Measuring B2B Marketing with the CMO of Compete, Inc.

[00:00]
Matthew:  Hello and welcome, everybody!  Today is August 27th, 2009 and you are watching PTV Live.   Thank you, everybody, my name is Matthew Mamet.  I’m at msmamet on Twitter and I’m here today with Stephen DiMarco, Chief Marketing Officer at Compete.  Thanks for joining us today Stephen, it’s a pleasure to have you.

[00:21]
Stephen:  Happy to be here.

[00:25]
Matthew:  As always you can talk to us on Twitter.  Send all your feedback to the PTV hash tag and we’ll answer any questions that you have, live with Stephen.  So, thanks everyone for joining us and Stephen I just wanted to thank you again for being here and to ask you just to summarize what Compete does, very briefly.  I think, for the most part, we are all aware of the little charts that we see on all of the major blogs that help support all of the bloggers opinions. 

[00:57]
Compete is known as one of the premier sources of website tracker analysis but how does Compete help companies with their online marketing initiative?

[01:02]
Stephen:  Very good question.  I can give you the 15 minute answer or the two hour answer.

[01:08]
Matthew:   Let’s see, we have a half-hour today so let’s shoot for two and a half minutes.

[01:11]
Stephen:  Alright, I have that version, too, so no worries.  Compete is an online measurement company and we basically help our clients answer two questions.  How do I find the consumers that I want to turn into customers?  Once I capture their attention how do I actually convert them into customers in a way that they will continue to come back again and again and again?  The way that we do that is through an online panel of two million consumers in the United States.  We have permission to see all of the web traffic that they generate about themselves.  As we know now the web is becoming such a central part of how consumers live their lives; how they search, how they shop, how they socialize, how they get information on pretty much anything these days.  It’s creating this wonderful breadcrumb trail about what consumers are doing online so that marketers can learn from it and engage them, not only online, but offline as well.

[02:01]
Matthew:  Excellent!  I think everyone would agree that understanding users and consumer’s behavior is key to marketing.  Services like Compete are key to everybody’s marketing efforts whether they be online or offline so we are really happy to have you here. 

[02:18]
Stephen:  It reminds me of a story.  Once, when we were presenting to a company that we were trying to turn into a client, they were faced with a large initiative; launching a new website.   The person said, “I understand that you’ve got all this great consumer information and competitor information but I don’t have the time to look at it, I need to get a website out.”  So, while you’d think that most people would want that, sometimes that extra information, some marketers would rather navigate blindly.

[02:46]
Matthew:  Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that; actually, that’s a great segue into our first topic which is a great article that I read on MediaPost by a guy named Stephen DiMarco.  So you recently wrote on MediaPost about a statement made by Al Ries who said that, “Determining the ROI of a marketing program is an expensive exercise with little or no value.  An experienced marketing exec instinctively knows whether a marketing program is working or not.”  Stephen, since you’re the CMO of one of the largest traffic analysis and information companies around, what do you think about that statement?

[03:28]
Stephen:  I think that Al Ries is dead wrong.  It’s tough to say, Al Reeves is absolutely a guru in the world of branding and positioning.  When he penned that article for Ad Age, it certainly captured my attention and I responded immediately.  The number of comments, I think there were somewhere over 100 comments on the Ad Age site about that article, in particular.  Often when you see articles like that, the comments will divide right down the middle; some supporters and some detractors.  This was closer to 90 percent detractors and 10 percent supporters.  So maybe there are 10 percent of marketers out there who still like to manage through intuition versus data.  I think it’s absolutely false. 

[04:06]
Matthew:  On the article that you wrote for MediaPost there were a lot of comments as well.  I printed it off and highlighted a few.  I think that for the folks that commented that were in defense of Al, I think they also were thinking along the same lines as the client or the prospect that you talked about just a few seconds ago.  Some folks still view the up-front planning analysis and then, after the fact, metrics-gathering as a luxury.  I think, in one of the comments down here, from Leo.  Leo Exter says, “Moving quickly is sometimes more important than moving accurately.”  I think there’s still a lot of marketers out there that believe that quantity is much more important over the quality or the ROI.  Your approach in your article was actually a great way of blending the creative impact of a campaign with data, metrics and ROI.  You outline four key points from a case study with Blackberry.  Let’s talk a little bit about what those four key points were.

[05:15]
Stephen:  Sure, you might have to remind me what the four key points were.  I know the Blackberry case study very well.  It’s a great story.  But the four points…

[05:22]
Matthew:  The four points; the first one was extreme positions are provocative but obfuscate our opportunity.  After I looked it up in the dictionary, I said, “Okay, I know what he’s saying.”  Really the challenge is not whether or creative should be at the forefront of marketing, the challenge is getting them to work together.  I think that Al is advocating for one extreme.  There’s a lot of folks in the comments who said, “Oh, he’s wrong.  You should do everything by the book, by the numbers.”  Really, what you’re advocating is to understand how they both work together.

[05:52]
Stephen:  Absolutely!  That experience is not uncommon in the best ad agencies; whether they are pure interactive agencies or integrated agencies, full-service agencies.  The best creative directors want creative briefs that the client writes and invests the time so that they can really understand the business and the metrics that the client is really trying to achieve.  That is where creative’s feel that they’ve got the best instructions to go do what they enjoy doing versus the absence of a creative brief where the quality of the idea is based purely on the creativity of the idea and that’s unbounded and often doesn’t result in the objectives that the client wants.  At the end of the day, creative’s don’t want to come up with…creative people don’t want to come up with ideas that are rewarded at award shows but result in the firing or dismissal or account review a year later because you are not achieving sales objectives.

[06:46]
Matthew:  Which is a great segue into the second point which is measurement drives all of these decisions.  A great line here is that in the best examples, data interpretation and creative implementation occurs continuously, making marketing agile.  I think that the concept of agile, as it applies to software development, has been around has been around for many years and only recently have the marketing departments and marketing specialists started to understand that this concept or this methodology could
really apply to marketing as well.  You know measure, understand, execute, and then start over again; re-measure, understand and then execute.

[07:23]
Stephen:  And that was exactly the point that I was trying to make.  We’re big, within Compete, followers of agile as an approach to software development.  We use it for compete.com and many of the other practices and as a sales and marketing team we said, “How can we develop and bring some of those ideas into the sales and marketing function at Compete?”    It’s hard, the marketing cycle and the sales cycle doesn’t necessarily fit nicely into an agile format.  Where it really gets difficult is where you’re looking for results that are not necessarily tied to a lead generation or direct response marketing efforts but are tied to branding and positioning and all the things that Al talks about.  My premise is that you can actually measure all of that and you need to measure all of that and moving quickly doesn’t mean that you have to move blindly.

[08:17]
Matthew:  Next point; if you can’t quantify it, you’d better be really lucky.  If you follow Al, using instinct alone is akin to just gambling.  I think that, pretty much, speaks for itself.

[08:26]
Stephen:  Yeah, there’s a great line…I feel obliged to quote to offer some perspective on my existing perspective.  I guess I’m doubling down on what I wrote.  A great quote from a book called ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ that was written by Tim Ferriss.  He said, “If you can’t quantify an outcome, you don’t have a goal.”   Everything that we do for our clients and certainly we take our own medicine; everything that we do for marketing Compete to the world has to have an outcome in mind before we can even start to expend any effort on it.

[08:57]
Matthew:  Important, and I think that if you find yourself in the trap and I think it really is a trap of, “I need to get my website launched, I need to execute.”  I think there is a systemic problem, if I can take your idea to the next logical conclusion.  Maybe it’s time to slow down and fix some more systemic problems.

[09:14]
Stephen:  Right, it’s the final two percent of thinking that you really have to push yourself to do.  That final two percent makes all the difference.

[09:21]
Matthew:  Then the final piece is; math can help you engineer outcomes not just measure performance.  I think if I remember, in the comments the fourth point was the one a lot of people said, “Wow, light bulb here.”  If I understand what happened then I can start to predict what will happen with next efforts.

[09:39]
Stephen:  That’s absolutely right.  If you understand your outcome, you can break down conceptually all of the steps that need to occur in order for that outcome to be achieved.  Then you’ll align your marketing programs against that.  Every step of the way, the goal is to get a consumer one step further in the process.  It would be nice if life was that simple and a lot of things go wrong but at least you know where they are going wrong in a process and very quickly address them and get them back on track.

[10:03]
Matthew:  Excellent.  So, let us know what you think.  You can tweet to the PTV Live has tag.  We are obviously coming at this from a very analytical mindset but for all of you creative marketers out there, let us know if we’ve got it right or we got it wrong.  While we wait for people to tweet in, let’s move on to our next story of the week which is an increase in companies that are blocking their employee’s access to social media sites.   If you’re in marketing you’ve probably heard of this thing called Twitter and this other thing called Facebook and it’s going to save everybody’s life and make the world a better place.  Most companies out there actually don’t agree with that statement.  This is some research from a company called ScanSafe; currently 76 percent of companies are choosing to block social networking and it is now a more popular category to block than online shopping, weapons related websites, alcohol related websites, sports related websites and other webmail.  This is an article that is on Mashable, which is a social website in and of itself in addition to being a blog.  You can imagine what the comments trended toward, “This is outrageous.”  I think that, one of the comments that I wanted to pull up that made a lot of sense to me; “Challenges to enterprise social media adoption are the corporate culture, concerns around employee productivity, information security and legal issues.  I think that if you think about companies that are choosing to block social media it’s probably a little bit of all of those things.  The idea that I don’t want something to get out onto the social web that isn’t approved or PR’d or that’s sensitive and it really is a sign of the times.  I think and let me know what your opinion is on this companies aren’t blocking people’s use of the phone or their email account.  These are all communication tools that we all understand and know and love but social media, being new, is getting this undue attention.  I want to understand.  What’s the policy at Compete?  How do you guys use social media?

[12:17]
Stephen:  This is a no-brainer, right?  Compete does not block access to any site on the web and you can imagine any kind of website that consumers might go to throughout the day.  It’s fully open.  It’s part of the corporate culture; it’s frankly a corporate policy that we don’t block usage for things like that.  IM, social media sites, social media application, you name it, it’s open.  If we did start to block stuff the issue is primarily that people wouldn’t want to work at Compete.  I mean, part of the reason that Compete is a special place to be is because there is a natural curiosity that comes with people who are analytic about what consumers are doing on the web.  We really need to access everything that consumers are doing online so that we have a point of view of it for clients.  In thinking about why other companies would do that, I don’t know what the balance is between productivity concerns which means that people are pounding on Twitter all day long, which even at Compete is not the case although we are heavy twitterers, versus…this goes back to, really, any kind of blogging.  Should my company blog?  Do I need to provide some editorial review before a blog or before a blog comment goes online?  We haven’t done any of that.  In fact, on our blog, we have a very popular blog it’s in the top 25 Ad Age ranked blog.  We allow any person at Compete to write a blog for Compete about a trend, a company or consumer segment they see online.  They use our data and we put out about one or two blog posts a day without any kind of checking or editorial review process.

[13:58]
Matthew:  I guess results don’t lie.

[14:00]
Stephen:  They don’t lie.  Our goal is to have a provocative blog so we tell people to push the envelope on what they talk about.

[14:07]
Matthew:  Have you ever had an experience where someone pushed a little too far and you found out after the fact?  If so, what was your response?

[14:15]
Stephen:  We have never read a blog that we said, “Oh, I wish you hadn’t written that because you gave out the next five years of our business plan.” 

[14:17]
Matthew:  That would be bad.

[14:18]
Stephen:  I would be happy to share our five year business plan with any competitor.  I’m not sure they could do anything with it
, anyway.  Where we have gotten into some interesting questions is where the blog has been so provocative that the company that we blogged about…I’ve gotten many CMO phone calls saying, “How did you get this information about my business” and “Now my board is calling me why are you reporting that online I’m not as effective as my direct competitor at engaging or converting customers online.  That’s not good the investor relations community is angry at me now.”  So, we love those.  That’s exactly why we want to blog because it brings the conversation to the debate and that’s when we try to sell those people some intelligence that helps them get from number two to number one in the first place.

[15:07]
Matthew:  Excellent.  So that has a very real and tangible and measureable outcome.

[15:12]
Stephen:  Yes, for sure.

[15:15]
Matthew:  Excellent.

[15:16]
Stephen:  The only other thing I would say to your point; people are going to communicate throughout the company.  There’s nothing about a social media site that makes it necessarily easier to communicate.  It just makes it easier to get that out to a wider audience.  Anybody who would steal corporate information and share it with a competitor on a blog is likely to do that in a more clandestine effort anyway.

[15:19]
Matthew:  Let’s be honest, if someone wants to get on Twitter there’s ways to get on Twitter from within a corporate firewall that is blocked.  That is the final comment that I was going to read here; there’s proxies which is essentially the way that would work.  You can go to a site that would re-direct you over to the site you want to go to.  Now you are paying the bill for being big brother saying, “You can’t do this.”  You are taking your corporate culture down a notch for no real outcome or benefit, rather.  So keep that in mind.

[16:13]
Stephen:  I do most of my blogging and blog group reading from my iPhone so you can’t block that.

[16:20]
Matthew:  That’s interesting.  That’s a pretty small screen to be doing a lot of reading.

[16:26]
Stephen:  I do this a lot; I’m very good at flicking.

[16:30]
Matthew:  So how many blogs do you think you can get through in the course of a day on your iPhone?

[16:33]
Stephen:  I probably don’t read as much as I should be reading.  I probably will read, I certainly read the Compete blog posts every day so that’s one or two.  I’ll read, maybe three or four more.  I’ve got my select few ranging from the sports blogs to the industry blogs to whatever else catches my eye for that day.

[16:52]
Matthew:  I just can’t get into the whole reading the newspaper or blogs on my iPhone.

[16:57]
Stephen:  Really?

[16:58]
Matthew:  I’m an iPhone user.  I love it but for me, Google Reader on my Mac is the way to do it.  I always find it interesting when I meet someone who…

[17:05]
Stephen:  How do you do that when you’re driving?

[17:07]
Matthew:  I don’t.

[17:08]
Stephen:  That’s when I do my best blog reading.

[17:10]
Matthew:  When you’re driving?

[17:11]
Stephen:  Yes.

[17:12]
Matthew:  Alright, very good, everyone stay away from Stephen on the highway.  I want to talk a little bit about a great short post from Seth Godin.  All of his posts are pretty short and pithy.  He says that for brands that matter there are two questions that every marketer needs to answer.  I’d like you to answer them on behalf of Compete if that’s alright.

[17:32]
Stephen:  I will attempt to do that.
[17:33]
Matthew:  Number one:  Do I want people to interact with me and my brand in unexpected ways?  As opposed to just quietly consuming it and actually I think we’ve probably already answered that.  I’ll let you answer it right now though.

[17:47]
Stephen: The key word in that sentence is unexpected ways.  I think that will threaten some people to answer it differently.  I want people to interact with my brand, period.  The deeper the interaction with our brand the more they will learn about the company and the services we provide our clients and how we help drive value for our clients which will help, our hope, drive their purchase propensity and start to work with us.  When a client goes quiet on us or a prospect goes quiet on us, that’s not a good thing.  We don’t like to lay low.  We want to be top of mind.

[18:25]
Matthew:  Being top of mind, sometimes, means challenging, we talked a little bit about that with your blog.  So, unexpected ways I think is a resounding yes.  Two:  this is a pretty easy answer.  When they interact do I overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?  I’m going to assume that you are going to say yes.  I’m going to follow up with a third question.  How?  How does Compete overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?

[18:51]
Stephen:  This is an easy one for use because we are big Seth Godin fans.  We’ve got pictures of purple cows; we’ve actually got purple cows in our office.  I think the key word there is remarkable.  It’s worth telling somebody about and that gets back to that common concept of promoter score.  I use the term is it ample or is it worthwhile?  Anything just north of ample is good.  Is it worthwhile, worth someone’s time telling somebody else about it?  Absolutely, we obsess about that.  We do it all sorts of different ways throughout the company.  I think the blog is a great example of that; where we do try and create original content that provides a unique and compelling view of something that people didn’t know existed beforehand.  So, from having something to talk about at a cocktail party or going in to your CEO and saying, “Wow, look at this thing, it’s really interesting.  Let’s use it in our board presentation.”  We’ve actually had people who use our blog in analyst’s calls as a way to demonstrate how effective the business is.  That’s how you know you’re hitting remarkable status.  Even in the reports that we provide our clients on a month-to-month basis, we are always pushing the envelope with what marketers can do with data.  In many ways, when you look at data in the hands of a marketer, it almost seems like…in the old days it would have been a bit of an oxymoron.  It just didn’t go together, kind of like giant shrimp.  The way that data gets really useful for marketers is when they make a decision on it.  The way they could make a decision on it is if they see a way to make money, steal a share from a competitor, drive brand awareness, save money or something that they can really associate with.  That means that you need to connect the dots with data, to a decision, to an outcome.  You start to hear these common themes through how Compete views the world.  For us it’s, if you can take a piece of data, tell a story about it that relates back to what you know the marketer cares about, change their business and can quantify it in dollar terms.  If you say there is a 50 million dollar opportunity, Mr. or Mrs. Marketer, to make this change to your website or to your marketing campaign, that is remarkable.

[21:01]
Matthew:  I think that, in this day and age, marketers are tasked with doing more and more with less and less.  I think this is a story that we are all hearing.  A product or service that can provide that level of insight and instruction to a marketer is extremely
valuable.  Again, getting back to what I was saying at the beginning of the program, marketing these days is understanding behavior and wants and needs of your prospect community.  These are all things that you need to know.  It’s great to hear it.

[21:37]
Stephen:  I’ve got one for you.

[21:38]
Matthew:  Okay, go ahead.

[21:39]
Stephen:  I have a question for you Matthew.

[21:40]
Matthew:  Oh, boy.

[21:41]
Stephen:  What’s the last remarkable brand you’ve interacted with?  Or a remarkable website?

[21:44]
Matthew:  Compete, right now.

[21:47]
Stephen:  Thank you.  Thank you, very much.

[21:48]
Matthew:  Prior to that, the last remarkable brand or website I think I continue to be impressed with Skype.  I was actually renewing my credits on Skype today.  In really understanding what they’ve done with the product and service they’ve provided is useful, it is remarkable, and it continues to improve.  Their online experience is clean and it’s everything you need and nothing you don’t.  So, I’d say Skype.

[22:16]
Stephen:  Do you get people to sign up for Skype?

[22:19]
Matthew:  We all are signed up on Skype, here.

[22:22]
Stephen:  So you are the Skype evangelist?

[22:23]
Matthew:  I think there are a bunch of us who said, “Look, I’m too lazy to get up and go talk to you so I’m going  to IM you.”  Then there were a few of us who said, “Let’s all get on the same platform so we don’t have to fire up 900 platforms.”  We all settled on Skype and I think we’re happy as an organization because of it.

[22:41]
Stephen:  I agree, Skype is remarkable and iPhone, recently, probably the most remarkable product out there.  Rue la la…do you know ruelala.com?  The e-commerce website?

[22:52]
Matthew:  It rings a bell but I don’t…

[22:55]
Stephen:  It’s another remarkable…

[22:57]
Matthew:  That’s like a Tech Crunch favorite.  You can read an article on them on Tech Crunch every three or four weeks but I can honestly say that I haven’t taken the deep dive to understand them.

[23:05]
Stephen:  I think for people who enjoy Seth Godin and his quick snippets of wisdom it’s very useful to take it down to a practical level and say, “Okay now, let’s go find examples and learn from them so we can relate what they are doing back to us.”   Some of the examples Seth with give are the bike repair show back in Charleston, South Carolina does something special.  That’s interesting but I’m selling web analytics.  I can’t give a poor child a bike for every one that I sell.  I guess I can give a poor child a compete.com subscription for everyone I sell.  I just don’t know how useful it would be.

[23:39]
Matthew:  He would probably throw a tomato at your house.

[23:42]
Stephen:  That’s what happened.

[23:45]
Matthew:  Seth is more about marketing religion than it is marketing handbook or tactics but he’s a great guy.  I love getting my daily inspiration from Seth.

[23:56]
Stephen:  He’s good.

[23:56]
Matthew:  I want to talk a little bit about selling.

[23:58]
Stephen:  Sure.

[23:59]
Matthew:  I want to talk a little bit about how online, and Web 2.0 for lack of a better word, have changed the way that people sell and have changed the mission of the marketing organization within a company.  First article comes from…I think this is a Mashable post.  It says that there are six must follow steps for any economy.  This is actually geared toward folks that are selling themselves as freelancers or service-oriented industries.  It doesn’t all apply to what you do but there was one part that I though bore mentioning.  The quote is, “While the economy is problematic it is never the reason a person or a company fails.”  I want to understand how has Compete weathered this economy understanding that everybody is pulling back their budgets?  Do you agree with that?  That the economy is never the reason that you would fail in your endeavors?

[25:00]
Stephen:  Yes, if the definition of failure is to go out of business, yes.  If the definition of failure is grow slow, then, no.  Certainly if you are doing a lot of business with the automotive industry or the financial services industry your business is not booming unless you are in accounts receivables collection, which we are not.  I do think we are comfortable in this environment.  Compete, particularly, because we launched in 2000/2001.  We were launched and founded in a kind of recessionary environment.

[25:33]
Matthew:  The first one, right?

[25:35]
Stephen:  Yes, so we are economy proof.  I’ve been here the whole time so I’ve seen, in the two cycles.  What happened in the first cycle which is happening in the second cycle now is people are saying it’s not enough to provide me with data.  I have too much data, I don’t have enough time, I don’t know what to do with it, it’s getting dusty on my bookshelf, it’s  nice to know but not a need to have.  Unless you can make your data relate back to decisions and make it a need to have then you are not going to be having a successful business or successful sales conversation.  You have to align your sales cycle and your sales processes with convincing your client or your prospect that this is a must-have.  That they will grow share and they will preserve costs using this data in ways that they couldn’t beforehand.  That requires a very consultative, smart sales process.  It also requires you to think about marketing differently.  Our website is a great example.  The whole reason that we launched compete.com and have a premium model with compete.com is so that companies that want to learn more about our company, about Compete, can interact with our data.  You can write anything that you want in a piece of marketing collateral and pdf it and email it to a client.  You can have pictures of your management team on your corporate website, that’s not what people care about.  They care about what can I use this data to do?  What action can I do better?   Why not open up the data to them to start to experiment with it?  Frankly, compete.com is our best sales tool…sorry, our best marketing tool right now.

[27:11]
Matthew:  So, there was a lot in that.  It was packed.

[27:15]
Stephen:  Sorry.  There is four years of experience with that.

[27:17]
Matthew:  Let me just pull out a few gems that I heard.  One is providing direct, demonstrable evidence that you are going to affect your client’s bottom; top line and bottom line is essential in a down economy.  Two is a consultative sales approach.  So understanding a prospect’s, I’ll say buying process for lack of a better phrase, and selling into that rather than trying to put a client or prospect into your selling funnel.  Understanding what their needs are and fulfilling them.  So, those are two that I got.

[27:53]
Stephen:  Correct.

[27:54]
Matthew:  I’m going to have to check the tape for the rest of them.

[27:55]
Stephen:  The rest was let a client experiment and explore your service rather than describing to them in paragraph form.  That’s been very powerful for us.

[28:06]
Matthew:  Show rather than tell.

[28:07]
Stephen:  Show rather than tell.  I will debate you about the buying process versus the selling process.

[28:13]
Matthew:  Okay, go ahead.

[28:14]
Stephen:  The buying process in our point of view from a client’s perspective often results…is often leading you to a path where the prospective buyer will say, “No, I don’t want that.”

[28:27]
Matthew:  Okay, so you are assuming that all buyers are inherently reluctant to buy?

[28:31]
Stephen:  Yes.

[28:33]
Matthew:  They are inherently reluctant to make a purchase.

[28:34]
Stephen:  Yes.

[28:35]
Matthew:  Interesting.  I don’t know if I would agree.  I’m not an expert but I think that if we’ve done the right amount of work to qualify and to bring the right traffic to the right site, then they do want to buy.  Their concerns need to be allayed through information.

[29:01]
Stephen:  Sure.

[29:02]
Matthew:  And by providing the right information at the right time we can move them through a process.  It remains to be seen.  It’s a bit of both maybe.

[29:12]
Stephen:  I agree with that.  Clients or prospects will get as much information from you as possible, drain you of your livelihood and get you to the point where you’re desperate to make a sale and then you’re selling based on their buying process versus selling based on your value proposition.

[29:28]
Matthew:  So there has to be a give and a get throughout.

[29:30]
Stephen:  Yes.

[29:31]
Matthew:  So, much like you do at Compete, you can have free access to the tool for a limited amount of feature set but if you want more; well there are things that you have to do in order to get that.

[29:44]
Stephen:  Consideration must be provided both ways.  I agree you can’t ignore the buying process but you don’t want to map yourself to the buying process because you’ll fail.

[29:54]
Matthew:  You can’t map yourself into the buying process or you will fail.  Words of wisdom.

[30:02]
Stephen:  From a marketing guy.

[30:03]
Matthew:  Good one, if I may say so.  I wanted to talk about one last thing in the sales process which is the idea of social CRM.  I’m not sure if you’re following this recent rise but there was a great article on ReadWriteWeb.  This one particular one, cure CRM, that really takes the concept of a traditional CRM, like a Salesforce, and maps that into the new tools like Twitter, Facebook.  You can actually, much in the same way that you can assign an opportunity to someone in Salesforce, you can assign a Twitter conversation to someone.  This particular article was a great example of this new way that we’re communicating with people;  this new way that sales is now using tools that have, for the most part, have been thought of as marketing tools.  I wanted to understand how social is being used at Compete to provide that consultative approach or to do more in the sales department.

[31:03]
Stephen:  Right, right.  So very good question, really interesting opportunities for companies.  We’re lucky, Compete is lucky.  We’ve got a sales team who’s top notch, a marketing team who’s top notch and we’ve got a client services team who’s top notch.  They work with clients.  They are all interdisciplinary.  The client services team is very effective at selling.  The sales team is very effective at providing client service and both of them can often create a lot of their own marketing campaigns and materials.  It’s an interesting, eclectic group of people who are doing a little bit of everybody’s job.  It’s not hard for a sales person to write a blog, promote it via Twitter and engage the Twitter followers in a conversation.  That happens quite a bit and we promote that.  From a CMO perspective it’s really hard to programmatically implement that and success often happens in hindsight when you say, “Hey, so and so did this cool thing and it had a great outcome and now we’ve got this hot lead and a meeting next week.  This is great.”  How did that happen?  How did we do it again?  How do we get every sales person or every client services person to replicate?  That’s where it starts to break down.

[32:20]
Matthew:  So there’s a little bit of experimentation, for lack of a better word.  There’s a little bit of…which seems to go against what we were talking about at the beginning of the program which is understand the ROI before you embark on something.  Just talk briefly about how you encourage experimentation without knowing what the result will be.

[32:40]
Stephen:  Right.  I think that’s a good question.  Experimentation we encourage at the individual level.  You’ve got your job and you’ve got the tasks that you need to accomplish in order to be effective at your job but some of the other time, go dabble a little bit.

[32:56]
Matthew:  Right.

[32:57]
Stephen:  Go discover stuff, go explore stuff.  There’s always going to be that aspect of something the first time that you do it.  You might have an outcome or an expectation in mind but even if you don’t, just go figure it out.  You see that a lot of times when you read someone’s Twitter feed and it will be, “My first tweet” and that will be four months ago.  It’s their last tweet, too.

[33:17]
Matthew:  Just checking out this social media thing.

[33:20]
Stephen:  So their first tweet was their last tweet and that was their whole exploration.

[33:23]
Matthew:  It sounds a little bit like the famous Google 20 percent time.  Which is a similar policy that Google has, it’s a little bit more structured even.  They ask you, they require that you spend about 20 percent of your time dabbling.  I think the famous case study is that gmail is the result of someone’s 20 percent time.

[33:43]
Stephen:  So you kind of force innovation into the time allocation that people have in their daily work life.  We’re not that structured.  We just have intellectually curious people who are trying to stay on top of Web 2.0 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera in their social lives but also on behalf of their clients.  Our clients are coming to us, marketers, agencies and publishers are coming to us and saying, “Hey, you know, tell me about this new thing Tweet cloud.  How can I get some interesting insights out of a Tweet cloud?  How does it work?”  So we have to be very deft and have to be one step ahead of our clients so we’ve got a perspective on that.

[34:22]
Matthew:  Excellent.

[34:25]
Stephen:  Did you get all that?

[34:26]
Matthew:  Yeah, I did.  I would love to keep going but we’re five minutes over and, unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for now.  Stephen, thank you very much.  I really learned a lot.

[34:33]
Stephen:  Thank you.

[34:35]
Matthew:  You can check out this archive online on our blog if you’re busily taking notes right now.  In the meantime, please leave us feedback.  Subscribe to iTunes at permissiontv.com/itunes and leave us a rating and review.  Stay tuned for next Thursday, September 3rd, Paul McNulty the CMO over at Unica which is literally right outside that window in the building right behind you Stephen.  He’ll be on the show with us and we’ll continue these conversations on these topics.  Until then, thanks and have a great week.  T
hank you again, Stephen.  I really appreciate your time.  See you next Thursday at 3 pm.