A year ago, we posted this blog article “I will pretend to sell, if you pretend to buy”. This was a mantra of my old boss and friend, Sherwin Uretsky and one of his famous “12 sins of selling” that I am still trying to remember.

I thought I would dust off the conversation and reinforce the ideas with three key  points.

Continue Reading →

Revenue Architects recently released a white paper exploring the rapidly evolving nature of software eCommerce and sharing insights on how to manage this change for maximum revenue growth.

Abstract & Download

With the increasing use of the Internet for eCommerce, many pundits had announced the death of the distribution channel for software perhaps assuming that software would be digitally distributed directly to the end user.  But now, more than ever, channels serve an increasingly important role for the software industry. And within just a few years it will likely change more than any other channel in businesses globally.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) will need to understand these changes and the  underlying technology needed to support them.  For example, ISVs must continue to manage their existing channels, many of which are undergoing dramatic change, while taking advantage of new on-line app-stores and affiliate style eMarketplaces.  The corresponding vendor technology solutions for software eCommerce are different from traditional e-Retailing solutions.  Therefore ISVs must also leverage the right solution type, providing both multi-channel management and deep software trade functionality.

Click on the image to download a free copy of the white paper.

Continue Reading →

Here are a few tweets from the last week that we wanted to share.

Facebook‘s New, Entirely Social Ads Will Recreate Marketing – http://bit.ly/yGD9O0

Experience is the Next Frontier in Marketing – http://bit.ly/zUjHyI

Drive B2B Channel Sales with Social Media Content – http://bit.ly/A0jiGC

How to Avoid Five Common Mistakes in Market Segmentation – http://bit.ly/zalm8I

Thriving On the New Facebook: Four Steps For Your Brand – http://bit.ly/xKVa0A

Why Pinterest Should Matter to You – http://bit.ly/wiDZOw

Continue Reading →

In a recent post in Bank Investment Consultant, Margarida Correia points out that financial advisors face threats from direct providers like Charles Schwab and Fidelity – the very firms that are in many cases are providing the underlying services for the RIA.

Image from Reuters.com

Image from HansaFX

Yet the article also points out a positive:

“It’s not all gloom and doom for advisors, though. Despite the inroads direct account providers have made, financial advisors still offer more robust services and can differentiate themselves by offering more personalized advice, including detailed financial planning, according to Cerulli.

“Advisors can differentiate themselves by creating a personal brand,” said Wolf. They can create a “client niche,” something that would set them apart from what the “bigger, broader firms are offering,” Wolf said.”

More Evidence of Ineffective Marketing

In an earlier survey by ByAllAccounts, Inc., the majority of financial advisors report low effectiveness of their marketing efforts, despite placing a high value on marketing.

It is clear that advisors are by and large not focusing their efforts on the most efficient marketing strategies. A large number of survey respondents still depend strongly on word of mouth and referrals for new business, and very few have dedicated marketing staff. Further, while most do advisors incorporate their websites into their marketing strategy, they also reported finding their website marketing strategy to be neutral or ineffective.

Some Strategies to Consider

Advisors should improve their websites first. In our presentations with Advisor Groups, we always point out how “all roads lead back to the website” . Make sure your website is designed solidly, well branded, and brings more dynamic content. There are also a number of related tools and strategies that advisors can take advantage of to improve marketing effectiveness, even if working with a limited budget.

• Google Analytics, a free data analysis tool, monitors website traffic and enables users to visualize and analyze the effectiveness of their website marketing strategy. This will highlight areas where improvement is necessary and will allow advisors to take the next steps in improving their marketing strategy.
• Soon, the Revenizer will launch giving a range of pre-built, easy to use scorecards. Sign up now and you will get in the loop for a free free service! We recommend this tool because too many people are not taking the time to look at the analytics and this tool makes it easy. (Revenue Architects is an investor in Revenizer)
• Advisors have also largely neglected to take advantage of search engine optimization and marketing automation software, both of which are strategies that can have a significant impact on client acquisition. Optimizing the firm’s website in order to be found by search engines will attract more traffic to the website and in turn new business to the firm.
• Off page strategies – like PR and Social Media presence adds more inbound links to your site.
• Newsletters and email campaigns are well known as a great way to stay in touch – and the technologies for this (like Mailchimp and Constant Contact among others) are improving dramatically.
• For advisors with more serious ambition to lead in marketing effectiveness, we recommend and help manage more robust marketing automation software solutions to drive greater impact and deliver more control.

Take a more systematic approach to marketing. Here are five steps:

1. Define your target markets / niches carefully. Build personas around each segment
2. Build your target universe of existing and potential clients (combining opt-in and acquisition strategies)
3. Deploy a Revenue System – processes and technologies for email, social media, website, content, lead nurturing and development, CRM
4. Run creative, tailored content-driven campaigns for each target segment
5. Nurture clients with technology to help self-filter the wrong clients and encourage the  right clients to your firm.

Revenue Architects helps financial advisors develop these strategies as well as select and operate the marketing technology systems that will work best for their firm based on ambition for AUM, target market and available resources. Reach us at www.revenuearchitects.com.

Continue Reading →

This post is being shared this week in our updated Newsletter which we plan to publish about once a month. The newsletter is designed to be easy to scan at a glance so readers can click only articles of interest. Articles are pulled from “Things We Think”, the Revenue Architects Blog. The blog is named after the 2001 Viant weblog.

Image via Wikipedia

Viant was an innovative company designed from the ground up to build digital businesses. We also created Revenue Architects from the ground up – to address our client’s revenue agenda. We thought the name worked.

The Business Issue

The pursuit of top-line revenue growth is more challenging than ever. The web, social media and mobile technologies have transformed buyer process. Businesses must integrate marketing and sales and better engage the web to capture, deepen and expand relationships. Yet, executing successfully requires a wide range of talent – from creative design and branding to content creation and technology. At the same time, some of the best experts are working independently from the traditional agency. We flexibly and adaptively bring these expert teams to our clients – helping them capture customer value with new marketing and sales.

2012 Momentum

Thanks to great clients, a great team and an extended expert network, Revenue Architects enjoyed a solid 2011 and is off to a great start in 2012. We continually refine our business model to ensure we are positioned to adaptively deliver marketing support for our client’s growth agenda. We are celebrating new members of the team, expansion of our client base, an updated website and new offices in downtown Boston. Here are some highlights:

• We helped over 15 new clients expand revenue performance in 2012
• Working with Charles Schwab and other leaders, we expanded our wealth management footprint
• With Betaspring, we launched Revenizer – a new company developing easy to use marketing score cards
• We moved to Post Office Square in Boston – co-located with Boston Insurance Brokerage
• Roy Satterthwaite joined our team to build out our client work in the west coast
• We launched a new website with some improved branding and plans for video and enhanced content
• We expanded our client base across technology, life sciences, financial services and mid-market
• We expanded our network of independent professionals and agency teams.

Welcome to “Things We Think” and our newsletter. We hope you are able to enjoy some of the perspectives and thank you to all that helped Revenue Architects have a successful 2011 and start for 2012.

Continue Reading →

It is great to be kicking off the Revenue Grader development project working with our partners Icicle Technologies.

Revenue Grader will be an entertaining yet informative way for business leaders to quickly and easily measure their potential for revenue performance. By self-scoring maturity levels across three main domains of a revenue architecture (Revenue Strategy, Revenue Systems and Revenue Programs), leaders  can rate maturity levels, identify gaps and map priorities for a marketing plan.

We decided to test drive the Revenue Grader with a set of B2B mid-market companies working with the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce (SACC).

About the SACC:

“The Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce plays a vital and active role in assisting Swiss companies in the United States and U.S. companies in Switzerland to expand their business. The Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce is a not-for-profit organization.”

About the Workshop

The workshop for the SACC will explore the opportunities and challenges for small and medium sized B2B companies seeking to develop strategies to leverage social media and digital marketing to expand their businesses. This will be an interactive 6-hour workshop and will be limited to 8 companies and will include:

• An overview and key principles of social media and digital marketing
• Group discussion of lessons learned, best practices, and challenges
• Working sessions to develop specific strategies for each participating company

Continue Reading →

Here are some metrics that Marketo and Eloqua suggest as what you might expect from successful lead nurture programs. Given the complexity of effectively implementing a personalized lead nurture program, it is interesting to see where the impacts might be and what benefits you might expect.

Marketo pointed to these metrics in a recent webinar invitation:

• Fewer marketing-generated leads ignored by sales (from 80% to as low as 25%)
• 150% increase in contact-to-lead conversion rate
• 2-3x lift in conversion rates on raw leads to qualified opportunities
• 20% more sales opportunities
• 225% increase in volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities
• 7% points higher win rates on marketing-generated leads
• 6% points lower rate of “no decisions”
• 2x increase in bid-win ration
• 47% higher average order values

Eloqua points to the following metrics and a case study in one of their white paper guides:

• Improved conversion rates at every stage of the demand waterfall, most significantly at the top of the funnel
• Nearly eliminated “unrated” leads in its database as a result of the discovery nurture
• Increased suspect-to-MQL conversion rate from 8% to 11% on net new leads entering the system
• Saw an additional 30% of “suspects” (or new visitors) convert to MQLs over time due to its seed nurture
• Drove a 64% increase in SQL productivity from corporate sales development through cultivate nurtures
• Increased by 118% the number of opportunities entering the pipeline

Continue Reading →

Below are some interesting facts and opinions about Facebook curated from the current Economist article.

“Last year the company had sales of $3.7 billion, a little below recent estimates, and made a net profit of $1 billion.”

“The network boasts 845m users, which, were Facebook a country, would make it the world’s third most populous, behind China and India.”

“Every day 250m photos are uploaded to the site. One out of every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook, according to comScore, a research firm.”

“Facebook accessible to ever more people. (The Boston Consulting Group reckons that around 3 billion people will be online by 2016, up from 1.6 billion in 2010.) The second is the rise of the mobile phone. Already more than 425m people are tapping into Facebook on these devices and in future most of the social network’s growth will come from the mobile web. Together, these trends could propel the number of users beyond 1 billion.”

“People are now spending far more time on Facebook than on rival web services such as Google (see chart 2) and why it has benefited from strong network effects. ”

Another interesting perspective- will a new hot social network take over? Tumblr? Twitter?

“One is that people stop using Facebook, either because they lose interest or because they are put off by its behaviour. As News Corporation discovered to its cost after it splashed out $580m on Myspace in 2005, network effects can also go quickly into reverse. Once large numbers of people started leaving the service, which became more cluttered than a teenager’s bedroom, it proved hard to stem the tide. Last year, News Corp sold the business for just $35m.”

Continue Reading →

An effectively designed website is only one element of an effective web marketing ecosystem. To achieve effective  web presence and drive qualified leads, we developed an easy to remember mnemonic “AEIOU” (attract, engage, influence, optimize, understand).

AEIOU helps to consider the strategies that make up a digital marketing strategy. But to really power the  strategies, companies need marketing automation tools. Platforms like Hubspot (www.hubspot.com), Act-on (www.act-on.com) and Marketo (www.marketo.com) and many others  are very powerful ways to manage multi-stage buyer processes and map content and engagement at each stage of the process – nurturing relationships from awareness to customer.

When budgets are a little smaller or the sales cycle is a little less complex, we often recommend using a component-based approach as a marketing solution. Some of our preferred solution components and web services include:

• WordPress content management system- we often recommend WordPress due to its ability to integrate nicely with other preferred web marketing systems and the ease of use our clients enjoy (www.wordpress.com)
• Unbounce landing page setup – easy to create and test marketing landing pages to drive qualified leads (www.unbounce.com)
• MailChimp – email marketing system – we set up custom email templates for this easy to use email marketing tool and measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns (www.mailchimp.com)
• Revenizer – a marketing dashboard we created (sister company) specifically to help measure the effectiveness of web and social presence and increase revenue from web marketing campaigns (www.revenizer.com)
• CRM -  Salesforce is the leading CRM and is often a great choice, however it is worth looking at many of the more “social CRM” solutions like Batchbook.

In selecting these solutions, we recommend that you find sets of solutions that work well together with strong APIs and integrations. If your needs are not too complex a component based approach can be a very affordable and effective way to deliver marketing automation.

Continue Reading →

Here is another a collection of  article links that we found interesting!

#wealthmanagement

Next-gen advisor breaks the standard RIA mold to grow with her young clientele—many with $100,000 or less of assets>
http://bit.ly/wD1ZfZ

Columbia Management Launches Social Media Program> http://bit.ly/x5k2Cs

FINRA Opens Door for Social Media with New Rules  http://bit.ly/zAqJ5o

Penton’s Registered Rep Launches Unique Social Behavioral Investment Dashboard for Financial Advisors>http://bit.ly/xfW25X

Penton’s Registered Rep Launches Unique Social Behavioral Investment Dashboard for Financial Advisors> http://bit.ly/xfW25X

The Investment Adviser and the Fish Story> http://bit.ly/wEVmYg

Financial Advisor – Efficient Financial Advisor Marketing Tools>http://bit.ly/xv5wtY

#b2B

B2B marketers may find significant benefit with QR codes> http://bit.ly/z1w8T4

Rainmaker Releases Latest Enhancement to B2B Commerce Solution> http://bit.ly/wlkWxx

Social Media Lets B2B Companies More Effectively Engage Customers> http://bit.ly/wjcnNC

Technology Marketing: Is Your B2B Social Media Strategy Sending Mixed Signals> http://bit.ly/yk5Xpr

How to Structure a Kick-Ass Marketing Team for Any Company> http://bit.ly/yvysaY

Where Social Media Marketing Fits In Your 2012 Budget?> http://bit.ly/xj62Ng

Content Curation Tools for B2B Marketing> http://onforb.es/xWLhoZ

#lifesciences

Outlook 2012: Life Sciences> http://bit.ly/wverdG

Applications: Wireless Monitoring Solutions for Life Sciences> http://bit.ly/AuAJlm

#general

Be A Social (Business) Survivor> http://onforb.es/wOe2fY

Using Social Media Marketing to Promote Green Business> http://bit.ly/x5aZq4

Continue Reading →