Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Technology - John Gravely's Blog

Blog moved

2010-02-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

I have moved my blog to my new domain at http://techmarketi.com (pronounced the same as Tech Spaghetti). Please visit me there and subscribe to my feed at http://techmarketi.com/feed/

Tech Marketing: Using your blog as a content source for your monthly newsletter

2010-02-12T12:43:00.001-08:00

If you've ever run marketing for a company and tried to have a high-quality customer or partner newsletter you know that the having fresh content can be an issue. The way we've solved that problem at Scribe Software is by creating a blog and publishing a schedule by which team members have to create posts. We then use the posts as articles for the newsletter. Each newsletter article is a summary of a post and links to the post page. This strategy has worked great because our team has embraced creating their posts and because we have a big enough team that no one person has too many posts assigned to them.

Since implementing this strategy our issue seems to be which articles to run highest in the newsletter and, often, what to cut from the newsletter. With ~10 new items on our blog every month we find ourselves now with too much good content. Since each newsletter may also have other items (sales promotions, webinar announcements, etc.) to include in addition to content stories we now have to be choosy about what makes it into the newsletter. This is a good problem to have and ensures that our readers will not opt out of the newsletter. Since beginning this strategy in August we've steadily seen our newsletter opens and clicks increase which has resulted in increasing readership on our blog. We know this because we use Pardot Marketing Automation software which gives us deep insight into all of our email, web form and website visitor activity.

Our strategy of using our blog to feed our newsletter to keep our customers and partners engaged has been a winner for us.

Ultimate Exits – A Great Guide for Selling Your Company

2010-02-10T11:15:00.001-08:00

In 2005 I took a class called 'Selling Your Business for a Premium' by Dr. Tom McKaskill. The class was recommended to me by my advisor at the time, Patrick Thean. Ultimate Exits is the updated version of the material presented in that class and I am listed as a testimonial for the material.

What I liked about Tom's approach is that it is very methodical in terms of how to identify the right potential buyers, build competitive tension and successfully prepare for and manage the due diligence and exit process. I followed his methodology and sold my company, c360, about a year later for a multiple of 3x trailing 12-month revenue. This was a good exit for the type of business we had and the position of being a leading vendor in a challenging and threatened space (add-ons to Microsoft CRM).

One of the premises of Tom's class was that many entrepreneurs are working for less than their market wage and would benefit by selling their business, getting their market wage and investing the proceeds of the sale. In my case c360 had reached a point where it either needed massive innovation funded by external capital, a shift in the business model (as add-ons became less necessary in the wake of a maturing core Microsoft CRM product) or an exit. I chose the latter option as the former two required uncertainties that would not have merited the risk and dilution. Of course, it helped that I had taken no external capital in c360 so there were no investors with whom to share the exit proceeds.

For entrepreneurs I would recommend building your business as much as possible without seeking investment. If you reach a point where you are starting to think about seeking investment be sure and really model out what your performance would need to be post-funding to personally achieve the return you want vs. achieving that return without taking investment.

And, read Tom's book. It is an excellent reference even if you have no intention of selling for many years.

Reading about Polar Exploration

2009-12-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

Two books I have just read (on my Kindle 2)...

South: the story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 expedition
Ernest Henry, Sir, 1874-1922 Shackleton

The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the "Fram," 1910-1912
Roald Amundsen

South is the true story of a Polar (South) expedition that went drastically wrong. Two boats left for Antarctica in support of Shackleton's attempt to cross the continent. One boat was carrying the party that was to do the crossing and the other boat was laying supply depots past the halfway mark since it would be impossible for the men crossing to carry enough supplies for the entire journey. Both boats sank, men had to live on floating ice for months, they had to cross violent seas in small boats and live in incredibly difficult circumstances for around two years. Several men died, toes had to be amputated, etc. It is amazing to read about the survival and perseverance but the book leaves you feeling like they just weren't planned and prepared for the impossible task given the technology of the day. For example, they rushed out of port without getting worms medicine for their sled dogs and many died.

Contrast this to Roald Amundsen's account of his successful first expedition to reach the South Pole (The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the "Fram," 1910-1912) four years earlier and you'll quickly understand why Amundsen succeeded. He planned everything to perfection and was intuitively cautious. It was actually Admundsen's success that caused Shackelton (who had previously tried to reach the pole using, if you can believe it, ponies instead of dogs - they all nearly immediately died) to reset his sites on crossing the continent so as to achieve a new 'first'.

It is very interesting to read these two books back to back and compare the styles of the two leaders. Suffice it so say that If I'd had to go south in the early 1900's I would have gone with Amundsen and the Norwegians.

More Books – Just keeping track of what I have been reading

2009-11-22T14:56:00.001-08:00

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman; John Krakauer

Another excellent book by Krakauer. Very detailed research. I'm glad I read this book because otherwise I might have stereotyped Tillman. He was a stud. Very smart, sensitive and questioning of what was going on around him.

Into Thin Air; John Krakauer

If you are thinking about climbing Mt. Everest you may lose interest after reading this book. Great book but I don't know why anyone would want to climb that mountain. Amazing tales of how some people will do anything to help people and others will walk right past a dying person to say they climbed a mountain. Some of this book is frankly hard to believe. Great book though.

Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home; Fernando Parrado

The events of this story happened when I was a small child so I had little knowledge of the tragedy and subsequent miracle. The original book on the subject, Alive, had been written in 1974, two years after the crash but was not written by a crash survivor. This book was written by a survivor and is an unbelievable story told very well. I'd love to meet Nando Parrado. Their (the survivors) story is amazing and just goes to show how tough people can be when they need to be.

Make your data better – use the Turk

2009-10-30T10:49:00.001-07:00

Need to improve your CRM data but too busy to do it yourself? Here's a trick that is cheap and easy. Amazon has a service called the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace. I'll refer to it as AMT for short. It is defined as a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. More specifically, it is a simple way to deal with small tasks that are tedious and time consuming. When you have simple tasks that require a human involvement you upload your tasks/HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to the Turk and someone, somewhere will do them for an amount that you agree to pay per hit. In my real world example that I am doing as I write this I am using the AMT to classify my CRM account records by industry. It took me about a half hour to set this up and is costing me $.10 per record. Pretty cheap, right? Here are the steps I had to take to make this happen:

Create an account with Amazon Mechanical Turk (this can use your existing Amazon.com account)
Design the web form that the person doing your HITs will use to do them (see below)
- Note that my form gives very detailed instructions on what the person needs to do. In this example, I am showing the person a company name and a web URL and am asking the person to go to the URL, read about the company, write a description (in their own words) of what the company does and then select an industry from a list of industries which I coded into the form using basic HTML. Note that I asked them to write the description in their own words because this ensures that they actually spend time on each task and make sure they get it right. Plus, it makes spot checking the results easier for me.

Export the CRM data from the CRM system. In my example I had to export company name, URL and account ID. I need account ID so that I will be able to update the records back into my CRM when the work is done
Import that CRM data into the Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Note on the form screen shot that the ${AccountName} is a variable that will be replaced by my actual data. The worker will see the same form for each HIT but with a different Company Name and URL for each record from my CRM system
Set a bid amount for each HIT
Publish the HITs and watch live on screen while people do them. Below is a screen shot of the job progress. It updates real time if I want to watch it but, of course, I don't need to. I can simply come back later and see how much has been done. From here I can review and export the completed HIT for re-import back into my CRM

As of right now my job of 1,614 records is 23% complete and I am paying the equivalent of $1.46 per hour based on how long it has taken so far. I set my job up so that multiple people can work on it at the same time and I bid $.10 per record so my total was 1,614 x .10 plus a ~$16 fee for Amazon. In total I paid $178.80 to get industries assigned to these 1,614 accounts. In reviewing the results including the descriptions I asked the worker(s) to write and the classifications they have chosen I can tell that I am getting very good work. Below you can see an example of a record where the worker correctly identified that the Dobla BV is a producer of chocolate and, thus, belonged in the Manufacturing – Food and Beverage industry category

What is fascinating is that I do not know, or care, if my worker(s) is/are housewives in Houston or college students in Calcutta. And, at the end of my job, I can spot check the results and accept or reject individual results.

Try it sometime and see what you think. I've done it three times now for various tasks and it has worked well each time. I have learned to include very detailed instructions (with an example) on my forms and I believe that is important.

Kindle Book review

2009-10-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a Kindle 2 from Amazon and I love it. It has made me start reading again so I wanted to do a quick mini-book review. I don't expect anyone else to read this but I figured I would use this blog to, among other things, keep track of what I've read.

It's Not About the Bike - Lance Armstrong (read ~9/1/2009)

Great book. This is Lance's first so it tells the story of his life before cancer, the fight with cancer and the initial Tour de France wins. Very motivational and well written.

Lance Armstrong's War - Daniel Coyle (read ~9/5/2009)

Very good. About more than Lance although the author most likely used Lance in the title to sell more copies. Lots of good content about the Tours, Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis, etc.

Every Second Counts - Lance Armstrong (read ~9/13/2009)

This is Lance's second book and it gets criticized a bit for having much of the first book's content in it and also for being preachy. I don't care. I liked it and wanted to hear about the later tours and Lance's life as a mega-star. Good book.

Chasing Lance: The 2005 Tour de France and Lance Armstrong's Ride of a Lifetime - Martin Dugard (read ~9/15/2009)

Excellent book. Written from the road on Lance's 7th Tour de France win (2005). The author wrote it from the outside and gives a good tour experience for those who didn't go.

Born to Run - Christopher Mcdougall (read ~9/20/2009)

Very interesting book on running with a focus on trail distance running. I read it to get psyched up about running as the biking season ended and I think it worked. This would be a must read for ultra-marathoners, hard core runners and anyone who wanted to understand the psychosis of runners.

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith - Jon Krakauer (read ~10/8/2009)

This is a good, but heavy read. It gets into the ugly side of Mormonism, specifically fundamentalist Mormons who have been cast out of the mainstream LDS church. It centers around a senseless 1980's murder but covers a lot of ground. Interesting, well written but very disturbing.

Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer (read ~10/22/2009)

One of a kind story. If you watched the movie it did the book justice but also (and probably necessarily) skipped a lot of interesting details. The book is well researched and written but is admittedly biased and justifies the actions of the main character who, for whatever reason, put his family through hell and threw his life away.

The Rebranding of Scribe Software

2009-10-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

For this post I'm going to talk about the great work our team at Scribe has done with the many changes we made in the first five months of 2009. Having rolled into New Hampshire in mid-January 2009 I found myself with a lot of time to improve my snowboarding technique and rebrand the company. Luckily, with Scribe we're dealing with a company that has a good reputation and great relationships with our customers and partners. With that as an enviable starting point we decided to focus on polishing the presentation and getting the message out to more people. To do this we quickly began work on a number of branding related initiatives.

Re-brand

In January, with Microsoft's Convergence trade show around the corner, our team had to first focus on creating a new look and messaging for this all important annual event. As anyone who has been to a Microsoft conference knows, these events are extremely well done and expertly produced. In our business Convergence is the place to be if you want to connect with Microsoft Dynamics Customers and Partners. With the help of the talented Bob Klingler from Atomic Fusion in Atlanta we got a snappy new look and logo. Heather and Brian, a.k.a. the Scribe marketing team, got everything rebranded and shipped in time for the conference. At first I didn't think that would be possible but they did it. Beyond the glitzy new logos on the booth, collateral shirts, cards, etc we also changed the Scribe tag line to the simple 'Configurable Data Migration and Integration'. In a world full of technology noise we felt it important to just come right out and tell people what we do (without using words like robust or synergy). We make great migration and integration solutions that are configurable; if you can remember that we're doing well. Our philosophy is that no one should have to work to understand what we do. Especially in the context of trade shows where a passerby may only give you a glance it is important to simplify the message.

Web Site

Once we had created a shiny new trade show presence it was only a matter of time before we applied that to our web site. In our industry having a clean and clear web site is expected but not often achieved. I tend to develop an impression of a company based on their site so I can only assume others do as well. Since all sites tend to lose their luster after a while it was time to start from scratch with Scribe.

The creation of a web site is something I've done many times now and each time it pays to step back and think about what you want to accomplish. We decided to focus on several areas:

Navigation
Content and Customer Evidence
Analytics and Automation

It helps to think about web site navigation in terms of the interests of your visitors. Persona is a word that is used to talk about users and that is what we designed around. To begin, we wanted the main flash animation of our home page to quickly tell the visitor what we do and provide some detail around it. Visitors now see our newly simplified tagline supplemented by a longer description of what we do. At the same time, as many people are visual learners, we created a flash animation that depicts integration processes and moves through scenes where various endpoints (applications and data sources) are integrated together by the Scribe solution. Now that the visitor knows what Scribe does we wanted to make sure that the navigation options provided an obvious next step based on his or her interest. To accommodate this we created a multi-level menu structure that expands when the visitor hovers over the main menu options. For example, when the visitor hovers over the 'Products and Solutions' link the menu expands so he/she can easily move to the topic of migration, integration a solution overview, etc. From those second level options the user may decide to dive deeper into migration as it relates to Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce. The goal was to provide general to specific places for the visitor to land and become educated. Once landed we keep the navigation handy on the left bar along with a constant group of important 'what's next' options should the visitor want to learn more or interact with us.

With a simple and logical navigation structure in place we turned our focus to content. Needless to say, content is a never ending work in progress. When you are in the business of integrating organization's critical data and business applications one type of content is very important: Customer Evidence. Luckily, Scribe has thousands of happy customers and the sales team had begun profiling Scribe projects well in advance. With many professionally written Customer Success Storiesalready in existence we wanted a way to communicate information on the many projects our products have enabled. This lead to the creation of our Project Success Snapshots page which allows visitors to see real integration scenarios grouped by industry, endpoint (i.e. data source or business applications being integrated) or business problem. The idea is that if the visitor can easily understand what we do and see that there is experience, competence and credibility behind it then we will be in a position of advantage.

The final area we focused on for the web site is perhaps the most important: Analytics and Automation. Like any self respecting marketing person should do we implemented Google Analytics. It is easy to do and provides a ton of great data from page views to bounce rate (did the visitor get bored and quickly bounce away from our site?) to unique visitors. Because the industrious development team at Scribe has created the fantastic OpenMind site which includes a Knowledge Base, Forums, Product Ideas with Community Voting and Product Roadmap areas we have multiple Google Analytics codes implemented to see the traffic on either or both sites. Having good analytics on our site is important but we also wanted to make sure the site gave our marketers the tools we need to be creative. This is where marketing automation comes in.

Pardot Marketing Automation

Most of us are familiar with email marketing. You create a fancy HTML email, send it to a bunch of people and then analyze who opened it and what they were interested in. At a previous company I founded, c360 Solutions, we used email marketing to launch a product we'd built called Forecast Manager. Once we analyzed the clickthroughs on the launch email we saw that a high percentage of recipients had clicked on a screen shot of a single feature of our product. We turned that feature into a product of its own and it was a big seller (Activity Summary). As much as I probably owe to email marketing we wanted to do more than just send emails here at Scribe. To this end we implemented Pardot Marketing Automation www.pardot.com package that tracks and analyzes visitor activity, enables simple form creation, profiles prospects (without overburdening them with requests for data), sends emails and more. As marketers you don't want your creativity to be impeded by the technical challenges of getting a form working or seeing who filled it out. With Pardot we have simplified all that while being able to give our sales team better information about the people that browse our site and fill out our forms. The obvious goal of all this is to generate more, better leads, and have an increased chance of closing those leads based on our knowledge of their interests. Since we sell exclusively through a channel we realize that our investment in Pardot not only benefits us but allows us to generate leads for our channel as well. This will be a primary goal of our marketing team going forward and our marketing automation strategy will enable it.