Salesforce, a pioneer in delivering business software over the Internet, is turning to social business and collaboration services to expand into new markets and keep its revenue engine running. So it’s no surprise that the company’s Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco this week is a love fest for social networking for business. But behind all the hoopla is a dark side that businesses should pay close attention to.

Salesforce’s New Social Tools

Salesforce unveiled a long list of products Wednesday and highlighted big-name customers like General Electric and Virgin Airlines. The new services are built on top of Salesforce’s core software for managing customer relations and for helping sales and marketing teams be more effective.

Over the coming months, Salesforce customers will have the option of using Chatterbox for managing and sharing files with partners and customers. Chatterbox places Salesforce in competition with Dropbox, Microsoft’s SharePoint and Box, in which Salesforce is an investor.

Other services that will be available in the near future include being able to hold conversations with customers via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and to create and manage marketing campaigns on the sites. Salesforce will also release tools for gathering intelligence on sales leads from Twitter, blogs and YouTube videos.

Market Pressures

Salesforce is hoping all its new products will keep it ahead of larger rivals Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. With such heavyweights in its rearview mirror, Salesforce can’t afford to standstill. It needs to enter new markets in order to continue driving double-digit revenue growth.

The brass ring for all players delivering business software over the Internet is a $49 billion market that grew by 25% over last year, according to Forrester Research. Spending on social business software will grow from $800 million in 2011 to as much as $5 billion in 2016, according to IDC.

Companies Fear Public Social Networks

With so much at stake, Salesforce is pushing hard into the new social business frontier. But what the marketing hype doesn’t highlight is the risks that need to be addressed before customers rev up the vendor’s new services.

The danger of having employees say the wrong thing on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn is real. Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline learned the hard way when it paid $3 billion last year to settle U.S. government allegations that sales reps sold the company’s drugs based on claims not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Avoiding A Calamity

To avoid such catastrophes, analysts recommend a thorough training program for every employee that will be conducting company business on a public social network. “Implementing them (social business tools) isn’t that difficult,” IDC analyst Michael Fauscette, said. “The problem is the tools need to change your business processes and your company culture.”

Employees need to be prepared to do business under the company’s brand in an open environment. Policies have to be clearly stated on what information can and cannot be shared with customers or partners. Workers also need to be taught how to speak on social networks. They need to be aware that communications go far beyond the walls of the corporate office where they are sitting in front of a computer.

While email can also be used to mistakenly release intellectual property or private communications with customers and partners, information posted on a social network travels faster and wider. “You’re no longer shouting it out in the cafeteria, you’re shouting it out at the local mall where anybody can hear,” Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said.

Nothing Is Simple

There is no simple way to introduce new policies and procedures for handling social business and collaboration tools. Changing a company’s culture to be sensitive to the greater exposure will also be difficult. So make sure you are ready before you turn on Salesforce’s new products.

Rising prices will drive housing sales for years to come

Commentary: Forget inflation — we're still in the global deflation event of all time

By Lou Barnes, Friday, September 21, 2012.

Inman News®

Housing market trends image via Shutterstock.

The market response to QE3 has been different than to the first and and second rounds of "quantitative easing." It’s subdued this time.

The initial upward burst in stocks has fizzled, and the run to commodities by those either fearful of inflation or hoping for it has also stalled. The 10-year Treasury note jumped almost to 1.9 percent from summer in the 1.5s, but has now retreated to 1.75 percent.

Only mortgages have behaved as expected, sitting at or slightly below the 3.5 percent all-time low, depending on the deal.

The usual weekly run of data on the current economy shed no new light, but deeper reports on credit and housing did enlighten, as did — may the saints preserve us — news from domestic politics.

Republican columnist David Brooks this week nailed Mitt Romney as behaving like Thurston Howell III, the clueless ascot-throated boob of "Gilligan’s Island." Romney had done poorly while cast as a Wall Street sharpie. Boob is fatal.

Measured by the flow of campaign money, businesspeople have been the largest (only?) segment of the electorate to depart Obama for Romney, and I doubt they have processed Obama’s now likely re-election. What impact might awareness have on expansion and hiring?

A hint at an answer overseas: After his inauguration on May 15, new French President Francois Hollande proposed to cut the 2013 budget deficit by 30 billion euros, about 1.5 percent of GDP. The cut will be funded one-third by spending cuts, one-third by new taxes on business, and one-third by taxes on the rich. Since the announcement, new business in France has suffered its largest drop since the free-fall in 2009.

Every 90 days the Fed releases Z-1, its compilation of every nickel rolling and landing in the U.S. economy. Some good news: The net worth of U.S. households is today only $3.5 trillion below its 2007 level, and up $9 trillion from its 2008 nadir. But 80 percent of the gain has been from stocks, a paper loss and rebound. Home values are still rumbling along bottom, little changed from the initial $7 trillion loss.

Household liabilities have fallen more than $1 trillion, all in the mortgage account. Second mortgages (all types) at first fell slowly from $1.1 trillion in 2007, the pace now accelerating (via foreclosure and short-sale wipeout), down to $813 billion. Trash mortgages crested at $2.2 trillion in 2007, and this fall will drop below $1 trillion.

Mortgages guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie and FHA/VA have been remarkably steady at $5.8 trillion. That pattern requires some thinking. The Fed has bought $1 trillion. The refi churning is a null set. Amortization knocks down the balance, but not much.

Loans for home purchase add to the account, but only as they exceed payoffs from sales. There is no alternate supply of mortgage credit. Those who dream of privatized mortgages might glance at another Z-1 line: Banks have dropped first mortgage holdings by 20 percent since 2007, the remainder only 43 percent of the government-sponsored sum.

The apparent stability in home-mortgage balances overall, outstandings down only from $11.2 trillion in 2007 to $10 trillion today, is misleading.

By all accounts some 20 percent of the remaining balances are underwater. They present both as a future loss and an inert supply not available for new transactions.

The actual, in-practice decline in supply has been on the order of 35 percent, and trying to get a new loan from Fannie makes all borrowers and mortgage bankers themselves feel like new-age Willie Suttons.

Nevertheless, prices of homes are beginning to rise. Some of the rising news is statistical artifact.

The National Association of Realtors reports that the distressed fraction of sales of existing homes fell to 22 percent last month, down from 49 percent in 2009. No matter how analysts try to adjust prices for distress, fewer of those homes selling unquestionably makes price increases look better than they really are for individual homes.

Ignore my quibbling with stats. The one, single patch of sunshine in this economy is prices of homes rising to any extent. Every dime up is a dime less underwater.

And the 5 percent miracle approacheth. Five percent appreciation means that I can at last hire a broker and roll my equity into the new place I’ve needed for years and years. That’s how housing sales numbers will rise, probably for a long time ahead.

QE3 has awakened the inflation worrywarts, led by Richard Fisher, the braying jackass at the Dallas Fed (some of my family are Texans, but not even they can explain why so many down there are compelled to act out the stereotype).

The worriers might spend more time studying data than talking. We are in the global deflation event of all time, inflation itself rolling over again into the danger zone.

Lou Barnes is a mortgage broker and nationally syndicated columnist based in Boulder, Colo. He can be reached at lbarnes@pmglending.com.

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Copyright 2012 Lou Barnes

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By Michael Aneiro

With three California cities opting to file for bankruptcy protection within the past month, many are worrying this could open the floodgates to more municipal bankruptcies. But Citi strategists say the bankruptcy option still brings enough stigma and costs to deter other troubled cities.

Citi notes that the cases of Stockton, San Bernardino and Mammoth Lakes are more or less outliers, with typical municipal issuers tending to be much more financially disciplined. But other California issuers share similar problems, such as weak revenues from property, sales, and personal income tax, as well as high employee salary and pension fixed costs. Citi says California’s Proposition 13, which caps property taxes, has also hamstrung the state.

As this week’s Barron’s wrote, some market observers worry that there’s suddenly less stigma associated with filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the muni equivalent of Chapter 11, which could encourage its use by other cities facing revenue shortfalls and heavy debt loads, or as a tool to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements. Not so fast, argue Citi strategists George Friedlander, Mikhail Foux and Vikram Rai:

We strongly disagree with this view and caution against this option as the cost of a chapter 9 filing remains harsh, with a near-certain lockout from access to capital markets, high litigation costs, and an uncertain outlook for governments and governmental employees once the Bankruptcy judge takes over. Access to capital markets to fund cash flow shortfalls (via BANs/RANs/TRANs) remains critical for maintaining key government functions and continuation of essential services. 

Citi says the spotlight has now shifted to Fresno, Calif., which it says also suffers from a high fixed costs and limited financial flexibility, as well as “excessive exposure” to a fragile economy. While the city has a well-funded pension plan, Citi says its revenue options are limited, forcing an over-reliance on spending cuts at a time when most services are already reduced. Moreover, Citi says long-term labor contracts with the police union have locked in compensation costs “at a level that no longer appears sustainable” amid weak revenue performance.

Despite all this, Citi notes that yields on California state general obligation bonds have yet to show any impact. Citi adds that fears of contagion remain limited and any market impact should remain isolated to weaker credits with specific budget shortfalls. More from Citi:

We believe that contagion on overlapping credits such as counties, school districts revenue bonds backed by “special revenues” resulting from the association with the problem credits could create some attractive values. Both market psychology and rating agency actions on these associated credits could cause trading levels to weaken in a number of cases, despite the likelihood that these credits will generally maintain their capacity to pay debt service. 

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16 Ways to Simplify Your Prospects’ Decision-Making Process

Posted by Ellie Mirman

Tue, Jul 10, 2012 @ 03:30 PM

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In an effort to break through the clutter and get the attention of more potential customers, are marketers going too far? A recent article from Forbes reported that decision simplicity was the number one driver of likelihood to buy, and the impact of simplifying purchase decisions for consumers is 4x stronger than the favored marketing strategy of engagement.

In fact, research company Corporate Executive Board (CEB) also found that a 20% increase in decision simplicity results in a 96% increase in customer loyalty, 86% increase in likelihood to purchase, and 115% increase in likelihood to recommend.

CEB is not the first organization to tout simplicity as a key driver in increasing conversions and sales. MarketingExperiments also advocates for limiting “unsupervised thinking” among your prospects in order to effectively guide more people to conversion. As it relates to landing pages, many marketers have adopted a lot of best practices based on this principle — removing navigation and distracting calls-to-action, keeping forms short, and clearly advertising the value of the offer. But this principle is applicable to all areas of our marketing — by simplifying our marketing, we can illuminate the path to conversion to drive better results.

Here are 16 ways you can simplify your marketing to make your prospects’ decision-making process easier.

16 Ways to Simplify Your Prospects’ Decision-Making Process

1) Add Calls-to-Action

The first place to start is to add a call-to-action (CTA) to your website. On any given web page, you should be able to answer, “What do I want people to do here?” Then, make it clear to your visitor that exact path. Do you want them to call you? Download an ebook and become a lead? Follow you in social media? Tell people exactly what you want, and it’s more likely they’ll end up doing it. Effective calls-to-action use actionable language (e.g. “Download Now”), numbers, a sense of urgency, and stand out among the rest of the page.

2) Limit Distracting Calls-to-Action

On the flip side, you don’t want to overwhelm your prospects with too many calls-to-action. From the visitors’ perspective, suddenly they’re in Times Square with ads all around, and they don’t know where to look or what to do. Rather, you want to create a one-way street — not a 10-way intersection that paralyzes your prospects or helps them tune out your calls-to-action. If you do have multiple CTAs on a page or in a piece of content, make one primary by featuring it more prominently, and when your prospect clicks through to its actual landing page, remove any additional navigation links or CTAs on that page to focus their attention on completing the conversion you want them to.

3) Deliver What’s Advertised

Some sneaky marketers used to do a bait and switch — advertise a raffle for a free iPad, but when someone clicked through, they’d display an ad to buy a car. Any time you deliver on something different from what’s advertised, you not only confuse your leads, but you also generate unqualified leads. If someone’s signing up because they’re interested in iPads, it’s very possible they’re not going to be interested in whatever you deliver that is not an iPad.

4) Tell People What They’re Getting

Any time you’re offering something to your prospects, be clear about exactly what it is. The point of the offer is to give your prospects a reason to engage with you — if they don’t know what it is, why would they bother? Is it an ebook, a webinar, a slide deck? What is the topic covered in your offer?

5) Tell People WIIFM?

Not only do you need to tell people what they’re getting, but you also need to explain why they should care — the value of your offer. In other words, ‘What’s In It For Me?’ (WIIFM?). Any transaction should be an equal (or better) exchange between you and your prospect; for example, they give you their email address in exchange for a free ebook.

6) Don’t Hide Your Pricing Information

Any time I come across a website with no pricing information, I start to think that something is fishy. Either they customize their pricing for every deal individually (in which case, I worry I’m going to get tricked into a worse deal), or the price will be so high it’s out of my range. Either way, I’m not interested in engaging with your company. Don’t withhold your pricing information. Instead, make it easy to navigate to within the products section of your website.

 

 

7) Provide Product Guides (About Your Product and Your Industry)

I (as a prospect) have a decision to make: whether or not to buy your product, or possibly opt for another competing product. I’ll take any information you or anyone else can provide to help me with that decision. Providing product guides — either about your own product or an analysis of the industry and the competing products available — is a great help in supporting your prospects’ evaluation process.

8) Share Recommendations/Testimonials From Customers and Experts

While it’s great to provide your own take on your product and the industry, you are of course biased, so providing any third-party recommendations — from users or experts — is a great way to ease a prospects’ decision to go with your company. At HubSpot, for example, we curate social media threads, blog articles, and case studies from customers and experts and feature them on our website — even on our homepage.

 

 

9) Let People Know How They Can Get in Touch

How can prospects get in touch with you? By phone, through email, via online chat? Make it clear on your website how people can get in touch with you, so those hottest prospects can reach out when they most want to talk with you. At HubSpot, this was a big piece of feedback we heard from our prospects — a lot of people wanted to talk with someone and didn’t know how. As a result, we added our phone number and a way to contact sales in the footer of every web page on our site.

10) Align Navigation With What Your Buyers Are Looking For

As marketers, we can sometimes get lost in our own work and how we discuss things internally, and if this translates into our marketing, it can cause a lot of confusion for your website visitors and prospects. For the content on your website, think about how your buyers speak, think, and what they might be looking for — and align your content and navigation around those revelations.

11) Surface Top-Searched or Top-Visited Content

Aside from surfacing the key sections of your website that your prospects want to navigate to, take a look at the most popular content on your site, and surface that as well. By looking at your most popular content (top-searched, top-visited, etc.) you can understand more about what your prospects are looking for and make it even easier for new prospects to find it. Two great ways to do this is to feature your top-performing offer on your homepage, and list the most popular articles on the homepage of your blog.

 

 

12) Don’t Ignore Questions or Feedback

Sometimes we marketers get tough questions and critical feedback — especially considering prospects’ ease of commenting on blog articles or speaking up in social media. Oftentimes, ignoring these comments can worsen the situation, leaving a prospect unhappy or inciting them to post even more critical comments. Every time a prospect asks a question or provides feedback, you’re given a great opportunity to engage with them and address any questions or issues they have. Be sure to monitor and respond to any blog or social media comments to catch these opportunities to lead more prospects to conversion. There are plenty of free and paid tools available to help you monitor conversations in social media. And if you’re both a HootSuite and HubSpot customer, you can use our closed-loop social integration to directly monitor your leads on Twitter! 

13) Categorize Your Content by Skill Level, Role, Etc.

It’s very likely that you’re already targeting different types of potential customers — various roles, backgrounds, and needs among your buyer personas. Help these personas to self-identify what content and which products are best suited for their particular needs by categorizing and labeling your content. At HubSpot, we label our content by skill level (introductory, intermediate, and advanced — just check out the top of this very article!) and by industry and role (small business vs. marketing teams, non-profit vs. ecommerce, etc.). This helps your prospects find the best content for them more quickly, rather than giving up, getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content we provide, or getting lost on your website.

14) Assign a DRI/Owner for Each Channel/Asset

A DRI is a Directly Responsible Person — an owner for a particular asset. Having an owner for each marketing channel or asset allows you to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. You’ll be more able to evaluate the potential conversion paths, respond to questions from prospects stuck at different stages of the conversion path, and make sure you’re getting the best results from each channel and asset. Here are a few more ideas for structuring an effective marketing team.

15) Pick a Campaign, and Focus All Channels on It

It can be overwhelming to juggle a lot of different offers, channels, and campaigns all at once — both for you as a marketer, and for your prospect as someone following your company. Look for opportunities to combine marketing efforts and focus multiple channels on a single campaign. Not only will you rest a little easier, but you’ll also get better (compounding) results and help focus your prospects on your top campaign.

16) Focus on the 1-3 Metrics That Are Most Important to Your Business

Not only do you want to simplify your prospects’ experience with your company, but you also want to simplify your marketing efforts. This helps you focus your efforts for better results. A key part of that is focusing on a few metrics that are most important to your business, as this will influence your strategy and where you focus your time, your calls-to-action, and other efforts mentioned above. To determine which metrics should drive your strategy, spend some time determining your marketing team’s specific goals, and then identify the top metrics that will indicate success or failure to achieve those goals.