The news cycle from April 2012 is nearly over but two tech stories are capturing headlines and my imagination:

• Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion – New York Times, 9 April 2012
• Google Drive Arrives, At Last – InformationWeek, 24 April 2012

It’s pretty clear why these items are newsworthy with the mainstream press: large companies, large markets, large valuations. The press and public alike care about Facebook and Google, and these announcements demonstrate their industry power and offer guidance to future strategy.

My interest in these stories are a bit different. For me, these news stories provide an opportunity to connect with customers through current events. Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend doesn’t pick winners, cover breaking news or expound on industry trends, but we do talk about persuasion, marketing and growing audiences. The Instagram and Google Drive news tie into principles that are near and dear to my efforts: focus and agility.

Instagram Succeeds With Focus

Instagram Succeeds With Focus

I have Instagram on my iPhone. I like the interface and have used it take many photos and to share a few photos with my social networks.

Instagram has a good product and an even better strategy. They focused on mobile photography sharing process for iOS. They innovated with simple-to-apply filters, social sharing and free distribution. They didn’t rush into obvious and difficult areas such as Android and video. Their iPhone app first shipped in October 2010, but they waited until April 2012 to ship on Android. They haven’t released a video app. May be they will in the future…I don’t know.

Focus didn’t mean they did only a little. It means what they did, they did very, vey well. Most will agree that their mobile app works well and the cloud component of their solution scaled well as they added more than 130,000 users per week.

Focus is a great strategy, especially when combined with a large market and product innovation. Focus takes significant management discipline. In a startup, the hard thing isn’t killing bad ideas. It’s killing all the good ideas you shouldn’t do right now. For Instagram the results are indisputable: their small team scored big!

Google Late to the Cloud Storage Party

Others More Agile Than Google Drive

I’m a big fan and heavy user of Google products. They are a company that has done more to sieze the Internet opportunity and capitalize on the digital revolution than virtually any company on Earth.

Google Drive is a nice product. It delivers Dropbox-like cloud file storage and Box.net-like cloud content collaboration. I’ve used Google Drive sporadically for the past week. It works as expected and nicely integrates with Google Docs and Chrome.

I’m quite happy that I chose to work with the nimble Dropbox solution and didn’t wait for Google Drive. I first heard about Google Drive around 2007. Shortly thereafter a working product became available from Dropbox, which I started using for free. Dropbox succeeded quickly with a freemium cloud solution before most of us had heard of “freemium” or the cloud. My cloud sharing workflow is humming nicely with Dropbox and I see few advantages to selecting a new supplier for this service.

Kudos to Dropbox and Box.net for being agile, innovating, investing and executing with the “cloud of Google” hovering over their marketplace. An additional shout out goes to Synology DiskStation NAS and Apple Time Machine for enabling set-it-and-forget-it back up/restore for our home computers.

Their is an optimistic lesson that every start-up entrepreneur can learn from Google Drive. Chirs Sacca put it best in a tweet: In the end, my lesson learned again and again? Never count on a big company beating a startup. Never.

Conversions in business-to-business marketing and sales processes are always exciting things. Amid the excitement, its important that the entire team shares a consistent understanding of how to measure sales funnel conversions.

This article lays out the three key performance metrics for conversions and why they are important. Along the way, you’ll learn the best practices to increase the leads of your businesses that many lead generation b2b companies implement.

Conversions

Simply put, a conversion is where an individual progresses from a less engaged state to a more engaged state. Increasing levels of engagement correlate to some degree with relevance, trust and purchase intent–all good things.

The total number of conversions is important because they give a sense of the magnitude of activity in the sales process. And size does matter. Each member of the sales team needs a steady flow of conversions in their territory to stay productive and hit their numbers.

Conversion Events

Conversions events come at many different stages in the funnel and mark the moment that a conversion becomes measurable. Conversions happen in the mind of the prospect first, and the vendor learns of the change from direct communication or through behavior measured on the web site. Examples of conversion events include:

• A customer sends a purchase order, converting a forecasted opportunity into a closed deal
• A sales accepted lead (SAL) qualifies into an opportunity
• A website visitor becoming an inquirya prospective customer visits a trade show booth
• A prospective customer requests a product demonstration
• A name in the marketing database, through automated scoring crosses the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) threshold, is passed to sales

The counts for each conversion event are important because they helps to identify bottlenecks and opportunities within the process. You need to know if you have enough lead development personnel in place to qualify incoming leads before they grow cold. Likewise, you need to make sure their is sufficient flow of MQLs for the number of quota-carrying sales staff. Not all conversion events are equally important to the sales process. Each organization needs to decide which conversion events are worth tracking and how various conversions events impact the sales funnel.

Conversion Rate

For each conversion event in your sales process, there is an an associated conversion rate.

The conversion rate for each conversion event is important as a measure of process efficiency. It takes a bit of experience with your lead generation techniques and sales processes to establish the “natural” conversion rates for various events. But once you have a benchmark, the next step is to look for ways to improve the conversion rates along the way.

Conversion rate improvements play a major role in profitability. If a particular ad campaign yields 10% more results, it drove more opportunities for the same budget. Likewise, if the same sales team is able to close 15% of MQLs instead of 10%, a nice percentage of the increased revenue flows down to the bottom line.

Getting  Sales Funnel Conversions Right

We’ve done a bit of math today but don’t forget that the real job is creating conversions. Conversions happen in buyers’ heads and are only counted when they hit the funnel. Defining the value proposition, making repeated offers, executing through the sales process is how you earn sales funnel conversions. The bulk of you investment needs to be focused on reaching out to new audiences and providing conversion-worthy content, products and experiences.

Tracking sales funnel conversions is very important because they often involve hand-offs from one person or organization to another. Hand-offs are an area where there is a heightened risk that something goes wrong. Best practices for hand-offs involve rules (either manual or automated) that ensure 100% of handoffs occur on a timely basis. What’s more, its not sufficient to hand-off a lead to sales to a “sales team;” it needs to be assigned to a specific person, typically based on a territory assignment. Another best practice is to measure the sales rep against a response-time SLA for newly assigned leads, as many kinds of leads get cold very quickly.

Both sales and marketing professionals still need to prioritize creation of new customers. Understanding the mathematics of sales funnel conversions helps you understand how the funnel comes together and where you can generate the most leverage for your business.