Membership has its Privileges; Best Practices IP vs. Social CRM

I wrote recently about our decision to expose our pricing publicly on our website. It was one of the most commented-on posts ever on this blog, as it seems to have connected with a number of people in the same situation. The intersection of theory and reality in the world of social media always spurs some interesting debates. We all agree that transparency is great and noble... but... what about the realities of having a broad set of products that range in price by a factor of over 10x? What about low-end competitors who compete aggressively on price? When reality and theory intersect it spurs some fun debates, and I appreciate all the comments from people in similar situations.

Today, I want to share with you a similar change in philosophy that we just made at Eloqua, that had equally passionate debates.

Last week we opened up public access to Eloqua’s best practices community portal where the biggest and most vibrant community of marketers gets to work, tackles challenging business problems, and builds the lead management processes that power their businesses.

This caused substantial debate internally, that is likely not unique to Eloqua, as we wrestled with the pros and cons of making this change. Given the response to the last post, I wanted to share with you our thinking on transparency, social CRM, and best practice knowledge.

Why do Marketers Upgrade?

The challenge that we wrestled with was that one of the main reasons that our clients join us, or upgrade from low-end systems, is to join the “community”. They want to compare notes with peers, understand how other marketers are engaging their sales teams, see what analytics their colleagues in similar industries have on their marketing dashboards, and get tips and tricks from people who have gone down this path before. This "membership has its privileges" motivator was very compelling.

The thought was, in opening up our online community portal, are we not giving away the “essence” of this community? The knowledge, best practices, tips, tricks, analysis, and ideas are all there. Could you not just buy a cheap-and-cheerful solution, and then leverage the experience and expertise of this community?

It was a very valid question, and it caused us a lot of consideration. In the end, after much debate, we opened up the portal and shared our expertise publicly. Rather than decrease the value of this knowledge, through giving it away, we are trusting that it will greatly increase the enthusiasm of marketers to join the best marketers on a journey of transforming their businesses.

Does Sharing Expertise Increase or Decrease its Value?

One of the parallels that worked well to win over those who were hesitant internally was that of Mike Holmes on the home renovation TV show Holmes on Homes. Sharing his expertise publicly, week after week, to 100 Million TV viewers has not, in any way, reduced the demand for top quality home renovation contractors. Far from it, it has increased it.

Can home owners watch the show, take notes, and then do it themselves, or use a low cost contractor to get the work done? Perhaps, but they now know the realities of the projects they are tackling, and are more likely to want to engage with a renovations contractor that brings expertise as well as power tools.

Sharing Marketers' Stories

As with any company, we have long been sharing client stories of success. We share videos of Mark DiMaurizio from Comcast Spectacor talking about how the Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers use deep segmentation to connect with B2B and B2C buyers, and we show Katina Fisk of Approva talking about marketing analysis and dashboarding.

These are great testimonial videos of the end state, and they highlight a great “finished product” in terms of results (thank you Mark and Katina). However, what we wanted to showcase in opening up the community was how those results actually get built. This is where the best marketers shine.

In the online community, however, Amit Varshneya and Tom Svec look at the nuts and bolts of building the type of deep segmentation that Mark talked about by leveraging company-level rather than contact-level information. Similarly Tricia Wilkerson looks at the specifics of tracking and analyzing banner ad clickthroughs in order to generate the type of marketing analysis Katina highlights.

Each of these marketing success stories, like Mark and Katina’s, that we share comes from the work of marketers like Amit, Tom, and Tricia. By sharing these stories, we hope to paint a picture of what marketing success truly looks like. Will the passion for great marketing that is shared by community members outweigh any downsides of sharing this “under the floorboards” view? We believe it will.


Have you had similar internal debates about opening up your expertise to the world? Please share them here, we would all benefit from your experiences on this topic.

Direct Mail, Email, and the "Teaser" Concept

Email and Direct Mail are very different marketing media types for B2B marketers. However, there are always lessons to be learned from one media type that can be applied to others. In Direct Mail, a lot of thinking goes into the "teaser" to get people to open the envelope. Laura Cross, who has done a lot of Direct Mail work in her career as a Marketer, talks about the techniques and strategies used for a Direct Mail teaser, and applies them to email marketing.

The ways that we inspire our audience to click through to a landing page are very similar, as Laura explains in this quick video:




(if this video does not load, click here to watch the Direct Mail, Email, and Teasers video)

Laura highlights the six key questions that email recipients answer as they decide whether to click through on your email:

Who – is this relevant to me?
What do I need to do?
Where do I need to go or to click?
When should I do this? Is there any reason it's urgent?
Why should I care?
How will this help me?

If those questions are answered clearly, in a way that compells the recipient, they will click through from your email to your landing page. I hope you enjoy Laura's video.

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?