Trebling sales leads at IBM Cognos: Interview with John Blackmore

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Trebling sales leads at IBM Cognos

February 2011 interview conducted by Gerry McGovern with John Blackmore, Senior Manager for IBM Web Demand Generation

Gerry McGovern: You did 3 times better than the industry average for achieving quality leads on the Cognos website. What was the single most important thing you did to achieve that?

John Blackmore: All of our marketing decisions on the Web are guided by five basic principles. I don't think these principles are particular to Web marketing-they're useful for all marketing tactics. The first was: "Lead generation is job one."

I think deciding what our Website was meant to do was the first and most important step to achieving results. For us, it led to a host of other easy decisions-if lead generation is job one, who is the easiest person to get a lead from? Answer, the warm prospect. Therefore, we could design a Website geared towards a person who had a business problem and believed what we offered could solve it. We could "de-focus" from the tire-kickers, the partners, the media, etc. It also meant that content had a business purpose as well as a visitor purpose. It allowed us to have reasonable discussions with people who wanted things on the page-when it didn't help lead generation we had a defendable rationale.

Your Website doesn't have to be about lead generation, but it should have a business purpose. It could be deflecting help calls. Or soliciting online donations. Or providing online services to citizens. The main thing is, and it's our first principle-know what you want to do.

You talk about web visitors being "real people" and not just "users". What do you mean by that?

Web visitors are often treated as second-class citizens. They're not serious people. They're hippies. They're ne'er do-wells. I like to think of Web visitors in a real-world rather than virtual- world way. Imagine you're running a GAP store and five different people walk in the door every minute of every day (even midnight). You'd be overjoyed! Taking a page from Gerry McGovern, once they walk into your store, would you try to talk to them all about the GAP and why it's a great company? No, they're already in your store. If they wanted to buy a pair of jeans they'd tell you. And then, you'd help them get that pair of jeans and make the transaction.

In Web marketing, we often work with people who see Web visitors as an abstraction rather than actual humans. I use the GAP test from above. For instance, you will often have fellow marketers wanting to flood your Website with offers to sign up for a physical event happening months from now. To them, an Event is the only useful marketing interaction, perhaps because it's something you can touch. That's not real-people -GAP behavior. You wouldn't say to a person in the GAP looking at jeans, "Why don't you wait three months, go to a store 100 miles away, and then we will talk to you about our jeans."

Web visitors, your Web traffic, are one of your most valuable marketing assets.

Your fellow marketers may also treat your Web leads as second-class leads. Part of the thinking is that the lead is too easy to get and is thus of little value. The person didn't drive downtown to a hotel in the morning. We didn't host a breakfast with a speaker. My response-If someone buys a pair of jeans from the GAP Website, do we get 50 cents on the dollar or do we get the full dollar?

I will say that our Web lead pipeline did have a slightly lower conversion- to -revenue rate than Push marketing. But the difference was about 3 -4 percentage points. And I can tell you that our lead development reps, each morning, would turn to their Web leads first and make calls based on "Contact me" and key Web-offered demos. And they were calling real people.

Would it be true to say that you're more focused on converting the people who are already coming to your website rather than building traffic volume?

I think one of the hardest things to do is generate real traffic (outside of paid search) and change your traffic profile. Web is "Pull" marketing. Your low-hanging fruit is working with what's already coming in your door. As I say, with 5 people a minute, you can keep pretty busy. Early on, we built a marketing funnel model with traffic at the top, then moving down the funnel, the people who clicked on an offer, then the people who completed the form, and then the people who became validated leads. While we were trying to build the traffic, we realized that efficiency gains in those other steps would mean more to the bottom line.

You had some interesting experiences with search engine optimization. For example, even though you managed to rank extremely high for certain keywords, it didn't necessarily result in an increase in the number of visits. Could you talk about that and your other SEO experiences? We did try to change our traffic-improve it-through SEO. Now, I'd rather win a term than lose it; I think Web people need to be quite competitive. Our team spent a lot of effort, with a wonderful search partner, to win terms such as "business intelligence". Lots of competition, really tough term. Well, after about ten months, we won it. Number one on Google! We expected the traffic flood gates to open up, after all, there were 1000s and 1000s of searches on this term. What we saw was perhaps an increase of maybe 100 per day-nothing game-changing.

My take-and no quantitative data on this, moreso a hunch- is that people searching on a generic term are looking for 3rd party sites and shy away from vendors. If you're searching on "family sedan" you're more likely to go to Consumer Reports or the like than Toyota or Ford. If you search on "Camry" you're ready to go to Toyota.

We continue to see this behavior-we're #1 for scorecarding software, scorecarding, and other generic terms. We don't get a ton of traffic.

I think a reasonable rule of thumb for a company is to aim to get 30% of your traffic from search. Most of that 30% will come from searches on your Brand and Branded terms.

Now, if you're a small company, anything additional is great, so perhaps that is where this really matters. But I would say the psychology works even more against you, as visitors are probably more reluctant to go to a company they've never heard of for a generic term. You'd be better off with content network ads on a 3rd party site.

You've found that taking the time to test headings can yield a significant return. Tell us a little about that.

Headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are important for search…and they're important for the real person. We bastardized a page from the Gerry McGovern playbook for this-we called the term that brought someone to a page the page's "careword." Wherever that word was on the page, the person's eye was drawn to it. Naturally, headings were places for the careword. So, if you navigated to a page on the topic "scorecarding" you wanted to see the term. It helps the person move around the page and find the important sections.

Another example of the use of column headings…we focused on generating demand from the right hand column of the page. Typically, we had put a heading in that column called "Resources" or "Whitepapers." We found that simply calling it "Scorecarding resources" if it was the scorecard page greatly improved our conversion rate. Not a big surprise. But it does mean that pages require attention-that you get more results when the page is crafted to the topic rather than a generic template in the hope that one size fits all.

I'd say more important than headlines was our learning on bullets or collections of items. Never put more than four things together (say four bullets, or four offers) in a single place. More than that and the visitor's eyes glaze over. Too many choices.

You've found that people scroll once the page has quality information. How important is the bottom of the page in this context?

Bottom of the page is the real sweet spot for content, probably the most valuable real estate for generating response. It took us two years to recognize that. The fifth principle guiding us was: "Ask, test, measure, adapt, repeat" or more plainly, constantly test your Website. As I noted above, most of our effort up to that point had been placing relevant offers in the right hand side. One of our team members asked himself, what if we put the same offers at the bottom of the page? Offers at the bottom of the page now account for about 50% of the responses; 30% from the RH side, and 20% elsewhere (banners, in-page, etc.) This was not a case of swapping the same responses-putting offers at the bottom of the page was one of the key leaps in bringing our average conversion rate up to 12% and higher conversion on our Website (Conversion rate being the unique respondents over unique visitors.)

The psychology of this makes sense if you think about it. If someone reads to the bottom of your page, he or she is committed to the topic. Give the person something to do. He or she is looking for a place to click. Satisfy that urge.

I have been in conversations with Web people where someone declares that visitors will not scroll or that a page must only be one-screen deep. I am not a big fan of such rules-everything needs to have guidelines. If the page is a content page-the place where the visitor can read well-structured content-then it can be a deep page. Using the scorecarding example I mentioned earlier, we have top-ten click items three screens deep. If you have a portal page-a page meant to help you get somewhere else-your visitors may have less patience with scrolling. Again, you have to have the intelligence to understand what all parts of your Website are meant to do, the role they play.

You talk about "No focus. No excellence." What do you mean by that?

This is another one of our five guiding principles. I should write them all out:

Know what you're trying to do…in our case, Lead generation is job one.
Low-hanging fruit first.
Don't enter marketing battles you can't win.
No focus, no excellence.
Ask, test, measure, adapt, repeat.

No focus, no excellence was more of a team management guideline. Our Web team took the Website from a conversion rate of about 3% (industry average) to 12%. That meant we did new things, took on new roles. I had to be mindful of taking something away if I added something to a person's plate. Our team thrived on doing the right things well. If I had an individual doing 20 things, each item might be average. If a person had 3-4 things, each could be excellent. People prefer being excellent. Our team did excellent things.

Without a word of exaggeration, I firmly believe I had the opportunity to work with a Web team that was among the top of any B2B Web team in the world. I think that opportunity to come together, discover together and reach excellence together was a career experience that will be difficult to beat.

You manage your websites based on a continuous improvement model rather than a launch- and- leave approach. How would you respond to organizations who say they don't have the resources to continuously test and refine their website?

We have to stop thinking of our Websites as liabilities to be minimized, and more as assets to be maximized.

One answer would be to go back to our imaginary GAP store. Would anyone say, "I have enough staff to stock the shelves to open the store, but I can't staff appropriately to refill the shelves, or fold the jeans people try but leave in the change rooms, or to have more than one person at the register when there's 5 or 6 people in line?" Web visitors are real customers. They've come to you. They've already had Brand experiences by typing in keywords or your company name and then clicking on your links. I can't think of more valuable people to your marketing process.

But to your point, not everyone has the luxury, as I did, to have a team…but we didn't start out with many people. I think the fundamental thing is to have intelligence and management behind your Website. Someone has to understand the purpose of your Website, and that someone should respect the value of its visitors. Web traffic is a massive corporate asset-I think it should be quantified as an intangible asset and find its way to your balance sheet-more valuable than desks and buildings. That's all Facebook is, or Google. They're traffic. They're you and me in the millions. If you're lucky enough to have high traffic-that should be accounted for by the bean counters.

If you have intelligent Web management, you will find a way to measure what matters. That's the key first step. One of my rules in measuring is don't measure something you're not going to act on. So perhaps you only measure 2-3 pages. What's the traffic? What do people do? If you change something, has it gotten better? If you can't save your whole Website, save one page. From there you'll learn, and then the learning can spread. But it starts with intelligence, an understanding of what you're really trying to do, and a desire to learn.

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