Derek Singleton

Comparing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of SaaS vs. On-Premise

As Cloud technologies continue to evolve, more and more software buyers are seriously evaluating software as a service (SaaS) solutions against on-premise offerings. While there are many factors that influence which deployment model is best for any particular business (e.g., ability to manage IT internally and speed of deployment) the cost of the system is often a key factor. But comparing the true cost of a Cloud-based system against an on-premise system can be time-consuming and is often a complex undertaking.

Derek Singleton on Mar 27, 2013 in News & Discussion

Four Tips for Improving Your Retargeting Campaigns

Over the last two years at Software Advice, we’ve experimented extensively with site retargeting--a display advertising method that shows your ads to visitors who previously visited your website, but are now visiting other sites. When we first got into retargeting, we were familiar with pay per click and had gotten quite efficient at setting up campaigns with decent margins.

When we got into retargeting, however, we had to learn a lot of new tricks familiarize ourselves with unique aspects of running a retargeting campaign. I’d like to share four lessons that we learned through trial and error over our two years of experimentation.

1. Check Your Campaign Settings
While it’s a logical step to focus on your campaign settings, there are several defaults that most retargeting vendors use in their system which can lead you to incorrectly target visitors. Here are a few tips on dialing in campaign settings.

Audience geography. Most vendors will default to displaying your ads internationally. If you don’t operate internationally, you’ll want to set some country-specific parameters.

Cookie duration. It’s important to align your buying cycle with the cookie duration for each user. Most vendors will set your cookie duration somewhere between 30-90 days. If you have a buying cycle of 5 days, this will cause you to pay for ads that are longer effective.

Offer rotation. You should also tune your settings to rotate which ad you show a particular user over the course of the cookie duration. While they may not have clicked on your whitepaper download, they may be interested in getting a free price quote.

2. Divide Your Site into Areas of Interest
Of course, if you want to truly get targeted with your display ads, you’ll want to show different visitors unique ads based on the pages they viewed on your site.

To segment your audience, you first need to divide your website into areas of interest. One logical segmentation would be to organize your website by industry (vertical market). Another might be to segment based on the products you offer. In either case, you’ll build a profile of your visitors by tracking which URLs they visited (e.g.www.acme.com/industries/financial-services).

This will allow you to show a different ad to someone that works for a small construction firm than you would to a large financial services provider.

3. Test Your Ads in a Disciplined Way
Once you’ve developed audience segmentation framework, it’s time to start tweaking and testing your ads. There are many aspects of an ad that you can change, but a few of them are:

Derek Singleton on Dec 12, 2012 in News & Discussion

Want Better Leads? Have Marketing Own Phone Qualification.

Marketing and Sales have long been at odds over whether it's better to generate a large volume of leads or if it's better to generate fewer, higher quality leads. Anyone involved in Sales or Marketing today, however, knows that the volume game is over. But the question still lingers: How do you get Marketing to deliver the high quality leads that Sales wants and expects?

While there are several ways to improve the quality of Marketing leads, I think one of the best solutions is to have Marketing manage the telephone lead qualification process. Here's why.

Marketing Doesn't Have Near-Term Quotas to Close Deals

The reality of Sales departments is that salespeople live quarter to quarter, and they have to hit a quota each quarter in order to stay in the good graces of their department. While this is a great incentive for keeping your sales team motivated to bring in revenue, that same incentive be counterproductive in the lead qualification process. Because of this, I think that Marketing is better suited for lead qualification.

Firstly, Marketing isn't worried about hitting near-term closed deal quotas. This allows the marketer to engage a prospect in a more open and honest conversation about their needs, purchase timeframe, budget and other factors that comprise typical qualification criteria. Beyond that, Marketing departments need to become more responsible for the quality of leads that they send to Sales. By asking Marketing to manage the qualification process, they're intimately tied to the quality of lead they're asking Sales to close.

In order to make this work, however, Marketing departments need to be methodical about who they hire, how they compensate and how the lead qualification process is managed--and improved. Here are four tips for managing this process.

1. Hire at the Junior Level

In any role, hiring the right person is critical. For the role of lead qualifier, you want someone energetic, competitive and willing to a lot of spend time on the phone. And you want them to junior enough to grow into a different Sales or Marketing role. Beyond that, you want someone that can really drive a phone conversation and has the inquisitive nature to to dig beneath the surface to uncover information from the prospect.

2. Compensate with a Sales-like Pay Structure

The biggest driver in increasing the quality of Marketing leads is to tie compensation to the sale. The easiest way to do that is to start them off at a base salary and offer a commission based on the total revenue of closed deals. You can also add incentives for qualification accuracy such as an additional bonus for a great Sales-accepted lead metric.

3. Decide How to Route Leads

The natural lead category breakdown is to create three buckets of leads: qualified leads, disqualified leads and leads that need to be nurtured. All of these are fairly self-explanatory but the last one is worth elaborating on. The real opportunity for shifting this role to Marketing is that you can dedicate someone to nurturing leads with a human touch. As such, there should be an intense focus on the nurturing aspect of lead qualification.

4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

While this is a long-standing issue in companies across the globe, it's a necessary area of focus for making this model work. You need Sales and Marketing to have regular meetings about lead qualification criteria to have Sales understand why Marketing is disqualifying certain leads (and to double-check that they’re not disqualifying a few hidden gems). The best way to manage this process is to have Marketing and Sales meet frequently. Start off having weekly meetings, then move to once a month afterwards.

While this is not an exhaustive list of what needs to happen, I think these are the key areas of focus. If you follow these steps, you can create a Marketing team that both drives more sales and is more accountable and better able to see its contribution to revenue.

What do you think? Leave me a comment over at Software Advice on my blog or simply drop me a line by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Derek Singleton on Oct 09, 2012 in News & Discussion

The Social Invasion Improves Audience Targeting

Crafting a message and then that reaches your target audience is never easy. It can be especially difficult to reach your target audience when you're operating with incomplete information. However, the rapidly expanding of influence is putting more and more information at the fingertips of marketers to help craft their messages. The explosion of information is what Dennis Pombriant and Brent Leary have referred to as "The Social Invasion."

Derek Singleton on Oct 09, 2012 in News & Discussion

A New Survey Finds Marketing Automation Increases Marketing Effectiveness

Ever since marketing automation was introduced as a classification of software, it's been sold as a way to increase the overall effectiveness of marketing operations. It's well known that marketing automation helps makes marketing campaigns more efficient.

Derek Singleton on Sep 20, 2012 in News & Discussion

Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Manufacturers

Cloud technologies are maturing to a point where they are becoming more relevant to the manufacturing industry. As Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) options begin to take a stronger foothold in the enterprise, manufacturers are taking the technology more seriously. While most of the attention in Cloud ERP focuses on the application, I think there are significant opportunities for manufacturers to make use of platform as a service (PaaS).

Derek Singleton on Jun 20, 2012 in News & Discussion

Mobile and Cloud Computing Are Increasing Food Traceability

The topic of food safety hits the national airways every time there’s a major product recall or an unsafe practice is revealed. Recently, it’s “pink slime” that’s the hot food subject right now.

Every time these stories hit the national media, I’m reminded of something: consumers don’t know enough about where their food comes from and how it’s made. The release of a recent mobile food traceability app called CLEARthruchanges that dynamic.

CLEARthru gives consumers access to a wide range of information such as:

Origin of product
Product freshness
Packaging information
Nutrition and allergen facts
Food recall information

All of this information can be accessed via a consumer’s smartphone by scanning a QR code. I think this technology has far-reaching potential.

Consumers Need the Ability to Trace Their Food

The incident of “pink slime” and major national recalls always highlights the fact that we’re left in the dark about too many things related to our food. We rarely know the exact location where our food is produced or whether there is a recall.

CLEARthru helps alleviate some of those poblems by giving consumers knowledge about exactly where their food was produced, and every processing and packing plant your food stops at on the way to the grocery store. This gives consumers an opportunity to look back into the food supply chain and access information that previously only manufacturers and distributors held in their distribution software.

It’s a great step toward giving consumers access to the information they need, but this technology is still at it’s early stages and needs a little time to develop.

There Are Still Limitations to Information

One of the major issues that I see with this app is that it requires consumers to have a smartphone in order to access this information. Beyond that, consumers have to scan the code in order to access it. While this isn’t a major imposition, most people that are shopping would rather get in and out of the grocery store. To incentivize consumers scanning these QR codes, however, CLEARthru offers specialty coupons that are attached to each QR code.

That should help with consumer adoption, but there’s one other major obstacle: companies have to agree to put these proprietary codes on their products. This is a sticking point. However, I do think that we as consumers could force these companies into adopting this kind of technology by demanding access to this important information. There are few things more important to know than where the food that sustains us comes from. And I think we need more of these kinds of technology solutions.

Do you have any thoughts on improving consumer traceability of our food? Please leave me a note over at my website at: Are Mobile Apps the Future of Food Traceability?

Derek Singleton on Apr 04, 2012 in News & Discussion

Cloud UI Standards Can Improve Productivity

If you're like me, you rely on a host of Cloud applications to get your job done each day. While the convenience and familiarity of apps built for the web is great, I can't help but notice the difference between each user interface (UI) I use. Currently, all Cloud-based ERP vendors are approaching the user interface with their own design style. For users that work with multiple cloud apps each day, this can be disorienting - not to mention bad for productivity and usability.

As more products are built for the Cloud, I believe that we aught to start thinking about creating a set of standards for what Cloud-based applications should look and feel like. Getting there won't easy, so it's time to start talking about creating these standards today.

Why Should We Create Standards?

Inconsististency in UI design has negative impacts on usability and productivity. It results in having to invest in more user training and can lead to costly user errors. A unified and consistent UI, on the other hand, can boost productivity.

The reduction in training time wouldn't even have to be significant in order to result in sizable cost savings. Consider a large company with several hundred users. If the learning curve for a Cloud app were reduced from three days to two days, you could potentially be saving thousands of dollars on training--and have employees in the office for another day of work. Beyond that, a more familiar and consistent UI would help reduce the need for extensive technical support and documentation.

Cloud UI Standards Need to Evolve Gradually

Of course, working toward this end goal has to recognize the vast range of Cloud apps available on the market. For instance, an ERP system is several orders of magnitude more complex than an email marketing system. So the idea is less to create a standard for specific elements, and more to standardize the general elements.

I think Google apps are an instructive example of what I mean by this. While there is a big difference between Google Calendar and Google Docs, there is a lot of UI consistency between the two. Even though they perform very different functions, the look and feel is very familiar. Because of this, mastering one app makes it much easier to master another.

The Google example is illustrative for another reason: the UI change was gradual and iterative. Google has taken approach to UI development where it's rolled out small changes over time without trying to tackle every app at once. This allows them to learn what works best, and gives them the capability to incorporate new Web technologies as they come around. Furthermore, it allows Google to be able incorporate the latest UI capabilities into their new releases.

I envision a Cloud UI standard evolving in much the same way. There are lots of iterations to the development process, but you're never quite "finished." By taking this approach to a set of UI standards, you'd gradually reach a point where UIs are relatively consistent across the board.

We Need Industry Collaboration to Get There

The end goal and benefits are pretty clear here. But achieving the goal will require collaboration on the part of an industry that's currently more focused on building out their own product rather than creating product UI consistency.

My friend Brian Sommer, founder of Vital Analysis believes that something like a set of standards can only be achieved if "a vendor with a huge SaaS presence publishes a great library of standards." Who might those vendors be? Sommer suggested Salesforce, Oracle and SAP as the top movers and shakers.

I tend to agree with him. But I also think that given the rapid innovation we're seeing in the consumer tech world, we could use some help from companies like Google, Adobe and Apple. The industry recently got together to talk about creating standards for portablility. Why not get together to talk about standards for the user interface--and usability? We're a long way off from realizing something like this but I think we should start the conversation today.

What are your thoughts on how to make this happen? Please leave me a comment below.

Derek Singleton on Feb 20, 2012 in News & Discussion

Implications of Activity Streams for Manufacturing

Derek Singleton on Jan 27, 2012 in News & Discussion

Answers to Five SaaS FAQs

Derek Singleton on Aug 03, 2011 in News & Discussion

SaaS cloud

Comparing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of SaaS vs. On-Premise

Four Tips for Improving Your Retargeting Campaigns

Want Better Leads? Have Marketing Own Phone Qualification.

The Social Invasion Improves Audience Targeting

A New Survey Finds Marketing Automation Increases Marketing Effectiveness

Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Manufacturers

Mobile and Cloud Computing Are Increasing Food Traceability

Cloud UI Standards Can Improve Productivity

Implications of Activity Streams for Manufacturing

Answers to Five SaaS FAQs

About

Help

Browse

More