Author: leila

7 Ways To Rock a Startup Accelerator Mentor Day

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter Follow @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in August 31, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

I spent the day yesterday at FounderFuel for their Mentor Day. If you aren’t familiar with FounderFuel they are a very successful startup accelerator based in Montreal. And what a day it was – 8 startups pitched and then did roundtable breakout sessions with over 50 mentors including VC’s, angel investors, entrepreneurs and senior executives. Here’s my mentor’s perspective on how a startup can really get the most out of a day like that:

1/ Pick your Target Mentors Ahead of Time: 50 mentors is a lot and they represented a wide cross section of folks that have deep experience in different consumer and business markets, and have a range of skills from technical expertise to sales, marketing, finance, and legal experience. Selecting a subset of the mentors with experience relevant to your business will help you target your discussions.A handful of the teams that needed marketing help reached out to me by email before the day and that helped to make sure that we connected at the session which I thought was pretty smart.

2/ Ask for Feedback on your Pitch: The mentors are both experienced pitch artists, and listen to pitches a lot. What better folks to give feedback on what worked and what didn’t work with the pitch you just gave? In this case the companies are all still in the early stages of the accelerator program so it’s a great time to get feedback that will improve the ultimate pitch you give on demo day. The feedback will also give you a feel for the differences in what an Angel investor might be looking for over what the more traditional VC’s are looking for in a pitch. “Tell me one thing that would have made my pitch better” or “What was missing from my pitch?” would both be great ways to start that discussion.

3/ Ask for Specific Help: The mentors are ready and willing to help but they can’t guess what you need. Coming with a set of specific requests helps shape the discussion in a way that is most helpful to you. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific introductions – even if the folks in the room don’t have the answers you need, chances are they know someone who does.

4/ Listen, Ask Questions (and Filter later): – The mentors yesterday came from really different backgrounds and had worked in a broad range of industries (consumer, gaming, retail, enterprise, financial services). Sure we’re all smart folks but you wouldn’t believe how different our opinons were about questions the startups were asking. For example, at my session with Openera – a tool for automatically organizing files and attachments – we got into a discussion about selling to consumers versus enterprises as a starting point. I ALWAYS tilt toward enterprises when people ask me that because I know/love enterprise sales. The mentor beside me, Yona Shtern, the CEO from Beyond the Rack on the other hand thought selling B2C (or B2C2B) was just fine. Only Openera can decide who’s got smarter advice for their business (yeah OK, in this case it’s probably the smarty-pants Beyond the Rack guy but hey you get what I’m trying to say here). Another example – in the discussion with InfoActive (a very cool tool that lets you easily create beautiful interactive data visualizations), I immediately saw the applicability to creating interactive marketing materials. I’m a marketer, that’s the obvious use case for someone like me. The mentor beside me (James Duncan, CTO at Inktank) on the other hand saw the value in selling to IT departments that needed a way to easily create good looking dashboards to help IT communicate to the business side of the house. That’s a great use case that a marketing person like me would be unlikely to immediately think of. Both ideas might be worth investigating but only InfoActive can really decide that. Avoiding “mentor whiplash”, as the FounderFuel gang refers to it, is a critical skill for startups in accelerators that have deep rosters of active mentors. Remember too that time is limited so you don’t want to waste it having a long debate with a single mentor over a specific point. Listen, probe a bit if you need to, and then move on. You can always schedule follow-on time with a specific mentor to explore an idea later.

5/ Take Notes: You put a couple of CEO’s a VC, a senior exec and a CTO at a table together and guess what happens? We talk. A lot. Not only that but the conversation moves very quickly from one point of view to the next. Some teams were recording the sessions but the room was loud (did I mention we talk a lot?) and figuring out who said what later might be a challenge by voice alone. Having someone taking notes is a good idea to make sure that you’re capturing ideas as they are flowing.

6/ Work the Edge Time: By far the best way to get 1 on 1 time with a mentor yesterday was to do it over the break or over lunch. That also gives the mentor a chance to ask questions they might not get a chance to in a round table session.

7/ Don’t Forget Everyone’s a Potential Investor : The VC’s are easy to spot (and there were a lot of them there) but most of the mentors I talked to are also doing a bit of angel investing as well. For companies at this stage anyone that’s willing to invest time with your company might also be likely to invest cash as well.

So there’s my advice. I’m sure the other mentors all have different opinions – yep, we’re funny that way.

August 31, 2012

Startup Marketing: Does the Competition Matter?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in April 12, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

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I have heard people make the argument that startups shouldn’t think about their competitors. I agree that many spend too much time worrying about how their feature set stacks up against another offering’s feature set. On the other hand, prospects are evaluating your solution against alternatives (which may not be products) and communicating how you are better than those alternatives is a key part of great startup marketing. Simply put – you should care about competitive alternatives if your prospects do.

Startups are not Big Companies

I very rarely see useful competitive analysis done by startup marketers, mainly because they are trying to do it like big companies do it. The big companies I’ve worked for have had departments dedicated to creating large detailed check mark matrices that showed how our feature set compared to competitive offerings. These matrices almost never included any feedback from customers. Needless to say, the products and their markets were very mature.

This approach completely falls apart within the context of a startup. Your competitors, from a customer point of view are almost never so easily defined. For startups, your offering is often competing with “do nothing”, “hire someone to do it”, use spreadsheets/documents/paper, or some other solution that might be completely unsuited to the task but is free/easy/what has always been used. Comparing features of one of these alternatives to your startup’s offering to makes absolutely no sense in this context.

A More Customer-Centric Approach

In the context of a startup the only competitive analysis that makes sense is the one that is happening in side the heads of your prospects. The more you understand about that, the more you can use that knowledge to improve your marketing.

Instead of the traditional competitive comparison matrix, a more useful competitive alternatives snapshot for a startup would look at what customers perceive to be the major benefits of the alternative, what risks they see that might stop them from choosing your solution and how you might address these issues in your messaging.

An Example

Here’s an example for CRMster, a fictional solution aimed at mid-sized consulting businesses to help them manage their customer information. The points here are just to give you some ideas about how this might look:

Competitive Alternative	Benefit customers perceive	Risk in selecting your offering	Value of your offering	Proof points
Do nothing – we don’t use a CRM tool and that’s fine by us	Free Zero effort required	Budget spent on this will mean less money for other thingsConsultants will have to learn the tool and record data they don’t today	More accurately predict future workloads so you can budget/staff accordingly and increase your profitability.Gives consultants access to more complete customer information making it easier to do their jobs.	3^rdparty data: Research shows companies using CRM are X% more profitable.Customer data: CRMster customers have x% average increase in revenue/profitabilityEnd user quote “CRMster makes collaborating easy. I want to marry it! ”Customer case studies
Manage customer data in spreadsheets	FreeEveryone knows how to use a spreadsheet	Budget spent on this will mean less money for other thingsConsultants will have to learn the tool	Eliminate the need to consolidate spreadsheets – a process that is time consuming and introduces errorsEasier, more effective team collaboration means projects are delivered on time, on budget.	Customer quote: “Consolidating spreadheets was a pain and our data stank. CRMster lets us accurately forecast our business.”Customer quote: “CRMster got our teams working together better so we could deliver projects on budget”End user quote: “So fun to use I gave up playing Angry Birds at work!”Analyst opinion: “Folks using spreadsheets are big losers”
Use CRMFree, a free CRM tool	Free	Budget spent on this will mean less money for other things	Expert customer supportProvides features for consulting companies that generic CRM tools don’t have.	Analyst data: X% of CRM deployments fail because end-users don’t get good support.Customer quote: “Their support is so great we send them chocolates on valentine’s day”Press quote: “If you are a consulting company you are an idiot if you buy anything else”Customer logos, case studies
Use BigWig CRM, a CRM tool for mid-sized businesses of any type	A safe bet: an established brand	CRMster might go out of businessThe software might be unproven, buggy crap	CRMster is way cheaper.Provides features for consulting companies that generic CRM tools don’t have.	Pricing and guarantees.Screen shots, product demosTeam bios – emphasizing successes and background in this market.Investor profiles, investment announcementsCustomer logos, case studies

For this example, only the last couple of rows get into any discussion of product features and even there those aren’t the only considerations. The other thing to notice is that the feature discussion can happen as part of a higher-level theme (we’re better because we are cheaper, more targeted to this market, or a more elegant solution) rather than a checklist of niggley esoteric features like you would for mature products in a mature market. If you are going head to head with an established player in the market you’re doing it because you have something radically different.

The Output: Better Messaging

The next step is to look at the themes and develop key messages that highlight your differentiated value while addressing the potential big concerns. I’ve written about messaginghere and here and I’ll talk more about how you would take the next step and construct messaging upcoming post.

April 13, 2012

Pre-Launch Marketing for Stealthy Startups
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

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Some products and services don’t have a pre-launch phase. For companies where building a minimum viable product isn’t a months-long effort, it makes sense to just launch a beta and then start talking about it. For other companies however, the product might take a bit longer to develop and talking about it before it’s been released in some form could be pointless (because you don’t have a call to action yet), risky (competitors position against you or customers get confused because there aren’t enough details) or both.

One of the techniques that I’ve used in the past is to engage with the market by talking about the business problem that your product or service is going to solve, without getting into exactly how you plan on solving it. At IBM we sometimes referred to this as “market preparation”.

For larger companies this often entails spending a lot of time (and money) with industry analysts and industry leaders sharing your company’s unique point of view on the market and why it is currently being under-served. If you do this properly you’ll come to a point where your point of view starts to align well with that of the influential folks you’ve been working with. By the time you launch, these folks will be standing behind you saying that your view of the market is one customers should consider.

Pre-launch startups generally don’t have the time, clout or cash to change the way Gartner Group thinks about a market but that shouldn’t stop you from taking your message out directly to the market you care about. There’s never been a better time for startups to get the message out. Here are some considerations:
1. Create a clear message about your market point of view – you will need to create a set of messages that clearly illustrate what the unmet need is the in market and why that need has not been met by existing players. You can go so far as to talk about the characteristics of the needed solution (without getting into the gorey details of exactly how you plan to solve it).
2. Develop case studies that illustrate the pain you will be solving – Gather a set of real examples of customers you have worked with that have the problem and clearly illustrate the need for a new type of solution on the market.
3. Spread the word – Launch a blog, write guest posts for other blogs, comment on relevant blog posts, write articles, write an e-book, speak at conferences and events, open a Twitter account and start sharing information that illustrates your point of view. There’s no end of ways to get your message out there. Do your homework and find out where your market hangs out. What forums do they participate in? What blogs and newsletters do they read? Get your message in front of them in the places where they already are.
4. Engage and gather feedback – Starting a dialog with your potential customers about how you see the market gives you a chance to test your messages and see what resonates and what doesn’t. You’ve made a set of assumptions (backed up by customer research hopefully), the more folks in the market you can talk to the more you can fine-tune your market story.
5. Capture where you can – If it makes sense you can start capturing a list of potential beta customers or a mailing list that you can use when you launch.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.
June 29, 2011
Customer Retention: 7 Ideas for Marketers

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in June 9, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

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As marketers we are often so focused on new customer acquisition that we sometime forget to pay attention to the customers that we already have. That would be a massive mistake.

It costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. You are 4 times more likely to close business with an existing customer than you are with a new prospect.

I recently brainstormed with a CEO about programs for their current customers both to improve customer retention as well as to drive new business – here are some of the ideas we came up with:

1/ Give your Newsletter a Kick in the Pants – We all get too much email. Your newsletter is going to have to kick ass just to get folks to open it, let alone take action. What could you give customers that would be so interesting, awesome or remarkable that they’ll say, “Yippie, the newsletter arrived today!” What works for you will depend on your market but I’ve seen good results with sample code, a customer spotlight feature, sharing industry data your customers don’t have access to, interviews with industry experts and video snippets of product managers or support folks sharing their favorite tips and tricks. I’m sure you could come up with a hundred other ideas. If your newsletter doesn’t feel like hard work to create, you could probably do better.

2/ Campaign to your Lost Customers – You are twice as likely to close business with a lost customer than you are with a new prospect. With close rates like that, you should be treating these folks like hot leads. Doing win-loss interviews can help you identify patterns around what went wrong in the first place and get clues as to what to offer them to come back.

3/ Campaign to your Inactive Accounts – These folks are like a loveless marriage – they haven’t divorced you yet but the thrill is gone. Maybe they stopped paying for maintenance during the downturn because of cost-cutting, or needed a feature you didn’t have (or they didn’t know you had), maybe there weren’t enough people signed up at the time to make the service interesting or maybe they were never really “activated” customers in the first place. Similar to a win-loss analysis you’ll want to get on the phone with a bunch of these folks to figure out what the patterns are and how you might get them to, ah, renew their vows with you.

4/ Get Marketing and Customer Service Talking to Each Other – Only 10% of your unhappy customers will tell you. The others tell their friends. Your communications to your customer base can help keep customers informed and that’s a good reason to get marketing and customer service talking to each other. Marketing can help communicate workarounds for common problems or information about expected fix dates for known issues. And don’t forget to make it easy for people to complain via any of your communications channels (including the marketing ones). The sooner you know, the sooner you can do something about it.

5/ Expand Inside Accounts – Think about ways to expand your reach inside larger accounts if you sell B2B. I once convinced a big retailer that had done a small deal with us to let us do a free coffee and donuts event in their cafeteria that turned into 2 six-figure deals. Don’t be shy about asking your sponsor inside a large account about how you might start a conversation with other groups.

6/ Help Customers Promote Themselves – Smaller companies are looking for ways to promote their products and services and drive links back to their own sites. I once had a Fortune 500 CIO agree to do a video testimonial with me mainly because he was a new CIO and wanted to raise his own personal profile for his next job. I always wonder why companies don’t give more awardsto their customers and partners. Everyone loves to get an award no matter who’s giving it out and when they brag about winning the “Excellence in Accounting Software Deployment” award, they’ll likely mention your name too.

7/ Show Them the Love (at least 20% of them anyway) – A few months ago I signed up for a pre-launch list for a new service. I was asked to Tweet about it as part of the sign-up, which I did. After the launch I got a form email thanking me for being a top driver of referrals (plus a t-shirt if I sent them my address). A personal email would have made a MUCH bigger impact on me, and how much time would it have taken? I bet I could write 100 of them in a day. I don’t want a t-shirt (side note–if your customers include women, you might want to re-think the whole t-shirt thing), I want to be thanked like a person and not some a faceless “top referrer.” Your business makes 80% of it’s revenue from 20% of your customers. Quit being so lazy – pick up the phone and pucker up.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in June 9, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

June 9, 2011
7 Startup Customer Discovery Questions
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in April 26, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

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Folks at startups have different levels of experience when it comes to working with customers. At the early stages when you are identifying the problem to solve, the key features of the solution and the customer segments that are the right fit for the solution, you’re spending a lot of time with customers trying to tease out as much information as you can. Last week I was asked by a new founder what types of questions he should be asking in these meetings. Here are a few suggestions:
1. What does your typical day look like? – This one is especially useful at the earliest stages when you are still trying to get a deep understanding of the space, the customers and what the key pain points are for those customers.
2. If you could change anything at all, what would it be? – This is a good one to get at the most pressing problem that a person is experiencing with a particular task or process.
3. What is the biggest pain you have today? – This will have to be framed within the context of the broader space you are looking at of course. The key with this question is to probe around the characteristics of the pain. Why is it painful? What is the measure of that pain (time, effort, etc.)?
4. How are you solving this problem today? – Again, try to ask a lot of open-ended questions around this one too. When was the solution implemented? Why was it done like that? Who made the decision?
5. What is this problem costing you? (lost revenue, lost customers, increased service costs, etc.)? – This is your first indication of how the customer might measure ROI no a solution in this space.
6. Who would you expect to solve this problem? – I like this one because it tells me a bit about how a customer would define the solution in terms of market space and also starts telling me something about channels. For example, in a recent set of interviews I did the customers said they would expect their phone carrier to deliver the solution to the problem (vs. getting it directly from a software provider) or they would expect to get it from a local VAR. In another set of interviews I did for a different product the answers were IBM, Oracle and Microsoft – with clearly a different set of expectations around that for service, price, etc.
7. Who else has this problem? – This might be different groups in an enterprise or different groups of consumers. It’s an interesting question to ask to see what else the customer is seeing in the space.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in April 26, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.
June 6, 2011
A Startup Marketing Framework (Version 2)

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 4, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

Back when I was running my consulting business I published a marketing framework that I used as a tool to explain to startups the types of things that I could help them with. I thought it would be useful for startup marketing folks as a guide and I think it has been – it continues to be one of the most popular posts on this site.

Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of smart feedback on the framework and I’m also back to working inside a company again so I thought it would be interesting to revisit the framework.

Assumptions

As I explained earlier, this framework doesn’t intend to cover Product Management (thePragmatic Marketing Framework does a good job of that) but rather the intention was to look at it from a purely marketing point of view. This Framework makes the assumption that you have a product in market, you feel fairly confident that you have a good fit between your market and your offering and you are ready to invest in lead generation. If you aren’t there yet, there is a lot here that you won’t need to (and more importantly, shouldn’t) worry about yet. Lastly, my background is more Business to Business marketing so like everything else on this site, this has a B2B slant to it. That said, I think most of it is very applicable to a B2C startup.

Market Knowledge

Segments – Based on your interaction with early customers, these are the segments that have the most affinity for your offering and are the target of your marketing efforts. These need to be well defined and very specific. I’ve had folks ask me where buyer/influencer personas fit and I include those here as part of what you need to understand about your segments.

Market Needs – From your experience with early customers you will be able to articulate the unmet needs in the market related to your segments (and beyond).

Key Points of Value – These are the most critical key differentiated points of value that your product offers. This is not a long list of features but rather small number of key attributes that customers in your segment love about your product. This is important for startups in particular to understand the real essence of why people buy your solution and it has a big impact on messaging, campaigns, sales strategy, etc.

Competitive Alternatives – These are the alternative ways that prospects in your segments can attempt to address their needs without your product/service. These may be competitive offerings, features or pieces of solutions in other spaces or the always fearsome “do nothing”.

Business Strategy

Business Model – This describes how the company makes money from the offering.

Sales Process and Strategy – The sales strategy is how the company will sell the product (including the channels if applicable). The Sales Process is the detailed step by step process that a prospect goes through on the way to becoming a customer. It’s important to note that this process starts long before a prospect interacts with a sales person and starts in the information gathering phase.

Market Strategy – The market strategy is a higher level view of how the company plans to scale in the market from early adopters to a broader market, including the segments to be targeted and in what order. (in Crossing the Chasm, this would be the description of your lead pin and the adjacent pins)

Partner Strategy – This box is new from the last version of the framework. I had previously included indirect sales channels in “Sales Strategy” but there are more reasons to partner than just sales (sometimes it’s for marketing purposes, or to provide services for example) and since Marketing is usually responsible for this at a startup I thought it needed to be included.

Tactics

Outbound Lead Generation – On the original Framework I simply had one box for “Lead Generation”. I’m deeply involved in Lead Generation with my current role (something I was less focused on as a consultant) and I started to think that such an important set of tasks deserved to be dissected a bit. Onbound Lead Generation in this framework is the plan including budgeting and task execution for lead generation tactics that involve “pushing” marketing messages out to an audience. This includes traditional marketing tactics such as events, advertising, telemarketing and traditional email marketing.

Inbound Lead Generation – This box is similar to the above box except that it includes that set of tactics that you are running that are focused on attracting prospects to you (rather than pushing messages out to prospects). This includes blogging, social media marketing, content marketing, and organic search tactics.

Retention and Engagement – The plan and budget for tactics aimed at retaining existing customers (really important for SaaS offerings) and engaging existing customers both for retention but also for improving customer satisfaction, cross-selling and up-selling.

Visibility – This is the bucket for all tactics related to ensuring that non-users of the product can observe that others are using it. This includes product features that encourage people invite their friends or display to a person’s network some facet of using the product, referral incentives, website badges, shareable content, reviews and awards, customer testimonials and success marketing, etc. (I talk about this in Startup Marketing 101)

Content

Messaging – This includes the company messaging, product value proposition, company and offering stories, responses to common questions, objection handling and reassurances for perceived risks.

Marketing Content – In the original version of the Framework, I had a single box called “Content Strategy”. I believe that the importance of content is growing to the extent that I think this deserves more attention. Marketing Content should still be planned out in a content strategy that will lay out what content will get created and for which purposes. This will include blogs, video, podcasts, whitepapers and ebooks, research and data analysis, press releases, shared presentations, and anything else that is informative and helpful to prospects.

Customer Content – This is a new box I added that is specifically focused on building a plan for content for customers (as opposed to prospects). The purpose of this content is customer retention and engagement (and it’s not an accident that this box sits next to that one in the Framework). Again, for SaaS type businesses, I believe that retention is increasingly important and marketing should be putting more energy and effort into “marketing” to their existing customer base.

Media/Influencer Outreach – Actions, programs and tactics related to working with reporters, analysts, writers, bloggers and other influencers.

Optimization & Market Learning

Funnel Optimization – The ongoing process of tracking and analyzing each stage of the sales funnel with the goal of making incremental improvements. (I did a post on some B2B metrics that I track to look at funnel)

Results Tracking – This was ROI Tracking in the last version but I broadened it out to Results Tracking. Obviously for each item of marketing spend, tracking the return on that investment with the goal of doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t is still something every startup marketer needs to do but there are other metrics that you will be tracking as well that aren’t necessarily “ROI” numbers per se so I broadened this one.

Customer Learning – The ongoing process of meeting with customers and testing the assumptions you have about their needs, environment, information sources and influencers, competitive alternatives, market trends, etc., capturing that information and feeding it back to the rest of the organization.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 4, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

June 3, 2011