Hubspot successfully analyzed over 1 million websites, 1 million Twitter accounts, raised another $16 million, and yet they only have 1750 customers.

Did anyone else notice this?

I’ve always been impressed with Hubspot, and I have much admiration for Dharmesh Shah and the other founders.  I’ve read just about all of their stuff on inbound marketing, permission marketing, conversion tracking and other juicy stuff.  But I was shocked to read the news about their $16 million in additional funding with less than 1750 total customers.  Boy, with all of the inbound marketing webinars and conversion improvement whitepapers, it seems as though Hubspot may need to eat more of their own dog food.  Don’t get me wrong – their customer growth rate looks like the “hockey stick” we would all love to have, and a 350% growth rate in revenue is not too shabby – but I expected more than 1,700 customers.  And it looks like it takes 2-3 months to acquire 250 new customers, some of which will churn I would imagine.

After the first two rounds of funding, they’ve essentially spent $10,000 to acquire each new customer, but as you will see further below, their average annual sale is only about $6,000. As good as their product might be, I’m sure they are not counting on customers sticking around for 20 months so they can break even, so they will need to sign up more customers faster than ever to decrease their cost per acquisition and get this thing profitable – and fast.  This is the risk by taking on so much funding – how much runway do I need to get our cost per acquisition down and our lifetime value up?  They spent the first $17 mil on engineering the product, perfecting it, building brand awareness, positioning themselves as experts with endless whitepapers, webinars, videos and more, and understanding the model to where they could go and raise more money.  Surely they know for every dollar they put into inbound marketing efforts, how much revenue and profit they will get on the backend.

Now, since this is their third round of funding, their gong to have to sell for about 10X their current value so the first two VC’s get their money out of the deal, at least so I am told.  Wow!  An “SEO Company” for $335 million?  I suppose they could always go public.  Remember when Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) did that last year?  I’m sure being in a niche space where comparisons are hard to come by makes it difficult for analysts to evaluate the company, and even harder for investors to invest in.

So if a customer today is costing them around $10,000, but they are only getting $6,000 per year per customer on average, how long will this model last?  Let’s take a look at their pricing model that is directly from their website:

If you segment customers across this type of pricing model, or a “freemium” pricing model, you will find that most of them  are in the low to mid tiers, with a handful at the top tier.  You spend most of your time trying to figure out how to upsell and convert your lower-tiered customers up into your higher profit top tiers.  Let’s assume Hubspot has a 60-20-20 split here from low to high.  So of their roughly 1,750 customers, that would put 1,050 at the low tier, 350 at the mid tier, and another 350 at the top tier.  If you do the math, that’s a little over $10.5 million in annual revenue, or $6,000 per customer per year, on average.

Hubspot claims an annual revenue growth rate of 350%, which to get to the $300 million mark is going to take about 2-3 years, assuming the growth is constant and they can get to about 50-60,000 customers.  So as you can see, the 250 new customers every 2-3 months isn’t going to cut it – they will likely need to get to around 750-1,000 new customers every month.

The guys at Hubspot are surely savvy enough and have enough brain power (and resources now) to pull this off, but it seems it will be a helluva feat.  Is Hubspot the next SalesForce?  Will they have to go public?  It seems like Hubspot is in the right position for extreme growth – a refined product, brand recognition, a seasoned team, cash in the bank – how could they go wrong?

Best of luck to ya, Hubspot.

Update 10/26/09: I just found this great blog post by Ben Yoskovitz: Raising Startup Capital is an Achievement, But Not the Most Important One.  He explains that Dharmesh is more of a “bootstrap guy” versus a venture capital guy, where he states “Closing a funding round is not value creation.  It’s the opportunity to create value.” – I happen to agree with Dharmesh on that 110%.  After you get your funding – whatever round or stage it is in – that’s when the real work begins.

Before spending thousands on a tradeshow, know the metrics needed to calculate your tradehsow ROI; and get a few tips on how to maximize your success.

We just returned from the Search Marketing Expo in New York City last week where we launched our new SiteJuice™ product. We brought a big team of 9 people to help manage the expected crowd of 2,000-3,000 people.

To calculate your tradeshow ROI, you first need to define your goals, and that has to coincide with what your spending and what you are currently paying to acquire a new customer.  That means if you are currently spending $100 to acquire a new customer, and you plan to spend $20,000 on the tradeshow, you need to get 200 new customers out of the show, which is 2,000 leads at a 10% conversion rate.  If that sounds too high, you need to spend less.

OK, so now that you have a rough outline of some goals based on expenses, what is your strategy?  Our strategy was people. The more people we had, the more people we could talk to about our product and sell its benefits.  We maintained folks in the booth, and other consistently roamed around not only talking to people and driving them to our booth, but also scoping out the competition.  This seemed better than blowing a few thousand bucks on some lame bag stuffers that everyone throws away, or an over-priced sponsorship for lanyards or Wi-Fi access.  Brand awareness is fine, but it doesn’t sell your product, particularly if nobody knows who you are.

So here are a few tips that I hope you will find valuable the next time you search out the next tradeshow:

Tip #1 – Make it uber-simple to sign up for your product. We created special landing page for folks to sign up for our product that had only 4 fields.  Also, we did not require an email verification, and once they entered their info, they were logged straight into their account and we showed them how to set it up.  Normal sign up processes won’t work for a tradeshow.  Even with this simple process and 3 laptops ready for signups, we still had lines forming.

Tip #2 – Simplify your giveaway prize. This was tough for us in the sense that we had all kinds of cool ideas from scavenger hunts, to awarding people for participation and more.  The key is to make it as simple as possible.  We gave away a MacBook Pro as the grand prize, and 5 SEO Makeovers as other prizes.  In retrospect, we would have been fine with just the MacBook Pro giveaway.  Even though the makeover was easy to get in (all you had to do was follow us on Twitter), it was difficult to talk about too many things.  You really have 1-2 minutes to talk with folks and you want to spend those precious minutes trying to sell them on why they should use your product instead of all the various prizes you’re giving away.

Tip #3 – Refine your selling points and messaging based on the audience. We spent a lot of time researching who the audience was and we broke it out into “pros”(people who were experts in search marketing) and “joes” (not experts), and we developed messaging and talking points based on whether they were an ad agency, SEO consultant, or someone just getting into the industry.  We made 11×17 laminated sheets that broke down the benefits depending who they were, and we had a 100% conversion rate for everyone we walked through the “cheat sheet”.  Most importantly, our team met internally several times before the show to discuss what to say, what not to say, and more.  I think this helped immensely in getting over 200 signups in 14 hours of floor time.

Tip #4 – You don’t need a $4,000 booth set up. We made a 10′ x 8′ vinyl backdrop with very large text (only 3 bullets) and a white box where we could run a projector against.  The best thing was that this fit in a suitcase so we didn’t have to pay shipping at all.  The backdrop was about $400, and we purchased 3 yoga balls for $21 each and $60 of Jelly Belly’s for folks to grab.  I even went to Best Buy before the first day of the show and purchased 3 HP Mini’s, and then returned them with no re-stocking fee after the show was over.  We had a $240 floor piece that we couldn’t dismantle and take back, so we gave it to someone at the convention center to avoid fees.

Tip #5 – Huddle. Our team (as large as it was) huddled before the show and after the show each day.  We shared interesting things that we heard from people, we talked about process improvements, and we talked about numbers and if we were on target with our goals.  On day two, we made some significant changes that I believe helped grow our sign up rate by over 30%.  People wanted to see screenshots, so we swapped out the 60 second video with 7 static screenshots that rotated every 15 seconds on the projector.  This way you could actually have a conversation with someone and show them the screens as they rotated by.

All of these tips should help you increase your tradeshow ROI by reducing costs and maximizing conversion rates on your end goals.  Let me know how you made out!

Have you ever been to a website that takes forever to load?  What do you do?

We’ve taken some past research and developed a way to determine how many visitors you could potentially be losing based on how long your website takes to load from 0-30 seconds.  This was not easy – only a couple of studies have actually been done, and not only are they “aging”, but they have also been controversial and only up to around the first 4 seconds of load time data.  Obviously, there are many factors involved in determining how long you are willing to wait for a page to load, but with tabbed browsing, faster connections speeds, and more, maybe this is why a real study has not been done since 2006.

Here are some key takeaway points from the research we were able to come up with:

- Zona research said in 1999 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if you page took more than 8 seconds to load.
- Akamai said in 2006 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if your page took more than 4 seconds to load on a broadband connection.
- Tests done at Amazon in 2007 revealed that for every 100ms increase in load time, sales would decrease 1%.
- Tests done at Google in 2006 revealed that going from 10 to 30 results per page increased load time by a mere 0.5 seconds, but resulted in a 20% drop in traffic.

Wow.  A half of a second?  Is that even enough time to take a breath? Yet, when browsing, most people will lose patience and leave your website before they even have time to breathe.   How this relates to e-commerce sites is pretty important. If your website is selling a fairly generic item, your site had better load pretty damn fast or you just lost your sale to some other guy. At Christmas, when every parent is looking for this seasons must have toy, better hope your website loads in under 2 seconds. When a husband forgets his anniversary and is quickly looking for a flower delivery place while the boss isn’t looking, your pictures better not be too big and take forever to load.

So how long does your webpage take to load? Check out Pingdom.com/Tools, and then come back here and approximate your potential visitor loss:

If you prefer to “geek out” and read our entire white paper, you can download it here.  (I will warn you that it does mention words like “mathematical model”, “radioactive first oder decay” and “non-linear regression”.)

The following is a blog post by Nan Palmero, Chief Inspriation Officer at Sales By 5, a San Antonio firm that helps companies achieve dramatic increases in sales.

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.

I’ve been wondering lately about Twitter.  I wonder when I send a tweet to my 800 followers, who is actually paying attention not only reading my tweet, but clicking on the link I provide.  In reality, it seems to me that we only have a small window of opportunity to be “noticed” or else the tweet just gets buried in the time line.

My guess was that any tweet has a “shelf life” of roughly 2 hours, and assuming about 5% of your followers are considered to be “active followers” (meaning they usually respond to things you post or at least consistently read them), I could expect about 20 click-throughs to the link I provided in my tweet.

The Test

I sent a post at 1:38p CST (right in the middle of the day, when hopefully most are actively using Twitter) entitled “Test: How I Evaluated the Effectiveness of Print Ads: http://bit.ly/19GkSz”; a blog I posted on this site on April 21st.  I used bit.ly to track the results, thanks to my friend @bolora.  I was using BudURL and was getting frustrated with it, so Bo said to try bit.ly and by inserting “/info” right after the .ly, I would get a full report on clicks, etc.

The Results

Right after the tweet posted, it was re-tweeted by friends @erikdarm (678 followers) at 1:53p, and then 2 of his followers re-tweeted the post; @blellowj (2,047 followers) at 1:54p and @stephenlynch (712 followers) at 1:57.  It is now 3:19p and there have been no further re-tweets, so the pass-along value may have reached its limit within the Twitter time line.

Total reach = 4,235 potential Tweeple to read and click on my tweet (my 798 followers, plus the followers of the re-tweets).

If you go to the bit.ly link, you will see a screen like the one below:

So the “Now” screen looks like this and refreshes every few seconds, so the time line keeps moving to the right.  (It would be cool if you could go back and see the clicks at the beginning – there was more activity around 2:00p with one time about 6 clicks came in simultaneously).

I think it’s safe to say the post has now exhausted it’s useful life, with the last click at 2:41p CST (it is now 3:29p and no click activity since then).

This shows the activity for the “full day”, with a total of 34 clicks at the 2:00p mark, and 15 at the 3:00p mark for a total of 49 clicks to the link in the tweet (i.e. 49 potential new visitors to our blog/website).

Conclusion

We would have to do several tests to prove this out, and I’m sure would vary if you were Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki, but in general (for the rest of us), from this small experiment we conclude that a “useful” tweet has the following characteristics:

-a shelf life of about 1 hr 15 min, and then it “dies”
-1 to 2% click-through rate on links

Which means that this is not a whole lot different than direct mail for example, without out the cost of course.  What do you think?  Is Twitter really a good way to communicate and share useful knowledge, or is it simply getting lost in the mix?

As I was flying back from the east coast on Southwest Airlines, as usual I pick up the latest copy of Spirit magazine to see what’s interesting as we wait until I can open my computer and do something else.  It occurred to me as I was perusing that there were very few ads that had either a direct response mechanism, or at least some kind of tracking mechanism to validate the performance of the ad.

The Test

So I decided I would do a study: count every single ad and see which had a) direct response mechanisms; b) tracking mechanisms; or c) nothing at all.  Even when I stopped in Nashville, I went and purchased the latest copy of Entrepreneur magazine and did the same study so I could compare the results.

So, let’s first define the three basic types of ads:

Direct Response – this type of ad has a mechanism to entice the prospect to learn more about the product or service, or to purchase.  Examples would be a tear-sheet to mail in for a free something, a link to a website with a promo code, a cut-out to bring in for a discount, a link to a form to download something, etc.

Tracking Mechanism – this type of ad does not have a promo or direct response mechanism, but has a special 800 number or URL so they can effectively track the responses from the ad.  The URL mechanisms are fairly easy to spot, but the 800 numbers are not.

Branding – this type of ad has no direct response mechanism and no noticeable tracking mechanism.  They simply are there to generate brand awareness to the company/product/service.

Now, knowing these basic parameters, there are some caveats:

1. Brand awareness ads have their place in the world.  As a measurement expert, I would love to see all ads of all types have a direct response or tracking mechanism, but it is not always feasible.  As long as the company knows exactly how much they are spending on “brand awareness” and has at least tested turning them on and off to see the relative impact, I’m OK with them.

2.  While some ads may not have a direct response or tracking mechanism, they could have had a place on their web sign up form with a “how did you hear about us” field.  I think these are generally ineffective since you never know if the person was guessing or simply picking anything just to get through the form faster.  If you are running ads in multiple publications simultaneously it is nearly impossible to track the performance of them, so you might consider running ads one at a time to see what the relative increase in performance is compared to when you run nothing.

The Results

The results of the test may or may not surprise you, but the use of direct response or tracking mechanisms in print advertising is largely missing.  Many of the hotels and casinos were guilty of most of the branding ads in Spirit magazine, while in Entrepreneur magazine, it was the franchises.  Collectively, less than 25% of the 125 total ads had either a direct response or tracking mechanism.

The Awards

Based on all of the 125 ads, here’s what we’ve come up with:

Best Direct Response Mechanisms

Gotomypc.com has an excellent campaign where they are giving 30-day free trials if you enter a special promo code.  Their ad in Sprit magazine had the code “spirit” and in Entrepreneur they had the code “entrepreneur”.  I have also seen them using this on their tv spots as well.

Airport Parking has a pretty good ad that offers 1 day free, and then asks for an email for the 2 days free offer.  The sales associate scans the barcode which indicates which offer and which publication it came from.  It could be a little clearer that you do actually need to cut this out and bring it in to the retail center.

Kaplan University has a great example of a tear-sheet that you mail in to get a free book.  If you don’t want to mail this in, you can call the 800 number (which I am sure is specific to the campaign) or go to the unique URL.  I like this one a lot because in the form it also has a referral mechanism where it asks if they can contact a friend on your behalf.

Least Likely to Succeed

IBM – First, this ad is way too busy with so much tech geek crap that I am immediately turned off.  I didn’t think the readers of Entrepreneur were the IT-type, but I could be wrong.  Then, if you want more information on this “offer” you go down to this small box where it has a long URL, or an 800 number where you are required to remember (or write) down some long string of characters.  Really IBM?  Surely you can come up with something better than this.

Comcast had an interesting ad that hooked me with the fact that I might be “stuck in an old phone contract that doesn’t fit” (which I’m sure many of us are), and then drew my eyes to the red strip where I thought I would find some direct response mechanism.  Nope.  Gotta go way back up to the top right corner to get a website and phone number.  This could have been so much better…

Most Confusing

The Parking Spot folks, similar to the Airport Parking guys up top, had a similar offer to save 20% at any of their “spots”.  Problem was I did not know or understand that I am supposed to cut this out and bring it in to the retail office.  Way down in the bottom right corner there is a “For cashier use only” which indicated to me that it was a coupon – other than that, I didn’t catch on.

Biggest Waste of Money

Now this ad was weird.  First, I guess I don’t understand the butterfly concept, but more ironically, I had to “search” for this search company’s contact info.  And I actually thought the name of the company was “Search Marketing” – that would be a blunder if people went to Google looking for “search marketing” and came up with their competitors.  My point is that the number and website (calls to action) are buried in the text that no one reads anyway.

I’m real big on measurement. And I mean BIG. Without data, you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure, you have no real insights to your business as to what marketing is working for you, and what’s not.

Whether you are spending a small fortune on marketing and advertising, or nothing at all, I’m going to show you 5 cost-effective ways to get more insights from your prospects and your customers to help grow your sales.

1. Web Traffic
If you are not looking at the traffic that visits your website, you should start today (that’s an order!). We can debate if you should use a server-based solution such as AWStats, or a javascript-based solution, such as Google Analytics, but that’s another blog post. I am going to recommend 2 products to you that are both javascript-based, and let you decide.

Google Analytics – this is a FREE but very powerful tool. You can literally install Google Analytics in less than five minutes, and start collecting data. You can segment your visitors, say comparing paid traffic to organic traffic, or traffic from one city to another. Their advanced segmentation and motion chart features are fantastic, but take a bit of wizardry to completely understand how they work.

Clicky – this is a paid tool, but does have a FREE limited version. Clicky offers real-time data, iPhone accessibility, and a “spy” tool where you can see what visitors are doing on your website in real-time. But primarily, Clicky is very easy to use.

I like to make the analogy that Google Analytics is like buying a bike in a box that you have to take home and assemble, where Clicky is already assembled and ready to ride.

Now, if you don’t have enough traffic coming to your site to measure, well, that’s another problem, and you’re going to need to run this FREE Website Analyzer to determine why you can’t be found on search engines.

2. Task Completion Rate
So now you have some analytics on your site. What are you looking for in all of those wonderful looking Google Analytics, or Clicky dashboards? You’re probably getting excited with “average time on site”, or “average this”, or “average that”. Beware of averages – they lie! While the dashboards are nice, they tell you little about what the visitor did, and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. So while we do have “conversion rates”, I would like to stress the importance of “task completion rates”, or the ability for a visitor to actually complete the task they set out to do. This can easily uncover some usability issues with your site.

I highly recommend using a FREE site-level survey called the 4Q. Four simple questions that measures how they liked the website from 1-10, the purpose of their visit, if they were able to complete their task or not, and an open ended comment.

3. Customer Leads and Sales
How do you currently track your lead pipeline? Do you know what your close ratio is? I just saw customer service guru Jack Daley speak, and he spouted some interesting data. If you contact a lead 2 times, you have a 5% probability of making a sale. If you contact a lead 12 times or more, you have an 80% probability of making a sale. The real eye-opener is that the majority of sales folks were contacting leads much less than 12 times, and in fact, the percentage that do is single digit.

Secondly, you need to be able to track every lead, the source of the lead, and if they converted to a sale. If you knew this, then you can start to compare quality of leads, such as do your paid search leads close faster than word-of-mouth leads? Or, do leads from direct mail result in a higher gross sale than newspaper ads?

The good news is that there are some tools to help you along. What you need is a simple CRM (Client Relationship Management) System. If you want to use a web application, try Zoho for FREE, or as little as $12 per month. Then there is Sugar CRM, the open source platform that you can download and configure on your own server. The app is FREE, but you will likely need to pay for a Sugar developer to get the tool working the way you want – unless their out-of-the-box solution fits your needs. Lastly, you could always try Salesforce.com, which has some great features like being able to link to your Google AdWords campaigns. The tool is relatively affordable when you start off, but if you are keeping tons of data, then it can get expensive.

4. Email Campaigns
I sure hope you are not trying to email hundreds of people a promo through your Outlook, Entourage or Mozilla email client. If you are, STOP! I have some better tools for you to try:

Constant Contact – you may have heard of these guys, since they have probably been around the longest. Surprisingly, they are not ahead of the curve when it comes to features compared to some other competitors. Their big thing is that they have an affiliate program. Big whoop. You need sales, not puny commissions of some email marketing tool. CC will charge you by the size of your list, and not by how many emails you send out.

Mail Chimp – these guys have tons of great information on how to properly set up and send an email to your prospects with all kinds of white papers and instructions. They even provide opt-in forms for your website that are completely customizable. Sending your first email is a bit of a hassle since they want to know exactly where you got your emails from, so expect about a 3-day wait to send your first email since they have to approve it.

Campaign Monitor – these guys have some neat features such as checking your email against over 20 mail clients so you can see what it will look like before you send it out. It will even convert a web-page to and HTML email if you want, and will even integrate into your Google Analytics account. They are also strict on the first email sent out. If you get more than a 0.02% complaint rate, they will disable your account. Pricing with them is a bit different. It’s $5 per email, plus $0.01 per recipient.

5. Net Promoter Score
This is undoubtedly the most important question you can ask your customer: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The score is from 0 to 10, where 9′s and 10′s are your “promoters”, 7′s and 8′s are your “passives”, and the rest are your “detractors”. You can read the book “The Ultimate Question” by Fred Reichheld for more information on how to apply this.

So there you have it – 5 ways to start measuring some things that will improve your marketing performance, and that won’t break the bank.

I’ve been paying attention to television advertising spots lately to see what the tracking mechanisms are.  Surprisingly, I would venture to guess that only about 30% of the spots (local and national) have clear tracking mechanisms.  The underlying goal is the necessity to know the impact of each media channel on sales.

The ones that are easy to identify are the ads that display a URL at the end of the spot that says something like “www.domain.com/tv32″, where the “tv32″ identifies the geographic location for a multi-location buy.  Now, it is likely that this page is not accessible through the main navigation, and may even have a “no follow” rule for search engines so they won’t index it and muddy the data.  You would simply go to your favorite analytics program and look at the pageviews for that special URL, and possibly even segment the group and track their activity beyond this page.  My question is do people really type in the “tv32″, or simply go to the main site?

Other methods use a promo code, where they send you to the main website (no special page) and will have a clearly labeled area on the home page to enter the promo code.  Each code varies based on the media, and possibly even run dates so you can identify very specifically where the traffic came from.  I like this method better because a) the ad becomes offer-based, rather than just awareness; b) it removes the likelihood of a visitor bypassing the special “/tv32″ page that was set up.

Now, you might say that the latter example mixes existing inbound traffic with new traffic created by the TV spots.  You are correct; however, we can do a couple of things to separate this out:

1.  Create a segment of visitors from the cities that the ads were run.  If you ran the TV spot over 10 different cities, then create a segment for those cities.

2.  Look at your aggregate traffic before the spots ran, during the flight when the spots were running, and again after the flight ended.  Now, if you are running TV, print and radio all at the same time, it will be very difficult to segment traffic out by media unless you use the promo code option above, but then again, those are really only the folks who would “convert”, which will be a percentage of the total visitors.

3.  Calculate the effect of increased traffic to the website by taking the gross traffic during the time the spots were running, and subtract out your baseline, or average traffic before the media blitz.

You can get more finite information if you know exactly when your TV, radio or print ads ran and comparing visitor traffic down to the hour if you wanted to.

So, given the complexity of monitoring traffic on a national media campaign based on the potential issues mentioned above, and the fact that no method will be perfect, there is third idea:

What if you were to purchase a promo URL for each medium, such as television, radio and print?  (I neglect to mention Internet here since those visitor types are much easier to track). This way your traffic would be easily segmented and not all together in the same “bucket”.  I am not seeing this being widely used, and while some may argue that it detracts from the brand itself, I still prefer to pick a method that is more “trackable” than another.

Of course, you could always do a media “hiatus” and measure the effect on sales by comparing POS data.  You could even run one media channel at a time to see its relative effect as well.

What do you think?  What have you seen?

A guest blog by Steve Patti, a marketing strategy expert at Polarity, Inc. – part of The Permission Network

Most of you that have read our blog posts know that we’ve been trumpeting a wake up call to all marketers that the days of dumping millions of dollars into non-measurable, interruption marketing are over.  While our target audience has been largely management and executives, we’re pleased to see the latest Ad Age article that raises the stakes and calls out the CMO as holding ultimate accountability for marketing performance and budget ROI — and we couldn’t agree more.

In today’s economic meltdown, marketers needs to be “manning the war room” where tactics are mapped, performance is measured, and funding decisions for tactics are made each week/month based on what is working and what is not.  Not only are we talking about measuring acquisition performance of the various sales funnels, but focusing on the lifetime value of the customers produced in each sales funnel (see our other blog posts on this topic).

It doesn’t matter if you’re embarrassed to say you are a marketer not getting it right when it comes to performance metrics — because few are.  However, the sooner you start the more quickly you can distance yourself from your competitors who may be sitting around their agency conference room asking how much “reach & frequency” they should be buying — instead of how they should be engaging prospective customers via permission marketing.

Feel free to share your thoughts.

I came across this excellent four-minute video by Phil Fernandez, President and CEO of Marketo, and he explains the importance of nurturing your sales leads into actual sales. He says that 50% of your leads are not yet ready to talk to a sales person, and are not ready to purchase. By properly engaging with these prospects, through webinars, emailing white papers, etc., we can, over time, get 70% of these leads ripe for sales. This is the “consideration” stage of the Awareness – Consideration – Purchase steps in all marketing efforts, as described by colleague Steve Patti of Polarity. Here is the video: