets. Share their content and reach out to specific people when you have content you think they might be interested in. Explore tools like Triberr as another good way of connecting to like-minded individuals.

The same goes for LinkedIn Groups and Google Plus Communities — create your own and invite people whose opinions you care about. Join groups focused around content that interests you. There’s no need to consume content from everyone at once.

3. Set aside social media time (and social media down time!).

Set aside a block of time each day to focus on social media — I recommend trying for earlier in the day if possible. Whether it’s 15 minutes or two hours, this is your time to respond, interact, post, and schedule. If you’re managing multiple accounts and not using a scheduling tool like HootSuite, I don’t know how you’re staying sane. Having one place to preschedule posts and browse all feeds, mentions, conversations, etc. will help you get the most out of that block of time.

You need to get over the fear of missing something. Yes, social media is 24/7, but you are not. You still need uninterrupted work time, even if social media is your main focus. If you don’t log off, when are you going to find the time to strategize and refocus as needed?

Now I want to hear from you — how do you deal with social media overload? Any tactics you’ve found helpful?

Terry Myerson, Coporate VP of Windows Phone

Microsoft Embraces the Startup Mentality for its Windows Phone Strategy

Last week, an article in TechCrunch highlighted comments from Microsoft’s Windows Phone Chief Terry Myerson about how they approach the mobile space. He referred to his team as a “scrappy albeit well funded startup” operating within Microsoft. Before you laugh, it’s worth noting that while they can’t really identify directly with all of the hardships that startups face, it is true that Myerson himself was at the helm of a startup that was acquired by Microsoft in 1997.

But with Windows Phone is Microsoft really embracing a startup mentality? And, more importantly, is it working?

As I’ve discussed in a prior review of Windows Phone, there are some definite holes in the product right now. Overall, they’ve struggled to gain share in the market, and are positioning themselves as a solid Number 3 option behind iOS and Android. That said, it’s far too early to count Microsoft out just yet.

Here are three ways the Microsoft Windows Phone strategy is taking pages from the startup playbook in its hunt for a competitive advantage.

1) Targeting Smaller Markets Its Competitors Are Vulnerable In

While Microsoft has publicly said they are focused US market, they are committed to picking the segments where they can get traction in other countries. According to IDC Windows Phone is outpacing iPhone sales in Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine.

Specifically, they have identified markets where smartphone purchases are not subsidized by the Cell providers. Since the full price of Windows Phone handsets are significantly lower than competitors, they have an inherent price advantage in those markets. Even though Microsoft has near unlimited resources, they’ve chosen to go the path of least resistance in terms of gaining market share.

2) Focusing on Core Competency and Leveraging Partners

They are relying on their hardware partners HTC and Nokia to build attractive phones. While Apple and even Google have built their own phones, Microsoft is unwilling to commit to building their own phone yet. They leveraged the strong brand presence of both Nokia and HTC in Asia to leverage the customer bases these partners already have.

While there have been rumors of a Surface Phone, Microsoft has been quick to shoot these rumors down. They are concerned about damaging their partner relationships and prefer to focus on their core competency: the Windows Phone operating system.

3) Adopting the Role of the Consumer-Focused Underdog

Terry Myerson has generally avoided confronting Apple and Android directly in his public comments. He attended the Dive Into Mobile Conference recently to talk about Windows Phone, and was asked to comment on the competition.

When asked about where Microsoft sees opportunities to go after their competitors, he simply said that Windows Phone was focused on the consumer.

However, while he had the audience’s attention, he did “hesitantly” jab Apple as lacking a sense of urgency and called Android “a mess”. Not exactly subtle and his comments created a buzz in the tech circle.

With that statement, he positioned Windows Phone’s core mission as serving the customer and separately implied Apple and Android were losing focus.

While Microsoft and “startup” sounds so contradictory, they are utilizing some of the tactics startups do to get traction in the hotly contested smartphone industry. While it is too soon to tell whether the Microsoft Windows Phone strategy will pay off, it’s interesting to see the behemoth compete in an industry where it is the clear underdog.

What do you think? Does Windows Phone stand a chance in the market? Is Microsoft’s attempt to adopt a startup mentality a winning strategy?

How can you drive more quality traffic and top candidates to your careers site? SEO isn’t just for marketers, it’s for recruiters, too.

Think about it. Any piece of content that your talent acquisition function creates — whether is it is a careers page, a job description, or a blog — is used to market your company with the goal of reaching quality job candidates, whether they are passive or active seekers.

But is your talent acquisition team thinking about SEO when they create that content? Unless they are contributing to a blog or article, probably not. For career pages and job postings, we, as recruiters, are typically focusing on describing the company, position, responsibilities, and core skills required.

Encouraging your recruiters to develop a working knowledge of SEO can allow your careers page or job descriptions to stand out from the crowd in terms of organic search. Not only will it drive more targeted traffic to you site, it’s also free.

Below are a few simple tips to get started on your recruitment SEO strategy:

1. First, research SEO keywords and phrases specific to your industry, market, and target job seekers. It’s important to know what keywords and phrases will yield the best results. Put yourself in the mind of your target audience — the job seeker — when researching and writing content for the strongest results.
2. Incorporate the language you found in your research into your content. This should be your content on the careers page, job descriptions, and any other recruitment content. Please keep in mind that you need to strike a balance with SEO — don’t overwhelm the job description with high-yield SEO or buzzwords, because your recruitment content will be marked as spam and/or the content will sound unnatural to your audience. You also do not want a standard job description with buzzwords that won’t stand out to job seekers. Use SEO keywords in the description, while staying true to what exactly the job description should be. Check out these tips for developing high impact job descriptions.
3. Make use of the job title. If the internal title is funky — because, let’s be honest, some are — then be sure to list what the “normal” title for this type of position is, as well. More often than not, job seekers are searching via job title when they actively seek out new opportunities, so this is definitely important.
4. Add links to other pages. A job description or career page can link to a number of different pages while still being relevant. Use links that will give the job seeker a glimpse into who you are as a company — this can include links to awards, company news, industry news, company videos, etc.

It’s time to think about SEO in terms of your talent acquisition strategy. Want to learn more about SEO for recruiters? Check out these three expert blogs.

What other SEO tips do you have for recruiters?

This week, I want to cover five ways you can improve your marketing clarity and effectiveness by staying sharp and narrowing your focus to the following very specific points:

1) Focus on a Specific Component, Step, or Stage of the Marketing Program

A marketing program is often anything but simplistic. It typically consists of:

• multiple, concurrently executed campaigns
• a variety of marketing channels
• different types of targeted prospects at varying stages of awareness, each with their own concerns and interests
• a host of different marketing tools to execute and measure impact

Therefore, it would be overwhelming to try to improve everything at once. It would be overwhelming even just to try improving a particular marketing channel or campaign all at once.

To make a dent in the whole program, you will have to choose your battle and pick what you want to focus on first. Ex: The traffic of inbound web leads from the website, or the interactions with your company’s official social media outlets on Twitter or Facebook.

2) Focus on a Specific Type of Activity or Specific Conversion Step

To turn the exercise into something that is actually measurable, you need to focus on a specific activity or outcome that is measurable and is meaningful. For example, let’s say the generation of new inbound web leads relies on three specific conversion points throughout the website. Your first step should be determining which of those conversion points is the most crucial or needs the most improvement (where the largest number of your prospects are getting stuck). Focus on that one conversion point only. Test, iterate, test, iterate, until you are able to see positive results.

It is important to keep your focus as sharp and targeted as possible. Ex: “Improving social media engagement” is too broad and vague. Something like, “increasing the immediate level of engagement with the company’s next marketing announcement on Facebook” is better.

The key to successfully identifying these specific targets for improvement is to think of them as “sticking points” or “bottlenecks” that are hampering your marketing operations, or “leakage” points that are draining away your marketing investments. Defined in those terms, you should identify the most important leverage points that enable better performance for that particular marketing activity or channel.

3) Focus on the Output for a Specific Market Segment and the Target Prospect in that Segment

This is a further filter that lets you better measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the improvement steps. As noted in my previous blog posts, aiming to please a heterogeneous group of targets is a futile exercise that will also confuse any analytical insights you might gain from the whole process. Therefore, it is important to be specific in terms of the content and targets of the marketing activities you want to improve.

Are you aiming your efforts at a particular target segment prospect, target segment customers, or target segment partners, etc? Only by being able to answer those questions with some level of clarity and confidence are you able to have a sharp enough focus for your marketing investment.

4) Focus on SMART Goals that Drive Impact for Doing Business in the Target Segment

Now that you have really defined the target of your improvement exercise, it is important to set SMART goals that motivate you and your team to actually go out and generate results with real impact. Not only do your goals need to be SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely), they should also correlate with ultimate business goals. They are better as “outcome-driven” goals rather than “activity goals” (aka “quota”), because activity or volume-based goals can be achieved without truly challenging the status quo and making a meaning improvement.

5) Focus on a Closed Loop Process

This should be a process in which improvement steps are first planned, prioritized, and executed, then measured and evaluated against prior performance or benchmarks. Once adopted or rejected, they should then used to generate additional improvement steps or ideas, and the process should repeat. This is an extremely important process to get right. It also requires a lot of discipline to adhere to, especially when marketers can’t wait to execute on their ideas, without ensuring that the impact of those ideas can be measured and replicated.

This all may sound like a lot, but successful marketing organizations have always incorporated most if not all of these principles in how they execute and strategize. And so can you.

Which do you think is better — a small, tightly focused marketing effort or a large, spread-out approach?

Applying and interviewing for a job can be a stressful process. Despite advanced preparation as well as strong performance during the interview, the outcome may result in you not getting the job. Why, you ask? Of course, there are always simple explanations and reasons that are beyond your control:

• the role may get filled internally
• other individuals may be identified as more closely matching the skill set or requirements of the job

However, there are cases in which you could have done something differently, and one or more of the following is to blame for you being eliminated from the process:

• your appearance
• your behavior during the interview
• yes, your social media profile(s)

Here are five job interview tips to reflect on that could potentially improve your chances of success the next time around.

1) Exude Confidence

Demonstrating confidence at the beginning and during the interview is an important facet to winning over the interviewer(s). A firm handshake along with eye contact and a smile serve as positive reinforcements, signaling to the interviewer(s) that you are the right candidate for the job.

If you are nervous during the beginning of the interview, it might be worth making some small talk as a method to ease into the process. During the interview, it is important to demonstrate that you are the right candidate by highlighting your strengths with examples, and being explicit about your achievements.

2) Know Your Worth

When asked about your salary expectations, be clear about what you are currently making, and what you will require if you choose to leave your current organization. If you don’t ask for it, chances are you likely won’t get it.

It is important not to undersell yourself — employers want to know that you are aware of your own self-worth and confident about your skills and abilities.

Be vocal about your total compensation expectations, but also demonstrate reasonableness. If the company will offer you equity instead of a higher base, chances are this could be a better option. Thus, don’t automatically discount the offer if the base salary does not match your requirements.

3) Address Resume Gaps

Gaps may exist on your resume for several reasons including personal time off for traveling, parental leave, career transitions, ill health, etc. You should not be worried about disclosing the reasons for these gaps to your potential employers.

The key is to emphasize that your skills are up to date, and that you have taken steps to ensure that you remain competitive in the job market, irrespective of how long you may have been away.

4) Tweet and Post Responsibly

It’s understandable that people use their social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) profiles as a way to express their opinions and share pictures. However, these tools are also ways for employers to observe your character, personality, and behaviors, and they serve as another tool to evaluate whether you would be a suitable fit for their organization.

I can’t tell you the numerous times I have come across inappropriate Facebook or LinkedIn profile pictures or messages in a candidate’s Twitter feed. Make sure you think twice before posting any inappropriate material, as that could potentially hurt your chances at obtaining a job.

5) Dress Appropriately

As a female, I find it is slightly more difficult to determine how to dress when appearing for an interview than my male counterparts, who can easily pull it off with any standard suit. With the constantly changing styles and fashion trends, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the wardrobe choices! However, one important thing to note — the classic black, navy, greys, and whites will never go out of style for an interview.

Keep your style simple and chic. For you females, don’t choose bold colors for your outfit, jewelry or shoes, as that can become a distraction during the interview. Also avoid uncomfortable shoes (e.g., high heels) or mini-skirts that can potentially lead to embarrassing situations.

With these basic tips in mind you’ll be free to focus yourself on doing your research and honing the talking points that are going to establish you as a top candidate and truly set you apart. Good luck out there!

What other interviewing tips would you add to this list?

Maxwell’s Law for SaaS

When it comes down to it, what is software as a service? I believe there is merely one law that should dictate SaaS, compared to many freedoms that it offers and that companies should take advantage of: Software as a service must be packaged and sold as a service with service-level agreements (SLAs). 

In essence, a SAAS vendor is selling service levels in addition to the current and future functionality of the product. This is in contrast to selling a file of software.

The issue is quite simple if you think about snow removal (being from California and currently living in Boston, this is something that I unfortunately need to worry about). I could buy a snow removal product like a snow blower that comes with certain warranties and service associated with the product (spare parts, places to get the product fixed, etc.), or I could contract with a service provider to take care of it.

If I contract with the service, all I care about is when they come to remove the snow and how clean my driveway and walks are when they are done. I also care about the price. I don’t care about the products they use, how much labor they are using, or anything else.  Just the price and the SLA. It is exactly the same with SAAS!

The Many Freedoms SaaS Offers

I also believe there are many freedoms associated with SAAS:

1. You can put your SAAS stack wherever you determine is best for your customer. This includes running the software in your own data center(s), putting it on one or more private, virtual private, or public clouds, running it on bare metal, any operating system, or any cloud infrastructure.
2. You can architect your product however you determine is best for your customer. This could include single-tenant, multi-tenant, or any other architectural approach that will serve your customer well.
3. You can include installed software, an appliance, or anything else that is valuable to your customers as part of your offering.
4. Your software can be consumed by users any way that is best for them. This includes using thin clients, thick clients, or any other client, and your software can be consumed by other software via an API or any other interface that works well for your customer.
5. You can build any whole product by surrounding your core product with any level of “people” services that will be best for your customers. This includes strategic services, customization services, installation and configuration services, training, customer service, or any other service that address your customers’ needs.
6. You can price and bill for your software however you want, so long as it works for you and your customers.  This includes subscription pricing, one-time pricing, or any other pricing.  This includes one-time billing, annual billing, quarterly billing, monthly billing, or any other billing.
7. You can sell your product and services any way that you want. This includes direct from your website, use of inside sales, use of field sales, and/or selling through indirect sales partners, or bundling your product with other products that are sold through another vendor.
8. You can set any growth strategy for your company that you believe will make you successful. This could include building a capital-efficient company and growing/managing based on CAC ratios and magic numbers, an all out “own the market at any cost” winner-take-all strategy, or anything in between.
9. You can do anything else that you want to do that will add value to your customers and/or help you build a great business.

Yes, I would like to see you minimize complexity, minimize labor, and have a great economic model, but most importantly, I would like to see you have a great competitive advantage and build a great company. And, of course, you need the freedom to figure out what that means for your specific situation!

The reason I wanted to approach this topic is that after working with SaaS companies for almost 10 years, there is still a lot of FUD in the markets about SaaS.  Many people restrict their freedoms and that can really have an impact on your ability to build a unique and valuable whole product for your customers and build a great company.

Note: I write this post using the term SaaS because it is a popular term. I actually believe the the right term is XaaS (“Zass”) standing for “Anything-as-a-Service,” so that it includes anything that the vendor wants to string together and offer as a service with SLAs (not just software).

What do your think? Are you blindly following the unnatural “laws” of others or are you freely deciding to build a competitive advantage with a great company growth strategy?

It’s been a tragic, frightening, and surreal week in Boston, overwhelming in so many ways. The immediate aftermath of chaos and confusion following the Marathon bombings has been slowly transitioning into something else now. Interspersed among the images and stories of pain and suffering have been inspiring images and stories of the best of us responding to the worst.

One message that has resonated and been repeated and shared over and over comes from a quote from Mister Rogers:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

Looking for the Helpers

The outpouring of help and support in the wake of the horrific events in Boston on Monday has been remarkable. Here are five examples of how the tech world has responded — small, encouraging reminders of the good we’re capable of in the midst of (and in defiance of) all the bad.

1) Google Person Finder

In the confusion during the immediate aftermath of the bombings, many runners and spectators were separated from and unable to contact their loved ones. With cell phone service impacted, friends and family throughout the country were unable to reach them, as well.

As Jason Corrigan reports in an article for Search Engine Journal, Google responded by activating Google Person Finder, an open source web application the company originally developed following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

“After the two bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon,” Corrigan writes, “Google Person Finder immediately began tracking over 5,000 lost individuals.” That allowed people like Kelly Manning of Saratoga Springs, NY, to track the whereabouts of her daughter Samantha following the explosions until she was finally able to connect with her over the phone.

2) Airbnb and HomeAway

As Brian Patrick Eha reports for Entrepreneur.com, both peer-to-peer apartment-sharing platform Airbnb and vacation-rental company HomeAway set up web pages to help those stranded or in need of emergency accommodations find places to stay in Boston, while also waiving fees and encouraging Boston hosts to share their homes.

3) Technology Underwriting Greater Good (TUGG)

Boston’s tech community (and others around the country) has rallied behind a fundraising effort by TUGG, which works with technology companies, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to volunteer and make grants to local nonprofits, and Fundraise.com to help support programs working with victims of the attacks.

The response to the campaign has been incredible. By early Wednesday morning over $100K had been donated, and as of this writing the total is over $150K. Click here to learn more, make a donation, and spread the word to others.

4) The Cambridge Innovation Center and Workbar

As Curt Woodward reports for Xconomy, both the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) and co-working space Workbar have offered space to local businesses in the Back Bay that have found themselves temporarily displaced due to office damage or road closures at the crime scene.

RU a Back Bay startup without a place to work? CIC is offering refugees free space this week, fcfs. Call to arrange: 617-758-4200

— Timothy Rowe (@rowe) April 16, 2013

5) EvidenceUpload.org

There is no denying the anger, frustration, and fear knowing that the person or people who did this are still out there. As a community, we can try our best to heal and eventually we can move on, but we need answers. By this point, a suspect (or suspects) may have been identified, but Boston Police and the FBI have made it clear that they need any and all tips and evidence witnesses can provide.

According to Kyle Alspach, writing for the Boston Business Journal, the site EvidenceUpload.org has been launched by a handful of Boston-area startup entrepreneurs (including individuals at Appsembler, PostMob, and BetaLab) as a way to help witnesses to Monday’s bombings upload their mobile device images and video to investigating law enforcement officials more easily.

Personal Note

My wife works at Boston Medical Center. Over the past few days she has been amazed not only at the incredible poise, responsiveness, and coordination of the medical professionals, but also the poise, courage, and selflessness of the patients, themselves. Many have a long road of physical and emotional healing ahead of them, and yet one after another they have expressed how thankful they are of the support, how lucky they are that things weren’t worse, and they insist that doctors and staff should focus on the ones who are in worse condition and who need more help than them.

With that kind of reaction, “victims” seems like the wrong word. They are survivors. And somehow, remarkably, they are finding it within themselves to be helpers, too.

Do you know of other ways the tech world has responded in support for those impacted by the Boston Marathon tragedy? Share your notes and stories below.