Online Backup Knowledge Base

Jack Wallen answers some TechRepublic members’ questions about how to destroy data on a drive without destroying the drive.

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We took a closer look at two recent reports highlighting how sales and marketing priorities and budgets are allocated in 2011. The good news is, according to CSO’s 2011 Lead Management Study, marketing budgets are on the rise. CMO Council’s The 2011 State of Marketing Report also confirms this, with 57% percent of respondents indicating that they are adding to their 2011 marketing spend. (Note that this represents a budget between 2 and 4 percent of revenue.)

So how are we spending all this money?

In CSO’s Lead Management Study, respondents reported their top three strategic marketing objectives this year as:

• Increasing new customer acquisition – 82.6%
• Optimizing cross-selling and up-selling – 41.7%
• Increasing brand awareness – 41.5%

However the real story is in the bottom three:

• Increasing customer renewals – 17.6%
• Enhancing customer experience – 16.3%
• Becoming customer-centric – 14.5%

CMO Council’s data also weighs in on our apparent lack of focus on our existing customers. Their State of 2011 Marketing report indicates that only 4% of marketers are concerned with customer churn when allocating their budget. CMO says “… marketers continue their focus on more costly customer acquisition strategies in place of customer retention initiatives.”

It’s been said before: it is far cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. So why is customer retention falling behind?

If we take a closer look at the data, we find that marketers are facing some big challenges this year:

• A lengthening sales cycle. Marketers now own more of the customer as sales cycles slow down and prospects spend more time on the web, learning and comparing on their own, before engaging with sales.
• Overwhelming amounts of customer data. Many more of us jumped on the social media bandwagon this year, afraid of being left behind and without having an integrated solution in place. Now, we have lots of customer data all over the place, and we aren’t sure what to do with it (or how to get at it.)
• Lack of talent. CMO Council reports that 37% of marketers plan to bring on new digital and interactive marketing talent this year. We’re not surprised. In 2011, marketers found themselves with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, even going mobile, and did not have a well-thought out strategy for any of it.

What is being lost as we fight our way through these challenges? The opportunities to build loyalty, increase revenues, and promote brand equity through our most precious resource: our customers.

Determining what priority customer retention should take in your marketing strategy starts by understanding the lifetime value of your customers. If you’re not sure where to start, check out our Customer Value Pack. It is designed to calculate the core value of your best customers and help you more effectively define, acquire, and retain the ideal customer set within a reasonable budget.

Knowing the numbers allows marketers to prioritize customer acquisition and retention strategies with more precision and authority. Because of this, we believe that all marketers must understand how much they can truly afford to spend to acquire a new customer.

Do you?

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Remote Backup Systems, the founders of the online backup industry and developers of the RBackup and Mercury OEM Online Backup platforms activated its Emergency Backup Hot Site for use by its Service Providers in the path of hurricane Irene.

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Successful selling requires an understanding of the buyer’s mind, and most MSPs fail to develop a clear understanding of their customer’s true needs. Specifically, many MSPs don’t understand why buyers do — or don’t — buy from them. Great businesses take the time to understand their buyer’s psyche. Let’s delve a little deeper.

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Since RBS started the Online Backup industry in 1987 many other companies have come and gone, most of them attempting to follow in our footsteps. Over the past 24 years many of these “me-too” companies have based their software on the basic protocol that we invented.

The basic process is simple and has few variants. To do a backup, compress changed data, encrypt it, send it over a network to be stored on a remote server, and make sure it got there safely.

To do a restore, present the user with an interface to select data, download the data from the server, decrypt it, then decompress it and put it back on the local computer, and make sure it got there safely.

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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.

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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

Think about it. Prospects are taking more time to gather information from the wealth of content online, content that marketers produce. This means we are presiding over a much larger share of the revenue cycle than ever before. If you aren’t yet measuring your ROI, it’s time to start. The Revenue Marketer™ is here to stay.

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Various data privacy regulations require compliance by many companies who use Online Backup services. Generally, the regulations require that companies ensure their data are completely inaccessible except by authorized people. 

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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.

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