Marketing numbers can lie

I barely passed an accounting course in college. The only thing I remember was a joke about "debits by the window and credits by the door."

I didn't understand the joke then, and I'm still confused by T accounts now.

Thankfully, in a stint as a bank credit analyst, I did finally gain some fluency with business numbers. I learned to cope with, if not exactly love, current ratios, inventory turnover, and return on equity calculations.

This experience with numbers can come in handy in marketing.

Measure, measure, measure

There's plenty of room in marketing for creative designers and copy writers. But if you're managing a marketing group, you'll also need to know your way around a spreadsheet too. Measuring is a big part of the job.

Marketers, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers in particular, can't afford to make decisions based solely on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence. They need hard, quantitative data:

• Which marketing programs are driving the most traffic?
  
• What keywords are producing?
  
• What's the free trial-to-purchase conversion rate?
  
• What's the return on social media?
  

Proceed with caution

Yes, gather and analyze quantitative data, but proceed with caution. Be careful in how you measure and what you measure.

One common measurement flaw is assigning a lead to one particular source. Salesforce.com and other systems have wonderful mechanisms to identify the source of each individual lead. It will tell you tell how many leads were generated by each source. And using that data, you can calculate the cost per lead per source and then make decisions on which programs to continue funding and which to stop funding.

The problem is that identifying a single source for any particular lead isn't really as simple as that. The fact is that over the course of the purchase process, most business customers are likely to touch your company through multiple sources, not just one.

The first contact may be through a keyword search, but later they'll read your newsletter, download a white paper, attend a webinar, and perhaps meet you at a tradeshow. How do you identify which single one of these activities is the sole "lead source?"

Leads are just the start of the process

The focus on leads and lead sources can also distort your view of what programs are really having an impact on your business. "Leads" are only the entry point in the sales pipeline. "Leads" need to be nurtured into "qualified opportunities" and then converted to "closed wins" in order to generate revenue.

If your entire focus is on counting "leads," you may be missing the bigger picture. Besides calculating "leads per campaign" and "cost per lead," marketers should also be tracking "cost per qualified opportunity" and" cost per closed win." You may find that campaigns that generate few leads actually produce many qualified opportunities and paying customers.

Remember, the goal of marketing isn't "leads," "followers," "friends," or "contacts." The goal is revenues.




This work by Peter Cohen, SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Amazon outage and SaaS marketers' response

I'm sure the recent service outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) had lots of engineers scurrying around, looking for a fix. I've been at a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider when the solution's gone down. The operations and support people work through the night and weekends.

Marketing people aren't completely off the hook, though. They should be doing some scurrying around too.

It's not all bad news

First, though, some good news on the reaction to the AWS outage. There's concern, but not panic. The SaaS and cloud market seems to be mature enough by now to withstand this kind of episode. People understand the risks, but they know they can be managed. Occasional downtime - as long as it is only occasional - can be tolerated.

Marketers' role

But there's a reminder here that prospective SaaS customers are legitimately concerned about performance and reliability. Good marketers should be prepared to address those concerns, especially in light of the AWS outage. If they don't ask, CIO's and IT people aren't doing their jobs.

For one, SaaS marketers should clearly explain their company's reliability and performance policies and procedures. A comprehensive document explaining security procedures, data back-up, redundancy, and other processes should be readily available. You might even prepare a short version that covers the highlights.

CIO's and IT professionals should be educated early in the sales process. The IT group might not be the entry point for your solution, but if it's to be deployed broadly through the organization, assume that IT will eventually be a part of the evaluation. Educating and gaining their confidence early on in the process can be very helpful.

By involving the IT people early, you may, in fact, find that the prospective customer can't or won't deploy a SaaS solution for this particular application. There are applications or organizations for which SaaS simply isn't a good fit. Better to find that out sooner rather than later.

Communication is essential

In the midst of the outage and after, AWS has been communicating with its customers about the problem. They reported regularly on system status and provided post-mortem reports to explain what went wrong. Salesforce.com and other large enterprise SaaS providers do the same.

Publicly exposing our companies' mistakes is not a natural act for marketers. But in the SaaS world, it's vital to building the trust required to win and keep customers.





This work by Peter Cohen, SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.