I don’t usually get involved in politics.  But this week, Christopher Dodd and Congress have targeted technology start-ups for annihilation by regulation so I’m asking you to join me in taking action to stop legislation that will be devastating for early stage tech companies like mine.  Hidden in the big banking regulation & bail out bill that Congress is currently debating, Christopher Dodd has included major changes to regulations for private investors in early stage companies.

Major changes to angel investing hidden in the bill include:

1) the requirements threshold for being an “accredited investor” will be raised from a net worth of $1 million or income of $200,000 to a net worth of $2.3 million or income of $449,000.  BusinessWeek estimates that this will make approximately 77% of potential angel investors ineligible.

2) once an investment deal is agreed upon, it forces companies to wait 120 days before they can receive the funds – four months is an eternity for an early stage company.

3) it eliminates Federal regulation preemption for companies who have only accredited investors – this means that small, cash-strapped companies will have to navigate the legal and accounting requirements of both Federal and state regulations – and for multiple states if the investment is syndicated across state borders.  Very difficult and very costly.

4) all startups who plan to seek funding will have to register with the SEC, thus incurring significant legal and accounting fees before they even have a chance to attract investment.

Given that banks have virtually nothing to do with the funding of startup companies, it seems very odd that Christopher Dodd would insert such a regulation into a banking reform bill.

I’m asking everyone I know to please help stop this portion of the bill before Christopher Dodd and Congress kill angel investing and an entire generation of baby startups.  Starting a company is hard enough – startups REALLY don’t need our own version of SOX!

Learn more:

Here’s the bill

SaveRegD – information site with online petition

Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill by Fred Wilson

Dodd’s Attack on Angel Financing from Seattle Tech Flash

Open letter from National Venture Capital Assn and Angel Capital Assn

Angels sing: ‘frankly ridiculous’ restrictions might ‘destroy Silicon Valley’

Where will your new marketing leads come from? How do people hear about you? What advertising, marketing, events, public relations, or Web site promotions do you have in place or planned? How do prospects currently contact you—phone, email, Web site, walk-in traffic, direct mail bounce back card, advertisements? As you develop your marketing data management process, you will want to plan how your company will capture and follow up leads from each source. As you develop new lead generation programs, make sure you integrate their leads in to your overall capture process.

Drawing a visual process diagram that maps your lead flows from their sources to your marketing automation or CRM system is quite helpful. The lead sources are the contact methods you use in your lead generation campaigns. The steps in the process are the immediate follow up actions that must be taken when a lead arrives.

For example, if you send an email promotion offering respondents a free gift, white paper, or other item, a designated sales or marketing representative will need to make sure the person receives the offered item if your system does not automate the delivery. Once the lead is entered into the company’s CRM or contact management system, it can be assigned to a special follow up campaign if desired.

The diagram below illustrates the typical lead flow from initial capture to CRM system upload for a small company. The simplified process illustrates how leads come in: marketing and lead generation program vendors, inbound phone calls, mail, fax, online requests from the Web site, online requests from campaign-specific Web pages, email inquiries, and direct inquires to sales reps. It also tracks follow up decisions and activities that might be necessary before the lead is even entered into the company’s marketing automation or CRM system.

Capturing marketing leads is one of the most important steps in any lead management process. Transforming raw leads lists into organized, usable marketing data does not happen by accident. When you initially set up your system or do your first major cleaning, your task will include organizing both past and future leads. First, you will want to locate, clean, and import all of the existing marketing leads your company has collected into your marketing automation or CRM software. Then, you will want to plan how to efficiently capture and organize each type of lead that you will generate in the future.

Identifying existing marketing leads and contact lists is like a treasure hunt. Begin your search by checking with every department, every administrative assistant, every sales rep, and every marketing manager to find out where existing leads are and how they are stored. This search usually turns up a mishmash of lead and prospect data stored in a wide variety of formats:

• Contact manager files
• CRM system
• Accounting system lists
• Spreadsheets
• Databases
• Email address lists/Outlook files
• Printed address directories
• Handwritten lists
• Stacks of business cards
• Post-it™ notes
• Trash-like scraps of paper with scribbled contact data

Try to get an idea from each list owner how the leads were gathered and how they are being used. This will help you categorize the information in each list as you consolidate it into a single master marketing list. Whenever possible, try to export the data into a spreadsheet readable format such as tab-delimited or comma-delimited text. This will allow you to import the data into a spreadsheet for cleaning without having to retype the entries.

Happy hunting!

Good marketing data is a living creature. Your job as the data’s caretaker is to help it grow and develop to support your business. Each morsel of data is called a field: the first name field, the last name field, the company name field, the created date field, the last purchase date field, etc.

Start with a good foundation of fields to support your overall marketing strategy and your sales and marketing processes. Then, as your company’s needs evolve, you can create and prune new data fields. It is normal for your data field needs to change over time. (In fact, if they are not changing, something may be wrong!) You will have new initiatives that require their own tracking fields and old marketing programs with their dedicated data fields will no longer be needed.

Here are some of the kinds of fields you are most likely to need as well as some questions to help you hone in on what type of information to include:

Contact Information Do you need personal or business contact information? Complete postal addresses, just email addresses or just telephone numbers? Will these needs change over the course of your relationship with the customer? Perhaps you just need an email address at the beginning for your enewsletter but plan to capture postal addresses for direct mail promotions when customers make a purchase.

Lead/Data Source Information Knowing where you obtained a prospect’s name is very important. You cannot make informed decisions about marketing promotions without being able to track their success and return on investment (ROI) over time. For example, if two online promotions generate the same number of leads how do you know which one to cancel when your budget gets cut? If you track your leads you will know which one generated three times more closed sales than the other one. Also, knowing the lead source information can influence how you choose to market to an individual. A person who watched your product presentation at a trade show is likely to require different follow up than a person who simply clicked on a Google ad and knows very little about your products.

Prospect Interest Information If you have multiple products, do you know which one to offer each person in your marketing database? Can you estimate how interested prospects might be in your products? Tracking this information as you interact with prospects helps you deliver the right messages at the right time and improves your marketing effectiveness.

Demographic Information If you are selling to consumers, knowing basic vital statistics such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, and income can be very valuable. With today’s variable data printing and custom email, you can easily use this information to customize not only the text, but also the photos and graphics you use in your marketing promotion materials so that your messages are more relevant for each prospect. Company demographics such as industry, revenue, employee size, or number of locations can be incredibly valuable for customizing marketing messages for business-to-business marketing programs.

Marketing Campaign Information Knowing when you marketed to prospects in the past can be very helpful for tracking marketing effectiveness and lets sales people know what to expect when they follow up with a prospect. Many CRM systems track this information automatically when you use their marketing features.

Complementary and Competitive Product Information It is important to assess how your product compares to complementary and competitive products. For example, if you sell software that easily integrates with a popular small business accounting program, one of your target market segments would be small business owners who use that software. In this case, it would be very helpful for sales and marketing reps to know which accounting package prospects use.

Sales Interaction and Milestone Information Do you have a predictable series of interactions with potential customers? An initial conference call? An in-person meeting? Signing a non-disclosure agreement? Delivering a proposal? Starting a trial? When sales tracks these milestones in the CRM system, marketing can support the sales process by sending appropriate communications based on the prospect’s maturity in the sales cycle. Marketing can also screen out prospects who are in sensitive areas of engagement (about to close, running a trial, etc.) so they do not receive marketing offers that might impact a pending deal.

Data Unique to Your Business You are likely to have unique data needs based on how you manage your sales and marketing processes. For example, a company that sells products to consumers via resellers would collect and track two types of marketing data: a) consumers who inquire about the product and b) resellers who might sell the product. The company would likely follow up with the reseller prospects directly, but forward the consumer leads to resellers in the consumer’s geographic area.

Who are your target customers? Of course, you should already have this well defined in your strategic marketing plan, but it is good to review as you begin planning your data strategy.

Before you can make good decisions about your marketing data, you need to have a good idea of who your ideal customers are, how you plan to reach them, and what information your sales and marketing team needs to track about them.

For instance, you might ask questions such as:

• Are your best customers consumers or business people?
• How do customers typically find out about products and services like yours?
• How do customers buy products and services like yours—directly, through resellers or dealers, from a retail store, via the Internet, etc.?
• How much do your customers expect to spend for a product like yours? Is it an expensive enterprise-strength product for large companies or an inexpensive product with fewer features designed for small companies and departments? Is it a luxury product for affluent consumers or a cheap product for discount shoppers?
• What is your typical sales cycle? What information must a customer obtain and what sales interactions must occur before a prospect completes the purchase of your product or service? Will customers buy directly on the first contact or does a sale take more time and involve multiple sales calls and negotiation meetings?
• How often do existing customers re-purchase from you? You will need to make sure your sales reps know when to reconnect with existing customers.

All of these factors impact how you acquire leads and marketing lists and what you do with the prospect data once you have it.  And after you have been collecting data for a while, you’ll want to analyze the data again to refine your data strategy.

Suppose your job depended on filling a large bathtub with water using only a cup and water from the sink across the bathroom. Easy with some work, right? Well, maybe not. How easy would it be if you had to not only fill the tub, but also maintain the water level consistently every month and every quarter? What if you had to fill and maintain the water level, but had no stopper to block the drain and keep your tub filled? How frustrated would you be if each time you poured water into the tub, it just flowed down the drain?

Building and maintaining sales pipelines at companies that do not have a consistent, effective process for capturing and managing marketing data is as difficult and frustrating as trying to fill an endlessly draining bathtub. Effective data management provides the stopper that helps keep leads from flowing down the drain before your sales team has a chance to close deals with them.

In today’s tough economic environment it is more important than ever to squeeze every dollar of ROI from every marketing asset—including your existing marketing automation system, marketing database or customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Making the most of your marketing leads is crucial for maximum profitability. Too often, companies spend thousands—even millions—of dollars for lead generation programs with barely a thought to how they will capture, process, and follow up the leads once they are acquired or how they will nurture them over time.

Let’s be honest: Improving data quality is not a sexy or high-profile marketing project. It can be pretty boring and is usually ignored. But getting your marketing data into a clean, optimized state can have more impact on your company’s bottom line than almost any single lead generation program.

Studies show that most marketing leads are wasted. According to Marketing Operations Partners, analysts at Sirius Decisions report that only 20% of marketing leads are ever followed up by sales reps, but about 80% of ignored prospects will go on to purchase from someone within 24 months. If you have clean, well-organized, accurately coded data, marketing can nurture those ignored leads until they are ready to buy.

Good data has a measurable bottom line impact. Another recent report from SiriusDecisions estimates that companies can generate nearly 70% more revenue simply by improving the quality of their marketing data.2 There’s a quantifiable waterfall effect: More leads get qualified and faster, sales follow-up rates increase, and more deals close. Incremental improvements can add up fast—especially when they are compounded.

Bad data, on the other hand, keeps costing you money. According to Johnathan Block, SiriusDecisions senior director of research, “The longer incorrect records remain in a database, the greater the financial impact. This point is illustrated by the 1-10-100 rule: It takes $1 to verify a record as it’s entered, $10 to cleanse and de-dupe it and $100 if nothing is done, as the ramifications of the mistakes are felt over and over again.”

Good Marketing Data Management Isn’t Rocket Science

Sure, many companies spend millions of dollars and deploy teams of dedicated staff to manage their marketing data. However, there is no reason why small and mid-size companies should have to spend a fortune or hire a team of experts to significantly improve the value of their marketing data. Luckily, managing marketing data effectively is not terribly difficult—it just takes a little forethought to create good processes and a little consistent effort to keep the momentum going.

We’ll take a look at how to improve your marketing data management processes in later posts.

Data cleaning sucks. But taking the time to clean your marketing data and update your marketing segmentation codes a couple of times a year really pays off.

I just finished a new video with a 10-minute introduction to my marketing data cleaning process. Since I hate cleaning data, I developed the process for using Microsoft Excel to semi-automate the process. So I enjoy the benefits of clean marketing data without spending too much time on tedious data cleaning.

Instructions are included in a new ebook from ChickBiz publishing called Double the Value of Your Marketing Data.  In addition to detailed instructions for the cleaning process, the ebook offers tips for marketing data management, recommendations for capturing marketing data from a variety of sources, and coding techniques for effective lead nurturing and segmentation.

Here’s the free video.

This week I applied for The Funded’s Founder Institute, a really exciting, structured four-month training program for new entrepreneurs. One of the questions on the application is “Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?” Wow! Hmmmmm.

In the frenzy of getting a company started, it’s easy to overlook that basic question.   Why would anyone want to leave the seemingly safe environment of a corporate job to embark on the crazy adventure of building a company – especially now in such uncertain economic times?  It’s a good question.

In my own case, startup addiction, faulty genetics, and a driving obsession are the only excuses I can offer to explain my compulsion to leave a nice, cushy job at a Gartner Cool Vendor to start a new company from scratch in the worst economic downturn of our generation.

After 15 years of working with technology companies – a large chunk of it in tornado-stage startups – I’m obviously addicted to the excitement of building new products at fast-growing companies in emerging industries.  Perversely, instead of enjoying the predictable routine of a well-defined job description at a stable, established company, I prefer to spend my days scrambling to solve a variety of challenges using a wide set of skills (some of which might have to be developed on the fly).  Life gets crazy in such an environment, but the satisfaction of wringing order and creating value from the chaos is irresistible.

The affliction runs in my family.  Four generations of women in the family have started businesses, my father has been building international divisions at tech companies for the past 30 years, my grandfather founded a company in his off hours and sold it to a Fortune 500, and even my little brother has become an entrepreneur.

Given these professional tendencies and familial influences, it was probably inevitable that I would become obsessed when the idea hit me for a new way to use technology to solve problems I passionately want to solve.  After filling a notebook for three years with feature ideas, sketches, integration options and data requirements, the obsession to build my apps for real people to use has become overwhelming.

I simply have to do it.  That’s why I want to be an entrepreneur.  How about  you?

The first day of my new life as an entrepreneur is here.  I’m at my desk wearing my favorite comfy shorts. Jean-Jacques Goldman is playing on iTunes. This video for inspiration  A very good day.

Over the years I’ve watched an interesting—if frustrating—scenario play out at numerous companies. Maybe you’ve seen it too? First, you take a talented, very hardworking woman who’s stretched almost to a breaking point by trying to do far more than humanly possible with very limited budget and resources. She works her butt off, accomplishes miracles considering the lack of resources, but eventually gets laid off anyway. Then, she’s replaced by a man who demands – and gets – twice or three times as many resources (and often a higher salary, too). With a lot fewer gymnastics and a lot less stress, he produces somewhat better results than she did and his managers congratulate themselves on “finally getting the right person in that position.” Good grief!

Here are five tips to help you to ask for and get the resources you need to do a great job. It’s easier than you think. Plus commanding an appropriate level of resources will help you not only produce better results, but also command more professional respect.

1) Start with the tools you need to do your job better and more efficiently
Would you berate a professional carpenter for being lazy or extravagant if he used a $300 hydraulic nail gun instead of a $10 hammer? Of course not! Having the right tool makes him much more efficient and valuable. If there is a tool or software package that would save you a lot of time or help you produce much better results, ask your boss for it. Even better: if possible just buy it, add it to your monthly expense report and tell your boss about the great results you’re getting after having taken the initiative.

2) Delegate! Just because you can do something yourself doesn’t mean you should
The more you focus on your higher level skills, the more valuable you will be and the more marketable experience you will build. If someone else in your office can make hotel reservations or order lunch without totally botching the task, delegate it to her and use the extra 20-30 minutes to review the strategic tasks on your to do list. The same goes for more skilled work. I’m currently teaching a junior team member in our office how to program HTML and delegating intranet updates and email projects to her. It’s a win for both of us – I’m creating a new resource to help with my workload and she’s building new, higher-level skills to boost her own marketability.

3) Find great vendors for specialized tasks
Let’s face it, a great vendor can often do work faster, better and more efficiently than you can. Don’t beat yourself up if someone could do a portion of your job better than you can. A specialist with the right training, the right tools and the right expertise ought to do a better job. Sure, you could design your own brochure. But if your only layout tool is Microsoft Word and it takes you four days to generate a design that isn’t grossly unprofessional, did you really save money by not hiring a talented, skilled designer?
When service providers contact you, take the time to speak with them about their services. Put together a file of vendor information so you have it ready when a project requires outside expertise or when your workload precludes your doing the project yourself. Building a strong network of vendors and service providers makes you more valuable and can be a great source of information about your industry and local market. The effort will benefit both you and your company.

4) Make your boss set priorities
Pssst! Here’s a secret: just because your boss tells you to do something doesn’t mean you automatically have to! Your work time is a finite resource – train your boss to use it wisely. If you already have 14 projects to do this week and your boss dumps two more on the stack, don’t just assume you have to struggle to try – and probably fail – to get everything done. Take a few minutes with your boss to outline the list of projects you’re working on and the time they will require then ask him or her to prioritize which have to be done and which can wait for later. This is a great time to suggest options for delegating some of the tasks to co-workers or to skilled vendors you’re conveniently already interviewed.

5) Practice asking!
If you’ve been afraid to ask for what you need for a long time, don’t expect the first time to be easy. Before you speak to your boss, take some time to practice the words, tone and spin you want to use in your discussion. Don’t beg. Don’t whine. Don’t apologize. Be as objective and confident as possible. Take on the attitude that you’re working with your boss to find the best solution for your department and your company. You don’t have to wing it either. Practice what you want to say in front of the mirror at home or in the car. You can even ask a friend to help you role play the interaction if you’re extra nervous.

And anyway, what’s the worst that can happen if you ask for the resources you need to do your job effectively? You could get fired, right? So what? Then, you could become the new hire at another company who walks in demanding adequate resources and a pay raise, gets them, and does a better job because of it. Hee, hee, hee! Go girl!