Blogs

When we first started seeing signs of the recession, my knee-jerk reaction was to dramatically slash costs, kill planned investments and ride it out. However, when the initial shock passed, I realized that now is the perfect time to take prudent risks and invest in the downturn to build a dynamic business that will trump any and all competitors when the economy turns around – and it will.

That's why it's extremely important to take this opportunity to hire great people, focus on product development and make smart acquisitions and other investments that will allow you to emerge from this economy stronger than when you entered it. Of course, keeping an eye on costs is important, but it shouldn't be in opposition to building your business. Assume your competitors aren't resting idle, and neither should you. If you can succeed in keeping your business healthy and profitable, you will have the flexibility to leap-frog ahead.

Now is not the time to freak out, but to get a clear vision on the changes you can make today that will have the biggest impact when spending ratchets up again in the next 12 - 18 months. You can't get this time back – use it wisely.

I just published a social media blog post for the Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog entitled I'm not knocking Facebook or Twitter, but...

After speaking to a number of prospects and customers, it became clear to me that the more that things change over time, the more they stay the same. Take for instance the role of the Marketer. Since the dawn of man, the role of the Marketer has always been to Reach, Engage and Influence their prospects and customers. Doing all three successfully substantially increases your chances of monetization.

The marketing world is experiencing a major transformation. While traditional online marketing channels such as email continue to serve your business well, a proliferation of new online channels is creating multiple paths to your audience, making it difficult and complicated to reach them as effectively as you did only a few years ago. In particular, the challenge for marketers today is that prospective buyers are spending more and more time in social networking sites, where individuals – not businesses - wield influence over brand perception and purchase decisions. Consumer reviews of products, purchase recommendations from friends and negative comments about customer service are now directly affecting your business. In these forums, traditional marketing approaches that work well in channels such as email and advertising, don’t work - and aren’t welcome.

To be an effective marketer today, you need to leverage and monetize both traditional online channels and emerging online channels to reach and influence your audience. This requires not only technology for creating, delivering and monitoring your campaigns, more than ever it requires expertise and understanding in how to use emerging channels appropriately and in cooperation with traditional channels.

Check out my Fortune blog post for some good examples of how companies have successfully monetized social media, or add your own in the Comments section.

Last week, the E-Commerce Times ran an article I wrote entitled, “The 4 Biggest Motivators for Social Media Marketing.” The gist of the article is that simply enabling your customers to share your email newsletter, web page or promotion is not enough.

In order to fully leverage the power of social media to reach new audiences, you need to first understand what type of social motivators would prompt your customers to share something and then devise a campaign in support of it. In addition to outlining the four principal social motivators, I also talk about the importance of being able to measure the impact of a social media marketing campaign and leverage that data in future campaigns.

Bottom line: social media marketing is much more than sharing functionality. You need a well thought out strategy. You can read the article here.

Yesterday was an exciting day for StrongMail. By acquiring PopularMedia, StrongMail establishes itself as the leader in integrated solutions for email and social media marketing.

The fact that this makes us the only company that is addressing the market need for a measurable and trackable social media solution for direct marketing should come as no surprise. StrongMail came on the scene 7 years ago in the same way – that time addressing the need for powerful and reliable email delivery technology. StrongMail shook up the market up then, and we're doing it again now.

StrongMail's continued innovation has allowed us to evolve into a world-class, enterprise-grade email marketing company, and yesterday's acquisition of PopularMedia puts us at the head of the pack.

Not only has StrongMail acquired PopularMedia's exceptional technology, we have gained their unrivaled expertise in creating viral programs that drive results. PopularMedia understands what motivates people to share online, and they've developed technology and strategies that tap into those motivators. By integrating email and social media together, StrongMail now enables marketers to Identify who their key brand advocates are and re-market to them as an exclusive, powerful segment. There's no denying the impact this can have in increasing results.

In short, PopularMedia has made a name for itself by enabling global brands to fully leverage the marketing potential of social networks through viral campaigns that can be tracked, measured and optimized to maximize reach and ROI. By acquiring PopularMedia, StrongMail makes it possible for marketers to easily integrate rich social networking functionality into their email campaigns to significantly expand their reach and effectiveness.

StrongMail believes that email and social media are two powerful channels that are intrinsically linked, which is why this acquisition makes a lot of sense. Not only is email a primary driver of social networking activity, it can also play a central role in launching social media campaigns that enable companies to actually collaborate with their customers, instead of the one-way communication that is typical with most direct marketing campaigns.

This is just another step of many that will continue to push StrongMail to the forefront of digital marketing. We are excited to be able to offer this unique technology to our customers, and you can rest assured that there will be more innovations to come.

Too many weeks have passed since my last blog posting, but I have a good reason this time. Actually, I have two good reasons. First, I am happy to announce that StrongMail just completed another record-breaking quarter of revenue and growth, despite the dreary economic outlook. We’ve signed a number of great brand-name companies throughout the quarter— where we're solving a number of critically important factors, ranging from elevating email marketing capabilities and transforming transactional email programs to maximizing email deliverability and accelerating email system performance.

Additionally, we just completed a major new product that we'll be formally announcing at ad:tech San Francisco. I am incredibly proud of both of these accomplishments and my team.

My reading log for the past three months has been a bit discombobulated -- I’ve been reading mainly magazines and articles about current events, namely the economy and what companies are doing during these times. Of particular interest are articles about what companies are doing from a competitive perspective. Here are some of the things that I’ve gleaned during my sporadic reading.

Pricing or Product enhancements?
One of the issues that I face, like many of my colleagues, is discounting. We are very fortunate to have a valuable product with a very compelling ROI, which enables us to hold our pricing steady. Many of our customers are investing to update their infrastructure during this economic down time to prepare for the eventual economic recovery, thus putting themselves in an even stronger position versus their competition. I believe that product and innovation are key. When your competitors are struggling, enhancing and innovating your solution set is key. Our customers endorsed that direction in our first quarter.

Attack Market Share?
My management team and I believe that this is a perfect time to go after market share, hence the major product news we'll be announcing on April 20. Economic dislocation drives additional opportunities for market share, especially among weaker, less capitalized competitors. We discuss this topic weekly during my management meeting to ensure that we stay focused on our core value proposition, our market position and listening to our customers.

Many of our prospects and customers are seeking us out as an alternative to their current provider. Why? As I mentioned above, enterprises are taking this opportunity to invest in the best-of-the-best technologies and shore up their infrastructure to be better positioned than their competitors when the economy eventually recovers. Enhancing and hardening our solution is where we’ve agreed to invest. We’ve been fortunate to earn the business of our customers—many from an incumbent competitor. As I mentioned in my previous blog posting, playing to your strengths will uncover new opportunities among weaker competitors.

At some point, things will turn around and the companies that invest and deploy technology to better their business, will be better positioned within their markets.

Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged! That’s probably because my team and I have been busy closing out 2008 and planning for 2009 and beyond. Speaking of 2008, you may have noticed that StrongMail signed a record number of customers this past year. I am so proud of our team. Without a doubt, they are passionate and committed to making StrongMail a very special company.

Beginning last November, I hit the road to meet with as many customers and prospects as I could. I wanted to see and hear, first hand, what they were thinking about the economy, how that would affect their business and what they planned on doing to bridge the gap. Every company had specific goals and requirements, so I found it interesting to get a cross-section of perspectives.

I was (and still am) particularly interested in how senior executives are managing differently during these times. Obviously, changes need to be made, expenses need to be reduced and strategies may need to shift to better reflect today’s realities. Between my conversations with prospects and customers, coupled with my current reading log, I found the following ideas to be most thought provoking:

Bad times could mean new opportunities.
Companies that are the most agile and make bold moves will have the upper hand. We’ve all heard about Carnegie Steel and Hewlett Packard, both being launched during very troubling economic times. Cutting costs is important, but being in a position to invest on the cheap presents a great opportunity to start something from nothing or to double down on your current solution/offering. I’ve spoken to a number of my colleagues (fellow venture-backed CEO’s), prospects and customers about this and there is general consensus on this thought. What new opportunities can you envision in today’s “new reality?”

Play to your strengths.
This is a good time to reinforce your sales channel, harden your product line and simplify your offerings (and messaging too!). Here at StrongMail, we talk about this every day, so we can be laser- focused on our strengths. This is a purposeful (and useful) dialog that helps us in the decision-making process. For example, as we developed our Operating Plan for 2009, we continually reminded ourselves of what we wanted to accomplish in our solution to meet the ever-growing demands of our prospects and customers. We’ve received good feedback from current customers about ways to further evolve our platform. Our strength has always been the underlying infrastructure of our solution—therein lies the gem: Harden the platform, ensure scalability, make it easier to use and make the solution as flawless as software can be.

We’re focused on investing in our sales channel, our solution and our people. I believe that if we remain focused, take action, stick to our strengths and continue to add value to our customers, we will come out of these uncertain times stronger, better positioned and with a lot more customers.

I would like to complete the list of the top 10 common attributes of successful leaders and draw this blog topic to a successful conclusion.

Here is the list (in no particular order), based on our collective experiences:

• Assembling a great team - See my thoughts in previous linked post.
• Fierce Sense of Urgency - Ditto
• Persistence - Ditto
• Vision - Defining, communicating and inspiring a clear, easy-to-understand vision, especially in challenging times.
• Capable - The ability to consistently demonstrate limitless capacity to solve problems.
• Humble - The ability to overcome the instinct of self-preservation, to fly under the radar and to make decisions that are best for the company.
• Trustworthy - The proven ability to empower their team and deliver as expected.
• Decisive - The ability to make timely, often tough decisions, in an unwavering fashion.
• Genuine - The ability to garner respect because of who they are and how they lead, instead of what they’ve done.
• Responsible - The ability to take responsibility for all team decisions that they’ve participated in, regardless of the success or failure of those decisions.

Tom Peters probably phrased it best: “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.” I want to thank all of you who have sent me your thoughts via email. I still marvel at the similarity of your recommendations and thoughts on these commonalities.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was invited to be a panelist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business entitled “Getting to the Top.” I was one of four CEO panelists, fielding questions about leadership, management, career paths and a number of leadership topics.

I wanted to follow-up on my last post and provide more details on the questions and my answers. Here are some of the questions asked during the panel:

“How do the skills required change from a Functional VP role to the CEO role?”
I answered that both roles share common skill sets, but as the CEO, the constituencies have changed: All Employees, Board members, Investors, market makers and Industry leadership are key constituencies that the CEO needs to address. My role is to set the strategic direction for our Company and to provide proof points to those constituencies that a market can be made. We’re trying to make something from almost nothing and the CEO needs to articulate this opportunity to those constituencies.

“What skills/advice had helped you in working with your Board of Directors?
This was an interesting question because frankly, it’s one of the hardest skills to develop for a new CEO. How much information do you share with your Board and how often? My style is to give frequent, transparent, high-level communications throughout the quarter. Establishing a good, trusting working relationship with your Board is essential. A very smart person taught me long ago, “Bad news is not like fine wine, it does not get better with age.” Transparency, defining a plan of action and managing expectations are the most important skills to develop when interacting with your Board of Directors.

[The very smart person that I reference above was my Grandfather, a hard-working, Italian national, who was a Blacksmith with the Italian Cavalry in Naples, Italy. He had a lot of great quotes for me when I was growing up and helped instill in me the work ethic that I employ to this day.]

“Are there any disciplines that you wish you had more experience with now that you’re a CEO?”
I could write for days on this subject, but the short answer is yes. I wish that I had a Law Degree (J.D.) and a CPA Degree. What I’ve learned in business is that having a great product, building a great company and making a market is only half the battle. The other half resides in the details: financing a business for growth requires experience and is complicated. Raising Venture capital is complicated. Structuring deals with customers is complicated. As the CEO, it’s important to understand every functional area, but hire the very best you can in each discipline.

“What Mistakes are most common for a first time CEO? What mistake did you make that you learned the most from?”
There are a lot of common mistakes for a first time CEO and I’ve made them all. The most common mistake, in my view, is not firing fast enough. A bad hire, without taking action, can really set a company back. Interestingly enough, there was violent agreement amongst the other panel members on this subject and my answer. The other common mistake is not taking risks. I call it “failing fast.” I use this term with my team a lot. It simply means that I am willing to provide a safe environment for innovation, but in return, the team commits to “failing fast” on the initiative. This means that the initiative has a very small team (1-3 people), architects the idea, prototypes it and then compares the idea to what our customer base is looking for. If it works, I authorize further development. If not, it “fails fast” and we move on to the next initiative.

“When you are hiring executives, what do you look for?”
This question really caught the attention of the attendees. Since most of them were Stanford GSB graduates or students in the GSB program, I think everyone was expecting a silver bullet answer. As you know, there aren’t any short-cuts when it comes to experience. What I look for in an executive is their ability to be a utility player—experience counts. A track record of success and knowledge/experience in different areas (Sales, Marketing, Finance, Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, Channel Development, etc.) is important to me. Once this hurdle is crossed, a good cultural fit is extremely important.

“What is the key to your success in one sentence?”
Work hard, do your homework, hire great people, instill a fierce sense of urgency in everything you undertake, take risks, don’t take yourself too seriously and have a GREAT sense of humor.

Overall, this was a great experience for me. I enjoyed my Panelist colleagues, their unique perspectives and their sense of humor. One thing that is very interesting is that each of us, though we all had disparate backgrounds, share a number of common traits as leaders in our respective companies.

Part I

I was flattered to be invited to join a panel discussion for the Stanford Graduate School of Business entitled “Getting to the Top.” I was one of four CEO panelists, fielding questions about leadership, management, career paths and a number of leadership topics.

I was looking forward to this panel for two reasons: First, I was interested in hearing how other CEO panelists would answer the questions and compare them to my experiences and, secondly, I wanted to hear what the Stanford GSB students were thinking about when it came to management and leadership.

After a brief review of our respective backgrounds, moderator Kathy Ullrich kicked-off the discussion with the following question: “What are the most important skills that a CEO needs?” I answered that first and foremost, the ability to assemble a highly skilled and talented, functional team was the key to success. The ability to recruit, assemble, build and coach a world-class executive team were important skills to develop. [I am fortunate enough to have a strong management team of which several members could easily be CEO’s of their own companies. This matters when you’re trying to build new markets and make something from nothing].

Ms. Ullrich then asked me to lead off and answer the following question: “What leadership/management skills has/have been most useful to you to help you move up?” I responded that from a leadership perspective, the ability to remove the fear of self-preservation was important. When a leader makes decisions to ensure his/her survival, then they aren't taking the necessary risks that are required to build a company. From a management perspective, I believe that the ability to set clear direction and goals, as well as instilling a fierce sense of urgency to meet those goals is paramount. Transparent Communications, Presence (to really be there when you’re meeting and listening, not playing with your Blackberry and ignoring cell phone calls during that time) and Coaching are all skills that have helped me along the way.

I will post another entry (or two) with some of the other questions from both the panel and the audience in the coming week.

But now, I have little kids knocking on my door asking for candy--Trick or Treat!

“The telescope that Galileo built in the late 1500s had the magnifying power of a pair of inexpensive binoculars available in any Wal-Mart, but it was enough to open up a new world.” I read this opening line of the Newsweek article “What We’ll Find Inside the Atom” by Leon Lederman on my transatlantic flight back to San Francisco, and I was sucked in.

Amazingly enough, Galileo’s telescope lead us on a direct path to today’s super-modern Large Hadron Collider that was fired up last week when I was in London. (Funny aside, my British colleagues and prospects were not in favor of this experiment—they, and a number of other Europeans, thought that this would have unintended consequences—like open up a Black Hole that would swallow all of Europe!)

The article goes on to state that throughout history, scientists have had to continually invent new tools and theories (for instance, to explain the behavior of atoms, scientists had to invent quantum theory, which led to semi-conductors and other technologies that account for a huge portion of the 20th century’s economic output).

How does this relate to the folks here in Silicon Valley? Because like scientists, new tools and theories are invented or evolve to break through to the next level of efficiency. We continually look for ways to invent, innovate, re-configure old tools or even more commonly, invent new tools to propel businesses forward (think telescope to atoms to quantum theory to semi-conductors).

Look at Apple and how they've transformed digital entertainment. Consumers can now carry their entire music library, plus TV shows and movies all on one device that fits easily in your pocket. Can you imagine floating this concept around twenty years ago?

VMware [NYSE: VMW] is another great example. The company broke new ground by allowing one server to run several operating systems at once, or allowing a particular operating system to run on any server. The server, essentially, becomes virtual—its function is no longer locked into the physical machine.

Or how about social networking? I believe that social networking will replace the need for CRM. Why? Between FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and whatever else is on the horizon, all of the information that you need to know about your customers will be available in tidy, relevant places.

And to think, Galileo made it all possible with the invention of the telescope.