This is a really big move. Google just officially launched their Google Apps software product.  At launch, they already have 1.75M companies using the software. Who knows how many of those are using the free "standard edition" vs a paid one. Regardless, that's a ridiculous install base which will upsell themselves when they add new employees.

This is aimed squarely at Microsoft's sweet profit spot. No doubt Google will continue to add capabilities to the suite. Unlike Microsoft, Google has no monopoly on desktop software to protect. So, while Microsoft continues to tell themselves that people want some strange integrated version of desktop software + online services, Google will eat their shorts.

The lesson for any business (not just software businesses) is that Google started with a free version of all of these products for consumers. This drove massive adoption. They, then launched a freemium version of Google Apps which again drove massive adoption. Now, they're launching the paid version in full. This process lowers the barrier to trial and the time between trial and satisfaction. This reduces so much friction in the marketing and sales process.  

This is a model for business building.

Their cost of customer acquisition (COCA) must be next to nothing. Their lifetime value (LTV) must be through the roof. And their cost of support is probably minimal.

Although this is classic Innovator's Dilemma product management (entering the established market), I think this is the smartest move Google has made since they cloned and improved their Overture with Adwords.

What I find really interesting is that they actually let people contact sales reps. (In the screenshot above, you can see it says "contact corporate sales". (It's notoriously difficult to ever get a person on the line at google, even if you're spending thousands of dollars per month on adwords.)

Not that Google has a reputation for rewarding sales professionals as much as their developers, selling Google apps is probably one of the few jobs I'd consider other than the one I have now.

You should insert customres, clients, etc for "users" in this article. It's easier to apply these lessons to your business if your a software provider. But, I'd argue that every company should be thinking about how to create or use software to capture processes between customers and your company. In short, everyone should be thinking like a software company. I bet there's a software company in your industry that is thinking about this stuff. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about how software that faciliates a processes by lots of people can be used to extract massive amounts of data that can be used to further improve a process or make reccomendation for other users. 

In other words, as we move our processes to web based software that is used by 1,000s or Millions of people, can the data be used strategically?

As an example, Google has a really interesting new solution to Captcha (Definition of Captcha.). Whenever, you're completing a form on the web and you're asked to enter a string of letters that are usually very difficult to read, that is Captcha. Lately, those strings of letters are becoming harder and harder to read. In fact, I've given up several times lately, as some have become nearly impossible to read. 

Google has a really interesting solution to that. They've taken their vast libary of photos and ask people to orient them upright to prove that they're a human. This alone doesn't seem all that genius. It's kind of a natural obvious idea. But, what's really interesting is that they are quickly creating a library of photos with directional information attached. Again, not too crazy cool. Most people probably publish photos upright when they publish them to the web. However, what google has discovered is that with many photos, people don't always agree what is upright. For many photos it's impossible to tell which is upright. So, Google is tapping the collective wisdom to determine which photos have obvous orientation and which don't.

Again, this might not be all that useful beyond the purposes of creating a very cool and easier to use Captcha system. But, it certainly demonstrates the point about how data from user input can be aggregagated from a large number of people and used to make an application easier or more powerful for the next person that comes along to use it. 

This isn't too far from what Google has done to rank websites. They take the liknks embedded in the web by humans to determine what web pages are most authoritative.  But, with this system, they are building data that isn't available to anyone with a crawler, like links are. In fact, just like their ad network that determines what ads to display based on click through rate, this system takes user data to improve the system.  This creates a competitive advantage for the system. It could even be called designing "lock-in" into a system.

I believe that data aggregation of user behavior and the lessons extracted from that data to improve the system will be a significant competitive advantage in next phase of web based software.

Do you have any interesting early proof of this in other systems? 

I'm still alive.

This might be the longest stretch of time that I haven't written on my own blog. 

I've been writing over at the HubSpot Online Marketing Blog pretty much weekly. Not that I don't love all of you, but the audience is much bigger over there: 10,000 readers. And no matter how bad my articles are, they usually get a handful of comments. Since I love the attention and the instant feedback, I'll continue blogging over there.

The real reason that I haven't been blogging over here is because I'm trying to maximize the ROI of the time I spend.

I've taken on two new roles at HubSpot. I'm still in the sales group, but I'm our first sales engineer; helping our 25+ quickly growing sales team when they need technical support, as well as making sure that we're properly setting expectations before passing a client over to our customer team. I'm also managing the creation of our partner program for internet marketing agencies, which involves working across our customer, sales and marketing teams. Both of these activities represent high potential for me and HubSpot. And both are pretty much full+ time gigs. 

Although I'm itching to do something on my own again (I have a really good idea about a book), HubSpot offers too much opportunity right now. Not only are we adding customers and growing our team, we're really helping small businesses generate an ROI from their online marketing activities. 

I was thinking about this the other day. Recently, I've been getting a bunch of referrals from people who are not my clients. For one reason or another, they haven't become a client yet. However, they are in love with what we do at HubSpot, recognize the value we provide and continue to refer people. I'll call anyone that has expressed a need or interest in my service.  However, these referrals are rarely as qualified as a referral I receive from a client.

A note that Rick Roberge wrote to a prospect about "referrals from clients" caught my attention: 

You asked yesterday how you could help me. Honestly, you can't. We met through an introduction, but the intro came from my client. Client's can refer. If you made a referral and they asked you, "What has Rick done for you?" What can you say? "Nothing. I don't need him." "Nothing. I can't afford him." "Nothing. I don't like him." I refer my clients and they refer me. I become an integral part of my client's business. We over-help each other and we deserve it.

It's very true. People who aren't your clients aren't really equipped to refer you the right prospects.  Why do you think that is?

I asked Tony Cole, sales development expert, to answer a few questions about hiring sales people. He recently launched a webinar appropriately named "How to  Avoid Salespeople Hiring Mistakes."

1. Why is hiring sales people so difficult?
Hiring sale people is not hard. Hiring the right ones is hard. Why? Too
few good sales people. Poor processes in place to separate pretenders from
contenders. Desparation to hire somone. Wrong profile used for the actual
role.

2. Do people tend to hire salespeople that are like them? If they were
successful, why is that a bad thing?

Success is not always duplicatable based on why one person is deemed
successful. You have to look at criteria to succeed currently and then
determine if the successful person doing the hiring achieved success based
on that criteria or did they get lucky or have an unfair advantage.

3. Are there ways to predict whether a salesperson will perform without
interviewing them?
Certainly a pre hire assesment will help. But it is not a substitute for
all the other steps required in an effective hiring process.

A lot of small businesses never get started link building.  I wrote a post the other day on the HubSpot blog which describes different methods for link building. Since not all link building methods deliver the same amount of results and since some link building methods are slightly out of reach for newbie internet marketers,  I described how a newbie link builder can go from 9th, 10th, 11th and senior year by gradually adopting all available link building methods.

The article got a lot of great comments and a bunch of people said they really liked the high school grades analogy.  The article was selected as a top seo/sem blog article for September by the Small Business Search Marketing blog.

So, what does this have to do with link building being sexy? 

Go watch this video and skip to 20:12 (20 minutes 12 seconds)

I don't read Seth Godin's blog. He already gets too much attention. But, Rick Burnes shared this with me in google reader.

From Seth's blog:

Everyone isn't going to be a leader. But everyone isn't going to be successful, either.

Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn't mean they're in charge, it doesn't mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we've got.

 

When I ran my own company, it was easy to lead both internally and externally.  A big reason I started my own Company was because I was frustrated with the company I was working at.  I left a large bureaucratic company because I knew that it'd be 15 years before I could accomplish anything... maybe. The Company was too busy protecting what it had and that resulted in people protecting what they had. I'll never work for an organization like that again.

As part of HubSpot, the dynamics are much different than running my own bootstrapped startup or working at a large old company.  Since I feel that we are changing the way the world markets, I am a part of creating something bigger than I ever could have created before. On the other hand, I don't get to make decisions. I still strive to lead where I can by helping my clients, people on my sales team and picking projects where I know I can affect significant change both for the company, clients and partners.

Like Godin, I believe that leadership is granted when an individual takes initiative to change things. Small successes along the way add up to amazing opportunities. 

From Ghennipher:

Some social media marketing detractors speak against the need for a professional standard to this medium since its ruled by customers. But as a consultant, I look at things from both the business' and the customer's viewpoint. Businesses are completely like a fish out of water and frustrated when they see customers lamblasting their brand all over social networks. So they generally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their interactive agency to create more digital advertising, or bravely create social network accounts and sometimes anonomously get involved in a negative discussion about their brand and try to change opinions - unknown and with no authority, so often to be found out - heaping even more dirt on a struggling brand. Don't think this won't happen with you or your clients - some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

I'll be speaking at the New England Business Expo. About 3k people from all over Central New England attend the show w/ 150+ exhibitors. I'll be giving a talk titled, "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Online and Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine"

You can register for it on the New England Business Expo website.

If you are a CEO or sales manager, I recommend you attend Frank Belzer's talk, "Are your salespeople driving you crazy?"

Tailored to women, I recommend you attend Deb Penta's "Create Your Personal Brand" and Jeanne Worrick's "Sell Like a Girl"

Considering that I've been passionate about social software since 2004, you wouldn't think you'd ever see a headline like that on my blog, ha?

Via a tweet from Ellie Mirman, I read an article written by Chris Brogan,  a force behind  adoption of social media in business.

His article was about how social media isn't that important... in the scheme of things... in most people's lives. And that the people living in the social media world need to remember that. 

A specific paragraph in his post inspired me to echo his sentiments:

I met a master salesman this year who sells products that cost more than double my annual salary. He's reasonably new to social media and the web, but he could teach me more about qualifying, prospecting, nurturing, and closing a sale than I could about blogging. 

I totally agree with Chris. In most people's worlds, social media doesn't impact them. It probably won't impact them significantly for atleast another year or so, even if they adopt use of it today. 

If they don't adopt now,  though... when their buyers become the 25 year olds of today, they'll be in trouble then. But right now it's not that important. 

What is important is that smart people like the salesman mentioned above adopt and use these sites and technologies and can teach us how to apply hard won business lessons to them. 

There are many inexperienced "entrepreneurs" that I know first hand, who seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of social media, trying to make a quick buck. They'd be served well if they took the time to learn that their MBA and youthful energy will be unlikely to deliver them Zuckerberg status. They'd be well served by learning how to "help people solve real problems" and "to act always in the best interest of their clients" like I'm sure the salesman mentioned above knows how to do.