Marketing Awards for Plex and Markit Strategies

Last night, the International Assocation of Business Communicators (IABC) Detroit chapter held their annual Renaissance Awards, and recognized several programs that were executed this last year by Plex Systems' marketing team in conjunction with Markit Strategies and PR, our marketing agency. The awards bestowed upon Plex and Markit Strategies were:

• Two Awards of Excellence (their top award) for our Media Relations (PR) program and our Direct Email Marketing program.
• An Award of Merit for PowerPlex 2008 (our annual customer conference) in the events category.

Congratulations to everyone on the marketing team, both internally and externally, and thanks to everyone who has supported these programs.

Does SaaS ERP Exist?

A few months back, I came across a question on an IT Toolbox message board asking "Does SaaS ERP really exist?" The original poster said that the only company anyone had told him about was Netsuite. Of course, I took the opportunity to respond, and I've copied my notes here (with minor edits to update info). The entire thread is an interesting read for anyone in the software as a service industry, as it indicates a lot of confusion about what SaaS is, and some common misperceptions about the limitations and benefits of the SaaS model.

My response to the original poster was:

Alan, I'll respond to question #3 - Why are there so few SaaS ERP vendors? First, let me give you my caveats: I'm VP Marketing at a SaaS ERP vendor, Plexus Systems (thanks Molly for mentioning us!) We're not appropriate for your situation, so I feel like I can make a few points without coming across as "salesy."

I speak at conferences about SaaS on a regular basis, and when I describe my company as a provider of ERP systems for manufacturing, you can almost hear the groans. In the high tech community, ERP is widely considered to be a mature (i.e., dull) market with very slow growth, and the industry is dominated by a few very large players. At the same time, writing a new full-blown ERP application is a massive undertaking. Given that confluence of circumstances, why would any hot young company (the majority of SaaS companies are startups or first-stage growth companies) want to attack that market? That leaves you at the mercy of the large providers who are already in the market (e.g., SAP and Oracle) who will slowly bring SaaS solutions to market, trying not to cannibalize their existing sales, and a small group of upstarts (like my company) who have already made the transition and are focused on one specific market (for us, discrete manufacturing).

Because most SaaS companies are new(ish), most of the solutions they are providing are focused on individual departments (e.g., sales) or functions (e.g., transaction processing). They simply haven't been around long enough to offer an enterprise-class solution that spans multiple departments, as an ERP system does. So, my list of SaaS ERP solutions would include: 1) SAP's Business ByDesign (a huge boost to the market, when they finally launch it) 2) My own company, Plexus Systems 3) Glovia (although their SaaS solution seems to have vanished recently) 4) Workday (though this is really human capital management for now, they will be a more full-blown ERP solution eventually) 5) NetSuite (when they started, they weren't really an ERP system - they competed with Quickbooks more than anything else. However, they've been adding functionality and trying to go up-market with these new functions, and they're a smart company, so I expect them to succeed) And, of course, there are dozens of very small companies that offer very specialized solutions for individual markets.

I hope this is helpful.

The Online Marketing Cycle and Marketing Automation Software, conclusion

In a couple of posts last week, I described our recent success in putting into place a lead generation program using a marketing automation system from Marketo. It's been very successful, and each week we are turning over a record number of qualified leads to our sales organization. The first two posts dealt with how this whole thing worked. However, there were some bumps along the road, and I'm going to talk about those bumps today.

The first problem we had is that we had no experience in a few key areas: best practices around landing pages, and "lead scoring," the system whereby points are assigned based on activities people take on your website, downloading papers from direct marketing, etc. But the more pressing issue was one of content: if we were doing to take our direct marketing program to a higher level, we needed content (white papers, case studies, etc.) with which to entice our email recipients.

As soon as we deployed Marketo, replacing all of our web forms and landing pages, we discovered an annoying problem: junk responses (AKA spam). For those of you not familiar with this issue, it turns out that hackers have created a series of bots that can search websites for forms, and then fill in those forms with spam. You think it's annoying to get Viagra ads in your inbox? Imagine how annoying it is to get it inside of a marketing automation system. (Just to be clear: these bots are not actually filling in this forms, but rather they capture information about the program that reads the forms, and they send spam data directly to that program in a format that gets through).

There is a simple, though inelegant, solution to form-spam: a captcha. Captchas are those images of distorted letters that you must read and fill in in order to confirm that you are a live person rather than a bot. Annoying, yes, but entirely useful. You would think that any software that is routinely used to build web forms would have this capability built-in, but it's absent from Marketo - an absence that the companys says it will address. In the meantime, we've been working on deploying our own captchas on the Marketo forms, which requires custom programming, which takes time. In the meantime, we're stuck with lots of junk being entered into our system every day.

The long-term issues focused on our lack of experience in deploying landing pages conforming to best practices, maximizing our return on investment for our ads. We could have hired a consultant to help us, but in fact it's difficult to find consultants with expertise in these areas - especially in the midwest. Additionally, I'm a firm believer in letting my people stretch themselves, and I was interested in learning more about this anyway. So our solution? Read a bunch of articles, try something, watch the results, and improve it. That's what we've been doing - we post two landing pages for each ad, with one variation between each pair (e.g., different offers, different graphics, one short page and one long page, etc.), rotate them equally, and we watch the results. When there's a clear performance advantage to one, we update all of our landing pages with that new change, and then we test something else. To that end, we've been doing fairly well with our conversion rates.

The other lack of experience was in lead scoring. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the real value of lead scoring builds up over time, and so I wasn't expecting much out of this in the first few months. Our target customers take their time in deciding to launch a new project, and they do lots of investigation before they're really ready to talk to us - in some cases, they can spend a year or two thinking about it before they're ready to talk to us seriously. (Really, no joke - our record is 4 years between the time someone first made contact, and when they were ready to launch a project to evaluate and deploy a new ERP system.)

As I wrote in my earlier post, we decide to make lead qualification a manual process for the time being, rather than relying on lead scoring. We'll continue to learn more about lead scoring as we go along, and hopefully the scores of our visitors will start building up over time in a meaningful way.

In the meantime, I am exploring additional tools that may be useful. My wish list is as follows:

1) Data append service, so when someone fills out the minimal information that we request on the website, the other fields that we want (e.g., industry, revenue, etc.) gets automatically added in.
2) Web site visitor tracking. While we use an analytics package, there are more advanced packages like the one from NetFactor called VisitorTrack that captures data about browsers on your website and appends info from several sources, so you see a record of the companies (but not the individuals) that browse your site.

Ideally, this would all be integrated into a single package with an automation tool like Marketo. That would be the killer web marketing solution, in my opinion.