So we all know that analyzing data can help grow your business; the caveat is that it only works if you know what you need to measure. I think it’s important to set your goals first and tie trackable metrics to each step, rather than gathering all the data you possibly can and then trying to decide what to do with it. It sounds so simple but so many people rush to track everything and then get overwhelmed with the data, unable to make any decisions based upon what they’ve found.

Our goal is to increase sales to startups, specifically by increasing the number of purchase campaigns and giveaway campaigns completed each week. So we’ve been tracking data that will help us monitor those specific actions. However I’m finding that data in the B2B marketing environment can be particularly tricky to gather and interpret. For example:

1. Purchasing decisions are usually made by a bunch of people together. So finding a correlation between an individual’s unique marketing exposure and the purchase decision of the group is hard.
2. Sales cycles tend to be longer. Which means that months could go between the time someone sees a marketing message then makes a purchase, which makes it difficult to figure out the cause and effect over time.
3. Because of generally longer sales cycles, decision makers tend to get exposed to a number of different marketing messages before making a purchase- so it’s a challenge to tell which specific message promoted them to buy.
4. And the sales force tends to play a big role in closing (or not closing) the deals which makes it challenging to observe the direct impact of marketing on the B2B revenue.

If you’re targeting a B2B market as well, how have you overcome these problems in the past? I’d love to know!

Like most people you’ve probably received a piece of promotional merchandise from a completely random company at some point, even if it was only a pen. If your experiences have been anything like mine, you’ve never given the merchandise or more importantly the company, a second thought if it wasn’t relevant to you.  As with any sort of marketing it’s crucial to identify people who actually impact your business before investing in them!

Customers

Quora, a question-and-answer website created, edited, and organized by its community of users, is a good sounding board for discovering popular and distinct opinions within the startup industry.

For example check out these 10 questions below to catch many startup founder’s perspectives on a number of different entrepreneurship topics that might currently be puzzling you:

1. What does it feel like to be the CEO of a startup company?
2. What does it feel like to sell your startup to a big company?
3. Why is Silicon Valley obsessed with small ideas that don’t solve a problem?
4. What San Francisco Bay Area coffee shops are popular hangouts for startup founders and workers?
5. What books are on your “must-read” list for web startups?
6. What would the ideal web technology team be composed of?
7. How do you promote your startup without being annoying?
8. What are some signs that you are no longer a startup?
9. Are there any examples of successful startups that have distributed teams?
10. Why do startups fail?

If you’ve found other startup related threads with insightful responses feel free to share them here!

(Via @rafaaresende)

1. Let’s get together and merge our layers.
2. I’d put you in my ‘Babe’ circle on Google+.
3. You must be tired because you’ve been streaming through my RSS feed all day.
4. You make my heart Twitter.
5. Can iTouch?
6. I know you’re a complete stranger, but I’d gladly waste one of my Pinterest invitations on you.
7. You can put a Trojan on my Hard Drive anytime.
8. I just added you to The Hit List (my GTD iphone app).
9. I totally Digg you.
10. I’d like to be the mayor of your bed.
11. Bonus: I’d like to pin you to my head board.

Science has taught us that human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence.

But in the world of a startup you’re typically wearing multiple hats and caught up in a blur of day to day activities. Without having a few overarching strategic goals to work towards, your day to day activities and inbox can totally carry you away. You may be a multi-tasker extraordinaire but before you know it Q1 is over and you’re not able to reflect on and measure what you’ve accomplished, because you didn’t set any priorities. Nor have you pushed the company forward in any significant strategic way.

We all know that Steve Jobs had a big company to run with Apple, and he could have brought many more products to market than he did; but he chose to focus on only a handful of wildly important products. The point here is that his focus was legendary and so were his results.

Basically your company will be much better off if you, as a leader together with your team, take the time to identify a couple wildly important goals per quarter. These goals are the ones you must achieve with total excellence beyond the circling priorities of your day to day. You must be willing to make the hard choices. To determine your goals ask yourself “If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?”

It may help to understand why you might currently be driving your company to take on too much, rather than focusing on one or two clearly defined goals:

1. As a leader, you tend to be ambitious and creative. The problem is that creative, ambitious people always want to do more, not less. If this describes you you’re almost hardwired to violate the first discipline of execution.
2. Another reason you might lead your team to go after too many goals is to hedge your bets.  You figure that if your company pursues everything, then it seems likely that something might work.
3. And finally what makes it harder is that these good ideas aren’t presented all at once, instead they filter in one at a time.

Perhaps it’ll be easier to take a step back if you can relate to any of those examples– at least now you’re aware! The success of your company in the long-term will depend upon your ability to focus on the right things.

If you’re struggling with identifying the right goals and executing them, you should check out The 4 Disciplines of Execution.

Since you’re probably busy dealing with your whirlwind, I’ll help you out by revealing key steps here:

• Discipline #1: Focus on the wildly important.
• Discipline #2: Act on the lead measures (not the lag measures).
• Discipline #3: Keep a compelling scoreboard.
• Discipline #4: Create a cadence of accountability.

How have you succeed or failed in setting the right goals?

Here at Printfection we’ve recently undertaken a project to refine the wording on our homepage and throughout our site to speak more clearly to our target market. It would have been easy to pile into a room, break out a whiteboard, and start free-styling thoughts in a brainstorm session to determine the new language. But we decided to go another route; instead we’re each privately thinking and developing our suggested copy in separate documents and then will later read and discuss everyone else’s ideas online, refining them to create the ULTIMATE wording (we hope!). Why would we do something that seemingly wastes time and duplicates efforts? Read on young grasshopper…

Back in the 1950s legendary ad exec Alex Osborn invented the concept of brainstorming (as you know it today) which he believed led to the most creative ideas. His version of brainstorming included gathering a bunch of people together in one room and abiding by 4 rules: Don’t judge or criticize, be freewheeling. The wilder the idea the better. Go for quantity; the more ideas you have the better. Build on ideas of fellow group members. Osborn’s theory from there on out, had a huge impact and companies everywhere started using this methodology. The only problem with brainstorming this way though, is that it doesn’t work!

Since then, studies have shown that performance actually gets worse as group size increases as a result of social loafing (allowing others to step up), production blocking (only one person can talk at once), and evaluation apprehension (fear of looking dumb). Beyond that it’s been proven that “the group” is literally capable of changing an individual’s perceptions without the person even realizing it. According to psychologist Adrian Furnham, “The evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

I should add that the one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs (think of the success of Wikipedia).

If you’re interested in learning more about the topic I highly suggest grabbing Susan Cain’s Quiet, which also takes on the open office space increases collaboration and creativity theory so many startups are touting.

Anyhow, now that I’ve explained the way we tackle brainstorming, and the way science suggests we should do it, I’m curious- when have you seen the most success with brainstorming at your company?

There’s a lot of GTD and productivity talk in the startupsphere. All fine and dandy, but for most us there’s a laundry list of productivity hacks much simpler than GTD. Things so simple, David Allen would be laughed off the bookshelves if he wrote about them! But since I don’t have any books to sell, let me share my little secret with you…

I’ve been using Gmail and Google apps for years, probably like most other startups.

But for a long time I never bothered to learn the shortcuts. Big mistake.

I was always rushing to get things done, and with a never-empty inbox, I didn’t feel like I’d be gaining much by taking additional time out to memorize them.

But one day I learned that I could simply press the “y” key to archive a message I was viewing.  And as it turned out, this actually saved me a bit of time. Nothing astounding, but it did the trick.

Finally, this year – three years later – determined to master anything that could save me time in the long run, I printed out a Gmail shortcuts sheet and taped it to the bottom of my computer monitor.

While I still haven’t learned all the shortcuts, I’ve found that even just knowing one combination helps me clear out hundreds of junk messages in minutes– which previously took me an hour.  (The secret: while in your inbox, press “x” to select a message, and “y” to archive it. Keep repeating as fast as you can pressing “x” and “y” and “x” and “y” and watch your inbox melt away!)

I found this was the answer to the “everything else” section of my inbox that I didn’t really need to read, and I bet you will too.

So yeah, I’m encouraging you to shake your fears of conquering Gmail’s shortcuts, but beyond that, take some time to reflect upon your daily activities to see if there are additional ways you can be crunching out extra time. If I would have done this three years ago, I would probably have saved DAYS of my life time that could have been put to better use. But I understand, old habits like using the mouse die hard!

1.) Get a tattoo expressing your undying devotion for your country:

2. Dye your dog (and your kid too or just a random kid you find on the street):

3.) Call every contact in your iPhone and tell them how much you love America:

4.) Dress your dogs up and take them on a walk- your own mini parade:

5.) Carry an American flag with you everywhere all day long:

6.) Paint your nails:

7.) Drink beer:

8.) Eat a donut with real American sprinkles:

9.) Wear sunglasses all day long, even inside, because your an American badass & the sun never sets on you:

10.) Sing Katy Perry’s song Firework all day long at the top of your lungs:

**Celebrate at your own risk

If you’re working in advertising and marketing for a tech company or start-up, we’ve rounded up the best blogs for your RSS feed:

1.) Mashable: The latest in social media, business, tech (mobile, entertainment, online video, business, web development, technology, memes and gadgets), entertainment and world news founded by Pete Cashmore.

2.) Marketing Pilgrim: Launched by internet marketing consultant Andy Beal in September 2005 this blog brings you the latest news, rumors and reviews of all things related to internet marketing and online advertising.

3.) The Denver Egotist & The Egotist Network: Founded in 2007, this blog offers a witty take on local advertising agency work & creative campaigns.

4.) Copyblogger: This blog was founded in January of 2006 by Brian Clark and provides the advice and solutions that empower people to successfully grow their businesses through social media and online marketing.

5.) PSFK.com: Daily innovation briefing with news from advertising, design and technology industries.

6.) AdAge: The leading global source of news, intelligence and conversation for marketing and media communities.

7.) BrainPickings: Awesome inspirational blog written by Maria Popova, serving up carefully curated news in politics, pscyhology, science, software, the social web, sustainability, technology, video, history and TED.

8.) ViralBlog: This blog helps you stay on top of the latest viral ideas and social trends featuring viral videos, games, advertising, research and social media.

9.) The Inspiration Room: This site features advertising, design, and marketing inspiration from the worldwide creative community.

10.) MarketingProfs: A blog with marketing resources, strategies, online seminars, case studies, conferences ,and events for marketing professionals.

Bonus: What’s Next Blog: Written by B.L. Ochman, this blog covers internet marketing strategy, social media trends, news and commentary.

Did we miss any of your favorites? Comment below!

If you haven’t already you should check out Alexis Ohanian‘s (he’s the guy behind Reddit, Hipmunk & Breadpig) new book released by Hyperink. It’s a quick and easy read about how to create a product and company that customers love and includes a bunch of real-life examples culled from his personal experience as well as the broader startup community. Beyond building something people want, it’s important you use available tools with care including user experience design, social media, and swag to further delight potential customers. He takes the time to stress that treating your first 100 fans well can go a long way (but don’t think that means you can stop at 100). The point is to build a passionate group of users (as about 80% of the use of your product will come from only 20% of users). For obvious reasons, we particularly enjoyed his take on the benefits of using swag to make folks swoon:

“Swag: so very useful, but so often trivialized—something I personally find very frustrating. What is swag? Well, it’s asking someone, some random person who is already doing you the favor of being one of your users, to wear your logo, to wear advertising on their torso all day long. If you could put a value on that, it would far exceed the cost of making that t-shirt. So yes, pony up for the good quality t-shirt, because people don’t want to wear uncomfortable clothing. Make your swag attractive and give a damn—make it pleasant for your users to help you.

Whether it’s a sticker, a t-shirt (the standard startup swag), or a luggage tag (see the benefit of starting a travel startup with a cute mascot?), make the process of giving someone swag something special. No one is going to show off a sticker, or anything else, unless they feel an attachment to the brand. Even something as simple as giving someone a chance to ‘earn’ the item makes a difference (e.g, “Show me how much you love hipmunk by doing an impression of the chipmunk ‘flying’ with its arms”).”

Yep, he summed it up- swag rocks and can go a long way in helping to promote your company if used the right way, and that’s why we’re here. We can totally help you delight your customers! Do us a favor and if you’re thinking about working merchandise into your repertoire drop us a line (realperson@printfection.com) or check out our giveaway campaigns, which make giving merch to your fans super simple. Oh and for real, check out his book you won’t regret it.