Startup Lessons Learned: The Importance of Lead Qualification

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lead qualification cartoon

Image: Dilbert

We’re a small scrappy bunch here at Dasheroo, and because of that each person is stretched super thin. Some of the times it’s obvious, other times it remains more hidden. But one spot we started to see a bit of a hit recently was in our larger sales deals.

Now don’t get me wrong – Mimi is a one-person sales team animal. She started here at Dasheroo way back when, selling when we barely had anything a larger business would want! But they bought from her.

But this month we ran into an unusual ‘problem’: we had too many leads, and too many demo requests for her to handle! Ok, Ok, I hear you “Umm, Hingley sounds like it’s time to hire another sales person”. Well, first I am that ‘other’ sales person, as any start-up CEO should be comfortable doing! But secondly, the real challenge was that Mimi’s close rates started to come down in April. And she doesn’t take kindly to that.

Seemed like this month in particular, Mimi was really having challenges with people not having the budget to pay for Dasheroo. We couldn’t think of anything specific that should impede closing deals in April. I mean, tax season affects consumer purchases, but not really B2B sales.

So Mimi, Janine and I started to dig in to find out why. We scoured the leads, the geos, the biz types that were coming in in late March and April to see if we could find any root causes. It didn’t take long to drill in and identify two fairly obvious source of new leads that were requesting live demos – GREAT new leads, but more SMB oriented types, folks that should probably start out with our free plan, and then build up through our auto convert editions over time.

It’s a lead qualification issue. And we don’t have an SDR (Sales Development Rep) right now to filter through and qualify the leads to help Mimi focus on the more high value ones.

So we took another look at Mimi’s email that goes out to everyone requesting a demo. The same email that had been going out for months and months, before we had the great challenge of ‘too many leads’. It didn’t set any expectations for pricing, annual commitments, anything that would help filter out folks that can’t afford, or don’t need, or pricer editions. We made revisions on the spot, stating our minimum $ commitment, and if they were’ ready for that, to watch our demos, sign up for a free account and kick the tires.

The result? Literally within 2 days, we effectively moved the appropriate folks to our ‘auto convert’ business and helped Mimi spend her time on demos and negotiations with businesses that have the need and budget for our Agency & Enterprise offerings! Just this week Mimi’s close rate is back on track and growing!

It’s amazing how a fresh look at ‘old’ communications and practices can really help boost your productivity when you’re growing!

New Research: B2B Marketing Spend to Increase

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We were just perusing some recent articles from our buddies at eMarketer, and found one that grabbed our attention – B2B Marketing: Where Are The Dollars Going?

Hey, we’re B2B marketers and want to know the trends in budgets – increasing, flat or decreasing – and where these budget changes may fall. Well, the good news is that 1/2 of the businesses polled said they were increasing in 2015, and only 17% reported that they expected a decrease. The balance, approximately 1/3 project flat budgets. Overall, budgets are projected to increase 4.4%

Our TakeB2B MArketing Spend Allocation

There’s a couple takeaways from this article. First is the allocation of budgets across several initiatives. It looks like companies are investing in hiring employees, and that’s always a good sign for future growth in other areas. Looking back at our previous experiences at other B2B companies, ‘marketing programs & campaigns ‘ which we see as paid media, looks pretty inline with many more mature companies. But with Dasheroo following a Business Freemium model, we project our paid media spend to be only 2-3% of our budget!

How does this jive with your upcoming B2B marketing spend? Let us know.

The other aspect of this article that popped to us was the reminder that no matter your marketing budget, get creative about ways to snag a few extra dollars from other, or unassigned budgets. Almost 80% stated that they could have access to additional budgets outside of the official marketing budget. So if you’re a little cash-strapped or your finance person of yours is having a cheap attack, think about how you can do the same.

Trying to drive more leads and have a great idea, but no budget? Refine your idea and approach your sales team. Let them know that if they co-opt all, or some of the lead generation cost, you’ll apply your expertise and efforts to make it happen. Or, have meeting with the other budget stakeholders in the company with a compelling pitch with your plan to invest an additional, specified amount of funds and how it would benefit the company. It may be surprising, but we’ve done just that and had folks from other departments (product, support, even engineering) volunteer some marketing budget for the greater good. Don’t be shy, be prepared and please please please make it work!

B2B Marketing: Is Business Freemium Right for your Biz?

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Talk about a conundrum for any tech entrepreneur: offer a limited-time free trial (typically 14-30 days) or roll the dice on business freemium? It’s one of the biggest decisions you can make. There’s lots of examples of successful business freemium companies out there – Evernote, Box, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, Hootsuite, Zendesk, Xero, VerticalResponse, & Mailchimp to name a few. Hopefully Dasheroo will make that list, too! So how did we arrive at the decision to go business freemium? Here’s some of the considerations we discussed:

Screen Shot 2015-03-01 at 9.21.59 AM

Dasheroo is all about business freemium!

  • Market size: Is it big and global? Ours is. In fact, we probably say “every business in the world needs a Dasheroo business dashboard” to someone at least once a day! And yes, it’s global. We already have users in 60 countries.You need a large market size since only 1-10% of your users will convert to a paid plan. Most freemium businesses convert 3-5% to paid.
  • User acquisition: Great, it’s free but will it help capture the market more quickly and efficiently? Viral growth and word of mouth is key here, as freemium basically takes the place of a big marketing budget or sales force. In our case, we believe that establishing a robust free plan gets the word out, and our users are currently our highest driver of new users via word of mouth. We still have a long way to go on adding viral hooks within out product, but we’ll get there too.
  • Support costs: Sounds obvious, but customer support and back-end (AWS, hosting & database scaling) costs must be modeled and minimized. We’ve talked to many folks out there, and this seems to be a ‘gotcha’ that just isn’t nailed down well enough at the get-go. We put the time into making sure our product is as intuitive as possible (reducing customer support costs) and instrumenting use case examples on the back end to make sure it is a sustainable model.
  • Competition: We took a very close look at our competition and virtually all went with a 14-30 day free trial. There’s one other player that offers a freemium plan, but we felt we could offer a more compelling, robust free offering. We also feel that as busy as people get, it might take more than a few weeks for them to set up their Dashboards and feel positive about the value; there’s nothing worse than getting forced into paying before you have derived value.
  • Can we make auto-convert work: Well, we better! We have freemium experience in our pasts and have learned a lot about what to do, and more importantly what not to do to right-size the features and functionality to the pricing tiers so it’s very clear to users the value they will get by paying for our service. Most of this is under wraps for now, as we’re monitoring how our users interact with Dasheroo, but when we do announce our pricing we’re confident it’ll be very fair and clear on what additional value users will get over the free version.

So that’s our story and we’re sticking to it! we’re still early on, so as we learn both the good and the bad, we’ll share them with you in future posts.

What’s your experience with business freemium or free trials? Share with us.

Google Analytics Acquisition Report: where are your B2B leads coming from?

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If you’re a B2B marketer, you live for leads. Sure, sales is where the rubber meets the road, but for most of those there’s a little hand-holding and nurturing before the order comes in. Users need to have confidence that the service you offer is really going to knock it outta the park for them. Their experience at these early stages is key in order for them to convert. That’s true know matter where they come from – finding you on organic search, via PPC, or from referral traffic.

Are you tracking the success of your lead gen and conversion sources and success by channel? If so, awesome for you; if not, well start now. Why? Because each channel will typically have pretty big variances in sessions and conversion rates, so understanding your most productive acquisition channels, then drilling into the underlying sources can help you optimize your efforts. Meaning, driving more, and higher converting leads!

So here’s a quick snapshot for the past several weeks of data for Dasheroo:

Google Analytics Acquisition report: Look at that referral conversion rate!

Google Analytics Acquisition report: Look at that referral conversion rate!

Here’s our 5 ‘channels’. In the next week or so, we’ll post more about exactly what each of these channels represent, because it can get a little tricky and deserves its own article. Keep an eye out!

But for now, look at that conversion rate of 8.62% for ‘referral’, yee haw!

Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from 3rd party sites, not organic or paid ads. When someone clicks on a link to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site. The originating site is called a “referrer” because it refers traffic from one place to the next.

So whatdya do next? Drill in, of course! Who are these awesome people sending me these obviously very relevant people that seem to really dig Dasheroo business dashboards. Here we go:

Screen Shot 2015-02-22 at 10.54.17 AM

Wow, Duct Tape Marketing sends us a lot of people. Thanks John and team! But just look at that ‘ga_partner_gallery’ source. 36 new users with a whopping 35% conversion rate. Whoa. So what is that? Well, that’s our brand-spanking new listing on the Google Analytics Partners gallery. That just went up a few days ago. OK, these are all great data points, but what do you do with them? Here’s a few ideas:

  • We’ll contact John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, thank him for all those folks he sent over and see if there’s some tweaks we can make to a landing page to make those people convert even higher. And when we start an affiliate program invite him to join.
  • Look at that inc.com traffic AND high conversion. Click on that link and find more detail, in this case 20 of the 21 new users came from just one article. Might wanna publish more articles like that one…
  • Google Analytics Partners…I think you’ve heard of Google. Pretty sizable. May not return our calls. But, Google is sharp and they love to see highly engaged users and valued apps. So a couple takeaways in these cases; first it doesn’t hurt to highlight this and lob a targeted email into the Partners team. Get ‘featured’ and you could generate 100s if not 1,000s of new users. Second, get yerself listed on similar sites and galleries! One of the reasons the Google Anaytics Partners site is working so well is because the audience is already very targeted and predisposed to wanting a product like Dasheroo. So we’re already busily researching and applying for listings on marketplaces that cater to folks that like business metrics – whether it be social media, email marketing, surveys, CRM or other types.

Bottom line, the metrics tell the story, you just have to know where to look, how to interpret them and leverage it for your B2B success. Do it!

How Important is Content to B2B Tech Buyers Post Purchase?

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We’ve gotta hand it to our friends at eMarketer, they have some of the best content out there. And just the other day, they published a very relevant article about B2B Tech buyers and if they expect and value content after the purchase. And it’s an important reminder; so often after you capture that all-important sale, it’s easy to ‘bag it’ and go on the hunt for the next one. And sure, you need the next sale, but not at the expense of continual value-add to current users.

And this eMarketer article focused on an aspect that’s actually pretty easy to do – adding value in the form of content. They state that a full 80% of respondents to a recent study say that it is important or very important to receive ongoing content after making a purchase. And only 2% stated that they have no interest at all in receiving content post purchase.

But what type of content to B2B buyers really want?

Graph: type of content B2B tech buyers consume post purchase

It appears tech buyers want to be confident you know what you are talking about!

They want information that will help them do their jobs better! Plus, when you publish valuable, relevant, helpful content it will also strengthen your relationship with your users. And that equals customer retention and positive word of mouth marketing. Hopefully keeping your users up to date with new product features and support information is baked into your communications already. If not, get on it!

We talk about the importance of content all the time, so we try to eat our own dog food, publishing content daily, if not several times a day. And since we don’t do any advertising or really any other form of marketing yet, we see the value from both a user acquisition perspective as well as ongoing relationship building.

Hey we’re certainly not perfect, but whenever we add new features, we’re not shy about letting our users know! And here at Dasheroo, we also think transparency is also a real ‘must have’. So we publish a Weekly Progress post that discusses not just new product features, but also provides an insight into our culture, people and the fun and challenges of starting up a new tech company. And when we think we have some advice that will make our users more productive in their jobs, we publish that too. We could probably do a better job of communicating in-app specific tech support updates, and we’re working on that now.

So take a minute to do a little internal audit of your own content marketing strategy. Are you checking all the boxes? Keep in mind that your users want to hear from you, before the sale and after, so invest the time to keep them updated!