 Welcome to our panel this afternoon. You're awesome. How many did you do, Ben? Fifty thousand. Nice. This is the marketing committee, right? Yes. Fifty thousand. Thank you very much for coming out this afternoon to join us for this panel discussion on marketing. We hope that this afternoon will be very beneficial for everybody here. And I'm getting a signal here that I'm not being heard very well, so I'm just going to turn this towards myself a bit more. Yeah, we'd like to have this very participatory. So we've prepared some questions in advance up front that we're going to have the panel discuss and talk about. And then we would like to open it up for you folks to fire off any questions you have. So through the course of the time together, we're going to give you opportunity to either stand up and ask those questions out loud or also to tweet them. We have a hashtag that will be showing you just in a moment that you can tweet those questions out on. So my name is Glenn Hilton. I'm the president and CEO of ImageX. We're based in Vancouver, Canada. And we've been involved in Drupal since 2006 and have been involved in media and development since 2001. Today in the discussion, we're going to, as I said, have an initial intro of each of our panelists, followed by some questions that we've prepared and then some audience Q&A and some closing thoughts. So let's start out and I'd like to introduce you to each of our panelists. The first person on our panel is Ben Finkley. Ben is the founder and CEO of Vellacci Digital Marketing. He's the chair of the Drupal Branding Committee and he's also the author of Drupal 6 SEO. He also has recently introduced a new tool called Automator, which you'll be telling us about a little bit more. This is a great tool that will enable folks to do online marketing automation and enables them to do so easier using this tool in Drupal. Beside Ben, we have Megan Sonicki. She's the associate director of the Drupal Association. She works with the board, staff and community to find new ways to support and grow the Drupal community. She's been working on developing some revenue programs to fund a lot of these initiatives. And since she started two and a half years ago with the Drupal Association, has increased revenue from 1.7 million to 2.8 million. Then we have beside Megan is Dave Terry. Dave is the partner and co-owner of Media Current based in Atlanta, Georgia. Media Current has been involved in Drupal since 2007 and has been very effective in helping grow the Drupal community in the Atlanta region. Dave has been the chair of the Drupal Atlanta users group since 2008. Has been the co-organizer of Drupal Camp Atlanta since 2009 and of the Drupal Business Summit in 2011. Dave's key responsibilities include sales, marketing, HR, recruiting and strategic partnerships. But his key responsibilities to ensure that all of the Media Current clients have projects that exceed their expectations. So that's our panelists. And so to start things off, I'm going to get us onto our Twitter hashtag here. So it's DrupalCon MKTG. DrupalCon MKTG is our hashtag. So feel free to prepare your questions and send them through to us there. Or also to be at our Q&A time, prepare to come up and ask them into the microphone. Alright, so our first question which we're going to ask to each of the panelists is how are you going about marketing and selling Drupal? So who would like to start us off on that one? I will, Glenn. Great. How are y'all doing? Thanks for being here. So it's a very broad question but our primary focus in marketing and selling Drupal as an agency has been to partner with other Drupal firms. We made a strategic decision about six years ago to not develop Drupal websites and instead only focus on the marketing of Drupal websites and that way we were able to partner with many different companies in the Drupal space without being a competitive threat. So that's where we focused our efforts in building those relationships and partnerships and that's where over half of our customers come from referrals from Drupal shops. So the Drupal Association is here to support a community, a global community and we have over 900,000 Drupal.org profile names and right now in terms of association membership we have 3,000 members. So we have a really big goal of reaching into the community, raising awareness about the Drupal Association, getting more participation in our programs that could range from DrupalCon to buying a membership or supporting partnership or even participating in our sprints to upgrade Drupal.org and even some of our marketing programs like Global Training Days. So we use a lot of community communication to achieve that and so you'll see different content strategies around blog posts and email campaigns trying to do a lot more by working through our channels such as the training companies as well as our hosting companies and really any way we can get the message out to the community. Yeah, so at Media Current we believe almost entirely in an inbound marketing strategy and approach and we believe marketing really starts with effective positioning and the key for us we feel like is positioning ourselves as experts in the marketplace and we feel like experts need to do two things. We feel like experts speak and write a lot about their subject matter so much of our inbound marketing is predicated around generating fresh, relevant content. It's really a content generation strategy and we implement things like e-newsletters, case studies, blogging, webinars, video interviews with customers and all of that creates a cumulative effect for lead generation which we really believe is the lifeblood of any agency like ours and those leads then get turned over into sales. Another quick thought, a question I've heard before is if I work at a growing Drupal agency or even if you're a freelancer or a smaller boutique firm which should I hire first? Somebody to focus on marketing or somebody to focus on sales? I would highly recommend you focus on marketing initially. Marketing is going to help position and align your sales and business development to be successful if you're having that debate. I'm here to tell you that we've seen a really positive impact by hiring marketing first. He's been able to generate a ton of content that has enabled our business development to be more successful. Excellent. Thank you very much. The next question is when we're competing against other shops sometimes not just other similar sized shops but some very large proprietary organizations how do we go up against that competition and how do we win bids against competition that seems over our heads? Who would like to take that one? We recently announced last week a really big win. The Weather.com, the Weather Channel is migrating to Drupal. We made that announcement along with Acquia, our partner in that deal last week. How does a deal like that come about? Just to give you guys a little bit of history I think one thing people have a major misconception around is that deals like that get closed in a smoky board room over a couple of hours. A deal like the Weather Channel is about a one-year sale cycle. We literally started building awareness to the Weather Channel about a year ago. It's a very thorough evaluation process. So really it starts with awareness but I really believe that the key to sales is effectively pre-closing along the way. So at Media Current we have four key criteria as part of that pre-closing. The four criteria are budget, determining if the organization has an appropriate budget for what they're trying to do. Timeline is what they're wanting to do. Are they looking at it in a realistic timeline? Third and probably the most important, what problems are we trying to solve? What are their pain points? How does Troople align with those problems? Fourth is are we talking to the right people? Are we in front of the decision makers who actually have purchasing decision authority? Then what we did with the Weather Channel was really validating a lot of the perceptions that they had of open source and Troople in the first place. We highlighted the benefits around cost savings. We highlighted the fact of how innovative Troople was, flexibility, all of those things. We then took it to the next level because the Weather Channel pushed back and said, we hear your claims. We want to actually see it. So we went through a series of demos and proof of concepts with them. We engaged them in a discovery phase, in-depth discovery phase, and now we're moving on to the migration. So for us, that's how a large enterprise deal is won. I think it's important to note as well that everybody looks at Aquia as the large 800-pound gorilla in the Troople space, and in reality they're 10 times smaller than SDL Tridian. They're much smaller than Adobe, Microsoft SharePoint. So this is truly David versus Goliath stuff, but as marketers, as salespeople, that's what we live for, right? And it's really exciting. So anyway, I could talk a lot longer about this, but I'll... Awesome. Thanks, Dave. So we got some feedback that just came through on the Twitter channel. So Jaden says that we need to liven up. This is supposed to be a lively discussion. There we go. Ben's back to his push-ups. Nice. And Javier is wondering if this is being recorded, and yes it is. So moving on to the next question. How do we grow an evangelized Troople outside of the existing echo chamber? So we come to a lot of camps and we sponsor these events and we do really good at promoting ourselves to ourselves, but how do we get outside and really start to make a difference in marketing Troople in the unevangelized world of the CMS? Right. Well, that's right. We have an echo chamber here in the Troople community and we all know how awesome Troople is, but we need to tell people outside of here, outside of this community, why they should be adopting Troople and the Troople Association is starting to take more of a role in this area and I'm really excited about that, especially as we've hired someone who has a product marketing experience. His name is Joe Saylor. I think he's in the audience today, but there he is. He's already waved. Joe, where is he? There he is. Hey, Joe. Welcome, buddy. That's right. So our Troople shops have been doing a lot of work in investing and doing the marketing out into the ecosystem, but they need some air coverage. I think that's your favorite word right now. There's some air coverage and there's a couple ways we do that. So we want to grow the community focusing on really two major audiences, developer, naturally. We need to keep getting more developers to come into our community and adopt Troople because we have to keep increasing that talent pool. I know everyone's looking for talent and so that's really important for all of us to scale and also to keep growing the contributions and innovation of the project. We've been seeing their bosses to adopt Troople in-house. So we have a developer marketing strategy as well as a business evaluator type of approach as well and obviously we need to talk to the CIOs, the CMOs and get them to understand all the great benefits, all the wonderful stories that we have here with Troople and how they can bring that to bear their company as well. So we have a couple of things that we're doing. TroopleCon itself is a great marketing platform and something that we're going to be working on to keep accelerating not just the project but accelerating the Troople adoption, reaching out more to the CIO, CMO market through our media partners and press releases and also oh my gosh, a marketing budget that we could actually do some marketing spend to reach into other communities and bring them in. But also the attendee base here is roughly 50% newbies. So that means TroopleCon is already attracting a lot of new developers and site builders into the community. So that's one way that we're reaching outside and bringing people in and onboarding them. But we also have, sorry I've got a little list here. So outside of the PR that we're doing we're also starting to look at Troople.org. Dries mentioned this in his keynote. So that's one way that we're going to be working on this. We're going to be working on this for these different personas and doing campaigns to using a content marketing strategy to attract people to Troople.org and giving them this landing page where they can get all the information that they need and pass them off to the marketplace where they can find a shop that they can work with. And also Global Training Days, all the training companies around the world that we're working on. I would like to give you guys a practical tip for how you can grow and evangelize Troople outside of the existing echo chamber. How many of you in the room either yourself or somebody that works with you have contributed any lines of code to Troople 8 core? Raise your hand. Probably 10, 12, 20, I don't know people in the room. How many of you have did any testing to Troople 8? More, like twice as many. So when Troople 8 comes out it's going to be a big announcement and there's going to be a big press release and stuff like that and all you have to do is write your own press release that says Troople 8 came out and we did this, this, this and this to develop Troople 8 and suddenly you have taken ownership of a new cycle in your local area because you've taken something that's big and global and impersonal and you've made it something that a local reporter can really sink their teeth into by offering up that person who's contributed some code to say oh well how are you involved in this huge piece of software that's coming out? Our community and I'm from Austin and Austin is changing the world by contributing testing and patches to Troople. Very, very easy thing to do for a couple of hours. You get lots of exposure and then we also get lots of exposure in the Troople community. So that's just one idea that you could use to grow outside of the community. Great idea, Ben. So moving on to the next question are RFPs worth it? Should we be responding to RFPs? So who would like to take this one? So yeah, I've heard this come up quite a few times there's actually sessions on why you should not answer RFPs and when people initially hear that they're sort of skeptical. They say sure, conceptually that sounds great but RFPs oftentimes are part of if you target a university a higher ed vertical or government and public sector RFPs have been around 50 years I'm not going to be some huge change agent to change the way they view an RFP process and sure, that's a given. I would counter that by saying you may be in the wrong vertical if responding to those RFPs are not cost effective. If your customer acquisition cost is so high because you have to dedicate resources to respond to the RFP you really need to evaluate that hard. The basic notion is that you're much better off spending time on thought leadership and content versus responding to an RFP and what many times happens is people respond to an RFP that they don't have a realistic chance of winning. They don't spend a lot of up-front time qualifying the RFP to find out what their win rate might be and they go in just like gangbusters because it's a high profile account or university that they may really want to work with. Again, the notion focus on thought leadership versus responding to RFPs and we have seen and we're guilty of it way too much psychological investment in too few deals. Everybody puts all of their energy and emotion in hoping that this one RFP comes to fruition at the end of the quarter rather than taking kind of a more diverse approach or strategy in spreading out responses among multiple verticals or markets. They end up getting so narrow, so much tunnel vision in just this one RFP that if they lose it it's just devastating and it may mean even downsizing or layoffs and you certainly don't want to be in that position. Excellent. Good answer, Dave. So moving on to the next question I just noticed that we had our first question come through the Twitter feed. Ben you might want to do more pushups for this one. This is Scott Horn he asked on position yourself as an expert do you have all staff create the content or certain people dedicated and what percentage is? Dave do you want to take that one or do you want to take that one Ben? At Vellacci so we've actually made a shift recently we had certain people who wrote a lot of content in the company and there was maybe three or four people that kind of produced all the content that we created and recently we decided that we are going to become a much more externally focused organization and everybody in the company had to produce content and not everybody can write well so some people do videos but everybody from our office manager to me produces content and our goal is to push out at least one piece of information about our company or about marketing or about Drupal every single day. So we spread it out across the whole company. I would guess that each person spends less than 5% of their time creating content and we had to really incentivize our team to make that happen. So the next question is what kind of marketing activities are the most beneficial? So obviously content creation Dave was one of the activities you've already mentioned is there any others that come to mind? We'd like to take that one. You should submit your website to any kind of awards programs that you might have seen around because if you've built great websites then submitting your site is free and if you win then it's huge kudos for you and we have the BlueDrop Awards coming up here in a few hours actually at 6.30 tonight where we're going to be handing out prizes for all kinds of different categories. That is inexpensive and there's not a ton of them so it doesn't take a lot of time but I would chime in with Dave and say that if content isn't part of your strategy that's probably the lowest hanging fruit is just writing really interesting things that people want to read and people want to do business with companies that they respect and people that are interesting so I keep doing push ups. So Ben you started the BlueDrop Awards why did you start that and how is that part of your marketing strategy? So it is the BlueDrop Awards, yes I had a hand in starting it it was there were several of us the goal for us is really to give back to the community by shining a big spotlight back on some of the best sites we're able to make the developers look good and so when we actually hand out the awards we give out two awards for each category one is there's only one website that wins and so we give an award to that company that owns that website because it's their website but then we give an award to the developer both of the awards to the developer company so that they can then go give the website under the award so it makes them look good and that's our goal with BlueDrop Awards is to make Drupal look good and this year we opened up the voting anybody on the planet could vote so our goal is really to reach people outside of the Drupal community to get them to come and go oh there are some pretty interesting sites here some good stuff is being done with Drupal but for us it generates a lot of goodwill to have created that program but all of our sponsors are part of that we do the work but we're not particularly highlighted outside of the sponsorship area so anyway hope you all come it'll be fun we have a comedian and free beer so if I can just add to the marketing activities so I think it's really fun to do vision and strategy but I think where you get your biggest bang for the buck is when you bring it back to the basics and that's with market research I think you have to really understand who your customer is even looking at all of your different types of customers and maybe even narrowing in on who you really need to focus on if you don't know your customer and you don't know how to serve them you won't even know what kind of content will really resonate with them so I really encourage everyone to do that kind of take the time to do that kind of work and so talk to your customers find out what made them choose you and especially talk to the ones that decided not to go with you and have someone follow up that information is really helpful and so I know other things are if you don't know what a SWAT analysis is or the four P's of marketing I highly recommend that you look that up and do it for your business the basics are really important and you build from there yeah I would just add you know unfortunately we really don't have one silver bullet to share in terms of you know there's one activity that's generating a ton of leads versus another personally in that media current we're very big on case studies a question comes up you know how do you differentiate if you're the buyer there's ten different firms who all make the same claim we all do Drupal development design support so how is a buyer to differentiate between all of those various claims we think the real key to differentiation is everybody has a reputation everybody has a track record in order to validate that track record you do that through case studies you show how you have solved similar problems for other organizations who are inquiring about your need so you know a good one is we've worked in conjunction with phase two in aquia on georgia.gov and it was the first state government agency to really do a wide scale adoption to Drupal that use case can be leveraged from a marketing standpoint to convince the 49 other states who have not adopted open source who have not discovered Drupal and that case study will help validate their decision so yeah if there's one that's been more beneficial I'd probably point to case studies and that's what I'd really strongly advocate great I see another question is just pop through on twitter it was in dollars what's the size of the Drupal market in the US that's an interesting one there I don't think I would have an answer off the top of my head I will research that and let you know yeah I don't know the answer on that one either moving on how can someone get involved with Drupal at the local level who wants to take that one okay well I can start this one but these two are really the pros and kind of practice what they preach so there's a lot of ways to get involved obviously whenever you can contribute code back to the project reach out to your local groups see how you can provide content for their meetups and help them maybe even offering a space or sponsorship is a great way as well and what I just love about this community is the co-opetition so reach out to other Drupal shops ask them if they have common pain points and how they're addressing it because everyone's just sharing this knowledge and I think through that you also find partnerships where you get this amazing what I call the lead load balancer effect people are saying I have this niche I'm a partner up and there's just this wonderful trust that's built up between companies and you know it's better that a Drupal shop takes that lead versus having it just languish so there's just a few things oh and the other big thing is after you finish your client implementation please write it up we need case studies on Drupal.org and if you do I will promote it and share it with the community we really need that content thank you excellent yeah let's move on to the next one what are some of the latest advancements in marketing that Drupal shops can take advantage of so there is a so you've probably heard of a type of software called marketing automation and it's basically it's a method of engaging visitors to your website as individuals and so over the last couple of years Velachi has actually been in development with a machine automation tool called Automator and you might have actually seen it out on the showroom floor or you can come by and take a look what we did really is we were trying to make it as easy as possible for marketers to use Drupal to really get the data about what people are doing on a Drupal website and then tying that back to individual users so you get really good visibility into exactly who's coming to your site and you can use it as a shop but it's something that you should be talking with your customers about if they're not already using marketing automation because it greatly increases the ROI of the dollars they're spending with you to build their site by giving them tools that help them make more money with their website so anyway that's what I do so I don't want to take my horn too much anybody else want to pitch in on any other tools approaches so let's say you have a limited budget or you're just a real small shop and you're starting out what would you suggest that they would do and where would they focus their marketing attention so yeah I mean the obvious one again is content focus on generating content it's a big commitment I think somebody asked you know how do you go about incorporating kind of everybody to generate the content we at Media Current set up an editorial calendar so it's based on a rotation but it's definitely a team effort we get everybody involved in blogging and case studies we also do webinars that we contribute back to the community but I think the obvious one too is just you know the best way to get involved from a marketing standpoint is you know Drupal's a duocracy get involved with the community go to the meetups help organize them get involved with your Drupal camp you will get an ROI back I think the biggest struggle that people have is their time constraint so you have to be able to incorporate the community aspect into your schedule and you will the more you get back I promise the more you'll the more you'll get back and return from a community standpoint and you know it does a tremendous amount of job of just establishing kind of your Drupal street cred you know if you're involved with the community if you're trolling the forums if you're answering questions your name will get out there I promise great alright so we had another question come through on Twitter this is from Fidelix her question is is there any specific techniques to sell or inject Drupal into government what's the question again is there any specific way to get into Drupal in government yeah I there's nothing we don't really focus on public sector as much I think a lot of it starts with just evangelism so if you're if the person works at a government agency and is trying to establish introduced Drupal to their organization I think just do the things that we were talking about earlier you want to make sure that you're talking to the right people more than anything what's the name of the session Mike excellent thanks alright next question how much should you use Drupal in your company marketing materials and branding and what should we be aware of in terms of copyright who wants to take this one I think you should use it when it gives you a competitive advantage when you can show additional value because you're a Drupal expert that's when you should use it in your company's marketing if you're going up a I don't know it's kind of hard to say it depends on the situation in general I think you should mention it I mean if you're specializing in Drupal it should be on the homepage of your website that has your company brand on it build your brand as its own standalone things at the end of the day that's what you own but make Drupal part of your story and mention it if you're wanting to sell Drupal websites don't go build your website in WordPress so that wasn't directed at anybody in particular just you know and if you have questions about trademark the trademark for Drupal and the Drupal icon is owned by Dries go to Drupal.com and really read that and understand it I was reading it last night to prepare for this it's kind of long so you can really use Drupal a lot more flexibly when it's doing something good for the community a program for Drupal but you need to be careful when it comes to a commercial entity so I just go to Drupal.com to check that out just to piggyback off by saying I've heard some really polarizing views on this question like if you're an agency and you're designing your own website how much do you incorporate Drupal into the messaging so at Media Current we believe strongly in mentioning Drupal and it's definitely a part of our overall strategy one of the biggest mistakes I think I've seen agencies they position themselves too much as a generalist and on their website they laundry list a bunch of different service offerings you know they start off saying they do Drupal and then when there's a valley in demand or workload they then say they do Joomla or WordPress or Java or other technologies or they may say they do SEO or hosting don't make that mistake if you're committed to positioning yourself as experts in Drupal Drupal should be at the foremost of the website and you've really got to validate why it is you're making claims of being an expert on the site and that goes back to what we were saying about case studies and content and blogging and video interviews and all of those things making sure that they're part of the website as well Excellent Alright so now we're going to move to open questions so if anybody has any questions there's actually one here from Adam yeah Adam's got one here on Twitter and I'll just read that one out in a sec but if you have any questions please come on up to the microphone or send them through his tweets so let's start with Adam's Adam's question is what are some things companies should consider before investing in marketing automation Thank you for the softball question there Adam I appreciate that There actually is a marketing automation BOF tomorrow at I believe it's 1045 it's on the BOF board so if you're interested in marketing automation in general you can come by and we can talk more about that but marketing automation it's not like something that you just throw it on your site and it just does your marketing for you it really does create it really does require a significant knowledge of how marketing works on your site it also changes in a lot of ways it changes the way that a company approaches the market it becomes much more focused on the individual and what they need to read and see to change their minds so you've got to look at doing some prep work around organization who's going to be the primary user of the tool who's going to create the content and what kind of content needs to be created but my personal belief is that sooner you can get the code installed on your site you can start collecting lots and lots of data and that can really help to inform a lot of those conversations so in one aspect you could say don't do any prep just get the code on your site and then over the course of the next couple of months you'll see a lot more information about how people are using your site what content they're interested in things like that and then that can direct what direction you take your content creation but you know buy my stuff Thanks Ben Michael's got a question he's going to come on up and another gentleman is right there How much time do you guys allocate for average blog post and or video post if you do those I'm going to repeat the question how much time do you allocate for blog posts or video posts I think this is a great question a person in my organization was tasked with writing a blog post and it was fantastic it was a fantastic blog post so much so that it was probably like four times longer than a blog post ought to be and I asked her how much time did it take you to do this and it turns out it took like a day and I was just gobsmacked I was like don't spend a day writing blog posts I was like take deep breaths and stuff but you really got to lock that down or people will spend a lot of time we ended up taking that blog post and turning it into a white paper and it's a fantastic white paper but it wasn't a very good blog post setting those boundaries are good for me I write fast I can do blog posts in 30 minutes maybe but for my team research and stuff I might say don't take more than an hour or hour and a half to get that first draft get some feedback polish it and put it up to me it's much better to go quick and dirty and do lots of content that's maybe not as perfect it's better to be consistent and deliver content regularly than it is to every once in a while put some fantastic piece of content up Dave's going to disagree now I think it's a really good question too and I'm going to take it to the next level and give more of a holistic view because I get this question a lot we know we need to be investing in marketing but we have all of this client work how do I balance non-billable and billable time if I'm at a Drupal agency I'll just really quick tell you the media current model we have a 70% utilization target and everybody looks at me initially it's low so 30% of our week up to 12 hours is dedicated to different categories the biggest thing I would emphasize to everybody is treat your internal work like marketing like you would client work so you have to do like what Michael's getting at assign estimates to how long a blog post would take for us we allocate up to 4 hours from the first draft to when Adam actually publishes it to our site and it goes through the agency and editing you know check but if you're not tracking that activity internally it can quickly go sideways so again make sure we have not only marketing we track how much time we spend on sales and RFPs we track how much time we spend on internal distributions and products we track how much community time that we give back to our managers I get to sometimes act like I'm a client and be able to approve and define requirements so you know that's part of our process that we've woven into media current and I just again can't emphasize enough make sure that you track the marketing activity time you need to know what kind of are away you're getting what kind of time you're spending on each of these activities that we talked about so we got a couple more tweets that came through and I believe there's a gentleman right here that had a question I had this question there are some use cases which Drupal handles really well so there was this question in between that how do you compete against other proprietary CMS platforms so are there some occasions where you saw a project and analyzed it and said that oh no Drupal is not a good fit for that or did you go the other way and say that oh we are going to write custom modules to this to that and eventually make Drupal fit the problem like where is this balance so just to be sure we understand your question is do you always offer Drupal as a solution or is there sometimes where you say no this might work better okay that's another really good question so we only target organizations that are already drinking the Drupal Kool-Aid if they're you know platform agnostic they haven't selected a CMS we just we don't chase those I've heard this come up a lot too lately what about just recommending the right tool for the right job well for us our tool is Drupal so we are always going to recommend Drupal and if it's just we'll look at it if we don't feel like it's a good fit but Drupal is so flexible now there's so many modules we rarely encounter a project where somebody needs a content management system where we cannot make Drupal work so and then I think Teresa's keynote was great I mean he hit on a lot of what the differences are between Drupal and the proprietary CMSs and it's your job you know the sales kind of side to make sure that messaging is getting through around what the value proposition is of Drupal versus proprietary okay great anybody else want to tackle that one before we move on to the next question Scott Horn has another one he says for clients that require coding a new reusable module do you use the benefits of contributing code as a selling point who wants to take that one Ben I think it depends on the customer some customers are very they believe in the community aspect they believe hey I'm getting this open source thing and if I can contribute back that's good for everybody because I'm getting the benefit of everybody else you know the whole story some customers really kind of believe in that and other customers are frankly just cutthroat and like no I want to own my own code if you write it for me I own it I think it really is you make the call at the moment but I would always ask obviously this community is built around contributing back cool things that we've all done so it should be part of the process that you ask for permission to contribute back anything that you're developing I think it's a great marketing message I think it's a great standpoint but you got to use it let's be honest when the rubber meets the road you're trying to make a sale and it'll help great another question from twitter from Kevin he says what do you find was the best way to get people to attend your webinars yeah I mean we're just starting to evaluate that ourselves and creating a webinar program and when the first things we're doing is reaching out to our audience to understand what do they want to hear about right it's all about the market research and making sure you have the content that they actually want to get back to the basics and what we also find is if you just do something on just a case study it's just not educational enough so people are really looking to learn something so what is that educational hook that you can bring to the table also yes you want to make sure there's a nice schedule and you get it out there for people to start registering but make sure you do a lot of alerts three days before one day before people sign up at the last minute more often than not so just make sure you're scheduling for the promotion is really tight so one of the things that we did with sorry to do this again but with Automator is to integrate the GoToWebinar package so that if you've set up a landing page and you've got a webinar it actually tracks signups and so it makes it really easy for you to target your house list against people who've shown interest in that particular vertical and then follow up with people who either you think should be there and they haven't signed up yet or people that attend your webinar so the integration pieces are really important so I think that's the do good webinars and people sign up for them I think to me that's the main part excellent any other questions one right back there coming up this goes back to marketing Drupal within your organization I work at a government organization we're about 1400 people and very diverse and our department has decided I work in IS that Drupal is a great solution but we can't just force everybody to use Drupal so I've been talking about Drupal I've been presenting it I presented at our internal technology meetings and we finally just stumbled over this concept where we have Drupal Fridays the organization will give you an hour plus your lunch, you bring your lunch to a room and a lot of these people I've been talking to, I had about 10 people come up were stunned when I had them install Drupal themselves and actually set up a content type and put in a field and make a view they were shocked they said this is what you've been talking about all this time, we can do this and while we're not necessarily trying to push development out into those departments we just wanted them to understand that that's how we can build applications for you and everybody's very excited I think that we're going to have we just had our first one we're going to have a lot more people come in fact we're thinking it might become kind of a problem so I'm telling some of the attendees that I spent quite a bit of time with that okay, you need to pay me back by helping the next group that comes in you guys need to start mentoring and helping them with some of the simple steps but that was extremely effective and I was really really surprised when I was showing Drupal and after talking to people about it how they really didn't get it until they put their hands on it and actually did it so that's all I wanted to say, thank you awesome, that's great anybody else have any questions or contributions that you'd like to make Michael you said you had to do a proof of concept so where do you draw the line between kind of what you do for free as part of the sales process and what you might need to do to actually win the deal and will they pay or not pay that's a really big question in the design community too because a lot of times designers will do comps up and there's this expectation from the client that you'll do it for free and that's frowned upon in a lot of cases and so how do you tend to deal with that Dave you want to take that one? so yeah, I mean the cliche-ish I don't know if it's where we draw the line from estimating versus consulting is if we're providing them deliverables that they're going to be able to leverage internally then we consider that billable work so the proof of concept work with weather.com, with the Weather Channel was a billable engagement and it was beyond just doing a demo we want to actually validate how weather feeds aggregate in Drupal and how the services layer works and how that kind of consultation is beyond providing an estimate but yeah, it's a tough one because you're trying to establish credibility with that prospect to show your depth of knowledge but at the same time you have to draw a line you can't give away your free advice despite who the logo is so we're in a good position Drupal the messaging the awareness is getting out the demand is high so I would just say don't take an advantage of because of that your time is your most valuable time and you can't get paid for it yeah, great I saw a couple of other people that were starting to get up if you have a loud voice you want to just stand up and belt it out I can repeat it back but is there any other questions that anybody has before we move on to the resources right back there right, so how do you deal with the whole aftermath you've launched the site and then there's all of these updates and the whole situation so if it's kind of how do you how do you sell that kind of the fact that the website is constantly evolving and it's not just the budget doesn't come to a hard stop after the implementation I think it starts with positioning the value and importance of support very very early on in the process I think a lot of prospects have the exception around open source that it's free we never lead with cost when we're talking to a prospect and this has been validated in a number of studies by CIOs CMOs who say the real attraction to open source in Drupal particularly is its flexibility they don't like being held kind of hostage to a product roadmap and we're still going to win on the total cost of the battle when I was talking to prospect a couple weeks ago and I said just let's do an apples to apples comparison on what a Drupal upgrade is going to cost every three to five years versus licensing with Adobe CQ5 you know and I would definitely recommend if you're an agency you should really incorporate post launch support or kind of overall package that you're selling I mean for us that's how we really feel like we're able to develop a long term relationship and kind of a from a strategic standpoint allow us to kind of get embedded into that organization's web strategy for a long long time Excellent so for the last portion of our session here today is that the panelists have picked out so on the list and you guys can't see it here but we have a number of different books the E-Mith Revisited who recommended that one Okay why don't you just give us a really quick tweet on how effective that is The E-Mith Revisited I think is the story of every entrepreneur's journey and it goes from where you're an expert at something yourself with lots of people wanting your business or wanting to do business with you and how to handle that and what's typical and what's normal is that an entrepreneur ends up not ever doing the cool thing that they enjoy because running a business is complex and so I think it's for any entrepreneur to understand that aspect of building a business is I think critical and I highly recommend that book it's a fantastic book raving fans customer service do it managing web content by Robert Rose who did that one was that you Dave yeah I think I'd highlight one of the last ones is Blair Ends he's actually somebody who specializes directly with web agencies he's not a real household name author but his specific niche and vertical is consulting with web agencies that are like 10 to 50 people we went through an exercise with him he really advocates strongly against RFPs and how to position your firm to never have to respond to another RFP again and he gets into into really a lot of in depth information on that so great we also had velocity predictable revenue marketing agency blueprint the thank you economy the dip by Seth Godin and delivering happiness anybody want to comment on any of those specifically yeah the dip by Seth Godin that's a book that I'll take you about 20 minutes to read and it is probably the book that is most profoundly affected my marketing of my company and that is basically I can sum it up you're the best in the world at whatever it is that you do and if you're not the best in the world then you haven't narrowed your niche enough keep narrowing your niche until you're the best in the world at that one thing and business will come to you but read the book it's a good book and I through delivering happiness in there by Tony Shea I would highly recommend you read that book if you haven't yet it's all about culture and the culture of your company can be a huge tool for you in marketing your business so that's it for today folks we want to thank each of you for coming out and I just want to say on behalf of the panel that one of the cool things about the open source community it's not just about giving back code it's about helping each other and so I want to extend just out to you folks that if any of you need any help at all please do feel free to reach out to us we want to assist you we want to help you we want to support you we want to see it be successful thank you