The Bell curve:

We are all familiar with the Bell curve or normal distribution for product consumption as we learned during our education.

There are many examples and applications for this distribution in all kinds of environments.

For example: the Bell curve can be obtained by charting the customer distribution compared to price.

This should be applicable in content consumption too.

Or not?

The pattern of On-Demand content consumption

Concerning On-Demand content consumption Douglas Warshaw (four-time Emmy Award winning network television producer/writer/director and programmer and entrepreneur) has made a interesting observations:
In On-Demand content consumption the low end and the high end content are being consumed in large quantities, whereas the middle range of content offerings have low consumption.

Low-End content: in large quantities
- Home videos
- Home movies & amateur films “User-Generated content”

Medium content: hardly any interest
- Local news
- Random TV viewing “Sampling”

High-End content: in large quantities
- Magazine shows & Documentaries
- Network Dramas & Comedies and Documentaries and Movies.

Hence the Bell curve is no longer corresponding with current consumer behavior.
He calls it the inverse Bell curve or the Warshaw curve. He proposes to flip the Bell curve for consumer content.

Similarities with Infant Mortality and Burn-in distributions

As the Warshaw curve has the form of a bathtub, it reminds of the curves used for Infant Mortality of products and Burn-in.
The bathtub curve consists of three periods:
- An infant mortality period with a decreasing failure rate
- Followed by a normal life period (“useful life”) with a low, relatively constant failure rate
- Concluding with a wear-out period that exhibits an increasing failure rate.
These curves are called Weibull distributions.
Used in Operation Research for addressing production and operational problems.

If you would tweak the parameters you could produce a curve very similar to the Warshaw curve, as there are enough parameters to play with.

So far for the maths.

Other examples of Warshaw curve

Low-End content:
- Flickr or Stock.XCHNG (high quality!)
- Blogs
- Free amateur adult content
- Product white paper of company

Medium content:
- Sony ImageStation has been closed – business model was: “paying” by receiving emails from Sony
- Newspapers, industry magazines with registrations allowing them to email the readers.
- Adult content portal websites linking to many other websites.
- White paper syndications: registration required

High-End content:
- Getty Images
- Newspapers with subscriptions
- Paid adult content
- Paid white papers and market surveys by research organizations: Forrester, IDC, Gartner, Jupiter, Ovum, Bloor, …

In order to close “Entertainment style”:

“Will Warshaw curve meet B2C?”
“Will Warshaw be applicable in B2B?”
“These questions – and many others – will be answered in the next episode of LEADSExplorer.” (Soap – TV series)

Public Beta

In case of a public Beta program for a B2B web service, anyone can sign-up from the website.
Thus there is:
- No control on who will be using the Beta.
- People need to be aware of your Beta (Press release?)

As any company can visit your website, any company can participate.
Thus you cannot control the market segment. It is likely that smaller companies will sign-up in greater numbers than larger ones (if you even get larger ones).
Thus chances are that the testing audience will not be representative for your future customer base.

As even your competitors can sign-up too, this is an additional drawback. Especially if you have the Beta sign-up process fully automated. Kicking the competition out once they have used it, might be already too late as they have used and investigated your web service.

Beta by invitation

In case of a Beta by invitation, only a selected number of companies are invited.
One can carefully select the number of companies and target the market segment.
If a there is a bias towards certain type of companies, efforts can be made to change this by inviting other companies.

Of course the companies need to be persuaded to take part in the Beta test.
As there is exclusivity in this ‘By Invitation’ only, people will feel special. This could help persuading people to sign-up.

Problem: who to invite?
Using our own LEADSExplorer web service we know the companies who have been visiting our website and are interested in our offering by the pages visited. They are likely to be interested in participating in a Beta.

If you don’t have such a website visitor identification service, it will be hard to select companies from a list (Yellow pages? or bought list). As this is similar to lead generation using emails or cold calling, many companies need to be addressed in order to get enough users.

Relations sharing Beta by invitation

This method consists by gifting the existing Beta users with additional Beta invitations they can send to their relations.
This might work between friends in social website and B2C, but it seems less likely this viral method could work between employees of different companies.
Still it can be experimented and could work.

Back door

As the Beta program needs to get enough participants in order to cover the entire market segment the solution is intended for. If not your feedback will be biased and you might have developed the wrong solution not meeting the demands of your future customers.
Leaving a back door entry by email inquiry should be possible allowing you to choose from several inquiring companies: info (at) LEADSExplorer (dot) com

Press releases as used to be

Formerly specialized agencies used to send out Press Releases to the press bureaus and offices in the world.
This was a selective process as only the press agencies could communicate with the press or press bureaus.
A well defined format of page layout with predefined paragraphs was being used.
Anyway these were costly undertakings to get the company or product in the press.

The Internet PR

Then the Internet enabled the free press releases.
Now anyone could just post a press release on one or many of the press release syndication websites. Your press release could get exposed to the entire world within hours at no cost.
The free press releases has several drawbacks:
- your press release was accompanied by advertising for other companies that could be related or not – or even competition.

The format was less strict as anyone could write-up a press release and no format is imposed.
Although the distribution is over the Internet, getting your PR in print is less likely.

Still the option exists to post the press release using a renowned press release syndication for a certain fee, with the benefit of getting into the printed media too.

The MicroPR

Now recently (May 15,2008) Brian Solis created the MicroPR – the micro press release using Twitter.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging.

You can post a micro press release directly to the community of journalists and bloggers on MicroPR or you can target a specific journalist or editor. The number of journalists and bloggers is limited.
Still this channel opens up the process of press releases even further than the Internet: free and direct.

MicroPR format: requires clever writing

The format makes it a micro press release as you start with only 140 characters for a Twitter message.
Additionally you need to specify the header: @microPR (8 characters) and in case of addressing a specific journalist @reportername (abut 10 characters).
Thus in case you include a journalist, there are only 120 characters including spaces left over.
@microPR …………………………………………………………………….. @reportername
As you need to include your company or product name (or preferably the website), then the message shrinks to less than 100 characters.
@microPR www.LEADSExplorer.com……………………………………….. @reportername
Or you can send a second tweet with solely your url, but then the receiver needs to combine them afterwards.

Due to the limitation of 100 characters, one has to be very brief and clever to write something interesting still having sense, or send multiple messages.

In any case the format is a far cry from the standard Press Releases in the print media.

Trying MicroPR

If you don’t try you will never know.
We tried it out, first apparently a broadcast, as we didn’t read the complete manual.
Next we handpicked a journalist: Gabe Rivera of Techmeme. (Please accept our apologies, we hope you don’t mind we picked you)
And gave it a try.
Now we wonder if the MicroPR will be read or not.

There is a special page on twitter to read these MicroPR messages. Or you can also run active searches or feeds on Summize or TweetScan.
Currently there is not much content.

By looking at the pages, our messages start looking like spam, as we used several tweets to get the message clear. And some tweets seem to be duplicated as there are two originators: Engago and MicroPR?

Impact?

Will it really have an impact?
Will we get references on the Internet?
Will we get press or bloggers interest or not?

The long way: if this gets some press coverage, then people in companies could read about our solution and could become interested.

If we get some press or blog posts, generating additional visitors or even leads, then we will let you know.

You have probably experienced these press releases too in the press or on Venture Beat or alarm:clock euro:
Announcing Beta programs for a yet to be launched web service.
You find it interesting and click on the link to get to the website.
There you find out the Beta has already been closed, even though the press release is just a few hours old.
Then you wonder, if it was ever really open to the public?
Still you can post your name and email address so they can contact you whenever the opportunity occurs for the Beta. This is the style: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”.

Beta purposes

Basically a Beta program is to test the application by the future users. The press release should get ‘probable purchasers’ signing up.

However could it be Beta program press releases are a form of advertising?
For:
- Teasing the market?
- Warming up the market? It takes time for people and companies to adopt or accept a new concept.
- Spreading the word, the brand? The more presence and visibility the better, the more trust created.
- Testing the reaction of the market? In order to adjust the launch or even change the web service?
- Getting additional links from websites for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
- Collecting contacts of possible leads? Lead generation.
- Attracting the attention of VC’s? As cash is running out?
Probably one or more of the above.

Press release or not?

Making noise creates expectations, if too early before launching the initial interest is gone. Moreover competition can have caught up already.
So should Engago Technologies send out a press release on our LEADSExplorer Beta or not?
We have the advantage to be able to evaluate those who register as we know their company name and can investigate before admitting them to the free web service.
One doesn’t want the competition to use the Beta.

Or should we wait with making waves?
We have tested the service already thoroughly.

Museum of Betas

In any case we have already submitted LEADSExplorer to “The Museum of Modern Betas”, as we liked the idea and it provided an additional link on the Internet.
We don’t want to stick to long in this Museum (MoMB) as a museum relates to the past.
Just need to get beyond the Beta phase and launch into the future.

Your experience with Beta press release?

What was your experience with the Beta press release for your service?
Or are you still in the Museum of Modern Betas?

We have quite a large number of visitors using their web email address for:
- Complete a web form on the website
- Sending us an email.
So they use email addresses at gmail.com , yahoo.com, aol.com, msn.com and hotmail.com
Their goal is to stay incognito or unknown.

As these people take the effort to fill out the form or send us an inquiry email for pricing information, one would expect they would have read the website. So they should know?

Why incognito?

As LEADSExplorer reveals the company name, there is no benefit in using a web mail address.
Thus what is the driver behind their willingness to stay incognito:
- Is this pure ignorance of what we are offering? Did they actually reed the website?
- Is this just their normal behavior? It is their habit.
- Is this to test the capabilities of LEADSExplorer?

Website visitor identification

Whatever their behavior or goal, LEADSExplorer allows you to know who they are:
- Their name from the web mail
- The company name
- The geographic location
- The language spoken
- The Internet origin: website link or search terms used
This information can be used in the reply email for adjusting the content.
Additionally by looking at the source code of the web page, one can even detect what brand of competition or CRM they are using, allowing to inform about their satisfaction with the current solution.

LEADSExplorer demystifies the incognito web mail visitor.

If you use the well known channels of marketing the amount of money and effort invested will generate the normal and expected return of inquiries and leads.
- The number of pages advertised will give a typical amount of inquiries.
- The number of online advertising will bring a typical amount of clicks.
- The a trade show will generate a typical number of leads.
- The number of webinars will get a number of conversations going.

Decreasing increment

Moreover the more you spend and invest on these trusted standard marketing channels, the less incremental number of leads they will bring. It is an asymptote:

After a certain point, the more you spend on advertising in print or online, the more trade shows you present your company on or the more webinars you organize, the lesser these will generate for each event or campaign.
Fewer inquiries and less leads per unit invested.

It is not a linear process: once you have harvested those who are open to your message or advertising as you address their problems, finding and digging out the next layer is more difficult.

Out of the box for budget reasons

There for anything that breaks out of this asymptote system and could generate more than average interest for the same amount of money or effort is to be favored.
You will receive more inquiries or leads then your budget would allow.
Thus think out of the box.
Find different channels or different approaches to distribute your message or brand.
Experiment and adventure your marketing message into new methods or channels.

Find a method that allows your message, company name or brand name to get replicated and spread beyond the normal audience, spreading virally.
The multiplication of the message, spreading beyond the initial efforts or investments.

Non commercial viral vs B2C viral vs B2B viral

Content has spread virally mainly in for non commercial reasons.
In some cases commercial B2C messages or content have been able to spread in a viral manner.
In B2B there haven’t been many examples of messages spreading beyond their normal borders, but there are some.

B2B is different from B2C for all types of marketing, including the viral campaigns.
The B2B campaign is intended for a limited number of people, whereas B2C viral campaigns are for the masses or large segments of the population.

The problem with B2B: the number of interested parties is limited and those addressed are enclosed in silos. Silos that are not communicating to other silos: an employee from one company has fewer relations with employees from other companies, than he has friends on the Internet. Thus the number on messages being forwarded is more restricted.

What can spread increasingly in B2B?

o Positive information
   – White paper (pdf): it should be good
   – eBook
   – Winning a contest, award with worldwide renown.
   – Press release concerning acquired important customers
   – Questionnaire and the results of this questionnaire
   – Statistical data on markets or businesses
o Create content:
   – Blog with teasing content: the blog has to be popular already
   - Video: getting remarked amongst all the other offerings will be tough
o Offer a free service for companies related to your main product
o Philanthropy
   - Donate
   – Create a foundation for a good cause.
o Negative news: bad news gets more press than good news and travels fast
o Distribute your assets for free:
   – Throw away money:
      . Launch party with invitees different from your market, but getting press coverage
      . A geek dinner for a B2B solution and hope they blog about it
      . Spend money in order to be remarked, noticed.
   – Give away shares of your company for free .
   – Offer your products, solution or services for free (typical web 2.0 / enterprise 2.0).

To boldly go where no man has gone before

Viral marketing is rare, successful viral marketing in B2B is even rarer, but it can be created and can happen.
Just think out of the box.

Marketing space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds of marketing and lead generation
To seek out new leads and new customers
To boldly go where no man has gone before
(for those who don’t know: Star Trek)

Findability

Getting found on the Internet is utmost important to us, just like Aarron Walter writes: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry.

“Findability is a multifaceted subject”: that makes it so complicated.
Findability is not solely SEO, but findability is the result of many activities and actions in and around your website.

Search engines: Feed every day

Feed search engines every day with content, as they don’t like to be on a diet.
Content related to your website or solution(s).

Food for thought becomes food for being found.

Number of visitors: up

Before we started to blog, we didn’t make any changes to our website during 4 to 5 weeks which resulted in slowly decreasing number of visitors.
Previously the number of visits was up due to the frequent updates we made for correcting the German and French pages of the website.
Lacking the updates, there was a minor decrease in visitors, up to 10%, maybe 15%.

As blogging makes almost daily changes to the website, it seems Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and other search engines like the new content activity: again they have started crawling the blog and the website more often.

It is not the number of readers of our blog, which is still very low, but the number of visitors on the website that has increased: about 25 to 30% more visitors per day.

Search Engine Results Page up (SERP)

The increase of visitors is probably due to the general findability in searches. LEADSExplorer is being found more often.

Previously, if we searched on “LEADSExplorer” around 3,000 references where returned.
Whereas now the search gives between 4,500 and 5,900 references. That’s an increase of over 30%.
Of course it is not only the changes on the website, but also the web pages of several blog aggregator websites that increase the number of references.

When people search on certain words, our website has obtained a higher SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which means the links to our website pages come up earlier in the search results ranking.
More visitors are more potential leads.

Please note:
Our blog is on the same domain (www.leadsexplorer.com), just for the purpose of increasing the SERP.
If your blog is hosted on another domain, blogging will not have the same effect.

Blogging benefits SERP and SEO

Thus we keep on blogging for SERP and SEO for feeding the search engines with content.

Maybe one day we will even get many frequent readers as the content is not (solely) intended for search engines.

In the mean time we are already happy with the higher number of website visitors, which we hope converting into more leads. Still visitors are not yet leads.

Do you have been involved with people who portray themselves as utmost important potential customers having big potential sales?
They know the opportunity of a lifetime in your business or related to your business.

The lead

The first contact is their initiative:
They approach you:
- On a trade show with a complex story or a very different business case.
   They propose the very important conference call with the involved parties. 
   Organizing will be difficult as they travel so much.
- By email or telephone with the message to call back immediately on their mobile phone
   They need to discuss important matters with you.
   You need to call them on their mobile as they are in very international business.

You have to take action or call them immediately, as it is very important and you shouldn’t miss this case.
A mega lead for free? There is no such thing as a free meal.

No call immediately versus the urgency of the lead

As their story or their opportunity is vague, not in your geography or sales territory (far away), and you don’t know them you don’t call them immediately. You need to serve other leads and customers waiting: quotations, meetings, …

As you don’t call them instantly back, they will:
- Send you another email urging to call them on their mobile.
- Call your P.A. (personal assistant) telling they expect you to call back immediately on their mobile.
   Your P.A. will call you urgently as the man on the telephone seemed to be important.
- Leave a message on your voice mailbox telling they have something important to discuss.
   It’s your last chance – call them back on their mobile instantly.

Apparently you should even thank them; they have selected you and called you! Giving you the change to participate in this major opportunity.

Then you wonder what’s up? So you eventually you call them.

The call to impress

Once you get into a conversation with them, they will tell you a rather complicated or confusing story partly related to your business offering. They are very enthusiastic and see many more opportunities to come.

Their main goal seems to be to impress you with their importance or their important relationships and the high market potential and opportunity they have acquired.

The urgency pressure and specific requirements

As they have declared themselves as very important, they start demanding all kinds of changes to your solution, that you need to do as else you will miss the enormous opportunity they know about and where they have access to.
However an immediate action or decision is not the case.
The pricing has to be discussed. Due to the importance of the project the pricing has to be very competitive (they don’t say low or cheap).
They close the conversation as they need to be ready for the next important meeting elsewhere.

Follow-up calls, conference calls and meetings

After several follow-up calls and maybe even a meeting (preferably in the national airport as they have other important business to arrange in many countries), nothing happens yet.
You need to work on the competitive pricing including all the required changes.
Thus you involve product management, who involves R&D or development. Then setting up meetings and conference calls as everybody needs to understand the concept, market and potential.

Every time the big potential customer will have a different reason, why the deal is not yet happening. Still you need to come up with competitive pricing for such a large deal.

Quotation

Some time later, you send them an email with your best offering and competitive pricing, maybe not completely matching their requirements, but fair enough.

Then silence from the potential customer sets in. 

Epilogue

Later you find out they:
- Have no business
- They have gone out of business by lacking customers or funding
- Are still trying to set up the business
- Have chosen a complete different low cost (or Open Source) solution, not matching their requirements at all.

After word

Did you ever understand these people?
Why was it so urgent?
- Their main goal was to get the lowest price for a one off solution.
- Running out of money and putting you as the vendor under pressure.
- They had this really great idea and tried to find a partner to fund and realize it.
- They were just dreamers.

Maybe we should feel sorry for them.
Maybe this is part of normal business and sales, where people try different schemes.
Still they have required time and people for meetings and conference calls.

Never the less: some of the most disruptive and innovative products where developed and launched in this way as these entrepreneurs had not enough money, no real business yet, no market.

Did you encounter similar people and similar leads?
What were your experiences with those life time opportunity leads?

According to Seth Godin all you need is to increase your value in order to avoid lowering prices.
Give the customer more value for money.

That is at least to say: Simplistic!

Commodity

In a commodity market where companies are competing on price with very similar products, adding value is not possible. A bolt is a bolt, a screw is a screw.
You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to: sell the value (by Mine Your Own Business).

Added value for non commodity

Added value is not something a product manager will produce overnight as by magic.

Added value requires:
- Careful planning: when
- Market research: what does the market see or experience as additional value
- Vision: what features will not hinder in future
- Calculation: cost calculations
- Revenue: estimated added revenue calculations

Investments required

In any case adding value to your existing product needs:
- Planning in advance
- Research and development
- Investment in production methods
- Marketing expense in order to let the market know the new feature(s)
- Sales training to explain the new features.

These additional investments have to be made in order to be able to offer the additional value.
Additional investments require financing which have a cost based upon the interest rate (internal or external).

Those investments and the cost of financing need to be depreciated over the number of products sold, increasing the cost price of the product.

ROI versus lowering prices

The exercise needs to prove if the added value is feasible and has a positive ROI (Return On Investment).
This ROI has to be compared with the case of just lowering pricing.

It can turn out just lowering the price is much more efficient and gives a higher return.

Thus increase your value in order to avoid lowering prices is not evident.
Price pressure is difficult to handle.

Sell the intangible

In order to handle the price pressure the salesman can try to convince the potential customer by selling the intangible benefits:
- Trust in company or product
- Brand name
- References
- The sales talent of the salesman
- The relationship of the salesman with the customer

Of course in the long run product, solution or service innovation is required.

Shit can happen every day – and you are very aware of it:
Immediately.

Shift happens over time – and you hardly notice:
Mostly some (long) time afterwards.

Shit has a short term impact.
Bothers people enormously and is temporarily utmost important. Almost as if it was life threatening.
Shit is related to daily operations. Mostly the effect and actions are immediately.

Shift has a long lasting impact.
Hardly interests anybody, and is seen as not important immediately.
Shift is related to vision and future. It can come slowly or can be disruptive.
The effect and actions are on the longer term.

Shit examples:
- Delays in shipments
- Wrong deliveries
- Missed meetings
- Signing of sales contracts delayed to next quarter
- Call off orders being moved to next quarter
- Angry customers
- Defective products
- Traffic jams

Shift examples:
- From trade shows to the Internet.
- From meetings to webinars.
- From on site software to Saas / Web services.
- From fixed line communications to mobile phone.
- From letters to customers to emails to customers.
- From receptionists to voice mail boxes.
- From having a personal assistant to having a PDA or smart phone.
- From leading product manufacturer to old products.
- From innovative technology company to lagging behind company.
- From CRT to flat screen television.
- From telex to text messages (sms).
- From fax to Instant Messengers
- From paper to e-paper / e-ink.
- From large stable multi national corporations to small 1 year old companies.
- Form blue collar workers to white collar employees.
- From Western Europe and US to China and India.

About the shit:
It’s everywhere every day – you notice it yourself.

About the shift:

Immediate pain versus long term view

The immediate pain:
Shit impacts management of a company and the quarterly results (less bonus for management).
The immediate relief:
In most cases: sales has to solve it by getting more sales the next quarter.

The awareness:
Shift is sometimes noticed and perceived by sales or line management, whereas corporate management should react upon these changes.
The non-reaction: missing the long term view.
However in most cases they neglect to do so, as “never change a winning team” rules.
reacting upon a shift requires a long term view.

People worry the most about short term problems, whereas we should worry about the longer view and impact and profound changes of shift.

Shift ready

Is your company ready for the next shift?
The shift where your competition could or will take advantage of?

Did you already notice a shift as this is the most difficult part?
The shift in your industry, but also the shift in the tools you use or your company uses to work.

Take a look in LEADSExplorer to see the shift of the lead generation from your website using pull marketing instead of push marketing.
To learn how sales in B2B get information from the company website and where the crm is a source of information.