Inbound Marketing Impact: the First Few Seconds of Landing

First Impressions

When we as owners and marketers have done all that hard work to get visitors to our website, we don't want to lose them before we can convince them they have come to the right place.

The adage that 'first impressions last' takes on a lot more meaning for inbound marketers. After all, in its most basic sense, 'inbound' marketing is advertising to an inward-leaning crowd of website traffic in an effort to pull them in and close a sale at some point.

A recent article by Kissmetrics, the 'first impression' you make on your visitors needs to have a positive action-inducing impact, or it'll be the last you'll ever see of them. Your visitors will hit the back button on their browsers and look elsewhere for what they want or need.

The impact that your site's 'first impression' can literally make or break your inbound marketing flow ' so you need to evaluate what your target visitors see in their first few seconds after landing on your website.

Professional Appeal Wins

Everyone knows that a professional-looking website is best, but what is a professional look? Is it clean? Straightforward? Formal? What if you were a children's entertainer, how should your 'professional' website look then?

A clown's professional website may be an extreme case, but it illustrates that the definition of 'professional' leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Remember that, at its essence, a Website is all about visitor usability and a consistent theme encouraging your visitor to stay and take action. A successful website needs to be built to deliver a great user experience and it needs to be themed properly for its content.

Of course, there are standard no-no's when it comes to professional websites, including:

• Distracting elements ' Flashy interactive text that blinks or marquees are not only distracting, but they also scream 'amateur.' Watch out for distracting ads too.
• Pop-up ads ' Interruption marketing is so 1990s! Of course, there are online interruption and outbound efforts that pay off, but you need subtlety and finesse. For instance, use pop-ups sparingly and only if the ad or promotional material you are push-marketing is relevant to the needs of your audience.
• Random content ' By random, we mean irrelevant or lacking context. If you really need to insert an ad for used cars in a website about kittens, you better have obvious context.

Maximizing the 'professional' appeal for inbound marketing means avoiding such pitfalls and demonstrating to your visitors that you can provide a great user experience and effective themes at a glance.

The Potential User Experience

Since we're talking about the first few seconds after a visitor hits your landing page, let's refine our point about a great user experience. After all, in the first few seconds, visitors do not have enough time to navigate through your website to see if it does indeed provide a great user experience.

You need to prove at a glance that your website's potential for a great user experience is there. Some facets of web design and content that can 'promise' a great user experience include:

• Website navigation ' A comprehensive (but not exhaustive) list of the most important or popular parts of your website.
• 'Scanable' content ' Very few people can read fast enough to assess the quality of your website's content in a few seconds. So use 'scanable' content.  This includes highlighted titles, headings, and bold formatted text.  Also, use numerals, bulleted items, and well-spaced, shorter sentences whenever appropriate.
• Images and other visuals ' Always use quality images and other visuals that complement or support your message.  Don't make your visitor guess about the relevance of an image to your topic.

Bottom line:

Inbound marketing relies greatly on 'first impressions' ' so make an impact!

Top Three Reasons Companies Are Not Organized For On-Time Service Delivery

Today, every customer service organization is awash in work.  Every day, contact centers, service centers and back office organizations receive hundreds and thousands of phone calls, web forms, applications and work items that all affect the customer experience.  Unfortunately, most companies have not optimized their back offices to process these discrete items as part of an interconnected customer experience management chain.  Here are the top three service delivery failures and what companies can do to optimize the customer experience.

Failure #1: Departmental Silos

Today, companies are notoriously organized by departments and compartments ' each is typically managed and goaled separately, and they don't communicate well with each other. This organizational structure is not an evil plan against consumers, but rather a convenient way to manage groups of people. However, the result can be a disaster for customer service expectations.  Does the front office communicate effectively what is needed for back office service delivery?  If not, how are customer expectations going to be met?

Failure 2: Lack of Management Visibility into Performance
When on-time delivery doesn't happen because of efficiency issues in the back office, the customer experience is crushed. What is the cause of missed service delivery and how can managers gain insight to make the required improvements? While many operations in the back office are automated, there is frequently a 'people element' within customer service workflows where people must review and add value to a process. 'As a general rule, only about 75% of work in an organization can be automated: the rest is human endeavor marshaled by manual processes and therein lays the ongoing cost.' (Source: University of Wisconsin, An Econometric View of Work and Play, April 2012).

For example, an insurance claim filed through a contact center or Web form will often require a person, a claims manager, to review the case, make recommendations and collect more information before a decision is made and is finally processed. Is this person aware of the customer's expectations or promises made by the company for the Service Level Agreement or SLA, or is this person just buried in too much work?  Backlogs of work are very typical in these operations since management visibility and the efficiencies typically found in contact centers are lacking in back office operations. Management needs more visibility into how their employees are engaging and performing with customer work.

Failure 3: Lack of Insight into Workload
Employees who are already backlogged with work, in training or on vacation impacts additional work items and deadlines that arrive daily.  Additionally, new marketing programs can dramatically change the workload that is coming into an already overloaded operations center. Beyond visibility into performance, organizations also need tools that allow them to manage and plan for the skills and resources required to meet changing workforce demands in the back office ' much like workforce management tools that forecast staffing levels in the contact center.

How can you tear down the silos that impact on-time service delivery?
Here are a few suggestions where you can start the process of tearing down silos that impact service delivery:

• Focus on the customer journey: recreate typical customer journeys in your organizations and determine where the customer touch points are and also the areas where service delivery breaks down for customers
• Focus on making customer information visible across departments
• Implement a single workload management solution for the enterprise that focuses on employee performance based on business rules for customer work
• Proactively distribute work based on business rules and service level agreements and track how this work is handled

Read more about workload management, or get the white paper, Taking the Effort Out of the Customer Experience; Best Practices to Optimize Your Service Strategy.

6 Reasons Why Employees Don't Respect You

Respect. It should come automatically for employees, because they're your subordinates, right?  After all, they wouldn't be there if you weren't there to feed them.  Plus, you were the one given the position of leadership, not them. I hate to break it to you, but sometimes the red carpet isn't rolled out automatically for people of your status. Did your world fall apart just now?  I'll give you time to let that sink in. Now breathe in and out then quickly get over it. Ditch the fantastic idea that the whole world revolves around you just because you're the boss.  Now that the mourning period is over, read on.

The number one reason for losing the respect of employees is because they're also losing their trust in you.  When followers lose trust in leaders, decisions become questionable and even the smallest changes can create suspicion.  If their attitude towards you wasn't this way from the start, their perspective of you must have changed along the way. Do you feel like you're losing the respect of your employees?  Here are the probable reasons:

You don't trust them 

You might feel like this is a chicken-and-egg problem, but, really, it's not. When you hire a person to do a particular job, they expect that you trust their abilities. Micro-managing and looking over your employees' backs are huge demotivators. It sends the message that you feel that an employee is incompetent and can't do anything right unless you're the one in the driver's seat. If you can't trust someone to do a particular task, then why hire him in the first place? Just do it yourself.   Take time to get to know the strengths of each of your team members.  Distribute jobs fairly and challenge them to their fullest potentials.

You're insecure

Another variant of the trust problem is when you don't give employees the chance to level up because of some insecurity issues. You leave the 'more challenging tasks' to the same people over and over again, because you're afraid that they'll botch it up and you'll get blamed for their stupidity or because of some unreasonable bias. For instance, I once had a male boss who gave all the 'quality' jobs to the men, while leaving the menial tasks to the females. There was another one whose point person was the office suck-up.  Instances such as these give off the message that you're insecure and selfish; you can't stand up and defend your employees if ever they do make some missteps. It may also give off the impression that you don't have the ability to mentor your subordinates or work with people who challenge your ideas. Or maybe you're afraid that if your subordinates succeed, they'll be better than you.  Employees generally want to get along with their bosses. Just read horror stories of the 'terror' boss and compare this to stories of the ideal boss.  You'd realize that not all employees are after your job. Some of them will happily work for a boss that brings out the best in them.

You don't respect their space

You expect people to drop their tasks for the most insignificant reasons, you hold them up for long-winding meetings that go nowhere and still expect them to be productive at the end of the day, you disturb the peace and quiet when they're working on critical tasks' the list goes on and on. I've always wanted to take managers out of their cozy offices to open-space cubicles just so they can appreciate the significance of private space.  As a boss, you have the right to call meetings or talk to employees on matters of importance. But if there's a way to keep it simple, direct-to-the-point, and short then please do so. One company realized that disturbances such as these irritated many of their employees. They came up with some rules when conducting business meetings.  To get rid of additional disturbances, they replaced the fax machine with internet fax and installed small chat areas around the room where people could talk in private when need be.

You're a poor communicator

You give commands and expect people to follow them without question. Unfortunately, you're not in military training camp where blind obedience is necessary in the line of duty. You're in an office with people of diverse backgrounds and personalities and where some people actually brains that they'd like to use for critical thinking.  I once knew two managers who usually agreed when it came to implementing office policies. However, Manager A would talk to his subordinates first when problems came up and ask if they had any questions or suggestions. Manager B, however, had a 'this is not a democracy' frame of mind. While it's true that leaders should be able to make decisions when the situation calls for it, not listening to your employees is detrimental to any company culture. Needless to say, Manager B quickly lost the respect of his few teammates when they realized that he was close-minded and too full of himself to recognize others' needs.

You make bad decisions

Bad can be relative. What's bad for an employee may be advantageous to the company.  It's sometimes hard to come up with a decision that suits both parties. There are some instances when you have to be play hardball to be a leader. But there are times when you may need to loosen that iron hold and see the forest for the trees. What are the long-term and short-term consequences of your decision?  Is a particular policy really necessary even if it means decreasing employee morale? How will a particular decision affect the company in various aspects?  After you've made a decision, how you communicate this decision to employees ' especially if it would affect their workflow ' is key to achieving understanding between both parties.

You make crass jokes

Some employees may find this acceptable and forgivable, but there are still some who don't. As a woman, I find crass jokes offensive, especially when they're dished out first thing in the morning. I don't want to be greeted by overgrown boys talking about sexually suggestive matters when I'm expecting to enter a professional environment.  Many of us employees expect our bosses to behave in a respectable manner. There are more significant and productive things we can talk about that go beyond bedroom jokes.

I am not advocating disrespect to leaders. I even feel that we should still follow their rules even if you feel them to be unwise. But I'm also convinced that there's a way for both employer and employee to be happier in their work relationship if effort is exerted on both sides.

You can command people to respect you, because of your title.  But you don't want that. You want to naturally command respect and foster productive professional relationships. Before firing off employees, do some self-reflection first. Learn to listen, properly communicate, help others succeed, and act like a leader.  That's how you earn respect.

This article is an original contribution by Iliana Snow.

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Top 5 Success Tips For Entrepreneurs!

In the modern world, business deals seem more lucrative in comparison to a job employment.

The idea of owning your own business fetches higher money in a much greater way.

Moreover, setting up one's own business is a trend in this modern generation.

Well, if you are interested in possessing your own business, you should take the first step and read the following 5 tips that will help you on your journey of successful business growth.

 

Create a reliable community of clients

Those who want to be a successful entrepreneur within a short time period should always remember that client is their most precious asset.

The warm relationship with the client community will always help the business run on track.

You should always be polite and committed to your clients in order to win their trust.

Doing this will ensure that you always have a group of reliable clients that will come back for your services, over and over again.

 

Try decreasing pace of investment

In the beginning, one should try to lower the amount of investment in their business as much as possible.

This idea will help you gain more from your new, small business, because most of the time, your earning will be saved and not spent on taking business loans, etc'

 

Build up your communication system

You should always be progressive in order to grow your business.

For instance, if you are engaged in online business such as content writing and web designing, the best idea  is to set up tracks to trap high paying clients through that.

Although, there is no other option for hard work and getting better results from online business, you still should be prepared to face complicated demands of clients

Doing this, can help you reach the height of success much sooner.

Being active on social networking sites, talking to the relevant communities of your business, and offering free samples of the work are some working ideas to broaden your client group.

 

Never get satisfied with the present status

Satisfaction with the present status of the business is a dangerous sign for the growth of your work.

This static condition inhibits you to search more ways of finding work and hunting for new clients.

So, you should always keep that hunger of success and earning money alive in your heart that you felt at the beginning of the work.

 

Being stable in your terms and ethics

Along with the maintenance of all the mentioned ideas above, the last but not the least is the maintenance of terms and conditions on which you base your work on.

Although you should be a little flexible in your work schedule to meet the demands of your clients frequently, being rigid by your own rules helps you develop self-confidence and the quality of leadership.

Similarly, you should owe to yourself to be stable on high ethical values regarding your work.

Promising deals with yourself for not being wavered from your own standard values, will lead you towards the brighter future.

This article is an original contribution by Samuel Pustea.

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One Essential Way To Get More Contractor Leads, Prospects From Adwords

If you are a contractor and your Google Adwords campaign is not getting you the results you expect, you might be missing this one trick.

I have spoken to contractors, remodelers, and construction company owners who are frustrated with the results they are getting from Google Adwords.

Does that mean Adwords doesn't work for construction and remodeling contractors?  No.   What it usually means is that they are doing their own pay-per-click management.

Unfortunately for them, they often have neither the time nor the expertise to learn all the tricks that will get them better results.  There are reasons why companies pay a professional online marketing agency to oversee their Adwords campaigns.

The One 'Insider' Tip Above All The Other Tips

'But Pat' is there one thing I can do right away to improve my results (lower my click costs, get more and better construction, or remodeling leads)?'

There are many different ways to improve a Google Adwords campaign.   Is there one thing you can do that will make the biggest difference?

Sorry, there is not one tactic that is more important than all the rest.  But, let me share with you a super important part of your Adwords advertising that can really make a huge difference.

What can make a huge difference:  You must be very specific in the keywords you use, and the ads shown.

Perhaps it is best if I show you what I mean before I go any further.  Watch the short commercial below.

Like the person trying to select a vehicle in the commercial, internet searchers have specific things in mind that they are looking for.

Most importantly' they want to find them as easily and quickly as possible.

Search engines are now very good at helping a searcher find exactly what he or she is looking for' and more quickly than ever.

What The Searcher Is Really Looking For

Let's go back to the video you just watched.  The woman is searching for a certain kind of car ('it needs to be a 2010 Ford Mustang, with leather, in either red or black').  They are not going to type in 'car' or 'buy a car' or 'new car.'  They are going to search for a specific car.

Now, here is where your Adwords campaign comes in.  Google rewards the advertiser who offers the searcher exactly what they are looking for' sooner rather than later.

So, if you are a remodeler, you don't just advertise using the keyword 'remodeler.'  You add the keywords, 'bathroom (or, bedroom or kitchen, etc.), plus 'remodeler' plus a geographical area, St. Louis.'  The more specific, the better.

In the end, you will have hundreds or even thousands of possible phrases people would use.

In contrast, we began working with a client (who had set up his Adwords campaign himself) and he only had 26 keywords in the entire campaign.  Not only were they missing out on a ton of searchers, they were paying 40% more since their keywords were broad and generic.  You pay less for a more specific phrase.

Not Just Your Keywords, But Your Ads Too

You have to use not only a variety of specific keywords but your ads needs to be as specific as the keyword people are searching on.

Watch here as I walk you through a great example:

The result of using very specific keywords and related ads is not only a higher response rate, but lower costs per click from Google.  Google rewards the relevance of your keywords and ads with more traffic, higher position on the page' at a lower cost per click.

How good is that?

The Cost Vs. The Benefits

Yes, it can be a good bit of work to insure that your campaign is set up properly.  But, the results month in and month out are worth it.

For example, when we have taken over a client account (either done by them or by someone they might have hired), and implemented the steps I am suggesting above, we have often seen a significant (30-40%) reduction in their click costs AND an increase (50-100%) in the amount of leads they are getting.  It really does work!

Want more Google AdWords performance tips?   Download our free report, 14 Quick Tips For Improving Your Google Adwords Campaign.  It is full of great ideas that will increase your traffic and response levels, while lowering your cost per click.  Download it today!

Taking Your Adwords Campaign To The Next Level

If you are wondering if your current campaign is set up for maximum results, let the professionals at 2nd Mile Marketing do a 25 point audit of your current campaign.  We will share some very specific, actionable steps that can be taken to improve your results.

Right now we are offering the 25 point audit for free.  Let us show you how you can get more' and pay less.  Sign up today for a free Adwords evaluation!

The CMO Guide to Building a Data-Driven Marketing Team

By now, every CMO understands the need to build a data-driven marketing team. But how do you do it? In this post I share Marketo's tips about the staff and skills you need to develop, as well as how to create a culture of metrics and accountability.

Hire the Right Kind of People

If you aren't getting the marketing metrics you need, it's probably because you haven't made them a priority.

In a perfect world, it's ideal to hire a full-time analyst for this job ' the pace of your enterprise's adoption of marketing analytics will be faster if you do. However, most marketers are faced with the reality of embarking on their measurement journeys with only the staff they already have. If you find yourself in this scenario, assign analytics ownership to someone currently within your organization ' and then make absolutely sure they have the skills, adequate support, and coverage to be successful.

You'll want to be intentional about the skills you search for and cultivate:

Analytical proficiency. Someone with analytical skills will be able to absorb, visualize and articulate large amounts of data and complex concepts, and make decisions to solve existing problems that make sense based on the available information.

Business judgment. All the numbers in the world won't help you create better business decisions if the analyst can't apply sound business judgment to them. When looking at an analysis, they need to be able to ascertain what the numbers really say, whether the methodology was sound, and most importantly, what it really means. It may go without saying, but the analyst must also understand your organization's unique products, services, industry and operations. If an analyst isn't familiar with your business, they won't be able to interpret your data.

Communication skills. An analyst must possess excellent written, oral and visual communication skills in order to explain the results of a given project in ways that enable an organization to learn and improve its operations. Such capabilities begin in effective interpersonal communication and extend to listening and group facilitation skills across a full platform of modalities: electronic communication, telephone and face-to-face conversations, group presentations, and so on.

Bias for experimentation. The ideal analyst needs to possess a demonstrated willingness to problem solve with new approaches.

Technical savvy. Your prospective analyst must understand how databases, CRM, marketing automation, and business intelligence tools work ' and work together ' to be successful in the role. This involves knowing each technology's potential uses and limitations.

Create a Culture of Analytics

Hiring (or designating) the right people is only the first step. Even at companies that already have significant analytical activities underway, doing the analysis is only about a third of the battle. The other two-thirds involve driving it into all current business workflows in a way that prompts your organization to use and act on your valuable conclusions.

Schedule some quality time. The velocities at which most marketing teams operate today often do not accommodate analytics, nor do they allow time for reflection around implementing analytical conclusions to improve operational efficiency and company revenues. If you want to benefit from your marketing metrics, analytics are something for which you need to allocate certain periods of time.

A facts and numbers mentality. A historical focus on 'soft metrics' have caused many marketing departments to become accustomed to operating outside of frameworks that are conducive to fact-based decisions and accountability. For marketing measurement to be successful, you need to bias your mindset toward hard financial metrics.

Accountability. It's pointless to set target goals if you don't also hold people accountable for meeting them.

Act on information instead of gut. All too often, businesses suffer from the curse of the H.I.P.P.O.: the 'Highest Paid Person's Opinion.' People may refrain from conducting valuable analysis and simply wait for their bosses opinion ' or they might allow a H.I.P.P.O. to override the analytics. Perhaps this is the case in your organization. Or maybe you yourself are the H.I.P.P.O.. In either case, do what you can to ensure all relevant data and insights are communicated before the H.I.P.P.O. comes out.

Bias toward insight, not data. It can be tempting to believe your success will increase with every additional metric you measure, but this is not the case.

Of course, none of this will work without buy-in and support from executive leadership, especially the C-suite. When done right, metrics can create a virtuous circle, in which the right metrics create the support for more useful and actionable metrics. If not, you'll encourage a vicious cycle with the opposite scenario.

Get More

For more, download my free 70-page eBook, The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics.

Please share your tips. How have you worked to create a culture of metrics and accountability in your marketing department?

B2B Selling: The NCR-MSTR OEM Partnership ' Pt 3 Finding a Deal

The following is a true story. A few names have been changed to protect the identity of some of the people involved.

In the first episode of this story, Scorched Earth, I described the situation leading to my being hired at MicroStrategy into an OEM sales role and the problems in overcoming relationships that had been soured by my predecessor.

In the second episode, Defeat, Adam Zais and I explored the changing fortunes of B2B sales professionals and I describe the events leading up to my being given 30 days notice of termination. This article covers the 90 day lifecycle of the deal itself.

Finding a Champion

Much has been written in B2B sales literature around the need to find a champion for your cause inside the company you are trying to engage. A champion can literally take you to the top of the organization, influence strategy, engage decision makers, acquire funding and make things happen in weeks that could take years, or may never happen without their support.

You will recall it had taken more me than 2 years to overcome the scorched earth from my predecessor, execute the joint marketing agreement that led to the value-added reseller agreement, which led to a couple of 7 figure NCR-Teradata-MicroStrategy sales to major US retailers, that saved me at the 11^th hour from being fired.

Everything that went before the pivotal meeting with NCR-Teradata in Vienna, VA., in mid 1999 can be described as grunt-work, relationship building, building influence and gathering intelligence.

Selling into a major corporation in B2B, or partnering with a major technology company in an OEM role, is like orchestrating a chess game, ' lots of activity with pawns, but nothing of consequence happening without engaging the major pieces. When Rocky Blanton attended our mid-year NCR-Teradata briefing, I knew we had found our major piece, a 'Queen' to champion our cause.

Rocky Blanton was VP of sales and senior member of the NCR retail team, ' he was also on the NCR-Teradata strategy committee. At our meeting, we reviewed our initial joint success with major retailers and discussed the pipeline of opportunities and the future technology roadmap for MicroStrategy products. It was during the discussion on strategy that Rocky revealed an interest in moving our partnership to the next level, ' OEM.

I remember the excitement as we took a break in our meeting and I literally ran down the hall and burst into MicroStrategy COO, Sanju Bansal's office to tell him the news.

Finding a Deal

The OEM partnership potential between NCR Teradata and MicroStrategy was obvious, even for our customers. The combined toolset was ideal for customers wanting to get answers to SKU'level business questions from extremely large relational databases. With more than 40 customers in common, it was surprising to many that it took so long to reach a formal OEM agreement.

The initial suggestion for a deal came from Sanju and it was for a $5M pre-pay. This did not sit well with me and after 3 years, I knew where all the skeletons and opportunities lay at NCR and felt that there was far greater potential for an accretive deal.

With Sanju on vacation in India the following week, I used the opportunity to pull together an outstanding group of MicroStrategy sales VP's, Steve Foley, Ray Tacoma and Dan Shoemaker, with MicroStrategy CEO Mike Saylor for a big-deal brainstorming session. I briefed the group on the potential pieces to a deal and the objective was to build a deal-engine with a bunch of levers that we could both manipulate in order to find a best-fit deal.

It was July 1999, the Dot.com boom was accelerating toward its zenith and the landscape for an OEM partnership deal was as follows: -

• NCR Teradata owned the lion's share of the high-end retail data warehouse market and still do today. Teradata was omnipresent in the World's largest data warehouses in the retail, telco, airline reservations and financial services markets.
• NCR believed they needed dot.com references for their Teradata data warehouses.
• MicroStrategy had just released MSTR7 and for the first time, had a strong product suited for VAR's and OEM's.
• The 3-year NCR Teracube development effort was proving technically challenging and was still not reference-able.
• MicroStrategy had IPO'ed a year earlier at an offer price of $12 and a year later the stock had doubled. In the heady days of the bubble, a joint marketing agreement or press release for a new customer announcement would cause the stock to move up a dollar. We knew we were in a bubble' this was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
• Every full-time MicroStrategy employee was an MSTR stockholder and there was a tremendous sense of destiny in the future greatness of the company. CEO Mike Saylor's vision was well understood and we drank the cool-aid ' as well as a lot of alcohol on the MicroStrategy cruise every year.
• Mark Hurd, was NCR's dealmaker and SVP of the national solutions group. Mark Hurd is a great salesman and he loves doing deals'. (I bet HP wishes they had him back).

Big Deals Have their Own Momentum

It was almost 90 days exactly from the Rocky Blanton meeting, until the MSTR-NCR OEM agreement was signed. If you have ever been surfing you will know that you have to put yourself in the right position in the swell to catch the break and then paddle like hell to get up on the wave. Once you are on it, it's a fast ride with tremendous momentum, it's exhilarating, exhausting and requires total focus.

The first change in the relationship as we started to work on a deal was the appointment of an experienced hand in Tom Crooke to run the NCR side of the deal. Our deal team consisted of myself, Sanju, Mike Saylor, CFO Mark Lynch and our legal counsel, Adam Ruttenberg, with Dan Shoemaker running the scenarios.

Once we had identified all of the deal elements in our deal engine, the roles changed and I became a supporting player as the executive teams on both sides took over structuring and negotiating the deal through a series of increasingly significant meetings in Dayton OH., and over the phone, culminating in the NCR-Teradata ' MicroStrategy OEM partnership.

Success has a Thousand Fathers, Failure is an Orphan

Just over 3 months earlier, I was an orphan, a failure and a waste of 3-years investment and had been given my marching orders with 30 days notice. How sweet the savor of success, after having tasted defeat.

The NCR-Teradata ' MicroStrategy partnership was structured as follows;

• NCR signed a $27.5 million, 3 year OEM agreement for MicroStrategy's entire suite of Intelligent E-Business' products and services,
• MicroStrategy purchased an NCR Teradata Warehouse worth $11 million to power the Strategy.com' network
• NCR became a master affiliate of Strategy.com
• MicroStrategy agreed to purchase NCR's TeraCube' business and all related intellectual property in exchange for $14 million in MicroStrategy stock

The partnership with NCR Teradata was the most successful of all of MicroStrategy's reseller partnerships and they sold through their entire $27.5M commitment.

There were many people who contributed to the success of the OEM partnership and ongoing business relationship. As I mentioned in the first part of this story, in OEM sales, it's best to park your ego at the door. It's a long haul, and when success comes, you will be one of many who contributed.

To be continued in Part 4. Aftermath