by Scott on March 19, 2007
I received a note from Barry Hess at Scrawlers reminding me that I signed up for a Scrawlers account, but had yet not logged in. (Scrawlers “embraces constraints” through stories of 100 words or less). I promptly signed in and posted my first three lines to Scrawlers that afternoon.
That email was a good example of the importance of occasional updates to your leads: your new and trial users who sometimes sign up, take a quick look, make a mental note to come back later, and then just forget to. The timing, content, and delivery of these emails visits, postcards, or calls are what I refer to as lead management.
Contact Managers vs. Lead Management Software
Barry’s was a simple email from his email client, I suspect. But what happens when he grows to hundreds and thousands of new users?
Maybe you are already there. That is where you start looking for small business lead management and contact management tools.
There are hundreds of tools available for online contact management and you could use one of those as your lead management software. But then you’d miss out on features that make for more effective lead management.
I’ve put together a quick list. The image at left is a preview of lead management software features.
Click here for a comparison of lead management software and contact management software.
Useful Reminders Work
The Scrawlers reminder prompted a new active user. After we at Synap Software send emails updates to trial users we always see login activity to accounts that had been inactive for a bit. Our reminder emails typically have useful information about a lead management feature or a small tutorial on lead management. This information both informs and reminds trial users why they initially had an interest in our lead management product. [Note: We do not monitor our users’ detailed use of the system, but do monitor login activity and user counts to help provide better service and understand aggregate usage patterns.]
Do you use trail-user management, lead management, or contact management software to keep your trial- and new-users informed and reminded of your product? We’d love to hear any experiences of how it’s worked out.
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by Scott on March 16, 2007
Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day! Take a break from micro-isv, lead management, or small business marketing work this weekend and enjoy it. Looking for a new angle besides green beer? Check out Patrick McKenzie’s free trial of Bingo Card Creator for this and other occasions as well as his collection of ready made free bingo cards. I know Patrick via the community of small software companies and he has earned a following of satisfied customers.
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by Scott on March 15, 2007
It’s all the little things. For example, while other people are buying extra laptop cord wraps and ties, MacBooks have one built right into the power supply. Simply flip in the outlet prongs, flip out the wrap feet, wrap the cord, and you have it nice and neat and ready to go. Just another little touch that, when all put together add up to a great experience with the product I use all day, every day.
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by Scott on March 14, 2007
This is the last of a 3 part series on small business marketing. Part 1 listed three reasons that small business owners avoid marketing efforts. Part 2 listed three quick examples of why marketing is important. This final part lists 7 steps that small business owners can take to improve their marketing results.
Ways To Improve Small Business Marketing
Individually, these are all good ideas for small business marketing and books worth of advice have been written about each idea. The real power comes from putting them together in a way that each step builds on the previous.
- Be “Remarkable”
See Seth Godin’s Purple Cow
. Build something that is “worth making a remark about”. Have a story to tell about yourself and your products. People won’t want to sell for you, but they will share interesting stories about you.
Do something different than your competitors. Have your own unique marketplace niche. If your competitors compete as “the lowest price” you won’t get to remarkable by being “lower than the lowest price!”. If your competitors compete by being large or by being small and personal, you won’t win by being larger or smaller or more personal. Do something differently.
- Participate In, Listen To, and Learn From Your Customers’ Community
Before you can do the next step (Be Heard) you have to do a lot of listening and learning yourself. Go where your customers’ are, both physically and online. Find out where your customers meet in person and get invited to attend. Find where your customers meet online and actively participate. In both cases, don’t participate by selling your product (see #7). Instead first just listen then start offering real, helpful advice. From this participation you will get more and more chances to be heard.
- Be Heard
Because you are doing #1-Be Remarkable, you will have plenty of interesting things to blog about. Because you are doing #2 in the list-Listen to your Customers, you will know what is interesting to them.
Blog, blog, and blog some more. Start blogging well before your product is released. Don’t wait until you are asking people to buy. Ian Landsman, developer of help desk software HelpSpot, wrote about how he found success at starting to blog well before a product is released. Read the excellent book for small business bloggers, Clear Blogging by Bob Walsh.
- Offer a Free Trial or Service
When people hear about your product or services, make it easy for them to try out themselves. Offer free samples, trials, or introductory services and don’t expect prospects to jump through hoops. This is especially important online. A two page sign-up form simply stands between you and a prospect and does not make it easy and free to try.
- Be Welcoming – Make it Easy for People to Send Feedback
After a person has tried your service, make it easy for them to provide feedback. Put a feedback page on your website and put a link in your product and emails to that feedback page.
Build places on your website where people can easily and voluntarily share some information about themselves that will help you better meet their needs. But don’t ask for every piece of information that you think might be valuable in marketing. For example, an insurance agent’s quote request page should ask for car make and model but not favorite hobbies. Make your information request and feedback processes frictionless and be sure to respond promptly.
- Ask For and Track Feedback, Testimonials, and Referrals
Now that you are getting feedback, use the positive feedback as testimonials. Also, ask those the provided positive feedback for referrals. Finally, track referral activity so that you can thank the referrer, giving your customer an even more positive experience.
- Let Others Do the Talking
When you boast about your own product, no one will believe you anyway. We have built a natural response to ignore others’ bragging. Don’t waste time on what gets ignored, instead be an informed expert (see #2) and make it as easy as possible for others to try out your product (see #4), to initiate conversations with you (see #5), and to share with others how great your products are (see #6).
Small business marketing can be almost systematic and does take planning. There are many small business marketing systems out there (here’s one we are building) to facilitate some of this so that you can focus on building even more remarkable products and services.
Note:
See also Improve Lead Conversion by Avoiding These 6 Marketing Mistakes
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by Scott on March 11, 2007
This is the second article in a three part series on getting started at small business marketing. In the first article I wrote about 3 reasons that micro-ISV and other company founders avoid small business marketing or start too late. In this article we take a quick look at three examples of where it takes more than a great product to get noticed in the marketplace.
Example 1: What’s Hot?
How many times have you seen a company success story to which your first response is “Hey, I could have done that!”? You see a Google acquisition or a hot startup on the cover of Business 2.0 and, if you are like me, you sometimes immediately think “That’s not so hot”.
What we are forgetting is that it is not the product that made the buzz. Most press mentions and awards and referrals are not about the product. They are about the story behind it; the way people feel about the creators of the product, the conversations people had about it. All things influenced by a company’s marketing and PR efforts.
Example 2: Musicians vs. Labels
Where do you stand on the digital rights management (DRM) and music revenues debate? Record labels are vilified in the popular blogosphere for being bloodsucking, greedy, enterprises that care only about money and not the music.
These devilish descriptions of record labels may be true – after all, the record labels are in business too which means seeking the lowest supply costs and the highest revenue margins – but we are not debating that here. The point for this article is this: the musician is the builder. The record label is the marketer. While many people decry the marketer’s unfair leverage, small companies can learn from this example that marketing provides leverage and value.
Interlude: Yes, The Product Does Matter
The remarkability of your product is very important. I’ll say it again. Please do develop remarkable products. In fact, a remarkable product is the basis of effective marketing.
This is not about making junk and marketing it well. It is not about selling sand to Saharans. This is about how even with a super product, it is the additional marketing activities that push that product to the next level. The final example helps illustrate this point.
Example 3: Three Steps to the Jolt Award
As final example of the importance of marketing your product, look at this
article from Andrew Binstock, an industry veteran, writer and judge in the software industry’s top prize, the Jolt Award. Here he offers three steps to become a Jolt Award Finalist.
Quoting Binstock,
1. Have a good product. This more than any other factor will improve your prospects.
2. Articulate why your product is better than others. Many vendors set up portals specifically for Jolt judges. They include movie clips of the product (10-15 minutes), screen shots, and generated reports. This is a superb idea.
3. Follow up with the judges. Send me a press kit in the mail. Some companies used to send ‘swag’—an industry terms for those inexpensive promotional chotchkas vendors give out. In a sea of choices, having a name to remember and with which I can associate specific features is a big plus.
Binstock’s step 1 is all about product. Steps 2 and 3 are all about PR and marketing. The point: don’t just build a product and expect people to love it and flock to it.
How?
But what do you do when you have years of experience building and almost none marketing what you build? Maybe you came from a company where marketing was its own department and now you are the marketer. In the next and final article we’ll talk about just that.
Part 2 of the series is here.
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