Compound this!

This is a bit of digression, but, hey, it is my blog.

So, last week, I was faced with the task of figuring out the annual compound growth rate - don't ask why, it is a long story. The trouble is that I cannot remember how to do it in terms of the right formula. My initial attempts at solving the equation using Excel ended unsatisfactorily (turns out to be a human error.) Then, I got really worried and grabbed a piece of paper and started to construct the summation equation from scratch. The first sample run was inconclusive because I was doing everything by hand including the compound calculation. Eventually, the formula hit me and I did a second simulation on Excel and it suddenly all made sense.

This is kind of freaky. You see, being an alumni of the school that wins the most Nobel Prize in economics and with graduates flooding the floors of Wall Street and other financial centers around the world, I am trained to do this kind of calculation even in my sleep. It is partly a pride issue where I was stunned that I could not recall how to do this.

I suppose when my school friends suggest that my diploma from that erstwhile institute should be stripped, they are onto something? But, That, I definitely take pride in.

so, how to you find the annualized compound growth rate. The equation in an Excel cell looks like:

V0*(1+r)^t=Vt

where
V0 = the base value of the growth
Vt = the ending value after t period
r = the growth rate
t = time period

And people think marketing folks are only foo-foo.

Harte Hanks is getting on my nerve. Whenever there is a request, their first reaction is to say "no" because it is out of the standard protocol. For example, I requested the daily update to include the field to indicate the number of employees for the enterprise. Within minutes, the reply was that this cannot be done because it is not one of the standard fields and it would have a major major impact for their operation. So, I replied with an e-mail that I was getting that information in prior daily updates and it just disappeared a few days ago. So, I would like to get it back. Anyway, I think I am getting it back starting tomorrow, but I don't know until I see it. Separately, I requested that HH provide new tape recordings of the call. They turn it down saying that unless we are not happy or concerned with the caller quality, it would be the same and this is additional work that they rather not do. Now, my question is that given all the calls are recorded, what is so difficult about getting that information to me? For that matter, I'll pay for the postage!

Things are getting interesting for Google again. With help from our capable engineering team, we now have the capability to send text strings via Google AdWords clicks. So, for each Google Ad, I have added information specifying the category, campaign, and ad title. In other words, i can now track where those pesky junk e-mail requests come from. And, amongst the good email requests, I will be able to measure the effectiveness of each category, campaign, and ad titles in a very granular way. Data collecting is half of the game and we are definitely starting on it.

Remember the concern with the sudden spike, it turns out that it was because the ad's were approved for Content on the 21st, thus the spike. It is pretty amazing that it went from 10-20 hits to thousands in one day. I understand how it works at an intellectual level, but it is still pretty mind-blowing in terms of the scale. On the other hand, it does appear that Google have process issues in Content approval. The campaign has been set up for a while and I just assumed that the Content has been approved (had I look closer, it would have been obvious that was not the case, but anyway.) On the other hand, since I split up the Search and Content hits for the campaign last Friday, I just got the new Content campaign approved in three days. What explains the difference in time? I believe the trick is to be a squeaky wheel. This Monday, I fired up another enquiries on why the Content hits has not been turned on yet. Today, I got a reply saying that it has been turned on - a turn-around of two days. On the other hand, in fairness, you have to give Google credit for the customer service. So, the lesson is to know what you want and demand that people give it to you.

I think.

Oh, the PR stalker. He gave me his references and I have set up a few calls. Unfortunately, the first call, I was about 10 minutes late and I left her a message about calling me. The second call, the person was not there. We will see how the stalker's references stack up.

The new thing for me is website revamp. I have been interviewing designers and setting expectations. The initial discussion did not go very far because the designers were looking for a comprehensive projects costing $15-20K with usability analysis and the other things nice. Lovely and wonderful but I cannot afford it. So, I have been in talk with a number of other designers and I told them that I am looking to get 5-7 website templates and we will do all the content and implementation. So far, some of them are still talking with me and I have a phone call tomorrow to interview another designer who is actually a friend. I hope that does not spoil our relationship.

On the website revamp, it also gave me an opportunity to reflect on how I want to position the company in terms of its public image and persona. I think the key thing for me right now is that it should not be text heavy which is a common fault of most tech company's site. The navigation should be such that a visitor can quickly find the relevant information he/she is looking for instead of having to read three pages of information before it. Color-wise, I like to keep it warm and bright. My concern is that given the number of new items that we want to add to the home page - webinars, quiz games, etc., I am not sure how to make the navigation clean and obvious. This will be an interesting challenge. But, first thing first, let's find a web designer.

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Stalked

My personal theory is that there is a conspiracy in Google land to drive up traffic. In one of my Google AdWords campaign, the usual impression rate is about 10-20 per day. That is until two days ago, started on the 22nd, the impression rate spike up to thousands. Now, as much as I like to take credit for increased exposure, I know this is not due to any intentional effort in our part and, as far as I can tell from the daily Google alerts, there is no reason from the external world that would cause this.

What I do see is a corresponding spike in junk e-mail hits from China. Lots of @165.com and @qq.com. I won't belabor the point of the stupidity in entering the info when you cannot expect to get anything in return, but this is really getting on my nerves.

So, I first fired up a complaint to Google saying that there is an unusual spike in impressions and I suspect there is a good (bad) reason for it. Then, I took all the non-core markets off the Google campaign geography - China is off. Finally, I split up the campaign that experienced the spike into Search and Content to ensure that any crowding effect from Content hits does not impact negatively the Search hits.

Can somebody explain to me the attraction of virtual vandalism? Shouldn't the person be surfing some adult oriented sites instead?

Harte Hanks is going on its second week. So far, we are getting an average of nearly two requests for appointment per day. And, non-appointments discussion where they agree to receive additional information runs about 11 per day. The initial logistic issue have been sorted out for the most part. We now get a daily update around lunch time for all the leads generated the day prior. I have also created a number of algorithms to prep the raw data into something a bit more intelligible for the salesperson. (I am just a nice guy.)

How to measure HH? That is really the question. I think the verdict is still out. But, so far so good.

I have been inundated by PR and marketing outfits in the past few weeks. It seems that as soon as our press release for the marketing product launch came out, everybody, or it seems that way, smells blood. And, in fairness, I have not discouraged this interpretation and been inviting these firms to send me their information.

The issue with my current PR team is that there does not seem to be a good energy level and everything seems to have to be driven from my end. Given the fact that we are not getting a lot of exposure anyway, this is quite tiresome. The plan to have a nice chat with the PR team tomorrow with Mr Whup-Ass in attendance. Given a choice, I prefer not to switch PR team due to the time needed to get up to speed. But, at some point, it may be needed. The question is, what and where is that point.

In terms of the PR firm calling, there is this firm that is kind of passive aggressive. The sales rep says that he can do better than our current team and keeps sending me cryptic messages on why he can do a better job in upping the exposure. Stalking comes to mind. We will see how this one works out.

Oh, remember the discussion about making a consultant/analyst an industry expert in an area that he has no idea on. I have been laboring everyday for the whole week to come up with a series of four white-papers focusing on different aspects of the product functionalities that are considered important by customers. While each white-paper has a specific focus, there are side notes that tries to give anecdotal information on the history and usage. I kind of like the format and it also allows me to intersperse bits and pieces from other whitepaper to create a complete picture for the reader. so, on one hand, each whitepaper has a specific focus, but in its entirety, it still gives a complete picture of what our product does and why it is a good thing.

Finally, there is additional discussion on pricing. Somehow I think we have a dysfunctional pricing process. This seems to be a topic that is regularly discussed and I have never heard any consensus. I think partly it is because pricing has been fairly academic until recently when we begin to get enough sales traction. But, as a consequence, there is a constant tug of war between sales and finance/operation. In a way, this is healthy because as a company grows, it is important to keep adjusting. On the other hand, I do feel that we still do not have a common language on pricing so that we spend a lot of time talking over each other's heads. That part bugs me.

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Seventh inning stregth

You know, I have not been to a baseball game for a long time and I do miss the silly interlude of the seventh inning stretch. Whoever came up with that idea is a genius.

Anywho, this is a little detour on the daily marketing grind so I can tell you about a few interesting blogs and how I am trying to monetize this Chicken Headless blog.

*Interesting blogs*
www.faultyvision.net
gc-gastronomic.blogspot.com
globalcorners.blogspot.com
zen.sandiego.edu:8080/Jerome

*Monetizing Chicken Headless*
I have signed up with Google's AdSense. So, do scroll to the bottom and click on something. I get paid by the click.

Okay, the stretch is over.

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Toasting and roasting

This week is pretty nuts. We have all the department heads flown in from all over the world for senior management strategy meetings. It is a good opportunity to meet the rest of the team with whom I have only talked via phone and Skype. On the other hand, meetings of this sort is a huge drain on time and it is not like I have too much time on my hands to begin with. But, truth be told, the past few days have been quite productive. Face to face meeting has the benefit of allowing contextual and real-time reaction that I have not seen reproduced in any meaningful manner via phone or internet.

The other good thing is that this is a good team. People have opinions and are not afraid to express them. At the same time, we do not hold fast to our views and readily accept logical counterarguments. In a way, it is a lot of fun. It is so important to have a team that is competent and have compatible social skills while maintaining heterogeneous views. This does not guarantee our success as a team or the company, but it sure gives me a lot more confidence than otherwise. (And, trust me, I have seen it all in this startup-land.)

I did my song and dance piece on what had transpired since I took over the marketing position as well as the various marketing programs that we will be doing in the next 90 days. The emphasis is to do more lead-generation and more publicity with the same budget. Specifically, I need to ramp up the lead-gen quantity to match the projected hiring of additional Sales people so that Sales gets enough through the funnel up front.

Harte Hanks is part of the story. The program just got underway last Friday and the response has been reasonable for the first few days. We are still working through some of the kinks. For example, there were entries where a request for meeting was setting for May (that is LAST month, in case you wondered what was the problem.) There are also some questions on what each responses were relative to the calling script. While these are important details, I feel pretty good that we will be able to overcome these issues. The bigger problem for now is the "lemon problem" in the case of who would talk with the caller. Ideally, we want people who are high-powered decision makers. Reality is that people who would take the time to talk tend to be lowly employees who was glad to talk because there is not a lot of interesting things going on. This problem, unfortunately, I am not sure how to fix unless we bring this function in-house.

But, overall, it looks okay. As of the first three business days of the program, we have generated six requests for meeting and some 25 contact information for future use. The hope is that as the caller ramps up with the program, we will have both faster and more efficient calls. I am also waiting for tapes of current calls as an on-going check-up of these calls. This is going to be an interesting program to monitor and learn from. Then, I want to get this function in-house as soon as possible with the assumptions that it will be less expensive as well as more efficient/effective. We will see.

For a high level PR spin approach, my song and dance piece consists of three prongs: vertical, geographical, and functional. By vertical I mean the specific market verticals that we have seen some success and have some good names to leverage. By Geographical, I want to focus on metro areas where we are seeing clusters of users. For functional, it would be an on-going process of touting the specific features and benefits of the product.

The key philosophical change is that I will be taking a much more component level approach to these prongs. One of the major failings with our past publicity effort has been that we have a consistent message. Now, this is great in principle because nobody is confused. But the problem for us is that it also becomes old news very quickly and I am having the darnedest time drumming up interests amongst press. By mix and match these components, I hope to weave different angles and hooks to pique interests and maintain a continuing level of exposure in the public space.

The other key philosophical change would be what I termed "the George W Bush's approach to publicity", namely we will undertake the program assuming no additional cooperation from the usual suspects - customers, analysts, and partners. This has been a major problem with the marketing program so far where we are constantly hampered by customers who are holding back and/or take forever to agree to press releases and case studies for one reason or another. So, I am putting together a slate of press releases and case studies/white-paper to be launched without getting customer help.

Finally, this is mostly tactical but interesting to note, I plan to make a consultant an industry expert for a field that he has no idea on. This guys is a hired-gun when it comes to white-paper and articles. And, originally, my plan is to hiring him to do one article. However, upon further consideration, my plan is to get him to "do" a series of at least four articles to establish himself as an expert in our particular product vertical. Of course, the part that I am particularly interested in as a marketer is that I will be writing these articles and spinning the story that defines the world view according to me. I am sure that I will have more to report on this intricate marketing dance as time goes on.

As I said, these were productive meeting.

In these meetings, there were dinners and lunches where we work on our team spirit by debating the merits of wine and food. There was almost a bet on what is the percentage of merlot grape in Petrus. Good thing that bet did not happen because I would have lost since I held the position that it is 100% merlot. Turns out, Petrus uses 95% merlot and 5% cab franc. I also got a list of New Zealand winemakers to try. And, most interestingly, our European head has a friend who just inherited 70,000 bottles of Austrian wine via a wine estate and this new owner is looking for ways to unload the wine cellar. Now, I would not be able to handle 70,000 bottles. But, with wines going back to the 1920's, I would not mind checking out some of the early ones to see how they turned out. This will be a small project that I will work on the side - playing the role of a match maker to get one or more wine import merchants in the San Francisco area to take these wine. And, maybe I can get a few cases as a finder's fee? We always need interesting wine.

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Optimizing input and output

So, the lead-gen side of things continue to hum along nicely. Based on my 7-day rolling average, we have doubled our raw lead counts since the product launch which is already double of what we used to get before the effort to optimize Google paid-ad's began.

The benefits of doubling leads is obvious. What is not obvious is that there is not a corresponding increase in junk leads. What I mean by junk lead is that there are times when people leave nonsensical information to request a product demo. Now, what I do not get is that it takes time to fill out the form and, since we are not a sexy company or sell a sexy product, why anyone would bother is really beyond me. If you are a competitor wanting to get product information, I can understand. But, to request a product demo with phone numbers like 1234567 and e-mail like aa@aa.com is just... Anyway, suffices to say that these people do not impress me with their intelligence. So, before I get really off the track here. I am very gratified to note that the increased raw leads does not lead to increase in junk leads and I am always looking for ideas on how to minimize junk leads. Please let me know!

So, I got the initial designs for the new landing page. They look darn good compare to our current offering. Bless our webmaster's soul, but good UI/design sense ain't one of the key hiring criteria for that position. Long story short, it fits well with our expectation as well as the various "best practice" sites that the on-line marketing guru has shared with us a while back (See the entry on "Harte Hanky"). Amongst the various design elements, I pick the one with a top banner showing the head shots of two (attractive) female professionals (I am sure they are model, but they look professional) while everyone else is pushing for a faded computer/keyboard/hands typing image. What won the argument is that while neither images are objectionable in an objective sense, studies have shown creating an association with a positive image can heighten the conversion rate. And, what is better than two women on the banner watching you enter your contact information like a good IT boy (yeah, it is a guy) should. This is just the design and will take a few more days to get it up and running. This is going to be fun!

So, Mr Whup-ass and I had a little chat on marketing. Specifically, my new mandate is to increase the lead gen activity by 5x going forward. The question that I am suppose to answer by next week's management retreat is how will I do it.

This is basically an optimization problem on possible input and expected output. On the input side, there are a series of "tools" that go from completely passive like boosting our Google ranking to aggressively active like buying directory information and call into the IT departments of these organizations. How I segregate the "tools" is to consider them along two dimensions. One is cost and expected ROI in both immediate and longer time frame. For example, buying ad's in a trade magazine is unlikely to provide an immediate return for the investment as it takes prolonged exposure for it to work. Whereas, doing a webinar is likely to have quick result as the audience is self-selecting. The other consideration is how much control we have in manipulating these tools. One tool that is difficult to control is trade show because once committed, there is nothing you can do if the audience is the wrong market and/or insufficient people show up for the show. On the other hand, Google AdWord is a beautiful tool that gives you a great deal of control and allows quick turn-around in experimentation. So, my current strategy consists of continuing the current program such as search engine ranking, Google paid-ad's, Harte Hanks, etc. The new program would be in the area of starting a weekly webinar series and boost PR output in terms of white paper, case study, and contributed articles.

Separately, in discussion with VP of Sales, his target is to get the monthly raw lead count to about 100 so that, factoring in our current conversion rate and closing rate, it would lead to each rep doing $1 million of revenue per year. Purely by that number, I think I am siting pretty since I am already exceeding that monthly number. But, of course, I should not be too cocky and start crank up the program. After all, we can do worse than having to bring in more sales and marketing people to offload the work. That, I am all for!

Speaking of Harte Hanks, it is commencing tomorrow. Our second test call came in and it sounded okay. Much more smooth flow and the branching really help in making the caller sound intelligent. We did have to make a change that mid-way through the question, there is a "read" where the caller talks about why this is an important issue and how we are a key player in this space. That is a fair idea and, if executed properly, should be powerful. One question I had was to put that "read" before or after the question where the call-ee answers how satisfied he is with his current solution. My thinking is that it should be before the question to plant the seed of doubt that maybe he is missing out on a good stuff and indicate that he is less satisfied with his current solution than what he otherwise would have said. Conversely, I do not want the call-ee to get agitated because he just said that he is perfectly satisfied with his current solution and was told that there is something even better out there. Long story short, I asked the Harte Hank lady to tell us where that "Read" should go given her vast experience, and she put the "read" after the question. (It is a shame that I cannot test out the two scenarios, it would be interesting to find out empirically.)

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Kinds of impression

Memorial weekend is a good thing. Actually, I think all long weekends are good things.

The product launch continued. We continue to get coverage a few days after the wire. Unfortunately, there was only one article written on the product. On the other hand, that article was picked up by quite a few outlets. So, between the wire piece and the article, we seem to have covered quite a bit of ground quantitatively.

One gratifying thing to note is that we are seeing increased traffic to the website. Before the launch, majority of traffic comes from search engine and the information requests tend to be the few that I have targeted with search engine in mind. But, this past week, there is a nice increase in information request coming from other areas that were not targeted. So, as a proxy, there is definitely increased interests. You might ask "shouldn't the site design be such that it drives the traffic to only the targeted/desired areas?" Well, if you have to ask that question, you do not know websites. Long story short, it is a perpetual catch-up game since you can only react to data which, by definition, is old news. Nevertheless, I am exacting some additional budget to streamline the website. Still trying to put my arms around this project but this should be a major undertaking for the next month or so.

Remember the "hot lead" that Harte Hanks called me for? We listened to the call recording a few days later where it was one of the calls. All that I can say is that the "hot-ness" came from the fact that the person asked the caller to call back at a specified time. (So far so good, objectively.) On the other hand, it was obvious that the person just wanted to get the caller off his back and, my guess, gave a call-back time knowing full well that he will not be there to pick up the phone.

Anyway, we decided to re-do the script. The individual elements are kept pretty much the same, but we put in a lot more navigational things in terms of what questions to ask. The original script was a sequential list where the caller just recite the questions from top to bottom. The new script has several branches and specifies that if the answer is Yes - go to Q5 and No - go to Q8. The idea is to take away the thinking for the caller. Two observations. One, it is unfortunate that we assumed a higher level of caller capacity than what was warranted. We always know that these are just hire guns and we cannot expect too much from HH. On the other hand, we have assumed that the caller would exercise some discretion in the basic zig-zag of a conversation. Did not happen. Even when the person on the other end already answered the question two minutes ago, the caller still recite the question. Anyway, I am glad to provide the hard-coded intelligence if it cannot be had organically. Two, it is kind of fun to come up with the branching script - it is like writing in unstructured programming languages like BASIC with a lot of GOTO. So, the new script was shot to HH for testing and I hope to hear the specifics before the week ends.

The $25 promo idea still sucks. I am quite disappointed. The latest incarnation is that the headline with no mentioning of the $ gets better performance. I will end the program this week and figure out what to do next. I also contracted a web designer to re-do a number of these landing pages. Hope to run the new pages in a couple of weeks.

I am sure that you heard me talking about Google paid-ad's before. The latest fine-tuning comes from separating out the Search Network from the Content Network. Basically, if you specify a campaign to do Search network only, it will pop up only when an user searches for the specified term. This is particularly desirable because it means that person is motivated to find the information. On the other hand, Google also pop up ad's next to relevant content using some proprietary algorithm - less desirable because the person who clicks on the ad may not have an immediate need. But, the good thing about the Content network is that it gives volume in terms of impression. A typical day, I may get a few hundreds of search impressions, but I typically expect to get a few 10,000's content impression if not more. Herein also is my problem. One of my campaigns starts to get a bit expensive and majority of the traffic comes from content network. Cost issues aside, my biggest concern was that the high Content network fee is crowding out my search network usage. So, while I am paying good money because of the content network volume, I am missing out on quality search network listing because of the budget. (This is a bit convoluted, if you really want to understand the thinking, drop me a line and I'll try to explain better.)

So, all these explanation leads to my decision to separate out the Content and Search network. Basically, I now run two campaigns for each category instead of one with identical content with the only difference in the network targeted. The early verdict is quite positive. The search network has been cranking along as expected and I no longer have to worry about people not being able to find us in a search. The content network is getting fewer impression because of the budget constraint. However, there is no noticeable drop in our website hit and, more importantly, product/sales demo requests. Finally, this gives me a much higher level of fine-tuning capability to trade-off between costs, number of impressions, and type of impressions. My plan is to run these campaigns for another week to collect enough data and change all the other campaigns into this duel-mode.

We are going to do a senior management on/off-site where all the managers fly into the HQ for Kumbaya and strategy sessions. I am in the process of preparing the marketing piece. This has been an interesting exercise because this is the first time since coming on board four months ago that I try to take a step back and see the big picture on what fits where. And, this also helps me to identify whatever is missing and where to put the resources. I should have something more concrete in a few days.

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