Sourcefire's Open Source Marketing Ecosystem

One of the great things about writing a book is that you have so many great conversations with leaders in the field. Chatting with Michele Perry and Karin Pindle, at Sourcefire was definitely one of those conversations. They have an interesting challenge as marketers; too many leads. Their open source product, SNORT, is wildly popular in the security space, and leads to large numbers of downloads. The marketing team's challenge, however, is to translate that interest into purchases of their commercial product, Sourcefire 3D.


Here's a case study on their efforts from my upcoming book Digital Body Language, to give you a sense of how the Sourcefire marketing team tackled that challenge:

Sourcefire: Open Source Marketing Ecosystem
As a leader in network security solutions, Sourcefire had both an opportunity and a challenge. Their freely available and popular open source SNORT® intrusion prevention system drove significant awareness and interest, but for their sales team to be most effective, they needed to engage with only the leads who were likely to purchase a commercial offering. To enable this, Sourcefire’s marketing team had to enable prospective buyers to progress through the maturity spectrum and identify those who were ready for sales engagement.

Search engine strategies targeted buyers at all phases of the buying cycle, with education offered to those searching for category-related terms and deeper demos and comparisons targeted at those searching for Sourcefire or a competitor directly. To start the process, Sourcefire created an education-heavy web experience. For those new to the category, analyst reports, case studies, demos, webcasts, and thought leadership were provided for little more than a small amount of information. This enabled Sourcefire to establish themselves in the prospects’ minds as a leader in the space, and engage in the start of an ongoing dialog, while at the same time guiding the prospects’ understanding and awareness of what matters most in security.

When engaged, a rich profile on interests and level of engagement enabled both the scoring of leads and the nurturing of those not yet ready for sales. A four category scoring system looked at marketing source, site activity, title, and company
profile in order to score and categorize leads.

With leads categorized in A, B, C, and D leads, the Sourcefire team did an interesting thing; A and B leads were immediately handed to sales, but the entire lead funnel was opened to them. Sales professionals would occasionally notice a D lead in a key account, and use the non-qualified lead as an opportunity to begin a relationship that would be valuable when the lead matures to a later stage.

Leads that were not picked up were nurtured over time, and with
dashboard metrics on lead population by level, they were moved slowly down the
funnel. Each nurturing campaign was measured on its ability to transition
leads between the stages. With this overall marketing structure in place,
the Sourcefire marketing team proudly points to two key data points as measures
of its success; their sales team has stopped screaming for more leads, and most
recently they achieved year-over-year quarterly revenue growth of 42% in 2Q08
over 2Q07. Both of which, of course, are great accomplishments for any
marketing organization."

The Book: Digital Body Language

Marketing is undergoing a major shift that has been brought on by the change in the way people find and consume information. Whether it is Google’s ability to make the information resources of the Internet searchable or social media’s ability to connect people with peers for credible opinions on products and services, the way in which we access information and search for products has fundamentally changed.

As this transition happens, marketing and sales teams must react. With the shift to online from face to face, the ability to see body language and “read the room” has disappeared. Marketing must step in to read prospects’ Digital Body Language and use that knowledge to guide the prospects’ buying process.

The new book “Digital Body Language – Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World”, discusses the transitions that this is forcing in marketing departments everywhere, as they move to succeed in this new reality. In it, Steven Woods, industry expert and CTO of Eloqua discusses best practices for analyzing and understanding customer intent through analyzing their Digital Body Language.

The book uses informative explanations and in-depth case studies of many of the leading marketers around the world to show approaches to profiling, leads scoring, lead nurturing, sales handoff, marketing analytics, and data management.

Woods makes a compelling case that the transitions we are all experiencing in today's marketing environment are part of a fundamental shift in the way we think about marketing and the way we understand the buying process of our customers.

Available today on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Body-Language-Steven-Woods/dp/0979988551

the official press release:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Eloqua-980067.html


And some reviews of the book:



Laura Ramos, VP at Forrester Research, on B2B Marketing Posts:
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/03/10/digital-body-language-steve-woods-on-b2b-marketing/

Mike Gospe on the Marketing Campaign Development blog:
http://marketingcampaigndevelopment.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/digital-body-language-book-review/


Jep Castelein on LeadSloth:
http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/book-review-digital-body-language/

Paul McCord on the Sales and Sales Management Blog:
http://salesandmanagementblog.com/2009/04/06/book-review-digital-body-language-by-steven-woods/

Bill Lawler from Lawler on Leads:
http://billlawler.blogspot.com/2009/03/digital-body-language.html

Andy Beal on Marketing Pilgrim:
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/04/win-copies-of-steven-woods-digital-body-language-book.html

Joe Zuccaro on Marketing Consigliere:
http://www.marketing-consigliere.com/?p=2120#more-2120

Jeff Ogden on Fearless Competitor:
http://www.findnewcustomers.net/digitalbodylanguage


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Fresh off the presses

I just received the final, final, final proof copy of the layout for my upcoming book - Digital Body Language. We're sending it to the print on demand presses tonight, and I should have a copy in hand within a week. Exciting times, to be sure. Also a good time to look back on the overall process for creating it. I had only a limited idea of what I was getting into when I agreed to write a book, so for anyone who is considering it, here's what it actually entailed...

• ~ November 20, 2007: original idea formulated and discussed. Really vague discussions, where I think I said "yeah, that sounds like a good idea".


• ~ November 25, 2007: as a complete surprise to me, Joe Payne, our CEO, announced at the company meeting that I would be writing a book. Nothing like pressure.


• December-February 2008: I spent quite a bit of time sketching out a rough outline (bullet points - maybe 20 per chapter) of what might make a compelling book.


• February-March: Here's where the fun began... by this point I had spent a bit of time reading a few articles on book writing, but I would say that the best advice was "just start writing", so I did, scratching out a rough draft of the first chapter (and a bit).


• March 2008: introduced to Dave Morris, at New Year Publishing, who agreed to take on the title as a publisher. He described a publisher as being basically a project manager who knows all the ins and outs of the book industry, and can get the right set of layout editors, printers, copy editors, and proofers together. Fair enough.


• March-July 2008: Writing like mad. I end up travelling a lot from Toronto (home) to the West coast, and 5 hrs is about the right amount of time for putting in a solid writing session. Mike Dowding, my copy editor kept me sane by massaging my writing into a more readable form.


• June-July 2008: The thing that I really wanted to do with this book was highlight a lot of real-world case studies; what real marketers are doing to improve their marketing. During this period, I did deep interviews with around 50 organizations that are doing very interesting things in their marketing functions


• July 2008: Live on Amazon - http://tinyurl.com/5mmbjx. Seriously, you only need cover art and an ISBN number to be live on Amazon - I was amazed.


• July-October 2008: Getting a case study from a client published in a book requires a LOT of back and forth. A draft, multiple revisions, PR approval, legal approval, changes from both of those, signoff; lots of back and forth. I was doing around 40 case studies, of which about 30 got to final approval. I had no idea going into the process that this would prove to be the most time-intensive part of the whole book creation process.


• October 6, 2008: We had Eloqua Experience, our international user group in Las Vegas, and the goal was to have copies of the book for everyone there. It takes about 6 weeks to offset print and ship books and about 1 week to digitally print and ship books. We missed both deadlines. Disappointment, for sure, but we did have a single advanced release copy available to hold up to the audience. Small victory...


• October 15, 2008: Final version of manuscript and all finalized case studies and approvals submitted to layout for the final time. The approval back-and-forth had lead to a LOT of changes; case studies in and out, pull-quotes in and out, stats in and out. This was now final. Big weight off my shoulders, sigh of relief...


• November 22, 2008: Just back from vacation, realized that the "final" layout I had been sent for review had used the wrong version of the manuscript and case studies. Oooops, all wrong, back to the drawing board.


• December 11, 2008: Final PDF of layout arrives, all is good, sending it for print-on-demand proof to be created.

So, that's the process - just over a year from idea to completion - from what I've heard that's about the norm. All in all, it was interesting and even enjoyable in parts. Working with a broad spectrum of marketers tackling interesting and difficult problems was by far the best part; it's amazing how open people are to sharing the good and the bad of what they've been working on. It was fascinating to hear many of the stories.

Next up, the book as part of our Marketing efforts. Anyone who has done this before, I would love to hear from you on what worked, what didn't. Anyone who is thinking about it, I'd be glad to share more of the trials and tribulations if you're interested.

Books, Blogs, and Demand Generation

I'm in a bit of a circular world right now as I write a blog about Demand Generation that explores the topics in a book I've just written about using various web media, including blogs, for Demand Generation, and of course both the blog and the book will be used for generating demand. So, I should probably explain that, me, this blog, and the book.

It all started about a year ago, in a conversation with our CEO, after a long series of trips to visit a lot of clients. We were chatting about what each client was doing, how they were using our product (Eloqua), and what interesting things they were doing to do campaigns, score leads, automate marketing processes, manage data, coordinate with sales, measure effectiveness, etc. At first glance, it almost sounded like every client was doing something totally unique, but in our conversation I tried to tie it all together and say that it was all part of the same challenge.

And then Joe (our CEO) said "you should write a book about this". Kind of in the same tone as saying "you should order pizza for lunch"... I was not quick enough to say "but I have a day job", and so, with that, the book project was born.

It's been a very interesting year, spending a bit more time working to explain the new world of Demand Generation, but it's been a very fun one. I had the pleasure of interviewing over 50 customers throughout the year, and getting into a lot of details on how they were approaching the changes that are happening in marketing, and what they are doing to build a Demand Generation practice. From small startups through to Fortune 500 multinationals there were common threads in the changes they were seeing and the challenges they were tackling.

But, the most fun part of it so far has been getting to know the "new marketers". Operational, driven, process-oriented, data savvy, quantitative marketers - the exact opposite of the stereotypes.

So, the book... it's in layout right now (aah, that's it's own fun story, more on that another time), and due very soon. Which gives me a bit of time to take the ideas in the book online into a forum for more people to jump in with ideas, stories, and challenges. And, of course, the more people we can educate about Demand Generation, the more people may want to talk with us about how Eloqua can help. Nothing wrong with that at all...

I'll keep this blog updated on our progress with the book, and its trials and tribulations (I'm sure there will be some), as we use it in some of our campaigns.