The Entrepreneurial Success Delusion

I am finding myself saying "Don't quit your day job" more and more to hopeful and bright eyed entrepreneurs. This is not the best way for me to get business considering RapidScaler is a technology acceleration services company. It is also not the first time I have talked myself out of a potentially lucrative consulting gig. 

I am both approached by and referred to successful entrepreneurs frequently. Almost all of them have the same basic formula: a great idea, maybe a prototype, and anywhere from $30K - $250K to spend on making their idea into a product.  Many of them have already been successful at something else and they view a new mobile app or industry specific software product as the "big one" that will propel them to "Facebook millionaire" status. Just two years ago, I would have gladly taken a nice management fee to help these people execute on their dreams. Having been down the road of crushed dreams, bankruptcy, and despair with many of them, I simply can't do it anymore with a clear conscience.

Take a few Facebook success stories, throw in cheap access to platforms, take a wad of cash from savings, finish it off with a passionate conversation among friends at Starbucks, and it is relatively easy to formulate the next $1 billion dollar idea. Similar to the starving actor in LA waiting tables, getting to success is a whole different story. And like the actor, the odds are not in the entrepreneur's favor.

I rarely come across a bad idea. Many ideas are great and in the ideal conditions, could be the next big thing. What I come across frequently are entrepreneurs that are completely delusional about the required effort and immense risk they are taking to create that next big thing. I realized when I was 18 years old and could not play the fills from "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, that I was doomed as a rock star drummer. I knew my chances of success and chose not to move to LA. 

There is currently a glut of software and technology start-ups vying for an ounce of consumer attention and maybe a few dollars a year for a subscription. A steady stream of success stories, user addiction to mobile devices, and social media have created a somewhat collective delusion about success in the Web 2.0 world. This delusion is dangerous and I have seen it first-hand destroy people, finances, relationships, and reputations. 

It is not that I am cynical about entrepreneurship or innovation. A better way to look at it is that I am no longer delusional about the effort it takes to be successful at both of these. The actor in LA (of which I have known many) is well aware of the odds of their success. Unlike the actor, the modern software or technology entrepreneur has a mild to severe case of this success delusion.

The truth is that almost all entrepreneurs fail. Tens of thousands of them will be out of business in the next year. All of them dreamed up the next “killer app”. They are so convinced of its usefulness that they are willing to spend either their savings or an investor’s money (usually not a professional one) to make it happen. The chances of success are slim to none if they are under the success delusion. 

If you have read this far, then I owe it to you to provide some useful insight.I have had the privilege of working with many entrepreneurs on successful projects across extremely diverse industries. There is a direct correlation to entrepreneurial success and sober, non-delusional thinking. The next few articles will explore some of the traits I have seen in these successful entrepreneurs.

Here is a preview of those traits:

• Planning to Mitigate Failure
• Developing a Deployment Model
• Tireless Product Pitching

Stay tuned...

Darren Hoch is the President and Founder of RapidScaler. He founded the company out of a growing lack of integration between email, CRM, social, and analytics tools. The company's mandate and passion is to make data work for business initiatives, especially marketing programs.

4 Simple Email Marketing Revenue and Engagement Metrics

There is no doubt that there is a mad rush across all industry verticals to collect "big data" and visualize it to try to make business decisions. There is a whole slew of disruptive technologies out there that are enabling analytics on ANYTHING. Email marketing is no exception. However, when I talk with any executive in the email marketing space, they are simply overwhelmed at where to start to get good email marketing analytics. 

Most email service providers have great reporting on email engagement. Most web analytics tools have great reporting on revenue performance for a site. There are integrations out there between all of the major players that give you some visibility into revenue and engagement performance in one tool. However, there are limitations as the integrations and reporting are limited. Usually, marketers find themselves having to download reams of CSV files, manipulate in Excel, and go blind making endless pivot tables to create the required marketing analytics to satisfy a QBR for a client or an executive. 

Getting access to data can also be a nightmare for marketers. IT shops are unwilling to give up, SaaS reporting interfaces may be clunky, and marketers don't sit around writing code for an API. It is painful to hear how some email marketing organizations spend weeks gathering reports and dashboards for a single executive meeting. Having a deep technical background, it is even more painful to hear because I know these problems could be solved in minutes with the right application of technology.

At RapidScaler, we tried to make all of this easy by doing three things with our software:

1. Automatically collect email marketing and web analytics data from popular systems and put it into a database for marketing analytics.
2. Develop a predefined set of email marketing analytics KPI dashboards that consume this data and answer all of the questions analytics should answer.
3. Enable these email marketing analytics dashboards to be shared on a website, in an ESP tool, or in a CRM application like SalesForce.

The end result is a tidy little software solution that gives marketers the following useful marketing analytics quickly:

1. Top 5 Email Performing Campaigns - giving clear performance by CTR, Revenue per Email (RPE), and total revenue by campaign
2. Conversions by Campaign - giving the marketer and idea of what percentage of CTR lead to a conversion
3. Customer Engagement Index - giving a simple and clear indicator on the trend of engagement of your subscribers in your list
4. Revenue Funnel - giving the ability to track conversions and revenue starting at an email campaign through a completed purchase

Putting together these analytics is not rocket science nor is it technically hard to do. Any IT person who tells you otherwise either does not get your needs or does not understand the technology. With the proper application of technology and technical resources who "get" your needs, any marketer can bring these kinds of marketing analytics into their programs cheaply and quickly.

Darren Hoch is the President and Founder of RapidScaler. He founded the company out of a growing lack of integration between email, CRM, social, and analytics tools. The company's mandate and passion is to make data work for marketing programs.

A Practical Guide to Creating a Single Facebook to Email Segment

One of our typical conversations with email marketers...

"Get user to download Facebook app. Pull Facebook data. Push into CRM lead record. Pull the following segment from CRM "Select all leads who subscribed to my fan page and Def Leppard's fan page who are over 35 and made a sales inquiry to my call center". Take list and push into email marketing system. Send special campaign, offering free download of "The Best of Hair Bands" music collection if customer purchases product."

When I talk about our simple automated tool that does this cross-channel segment, it blows marketers away. "Really? Your team knows how to do that?" Yes and you'd be shocked how easy and cheap it is to do it. I find it interesting that for all the hype, vision, blogging, seminars, funded social media companies, and buzz words out there, marketers still can't get a simple cross-channel segment into production. Some of this has to do with the fact that data has never been aggregated like this before and therefore, marketers just don't know what will work. Some of it also has to do with stubborn IT teams and a failure to communicate marketing integration needs.

I am a big believer in start small and simple. Here is an exercise that can actually take you from beyond the hype to execution. Grab a notebook and pen and head to Starbucks one morning.

Throw way all previous conversations with IT about what can't be done and clear your mind of all the "big picture or canvas or broad strokes" hype about cross-channel this or that. Simply ask yourself this question, "If I could have any segment I want between two data points, what would it be?"

Follow these steps:

1. Write out all your tools that collect customer engagement data. Leave room under each to add the types of data each collects.

2. Under each tool, write out the types of data it collects. Yes, there may be way too much to remember. Write down at least the stuff you know may be useful.

3. Once it is all written out, start to draw lines between data segments that you may find interesting. Here is the catch: only draw one line between two tools. You can connect multiple data points within the tools, but only have one line across tools. 

4. Create 5 of these lines and then actually write out the segmentation on a fresh sheet of paper. For example:

"select all people this week who abandoned my shopping cart and then posted a negative comment on our FB page"

5. Read my previous posts about engaging IT teams to get marketing integration projects done. Part I and Part II.

6. Approach IT (humbly) with the segment that you think is most important and ask their insight on the feasibility of getting whatever backend integration required to make this segment possible. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that they are willing to help you accomplish this one segmentation goal. They'll either build something from scratch or reach out to a company that can help (hint) with the integration. More than likely, they will implement a tool that can do more types of cross-channel data integration, but don't get ahead of yourself.

It is very feasible that you could have the integration you need to execute your first cross-channel segment within a few days or weeks. From there, move onto your next segment and integration. 

If you think this seems too easy, then you are right. Our most common and popular tool at RapidScaler is our simple Facebook to SalesForce to ESP adapter. Why? Because it moves cross-channel segments from a pipe dream to a reality. 

3 Ways Start-Ups Can Increase Webinar Attendance

Written by Jessica Crook, Customer Relationship Manager for RapidScaler

Ramping up a start-up marketing effort often calls on some serious right brain activity. As you are looking to engage and grow your client base, the first thing you should do is stop selling and start sharing. Seriously? My reply is “Absolutely.” Webinars are a great way to do this. You are able to provide your audience with industry related information they will enjoy and be able to use, in an environment and time that is minimally obtrusive to their workday.  And you can do this without cramming your elevator pitch down their throat. But how do you drum up interest and attendance? 

Use your social networks. This does not mean the day before your webinar (or even the week before) you join every social networking group there is and blast your message across the net. You should absolutely NOT do this. Plan ahead. Let’s believe you are currently utilizing social media on a professional basis. 

Here is how we maximize our social networks to drum up webinar attendance. These techniques have doubled our webinar attendance and have provided us at least 2 - 3 good software/services sales of $20K or more each.

When to Host

Our research suggests that people are most willing to participate in a webinar on a Thursday. We schedule two webinars to accommodate all  timezones. Our first is at 10 AM CST and our second is at 2 PM CST. We have been able to cover San Francisco to Moscow with this scheduling. We even get attendees from Delhi to Shanghai on our morning session. Most APAC customers are used to attending US based events at night.

 

LinkedIn 

Join groups that are interested in your line of products or business. If you sell apparel to small boutiques, find groups on LinkedIn that boutique owners belong to. You can also search for store buyers as well and see what groups they belong to. Be creative and think about who your audience could be. Engage in the conversations online and offer advice or feedback that has NOTHING to do with pitching your product. Then, when the time is right for your webinar, SHARE the opportunity to participate. Approaching your LinkedIn Groups this way will help build your brand credibility as well as long term relationships with potential clients.

Email 

Send out a personal email to your contacts, especially those you have already had an exchange with. Save a mass email campaign (this is good for a broader reach) for when you simply have too many contacts. Take the time to look up your contacts you would most like to attend your webinar and tell them so. People like to feel recognized and appreciated and reaching out to them one-on-one via email is a fast and easy way to do this. It is sheer flattery which can go a long way. Your email can be a template you put together to use over and over; but add that personal touch. “How was your week?” “Last time we talked…” and so on. Then cut and paste. Even if most of your email is broiler plate, the email is still perceived as you taking the time out of your day and thinking about that person. Priceless.

Our research (and Google Analytics) suggests that we get the most engagement activity on our emails and website on Thursday mornings. We do all email drops by 8 AM Eastern on Mondays, 1 week before the webinar.

Twitter 

So you just started tweeting and you may only have around 30 people following your company. You’re first strategy should be to find out who your most influential tweeters are in your network. Hopefully these are people you have had other interactions with in the industry. If not, find ways to have interactions and conversations. (Refer back to the LinkedIn suggestions.) Leverage these Twitter masters to help you get your message out by giving them something interesting to share with their audience. Again, send out a personal message to them asking them to “help” you share your webinar event. 

Conclusion

There is a whole psychology behind asking someone to do you a favor that works very well, but we can cover that another time. Start preparing for a webinar in advance by keeping your online relationships primed. Make the time to send out a personal message and give your audience something they can benefit from. Let me know how successful this style of “selling” was for you, and any other creative ways you found to engage and drive traffic to your webinar.

Jessica has 9 years of sales and customer relationship experience in the creative agency industry. She provides excellent customer care at RapidScaler. Jessica is one of the first people customers meet at RapidScaler and the one almost every customer goes to when they need something. She is highly organized, anticipates needs, and provides proactive service even before our customers know there is an issue. Not only does she provide excellent customer, she is simply a very pleasant person to work with.

How to Communicate Marketing Technology Needs to IT - Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I discussed a few common misunderstandings between marketing and IT teams that cause marketing integrations to fail, cause marketers to resort to more SaaS tools to get the job done, and cause IT teams to become even more tweaked when they are forced to integrate these SaaS tools.

The following is a list of additional misunderstandings that can be easily addressed by marketers.

IT people don't see the potential dollars like you do.

Every marketing integration project has some ROI objective to be more relevant, make more sales, and increase revenue. Considering this is what PAYS everyone (including IT), it is logical conclusion that these are important projects and should have IT priority. While there is significant truth (and reality) to this, many IT people don't see it this way, hence why they are not in sales and marketing (and many should never be). If you lead with your "demands" then IT people will immediately lump you in with "yet another person or team asking me for something." IT teams already feel under-appreciated. Any potential for an IT team to understand why your project benefits IT and the company has been completely lost in your first "demanding" sentence.

Action Steps - While the ROI is completely evident to you, it may not be intuitive to an IT team. Before you even talk to IT, come up with a list of 3 ways in which IT will benefit from your project. Lead your conversation with those benefits. I have worked with some companies that actually bonus IT teams based on overall sales goals and numbers, enabling IT to participate in the success of a project they have launched. Dare to think outside the box. That is VERY motivating. Many IT people are on fixed salaries and feel snubbed when they kill themselves to provide a technology and see no rewards from their hard work.

IT teams are not dreamers, they are practical.

Many marketers request integrations that are so impossible and impractical that not only do they run IT off, but it forces IT teams to lose respect for the marketing team. The thought that goes through IT's head is "Does this person have any freaking idea what he or she is asking for?"

There is truth to this. I have heard marketers ask for the technology equivalent to "I need you to figure out a way to put an espresso machine on the top of the Eiffel Tower that uses ethanol as a power source and can only grind direct fair trade beans from Sumantra...in 3 days".  Yeah, that makes no sense, people would think you are nuts and probably lose a certain degree of respect for your ability to reason. Many times, this is how marketers present their technology needs to IT and demand it.

Action Step - Preemptive humility goes along way. Start an IT conversation with "Pardon my ignorance guys and tell me if I am nuts here, how feasible is it to integrate our Facebook fan page data with our backend CRM? Is it a 3 day, 3 week, 3 month, or 3 year project?" By demonstrating your practicality here, your project will at least gain a listening and willing ear from an IT team.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these two blog posts have provided some very practical approaches to engaging IT on your marketing integration, analytics, and segmentation projects. Keep in mind that IT teams are highly innovative and intelligent like you, talk to them in a way they understand and they will make you completely unstoppable in your technology initiatives.

How to Communicate Marketing Technology Needs to IT - Part 1

"Why don't I just get up and go get some coffee?", I said to everyone in the conference room. The VP of Marketing and CIO both stopped their very professional jabbing at each other and looked at me stunned. Being "the consultant" for an marketing and IT acceleration company, I was used to being a referee for heated debates between teams. However on that day,  the best course of action was to simply duck and work with whomever was left over after the dust settled.  "No, that's okay. I think we're done here", said the VP of Marketing in complete frustration. The CIO and his two lead developers left the room with their chests lifted and with disdain over the fact that the marketing team "wasted" their time.

"Why do those guys make it so hard for us to get our job done?", said the VP of Marketing in a tired and weary voice.

Having sat in between marketing and IT for years, I have heard these words almost every time I parachute into a company for a few days. With the exception of Zappos (they really do have an awesome culture), highly intelligent marketing and IT teams fail to leverage each others talents over a few simple misunderstandings. Take these off the table in the beginning, and both teams can be empowered to do amazingly innovative things together.

Marketers, here are the top 3 things IT people care about and how to speak to their needs:

1. Resourcing - IT teams keep the entire infrastructure of the organization running. From their perspective, you are one of many groups (sales, support, HR, etc) that require their attention.  Your requirements for data analytics, tools, segmentation, and integration are massively important to the future of the company and sales growth. IT guys don't get this. They literally see you as another organization asking for their time and attention.

Action Step - Acknowledge IT's burden to get stuff done.  Instead of leading with everything you need (like every other group does), ask the IT team how busy they are and seek to understand what is required of them.

2. Security/Compliance/Availability - IT teams are under significant pressure to keep data safe and systems running. This is a VERY hard job in and of itself. When you come at IT teams with any kind of requirement that may even slightly disrupt this balance they have worked so hard for, they will immediately become skeptical and defensive. They may also become offended that you could be so ignorant about data security in your requirements. To a certain degree, this is what they are paid to do. If there is any data breach, they are responsible...not you.

Action Step - Acknowledge IT's burden for security. Seek to understand IT's responsibility for security first. Ask IT about the available data and secure ways to get access to it. Let the IT team know you also respect the need for data security and compliance.

3. Tool Selection - Since marketing teams fail at #1 and #2 above, they often get frustrated and turn to SaaS tools to solve their marketing needs. This is usually without any consultation from IT. The problem here is that most non-IT teams run to a tool without thinking through future integration needs. While the new SaaS based social monitoring tool you been using for 3 months is AWESOME, you come to the conclusion that unactionable data is of limited use. In order for this tool to be more useful, it really needs to integrate with your CRM or email system. 

When you approach IT about this (given everything I have discussed so far), they are understandably livid for multiple reasons. They are being asked to integrate a tool that they had no influence in purchasing, that is going to contend for resourcing, and may or may not introduce a security and compliance risk.

Action Step - If you have done #1 and #2 right, then this should not be an issue. If you get the IT team on your side, they can be extremely helpful in tool selection. They are much better at scoping current and future integration requirements. They can see issues down the road that you can't see. They can get a vision and plan for the integration you will eventually need.

A simple conversation goes a long way...

The next time you want IT to get a marketing project done for you, walk into the CIO's office and say the following:

"I know you are a very busy person and our company has placed a huge burden on your team. I don't want to add any liability to that burden. Could you give me an idea about your current priorities? I have a few projects that will move this company forward, increasing all our bonuses, that will require some IT resources. Right off the bat, I want you to know that I don't want to do anything that will risk our data, put more stress on our systems, or consume your development team. Can I review these ideas with you and you make some suggestions on how we could actually get this done?"

If you think I am living a pipe dream, I said this almost verbatim to a CIO 2 weeks ago before asking to install our vendor appliance in his data center. It took less than 5 minutes to get his approval. 

Making IT Meetings Easy

It is very interesting (and sometimes frustrating) for me to participate in IT conference calls where a bunch of really smart people can't seem to reach consensus on anything. The initial intention of the call was to solve a problem or talk about a technology direction. The organizer presents an agenda, meeting invite, and orchestrates the kick-off of the meeting. From there, these calls descend into complete chaos at different rates depending on the personalities in play. For example, any of the following personality types can be on these calls: "passion guy", "risk averse girl", "need to have it organized guy", "rambler girl", "tangent guy", "big picture girl", and "use acronyms and buzz words that nobody gets guy".

All of these people are highly intelligent and all bring something to the table. The problem is that they are in support, engineering, QA, sales, and marketing. Each has expertise and a vested interest in their slice of the technology. They see the problem through how it affects them and their team. This is a natural and appropriate response for the daily grind, but can be disastrous for brainstorming issues. For example, the backend engineer does not understand why a 22 year old marketing major can't login via SSH and pkill -HUP the application. Likewise, that 22 year old marketing major can't understand that implementing that "Green Button" in the UI will take a complete rewrite of the software code. The support guy freaks out when the professional services guy throws out a "custom work around". The sales team doesn't understand why the product manager can't have every feature built yesterday. If these calls go on too long, they turn into nothing more than product bashing, personal snipes, and power plays.

The following suggestions come from my own experience of both leading and being in the middle of these calls. These are techniques I use and they have been wildly successful in having productive meetings and navigating personalities.

Overcommunicate the context of the meeting

I start every meeting with the purpose and importance (what and why) of the call. From there, I describe in painful detail all history and conversations I have had with people leading up to the call. Moving on, I describe the boundaries of what we should and SHOULD NOT talk about on the call (this one is huge). Finally, I ask for understanding and buy in before we proceed. Does everyone have the right context?

This reduces so many common problems in meetings. For example, by providing the history, a passion guy or rambler (like me) won't go on a 5 minute rant without taking a breath only to realize that their idea was taken off the table weeks ago. For the tangent person, there is recourse to get them back on track when they go off. For the organized and risk averse, they have the structure needed to not panic and participate. The big picture girl won't boil the ocean. The acronym and buzz word guy will not criticize the big picture girl for coming up with a lame phrase like "boiling the ocean".

Lead with options

I try to come into every meeting with an option a, b, and c. These are not final outcomes, but grouping of thoughts. Chances are that you are meeting because there are multiple email threads and conversations tied up into a final outcome. By coming forward with simple options, all loose thoughts are now clearly organized and categorized for the participants. There is a frame of reference and an anchor for conversation. Our brains constantly do this naturally, why not preempt chaos with some organization? My options always include 4 standard sections: overview, reward, risk, and cost.

All subsequent conversation in the meeting is framed around the options. People all have a common reference point. From here, each personality type can exercise their talents, but do it from within the framework of an option. For example, the passionate guy can get riled up about option a. The tangent guy really has nowhere to go and can bounce lots of good ideas within a single option. The risk averse gal can visualize and compare risk across all the options. The big picture gal can now produce more tangible thoughts anchored in a viable option. The acronym guy is locked into using the common verbiage everyone understands.


Ultimately, the options are changed somewhat with the input of the team. Once everyone agrees on the options, then you can exercise the most democratic form of decision making - a vote. Even if someone does not like the option selected, at least they had a say.

Be bullish on follow-up

I have come to the conclusion that I will be the keeper and police officer of action items for other people following a meeting. I will be setup for failure if I send out a summary,  assign tasks to people, and then chase individuals down. In order to manage my own time better and that of others, I immediately send out follow-up meeting invites for one on one or multiple people. I have found that a meeting invite on a peer's calendar is a great reminder for them. It is like pushing a task onto their todo list scribbled in their notepad.

The bottom line here is that meetings can be so much more productive with context and structure. You spend far less time having personality collisions and far more time leveraging the strengths of the people in those personalities. As always, I am sure there is someone smarter than me who has this down in a book or process with a clever acronym. I should introduce him to acronym guy.