Demand Generation « Dave Stelzl's Blog

Archive for the 'Demand Generation' Category

May

Meeting w/ Business Leaders In Richmond Va.

Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: continuum, lunch & Learn, Marketing, security event, zenith infotech

Nearly all of those who attended today’s seminar in Richmond received complementary assessments through Sklar, the sponsoring reseller, along with Continuum (the company who recently acquired part of the Zenith Infotech managed services company). Just before speaking I had the opportunity to review some of the latest security trends – many of these are highly relevant to small/medium business owners. A few sound bites that made their way into my keynote:

760 iBahn customers (companies in including Marriott) have been compromised through the iBahn network…
Hotel hotspots are under fire using a sort of “Man in the Middle” attack that install bots on one’s computer – this would also apply to any hotspot including those free networks at Panera and Starbucks.
An alarming number of Android apps containing bots
Unsecured smart phones
Recent hacker activity developing between China and the Philippines (This will be interesting to watch as pressures grow).

Also, consider the number of recent reports coming out of China, alerting us to efforts to steal US intellectual capital! This should cause every business owner to feel a sense of urgency, to make sure their company secrets, new inventions, and business strategies are kept in a safe place. The biggest issue I see as I visit different cities is simply that business leaders are unaware of how urgent these threats are, and are assuming they are safe when they don’t see evidence of cyber attacks on their own computers. The best attacks are stealth – company leaders need to know this, while consulting companies must develop the tools and skills to accurately assess security risk.

May

Data@Risk – Preparing for the Richmond Executive Security Luncheon; Speaking David Stelzl

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Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: David Stelzl, event marketing, lunch & Learn, marketing event, speaker

Read Data@Risk

“At no point was sensitive or controlled information compromised,” according to reports from today’s cybercrime news – this is typical. It reminds me of the time my dentist told me, “There is no proof that amalgam fillings are harmful.” I told him, there was a time when studies had not proven that cigarettes cause cancer…and how can the security people at NASA be sure nothing has been compromised in the wake of April’s attacks?

Why are companies and high-profile organizations losing this battle? This week I will be speaking to business leaders in Richmond VA on the threats and risks associated with Cybercrime. No matter how much they spend, or how well protected they think they are, the criminals will continue to win as long as this is treated as a technical issue.

I was on a coaching call with a sales person yesterday who was complaining that only 7 people attended their last event…after further exploration I discovered the problem – the event was advertising more product information. This is not a product sale! It’s a risk sale. You can invite the business leaders, but they’ll delegate to IT every time when the topic is a product or feature, and if the product info doesn’t sound great, even IT will stay home. Focus on the trends, look at the growing risks – consider what these business leaders are worried about when it comes to technology. Address these business issues in your next event if you expect people to attend. This creates a win/win every time. In the end, business leaders need to know what is going on, and you must have a way to help them succeed in warding off the enemy.

May

Building a Following w/ The End In Mind – Tips on Social Media

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Categories: Demand Generation and Marketing
Tags: event, lunch & Learn, marketing with social medial, social media, social media marketing, Technology

When I say “event” or “Lunch & Learn”, the first question is, “How do we get people to come? Tomorrow I am conducting a conference on entrepreneurial thinking and we have over 130 people signed up – how did that happen? Well, there are many factors, but one factor should be the use of social media. If you are not leveraging social media tools in your business to build a following, you should be. If you are, check to make sure you are actually building, and not wasting your time.

Understanding How it Works

First, I think it’s important to say, social media is not a quick, over night kind of thing. People who use social media as another avenue for spam are not going to be successful. No one is going to buy a magazine full of advertisements. I remember watching one of my friends open his Car & Driver Magazine in high school. The first thing he would do is flip through to find the ad pages and rip them out. Then he would hold up the remaining magazine – it would be half the thickness of the original.

Social media is about content and creating value. What do your readers want? What will help them with the business they are trying to build? You can’t just guess on this, you need input. I recommend asking your best clients what to put out there. It also has to be something you are passionate about. If you don’t have a passion for the things your clients need, you might be in the wrong business. When the two come together, something happens – people start following.

Gary Vaynerchuck, author of Crush It, gives us a sense of that passion – check out his blog. Of course, if you know Gary, you don’t read his blog, rather you watch it. On the other hand, David Meerman Scott does a great job explaining how content should work and how to build, what he calls personas of the people you aim to reach – check out his book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Talking Strategy

Yesterday I was on a coaching call with a marketing VP talking strategy and social media. His company has content, but as we read through it, we both saw the same problem – the content is to technical and too generic. His market is pretty specific, yet his content is not. If I ask him to describe his target prospect, he can do it, but when I read the headlines on his blog, they don’t tend to attract the right target – or any specific target.

Social media is a process – its a set of tools that allow me to address a people group. The group already exists out there. My job is to write compelling content to the group as if I am the newspaper serving a local town. My content has to be great – it has to compete with a million other people. This is where Simon Sinek’s video, which I posted a few weeks ago, comes in; Starting with the Why. When I think about my own business and why it has been successful over the past 8 years, I know it is because I am doing exactly what Simon is describing – I am selling my Why. In my words, I am working to meet the needs of my people group. A concept I describe in detail in my book, From Vendor to Adviser.

When a business owner or VP, of a large company division, wakes up in the morning, I doubt they are thinking about your products and they probably won’t tune into your blog post if it’s all about you. Yet they will probably read their email first. For some reason, even the busiest people go to email first. What are they looking for? If something is going on in their business, it’s likely somewhere in email and like most professionals, they head there first. The question is, will they subscribe to your media, making it part of the morning routine?

So How Did We Get the 130 People?

Building an audience happens through social media – making contacts, building trust, and building interest. It won’t happen overnight, in fact the first year of my blog, I struggled reach more than 10 to 15 readers in a day; sometimes less. Some people continue to buy lists and make calls, and there is a place for this, but calling people you don’t know, and more importantly, who don’t know you, is a tough way to build an audience for your upcoming event.

May

Conversion Rates Can Kill Your Program

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Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: lunch & Learn, marketing event, security assessment, technology event

What happens after a campaign or event? There’s a great feeling that comes with a successful marketing program – in my case, it’s usually a live educational event, but it might also a webinar or calling campaign. I just received an email from one company I’ve been working with over the past several months – his recent event netted about 32 assessments! He’s about halfway through the first phase, and reports some alarming findings…something I am not surprised to hear. The next step is delivering the results. This is a critical step in the process; one not to be taken lightly.

In most cases we are relying on an engineer to pull together the data that proves there really is an issue – not too many sales people have the skills to pin point urgent security issues. It is at this point, after the data has been collected, that the sales person must get involved to find out what was found, and help assess the urgency of the issues. Familiarity with security sometimes causes us to pass over things that are urgent with the idea that, “Everyone has these problems, therefore they aren’t that urgent.” Another issue that arises is, in the thrill of performing these assessments, little attention is paid to the delivery of the findings – this can kill the entire program. The truth is, there is a deal behind every single deliverable. If you lose sight of this, you might find that half of your reports have been delivered, and no one is signing. Your conversion goes from a promise to zero in no time.

I recommend working through these deliverable with a tightly defined process of delivery and assessing the delivery…measure every step to see what happens in the early meetings before handing out all 32 reports. If your findings are not driving action, something is wrong and must be corrected before they’re all out. Remember, the assessment is performed to find urgent issues. If the client has urgent issues, but does not act, the sales person has done them a disservice – they have failed to convince the client of the urgency at hand.

Apr

How Do I Build a New Region – Using Educational Marketing

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Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: David Stelzl, john chambers, marc benioff, marketing event, rsa, technology speaker

Downtown Grand Rapids

I’m Back from Grand Rapids and heading into a busy week, but not without some reflection on the benefits of last week’s educational event. 27 business leaders attended this event where I addressed the group on current security trends and threats specific to the SMB space. Over half of them will be looking at their security issues in greater detail this week with the sponsoring solution provider, in the form of an assessment. The majority of these companies are not currently engaged as clients, but are still receiving this assessment as a thanks for joining the meeting. This is a significant step in the right direction and a value to both the business owner and the consulting firm.

On Friday (the day after this event) I spent some time with a rep out in the north west (by phone), going through this type of event and what makes an event successful. On the call, we discussed ways of attracting new clients, a question I have run into more and more over the past year. He mentioned that they have tried doing lunch & learn events, like the one above, to demonstrate their value to the local firms – “But we can’t seem to get people to attend – why?” “How do you continue to attract audiences, even in cities where there’s already of glut of these kinds of events?”, he asked. There are a couple of key issues to consider here:

1. People attend events that offer something they personally need and care about. If I am in the market for a particular kind of tool or home improvement, I might attend a home show or head over the the Woodcraft store’s open house (a popular store for those engaged in fine woodworking). I have a specific need and the above mentioned gatherings offer some insight. If the thing I am buying is obvious, I don’t need to attend. The problem here is, my lunch & learn at this point only appeals to a certain group of people who are currently shopping for something – it’s a small audience, and my chances of marketing to the right people are slim.

2. If I make this into a product pitch, I can still draw an audience. Consider RSA – a product show that continues to draw thousands. What’s the attraction? There show is advertised to technical people…but the attraction comes with the speaker line-up. Technologists convince their firms to fly them there and pay for lodging and food, to see John Chambers or Marc Benioff speak. The problem with your lunch & learn at this point is, you don’t have a speaker that will draw an audience. Stop saying, “People are too busy,” or “We have too many lunch & learns in our city,” the truth is you don’t have a show worth going to.

3. Too many companies are focused on the numbers. My coaching client on Friday told me his sponsors only care about numbers in exchange for marketing dollars – meaning it doesn’t matter who shows up. This is wrong thinking. The vendor requires some re-education on the importance of converting attendees to buyers. The percentage matters far more than the number of attendees when we are working with expensive solutions. With this in mind, getting the large technical audience referenced in point number 2 is not really valid. Based on the attendee list, I can almost predict the percentage that will sign up to do the assessment (or any other offering). IT people will love the talk (if it has great content), but will pass on the assessment – why? Two reasons, they have no liability, and they have no money. The bottom line here is; setting up an educational event for technical people will buy some good will and demonstrate value to an existing customer base, however it generally will not produce new clients for a solution provider.

4. Content that will attract business leaders, must focus on the business leader and their business. What do they think about all day? Obviously they hire advisers; legal, health, financial and investment, and more..what about technology? The event mentioned above was specifically designed to help business leaders understand their risk and liability regarding data and intellectual capital that resides in their most important business applications and databases. These attendees saw value, responded to a message aimed at reducing their risks of data loss, and followed up with value delivered through the sponsoring solution provider in the form of an assessment.

Apr

Poisoned w/ The Knowledge; Information Security Speaker David Stelzl

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Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: forensics, IBM Security, information security speaker, marketing event

Grand Rapids Marriott

This morning I am getting ready for today’s executive security lunch meeting in Grand Rapids, MI (Sponsored by IBM). The question came up in a meeting yesterday, “What is an urgent security issue?” This may seem obvious to some, but when you start discussing it, opinions differ. For instance, an IT person might see anything that affects their job stability as an urgent issue, the security consultant might consider a lack of policy or compliance to be critical, but the business owner might not consider anything urgent until it’s been explained in layman’s terms – and they are convince something is threatening their business.

For example, is malware urgent? When you think of malware on a PC, it’s tempting to think, this happens everyday, therefore it’s not urgent – it might be easy to delete, and therefore it isn’t urgent. However, if you explain to the business owner that someone outside your organization has installed code on their laptop that allows them to potentially collect passwords, read files, and even listen in on meetings or access some of their most sensitive databases, it’s urgent. Nortel’s recent discovery showed that bots had been installed (malware) to steal data over the past 12 years. Their AV experts could not detect it, yet their security officer suspected it. The executives ignored it simply because it wasn’t pointed out in a way that they could receive it. Had they known that a competitor was stealing their inventions, I feel certain they would have acted. If someone called this a virus with possible, but no actual damage, they would have assumed IT had everything under control.

Being a provider of security solutions requires more than strong technical skills in the area of information security. It requires the ability to look at a business model and understand what is important. It requires the ability to predict where the weaknesses are based on the way that company uses technology. It also requires the ability to do some forensic investigation to discover what is really happening under the covers, and once all of that has been done, it requires that someone be able to piece together evidence in order to predict what might happen as a result, and what the likelihood is that something bad will happen any time soon. If this can’t be done, chances are that the executives will never take action. Their position is one of determining where to focus. Every day they must look at the potential opportunities, and the possible risks; and after weighing whatever data they have, they’ll make a choice where to spend their time, money, and energy. If the data risks are under control, at least as they perceive them, no action will be taken. It is incumbent on the security professional to figure out if the issues at hand are, in the reality – in light of the business, critical or not. And then, the challenge becomes one of presenting in a way that compels that management team to take action. This is the difference between the professional security consultant, and the backroom security expert.

Apr

Data@Risk – Preparing for This Week’s Security Seminar in Michigan

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Categories: Demand Generation and Sound Bites
Tags: David Stelzl, security seminar, security speaker, wall street journal

Available at www.stelzl.us

As I prepare for this week’s educational security event in Michigan, I am reminded that this is the perfect time to be reaching out to business owners with an educational message. Security issues are rampant, and businesses are being compromised every day.

I was talking with another one of my clients this morning reviewing their blog posts and other educational social media programs online. We were talking through some of the major challenges business owners face and what topics integrators and solution providers should be focusing on. In his case, his entire company has moved to a security message simply because the need is there. Everyone has a security need right now – areas may differ, but they all need it. This is a time in history where security is urgent for businesses of all sizes.

In the case of the Michigan event, our initial response has been very strong – we’ll have a packed room for this event. We have about 30 business leaders signed up – business owners and executives all facing the same issue; that of making sure their data is safe:

1. Wall Street Journal reports that 75% of employees admit to stealing data. How should business owners view the hiring process and what steps should be taken to ensure new employees have the right access, with the right amount of accountability?

2. Gen Y hires are turning down jobs that won’t allow them to use their own smart phones and tablets. How do companies address this type of thing. Smaller companies probably lack detailed employment policy handbooks and training on this sort of thing – what should they do?

3. Work-at-home programs are also growing. The State of VA. has, in the past, offered a substantial grant to small businesses who move some of their office workers to home offices. But how do these companies maintain control of home based computers used to access sensitive information?

4. Recent advancements in malware have made many of the older anti-malware technologies useless. With little or no info security skills on staff, how will these companies ensure computers are not infected with spyware and keystroke loggers?

5. Liabilities are growing as threats increase – what policies must be in place and how do these businesses deal with compliance?

On Thursday we will be going through some of the business level mindsets from my book Data@Risk to address the root problems most of these companies have. It’s a difficult area for these businesses, but our goal is to give them some direction on how to get their company thinking about, and doing the right things to reduce the amount of exposure they have; things they can actually get started with right away.

Apr

Eventbrite – A Tool to Help w/ Your Next Event

By Dave Stelzl's Blog 2 Comments

Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: eventbrite, google analytics, landing pages, marketing events, setting up events

If you have attended any of my webinars, or perhaps signed up for my online Making Money w/ Security class, you’ve been to my EventBrite page. This has been a great tool for setting up just about any kind of event, both online and live. I wanted to pass this along to you as you consider doing lunch & learns and marketing webinars this year…a couple of great features to ease the burden of event planning:

First, the fee; Eventbrite charges a percentage of what you charge, so if your event is free (which most lunch & learns and marketing webinars are), your fee will be $0! It doesn’t get much better…
You can limit the number of seats, so if you have a Webex account that permits 100 seats, you can limit your sign up to 100 attendees. Same would go for a live event.
You can set up different ticket types, so in my Making Money w/ Security class I have three different ticket types; one at list price, one for early sign up, and one for mentor alumni. This really helps when the event has a fee associated with it.
It’s easy to customize. I often have a picture to go with my event, so uploading a photo is common. On some sites you have to make the picture a certain size, but Eventbrite is smart enough to modify your photo so that it works without any changes.
You can include a location which automatically displays the Google Maps picture! Pretty cool for live events.
You can specify what information you want to collect. Some can be optional, and others can be mandatory, but its all up to you.
You can mass email your list, keeping people up to date, and sending out reminders – all prescheduled and easy to create. That is how I get the 24 hr notice out, then the 6 hour, then the 1 hour reminders. This cuts down on attrition.
You can also do mass email marketing with a list right from Eventbrite and it will track your responses. I don’t use this, but its out there.
You can connect with Google Analytics, or just view the Eventbrite statistics. Google gives you more, but the Eventbrite stats are good enough in most cases.
Finally, you can duplicate an event – making it easy to set up a next event of a similar type – for instance, if you do monthly webinar events.

There you have it – give it a try, you won’t be sorry.

Mar

70 Attendees and a 90% Response Rate – David Stelzl Speaks to Business Owners

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Categories: Demand Generation
Tags: David Stelzl, educational marketing, lunch & Learn, Managed Services, security speaker, Technology Sales, var

Back from South Dakota – we had about 70 attendees last night, mostly business owners and leaders from the local community. About 90% of the companies represented signed up to have their security assessed…why?

Because the event was focused on their business and a growing need every attendee had in common. This event had nothing to do with products, or the WHAT Golden West Technologies (The sponsoring VAR) sells. It had everything to do with educating those who have worked hard to build businesses, and who want to keep those businesses going in the future.

This is the time to be talking about security…just this week government representatives and consultants have made statements in the Wall Street Journal saying things like, “Consider every one of our networks to be compromised”, “All we can do now is focus on preserving the data”, “We are losing the war with cyber criminals.” I also read in Wall Street this week that business leaders tend to shy away from knowing too much…but with a compelling campaign encouraging them to take action, we had over 70 responses in just a couple of weeks. 5 or 6 had to cancel, but consider some of the average attrition rates at lunch & learn programs and you’ll see numbers like 50 and 60 percent. This was a great event and more are needed just like it. The business leaders need the education, and the solution providers need to take a more active role in helping business leaders understand the issues and why they need to be involved personally. Last night was a perfect example of this in action.

Mar

Speaking to Business Owners in South Dakota; An Educational Security Event

By Dave Stelzl's Blog 1 Comment

Categories: Demand Generation and Opportunities
Tags: David Stelzl, joint marketing funds, Managed Services, marketing campaign, marketing event, security, speaker, Technology, var

Note: Here’s my Hertz rental car at the Rapid City Airport – If they had known that I have seven kids, they would have also known that I only know how to drive big vehicles…

It’s a great day in Rapid City, SD – I love this job because I love events like the one we are doing today. Every business owner out there is working hard to build a successful company, and today is no different. 72 of these business owners and leaders are meeting today to gain insights on how to deal with information security as their business grows, and the threats increase. As they focus on their customers and offerings, someone has to sort out the technology, and figure out how to maintain it – keeping it secure, up, and running smoothly.

A local solution provider in town is sponsoring this event – we’ve been preparing for this over the past few weeks, looking at who should attend, who will benefit, and how to best address the issues businesses are facing. The exciting thing is, we have answers. We have an understanding of what these companies are facing, and we’ve put together a plan to address it. We have a way to show them the problem, a way to measure the effects it is having on their businesses, and a way to bring managed remediation to any issues that may exist. It’s simple to do, compelling, and valuable to both the sponsor and the attendee.

This is what we do – the technology business is not about selling the next widget, or even maximizing profits – it’s about the people you are serving through it; in this case, small and medium business owners and managers. The profit is a measure of your success in carrying out the mission. At the end of the day it’s a win/win proposition.