Who's in charge here anyway?

I just stared and stared at this paragraph because it spoke the truth, especially for me and my company. No one is in charge of the product, no one is going to analyze customer needs. It's more like a tree growing, than an organism that has a brain.

Adroit Consulting – summary of presentation at BMA conference

We will be making the argument that in B2B companies Marketing should own Customer Relationship Management and assume a P&L role. Marketing is the rightful steward of the customer lifecycle, but in many mid-sized, B2B companies, Marketing is being marginalized and is becoming strictly a marcom function with no upward mobility path. Whoever owns customer data and insight into customer behavior has the opportunity to improve the profitability of customers. But with ownership comes accountability for that improvement.

In the email I received from his consulting company, Stan Martin also makes the additional point that by knowing the customer, marketing is better prepared to control product marketing.

A good b2b marketing laugh

Check out this company's explanation of their name, Forced Potato. Read on and find out the even funnier explanation of their parent company's name, Pempek. This is even too wacky to be called a Purple Cow.

Forced Potato - Where did the name come from?

Beyond the guestbook call to action...

This article from ClickZ covers some good advise beyond the typical search optimization, but suggesting you think like your client. The author does mention 'vertical' lead sources such as Thomas Register, too.

Things get sophisticated, though: When measuring, managing, and optimizing a campaign, you may want to set blended objectives that go beyond a simple "contact us" lead form or a phone call. In other words, for a visitor not ready to contact you, can you create another objective for them to achieve on your site that will help move the sales process forward? A download or a demo, for example?

B2B Search Best Practices

A new directory to watch

I received a call from LabX, to get me to advertise on their website, which seems to be mostly a used equipment auction/classified ad site for scientific instruments. Our target market isn't the 'scientific' market, but I did find one of our models for sale used.

It maybe a good way to generate traffic to our site with people actively shopping for what we offer. I'll be investigating. In my mind, it sounds like another angle on the GlobalSpec model, but for bottom feeders.

LABX - www.labx.com - New and Used Lab Equipment

Internet Marketing Conference

I have signed up for a conference on internet marketing put on by my local Thomas Register reps. The keynote speaker is an Aaron Kahlow, plus subjects like: search engine optimization, website development, internet tracking, and (of course) TR internet initiatives. I promise a full report after the seminar, coming up in two weeks.

Useful stuff for web marketing

This article gives you seven basic items to review to make sure your site visitors become leads. Check out the author's weekly column on "ROI marketing"

In summary:
Message Must be Relevant (Identify the benefits and value your products or services confer)
No Jargon
Don't "We" All Over Yourself (The first rule of online success is it's never about you)
Keep It Need-to-Know (Ask for as little information as possible)
Help Them See It (Evaluate text scannability)
Qualify Better (Let visitors know briefly who you are, what you do, and what you offer)
Test, Measure, and Optimize

Challenge: Get More Leads by Next Friday

How do you respond?

We spend a lot of effort creating a website, but how much effort is spent responding to those who contact your company via the website? This survey and analysis by Boyink is basic, but is a good dose of reality. I'm going to add a feature to allow the sender to copy themselves on their request, which was one of his suggestions.

Email response study (200K PDF)

Beware of Topsites

I get regular hits on this blog regarding my previous post on Topsites-us.com, so I did a search myself. Here is an indepth review of what Topsites is doing.

Topsites.us / Topsitez.us / Topsites-us.com Bogus "Renewal" Notices

A little late

I got a call and an email with another despised pre-qualification surveys for CRM software. The company contacting me most likely received my request for information back in March, when I was in "search mode". While not as bad as the bone-head from Seibel, I'm still kind of shocked. I'd guess the leads from the website I requested the info from just weren't handled well. What happens with your leads?

What would you do?

We've got a new administrative assistant to share with several departments. What tasks should we ask her to do to help our sales and marketing efforts? Direct mail, call clients, clean-out files?

One idea floated is to have her do a client survey. Maybe a good idea if the results can help me tune our CRM initiative to what the client wants. What questions should we ask?

CRM update, kind of

The sales manager and I have come to terms with our CRM selection process and are ready to be turned loose. We agree that all three software we are looking at would be suitable and do what we want. Their connection to our back-end ERP system is the greatest variance. But we at least agreed on one vendor (I ain't telling yet, read on).

Today I fielded a call from one of the other companies and told him our pick. Their package was the highest price, but he offered to drop to meet the price of our selection. And they were offering better integration with our ERP system (I think). So, do we switch horses? Or is "price matching" a strategy we should snub? The drama continues to drag out. Need the big guys thumbs-up and we can get on with it.

Test, test, test

Being the one person who has access to our website is convenient to make changes almost 'on the fly'. The problem is quality control. I recently found that the "TinyURL" link that I used back in January was case sensitive, but when I added it to our website, I didn't know this. The result is a bad link! I had a similar problem with a personal blog of mine, too. I write this post to remind myself to test changes that I'm otherwise not going to see or use. You should do the same.

Punch it up

Interesting article in BtoB Magazine (but not on their website) about improving trade advertising for industrial trade journals. The magazine's popular "Copy Chasers" critique advertisements regularly, but this article gives general advice to punch it up. They are aligning with two other influencers in my current thoughts: Seth Godin's 'Purple Cow' and Emeril Lagasse's 'Kick it up a notch'.

The Chasers' point is to focus on one item and message, don't cram the page, and make it look attractive (including using people). The implied thought is that you should give them enough information to be interested to click over to your website. If the ad is compelling, they will!

You mess with Google, you lose!

I've probably complained here before about a certain competitor who was "spamdexing" Google, and hogging every single #1 spot of the keywords I track. As of today, their site no longer exists in Google. He now has to rely on a one-page site under a different URL, plus his AdWords ads to generate traffic. Yay!