Killer Web Content Webinar

Every once in a while I come across a webinar that looks highly relevant to software marketers. Check out this one entitled, "Killer Web Content: Make the sale. Deliver the service. Build the brand" which airs next Wednesday.

The speaker, Gerry McGovern, has a great reputation in the website usability space, which is crucial to your success. After all, if your website visitors are getting confused on your site, they won't convert to leads.

Would love to hear your thoughts once you listen to it. Email me at ortner@capterra.com.

Ten Tips Regarding Homepage Design

Enough marketing consultants advise you not to link to your homepage from your Pay-Per-Click ads that I don't think it needs to be repeated by me. However, I do think the Pay-Per-Click Listings we offer on Capterra are an exception if, and only if, your homepage is well designed. So what comprises a well designed homepage? Try this top 10 list:

1) Focus attention on your offerings. Afterall, the primary goal of your website is to generate leads, and the primary reason that prospects visit your website is to find information about your offerings.

2) Have your About Us page and Contact Us page very easy to find. Both should be part of your footer and at least one of them should be up top and highly visible.

3) Include a free offer and call to action.

4) Make it easy for your visitors to find your most popular web pages by linking directly to them.

5) Try to keep everything above the fold. Users seldom scroll down anyway.

6) Make it look clean and professional. It will be the first impression of your company for many of your prospects and partners.

7) Include an image of a person, a screen shot of your product or some other relevant graphic.

8) Avoid images that move since they often distract the prospect.

9) If you offer free trials, online demos or downloads, be sure to mention them since they are often favorites of your web visitors.

10) Test changes to your homepage frequently to see what works and what doesn't. You'll be surprised by the impact that seemingly minor details will have.

For a good example, check out Intuit's homepage. Your homepage will be the doorway to your website for much of your web traffic regardless of whether you link to it from your paid campaigns. So anything you can do to improve it should have a direct impact on your ability to convert your visitors into leads.

Any suggestions that I missed? Email me at ortner@capterra.com.

Your Lead Cultivation Process

I spoke with another software company yesterday that complained about their web leads. They said most just wanted to read white papers or do demos but were nowhere near buying. Thus they were a waste of time.

I simply asked him if they had a process in place for following up with these leads so that when they were ready to buy 6-9 months from now, that they would still be in solid contact with them. He said that was the problem. They didn't have a process.

So as it turns out, the problem was not the low quality of their web leads. The problem was that they lacked a good lead management/cultivation process. But unless we had this conversation, they would have continued to place the blame on their lead generation channels (such as Google, Bitpipe and Capterra).

Unfortunately, I think this is fairly common. IT marketers know that the buy cycle can last for months - even the better part of a year. So it should come as no surprise when they hear a prospect say that they are just doing some research but aren't close to buying anything. Translation: they are in the early stages of buying software so please act like a consultant and not a salesperson. Then stay in touch on a monthly basis so that when they are ready to fork over some dollars, they remember you.

In fact, I just read a great lead management piece by Robert Moreau of Rubicon. Check it out!

So why do so many software companies have a hard time with this? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please email me at ortner@capterra.com.

How To Fix Marketing

I'd like to pick up where I left off in a previous column. How can marketing people start getting more respect from the software companies they work for?

Engineers can point to the product and say they created that. Salespeople can point to their customers and say they landed them. So what can the marketers point to?

For the most successful companies, marketers steal the thunder from salespeople and claim the customers as theirs! Microsoft, Dell, Coke, GE, and almost every large successful company started out with salespeople taking the credit for customers (rightfully so) and then as consumers become more aware of their offerings the lion share of the credit shifted to marketers (also rightfully so).

This shift is not as complete for complex products such as business software since they require more guidance from a salesperson, but the shift still occurs. So how should marketers kick-start the process?

The answer: understand that lead generation is job#1 and until you have that down to a science, your input on marketing's other responsibilities will be undervalued. In that vein, analyze your lead generation process. Are you constantly improving your website's ability to convert visitors into leads? Do you know the referring channel of every single lead? How do you cultivate your leads? At what point are leads being sent to salespeople? Evaluate every ad dollar that you spend - print, online, tradeshow, you name it - to determine how well (volume and cost per lead) it is generating leads for you.

Doing all of this is very much a quantitative, methodical, iterative process, not so much a creative one. Are you up to the challenge?

So what is a lead anyway?

I recently sent out a survey to our customers asking what value they place upon leads and the number of different responses was roughly equal to the number of people who responded to the survey. Not only is there not much of a standard as to how to value a lead, but there appears to be very little agreement as to how to even define what a lead is. I realize that the specifics will differ from company to company, but I'd like to attempt to place a stake in the ground and provide both a broad definition as well as a method for valuation.

First, what is a lead? I'll throw down the gauntlet and state that every potential buyer who (1) provides their contact details and (2) takes specific action to request product information relevant to your offering is a lead. If they have not taken action - such as if they are a name you have bought from an industry list or event list - then they are not a lead.

(This does not mean they do not have value. In fact, names acquired in this manner - let's call them "prospects" - often go for anywhere from a few cents to over a dollar depending on how targeted and current the list is.)

But a lead is someone who has taken action like request a white paper, a demo, a free trial or even direct contact from a vendor - and has provided their contact details in the process. By taking action, a prospect in effect becomes a lead. More specifically, an unqualified lead.

And once you have a lead, it is the responsibility of the marketing staff (not the channel!) to qualify the lead by doing things such as determining need, timeline and budget before handing them off to sales.

So now that we have distinguished a lead from a mere prospect, what price can we assign to the value of a lead? This depends on four things:

1) The price of your product.
2) The % of your sale price that you are willing and able to offer to the channel.
3) The rate at which your sales team closes qualified leads.
4) The rate at which your unqualified leads convert to qualified leads.

Let's assume your price is $10,000 and in the interest of simplification there are no additional fees that you charge. Let's also assume that you are willing to pay your channel a 20% commission on sales, that your sales team closes 10% of its qualified leads, and that 50% of your unqualified leads convert to qualified leads.

Simply multiply all of these numbers together to arrive at a $100 value per lead. Of course, the devil is in the details. Your close rate will probably differ from channel to channel depending on the quality of their audience, how your call to action is framed, etc. So you will probably end up calculating an average lead value across all campaigns, as well as campaign-specific lead values to better determine where to spend your marketing dollars.

Thoughts? Any disagreements with the logic? Please email me at ortner@capterra.com.