What do you do when you have a great subscription product an entire company can benefit from? Sell one division first! We spoke with Sharon Gillenwater, Principal and Founder of Boardroom Insiders, about how this subscription database is using internal champions to shorten its sales cycle. Plus, discover some great content marketing tips for database publishers, why designing a homepage like a landing page is a great idea for B2B sites, and one of the few times PayPal is a great choice for a payment processor.
Company Profile
Founded: 2009
No. of Publications: 1
Employees: 11 full-time, 8 part-time
Business Model: Hybrid — subscriptions, bespoke projects, one-offs
Paying Subscribers: Several hundred companies, ranging from one seat to enterprise subscription
Location: San Francisco, CA
Website: http://www.boardroominsiders.com/
Target Audience
Boardroom Insiders targets marketing and sales professionals at companies looking to sell their services to very large organizations. Their particular sweet spot seems to be tech companies, although they have subscribers from a variety of industries.
Boardroom Insiders has a secondary market consisting of HR personnel and recruiters, particularly those from boutique executive search firms.
Content
Boardroom Insiders provides its audience with in-depth profiles on executives and senior leaders at a host of public and private companies. While the site trumpets profiles on all the leaders of the Fortune 500, it actually contains far more profiles, some of which are the result of bespoke projects and requests by subscribers. In reality, the site contains profiles from the Fortune 2,000, including a few non-US companies, (Global 500), and some lower level executives, such as divisional CIOs at tech companies. The profiles also contain information beyond biographical data and contact info, such as the person’s expressed goals in his/her position, which may vary from overall company goals (i.e., a CEO and CMO may have the same company goals but different initiatives and challenges in their roles in meeting those goals). In addition, the profiles contain information from media clippings and other public sources of information. (Check out a sample profile here.)
Originally, Gillenwater created the site and content to help sales persons get meeting or craft messages for senior level executives. But since launching Boardroom Insiders, subscribers have found alternate uses for the site’s information, including entering the information into key account management systems, customer-specific dashboards, or executive events. For this reason, the profiles are provided not only online in HTML format, but also in PDF and text-only versions.
While most of the information used to develop the profiles is available for free online, Boardroom Insiders is pay-worthy because the site distills massive amounts of information from numerous sources into succinct profiles specifically for marketing and sales needs. “We believe every sales and marketing person should be doing this research on their own, so original value proposition was ‘we do it for you and save you time!’ But what we found out was that sales and marketing folks don’t have time so they’re not doing it at all. So now we’re filling this knowledge gap. The alternative is a higher likelihood of blowing a meeting,” Gillenwater says.
The site updates 75 to 150 profiles a day. They often schedule these updates around quarterly conference calls, breaking news and major investor events.
Gillenwater says the site uses a mix of onshore and off-shore editorial resources to create and update the profiles. Staffers do basic data collection (school, work, contact info, work history). Then the company has its more highly skilled editorial staffers polish the profile and add additional research (personal research on family, thoughts on leadership, hobbies).
The site also uses some technology, such as a web-scraping tool that alerts the site if an executive is no longer on a company’s executive team page. But overall, the profiles are created through a manual process in order to be highly curated.
Revenues
Boardroom Insiders has annual revenues under $5 million.
About two-thirds of those revenues come from subscriptions, particularly group subscriptions. Another third comes from bespoke project request from current subscribers. Finally, a negligible amount of revenue comes from the site’s sale of individual profiles upon request, priced at $50 a piece.
The site engages in custom pricing for its subscription sales. The range is between $5,000 for one person at a small company to $100,000 for a large company with multiple seats. Gillenwater says the average account is between $25,000 and $50,000. The sales staff will have a conversation with prospective group subscribers about how they plan to use the site before quoting a price.
The site has not conducted pricing tests because of the custom nature of its pricing, but it has tried a lot of pricing models. Earlier, the site was more expensive, and that led to some pushback from clients. “Now, I think we’re where we need to be because we don’t get questioned on it or as many objections,” Gillenwater says.
Marketing Tactics
Gillenwater says that good SEO has been the main source of traffic for the site. A secondary source is word-of-mouth marketing. The site also engages in PR and blogging activities to increase their online footprint.
SEO
Boardroom Insiders invested in an SEO consultant early on to create the skeleton of good SEO. It then goes back to that person annually to review the site and make additional recommendations. Thus the site comes up #1 for its name and terms like “Download in-depth executive profiles and biographies.” It also ranks first in organic results for many CEOs, although not the most popular ones, like Bill Gates.
Word-of-Mouth
Gillenwater says the second biggest source of subscriber acquisition is from people familiar with the site who then move to a new company or tell another department within the same company about the site (see Group Subscription Tactics for more).
Blogging
Gillenwater has a background in content marketing, and thus plays to her strengths by producing blog posts on a regular basis. The most interesting thing about these posts is that many have a Call-to-Action button at the end for additional content, like a podcast, or download, or an offer for a free profile or trial.
The site also uses a third-party vendor to re-purpose this content through emails, social media, podcasts and whitepapers. This strategy helps augment the site’s search rankings by automatically re-posting content to the site’s various platforms.
PR
Boardroom Insiders will also release press releases when CEO appointments or activities make the news, such as this one on Mary Barra, the new CEO of GM.
Conversion Tactics
Boardroom Insiders has set up its homepage to function as a conversion page, a smart move for any site with a hard paywall.
There are several best practices employed here — benefit copy, big buttons and the use of video.
However, there are also a few ways the site could improve the page:
- The buttons shouldn’t be the same color — choose one to highlight over the others (usually, the call-to-action you most want people to do).
- While using video is great (especially since it employs an outside expert, Lisa Earle McLeod, author of Selling with Noble Purpose), the video box should be bigger and more prominent. (But it’s wise not to use auto-play, especially on B2B sites, since nothing annoys a prospect more having their computer blast audio unexpectedly during work.)
- The client logos are great external endorsements, but the variety of colors distract from the conversion button at the bottom of the page. The site should grayscale the client logos so that they don’t distract from conversion.
The site offers a free search of its database in exchange for an email address, which is smart. However, the site also requires an alphanumeric password to set up a trial account, which can be a friction point and decrease conversions. When asked why, Gillenwater said the site was a bit worried about people trolling the site for information or to scrape its database. “My initial instinct was, ‘Let them see everything.’ But we did have people literally robbing us, trying to download hundreds of hundreds of profiles.” In response, the site now gives only limited access during the trial period (although they will email free profile to a prospect who searched for an unavailable profile). We also recommend the site trying installing a Captcha box instead, since forgotten passwords are a major and unnecessary impediment to high subscriber usage and engagement.
Trial-takers are converted to paying subscribers mainly through lead nurturing. In addition to free profiles, the site will offer content, like top 10 lists and best practices. If it’s a highly qualified lead, Boardroom Insiders will look the person up on LinkedIn or the Web and call them directly if possible. The site will also offer free demos for anyone who wants one.
The site has conducted some A/B tests to improve conversions, which has led to steady improvement (i.e., an 8.6% open rate vs. 8.5%). There have been no major lifts, but the steady improvement makes a strong case to continuously refine and test your landing pages.
Group Subscription Tactics
Boardroom Insiders acquires many of its leads for group subscriptions through word-of mouth. Typically, the site will sell a group subscription to a sizeable department within a large company (e.g., the regional sales division, but not the entire sales team, will have a site license). Then word-of-mouth will spread through the company and Boardroom Insiders is able to increase the number of seats within the company.
The site found that trying to sell to the whole company was taking too long — sometimes a year — and that this approach is more effective.
Sales are closed mostly over email and the phone by the sales staff. The site monitors usage, and if there’s not enough usage, Boardroom Insiders will approach their clients with an offer to help with adoption.
Payment Processing
Boardroom Insiders will invoice clients upon request but prefers to take credit cards, since the accounts payable cycle has seem to have grown longer in recent years, from 45 days to 90-120 days. However, they had trouble with some credit card processors not accepting charges above $25,000. In search of a solution, Boardroom Insiders switched to PayPal which allows them to process up to $60,000 in one charge. Also, in order to incentivize quick and up front payment, Boardroom Insiders will offer a discount for early payment.
Retention Tactics
Boardroom Insiders has a renewal rate of 86%, and some subscribers have been with the site for 3 or more years now.
Tracking usage is Boardroom Insider’s main retention tactic, along with upselling more seats in a site license.
But the site also offers bespoke profiles, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the bespoke profiles meet a clear subscriber need while growing Boardroom Insider’s database for other subscribers. However, because any user can order a bespoke profile for $50, companies are sometimes concerned that their employees will rack up a steep bill through Boardroom Insider. In response to this quandary, Boardroom Insiders built a self-registration link and system, so that individuals within a company have to enter a personal credit card in to get custom profile. This prevents the subscribing company from getting a steep bill. Granted, this employee could use a business credit card, but such charges are easier to monitor and track by division than a simple all-access system. This is the one time more friction is good from a customer service point of view.
About Sharon Gillenwater
Sharon was working as a marketing consultant for Sun Microsystems when she began creating in-depth executive profiles for the sales team. “I realized that these profiles contained information that every sales person on the planet needed,” she said. “Having this executive insight would make them more confident, more relevant and more successful in their sales calls.” Thus, the idea for Boardroom Insiders was born, and the site launched in 2009.
She says her first surprise was that it was easier than she thought to create the content quickly. But the hardest challenge was figuring out pricing and the business model. “We went through an entire year where we said we can’t do custom projects. Then we did a few custom projects, and it resulted in a huge explosion of business on database side.”
Her advice to other database subscription publishers is to focus. “Don’t try to be all things to all people. Don’t produce a lot of content that people aren’t paying you to produce.”
Vendors and Technology
Hosting — GoDaddy
http://www.godaddy.com/
Payment processing — PayPal
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant
Email, social media & landing page management — Hubspot
http://www.hubspot.com/
Web design & development — independent contractor
Content management — custom built & Hubspot
SEO Consultants — Mission Web Marketing
http://www.missionwebmarketing.com
Editorial — Information Evolution
http://informationevolution.com/
Analytics — Hubspot
http://www.hubspot.com/
Insider Analysis
Boardroom Insiders clearly has a unique product that’s not only meeting a need and pain point for sales and marketing staff, it’s the type of product that’s malleable to different uses by companies. As far as data content goes, that’s a win-win. In addition, the site does a great job of harnessing its word-of-mouth to upsell more site license seats. And we love how the site is using its requests for bespoke projects to deepen its own database.
The homepage/landing page could use a few design tweaks, including gray-scaling client logos so that the CTA buttons stands out more. Also, the site may want to try installing a Captcha box instead of requiring alphanumeric passwords (see our Best Practices on User Logins). They should also consider initiating a formal word-of-mouth program to help their internal champions make their case to other groups within an organization. This could entail providing current subscribers with emails or free profiles to impress other division heads (see our Case Study on SimpleK12 for more on this tactic). Finally, the site could improve its retention rate a bit (90% is not unsurprising in B2B group subscription rates) by instituting a sophisticated email and telemarketing campaign and data analysis of common drop-off points (our Retention Handbook talks about this in depth).
