Blitztime is a genius concept. It takes the benefits of traditional networking and the benefits of online networking and puts those benefits together in an online/phone speed networking environment.

I've been sending it around to people and encouraging others to check out their weekly open networking events. I've also been talking to the founders. I'd love nothing more than to take the time and promote the hell out of a Blitztime event, like I did with Art, Wine and Networking, but given the fact that I have more leads than I can possibly call, doing that is not a priority right now.

What I do plan to do, in the future, is leverage Blitztime to create interaction among my clients so that they can help each other out in their online business growth activities. Having 50 business owners and marketing professionals working together networking online will be a powerful force in the social media world. But, that's a few months off. And the plan isn't fully plotted. But, Blitztime will be a part of it.

In the meanwhile, you should check out Blitztime and attend a SpinCycle event.

Linda Sevier, PC4Media partner, web designer, and all around great person, wrote a great summary after she attended one. I offered to post her thoughts up on my blog:

Have you ever heard about something new and thought to yourself  "Wow!  What a great idea!  It is so simple and obvious, why didn't I think of that?".  I had that kind of experience today.  I was invited to a Blitz event (Spin Cycle: Business Networking Made Easy) at BlitzTime.com.  It is a new way to network over the phone, in the comfort of your office!  I followed the emailed instructions to call and logged my computer into the website.  After a quick explanation, I was networking!  I was spun into one on one conversations with other networkers.  A time clock on the web site kept track of each "spin cycle" and the profile of each person I networked with was displayed automatically on my computer.  No squinting trying to read a name tag or worse yet, remember their name and company after the introduction.  Will it replace face to face networking?  Not any time soon but it is something I will do again in addition to traditional networking events.  If you are up for a new experience, take BlitzTime.com for a spin!  

I sent out an invitation to some people to write guest posts on my blog. Ray Schavone, owner, founder and chief bottle washer (literally) of Deja Brew, a brew-it-yourself beer making business, wrote an excellent how to article on starting a brew your own beer store. There's also lessons for anyone starting a business:

So you want to start your own business? Why? It's a lot more work than you might suspect. You'll have a jerk for a boss, and get to deal with everything, EVERYTHING, related to your business. You won't be able to call in sick, or take time off because the day is nice. And nobody, nobody, will sweep the floor as well as you will. Everyone else in your company will be an employee, and you know how much you care as an employee.

I started my own business over 10 years ago. Here's a couple of things I learned about starting a business.

Business plan
It starts with a business plan. I'd strongly encourage, urge, or cajole you to start with the Small Business Development Center. You can find them at your local business college or through your local Chamber of Commerce. Or, you can locate on of the centers through the SBDC website; http://www.asbdc-us.org/

This is a free service btw.  Well, you pay for it through your tax dollars, but why not use it? Their goal is to help entrepreneurs realize their dream of starting a small business. Did I mention it was free?   They ran me through the paces to get my business plan to the point where I could qualify for an SBA guaranteed loan.

Funding
If you've got all the funding you need, you can skip this step. I brought my plan to about 20 banks before I found one that was interested. It took Walt Disney 297 banks to find one to fund his Disney Land project. So don't get discouraged. I had to put roughly 50% of my own funds into the financing. They very much want you to have some skin in the game. Last thing about funding; you need to have enough operating capital set aside to get you to profitability. That's why most small businesses fail. Not because of bad ideas, or bad business people, but they were under funded, and couldn't make it to profitability.

Location
Our business needed a brick and mortar location, and we had to have a lease in place before we could get the funding. As they say; location, location, location. It made a huge difference for us. We get about 35,000 cars a day driving by our location.

Build out
You may be able to move right into a space and go from there. We needed to build out. We were lucky, it was empty warehouse space, and the landlord was willing to cover the cost of the build out, as they were building out a couple of other store fronts at the same time. If you've got to build out, stay on top of your contractors. If the ideas in your head can easily transfer to paper and diagrams, then great, if not, you need to be there. I had great contractors. I was still there every day to answer their questions whenever a change had to be made.

Town approvals
We needed to get town approvals for our business. We needed a Zoning board variance, and Board of Health approval. Don't be shy; get in front of these folks early on. I did and found them to be incredibly helpful. It may have been dumb luck on my end. But, if I can relate a comment made to me by the BOH when they were reviewing my plan; "I just wish that everyone who needed our approval to open a business in town would do what you did. Get into us early and discuss what they want to do, and let us suggest changes It would save them time and money"

Occupancy
Since this was new space, we needed permits from the plumbing, BOH, and fire department. The fire department wanted additional sprinklers. We had to get the plumber back to do the job, and then the fire department back for the approval. This caused us a two week delay. See my note on town approvals above. We did not engage with the fire department prior to completing our plumbing and build out.

Opening
We had a "soft" opening a couple weeks prior to our Grand Opening. This allowed us to test our system and processes to get them correct before we opened to the public.

Advertising
I'm not much of an advertising guru. But, as soon as the sign went up, it was like an invitation was sent out to every advertising sales person in the area. Ugh..  We have a unique business. It's a brew-on-premise. We were the first in Mass., the 2^nd in New England, and about the 50^th in the US of A. So, I felt we were newsworthy. As the barrage of advertising execs started through the door, my response was simple; run a news story about us and how unique we are. If it drives phone calls and generates interest, then we know you are a good advertising vehicle for us. Some took us up on the offer, others didn't. The best advertising is word of mouth.  

Customers
Love your customers. Yeah, they can be a pain in the neck sometimes. We have no problems telling them that when they are and that they need to chill out and have a beer. We've made some great friends through our business. I wouldn't have it any other way.

HubSpot just launched an 11 page free internet marketing eBook. If you're a small business owner, marketing or sales professional and are frustrated with not generating enough leads from your website, you should go read it online or download it.

Here's the sections: 

1. How the Internet Has Transformed Business
2. Outbound vs Inbound Marketing
3. B2B Marketing Research
4. Organic vs Paid Search
5. On Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
6. Off Page SEO or Link Building
7. Starting a Blog
8. Convert Website Visitors into Leads
9. Web Marketing Analytics
10. Other Internet Marketing Resources.  

I started reading Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Work Week over the summer.

I've tabled the goal til 2009, as I'm really just starting to build my business so that growth and the workload is sustainable. I am no longer "doing the work" anymore, as I was in 2006. So, I just focus on bringing in new clients. I stay in touch to make sure they are making progress towards their goals, but getting them going and making progress is other people's responsibility.

It's nice. Very nice. Life is simpler and manage-able. 

My goal is to bring on 240 clients this year, which involves me working my butt off. By the end of the year, though, I want the majority of my business to come from referrals from clients. At that point, I'll be able to get a lot closer to working 4 hours a week.

Right now, I'm probably working about 80 hours/week.

And I'm thinking that I need to figure out a way to outsource some simple tasks. I was never good at "simple tasks" anyways. 

I started talking to the founders of AskSunday about a month ago. It seems like a very reasonably priced service which enables anyone to outsource all kinds of tasks. 

Here's a video about them:  

Marketing Automation is the topic du jour in the marketing world. Aweber has been the pioneer allowing marketers to segment "types of buyers" and then setup "drip email marketing campaigns" that educate buyers about how to solve xyz problem [usually] using the marketer's abc solution.

There's many more new solutions out there that are much more sophisticated now. More expensive too.

Marketing Automation is smart. Usually, I think it makes the job of salespeople easier if the prospect can communicate their problems, and are confident that your solution solves their problems - going into the sales process. Marketing automation gets your prospects up to speed.

At HubSpot, we have prospective clients with multiple employees that are subcribed to our newsletter, attended several webinars, downloaded our white papers, visited our product and pricing page, left 4 comments on our blog, visited our site a total of 10 times and filled out 6 forms over 3 months. When we call [or rather: they call us], as you could imagine, they're pretty much ready to buy.  

And I think there is a rule in sales that says something like, "When the buyer says they're ready to buy, it's time to shut up". Right Rick? Dave? Al? 

Regardless.. The topic of Marketing Automation is top of mind for many marketers.  

I even had a local realty franchise owner tell me he wanted to do marketing automation. To which I asked:

• How big is your email list?
• How many people sign up for your email list every month?

His answers were low hundreds and a few every month. He's not a candidate for marketing automation. Marketing automation should be done by people who have many more leads than they can handle and can't find any other way to figure out who the sales people should call first.

I also asked the realtor:

• Are your sales cycles long - involving multiple types of decision makers each with different agendas, concerns and challenges?
  
• Do you sell different products to different types of buyers? Are you selling one thing to engineers and another to the CTO? Are you selling one product to people in the auto industry and another to people in the aerospace industry?
• Do you have to educate your buyers before they're ready to buy?
  

He answered "No". Again, he's not a candidate for marketing automation. Marketing automation is good if you need to educate your buyers with bite sized chunks of information over time. If your sales cycle is short and only 1 or 2 people are involved in the buying decision, you don't need marketing automation. Marketing automation isn't going to close more deals for you. (Better salespeople might.) 

Just to drive the point home, I asked a few more questions:

• What types of things are you doing online that will get a prospect to come back to your website? Are you writing blog posts where they can leave their thoughts? Are you doing regular webinars that they can attend? Are you publishing white papers or articles they can sign up to download?  Do you have new promotional offers they can sign up to receive? New Press Releases they can read?
  
• How often are you doing all of this stuff?
  

He said, "My website really needs some work. I even have trouble editing what I have now, let alone adding things to it. I know that I'm not getting all the leads I could be getting because I don't have anything to offer them to get them to come back to my site." Again, he's not a candidate for marketing automation.

I stopped there. I recommended he use Constant Contact as that would be a better solution for him for email marketing. Besides that, I recommended that he should just focus on getting more traffic to his website and converting more of his visitors to leads, so that his agents would have more people to call and he'd have more people to send his email newsletter to.

Their lead to deal conversion rate isn't the problem. It's that they don't have enough leads.  So, marketing automation is not going to solve their most pressing issue. Improved PPC performance, SEO, blogging and more lead conversion events such as webinars, promotions and downloadable articles (eg "how to lease commercial real estate") are what's needed. 

They don't need to do online marketing automation. They just need to start doing more online marketing. And start measuring what works. And what doesn't.

Are YOU ready for Marketing Automation?  

Mike Langford, at our seminar the other day, was talking about networking for small business owners. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "network with people who have already achieved what you want to achieve".

I couldn't agree more. I also like to network with people who are equally ambitious and dedicated as I am too. It keeps me sharp and positive. 

At HubSpot, I've never been around as functional, dedicated and extremely intelligent group that is this large. I've worked with some of the smartest and dedicated people I know at other places. But, EVERYONE at HubSpot has a passion for making themselves, their team, the company and their clients successful. It's inspirational and motivational.

However, of all the people I hang around with, the smartest ones that I know are my friends from WPI. My buddy, Darryl Pollica, is leading the development of fuel cell systems at a one of the leading fuel cell companies in the world. My buddy Josh Brotherton leads implementation of biopharmaceutical process control systems for majorly important biopharmaceutical companies. (And beer companies too.) My buddy, Jeremy Olszewski, is VP in charge of about 60 people at Fidelity's Acturial Services group. He's an actuary with a personality, although we're still working on his dance moves. 

And Seth. There's Seth Popinchalk. Seth is the man. He's one of the most intelligent people I know. Not just at his job. But, he's a role model. He inspired me through some times in my early twenties when I was pretty lost. And he's always been a step ahead of me in terms of making big life decisions. He's the guy that goes first and reports back. He's an amazing husband, dad and he's super smart at all things physics and math. He's one of the most curious smart people I know, constantly tinkering with things. Well, he's been telling me he's been tinkering with his blog for the last six months. And he finally launched it. It's quite technical. So, I'm sure you might not get what he's writing. My physics and differential equations, etc are a bit rusty too. So, I don't think that I'll read it regularly.

Nonetheless... he seems to be showing promise among math bloggers and his first post has 34 comments already!

So, maybe I'll have him write a guest post about "what i takes to start a blog at a big and booming company" like Mathworks. 

Yesterday, I gave a talk about how to generate leads using linkedin and other online networking activities. 

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This morning, it looks like LinkedIn has launched a nice redesign of their site. It took me a few minutes to get used to it. But, after clicking around, I think it really works. It's more intuitive, and organizes things a lot better. It seems that a lot more capabilities and information are easier to find now and are a few less clicks away. (Another fan of the new look.)

Yesterday, Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Co-founder launched a group on LinkedIn called Internet Marketing Mavens. If you consider yourself an internet marketing maven or aspire to be one, you should request membership. 

Why You Should Join LinkedIn.
Unless your company primarily services teenagers or college students, more of your prospective clients and current clients are on LinkedIn than any other network [In the US atleast].  I'm not saying they're using it well [or are any more likely to respond to your email or take your phone call]. But, they are there. [Where else are there that many of your prospects in one place?] Some of them might be on Facebook or Myspace and I'm sure you could attend conferences where more of them are.

But, no matter what you sell or who you sell to, LinkedIn is the domain of people with buying power inside the home and inside the company. And it's 24/7 and tells you who knows who. (Still not convinced? Here's another good argument.) 

What I Wish LinkedIn Would Do Differently
Allow more unfettered comunication. Their business model is dependent on charging individuals for the privelege of communicating with their personal networks. Long term, this is not sustainable. It's the equivalent to a tax that discourages commerce.

LinkedIn (and us) would be better served if they enabled more communication and created other ways to add value. 

The greatest thing that LinkedIn did for allowing people to meet new people, was start their question/answer functionality.

Their group functionality needs a little work, though. It merely allows you to join a group. It's kinda like joining the chamber of commerce just to be in the business directory. Yeah. It's cheaper than the phonebook, but the real value of joining a group is that the group provides opportunities for people to meet new people through committees, volunteer opportunities and events. LinkedIn should, at a minimum, launch a premium group service that allows organizers to launch a forum, publish some events and send bulletins to members. The groups' page should also show network updates, job posts, question/answers that anyone in the group has published. 

• Why does sales think all the leads are so crappy?
• How come it is so hard to measure all my different marketing programs?
• How can I use a Blog to better market my company?
• How valuable is my web traffic?
• What do all these web stats actually mean for my business?

At WhizSpark, I attempted to apply engineering to event promotion. I did it pretty well. Promoting a successful networking event, I found, was just a matter of getting enough people with a vested interest to invite their contacts. If I had 20 people promoting it, it seemed to always work. When I had a 100 people promoting an event, we had several hundred people in attendance. Eventually, I built up a really good email mailing list and depending on the event, all I had to do was send an invitation. Of course, the bigger the mailing list, the better the results. HubSpot conducts online marketing webinars all the time with several hundred people in attendance. 

Event Promotion is Predictable. Measurable. Engineerable.

In a similar fashion, sales has always been pretty scientific. If a salesperson contacts enough prospects, they'll make enough sales. Depending on the sales cycle, number of prospects touched, # qualified, and historical conversion percentages... sales should be predictable. Measurable. Engineerable.

Shouldn't advertising be the same way?

Obviously, the engineers at Google thought advertising should be. And they created Adsense. And made online advertising measurable and pretty damn scientific. Certainly Engineerable.

Shouldn't marketing be measurable too? It seems to me that measurable marketing is the next frontier.But, how do you measure SEO, blogging, webinars, activity on Digg or LinkedIn, leaving comments on other blogs?

Isn't this stuff more art than science? No. Not at all. I'm not saying that creativity isn't necessary. And these activities should be treated as opportunities to meet, interact with and educate potential prospects. Not as places to blast your positioning statements or litter with links. I'm just saying that a marketer should put their right brain on too.  

So, how do you go about measuring it? What are the important criteria?If I take a very web centric view, here's the questions I'd want to answer: 

• How much qualified traffic can I possibly get to visit my website?
  
• How much qualified traffic am I getting now? How much traffic are my competitor's getting?
• How much of my traffic is converting? Notice I didn't say lead. I think some conversions don't warrant a sales call. For example, someone might sign up for an email newsletter or leave a comment on a blog.
  
• How much traffic is converting into a lead? I'd qualify a lead as someone who registers for a seminar/webinar, downloads a white paper, or more explicitly requests someone to contact them.
  
• What marketing activities cause conversion events? If someone signs up for an email list, then attends a webinar one month later, I'd say that the webinar is a marketing event that should be done again. If webinar x causes 24% of your site visitors or email list members to convert, and white paper y causes only 2%, then do more webinars.
  If blog post z garners 15 comments from 25O RSS reads with 4 resulting in a repeat site visit and other conversion event after viewing your product description page... than blog post z.1 is something that should write. Similarly, activity by marketing or anyone else in a company, that happens on external blogs, social media and social networking sites, should be measured too.
  

• What marketing activities are generating highly qualified leads?
• What sources of leads are converting at the highest rate in the shortest amount of time?

• What sources of leads are buying our most profitable products?
• What sources of leads are repeat buyers/ bring in clients that are retained the longest?
• If I spent x amount of time + y amount of dollars on marketing to z lead source and z lead source converted into client buying revenue r  and profit p producing product and client stayed for n years, what is my true customer acquisition cost?
  
• What's my most profitable marketing activity? Which marketing activities are not as profitable?

• What marketing activities are best for the bottom and top lines of the business?
• How much can I grow the business if I invest x dollars into marketing activity z?
  

I have about 600 subscribers that I've accumulated over the years. Many I know personally. Many I don't. But, most are either people in the tech biz or small to mid sized business owners. I started small and I've stuck with it. Like anything, it's not easy and it takes committment. 

Small & Mid Sized Business Owners and Marketing Professionals who are considering starting a blog are usually hesitant for a lot of reasons. Most of them very valid.

1. They're afraid of how much work it's going to be. And they're already strapped for time.
   
2. They don't know if they'll be able to write interesting stuff. 
3. They don't quite understand how it will help their business grow.
   
4. They don't know how to grow their readership.
   
5. They don't know how to get one set up on their website or are afraid it's going to cost a lot of money to do it.
   
6. They're afraid that there will be more people that criticize them in their comments than will complement them.
   
7. It's not really something that people in my line of business do. (I hear this a lot from financial and legal people.) 
8. If you have any other reasons, please share them in the comments. 

However, I think the biggest reason not to start a blog, is because they don't know how to get started. I usually tell them to find interesting blogs, start subscribing and reading them via a feedreader. Then, start leaving comments on those blogs. Eventually, you'll write a really long comment and you'll realize that you should post your thoughts to your own blog instead of in someone else's comments.

But, some people still hesitate. So, I have an offer for any business owner, sales manager, web manager or marketing manager that wants to take me up on it.

If you have some insight and can write a genuinely educational article (on any topic) about your product, service, business or whatever, you're invited to write a guest post on my blog. You can even link to your website.

There's no charge. There's no catch. Your post will have to pass a little bit of editorial review and you must lean more towards educational than promotional. But, all you have to do is apply by filling out this form.