Instrumenting the B2B Revenue Cycle
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Implementing Agile Marketing – Part 1
Our team at SmartBear produces lots of content, webinars, emails, trade shows, product launches, and sales training sessions each month. Since the company has four product areas, our team supports what are essentially four different sales and product organizations. Getting all the work done, on time, in the most efficient way possible was becoming a…
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Renew Your SaaS Contracts Early
We track lots of data as you have seen from the blog. One of those things we look at closely is the money we spend on sales and marketing software. Depending on the vendor, software costs are driven by consumption either based on user counts, database size, emails sent or other measures. We work hard…
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An Important Metric – 3 Marketo Champions
I am CMO of SmartBear software and we track a lot of metrics. At last count we had about 10 sheets in a google docs workbook each with about 80 metrics per sheet. It takes us about 90 minutes every Monday to review the prior week. But when we are done, we know what happened…
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Why a Service Level Agreement with Sales is a Bad Idea – Part II
Service level agreements (SLA)for lead follow up are all the rage in marketing and sales organizations. Promoted by marketing analyst firms as one of the things that help with sales and marketing alignment, in my view they do the opposite. In part I of this post, we walked through how SLAs are used with two…
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Why a Service Level Agreement with Sales is a Bad Idea – Part I
Service level agreements (SLA)for lead follow up are all the rage in marketing and sales organizations. Promoted by marketing analyst firms as one of the things that help with sales and marketing alignment, in my view they do the opposite for the following reasons: SLAs are good when required if the goals of two organizations…
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Building a Marketing Operations Center
We just moved from Beverly to closer to downtown Boston into an amazing space in Somerville, MA. We are sitting right on the Mystic River, 4th floor, on top of retail shops, a T- Stop etc. It is great space. Of course, once we moved in, I had to immediately get my marketing operations center…
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Don’t Do Marketing Budgets – Part II
Lot of questions about my posting advocating no marketing budgets – the reality is that yes, I, the CMO have financial guidelines I have to hit with the company. I know my salary and benefits numbers, and my all other marketing spend numbers. And yes, at the beginning of the year, I make some approximations…
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Why Use it Or Lose It Marketing Budgets Work Against the Company
Last post we talked about why handing out marketing budgets isn’t a good idea. It is counter intuitive, but giving someone on the team a blanket “budget” to some extent provides an entitlement to spend the money. Read the post for more info. The second deadly marketing sin with budgets is the “use it or…
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Planning for 2015 – Why Budgets Don’t Matter
I am being a little tongue in cheek here, but the focus on “budgets” is very overblown and somewhat destructive to the mission of the marketing group. Why? Most of marketing success is not budget related – you can’t buy your way to success If you align budgets with the people accountable for success, only…
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Is Anyone Measuring Response Rates on these Emails?
If I start posting really bad email solicitations that I get, will they stop? Each time I get a solicitation email that is just so bad from a reputable company, I have to ask myself, are they measuring the feedback? The click through rates? The unsubscribes? I have to conclude no. Someone inside the company…
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