My Marketing Aha Moment

For the last 10 years of my professional career I have been in the business of technically supporting sales reps as they sold hardware and software to our customers.  I was the Solution Architect.  My job was basically to make sure the sales rep didn't screw up.  In this process I had the opportunity to try to think about what was the best way to portray the product so that the customer would want to buy it from us.  Sometimes that was a chore, other times it wasn't.


In my role as a solution architect I can't tell you how many events we did over the years.  I used to run a demo lab and we would come up with ideas to get people to come see our wares and sometimes we would get people to come and sometimes we wouldn't. When nobody showed up we would blame marketing who would in turn blame sales for not inviting their customers.  Over time I think a started to notice a little "seminar fatigue" within the IT crowd and some of these events that work well years ago seemed work sometimes.  I work in the NY Metro area so on any given day a could probably attend 20 to 30 different events put on by companies.  At one of the last ones that I did we got decent attendance but it was nothing like what we had seen before. How does a business deal with that?


I have always toyed with the idea of becoming a sales rep or starting my own business but the idea of having to go out and find people to sell to made me a little nervous.  I have 6 kids so the variability of paychecks was something that I didn't want to have to think about.

So I guess you are asking what do my musings about events have to do with marketing.   I am not a marketing professional by trade but I have always been interested in the big question of How do I find the right people to sell to at the right time.  Over the last 10 plus years in sales I have seen a number of leads come in from marketing to be honest with you 99% were garbage.  And after looking at what we have been doing in the past I now know why.  Marketing has been comfortable doing things that they have always done and in the past it was very difficult to tell whether what they had done had any effect at all.  In the past couple of months I have have my eyes opened to a whole new world of how customers are now interacting with businesses that I hadn't even considered.  So when did this AHA moment hit me?

My journey started last year when I attended November 2011 CloudForce in NY where they mentioned two topics that caught my attention.

1. In the past there were very few outlets for customers to look for information about products so the job of sales was to help educate them.  We now no longer live in that age of information scarcity.  It is very abundant and everyone is an expert
2. People are using social media to connect more to information and resources and the new sales models need to understand how people are looking for the information.  

I thought I had stumbled on to a hidden gem of wisdom that I had previously not considered.  Little did I know that the leading thinkers in the marketing world have been stewing over this for a couple of years.  The traditional roads to market were not working for them.  Buying big ad campaigns and doing expensive product blitzes were having less effect.  People have also been attuned to filtering the content out there because there is just to much to deal with.  It turns out that in the past most marketing budgets were concerned with outbound campaigns that were interrupting customers (cold calling, email/spam, etc.) while the new thinking in the marketing world is inbound marketing that uses your intellect to attract customers to you by providing useful content. 
 
One of the other things that started to open my eyes to some big changes going one was actually being scanned by a marketing automation vendor in the vendor pavilion.  I wasn't particularly interested in Marketing Automation (I'm a tech guy not a marketer).  Shortly after the conference I received an email from Marketo about providing good content to their customers.  I was blown away by how prescient their advice was.  I immediately started asking if we had any marketing automation in place.  As it turns out our company used Pardot but we were in the process of evaluating different vendors software because our renewal was up.


With each new vendor I seemed to be constantly enlightened by each piece of new software and just when I think I see something that I really like I get to see another one.  It has been a great ride.  We have looked at 4 vendors  Marketo, Pardot, eTrigue, and we are starting to look at Hubspot. 

All of the vendors are relatively speaking doing the same thing.  I guess the reason for this is that there is a problem with how people were marketed to in the past.  Cold calling campaigns and email blasts with no analytics meant the it was hard to determine what was successful.  A famous comment usually attributed to Lord Leverhulme goes:

“I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half”

So from what I have seen I really like the simplicity and layout of how  eTrigue lays out its campaigns and how it reports on marketing activities and it ranks really high on my list.  I really like how Marketo tracks all customer touches with all campaigns and is able to show you when and where customers interacted with what you are doing.  Hubspot really has get me very interested because they don't just report on and give you the ability to set up campaigns and create landing pages but they use analytics to help you determine what you should be saying to get success in your campaigns.  They also give your the ability to see what your customers are doing.  One of the other features that is extremely interesting to me is there Hubspot marketplace where they integrate with other vendors products.  I work in the cloud space and as you can see from my first post I think that most software will be SaaS software so in the cloud software is king.

I am also a fan of SalesForce.com's AppExchange  and the Bitnami pre-configured cloud applications for the same reason.  The cloud vendor that provides the best integration with software will win (and some vendors have a really good head start). 

This journey of evaluating the next generation of marketing automation has been an extremely enjoyable on and I am thankful for that day in November CloudForce when I had my marketing AHA moment.