“As the digital information created by businesses continues to explode at astronomical rates, the need to store, manage, socialize, and share this information is becoming extremely challenging,” says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “By providing innovative technologies that help enterprises better compete in this new era of information complexity and move their data out into the cloud, the OnDemand 100 represent some of the highest-growth opportunities in the private company marketplace.”

In conjunction with the AlwaysOn editorial team, the OnDemand winners were selected by partners at SAP, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, Blackstone Group, Bridge Bank, Fenwick & West, Silicon Valley Bank, and industry experts across the globe. Armed with a rigorous protocol and only a few months of time, this cooperative set out to find within the world’s entrepreneurial communities the few companies that are taking old notions of data management, customer relationships, and infrastructure and forging solutions that will shake up the industry and lead to huge value creation opportunities.

v-Pitch and the OnDemand Top 100 companies will be honored at AlwaysOn’s OnDemand event on March 28th-30th, 2011, at Hewlett-Packard’s Worldwide Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

v-Pitch will be presenting at the following time:

Tuesday, March 29th
2:00 PM CEO Showcase Sessions

Learn more about this event: AlwaysOn OnDemand 2011, OnDemand Top 100 Winners

v-Pitch has created a fun way for businesses to conduct their sales. Through delivery of highly engaging personalized video sales pitches and track analytics, v-Pitch has given sales organizations the ability to accurately evaluate the success of each delivery. This allows the sales person to prioritize their time so that they are only following up with educated and interested potential customers.

About AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn is the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley. AlwaysOn helped ignite the social media revolution in early 2003 when it launched the AlwaysOn network. In 2004, it became the first media brand to socially network its online readers and event attendees. AlwaysOn’s preeminent executive event series includes the Summit at Stanford, OnMedia, OnHollywood, Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic, OnDemand, Venture Summit Silicon Valley, Venture Summit East, GoingGreen Silicon Valley, GoingGreen East, and GoingGreen Europe. The AlwaysOn network and live event series continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, and advertisers like no other media brand.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

Imagine walking into your office on Monday morning andfinding ten hot leads flowing into your inbox. What a way to start business on a Monday, huh? Lead Generation is not a new form of gaining new business, but it now has a new approach. Rather than sitting at a trade show table for hours on end, or sitting up a display in hopes that targeted consumers will complete a form, you can have leads generated and sent to you using the technology of the Internet.

How Does Lead Generation Work?

There are agencies that specialize in providing qualified leads to businesses. The process of lead generation is actually very easy. An agency develops a website or partnerships with several websites in which they promote and advertise your product or service. A consumer finds these directories or informational sites and they are able to complete an online quote request form. This form is submitted to the agency. The buyers information is verified and matched to the appropriate providers. These matched leads are then sent via email to the prospective providers with full contact information and purchasing requirements.

What Business Industries use Lead Generation?

Lead generation could work for just about any business, but most industries using this type of marketing include insurance agencies, education institutions, office suppliers, and furniture stores. Trends show that lead generation will become even more popular in the future, especially for service oriented businesses.

Why Use Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a win-win for both the buyer and seller. A buyer is able to request information from several businesses that offer the product or service that they are looking for and the seller is given the opportunity to pitch their product or service to someone who has given them permission. Conversion rates on leads that you receive often have a higher conversion successrate than cold contacts because the prospect is prequalified, before you ever receive the lead.

Lead generation has become popular with businesses because it enablesa business to:

Determine pricing on a per lead basis
Choose the product or servicethey wish to offer to prospects
Select the geographical area that the business is interested in
Control the number of leads a business wishes to receive per month (this assists with budgeting)
Pay only for the leads thatare received
How Much Does it Cost?

Lead generation can be extremely cost effective. Leads range anywhere from $5 to $25. Price often depends on the measure of difficulty ingetting the lead. The easier the lead is to get the lower the price seems to be.

Agencies that offer lead generation will often charge you a setup or maintenance fee. This can range between $50 to $200 per year.

Is Lead Generation for You?

If your calendar is empty and you need business fast lead generation is a way that you can grow your business rather quickly. It’s an easy way to increase your ROI and get more business on your books. Approach it just like you would any other advertising endeavor, set aside a reasonable budget to test it and see if it works for your business. The key to being successful in lead generation is to brush up on your sales and marketing skills so that the leads you receive convert at a high sales rate. Do not try to approach this method of marketing without the ability to follow through and close the sale.

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Strategy and Measurements

• The VP of sales creates and executes the sales department go-to-market and operational strategies to achieve business objectives. He participates with other senior managers in developing strategy for the entire company. He determines and monitors the department’s key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue vs. plan, contact rate, quote closure rate and gross profit percentage. He anticipates and reacts quickly to trends and changes in performance. He develops and manages sales department budgets.

Leadership

• The VP of sales directs and manages sales department employees. She hires, supervises, develops and mentors sales directors. She indirectly supervises sales managers and sales representatives. She develops and implements employee performance management programs. She participates in corporate succession planning activities, writes and delivers employee reviews, keeps close tabs on employee morale and creates a positive working environment.

Selling

• The VP of sales assists with complex sales negotiations, attends sales presentations and helps close sales deals. He directly manages very large, high-profile customer accounts, as appropriate. He helps develop sales proposals and responses to request for proposals (RFPs). He develops and oversees a sales training program for new and existing employees. The VP of sales ensures sales employees are equipped with the product, system and selling-skills training that they require to be successful. He partners with marketing to develop lead generation and revenue generation programs, and to create high performing sales collateral.

Technology and Continuous Improvement

• The VP of sales continually improves the effectiveness of the sales organization and enhances productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction. He oversees and drives adoption of sales technology including customer relationship management (CRM) and a sales intranet. He partners with information technology leaders to identify and implement new technology and improve existing technology based on business needs. He develops, documents and enforces sales policies, standard operating procedures and best practices. He also streamlines sales processes.

Experience, Education and Skills

• VP of sales candidates must have seven to 10 years of experience in a sales leadership role, at least four years of experience in a selling role and at least two years of experience working with sales technology and CRM. It is helpful for VP sales candidates to have at least two years of experience in a senior leadership role, working with C-level executives. A bachelor’s degree with a business concentration is required. An MBA is preferred. The vice president must demonstrate outstanding leadership, communication and interpersonal skills. She must possess expertise in selling strategies and methodologies, strategic planning and execution, and employee motivation techniques.

Compensation

• The compensation for a vice president of sales varies based on the industry, the number of employees managed and the breadth and complexity of responsibilities. According to GlassDoor.com and Salary.com, it is common to see base salaries in the $125,000 to $175,000 range, with total compensation including commission in the $175,000 to $225,000 range. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, sales leadership roles should grow by 13 percent through 2018.

Source Ehow

1. Have Sales and Marketing Meet Frequently

While there is a growing culture at startups to eliminate meetings, we have found that frequent meetings between sales and marketing help keep the lines of communication open.  We have a Smarketing meeting every single week that includes the entire sales and marketing team.  We review the activity for the week for both teams, update the sales team on what marketing is doing, and vice versa.  Today this meeting is mostly about sharing information – with over 70 people it is no longer a great way to get feedback or discuss something – but in the earlier days of HubSpot it was smaller, more informal and we would discuss things and provide feedback both ways.  The meeting takes 30-60 minutes, and both sales and marketing people present, as well as some other groups within the company.

In addition to the weekly Smarketing meeting, a subset of each team (about 10 people total) meets monthly to review our results in depth and talk about future plans for improvement.  This is where we have more of a discussion, and we hold each other accountable for our portion of the partnership.  This meeting started later at HubSpot, once the weekly meeting got too big to use it for discussion.

On top of these two standing meetings, there are of course impromptu meetings on different topics, and because of the culture we have built, sales and marketing are usually both represented in those meetings together.  So marketing won’t get together to talk about leads without getting input from sales and sales won’t start a new sales effort without including marketing.  Sounds like Smarketing to me!

2. Build Multiple Relationships Between Sales and Marketing

At other companies the primary relationship between the two teams might be between the VP Marketing and the VP Sales.  This is a mistake.  Mark Roberge and I try to build strong relationships at multiple levels of our team to make the two teams functions more like one team.  You want sales managers talking to marketing managers, you want everyone in marketing talking to individual sales reps.  The idea is that rather than every problem bubbling up to the VP of Sales and then having a conversation with the VP Marketing and then it flows downhill, solve the problems at their source by empowering everyone on the team and building relationships at all levels in the team.  Today at HubSpot, Mark and I only have to get involved in a small number of issues.

3. Mix Marketing and Sales Desks Together

At most companies the majority of communication and relationship-building is informal, so it surprises me when the marketing and sales teams sit in different parts of the office.  Some companies might put sales and marketing near each other, but it is still one big group of salespeople and one big group of marketers that happen to sit near each other.

What companies should do is mix sales and marketing together.  Every marketer should sit next to a sales person and vice versa.  The benefit to marketing is that they get to see firsthand what salespeople do, and if the marketing activities they are working on help sales or not.  The advantage for sales is they have a marketing person to whom they can ask questions about the leads they are getting and the different marketing programs created.  This is also a benefit for marketing, because when salespeople better understand the leads they are getting, they can go after them more effectively, which makes them both more productive and happier.

At HubSpot we actually take this office arrangement a step further, and all of our implementation and support consultants also sit among sales and marketing, so we have sales, marketing and post-sales all together, helping to build even more cross functional communication.  Using humans natural tendency to be social in order to build better marketing and sales communication works great.

4. Provide Many Types of Feedback Between Marketing and Sales

We ask each sales person to rate their leads in our CRM system.  We send out periodic surveys to the sales team to give feedback on leads and the sales tools marketing provides.  We have 1-1 conversations with many sales reps to get their feedback on marketing in person.  We ask sales managers to get 1-1 feedback from their teams and then provide that feedback to marketing.

Marketing people go on demos and provide feedback to the sales team on how they are doing.  We monitor the stats of each sales rep on their success with following up on leads and show them if they are not doing as well as the rest of the team.

The goal of all this activity is to make everyone in marketing and sales feel empowered to offer feedback, and that the feedback is actually used to make decisions and improve things.  While everyone in sales or marketing does not always agree with all the decisions they make, I think they would all say that they are part of the team and that both sales and marketing listen to each other and when we make decisions, their voices are heard.  This level of feedback and trust is key to successful marketing and sales communication.

5. Agree on Terminology

Communication requires the two parties to use a similar language and vocabulary.  One of the things that we did at a very early level (only a few employees in the company) was to decide what a “lead” was and what an “opportunity” was, wrote down those definitions, and then built them into our reports and culture.  If you don’t have agreement on what a “lead” is, you will constantly have the problem of sales complaining that the leads are bad and marketing complaining that sales is lazy and not working the leads effectively.

Our definitions of “leads” and our sales and marketing process have changed a lot over time, but at all times we had firm definitions and had a sales and marketing SLA that defined exactly what each group’s responsibilities and goals were.  (In fact, there was one period of two months where one of our definitions got a little hazy, and those were some of the rockiest months in terms of communication between sales and marketing.)

6. Use Data to Communicate

Finally, all of this communication between sales and marketing is built off of the principle that data never lies.  Salespeople are not allowed to say “the leads suck” without data showing that the conversion rate has dropped or a key demographic factor has waned recently.  Marketing isn’t allowed to say “sales are lazy” without data to show that they are only following up on each lead only one time.

This does not mean that informal qualitative feedback is not useful in sales and marketing.  But it does mean that if there is a way to use data to verify your feelings, you should use the data.

At all of our meetings, we use data to understand the current state of sales and marketing, we have daily reports that show exactly the progress of both sales and marketing each day, and we generally don’t answer questions with “it feels like”.  Data is a wonderful tool to help remove the emotion from conversations, and to focus your teams on the real problems.

Source HubSpot

1. Provide the option to subscribe and unsubscribe to your email list. The purpose of email marketing is to reach possible clients for your business. Providing the option to subscribe and unsubscribe to your email list, especially if it’s the first time that the recipient is receiving your email, will help you pinpoint who those prospective clients are. Provide clear instructions on how to subscribe, unsubscribe and how to update the email address in each of your emails and newsletters.
2. Honor the requests for opting out of your email list. When people send you requests to opt out of the email list, make sure that you honor them. You do not want to be bombarded with complaints from people who still continuously receive emails after they have unsubscribed.
3. Remove email addresses that are no longer active from your email list. It is important that you always keep your email list updated. You don’t want your newsletters and promotions to go to waste, right? There are many programs that you can use to help you track the emails that you’ve sent. One of the features that they offer include tracking bounced emails from inactive email addresses. Reconfirming the subscription of the members every month is also an effective method for you to track those that have changed their email addresses.
4. Be a consistent email marketer. Send emails at regular intervals to put your subscribers at ease. If you flood them with emails everyday, most likely the messages will just be deleted or tagged as spam. To entice the people in your email list, offer tips, perks and promotions. Make sure that the content of your emails are relevant and worth reading.

Email as a medium for marketing can bring wonders to your business as long as you continuously keep track of its progress. An effective email marketing campaign equates to prospective leads and profit for your business. Follow the pointers we have outlined for you so you can monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing.

John Janetos, vice president of business development and sales for email marketing services provider iPost, offers an example. A company found that the open rates for a particular email campaign were only so-so. By tracking social network conversations, however, the company saw that there was a lot of talk about the offer within the email. At around 9am in each time zone, social media buzz ramped up, driving recipients of the email to the company’s bricks-and-mortar stores. “If you’d just looked at the email metrics, you’d have thought it wasn’t a great-performing campaign,” Janetos says.

“The effect and performance of email is undermeasured,” he continues. “There’s a halo effect to it. How do you measure the true performance of email and connect the disparate channels to get a holistic view of all your channels?”

Not surprisingly, Janetos believes that the new InstaVista dashboards developed by iPost and analytics technology provider Anametrix, a provider of cloud-based business analytics technology, will help. InstaVista enables users to overlay data from social media listening, search engine marketing, and online advertising, among other sources, onto their email metrics.

There are, of course, low-tech, manual ways to determine the effects of email on other channels. Including a coupon with specific codes that must be printed out and brought to a store in order to obtain a discount is one method. QR codes are a modern take on that method: “All of a sudden you’ve made the physical world interactive,” Janetos notes. Embedding trackable forward-to-a-friend or share-with-your-network (SWYN) buttons in your emails is another. Regularly searching Twitter, Facebook, and Google for your brand name and particular phrases may seem labor-intensive or time-consuming, but it can give you an idea of the viral spread of your email marketing.

“What we think is exciting is that it’s not enough to do just email marketing or social marketing or interactive marketing,” Janetos says. “Brick-and-mortar is still real, direct mail is still out there. You’ve got to have a holistic view.”

Source ChiefMarketer

By Mark Brownlow, Revised: May 2010 | First published: Nov 2006
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People unfamiliar with email marketing often wonder what all the fuss is about. Didn’t spam kill email as a marketing vehicle? And if spam didn’t kill it, what about blogs, Twitter and all the other clever ways we can communicate online? Isn’t email outmoded?

Those wondering about the benefits of email marketing in today’s ever-changing online and marketing environment will find the answers below.

It works

Businesses engage in email marketing because it works. And works well. Here are the numbers…

• According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. The expected figure for 2010 is $42.08. As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs.
• In Datran Media’s 2010 Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 39.4% of industry executives said the advertising channel that performed strongest for them was email. This was the top result.
• The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO.
• A summer 2009 survey of Irish marketers found 79% rating email marketing as important or very important to their marketing strategy.
• Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online 2009 survey of retailers found that “E-mail is the most mentioned successful tactic overall”.
• A December 2008 survey of hundreds of marketers by MarketingSherpa saw pay-per-click search ads rank top for ROI, followed by email marketing to house lists in second place.
• A February/March 2008 retailer survey by shop.org revealed that email marketing has the second lowest cost per order (CPO) of any online marketing tactic. The CPO of $6.85 compares favorably with, for example, paid search’s CPO of $19.33.

The money is following the results…

• A December 2009 survey of 300 email marketers by Silverpop found that their companies were feeling the effects of recession, but “four out of 10 marketers reported that their email budgets in 2010 would increase, and nearly half (47 percent) said their budgets would stay the same”.
• A November 2009 survey of B2B marketers found that email marketing was likely to see more spending increase than any other form of online marketing bar website development.
• A Q2 2009 survey of over 5,000 senior US executives revealed that email marketing was the channel most likely to see an increase in marketing budget.
• 46% of North American small businesses surveyed in 2009 by Hurwitz & Associates use email marketing, with another 36% planning to do so in the coming year.
• Seven out of ten UK marketers surveyed by the DMA in 2009 expected expenditure on email marketing to increase over the next 12 months.
• In August, 2009, Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s annual Communications Industry Forecast suggested total spend for email will grow from $11.9 billion in 2008 to $27.8 billion by 2013.
• An April 2009 survey of senior marketing executives by the European Interactive Advertising Association revealed that 46% of respondents plan to invest more in email.
• In Datran Media’s 2009 Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 58.5% of industry executives said they planned to increase investment in email. Only 5.7% planned to decrease it.
• Internet Retailer’s April 2009 email marketing survey found that 51.6% planned to increase spending on email during the recession, and only 4.7% planned to decrease it .
• Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online 2009 survey of retailers found that 88% of them list “e-mail as a high priority for the year”.
• A 2009 survey of US B2B marketers by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research found that 39% planned to increase email budgets, while 11% planned a decrease.
• The CMO Council’s Marketing Outlook ‘09 Report reviewed the plans and opinions of 650 marketers. Email marketing was the top target area for investment in 2009.
• A survey of B2B marketers in November, 2008 noted that 68.3% intended increasing spending on email marketing in 2009.
• The DMA estimate spending on email marketing (in the USA) will increase from $600 million in 2008 to $700 million in 2009.

Why it works

Email marketing works for a variety of reasons…

• It allows targeting
• It is data driven
• It drives direct sales
• It builds relationships, loyalty and trust
• It supports sales through other channels

Modern email marketing services and solutions support database integration, segmentation and various other tricks and techniques for improving the targeting of outgoing messages. Advanced methods generate on-the-fly emails customized down to an individual recipient basis.

And every email campaign you send out generates a heap of actionable data you can use to refine your approach and messages.

Email promotions and offers generate immediate action: sales, downloads, inquiries, registrations, etc. Informative email newsletters and other emails send people to offline stores and events, prepare the way for catalogs, build awareness, contribute to branding, strengthen relationships, encourage trust and cement loyalty.

All in all, a pretty good way of going about your marketing business. But…

Let’s not get carried away

Just like a garden only bears fruit if managed properly, so it is with email marketing. We know it can work, but you have to get the basics right. The basics of building a list of people who want to hear from you, crafting a message, and ensuring the emails get through to those on that list.

And once you have the basics right, there’s a whole spectrum of more sophisticated tactics you can employ to drive further success. Because the metrics show us that there’s plenty of room for improvement and plenty of rewards waiting for those who do improve.

For example, one report found that “using web analytics to target email campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and eighteen times the profits of broadcast mailings.”

At a simpler level, just mailing a small coupon offer to customers who hadn’t purchased for a while brought in a ton of extra sales for one retailer.

Email-Marketing-Reports

Email marketing is, as the name suggests, the use of email in marketing communications.

What sort of email?

In its broadest sense, the term covers every email you ever send to a customer, potential customer or public venue. In general, though, it’s used to refer to:

• Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again
• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship
• Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people

Give me an analogy…

You can think of these three main forms of email marketing as the electronic equivalent of:

• Direct mail
• Sending people a print newsletter
• Placing advertisements in subscription magazines and newspapers

There is, however, one extremely important difference – the issue of permission (see later).

Why is email marketing so popular?

Email marketing is so popular because:

• sending email is much cheaper than most other forms of communication
• email lets you deliver your message to the people (unlike a website, where the people have to come to your message)
• email marketing has proven very successful for those who do it right

For more information, see the article Why do email marketing?.

Let’s briefly review the three types of email marketing:

1. Direct email

Direct email involves sending a promotional message in the form of an email. It might be an announcement of a special offer, for example. Just as you might have a list of customer or prospect postal addresses to send your promotions too, so you can collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses.

You can also rent lists of email addresses from service companies. They’ll let you send your message to their own address lists. These services can usually let you target your message according to, for example, the interests or geographical location of the owners of the email address.

2. Retention email

Instead of promotional email designed only to encourage the recipient to take action (buy something, sign-up for something, etc.), you might send out retention emails.

These usually take the form of regular emails known as newsletters. A newsletter may carry promotional messages or advertisements, but will aim at developing a long-term impact on the readers. It should provide the readers with value, which means more than just sales messages. It should contain information which informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.

3. Advertising in other people’s emails

Instead of producing your own newsletter, you can find newsletters published by others and pay them to put your advertisement in the emails they send their subscribers. Indeed, there are many email newsletters that are created for just this purpose – to sell advertising space to others.

Where’s the catch?

This all sounds great of course. Imagine how much cheaper it is to send a message to thousands of email addresses, rather than thousands of postal addresses!

It’s not that simple, unfortunately. Quite apart from the complexities of designing and delivering email messages to the right people, getting them to actually read and respond to your message, and measuring and analysing the results, there is the issue of permission.

What’s “permission”?

Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission. This is a complex issue and the subject of intense debate in the marketing community.

Essentially, you need an email address owner’s permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don’t have this permission, then the recipients of your mail may well regard your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email.

You do not want to send spam!

If you are accused of sending spam, then you may find your email accounts closed down, your website shut off, and your reputation in tatters. In some parts of the world, you may even be breaking the law.

Quite apart from these practical considerations, there is also a strong argument which says that long-term successful email marketing relationships with customers and others can only work anyway if they’re permission based.

The big question, of course, is what constitutes permission…and that is the main subject of debate. It’s important to remember that it’s not your views, or even the views of the majority, that count, but the views of those receiving your emails and those responsible for administering the infrastructure of the Internet.

An example of permission is when your customer buys something from your online store and also ticks a box marked “please send me news about product updates via email”. You now have “permission” to send that person product updates by email, provided you also give them the opportunity to rescind that permission at any time.

Educate yourself

It’s important to stress that anyone considering email marketing must read up on the subject of permission and spam. If you don’t understand the importance of permission and the risks of ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.

Don’t panic, though. It’s actually relatively easy to ensure that the address lists you use or build yourself are permission-based.

OK, now that you’re armed with some brief background information, browse the rest of this site to find the resources you need to develop a better understanding of how email marketing can work for you and your (potential) customers.

Source Email-Marketing-Reports.com