A lesson learned from this year is that authenticity really matters, and companies are starved for the real story on what works and what doesn't regarding marketing inititiatives. Here's the background on our delivering the straight story to a number of our colleagues.
Our CIO, Kim Elsass, had an opportunity to present this fall to a group of Marketing and IT executives in Copenhagen, where he works at our Corporate Headquarters. They had asked him to look back over the past 2-3 years at Sitecore Marketing, and described what has worked and what hasn't, lessons learned, and what we are now doing differently.
Since I'm responsible for our global Marketing budget/ demand gen initiatives it made sense for me to put this together for him. But as I'm in our North American headquarters here in the San Francisco area, and Kim is a terrific presenter, we worked as a team- I wrote and he talked.
It was the perfect opportunity to pull together our ROI info for this extended period, and was illuminating and a bit gratifying to see the positive results that have occurred in the past 2 1/2 years. But in no way was I prepared for Kim's email the morning after he spoke. Here is what he said:
"Hi Paul,
I am so pleased to say that the presentation I made yesterday (Your PRESENTATION) was a fantastic success. I’ve never encountered so many people (C-level from sales, management, and marketing) so excited from my appearance. :-) I actually never managed to finish the presentation, as there were so many questions and comments underway. After the show, I was “attacked” by 8-10 managers with additional questions and some asked me if I could do the presentation for their managers in their own environment. Awesome – I’ll share the profits from the lecturing tour with you. :-) Already, I owe a bottle of Amarone from last night.
It’s a Sitecore presentation that I really can align myself with, it being light years from a traditional product presentation, but was about how to intelligently create measurable RESULTS.... "
You just love getting those emails, don't you? When I followed up with Kim he was even more effusive than his email, and was tickled that he continued to get requests for his presentation.
Given the Economic Hurricane in 2009, in retrospect it isn't all that surprising that a candid presentation about our real world experiences and marketing ROI comparisons made for an attentive audience. Even more importantly, using your website to reach your audience is clearly a winner, and supporting your channel partners through thick and thin pays off. Frankly a lot of our competition has cannibalized their channel by taking business away to prop themselves up in these tougher times, but our ROI metrics tell us that our Partners provide great value.
Our CIO, Kim Elsass, had an opportunity to present this fall to a group of Marketing and IT executives in Copenhagen, where he works at our Corporate Headquarters. They had asked him to look back over the past 2-3 years at Sitecore Marketing, and described what has worked and what hasn't, lessons learned, and what we are now doing differently.
Since I'm responsible for our global Marketing budget/ demand gen initiatives it made sense for me to put this together for him. But as I'm in our North American headquarters here in the San Francisco area, and Kim is a terrific presenter, we worked as a team- I wrote and he talked.
It was the perfect opportunity to pull together our ROI info for this extended period, and was illuminating and a bit gratifying to see the positive results that have occurred in the past 2 1/2 years. But in no way was I prepared for Kim's email the morning after he spoke. Here is what he said:
"Hi Paul,
I am so pleased to say that the presentation I made yesterday (Your PRESENTATION) was a fantastic success. I’ve never encountered so many people (C-level from sales, management, and marketing) so excited from my appearance. :-) I actually never managed to finish the presentation, as there were so many questions and comments underway. After the show, I was “attacked” by 8-10 managers with additional questions and some asked me if I could do the presentation for their managers in their own environment. Awesome – I’ll share the profits from the lecturing tour with you. :-) Already, I owe a bottle of Amarone from last night.
It’s a Sitecore presentation that I really can align myself with, it being light years from a traditional product presentation, but was about how to intelligently create measurable RESULTS.... "
You just love getting those emails, don't you? When I followed up with Kim he was even more effusive than his email, and was tickled that he continued to get requests for his presentation.
Kim walked the attendees through various challenges we had, solutions we tried and the results. Like the graphic at the top, he identified the initiatives and their varying ROIs, as best as we can measure it.
The summary is that the biggest winners in terms of Lead Gen ROI were our Website and our Partners. We got more revenue per cost expended through leads delivered from http://www.sitecore.net/ and our global Partners than any of the other means we tried. And believe me, we tried a lot.
Given the Economic Hurricane in 2009, in retrospect it isn't all that surprising that a candid presentation about our real world experiences and marketing ROI comparisons made for an attentive audience. Even more importantly, using your website to reach your audience is clearly a winner, and supporting your channel partners through thick and thin pays off. Frankly a lot of our competition has cannibalized their channel by taking business away to prop themselves up in these tougher times, but our ROI metrics tell us that our Partners provide great value.
Our approach is to invest even more in the initiatives that are providing the best returns, so here is to taking on more business possibilities through our websites and to many returns with our global Partners in 2010.
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