Year: 2006

I know most of you will just scan the following list, but that’s okay…thanks for being there and reading what I’ve written for the last year.

I especially enjoyed these posts of mine for their ‘aha’ effect, or the frankness of my opinion. The Marketing Eye series was probably my favorite effort of the year.

1. Gizmos Week: PowerDesk Yes, you need this!
2. Buyers are looking for sellers “Buyers are looking for, but not finding, the following information on our websites: Pricing, Tech support details, Shipping, & Ordering online.”
3. Is It Really That Difficult? “In B2B, haven’t we all assumed that product knowledge is #1 for an effective salesperson? Have we been that stupid?”
4. Is B2B marketing really this bad? “Some of B2B products get sold without a customer ever looking at a website, while others are web-intensive. You can’t just “leave these outmoded methods behind.”
5. Techie prospects like industry standards “Being ‘standard’ eliminates risk, justifies pricing, and removes the sense of manipulation. It’s a powerful concept.”
6. BtoB advertisements Crappy ads pervade…let me prove it to you.
7. B2B content trapped in need for completeness? “How much smarter is it to leave your marketing incomplete and let the reader do the heavy lifting? The conclusion may be obvious, but now the conclusion is theirs.”
   
   
8. Marketing Eye for the Sales Guy series My intro to this series: “These salespeople have only one chance to do it right, in most cases. And being on the receiving end of the pitch, I’m constantly amazed by how salespeople blow it. Top crimes, IMHO: Wishy-washy voice mails; Not asking the right questions; Barking up the wrong tree; Not following up; Pretending the Internet doesn’t exist”
9. Small and ugly can be a winner Get the most of your partial-page ad.
10. Quality is free! Freely abused, anyway “In today’s online world where marketing-speak is not tolerated, the marketer may just avoid the subject of quality and let the buyer assume that your quality meets whatever minimum standard he or she has.”

Now that IE7 is widely installed, users may come across your website and get a warning something like this:

Russell at Info-Commerce Group does the due-diligence about this new feature and shares in his weekly newsletter: Go Phish!

Essentially, the tool runs off a blacklist. The blacklist is based on verifying if the URL is registered to a incorporated business. Now that sounds risky.

Actually, the first time I ran across this warning, I did a double take at the website I was accessing and then turned off the phishing filter. But what is someone who isn’t savvy going to do when they get this warning?

Robert Rosenthal at his blog Freaking Marketing posts a little rant titled: Why Most Business-to-Business Marketing Campaigns Are Uninspired Or Just Plain Awful.

So what’s he gotta say? The truth, pretty much. He uses B2C marketing as a foil to compare B2B marketing.

“B-to-B marketers view themselves differently — Ask the CEO of the soda company what business they’re in, and she’ll probably say, “We’re a marketing business that happens to sell sugared water.” Ask her counterpart in a software company the same question and he might say, “We’re an engineering firm that has to do marketing and advertising and all that sh*t.””

Here is the rest of the list:

• Marketing managers aren’t in charge of marketing
• Sales steals money from marketing
• Accountability is insufficient
• Not enough first-rate talent

You can head over and read his comments on each of these bullets.

The last one aught to get your attention: Not enough first-rate talent in B2B marketing? Okay, I’ll agree. But if you look at the rest of his list, you can see why.

I do want to add one thing:
B2B marketing is not a consumption/demand generation process. Engineers don’t buy my products because they are cool or fulfill some previously undiscovered need that only a good ad campaign can enlighten them to. They buy because they have a new requirement or a justified reason to improve what they have.

So, Robert is right that B2B marketing campaigns suck. He’s right that we are not the drivers of our businesses. But that isn’t where our focus is. There is a lot that B2B marketing does extremely well that B2C marketers don’t even understand.

I was just sitting at my desk opening my mail. There was a small envelope from Google.

Obviously a Christmas card. What would Google send? A reward for sending thousands of dollars their way and helping inflate the value of their stock?

Nope. Just a rather plain card with ‘Happy Holidays’ in a couple dozen languages. Yawn.

Then I turn to my PC and see an email waiting from Google.

“Adwords Service Level Enhancement”.

Seems I’ve qualified for human-voice support via a toll-free number.

It was interesting how the email was a reward that arrived just as the Christmas thank-you did. I may never use the toll-free assistance, but the offer is appreciated.

Thank you Google.

This week I am sharing some of my favorite software gizmos from my Web-marketing toolbox.

This time I’m going to pimp for a couple new gizmos I’ve recently learned of. They don’t have a spot in the toolbox yet, but they are fun to play with.

Kuler is an online tool from Adobe that lets you play with and share color combinations. For non-artists like myself who need to design things anyway, this may be handy to get a cool color palette. It is all flash and the site seems to run slow.

Linked-in is one of those web tools that is cool, but I haven’t found a purpose for it yet. If you sign up, you can link to me there if you know my last name. You’ll find 22 folks with the same name…but only one from Michigan. Once everyone is linked together, I’m not sure what is supposed to happen.

SalesGenius is nifty tool that tracks when prospects are opening mail and visiting your website. It’s focused on supporting salespeople, not marketers, so its functionality and reporting is more granular. Haven’t tried it, but it has a lot of potential if your sales process is very web-centric.

JetNumbers is a ‘Skype for the rest of us’ application that establishes a local number for you in other countries. Then they connect that number to any local number you want. Now you can get clients or salespeople around the world to easily call your home office. We’re going to test it out going from China to Michigan.