The SaaS Experience; Application, Knowledge, Best Practices

Our customer success team recently released our Customer Central portal, which provides a wealth of material to aid in customer success. The project has been under way for some time, but its release got me thinking about the future of the SaaS application experience.

Much of the discussion around the user experience that a software vendor provides is focused on the technology itself. This is very much a key aspect of the experience a user has with a software application, but it's very much not the only aspect of that experience.


There are three main areas of the overall experience a user has with software:



The Software Application: the product itself, and the aspects of the technology and user interface that guide a user to better understand and use it


Help and Documentation: the explicit knowledge that surrounds the application and provides instructions on its use. Whether in a help center, support portal, or knowledge-base, this documentation is generally application specific and task focused.


Community and Practice Information: the implicit knowledge of how an application can best be used to achieve a business goal. Often this information is shared through peers who have gained experience with using the application to tackle a business objective, and embodies a broader scope, including business, process, and political issues likely to be encountered.


Why bring this up?


Because I suspect we are at an interesting inflection point in the market after which these three experiences will no longer be separate.

Currently, these three main areas of experience with an application are separate. Software vendors provide the application experience, and whereas they may use a variety of third party tools to do so, it is delivered as a relatively self-contained experience.


The documentation for a software application is, similarly, delivered as another experience. Very often, a third party provider of documentation software is used that provides the ability to store and present information, and allows users to search for information in a variety of ways.


Community and best practice information is delivered in a much less standard way. Sometimes it is delivered through a single portal interface that manages a vibrant community, but often it is an amalgamation of a variety of sources, some company sponsored, and some user driven, where best practice approaches are shared.


There are a few interesting trends in each of these that makes me think that within a few short years we will be dealing with a single user experience across all three.

First, SaaS technologies, unlike installed software, easily allow integration of the experiences of the software application, and the help documentation. As both the software application and the documentation libraries are now built to be deployed in the cloud, it is a simple exercise in software engineering to embed the help documentation directly into the application experience.

Today's documentation systems are rapidly evolving to better support this approach, as it allows contextual access to key information, and thus greatly improves the users experience with the application.

Secondly, there is a significant evolution in both community software and help documentation software to move their experiences closer together. Idea exchanges, discussion forums, and collaborative voting on enhancements, all allow the viewers of once-passive documentation forums to interact with one another and exchange ideas.

Thirdly, applications themselves are beginnning to enable the sharing of best practice approaches. In demand generation and B2B marketing, the best automation programs for event management, free trial optimization, data management, lead routing, or lead scoring are being shared among marketers within, and even between, organizations.

As these transitions take place, we are evolving towards a user experience that combines all three, for the benefit of the marketer. As an example, a marketer looking to build a lead nurturing campaign should be able to, from a single experience:

• compare notes with other marketers who have tackled similar business challenges
• download sample nurturing campaigns as potential starting points
• understand the precise functionality of a particular software feature being used
• build and deploy their own lead nurturing campaign

Today's marketers, when evaluating software offerings, are increasingly pushing the evaluation envelope of demand generation software beyond the software itself. In its early days, SaaS software shifted an element of the burden to achieve success back towards the software vendor through a pricing model that was recurring, not upfront. It has been a very healthy shift for the industry and clients. Now, as marketers increasingly push to evaluate how each vendor will provide an overall, wholistic experience that allows them to achieve success, we will see this shift continue.

Software continually evolves, and at each evolutionary step, disparate parts of the software stack become seamlessly integrated for the benefit of the user. I suspect that one of the next evolutions we are about to see is the integration of the application, the documentation, and the community into a single, seamless experience for the user. I, for one, am very much looking forward to it.

I look forward to your comments. Is this a shift you can see happening? Are you beginning to evaluate software in general, and demand generation software specifically on its overall experience and path to success?

Flyers: Renewal Marketing Leads to Deeper Interest Profiling

In the case study on the 76ers, we'd talked about using a multi-channel campaign to build upon the emotional excitement of an NBA franchise. In doing so, however, the opportunity to build a much deeper understanding of exactly what each fan is most passionate about was not overlooked. In this case study, from Digital Body Language, the Flyers leveraged the digital body language insights to better understand which player each fan was most enthusiastic about.

This insight will be leveraged to deepen the emotional tie in future marketing campaigns by focusing communications on what each individual fan is most interested in. I hope you enjoy the read:

Flyers: Renewal Marketing Leads to Deeper Interest Profiling

The Philadelphia Flyers wanted deeper relationships with fans while also driving the highest possible rates of renewal for season-ticket holders. With careful planning, they were able to achieve both of these goals at once.

The team created personal URLs (PURLs) for each season ticket holder (such as http://www.myflyerstickets.com/johnsmith) and invited each customer to his/her personal site to complete the renewal process. On the personal page, personalized content and offers enticed the ticket holder to renew. But just as importantly, the Flyers began to build the basis for a direct online relationship with each fan.

The Flyers’s site contains rich information (including video) on players, stats, schedules, and the draft, and through the direct relationship with each season ticket holder that they have now built, the Flyers better understand each fan. By observing each customer’s unique digital body language as they look at stats, read up on players, and watch highlights, the Flyers can identify things such as favorite players and whether they prefer stats or highlight reel footage.
In upcoming seasons, the Flyers plan to leverage this rich base of knowledge based on the fans’ digital body language to continually strengthen and hone the message. Personalized video and audio messages from each fan’s favorite player and RSS feeds of stats and highlights tailored will deepen the team bond.

The Flyers increased online season-ticket renewals from 1% the previous year to 18%. Renewing online also allowed real-time processing so these numbers were available immediately to senior management opposed to the time lag that occurs with processing renewals manually. Of course, the Flyers were also able to deepen their understanding of their fan base and strengthen those relationships significantly.

Framingham Heart Study has lessons for Twitter

In 1948, the National Heart Institute embarked on an ambitious study of the causes of heart disease. By studying 5,209 men and women between the ages of 30 and 62, who lived in the town of Framingham, Massachussetts, and who had not yet developed overt symptoms of heart disease, researchers were able to learn about the underlying causes and symptoms of one of the leading causes of death and serious illness.

The Framingham study was groundbreaking in its contribution of knowledge about heart disease, and has become the foundation of medical diagnosis, practice, and treatment in the area throughout North America and Europe. It has led to over 1200 articles in medical journals in the past half century.

However, in recent years, there have been questions of its ability to correctly model the risk factors on certain patients, especially those of South Asian and African descent. The population of Framingham, Mass, when the study was conducted, was predominantly caucasian, and thus the guidelines it produced have been cause for question in today's multi-cultural world.

Quite simply, as populations change, rules and guidelines built before the change may need to be re-examined for their applicability after the change.

So, what does this have to do with Twitter? Twitter too, has guidelines, practices, and approaches that work. The vanguard of Twitter, folks like @guykawasaki, @chrisbrogan, @armano, and @conversationage have communicated these guidelines and practices, and in doing so have made Twitter into a very effective and very popular tool for communication.

But in becoming so effective and popular, the population on
Twitter has fundamentally changed.

Now, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and Oprah are avid Twitterers, colleagues who had not heard of Twitter 6 months ago are joining to "see what it's about", every politician is borrowing a page from Obama and joining the fray, and radio stations seem to mention their Twitter handle more frequently than their web address. @MackCollier has already recently written about the changing population.

Plenty of people are debating whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I think that debate is moot. The population of Twitter has changed and is changing, and the change will continue to be interesting.

The real question is, much like the Framingham Heart Study, does a change in the population on Twitter mean a change in the guidelines?

It's difficult to believe that Ashton and Britney are following the "rules" that were tacitly understood prior to their arrival, and in fact I don't think it would make sense for them to. They bring a different persona to the population, and in doing so, change the landscape a small amount.

I don't profess to know how the guidelines of Twitter will evolve with a new, larger, more mainstream population in place, but I do have some questions:

- will it be accepted for celebrity Twitterers to be "outbound" only, rather than interactive?
- will we accept that many Twittering celebrities will be ghost written? Or will we insist on authenticity?
- will Twitter become the defacto standard for news distribution for outlets like radio stations and news publishers?
- how does our organization of Twitter communication evolve beyond Tweetdeck filters and the like when there are "updates" from celebrities or news outlets and "communication" from individuals to manage?
- what measures of influence will evolve to indicate the most influential writers?


What are your thoughts? How will the norms of communication on Twitter look 12 months from now, as the population continues to change?

National Instruments: Multiple Activities Leading to Multiple Responses

National Instruments has done a great job of creating an information rich web presence that provided relevant and useful information to their audience of scientists and engineers. They had implemented a very elegant equitable exchange of information process that asked for small amounts of information from their audience in exchange for access to the information resources, and were nurturing their prospects based on the information they had requested.

The challenge that Helena Lewis and the team at National Instruments needed to tackle though was what happened in a prospective buyer was very active on their site and accessed multiple information resources in different areas. Here is a case study on how they tackled the challenge, from Digital Body Language:

National Instruments: Multiple Activities Leading to Multiple Responses


National Instruments leveraged the rich information on prospects’ interests that it gleaned from prospect digital body language on its Web site to deliver highly targeted and relevant communications. The success of these communications was evident in the very high open and clickthrough rates discussed earlier. To achieve this, however, National Instruments had to overcome an operational challenge.

The mapping of online activities to communications was straightforward, but also created a challenge. What should happen if a site visitor performs multiple actions that warrant a communication? For instance, downloading four whitepapers should not result in four communications.

To ensure that prospects are not inundated if they perform a number of triggering activities, National Instruments built a waiting period of 24 hours into its scoring. If multiple actions were seen in a 24-hour period, the actions were scored individually and the most relevant communication was selected. Similarly, if an action had been performed before (for example, downloading an automated test guide), the prospect was not sent communications that had this as a call to action.

This solved the challenge of too many communications, but National Instruments also realized that certain key actions should bypass this logic. For example, if a visitor abandons a shopping cart, or saves the configuration of a product, a communication would be immediately triggered. The 24-hour delay was reserved for communications that were deemed less critical.

Since National Instruments is a global organization, each time it learned a better way to interact with customers and built processes for doing so, it replicated that logic and structure and separated it from the content. In this manner, it only needed to translate content and messaging to roll out its program to any of 35 countries.

Why the Contact Washing Machine must be In-House

As B2B marketers, we all deal with the same reality; we receive a continuous stream of dirty data, but yet realize that success requires us to work with clean data. I wrote some time ago about the Contact Washing Machine concept, a data cleanliness program that standardizes and normalizes data within a B2B marketing platform.

Since that time, however, I've had a lot of conversations where marketers have suggested that they don't need to establish the discipline of the contact washing machine to keep their data clean, as they have a service (either a tool or an agency service) that they send their marketing data to once in a while to have it cleansed.

The challenge with this approach is that the data we are dealing with is continually being used, and continually being added to and edited. Every source of data that flows into your marketing data base has an opportunity to dirty the data that is within it. Whereas you may be able to control some sources of data, many you cannot, and if a data source is contributing dirty data, very quickly your marketing database will soon have a percentage of data that cannot be relied upon.

The sources of data to most of today's B2B marketing platforms are quite varied, and many of them either are not, or cannot be, rigorously controlled in terms of the data they pass into your platform.

CRM systems and data marts will have their own data rules and data standards, and may contribute data of varying qualities. Event registrations may be provided to you by third party vendors and thus have non-standard ways of collecting data. Web forms may allow free-form text fields for titles, industries, or address fields, and in doing so contribute dirty data. List uploads, whether purchased, or from legacy data stores are often of dubious quality, and any integration with your sales team's desktop email environment means that they will be contributing data as they chose to type it.

In short, the variety and breadth of data sources in most marketing environments means that we cannot control what data is coming in, and thus, our data quality begins to degrade as soon as we have finished a bulk data cleansing process.

The only viable solution, and the concept behind the Contact Washing Machine, is to bring it in house. In order to have clean data in your marketing platform, you must have your data being continually cleansed at each touch point. Each time that data is sourced or changed, it should be put through the cleansing process of the Contact Washing Machine in order to remain clean and standardized.

Whereas bulk data cleansing can offer additional cleaning to what the automated standardizing, cleansing, deduping, and normalizing that a Contact Washing Machine can provide, both are necessary. If you think of clean data as being like the oil that keeps your marketing engine running smoothly, you can think of bulk data cleansing as being like an oil change, and the Contact Washing Machine as being like an oil filter within the engine. An oil change may do more to clean the oil, but you won't get far from the mechanic's garage if your engine does not have an oil filter to keep things continually cleansed.

Strategy and Tactics in B2B Marketing with Social Media

The world of B2B marketing is changing. A lot.

Many of us have been in conversations where we discuss the tactics we are using, and how they add up to an overall marketing strategy. I've been in a lot of these discussions too, and the general definition of what makes a marketing strategy leads to an interesting discussion.

The question is whether a strategy needs a defined outcome (an exact destination) or a general outcome (a general direcational goal) as it's intended target.

In my view, restricting strategic thinking to a defined outcome, instead of just a directional outcome leaves it almost useless for uncertain areas like social media. I would be rather suspect of any marketer who felt comfortable setting out exactly what their 5 year (or even 2 year) goals were with their social media strategy, along with tactical milestones along the way. The honest truth is we don't know. None of us do.

However, that does not leave us strategically hamstrung. If you look the the strategy and tactics for a participant in the American migration in the mid 1800s, you see a similar pattern.

Strategy:

• Go West, Young Man

Tactics:

• Get covered wagon
• Drive to western edge of town
• Keep going west
• Avoid any disasters that arise on route
• Repeat steps 3 and 4
• You'll know when you end up where you want to be

The reality is you are getting into unknown territory, and as such, it is not possible to define a strategy down to an exact level of detail with a specific end goal in mind.

Today's B2B marketing world, especially as we engage with social media, has a similar challenge. If we attempt to define exactly what the outcomes are of any specific initiative, we end up unable to even start. Directionally, we do know where we want to go:

• Better engagement with customers
• Better understanding of their needs
• Better awareness of our message in the market

However, it is not possible to always accurately map our tactics to these directional goals. Sometimes we just have to set a directional strategy and execute against it as well as we can.

Is this how you're thinking of your B2B marketing strategy in social media? Here's what we're doing at Eloqua which is working well in terms of engagement, understanding, and awareness, but as a general direction, not an exact destination strategy. Have you been able to get your executive team comfortable with a directional strategy?

Synopsys: Centralized Marketing Communications

Large organizations whose marketing groups have grown organically over time can often have fairly disparate functions, content, and databases. To bring those distributed marketing efforts into a central marketing database can often be an interesting challenge. Mital Poddar at Synopsys walked me through how they had tackled that centralization effort when I chatted with her during the writing of Digital Body Language.

Using a combination of incentives, including tracking of digital body language, high quality branded templates, and management of opt-out requests, Synopsys was able to win over the distributed marketing teams and centralize over 100 independent marketing databases.

Synopsys: Centralized Marketing Communications

Synopsys is a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing. As such, the sales process is very knowledge and education oriented. Sophisticated buyers and sophisticated sellers exchange lots of information throughout a lengthy process. Because of this, Synopsys discovered that each of their product marketing managers were sending micro campaigns to small lists of prospects at various stages of the education and sales process.

This had been a somewhat functional process, but did not allow Synopsys easy control of their brand and messaging and the risks of over-communicating to customers due to a lack of centralized control had become significant. It also did not allow Synopsys any insight into the digital body language of those prospects as each individual salesperson would send their small scale campaigns in their own way – often from their desktop – in a way that did not allow centralized tracking.

To operationalize these communications in a way that still allowed the knowledge-intensive sales process to progress, but gave Synopsys better control over brand and better ability to provide insights into their prospects’ digital body language, they decided to centralize the process. Each salesperson could send any communication that they desired to, to any list of their prospects, but it would be executed centrally by a marketing service bureau (of one individual). This enabled consistency in brand messaging and started the process of keeping historical campaign data in one location.

As with any organization, there were pockets of resistance to either the creative
standardization (all communications would now share a common look and feel) or to giving up control of a list of contacts. The centralization, however, offered three benefits that outweighed these hesitations. A common theme was more aesthetically pleasing than most of the individual efforts, winning over many. The reduction in effort was a second significant selling point. The ability to instantly see the results of each campaign, and the individuals who had clicked through and sought further information, was the final advantage to win over skeptics.

During two months, the transition was made to this new operational model. The field team was able to quickly craft the message and the target audience they had in mind, which was then passed to the central marketing service organization. By centralizing management of the final creative touches and the distribution of the messages, the marketing organization was able to maintain control over the branding and look & feel. The team was also able to ensure the proper tracking was in place to allow insight into the prospects’ digital body language.

Through centralizing these communications, the Synopsys team was able to gain control over their brand and the frequency with which they communicate with prospects, while at the same time building rapport with their sales organization. By adding in the ability to observe the customers’ digital body language, they also began to build a foundation for deeper insights into their audience, and for an internal culture of analytics.

Our B2B Facebook Marketing Strategy

It's a work-hard, play-hard world out there, and there's nothing better to end a day of deep discussions on marketing than sharing a few drinks or going out to grab a bite to eat.


At Eloqua, we are lucky to have some of the most interesting, fun, and social customers around (they are marketers, after all), so when we started talking about what one might do with Facebook from a B2B marketing perspective, an obvious answer came up. Keep it friendly.


I suspect we're not the only marketing team who was on one hand intrigued by the reach and the buzz of Facebook, but on the other hand not quite sure what would work from a B2B marketing perspective. The idea of discussing the latest whitepaper or marketing best practices did not seem to fit the social vibe of Facebook. When the discussion turned to our customers though, we quickly realized that the social interactions we had with them were as interesting and valuable as the marketing discussions we had.


Another thing that we discussed was that many of our team will work with our clients remotely before ever meeting them face to face. Friendships develop over email and phone conversations far before having a face to face interaction.


So, our Facebook plan developed. We wanted to explore and expose the social side of Eloqua. As we go to events, share a few drinks with clients, or have dinner with marketing groups, we'll post the pictures on Facebook so the clients we are already friends with can get to know us better as people, and the people who have met at user groups around the country can reconnect online.


What is our business rationale for this? That's a great question. The Gallup organization did a workplace poll a few years back that observed that having good friends at work was a significant factor in employee retention (http://gmj.gallup.com/content/511/Item-10-Best-Friend-Work.aspx). Could the same idea hold in client retention? We're not sure, but it's fun to try, and a great reason to get more social with our clients.




Our commitment is that we won't "talk shop". Every marketer we have interacted with who experiences an Eloqua event and feels the vibe and energy of the community is excited to join it, and that is motivation enough for us. Will this strategy work, we're not sure, but as David Armano said the other day, we're all learning by doing - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/03/brands-will-learn-by-doing-get-used-to-it-.html




I'm interested in your comments, whether you're an Eloqua customer or not. What have you seen with this type of a B2B Facebook strategy? What has worked, what has not? What are your first reactions? If you are a customer, what are your thoughts on our Facebook presence? What would you like to see more of or differently about the social side of Eloqua?

VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads

Almost any of us in B2B marketing wrestle with the challenges of the leaky funnel. As we pass leads to sales that are not ready, perhaps due to them being a "future likely" rather than a current opportunity, we end up with a dead lead pile.

Re-engaging with this dead lead pile can be one of your easiest ways to generate more active opportunities without significant additional expenditure. Amy Marks from VFA took this approach, and I had the pleasure of chatting with her about it when I was writing Digital Body Language:

VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads

VFA, a leading provider of end-to-end solutions for facilities capital planning and asset management, had many dormant leads in its marketing database. Amassed over a period of years, through tradeshows, lists and sales activities, these “dead” leads were stored in VFA’s CRM system, had never been converted to opportunities, and were no longer receiving communications from VFA.

To engage these leads, VFA implemented a 5-part nurturing program that provided unique content to each of the 6 verticals targeted by VFA. The initial communications were case study focused, and progressed to white paper and webinar downloads, then offers to request a demo or engage directly with sales.

At each step of the process VFA’s marketing team enabled the prospect to engage in a way that was governed by the prospect’s own buying process. Each email offer connected to a landing page that described how similar organizations were able to meet their business challenges.

Additional resources—articles, case studies, white papers—were offered, allowing prospects to select the information they needed depending on their stage in the buying process. At each step, the prospect had the ability to “short cut” the process and jump straight to a later stage; by either requesting a demo or engaging with the VFA sales team.

The campaign succeeded in bringing back a tremendous number of leads from the “dead”. Over 120 highly qualified leads were passed to sales, and over $1.6M in pipeline was created. In a typical example, a lead may have been disqualified at a much earlier date, but given changes in the prospect’s organization, they were now ready to purchase and a sales opportunity was discovered. Only through nurturing and observing the buyers’ digital body language were these opportunities rediscovered.

What the Prius can teach about B2B Marketing Analytics

Anyone who has driven in a Prius is aware that it is an interesting experience, different than in most other cars. However, can it really teach us about B2B Marketing Analytics?

I think the answer is yes.

If you look at the dashboard of the Prius, it has some interesting data. Mainly, it shows you your energy consumption, and your gas mileage in Miles Per Gallon. The data is right in front of you, and continuously updated.

It is interesting in that there are no compensation plans, MBOs, or commission structures associated with your gas mileage, but every Prius driver will report the same effect - you change your driving habits. Just by having the metrics in front of you, you feel compelled to do the behaviours that drive the number in the right direction; accelerating gently, not driving too fast, braking slowly.

This works in B2B marketing too. Socializing metrics can drive behaviour, regardless of compensation plans and MBO objectives associated with those metrics. If your marketing organization does not share, socialize, and discuss metrics on campaign response, you may be surprised at what happens if you do.

We all react naturally to seeing metrics in front of us on our behaviour, and much like in driving a Prius, if we see that our marketing campaigns are not influencing buying behaviour, are not driving inquiries, or are not guiding leads to become marketing qualified leads, we will likely stop those activities.

5 steps to a more honest view of buyer interests

I was talking with Stefan Tornquist the other day while we got ready for a video webcast with On24 (see the webcast here). We spent some time discussing one of the results from an interesting survey that MarketingSherpa did on buyer transparency.



Sherpa had asked the question "How often do you provide accurate information during registration?" of 2,700 technology buyers, in the context of events such as webinars and virtual events. The results were very interesting.

Data such as name and email were generally provided in an accurate manner, with around 70% of respondants always providing accurate information and another 20% sometimes providing it. However, beyond that, the prospects' likelihood of submitting accurate information plummetted. For Job Title, only 53% said they always submitted it accurately, and for company size it dropped further to only 40%. Although information such as readiness to buy, or main area of interest, was not studied in this survey, most marketers would intuitively suspect that it would be significantly less accurate than even Job Title and Company Size.



This challenge underscores the importance of observing what prospective buyers do, rather than just what they say, in understanding them as a buyer.

1. Map your buyer's buying process and understand how each buyer progresses from education through to vendor discovery, validation, and purchase.
2. Understand your marketing assets, and map each of your marketing assets into the "buyer's toolkit" so you can understand where each is applicable in the buying process.
3. Define areas of your website that also map into this buyer's toolkit, allowing you to understand how web activity best maps to buying stage and area of interest.
4. Add in search activity to give you an even more refined view of buyer interest and intent. Understanding what questions each prospective buyer is asking gives you a much more accurate view of their stage in the buying process.
5. Present the information on each prospect's true area of interest, or stage in the buying process to your Sales team in the environment that they are most comfortable in - their CRM system.

There is no way to guarantee that your insights into buyers' roles, interests, and industries are accurate. However, if you look at their digital body language to see what they do, and what they show interest in, and use that information to augment what they fill out on web forms, you will have a clearer picture of their interests than through web forms alone.