Category: Drew’s Articles

I’m Still Not Done With My Potatoes

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Surly may not do my too cool for school Swedish waitress justice. She dispensed my morning coffee like a hand grenade— more throwing than pouring. Evidently she didn’t get the memo that we’re in a new age of customer service because before I could finish my food, she cleared my plate. And though I exclaimed, “I’m not done with my potatoes,” that plate was toast. (If this paragraph seems familiar, its because you read it first on FastCompany.com)

Unsettled, I couldn’t help but wonder if my grabby waitress was a blustery metaphor for the rapid-fire world of social media, especially Twitter. Every day thousands of morsels cross my Tweetdeck, many half-baked, some food for thought but none wholly satiating. It was with this mindset that I attended this week’s 140 Characters Conference, the veritable smorgasbord of Twitterville.

Curated by social mensch Jeff Pulver, this conference is unique in many ways but most notably for the fact that each of the 140 “characters” has only 10 minutes to tell their story. And when time is up, the theme song from Exodus blasts them off stage. Akin to a Spanish tapas bar, this approach limits the impact of any one dish, leaving you hungry for more of the good ones and grateful the bad ones got cut off.

A few of the tastier characters
Twitter superstar Ann Curry (okay she’s a TV star too), spiced up the morning with an impassioned plea for attendees to use the power of Twitter to do good. Seducing the crowd with a self-deprecating imitation of her mother’s halting English, Curry encouraged the audience to “dream the improbable” since she is living proof that these dreams can and will come true. I’ll take my potatoes with Curry any time.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker tweeted his way to the conference, alerting his 1-million-plus followers that he was stuck in Lincoln Tunnel traffic. Once he arrived, Booker’s straight talk about changing the way government works, including being more responsive to the individual, was refreshing but the gong went off long before anyone was ready.

Jeffrey Hayzlett, the former CMO of Kodak turned social media evangelist, took timeout from his book tour to introduce Gaby Zwaan, a Dutch artist whose career Hayzlett helped catapult via Twitter. Only a bit gabby, Zwaan let his tulip-filled paintings and street art tell his story, providing a quick feast for our eyes without overstaying his welcome.

No need for 5-hour energy drinks
Among the surprises, Ian Spector, a diminutive, self-described geek, shared his unlikely journey to fame by creating the bestselling Chuck Norris fact books after his tough tweets became popular. Providing a real-time taste of his wry sense of humor, Spector revealed that the indefatigable Norris actually sued him after the first book was published, a rich detail that left me energized and ready to kick Norris’s ass.

Mark Ecko provided the espresso by stimulating the post-lunch bunch to take action against corporal punishment. Explaining that paddling pupils was still legal in 20 states, Ecko told how he’d used Twitter and social media to change the law in one and how we could do the same in Texas. Within seconds, tweets targeting @govperry, who just needed to sign HB 539, poured out to #stopthepaddle.

Plenty of time for hugs
Most show organizers shake hands with their speakers. Not Jeff Pulver. He insists on hugs. Pulver explains that hugs are not only more hygienic but also express his desire to increase the warmth and sharing nature of his events. So every speaker got a hug, with the notable (and accidental?) exception of IRS representative, Jessica Orquina, whose desire to help troubled tax filers via Twitter seemed heartfelt.

Humanitarian Mark Horvath shared how social media fit into his personal campaign to help the homeless get off the streets. Working with the 140 Character community, Horvath raised enough to help Carey Fuller and AnnMarie Walsh gain housing, a story well-told on his HardlyNormal.com blog and on InvisiblePeople.tv. Fuller was at the conference, hugging all and tweeting her thanks.

Another hugger, Parisian Michelle Chmielewski, encouraged attendees to get up and share an “uncomfortably long hug” with a nearby stranger. Many did just that. Michelle, as it turns out, is a social star, recently gaining over 550,000 views with her charming “Learn French in One Word” video on YouTube. Her more recent “free hugs” video, shows Michelle putting hugs where her mouth is, on the streets of Paris!

Make time to slow it down
Lest you think the conference was all sizzle and no steak or that I’ve lost my way in this story, I will now come full circle. At the event, veteran journalist Dan Gillmor noted that while Twitter is terrific for “fast news, we also need slow news.” His appeal to be skeptical of all tweets and to take a breath before jumping to conclusions, had the allure of a well-aged wine to this particular reporter.

Ironically, the exit music harrumphed long before Gillmor or this audience member was ready. Just as he was explaining several egregious reporting errors via Twitter by normally reputable sources like NPR and Reuters, we had to move on to the next speaker. Alas, once again, my potatoes were taken prematurely, leaving me little time to digest Gillmor’s profound yet ironic message.

Final note: Before I dashed out of the conference to get lunch, I got a crash course from the founders of Webdoc, a tantalizing new web-based application that mashes up content into sharable, embeddable, essentially bite-sized HTML5 files.  My first, somewhat half-baked Webdoc appears below (if it doesn’t show up click here.)

The New Curators (of Content)

Posted on by Drew Neisser

How Thrillist, PSFK and start-up iFlow are capitalizing on the accelerating need for content curation. (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com)
Barring the invention of a “time turner” like the one Hermione Granger sported in 3rd Harry Potter novel, most of us will never have enough time to consume the information we might otherwise want to absorb.  There’s simply too much info and too few waking hours.  Enter the notion of curation, a relatively new term that is not unlike the editor of old, a trusted person or organization that filters information and aggregates it in an organized fashion for others to enjoy.

According to Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, “curation is the new way of organizing the web going forward.”  And no doubt he’s right.  Curious about why new curators like Thrillist and PSFK were thriving while the traditional publishing world floundered, I spent some time with their respective founders, Ben Lerer and Piers Fawkes.  These conversations plus one with Eric Alterman, the founder of a new curation engine called iFlow, revealed four insights that could help you too capitalize on the curation phenomenon.

You can’t curate for everyone, so be targeted
In Brian Solis’s recent tribute on FastCompany.com to Rosenbaum’s book, Solis noted, “the social capital of a curator is earned through qualifying, filtering, and refining relevant content.”  The key words here being filtering and relevance, something that Thrillist with its focus on urban males 22-30 has done exceptionally well.  Explained Lerer, “we’ve zoned in on a niche group that was previously starved for the kind of information we deliver.”

Thrillist, for the uninitiated, started in 2005 with a newsletter to 600 New Yorkers and is now in 18 markets with 2.5 million subscribers.  Added Lerer, “our voice is extremely targeted to a very specific part of the male demographic.”  Lerer and his fellow curators of newish nightlife have built a highly profitable business during a time when traditional publishing tanked. This was done, according to Lerer, “by zoning in on a small sector of the population and speaking to them in a voice that they trust.”

It’s not curation without a well-defined focus
The New York Times famous line “All the news that’s fit to print,” made sense when newspapers were the primary source of daily information.  Now it seems more like a potential epitaph, as newspaper readership plummets in the face of more focused web-based alternatives. One of the up and coming alternatives is PFSK, which founder Fawkes described as “the go to source for new ideas for creative professionals.”

Founded in 2004, PSFK has grown from a trend-spotting website to a hybrid company that publishes content, creates events and provides consulting services to clients like Nike, Target and BMW.  When asked if PSFK was in the curation business, Fawkes affirmed, “yes, our job is to find new ideas and we present them up to 50 times a day.”  Reflecting on their focused approach, Fawkes added, “every month a million designers, ad folks, digital entrepreneurs and media mavens get inspired by our content.”

If the curation is good enough, it will [almost] market itself
In the new world of curation, “information becomes currency and the ability to repackage something of interest as compelling, consumable and also [as a] sharable social object is an art,” wrote Brian Solis. This perhaps is the fundamental difference between the old world newspaper and the new world of curators.  New world curators can connect and engage with other curators, helping to disseminate information quickly and at little to no cost.

Ben Lerer of Thrillist recalled taking this approach out of necessity since, “one of the stipulations with the money we raised was that we couldn’t spend any of it on marketing.”  “So we focused all our energy on building something that people actually liked and would want to pass along to their friends,” explained Lerer.  By “putting content first and making sure its written for the guy reading it,” Lerer and his team developed a loyal audience that in turn shared the content and or acted upon it demonstrating they too were in the know.

Human curators beat the algorithms
No matter how you many words you type into Google, you’re not going to find a recommendation you trust without clicking deep into another site.  On the other hand, a quick visit to Thrillist and PSFK provides recommendations and ideas that are trustworthy without fail. When discussing the shortcomings of algorithmic curation, serial entrepreneur Eric Alterman explained, “only human curation can deliver real time content… that consumers are actually seeking.”

Seeing an opportunity in the limitations of algorithmic curation combined with the overwhelming flow of content generated via social media, Alterman is just about to launch a new curation platform called iFlow.  Alterman believes that iFlow will address the problem of information overload, enabling “efficient curation into highly contextual aggregate streams [that] include all content types.” Given Alterman’s track record of turning ideas into successful companies like KickApps, his hope “to bring the art of content creation to the widest possible audience,” is anything but a pipe dream.

Final Note:
While admittedly I’m no longer in Thrillist’s demographic, I became a fan in ‘08 when one of my clients wanted to connect with their readers.  Seeing Lerer’s presentation at a recent PSFK event, I was simply blown away by their success in three short years.  It was the quality of the presenters at this conference that got me thinking about curation and led to my conversations with Lerer, Fawkes and Alterman (see their respective interviews on TheDrewBlog.com).

Insights From a Serial Entrepreneur

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Eric Alterman is founder and CEO of Flow Corp, a start-up aiming to capitalize on the burgeoning needed for content curation, the topic of my upcoming post on FastCompany.com.  Eric is serial entrepreneur, having created companies such as MeshNetworks (acquired by Motorola for $230 million), SkyCross, TeraNex and most recently KickApps, the first “drag and drop widget builder.”

DN: As an serial entrepreneur, how do know when you’re on to something?
When I can’t stop thinking about a new concept for months on end and every morning brings new scribbles in my bedside notebook. Weaker ideas tend to come and go over the course of a few days or weeks.  For better or worse, the ideas that evolve into actual ventures tend to have richer theoretical implications that imply a broad vision with many possibilities.  Ideas loaded with many possibilities can actually be a liability (where do you focus first?), but it’s what holds my interest long enough to begin the heavy lifting required to launch a venture.  I think entrepreneurs need to be intentionally naïve during the conception stages of a venture.  Down the road the skill of listening is essential—at the beginning the skill of not listening matters more.

DN: Do you see any problems with the way content is currently curated via social media?
Social curation represents an undeniable paradigm shift in the realm of content discovery, but it has important limitations.  While the people I subscribe to on Twitter and Facebook fill my stream with content that’s often of general interest, social streams lack contextual relevance to my real-time interests—i.e. the information I need right now.  There’s lots of talk about the real-time nature of Twitter, but outside of breaking news social streams are not capable of delivering what I’m uniquely interested in at a given moment.  Social streams are great for browsing,  but only contextual streams can serve my immediate needs.  My belief is that a platform that enables efficient curation into highly contextual, aggregate (i.e. from multiple sources) streams is one of the next great opportunities, and it includes all content types (from blog articles and videos, to cancer research and cars for sale).

It might be said that traditional search is the solution to discovery of content matching my real-time interests (i.e. what I need to know right now).  But traditional search suffers from a number of different problems.  First, despite recent efforts by Google and others, search is not inherently a real-time solution.  It’s unlikely that a search for theater tickets will provide you a result that includes tickets that became available five minutes earlier, let alone 5 seconds earlier.  Beyond that, search is best at providing links to websites containing content deemed relevant to the three or four words typed into a search box.  Search engines don’t routinely provide content directly, they provide links to other web pages.  Even if a search engine properly disambiguates the pages it crawled days or weeks earlier, it may not have properly disambiguated the search request, itself.  By my own definition, the term curation suggests an explicit, largely human process with a result that is real-time and unambiguous.

DN: Can you give me a preview of your latest venture, Flow.com?
The Flow’s consumer experience (available soon at iFlow.com) is all about providing a simple but powerful application that invites media and commerce publishers to directly connect with consumers looking for specific content—real-time streams of precisely what they are looking for.  We call those streams “flows” and every piece of content moving through a flow is called a “drop”.  Flows and drops can be highly structured (multiple required or optional fields—e.g. year, make and model fields of a car being sold) or minimally structured.

Publishers can reach audiences very directly, without the inefficiencies of SEO and social strategies.  Consumers get the benefit of a new, highly contextual content discovery experience that is both radically new and yet very familiar for those already using social media applications.  It brings content out of stovepiped data stores and unstructured social streams, into a common data exchange organized by the intention of both publisher and consumer.

One of the most exciting aspects of the iFlow experience is the way consumers easily “remix” real-time content from many sources into their own highly contextual “flows”.  Those flows can then be shared by their curators (and audience) both privately and publicly with minimal effort. iFlow will provide automated ways for pro-sumer curators to populate flows, but manual, drag-and-drop curation will be the norm for everyday consumers.  My grandmother’s favorite aphorism is very true for curation: “many hands make light work”.  In the end we expect to bring the art of content curation to the widest possible audience.

The same Flow platform that powers iFlow.com will also be available to application developers in a platform-as-a-service model (PaaS). Our intention is to provide mobile and web application developers access to a modern  “data exchange” that allows highly scalable data sharing between many applications.  Our belief is that next generation applications will be curating content from many other applications to provide broader, more data-rich consumer experiences.  Imagine an apartment rental iphone app providing its users lunch coupons in the neighborhood they are exploring, information about local schools and perhaps a free cocktail during happy hour—seamless access to a diversity of real-time data is the enabler.  Consider what Multiple Listing Services (MLS) did to revolutionize the real estate industry with a relatively archaic technology stack—now extend those sharing and interoperability benefits to every industry and every data type using a modern, highly scalable real-time architecture.

DN: Why do you think curation is so important right now?  Talk to me about the benefits of human curation versus algorithmic curation (i.e. Google).
Curation is all about creating context and meaning from the terabytes of largely unstructured data generated every few hours by web, mobile and enterprise applications.  There’s a place for algorithmic curation, especially when users are searching for specific facts or answers to formulaic questions.  But anyone that has searched for something like, “1973 Firebirds for sale in Brooklyn” know that search can never deliver an aggregate real-time list of 1973 Firebirds for sale in Brooklyn from many sources, only a series of websites.  Similarly, only human curation can deliver a list of “funky artist parties in San Francisco tonight” or “the most interesting jobs for javascript programmers in New Jersey”.

DN: Where do you think the time for Flow will come from?  Out of existing social?  Out of other online activities?  Out of offline activities?
Unlike the voyeurism and serendipitous browsing of social media, Flow discovery is a relatively deliberate and intentional process—discovering real-time content that consumers are explicitly seeking.  That kind of activity disrupts a variety of less efficient modes of explicit discovery, from classified and message boards to websites and disaggregated mobile apps.  I  believe people will always make time for social discovery which serves an entirely different sort of emotional need.

Where do you think the revenue opportunities are with better forms of content curation like Flow?
We have a number of models in mind, from “freemium” upgrades to both our consumer and developer applications, to App and data marketplaces.  In the long term it will be hard to avoid “promotional drops” (i.e. advertising) given the very specific contexts the Flow provides relative to social media and even search.

Making a Hit While Serving Customers

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I saw Ben Lerer speak at the recent PSFK conference and was blown away by how quickly Thrillist has grown.  In many ways, its is a classic example of Marketing as Service, with the newsletter being the service and in this case part of the product that meets a distinct information need.  Thrillist has also had a profound impact on the businesses they’ve recommended, gaining the kind of “make a hit” influence that newspaper critics used to enjoy.

DN: Thrillist has grown quite a bit since its founding.  Can you give me the highlights of this growth in terms of subscribers, markets, revenue, profitability?
We sent the first Thrillist email in 2005 to 600 friends in New York and in that first year slogged through the mud and grew to 30,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. By the end of 2008, we had expanded into seven cities and became profitable, bringing in approximately $5 million in revenue. In 2009, we launched in five additional markets and passed the one million subscription mark. And now, just a couple of months into our sixth year, we’re in 18 markets including our first international edition in London, reaching over 2.5 million subscriptions. With the acquisition of members-only online retailer JackThreads.com and the launch of localized deal site Thrillist Rewards, we’re expecting to bring in more than $40 million in revenue this year.

DN: Why do you think the Thrillist newsletter has been so successful?
As with any successful company, the winning formula is always a strong demand and a quality product. We’ve zoned in on a niche group that was previously starved for the kind of information we deliver. They were looking for trusted recommendations on where to go and what to do in their city and the best ways to spend their time and money and we do a good job delivering that.

DN: How do you decide what to feature in each of your newsletters?  What is the editorial review process?
We have a local editor on the ground in each of our markets whose main job is to scour their cities to find awesome things.  It has to be something new, unknown or under-appreciated (i.e. an underground supper club, a maker of custom shoes operating out of a warehouse in Brooklyn, or a restaurant with an off-the-menu three martini lunch special).

DN: Talk to me some more about the importance of curating great content…
When we first started out, one of the stipulations with the money we raised was that we couldn’t spend any of it on marketing. So we focused all our energy on building something that people actually liked and would want to pass along to their friends. We know how valuable our guys’ time is and we don’t want to waste it with anything but the winners, so we always put content first and make sure it’s written for the guy reading it.

DN: Newspaper and magazines have been curating content for years yet almost all are losing money.  Why do you think Thrillist has been able to be successful curating editorial content when these other info sources have not been able to make any money, especially online?
Our voice is extremely targeted to a very specific part of the male demographic. We’re not trying to reach all people in all cities. We’re zoning in on a small sector of the population, speaking to them in a voice that they trust and relate to and delivering content that they want to read, in a way they want to read it. Because of this, we’ve developed a loyal audience that trusts us and acts on our recommendations.

DN: Do you have a customer feedback system in place to help you measure what content is resonating?

We do have a system that collects data, click-through rates, etc. but we mostly find validation by speaking with the owners of the businesses we cover. We have stacks upon stacks of testimonials about selling-out seats, packing restaurants and huge increases in traffic to websites. We also see the companies being covered in additional press outlets and going viral across all social media platforms.

DN: Have you ever recommended something that turned out to be a bust?  If so, how did you handle this?
We’ve definitely recommended some things that were better than others — that’s part of the challenge of breaking stories. But our batting average is high and I think the audience has patience for when we miss because they really appreciate when we hit the nail on the head.

DN: Can you give me a specific example of a new restaurant or bar that you featured and the impact it had on that business
We recently covered a food truck named “Feed Your Hole,” that serves specialty hot dogs and burgers. We spoke to the owner a few days after our write-up who told us they were experiencing lines around the block and that they even had to turn away crowds of people. Prior to our write-up, they were unknown and by their opening day, there were masses of people lining up for their food. This is common feedback for us but its still awesome every time we hear it.

DN; What role does your website play in your overall marketing and customer service mix?
We recently redesigned our website but prior to that, it was mostly just used as a tool for capturing subscribers. Most of our partnerships efforts drove traffic back to the site with hopes of enticing new subscribers to sign up. Now, our website is more of a destination for users seeking local lifestyle and entertainment content but we still have lots of work to do. Basically, we know we’ve got lots of valuable content on the site but we’re still figuring out how to surface the right content to the right guys.

DN: You’ve added some new services in the last year or so.  What are they and why did you add them?
In the past, we had covered JackThreads editorially – they hosted a lot of brands that we also frequently covered and so it made sense for us to actually be able to sell these brands to our audience, instead of simply recommending them. Another recent launch is Thrillist Rewards, which gives us a chance to monetize some of the local transactions we’re able to drive every day. Our mission is the same with this as it is with our content: we want to bring guys deals that they’ll actually enjoy and are actually relevant for them. A few of our recent deals are “Unlimited Beer and Ribs at Hill Country BBQ” and “a Strip and a Strip at Robert’s and Score’s.” We are also able to help small business reach our audience beyond editorial coverage and national display advertising.

Customer Experience Done Right

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Every once in a while you’re lucky enough to meet someone who is really doing things right. I felt that way after hearing Gibbs Jones, SVP of Customer Experience at Suddenlink speak at the Satmetrix Net Promoter conference earlier this year. I followed up with Jones and his associate Pete Abel, the SVP of Corporate Communications after the conference, yielding the interview below and an upcoming post on FastCompany.com.

DN: How did the customer experience role come into being at Suddenlink?
Abel: There’s always been a Vice President of Customer Service who is responsible for the overall operation of our call centers. Currently we have six of those, all in the US. There was a person to oversee those call centers. The evolution of the role was from call center manager to a broader customer experience role, which started close to Gibbs’s advent and there was a recognition that there was so much more to customer service than them just calling the call centers. We knew that and by putting that all under one title we could better drive results in an area that is really important to our CEO.

DN: How close is the CEO to the customer experience process?
Abel: Our CEO frequently discusses the importance of customer service on our quarterly earnings calls. If a customer manages to get his email address and sends him an email, he personally responds to that customer. He wants the customer to know that he’s accessible like anyone else in the company to deal with any issues they’re having and to make sure they’re having the best experience possible.

DN: How do you monitor customer satisfaction?
Jones: We have three ways to measure the customer experience. First, we are part of the JD Power study and work with them to understand their perspective, what’s driving the customer experience.

Second, we have a relationship net promoter survey, which helps us understand the customer’s overall feeling about Suddenlink as a company: what level of service we provide, the professionalism of our employees and if customers would recommend us to friends or family..

Third, and most comprehensive, is our transactional net promoter survey. Each time a customer contacts us for assistance, we send an email to them that asks questions specific to their recent transaction and gives them the opportunity to score us on different attributes and describe their experience in their own words.

DN: Are performance reviews tied to customer satisfaction?
Jones: We’re getting ready to launch a career progression plan for our CSRs, which allows them to get promoted within the CSR role giving them additional pay and recognition for doing a great job. We find a lot of value in the positive comments and are working on getting all of those back to the CSRs and technicians.

DN: How do you address the detractors?
Jones: For anyone having trouble with a service or feature, we pick that up as part of the survey and it comes back into a special group in our call centers and they follow up with the customer within 48 hours. We proactively call customers back. When you first approach someone and tell them you want them to be a CSR to talk to our angriest customers you get some funny looks. But it’s actually become one of the most popular jobs because customers are blown away that you actually took time to read the survey and the fact that you followed up creates immediate promoters because it says that you care.

DN: Give me a specific example of something you’ve fixed that’s improved customer satisfaction?
Jones: We changed our arrival windows in most of our markets. Most of our customers have access to our windows now. We changed to two-hour windows from all day windows because when we saw the data we realized it was better for the customer.

DN: Do you have other examples?
Jones: We have a list of 30 or 40 things, large and small, that we fixed or are investigating how to fix. For example, in the comments in one of our regions, customers were calling in to get their DVR fixed and we sent a hit to their box and content disappeared. After seeing a few of those each week we figured out there was something systematically that we needed to fix. The CSR’s had access to a refresh code that they shouldn’t have, and without our metrics we wouldn’t have known it.

DN: How does social media fit into all this?
Jones: It’s another way to gauge the customer’s experience. Our approach initially was to listen and understand what they were saying and from there developing the right platforms and forums. Social media is another great customer touch point. It allows us to engage them directly and try to get problems fixed.

DN: Which department does social media fall under?
Gibbs: It’s in the customer experience department. First and foremost, it’s a way to hear what our customers are saying and fix those things that need to be fixed. We’ve had some marketing engagement with social media. It’s a service channel that marketing has used as well.

DN: Do people ever re-tweet about their satisfaction after the issue has been resolved?
Abel: One example is a gentleman who tweeted about a service problem. We got in touch with him and worked out the problem, and he then sent out a follow up tweet saying, “hey, great Twitter service, I’m glad you’re using this to solve problems.” We found out later that he’s an investor in Twitter and other startups and he has close to a million followers on Twitter.

DN: Over the last two or three years, has customer satisfaction increased?
Jones: If you look at our longest running customer service surveys between 2007 and 2010, we saw the number of promoters (customers rating us nine or ten) grow from 54% to almost 60%. Our detractors (someone rating us between 0 and 6) declined from 26% to 16%. So, our overall net promoter score has increased from 28 to 43, as measured by an independent research company. In our industry many companies don’t have a positive net promoter score at all. We spend time every single day on the things we can do to improve the customer experience, which should then drive the score up.

DN: Has this increased the bottom line of the company?
Abel: During a tough economy, one where we’ve seen other cable operators achieve slower growth than they were accustomed to, in the past year alone we saw the total number of households we serve grow by nearly 7,000. We believe that’s an indicator of our customer service because we don’t have the biggest marketing budgets or financial resources. The fact that we were able to grow the number of customer relationships is an indicator that (customer service is) paying off.

We also had a record year in the total number of units of service sold. We’ve added nearly 230,000 new units of service sold to customers, which is by far a record year for us. Revenue has grown very steadily too, up 8.7% between 4th quarter 2009 and 4th quarter 2010. All of those core financial metrics are improving and when we compare those to our peers who publicly report their results, our financial operating results consistently meet or exceed them, and when you look at them in aggregate, we beat their percentage growth year over year.

Driving B2B Revenue Growth

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Most service providers like to say they “eat their own dog food.”  Not Jon Miller, co-founder and VP Marketing of Marketo. Miller prefers “drink your own champagne,” and not just because it sounds classier.  This preference is based on the stunning fact that Marketo is according to Miller, “currently the fastest growing software-as-a-service company in the world,” a feat accomplished by using their own software to turn marketing into a science.

Founded in 2006, Marketo already has over 1,000 clients, who pay just under $30,000 per year with the goal of improving the yield of their marketing activities.  Miller and his team rejected the notion that marketing was an art form, relegating that to the “Mad Man” era, preferring to focus on “process and analysis,” and in doing so delivered to this interviewer 8 delicious ways to drive revenue.

1. Don’t call a lead before its time
For most marketers, a lead is a lead, entered into a CRM system like Salesforce and treated with equal urgency.  According to Miller’s research, this approach means that, “only 6% of leads ever close” and “only half of the sales people make their sales goals.”  Having been able to identify key buying signals, Marketo’s system separates leads into two buckets, the 20% who are “ready to buy,” and those that require nurturing.

2. Know the buying signals of your prospects
Just because a visitor to your site gives you their contact information for something like a white paper, doesn’t mean necessarily that they a qualified lead.  Explained Miller, “if somebody downloaded our webinars or thought leadership [documents], we know they’re at the early stage.”  However, reported Miller, “if you go to our website and see the detailed pricing pages or register to watch a detailed demo, you’re very likely to enter a buying cycle with us.”

3. If they give the sign, call your leads post haste
When all leads are given equal value, they naturally clog up the sales process, wasting the time of both the prospect who isn’t ready and the sales person who then becomes skeptical of all the leads, further diminishing the yield.  But if only truly qualified leads go into sales pipeline, the sales force is reading and willing to jump all over them. Added Miller, “if you show buying signs, we’re going to be dialing your phone in 3-4 minutes!”

4. Reward your marketing team more and raise quotas
At most companies, marketing generates about 30% of the leads, which means the sales force needs to be heavily incentivized to not just close but also to find the leads themselves.  “At Marketo our marketing team generates 80% of the sales pipeline,” explained Miller.  This has allowed them to “radically reduce the salesperson’s risk” and “change how [we] compensate the marketing department.”  And because Sales has better quality leads, they close at a higher rate, allowing Marketo to raise quotas and hire fewer sales staff.

5. Focus sales team on closing not educating
According to Miller’s research, at most companies “almost half of the salesperson’s time is spent on unproductive activities.”  This includes educating prospects on the category and the product.  “This is outmoded thinking,” explained Miller, since today “70% of the buying cycle is complete before the buyer wants to connect with Sales.”  Assuming you are providing all the necessary educational material online then you too can “optimize the demand chain” by only giving Sales leads that are ready to be closed.

6. Hire a CRO
After all this talk of marketing efficiency, one of the more surprising outcomes of my conversation with Miller was his suggestion that companies hire a Chief Revenue Officer and place Marketing and Sales underneath that person.  Explained Miller, whose company just hired a CRO, “I don’t believe you can have a CMO and a CRO.”  This is not “a glorified Head of Sales,” added Miller, but someone who can lead “a fundamental transformation about how you think about generating revenue.”

7. Nurture all your other leads
While the bulk of this conversation has focused on identifying and converting hot leads, this is only half the secret to Marketo’s success.  The other half is the recognition that today’s tire kickers are tomorrow’s buyer as long as you have a strong “nurturing process to educate and stay in touch with them over time,” noted Miller. He added, “a full half [of our leads] are coming from seeds we developed earlier.”

8. Invest heavily in content development
When explaining Marketo’s success to-date, Miller revealed that they invest heavily in marketing, spending three times the ratio of most companies but because of their lead conversion rate, they are also more efficient and profitable than these other companies.  A huge portion of that investment goes into content development including webinars, white papers, blogs and social media.  In addition to creating “a lot of inbound leads and SEO, [this content] also helps to build trust and credibility with buyers who are starting to perceive us as innovators and thought leaders,” explained Miller.

Final note: A magna cum laude physics major at Harvard, Miller’s desire to find the math in marketing shouldn’t be all that surprising.  What may come as a surprise is the extent of Miller’s foresight as exemplified by the fact that he “actually started writing [his] blog before writing any product.”  For more on Miller, see my follow up interview here on TheDrewBlog.com.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.