Selling isn’t easy. However, if you adopt a systematic approach, support new technologies, and offer best-of-the-class services, you can really accelerate your sales. The following five points provide insights into such things and help you win new customers.
We reviewed Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics and found it lived up to its title with 70 pages of detailed advice on how to most effectively gather and measure key marketing metrics.Within the Guide, a new profile emerged: the Revenue Marketer™. Marketo describes them as marketers who, “begin to operate and sound more like sales.” Trademarked by The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketer™ “…knows how their key metrics stack up against their targets, and what they plan to do to improve their results.”
If you don’t classify yourself as a one of these new breed marketers, you’re not alone. 44% of marketers have no idea what profits a 10% increase in their marketing budget would generate (Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study)
However, we should.
As the Definitive Guide tells us (and as most of us suspected already), to gain more credibility and respect (translation: budget and resources) within our organizations, marketing needs to measure the things that will guide decisions that improve profitability. We need to start speaking the CEO and CFO’s language.
To do so, we first need to understand and develop goals around:
- How many sales we anticipate our marketing program(s) will generate
- How much revenue each sale produces
- What the gross margin percentage is
Next we need to design our programs so that we can effectively measure results. With clearly understood goals and well-defined ROI estimates at the outset, we can then track and connect measurements to our pipelines, revenue, and profits. We also can make adjustments to programs with actionable data to improve results, and therefore improve credibility.
To get started, we recommend you download our Marketing Audit Pack. This group of templates includes our Marketing Plan Audit Template, Marketing ROI Template, Sales & Marketing Scorecard and S.W.O.T. Analysis Template, and will help you:
- Make well-informed adjustments to your marketing strategy
- Understand the true performance of your marketing plan vs. the estimate
- Report your status on a weekly basis to raise awareness about your sales and marketing results
- Calculate the ROI on your marketing plan
When you’re dealing with a system that won’t boot, you need to fall back on some diagnostic skills and recovery strategies. Jack Wallen shares his field-tested approach.
Scratching your head about which Samba security mode to choose? Jack Wallen’s description of each option might help make a decision.
From flugtags to x-fighters, Red Bull 
pumps out wacky marketing events around the world like it’s downed way too much of its homebrew.
From July 7-10, it raised the bar with “Red Bull Creation,” a creativity contest held in a Brooklyn park that pitted 16 teams of the country’s most way-out “hackers, tinkerers and fabricators” in a three-day “build-a-thon.”
The teams were given a theme—“energy in motion”—the night before the competition kicked off, and then had 72 hours to build whatever they’d dreamed up—the weirder, the better.
The event’s mindset is perfectly illustrated by the winning entry from a Minneapolis team called 1.21 Jigawatts. Red Bull described it as a “massive hamster wheel, wired into a mobile network, given its own phone number that received up to 60,000 one-word text messages at a time.” Upon receiving a text message, the wheel would begin rolling and print out a perfect copy of the word on the ground.
Practical, schmactical. 1.21 Jigawatts beat out other entries, including a wheelie-popping shopping cart and a mechanical inchworm named Chillerpillar, on the basis of being “unequivocally awesome.”
Red Bull’s promotional campaign was pretty creative itself. Before the event, it posted ads with QR (quick response) codes on bus shelters all around New York City. Passersby who scanned the code with a mobile device were redirected to a video promoting the event. The campaign seemed to work; on the final day of the event the teams finished their projects onstage before a packed house
Red Bull is no stranger to unique mobile promotions. Last year, it targeted Formula 1 fans with a new racing game built for iPhones and iPod Touchs. This year, it participated in a campaign at 1,400 Canadian convenience stores that delivered instant coupons to shoppers carrying Bluetooth-enabled devices.
— Bob Pickard
In response to a TechRepublic member question, Jack Wallen reveals a couple of troubleshooting steps he takes when Outlook is muddying the waters of the powerful .pst and .ost files.
When MSPs think about the benefits they provide their SMB clientele, they probably focus on internal efficiencies that can benefit the bottom line. But MSPs need to take a broader look at how their services can aid all aspects of an SMB’s operations. For example, managed contact center services can aid your SMBs clientele in providing high quality customer service, and even in charging a premium for them.
Bill Detwiler shows you how to avoid five blatant security mistakes when deploying a new wireless access point.
Call it a blessing in disguise. Most recent economic reports say SMBs have been slow to make hires. But most IT research indicates that SMBs continue to expand their IT spending. In theory, that means SMBs will increasingly turn to managed services providers (MSPs) and other external folks for IT assistance to fill tactical and strategic gaps.
Generally speaking, I think most MSPmentor readers have been building their managed services businesses for five to 10 years. But what if you were building that business from scratch right now? Here are 10 steps to consider for startup MSPs — though the steps certainly apply to established MSPs that are looking to rethink their strategies for the second half of 2011.
When it comes to profitably scaling a service provider business, there are two key requirements: First, delivering effective customer service that leads to more and more happy customers. Second, establishing the operational processes that enable this level of service, while boosting the efficiency and productivity of staff.