B2B and Industrial Marketing Blog
I am the ruler over my computer and know how to get it to do almost anything. But today I learned something I didn’t know. Something helpful that I didn’t even expect, and its so easy:
Adobe Acrobat can ‘Save As’ the following file formats: jpg, ps, rtf, txt, eps, png, and tif. Now I can put PDF documents into a PowerPoint presentation easily and do other nifty things.
Go ahead and laugh at me if you already knew this, but I’m more excited than embarrassed.
I received a postcard from Graphic Controls yesterday. It was addressed to our company without a name or title to go to. Apparently the receptionist assumed it was for printing services and put it in my mail. That may be the biggest problem with this nitwit…sending a mailer without directing it anyone. (And after a little investigation, I find they are a vendor of ours–you’d think they’d have a name to send it to.)
Here’s the headline of the card. Can you guess what their second error is?
Got it? They don’t tell you what they do, or give any scent of information to get you to read the card. The list of bullet points below the head just give the benefits of the website, with no indication of what they sell (see the card here). If you squint at the screen shot you might figure out what they do, but it isn’t until the back of the card that you read that they make “quality precision charts and marking systems”.
The list of benefit bullets is lame, stuff like “Place Orders on-line” (without clarifying if they will accept PO numbers online). They bury the biggest benefit in the last bullet…the ability to search for products by OEM part numbers.
Their lastly, their special offer:
“Special for On-line orders only: $100 minimum reduced to $25 now through 12/31/05”
Okay, as I think about it, this isn’t that bad a deal, but should it be a ‘special’? Isn’t part of the benefits of an e-commerce website is the reduced cost to handle orders? Wouldn’t this serve better as a permanent change?
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they are testing a shift in the minimum order. But with a lousy card like this, they are going to be struggling to get much traffic at all on their new site.
If you haven’t got this nifty tool, go get the new version 2.0.
Free Monitor for Google
It just quickly queries Google for your ranking for a URL by keyword. Painless…unless it delivers bad news, anyway.
Interesting how little details can screw things up. I had a online survey form set-up by an outside agency for a specific purpose. Their form asked users to provide their Name, Business, Address, Phone, etc.
It was interesting how many described what their company does in the ‘business’ field. No, we just want their company’s name! And it does make working with the resulting data a bunch more work.
The details will kill ‘ya.
InfoCommerce’s last blog/newsletter had an interesting editorial that centered around this statement: “What’s fueling paid search is the pay-for-performance model, where advertisers don’t pay unless something happens.” The title of the article: In a word: Fair.
Actually the article is a good exploration for pricing of online advertising pricing. How much are leads worth? How much more are quality leads? How does pay-for-performance make for a fair bargain between advertiser and publisher?
My take? The ones charging flat rates (Industrial Quick Search, ThomasNet, GlobalSpec) are big pills to swallow. However, they promise targeted leads…high quality.
PFP sites (business.com, Yahoo/Overture) keep my business because I can maintain a low investment and just pay for performance. Lower quality, lower cost, lower risk.
Meanwhile, pay-for-performance at Google, if looked at annually, can eclipse the flat-rate sites, so the overall cost is similar. Google Adwords has proven performance and quality…probably the best value of the bunch.
Anyway, as a marketer, I depend on a mix of sites to gain visiblity and quality clicks/leads. The mix I use is strongly influenced by the site’s pricing model, as well as percieved quality.
Today’s mail brought me two articles to blog about. Both are not online, so no links:
Sales & Marketing Management wrote about blogs and yours-truly in its October issue. A concise one-page article in it’s Work/Life Balance section. “Decide if what you write about is for the general good, and not gossip or strategic secrets,” Jung suggests. Also quoted in the article is Steve Rubel of micropersuasion.com.
UPDATE: You can find the article about blogging & me here: Express Yourself (I like the Madonna title)
Now that my ego’s been stroked, here is some real content:
Circuits Assembly had a very interesting story in its October Industry News about how BTU International rescued itself from 14 negative quarters. Like a lot of manufacturers, they were caught in a recession and the shift to China. The article tells about the personnel changes and strategic efforts that brought them back. It looks like getting their arms around the international sales organization needed to support the now international client base was a big part of the successful turn-around. Well, that and good leadership, and developing manufacturing in China. Anyway, a good read, if you get CA.
Heard over a couple cubes: “Oh crap, an invite to a reverse auction!” Yes, the only thing worse than getting an official RFQ is getting invited to a reverse auction.
Unfamiliar with the reverse auction? It is an online auction where you bid the price you are willing to sell your product at. These auctions are powerful because they limit control of the sale to the buyer with price as the sole factor. That means the company buying has: decided your product is a commodity, cut out the end users, and will be unsympathetic to pleas of anything unrelated to price.
Here is an article from the other side of the table at Purchasing.com poorly titled as: Not just a cost-reduction tool:
“And while price will always be an issue, more buyers today use reverse auctions to determine best value. That is, they factor into the reverse auction equation the quality and delivery performance of suppliers. They will evaluate potential suppliers before including them in reverse auctions.
‘If they pass our quality audits, and, if they pass our financial audits, then we may allow them to participate in reverse auctions,’ says DeHart. And while existing suppliers sometimes balk at being part of a reverse auction, they often ‘come out looking good,’ he says.”
In other words, if you meet their minimum performance standards, you are included in the auction. I don’t see how that really adds any value to the reverse-auction model. But when someone else bids 25% less than you did, you want to call and ask to make sure the offer is ‘apples to apples’, but they don’t care–its a commodity.
Some time ago, I predicted a Google Calendar back in February. Looks like things might be moving foward, both in others spectulation and possibility. Here is one take on it:
A Google Calendar Theory: “Perhaps this is it. Google Calendar will be Mozilla’s Calendar Project, except it will be a Web-based hosted application running on Google’s servers and tied nicely into Gmail and Google Talk. Mozilla would really become for-profit then.”
I’ve had a couple salespeople call me twice recently…without their realizing it. If you are doing outbound calling, don’t you keep track of stuff like that? And another guy trying to sell me an expensive ad package without qualifying me (or he would learn he is wasting his time). More salespeople lost in the MAZE.
Semirelated: I want to praise the guy who I bought my car from via eBay. His first email to me promised “you will not be dissappointed.” He may not be a salesperson, but he understands the issue of buyer’s remorse I was facing buying a car unseen. The book Pardox of Choice made a big issue of buyer’s remorse as an impediment to sales–this guy gets it.
Oh, and yes, he delivered. I am not dissappointed with the car.
The Semicon trade show in San Francisco last July gets a harsh critique for not executing its new combined ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ shows into one site, as published in Chip Scale Review Magazine:
“And some of this year’s exhibitors, especially those who were exiled to the third floor of Moscone West-where you could fire off a cannon between rows without fear of hitting any visitors-will undoubtedly make their displeasure known to SEMI by not returning next year.”
While I was bold enough to call Semicon nitwits earlier this year for their bulky ‘free’ mailer, publisher Gene Selven doesn’t go quite so far. But he does point out all the shortcomings he saw himself, or heard from exhibitors (and we agree). In summation, there were two problems:
My best experience with a two-floor show was at OFC in Anaheim where they put registration in the basement so that everyone had to filter through the basement at least once. At other shows, I’ve seen contests and refreshments offered at less traveled sections.
Certainly Semicon should have known that they were going to have these two problems. This, on top of the problem of moving the back-end show out of San Jose, where most of their show traffic comes from. According to Selven, a defection of exhibitors means they won’t have to worry about driving traffic to the third floor next year!
