Hubspot Offers Small Business Marketers a Big Bundle of Features

Summary: Hubspot offers a bundle of Web traffic generation and lead management features in one low-cost package. Small businesses willing to invest some effort should be pleased with the results.

Yesterday’s post described one strategy to sell marketing automation to small businesses: provide a specific, turnkey service that requires virtually no skill or effort from the user. But I don’t think that can scale: companies require many different services and will not want to buy and run each one separately. So I believe the future lies with integrated marketing automation systems that combine many different functions while sharing data and processes whenever possible.

Of course, these multi-function systems must still be suited to users with little time and expertise. Marketing automation vendors entering this market are essentially betting that they can make their systems powerful enough to be useful and easy enough for a small business to run. If the vendors fail, the business will go to consultants, ad agencies, and other service firms that do the clients’ marketing for them. That would greatly limit the marketing automation vendors' business.

Hubspot has accepted this challenge. Although Hubspot positions itself as an “inbound marketing system,” it actually does more than the search engine optimization, blogging, social media interactions and related analytics needed to generate Web traffic. The current version also hosts landing pages and Web sites, manages a lead database with profiles and Web activity history, generates lead scores, sends alerts to sales people, and synchronizes data with Salesforce.com.

All that’s missing to be full-blown demand generation system is outbound email and lead nurturing campaigns—which the company has announced it will add.

Implementations of these features are intentionally simple, since ease of use is more important than sophisticated options for small business marketers. But Hubspot also applies automation to improve results without making the user work harder. For example, the blogging system automatically connects the blog to social media sites that help to redistribute content. It also checks posts to ensure they are optimized for search engine rankings. Hubspot provides similar graders for the Web site and individual pages, each generating reports and recommendations for improvement.

(Free versions of these and other graders are available from Hubspot at Grader.com. Most seemed fairly useful when I played with them a bit, although the Web “personality grader” managed to be both inaccurate [“your Internet use primarily consists of emailing family pictures and checking your teenager’s Facebook”] and insulting [“engaging in more meaningful conversations and sharing less about your personal life may improve this grade”]. I'm not sure what to make of that, except to suspect that someone left the programmers unsupervised. [I've since been informed that Personality Grader was an April Fool's joke.])

The scope of Hubspot makes it somewhat difficult to assess. The system’s heart is clearly search engine optimization and the supporting features to generate content (blogs and Web sites), receive the resulting traffic (landing pages) and analyze the results. These components seem well designed, tightly integrated and, at least for the graders, innovative.

The one major missing inbound marketing feature is paid search management, such as Google AdWords integration. Hubspot Marketing VP Mike Volpe said that paid search can be tracked as a source, and that clients have not requested deeper integration – apparently because they’re already happy with the AdWords interface. But I still find this a curious gap, since it leaves the system blind to a major marketing expense. It's part of a general lack in Hubspot of the “campaign” orientation found in most marketing automation systems. Maybe small businesses don't think in campaign terms -- or maybe it's just that search engine optimization isn't organized that way.

Hubspot looks more like a conventional marketing system in its ability to manage a lead database. Leads can be captured on landing pages, imported from lists or added through Salesforce.com synchronization. The system can also create profiles of anonymous visitors, using their IP address to infer geographic location and company. The database can include answers to survey questions and fields imported from Salesforce.com. It also stores Web activity history, captured by the usual methods: tracking scripts on the Web pages (created automatically on Hubspot-built sites) and cookies on the visitor’s PC.

Hubspot originally used its lead database largely for analytics. But it added Salesforce.com integration in 2008, which also meant the leads and their activity history could be shared with sales people. It extended this in 2009 email alerts triggered when user-selected leads visit the Web site. It also now uses Salesforce.com opportunity records to measure the close rates of leads from different sources. Users can also flag the closed leads manually.

Closed leads are also used to build a ranking system that assigns each lead a value between 1 and 100 based on its likelihood to close. This is a good example of the Hubspot philosophy at work: the grading system is simple (just one score), simplistic (formulas can look at the number of page visits, but not particular pages) and fully automated (it develops a custom scoring formula for each client and adjusts it over time without any manual input). Volpe acknowledged it takes a long time to gather enough data to build a reliable formula. But he argued (and I agree) that few small business marketers could build a better formula on their own.

Once Hubspot adds outbound email and nurturing campaigns – which Volpe said should be “relatively soon” -- its lead management features will about match other small business demand generation systems. That’s good enough, though not as impressive as its search optimization capabilities. (Actually, most small business demand generation products also offer a lightweight CRM module for companies that don’t have a separate CRM system. But I consider that optional.)

Hubspot also includes some functions that extend beyond traditional demand generation. These draw from its roots in Web traffic analysis. One is an automated analysis of competitive Web sites, based on Website Grader. This shows traffic from major keywords plus several types of rankings. Other features include automated Web scans to identify changes in keyword rankings and relevant social media articles. The social media features also make it easy to comment on the articles and to measure the reach of the company’s own blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube posts. Although none of these is itself a major innovation, they’re useful tools to assemble in one place.

So now that we’ve taken a look at some of the mechanics of Hubspot, let’s circle back to the original question: is Hubspot powerful enough and easy enough for small businesses marketers?

The system clearly succeeds on the power front: although most of its features are fairly basic, they should be more than adequate for most companies. Even though Hubspot is not quite a complete marketing solution (lacking the paid search management and integrated CRM), it does enough different things to replace many other systems.

I have more doubts about user effort. Hubspot isn't hard to use, but it does seem to require a lot of work from its users. In particular, the Web site and keyword reports all seem to issue alerts and recommendations that the user has to execute separately. Whether it’s adding new keywords to page metadata, changing a bid on a paid search ad, or rewriting copy to be more search engine friendly, Hubspot looks more like a demanding boss than a helpful assistant.

In a small business where people are already stretched to the limit, a system that adds rather than reducing work is not very appealing. Even knowing that the added work is valuable doesn't necessarily solve the problem: the time has to come from some other work that has value of its own.

But maybe that’s just me. Volpe said that users’ biggest problem is finding time to write new content, not making the other changes like tweaking page tags. This is because most of the system’s automated recommendations are specific enough that they’re pretty easy to execute.

Of course, the customers are the ultimate judges of success. Volpe said that 98% of Hubspot users renew each month. That sounds pretty impressive, although it does equate to losing nearly 25% over one year. A less ambiguous statistic is the current customer count of 1,400, which is higher than any other small business demand generation system I’ve seen (though still dwarfed by Infusionsoft’s 15,000 clients).

Even small businesses shouldn't have a problem with Hubspot pricing: a version without Salesforce.com integration costs $250 per month, while one with Salesforce.com integration costs $500 per month. There’s a $500 setup fee for both products, which covers four hours of consulting. There are no additional costs related to volume or anything else, although that might change when email campaigns are added. The smaller system is sold on a month-to-month basis, while the larger version requires an annual contract. The company also offers a seven day free trial.

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Helmsman Shows How To Serve Small Business Marketers

Summary: Helmsman Marketing offers turnkey marketing campaigns for small business. It's a great way to meet their needs, but probably not the model that will ultimately prevail in small business marketing automation.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to marketing automation vendors hoping to sell to small businesses. They all seem to think this market is under-served and therefore open for them to dominate. In one sense they're right: there are millions of small businesses, few of which use serious marketing technology today. But the very fact that I'm talking to so many vendors means there is no lack of competition.

The entrepreneurs starting these marketing automation firms think they have few competitors because they rarely run into them. But that’s because small businesses rarely look for alternative solutions: if they see a system that seems to meet their needs, they’ll buy it and move on to the next project. Small business people just don’t have the time or expertise for elaborate vendor comparisons.

In the short term, this means that plenty of small business-oriented marketing automation vendors will prosper in isolation. Eventually, though, some will grow larger, market themselves more aggressively, and penetrate the awareness of small businesses beyond their immediate circle. That’s when buyers will recognize they have alternatives and be forced to make choices.

At the moment, though, the market is in that delightful early stage where a new vendor with a unique approach pops up every week. Last week it was Helmsman Marketing, a five-month old company focused on helping small businesses run multi-step, multi-channel, outbound customer relationship campaigns.

Ok, that last sentence is a mouthful. But I think it captures the key components of Helmsman:

- multi-step: the system runs campaigns that deliver a sequence of messages. The precise timing of these is adjusted for maximum response through the life of the campaign as Helmsman reports on results such as email opens. The reports are generated automatically and the adjustments are made manually. A typical Helsmark campaign might include five touches over several weeks.

- multi-channel: Helmsman delivers messages via email, automated voice mail recordings, fax, text message (SMS), and printed postcards. These are all managed by the vendor itself. Helmsman can also arrange to ship promotional products. The company stresses multi-channel campaigns because it has found that email isn’t always delivered and different customers will react to different media. Their use of post cards is particularly intriguing because it’s the second or third time I've recently been told that post cards are especially effective for small business marketers.

- outbound: pretty much all Helmsman does is send messages. Results like email opens are recorded within the system, but actual replies would be directed to a company CRM system or elsewhere. The one big exception is that the vendor can build and host Web landing pages and forms.

- customer relationship campaigns: most Helmsman programs are sent to existing customers to remind them of renewals or to schedule service appointments. The system is also be used for prospecting, such as seminar invitations. But the company warns that multiple contacts without an existing relationship can be annoying – particularly with intrusive media such as phone or SMS.

So that’s what Helmsman does. Integrated multi-channel capabilities are unusual, but otherwise the system offers less than most demand generation or consumer marketing automation products. What actually makes Helmsman special is something other than features: it’s a business model that is tailored to small business needs.

Specifically, Helmsman is sold as part of a service package that relieves marketers of the need to set up and execute their campaigns. According to Helmsman CEO and co-founder Tim Haller, he quickly discovered that small businesses lacked the time and skills to run a system like Helmsman for themselves. So the company meets with each new client for an hour or two to understand their goals and marketing messages, and then does the rest: designing the campaign, creating the marketing materials, sending the messages, and analyzing the results. If the customer list needs some data cleansing, Helmsman will do that too.

This approach avoids the time and skill constraints that – even more than direct cost – are greatest barriers to small business marketing automation. It also allows purely project-based pricing, derived from the numbers and types of contacts. This makes it easy for businesses to compare the costs and results of using the system, so they can judge its practical value. In the case of renewal and reminder programs, Helmsman is often fully justified by the savings from not having company staff make phone calls. Actual costs depend on the project (postage in particular is expensive), but have never exceeded $2 per contact. There’s a project minimum of about $750.

Helmsman released its product in April 2009 and currently has about 20 systems in place.

So where does Helmsman fit in the grand scheme of things? More than anything, it illustrates the importance of vendors helping clients to use their systems. Small businesses are the most extreme example of this need, but it applies to other, more sophisticated businesses as well. Helmsman also shows the importance of tying system cost to specific business value, something that its project-based billing structure does just about perfectly. The point about multi-channel contacts in general and post cards in particular is more tactical but still worth noting.

Yet despite these strengths, I don’t think the Helmsman approach will ultimately dominate in small business marketing automation. Specialized systems can be very attractive but companies don’t want too many of them. While Helmsman itself may succeed as a pure service, I expect that small businesses will ultimately adopt general-purpose marketing systems that support many applications in a single integrated environment. These systems might be sold with prebuilt project templates, similar to newsletter and Web site templates already offered by other types of vendors. Small businesses will then be able to pick and choose the projects they wish to execute without needing a separate vendor for each. Simplicity and support will always be essential for success, but the ultimate victors must combine them with flexible, extensible solutions that can grow and change with the business itself.

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Entiera Offers Consumer Marketing Automation Software as a Service

Summary: Entiera is a sophisticated consumer marketing automation system, offered as a service and at a lower price than conventional competitors.

Entiera Insight is a marketing automation system primarily for companies that sell to consumers. I’m highlighting this because most of my recent posts have been about B2B marketing automation (demand generation) systems, and the two types of systems are quite different. This means I apply different standards to evaluate them.

My template for demand generation systems includes outbound email, landing pages, lead scoring, nurturing campaigns, and CRM integration, while my template for (consumer) marketing automation has planning, project management, content management, execution, and analysis. There is certainly some overlap: “execution” in marketing automation typically includes nearly all the demand generation functions except for landing pages and Web content management. But consumer marketing automation systems generally have more advanced database, segmentation, planning, project management and analytics. (See the paper Demand Generation vs. Marketing Automation in the Resources section of the Raab Guide site for more on this topic.)

Back to Entiera. Although their Web site is tagged as “on demand marketing automation”, they have in-house staff to build, run and analyze client databases, plus compiled consumer and business files that can provide prospect lists or enhance customer records. This makes them sound more like a “hosted” vendor than “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS), per the distinction in my July 25 post. But I ultimately classify them as SaaS because they offer self-service versions of their data loading and analysis tools. This is unusual among consumer marketing automation vendors.

Entiera Insight includes modules for campaign management, predictive modeling, marketing planning, reporting, and database management. Content management and project management are handled within the campaign module. Thus, Entiera offers all five elements of my consumer marketing automation template.

Like most consumer marketing automation products, Enteria is primarily focused on outbound campaigns. Users construct each campaign from components including filters (list selections), paths (segment definitions), channels (messages), suppressions and deduplication rules. These are laid out in a half-tabular, half-graphical format based on columns that each contain a single type of component.

For example, the first column in a typical campaign would contain a filter to select a universe; the next column might contain several path definitions that divide the universe into segments; and the third column could contain several channel definitions, each linked to one previous path. A multi-step campaign would contain several columns of channels, with each channel linked to a channel in a previous column. The terminology and interface are unusual, but should work well after some practice.

Filters and suppressions are constructed with powerful query builder that supports multiple statements, calculated values, and different types of samples (fixed quantity or percentage of universe; random, ranked or Nth selects). Records selected in one filter are automatically excluded from subsequent filters in the same column. This is a standard approach in consumer marketing systems, but often missing in demand generation products. Users can save standard queries and reuse them across multiple campaigns – another feature that’s more common in consumer than B2B systems. Entiera is rolling out a new Adobe Flex-based interface that will have similar functionality but with a more flexible, drag-and-drop style.

The channel (message) objects are assigned channel types, start dates and end dates. These dates are separate from the start and end dates of the parent campaign, although the channel dates must fall within the campaign’s date range. Channel objects can either be triggered by a specific event or execute after a specified waiting period. Although one channel object cannot be shared across campaigns, the objects are built with offers and marketing contents (such as a specific email template) that are themselves reusable. The system captures detailed information about offers, including target audience, limits on how many times they can be used and accepted, effective dates, unit cost, and retail value. This is an impressive set of features.

Campaigns are executed outside the system, either through transferring files or by sending messages to an external API. Entiera currently uses Exact Target as its email partner, although it could work with others. Users can build and reuse standard execution templates for specific destinations. They can also manage seed lists and control groups. Each campaign can execute once or on a regular schedule. The system is designed to support real-time interactions, although no client has yet deployed it that way.

Planning in Entiera is largely at the campaign level. Campaigns can be assigned start and end dates and tagged by type, objective, category and products. This lets users analyze their plans and results across different dimensions—an important need in complex marketing programs. Users can also enter actual and estimated figures for costs, revenues, audience count, responses and conversions. They can define fixed and variable costs for a campaign and have the system calculate the total costs based on volume.

Although the vendor is working on an expanded planning system, this is already more features that many marketing automation systems provide. Project management is less impressive, currently limited to campaign-level task lists. Tasks cannot be assigned to specific individuals, although this should be added by the end of 2009.

Reporting is available through a mix of standard and custom reports. Standard reports track performance by campaign, type, and channel, including responses, conversions, revenue, costs, and return on investment. Users can also see results for different offers and creative types, as well as responder profiles based on demographic information appended from the vendor’s compiled files. Custom reports are built in Jaspersoft open source software. Users can access different views of the underlying database, allowing them to work with data that is organized and named in ways that suit their individual needs. Custom reports can be saved, shared, combined into dashboards, and distributed by email on a regular schedule.

Entiera also supports advanced analytics and database management. A graphical interface lets clients create complex data flows to import and combine multiple sources. It can do name/address matching for customer data integration and can easily incorporate the company’s compiled lists. Kxen statistical software is integrated for end-user predictive modeling and scoring.

I trust it’s clear by now that Entiera is designed to support complex marketing operations. Security is also enterprise-grade, allowing different users to access different functions, data sets and campaigns. The interface supports different languages for different users within the same installation, a subtle feature which identifies enterprise systems. Entiera also supports portals (with message boards, document repositories, Wikis, etc.) that can be open to everyone or limited to a particular group.

The cost for all this is not cheap, but still considerably below a traditional enterprise marketing automation system. Part of the difference is that Entiera includes database management, reporting, analytics, hardware and other costs that would be purchased separately with traditional marketing automation software. In addition, fees for Enteria are just not that high: a mid-size consumer marketer might pay $20,000 to $40,000 per month, which is about half the cost of a traditional on-premise system.

Entiera was founded in 2005 and released the first version of Insight in 2006. The company has about a dozen Insight clients, and many more using its other services.

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Genius.com Adds Short URLs to Capture Social Media Replies

Summary: Genius.com is adding a URL shortener that will tie social media responses into the regular flow of demand generation and lead management. It’s a small but important step towards making social media a standard business tool.

I saw a quick demonstration today of a new social media feature that Genius.com will release at the end of September. It generates short URLs that directly connect social media responses with Genius.com’s standard marketing and sales support features. Here’s the press release.

As I wrote in my February post on Genius, the system creates links to a proxy server that can track Web site visitors within the demand generation system without actually modifying the Web site. (Typically, such tracking requires a landing page built in the demand generation system or a tracking script embedded in the regular site pages.) The Genius link can either point to a landing page created by the salesperson or marketer in Genius or pass the visitor directly to the existing Web page. These links are typically placed in an email created by a salesperson or marketer. The new feature is a desktop widget that creates short versions of such links so they can be added to social media responses such as a Twitter post, Facebook page or blog comment.

This both is and isn’t a big deal. From the technical and end-user standpoint, Genius has simply made it easier to access its existing technology. That’s a very small step. But from the business standpoint, inserting Genius URLs (inevitably if painfully shortened to “GURLs”) means that links in a social media post can now be tracked like other online responses: that is, the visitor can be tied to the original source, assigned a tracking cookie, shown special messages and added to normal lead processing streams. In Genius’s case, this means that visitors can be associated with a company via their IP address, offered an online chat and scored on their activities and form responses, while salespeople can be alerted to important events, find related data or leads in JigSaw or LinkedIn, replay the Web site visit and access the full activity history.

In other words, Genius has taken a major step towards integrating social media with the standard sales and marketing toolkit. Companies must still find effective ways to monitor and respond to social media events. But once that happens, the new Genius feature will let them manage all further interactions with the same tools and processes as leads from any other source. This is major progress, and a capability that I haven’t yet seen from other demand generation or CRM vendors.

That said, there’s a business strategy question of whether this product will give Genius.com a significant competitive advantage. I suspect other vendors could easily create the short URLs themselves and distribute them on a desktop widget. It would be harder to match Genius.com's technology for letting salespeople and other non-marketing users add their own landing pages. But I suspect most companies will want social media users to rely on a standard set of company-approved links. So that particular part of Genius.com's technology may not really matter.

However, I think the real use case is people pointing to ANY page on a company Web site* that happens to answer a specific social media query. In that case, what matters is the ability to create a short URL that activates the demand generation tracking features. This fits perfectly with the Genius.com proxy server. I don't know how difficult it would be for other vendors.

It's also true that Genius.com has a general advantage in dealing with non-marketing users because its original product was aimed at salespeople. But other demand generation vendors are already working hard to extend in that direction so I don't know how long Genius.com's lead will persist.

Whether or not Genius.com gains a long-term advantage, they certainly deserve credit for being the first (so as I know) to deploy this extremely creative and valuable idea. But the great thing about competition is that if a new feature is really valuable, other vendors will copy it—and then everyone benefits. To me, that’s the best outcome of all.

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* Genius.com only lets users link to pages the user's email domain, or others site for which they have explicit permission. This prevents them from intercepting links meant for someone else.

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Why Most Consumer Marketing Automation Systems Are Not Software-as-a-Service, And When That Will Change

Summary: Consumer-oriented marketing automation systems have been slower to adopt the Software-as-a-Service model than business marketing (demand generation) systems. But this will soon change, bringing lower prices and better systems as a result.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now the standard model for business-to-business marketing automation (a.k.a. demand generation) systems. Any vendor who didn’t sell that way would be an oddity. But consumer-oriented marketing automation products from vendors like Unica, SAS and Teradata are still commonly sold as traditional on-premise software.

Hosted vs SaaS: What's the Difference?

Many of the consumer-oriented vendors do offer “hosted” versions of their systems. These resemble SaaS in that the software is maintained off-premise by a third party. But clients typically still purchase of a perpetual license rather than paying monthly fees, as in SaaS. More important, the hosted systems are still largely configured and managed by the vendor or a business partner such as a service bureau. To me, the essence of a SaaS system is that users can largely do this for themselves.

I’m making a distinction here between running the software on your computers, which both hosted and SaaS vendors do, and managing each client’s implementation and on-going data maintenance. Hosted vendors do this for their clients but SaaS clients do for themselves. Although this distinction may be fuzzy in some cases, I still think it's important.

There are also technical distinctions that identify SaaS systems, such as whether one system serves multiple customers ("multi-tenancy"). Some people would argue that true SaaS systems are by definition multi-tenant and hosted systems are not. Mostly I’d agree, except that I can think of several conventional systems with versions that a service bureau can install to support multiple clients. Those are multi-tenant by any reasonable definition, but they’re managed by the vendor in the way that SaaS software (as I conceive it) is not. Multi-tenancy itself comes in several versions, depending on whether the hardware, software, and/or the database instance are shared. These have important technical and cost implications, but they aren't relevant to this post..

Why Consumer Marketing Systems Have Lagged in SaaS Adoption

What caused the divergence between consumer and business marketing systems? Much has to do with timing: the major consumer-oriented products were developed when on-premise software was the standard, and the large organizations who are their major customers have been relatively slow to accept SaaS in general. By contrast, the demand generation systems are newer and are sold to smaller companies, which have been early adopters of SaaS.

In addition, consumer marketers tend to manage the entire customer relationship, which requires integration with other corporate systems such as billing and customer service. Until recently, few SaaS vendors could handle such integration effectively. Business marketers generally limit their focus to lead generation and nurturing, which at most requires light synchronization with sales.

Consumer marketing databases also generally have more data feeds and more complex update processes than business marketing systems, again because the consumer systems are managing existing customers as well as leads. This makes them harder for consumer marketers to run without assistance, and thus less suited to the self-service-based SaaS approach. Yet even this is changing, as SaaS tools deliver greater power to non-technical users. For example, SaaS-based business intelligence vendors like Birst and Autometrics offer data integration capabilities that could form the basis for building a marketing system. The increasing openness of SaaS products also makes it easier for them to call on external data integration services.

In short, there’s nothing inherent in consumer marketing that prevents use of the SaaS model. The early obstacles that led to quicker adoption by business marketers are rapidly falling. We can expect the major consumer marketing automation vendors to continue to evolve their hosted offerings towards a true SaaS approach. We can also expect new entrants that are SaaS-based from the start, such as Neolane and Entiera (which I plan to review next week). And we’ll probably see marketing capabilities added by SaaS vendors in related industries such as email services (early example: Silverpop’s acquisition of Vtrenz, now Engage B2B) and Web content management (see my reviews of Marqui and SiteCore).

SaaS Systems Will Bring Lower Costs and Better Products

This can only be good news for consumer marketers. Pricing of conventional consumer marketing automation systems has remained stubbornly high in recent years. This is in part because of limited competition, but also because the bulk of the ownership cost is in the labor to deploy and maintain the systems. High labor costs mean that lower software prices would do little to encourage sales, since the buyer’s total expense would remain nearly the same.

By contrast, business marketers have seen ever-lower prices and rapid innovation as a multitude of SaaS-based vendors enter the field. These systems take very little labor to deploy, since that’s inherent to the SaaS model. In fact, implementation fees have in many cases fallen to zero, making the software fee itself the main expense. (The user’s own labor is another cost, but it’s largely hidden and difficult to estimate in advance; it therefore plays a minor role in the purchase decision.) The result is heavy competitive pressure to cut software prices, as vendors scramble to gain enough customers to cover their (largely) fixed costs.

SaaS-based consumer marketing automation systems have fundamentally similar economics, so we can expect similar results: new entrants able to deploy their systems at lower total cost than conventional software (because users do more of the work) will reduce their prices to achieve an adequately-large customer base.

The process will play out over several years as the SaaS based systems evolve to support more sophisticated marketing and greater end-user self-service. This means the new systems will start in the less-demanding lower and middle segments of the market and eventually work up to the largest marketing automation deployments. Still, the trend is clear and, so far as I can tell, quite inevitable.

It’s a great time to be a marketer.

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Simple Usability Studies Are Still Worthwhile

Summary: Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has proven that simple usability tests are highly effective. Marketing automation vendors should take heed. Come to think of it, so should marketers.

A vendor very proudly showed me their new Adobe Flex-based user interface the other day. Flex is a “rich Internet application” technology, meaning it gives you drag-and-drop, pop-up windows, and other features of a desktop graphical user interface. I found the new interface a bit confusing, so I asked whether the vendor had done any usability testing. He said they hadn’t done anything formal, because of the cost, but had shown it to many current users who were very enthusiastic about the change. Fair enough.

By coincidence, a random Twitter post this morning pointed me to the blog of Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. The specific post had to do with a study of mobile phone usability, which you won’t be surprised to find is dismal. But what particularly struck me was the relative simplicity of Nielsen’s methods – the study involved just a few dozen users doing selected tasks and its primary metric was the straightforward one of success rate. (I don’t mean to suggest the study itself is simple – the full report runs 132 pages and costs $198.)

Poking a bit more around Nielsen’s blog and Web site, I saw that simple usability studies are a recurring theme. For example, he showed back in 2000 Why You Only Need to Test with Five Users and made a more recent case for Fast, Cheap, and Good testing methods. Indeed, yet another post on Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations demonstrates that testing even two users is better than guessing.

Now, it’s true that Nielsen is measuring Web site usability, which is considerably less complicated than usability for a software application such as a marketing automation system. But I still think his point and his methods are valid: even a little usability testing goes a long way to help designers make the right choices. It’s something I hope more vendors will keep in mind.

Of course, Nielsen's work is even more directly applicable to the landing pages and other Web site components that marketers construct for their own use. Most marketers don't test enough in general, so you can see usability testing as just one example of the larger problem. But usability testing methods are different enough from standard marketing tests to think about them separately. The fact that they can be done very simply and before a page or site is launched actually means there is less reason not to do them, and greater value when you do.

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Jesubi Doubles Sales Prospecting Efficiency

Summary: Jesubi is designed to make sales prospecting as efficient as possible. It shows how specialized software can be much better at one function than general purpose systems. You may not want to replace your CRM system with Jesubi, but dedicated prospecting teams should take a close look.

The latest stop on my little tour of not-really-demand-generation systems is Jesubi. The flash show when you enter the company’s Web site could easily be mistaken for a demand generation product – it lists campaign workflow, list segmentation, email templates, Salesforce.com integration and dynamic reporting. Only a couple of other items hint that this is really a product for sales departments: manage calling queues, track appointment quality and record call history.

Once the flash has run its mercifully-brief course, a more concrete promise appears in delightfully large type: “DOUBLE YOUR SALESFORCE DON”T DOUBLE YOUR COSTS”. Except, um, this message still doesn’t quite clarify what they’re selling. I would have guessed recruiting services or maybe offshore outsourcing. But the succeeding text finally ends any confusion:

“Jesubi is for companies that:

• Have a sales team
• Need to increase prospecting activities per hour
• Need real-time visibility by rep, campaign, industry
• Want to proactively reach their market place
• Want to generate and qualify more leads
• Need to measure response rates of messages”

That’s a lot of words, but you had me at “increase prospecting activities per hour”.

Indeed, what impressed me about Jesubi was its very tight focus on prospecting productivity. The system was originally developed for its own use by outsourced appointment generation vendor LeadJen. As Jesubi president Bill Johnson tells the story, LeadJen originally worked directly with its clients’ CRM systems but found they were poorly suited for systematic prospecting. Jesubi was the result, and more than doubled LeadJen’s touches per hour when it was introduced in 2007.

Another way to look at it: Johnson showed me that it took 12 clicks to log an email in Salesforce.com, compared with about three clicks in Jesubi. Multiply that savings by hundreds of contacts per day and you’re talking real value.

Everything else about Jesubi needs to be understood in this context of inside sales productivity. Yes, it does list segmentation, emails and multi-step campaigns, but these are not the outbound email blasts or unattended lead nurturing campaigns of a conventional demand generation system. Rather, the emails exist largely to support telephone calls, either in advance or as follow-up, and the campaign steps are largely tasks for sales people.

The real attention has gone into scheduling and recording one-on-one interactions. For example, Jesubi makes it easy to capture referrals and link them back to the original contact, so the system can accurately report on the value generated by each name. Building these links is difficult in most CRM software and virtually impossible in marketing automation systems.

System reports are similarly tailored to tracking prospecting results. Jesubi provides detailed statistics on the outcomes of each contact within a campaign, as well as highlighting results for each sales person. The goal is to help managers understand which activities and which workers are most productive, so they can quickly correct problems and improve results.

Jesubi does provide standard contact management functions, such as call notes, opportunity tracking, and Microsoft Outlook integration. Johnson said about 40% of Jesubi clients use it as their primary CRM system, while the balance integrate it with Salesforce.com or another CRM tool. Automated synchronization is available for Salesforce.com using their standard APIs.

Jesubi is offered as a service, with pricing starting at $100 per user per month. Implementation adds $1,500 to $5,000 depending on complexity. Much of the effort is dedicated to setting up custom categories for campaign activities and outcomes so the system runs as smoothly as possible. Jesubi was made commercially available early this year and currently has about 35 clients averaging about ten users each.

Although I’ve described Jesubi as a sales system, Johnson points out that this type of prospecting is sometimes the responsibility of marketing. This makes Jesubi yet another example of the much-discussed blurring between the boundaries of marketing and sales. It’s also an great example of the true meaning of usability – a product that is very well suited for a particular purpose, even though its capabilities for other tasks are limited. Just thought I’d point that out.

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