Category Archives: Sales Enablement

The Six Triggered Campaigns Every SaaS Marketer Should Try

Almost any business can benefit from the strategic implementation of triggered campaigns (see: http://www.emiboston.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Triggered-Campaign-Field-Guide.pdf) to increase mindshare, walletshare, and lifetime customer value. For SaaS businesses, though, the benefits can be even more powerful as success depends on the optimization of the ongoing revenue stream from existing customers and prospects in trial. In a SaaS business, there is a proliferation of customer “moments of truth” – points in the customer lifecycle when the customer experience can significantly affect the business decision-making process. Because services are often paid for as-you-go, a change in usage volume, a service experience, training attendance (or lack thereof), and the degree of understanding of the product features can all lead to decisions to increase or decrease contract levels. As a result, marketing based on usage behavior and lifecycle rises significantly in importance as there is a strategic imperative to influence and/or drive interactions.

With that in mind, the following is a list of triggered campaigns that any SaaS marketing team should think about putting into circulation:

  • Free trial conversion. Once a prospect is in trial, that is the opportunity to communicate the value of the product – to reiterate the benefits and make it an easy decision for them to move from trial to paid. The conversion campaign should be planned as a series of communications, ideally including sales scripting. Customer testimonials and cautious use of incentives (e.g., discount offers) can be effective.
  • Win Back. You win some; you lose some. Having invested in getting the prospect to trial or even to a paid subscription, you shouldn’t sit back and simply accept the loss of a customer. A campaign based on common reasons for cancellation and/or non-purchase, potentially featuring incentives to entice the customer back, is vital to ensuring that you are maximizing the return on your acquisition costs.
  • Onboarding. Immediately after a customer has agreed to a pay is not the time to sell, but it is definitely the time to reaffirm the customer’s decision and the value of the product, as well as preparing the customer for future communications. The Onboarding campaign can be a single email, a series of emails, or even a multi-channel/multi-touch effort.
  • Training attendance. Even if it’s the greatest software in the world, customers won’t use more, expand their user base, and spend more unless they really understand how to use it. A triggered campaign targeting training attendance is therefore vital to maximizing lifetime customer value. The campaign can target individual users or a point-person/advocate who has a stake in training attendance.
  • Cross-sell and up-sell. After the onboarding campaign has laid the relationship groundwork and the training attendance campaign has ensured initial satisfaction, it is time to begin trying to increase walletshare. Cross-sell and up-sell campaigns should not apply a “hard sell” approach; they should be informative rather than overtly promotional. Again, customer testimonials (e.g., “see how customers like you are getting the most out of the software”) can be a powerful messaging element.
  • Feedback. Nothing enhances satisfaction like being asked for feedback. Any important point of contact (e.g., service call, initial implementation, training session attendance) should be seen as an opportunity to solicit opinions. But beware: if you don’t take action on the feedback, asking can be worse than not asking at all.

The good news for marketers is that not only is lifecycle information available for triggers, but now, through companies like Totango (www.totango.com), one can easily create and execute triggered campaigns based on software usage.

The Vinaigrette Moment: Marketing and Sales Integration

Drip olive oil and vinegar onto a plate, and you end with little pools of each, unmixed, only really able to be enjoyed with some effort by manipulating your fork to get just the right amount of each to adhere onto the lettuce. However, if combine olive oil and vinegar in a receptacle and whisk them, you end up with a lovely blended vinaigrette. This description of basic salad dressing chemistry is a useful metaphor for bridging the divide between marketing and sales – a topic that was the subject of a panel in which I participated at the recent Tech Marketing Summit in Santa Clara.

Fundamentally, there is a lot about marketing and sales that is different:

  • Marketing tends to be more project (campaign) oriented while sales is more process (ongoing, repeated effort) oriented.
  • Testing and educational failure is (or should be) valued by marketing but is not really part of the sales lexicon.
  • And, most obviously, sales has revenue targets while marketing typically does not.

Oil and vinegar. But, with a little effort in the form of enabling technologies like integrated CRM/Marketing Automation systems, and some shared and defined objectives, the two can work separately but harmoniously to achieve good results.

Where things get really interesting, though, is when the two set aside their natural differences and really cooperate and collaborate. For example, if marketing interviews salespeople and finds that 15-20% of their time is spent creating presentations and doing customer research, there is a huge opportunity to give those sales people another 7-10 hours of sales time every week by creating presentation templates and a customer intel portal.  Likewise, if marketing and sales work together to analyze win/loss rates in certain segments, a picture can emerge of latent opportunities to pursue new markets or better allocate marketing investment to maximize the revenue opportunity. It’s only with this kind of collaboration that you get true go-to-market optimization.  And that’s the vinaigrette moment that produces real results.

SuperBanker: The making of a gamified conference experience

Compared with traditional training and marketing strategies, gamification – the application of social gaming theories and techniques in commercial contexts – can dramatically increase audience involvement and the degree to which communications actually change audience behavior. Firms across all industries are becoming increasingly aware of the power of gamification for business objectives, such as motivating and training a sales force or connecting with customers.

This week, EMI launched SuperBanker, an online mobile game, at SourceMedia’s 17th Annual Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium. SuperBanker demonstrates the use of gamification for business purposes, and was designed to enhance attendees’ conference experience. Players could create their own superhero alter ego, and earned points for answering questions about the session presentations, networking with other players, or visiting the exhibitors at the conference.

Almost 200 top-level banking executives and service providers played the game, which culminated in an exciting fight for first place in the final hours of play. It wasn’t easy to make SuperBanker the success that it was – a delicate and detailed strategy lies behind the colorful graphics of the game.  Here’s a peek behind the curtain:

  • Fitting the imagery and tone to the audience – can a game be too fun? The theme for the game had to balance fun with seriousness, because conference-goers would be in a professional mindset while playing the game.  Rather than the traditional superhero tights, the game avatars were dressed in business suits; rather than playing through an animated world of villains and crises, players answered conference-related trivia challenges.
  • Walking the thin tightrope between engaging and too involved: A game that is too demanding will discourage participation; too easy, and it won’t be fun to play.  In a conference setting, there is an additional layer to setting the difficulty of a game: the goal of the game is not to engross players, but instead, to allow them to engage with the game and the conference itself simultaneously.  SuperBanker play was designed to be accomplished in between conference  activities; what’s more, it rewarded active participation in the conference with game points.
  •  Bringing the game into the physical world: Because a conference audience is physically located in the same place, it was important to bring the game into the physical setting in which the players were interacting via stickers, life-sized cutouts, and other things, in order to connect the game experience with the conference itself and generate continued participation.  Perhaps the most important example was a large leaderboard screen that displayed the top ten players’ scores – even though players could instantly access the leaderboard from their own devices, many walked back over to the screen to see it displayed there.
  • Creating a sense of progress and the attainability of winning: At the conference, one player pulled ahead early and maintained a solid lead throughout.  This could have discouraged others from signing up or continuing to play, but SuperBanker was designed to create a sense of accomplishment for everyone playing the game.  Players could win smaller prizes throughout the conference; every member of the team with the best average score was awarded a prize; and for the highly engaged group, there were also prizes for second and third up for grabs.  And indeed, attendees played the game to the bitter end – resulting in a last minute upset!