I sent spam?

I had an email reply to a proposal I sent out this morning. I noticed that he had received the message labeled as 'possible spam'. Now why is that?

Then I had a sales rep call wanting to talk about the emails he had sent. What emails I asked. Turns out they were in MY spam folder. He is using an AOL account. They were labeled spam by Spam Assassin run on our host's mail server. I am running Cloudmark on top of that, which hadn't tagged it. While looking for those emails I found one from an employee in my spam folder.

I'd try to be a little more cautious about thinking your emails are getting thru right now.

BTW, this blog's host, 8-95.com started making spam as an attachment and then puts the body copy in plain text so you can't accidentally ping their servers to let them know you read their email. This does make it harder for Cloudmark to separate, though.

CRM project moving ahead!

It took almost two years to finally get my CRM project approved and order placed. We went with Goldmine. Why? It may not be the best software, but having a local consultant to support us is a major plus, especially when he is interested in helping us. That gives me two distinct benefits:

• I don't have to find myself in the role of 'administrator'.
• The consultant will help encourage us to do more than just 'use' the software. Otherwise, my fear is that management will think that once it is installed and live, the work is done.

So, what have we done so far?

1. I put together a implementation team with our: sales manager, inside sales leader, support leader, and sales secretary. This gives views and expertise from different angles.
2. I held a general meeting with everyone in the sales and support departments, as well as having our president sit in. Having the president there was a major plus, so he could hear my plans, as well as gauge the reaction of the staff.
3. With our consultant's template, put together a outline & calendar for implementation. The plan does not detail the 'pilot testing' and modifications done by us internally. I'm going to have to exert my own leadership to get through this valley. We scheduled pilot testing for about one month.
4. The consultant spent two afternoons here learning more about our needs, goals, and processes so that he can provide a recommended configuration of Goldmine, as well as changes in the process. Having processes in a flow chart (ala ISO 9001), made this an easy task for us.

I'm really excited about how many immediate fixes we will have to the way we do business. My head does swim with the multitude of issues that need to be settled an implemented. However, there are a number of '800 lb. gorillas' we've gotta wrestle first:

• Segmenting customers
• What data to import
• Revamping our quotation format

Traffic power is alive and kicking as 1p.com

Thanks to Rank for Sales blog, I learned that the evil Traffic Power (my previous post) has resurfaced. This time they are showing how evil they really are.

They are now 1P.com. Read the FAQ and it sounds like the same stuff. Second to last FAQ states no refunds.

What is interesting is that they are setting up their own web forums. You would think that they would do this to create link traffic for clients, but it is worse than that. They are actively dissing major SEO companies and personalities. There is a surprising amount of effort here, and to the sites they link to that do further slander.

Business.com--Home of click fraud? Major analysis!

I've been advertising on Business.com for a few years. At 70 cents a click, I started out thinking that it was a reasonable way to promote our business, knowing that our listings would be shown in a 'contextual' mode. Exposure is good, right?

But nowadays there's such a thing as click fraud. In this article from Wired on click fraud published today, the author says no one is doing anything about it. So here I am doing my part.

Why? My referrals from business.com have been increasing and this month they jumped. Here are the numbers from last month:

• business.com 606
• rd.business.com 55
• billed click-thrus 478

I don't want to reveal my company's site-traffic, but I will say that this puts them as #2 referring domain! This is double last month's traffic, which was also high. Suspicious? Oh yea.

I used FastStats to filter analysis to only hits from business.com. Doing so does skew some of the numbers, as the referral is only for the first page that the visitor hits. So total time on the site and click-paths are not useful data. And then I looked at the log file for one day, when I got 117 hits! Here's some observations:

1. 559 of the page requests came from searches using their 'frame the destination page', suggesting that the clickers are using that to seach and click.

2. Referrals came from these partners on the single day:
23 from partner=2627803
52 from www.galaxysearch.com
Results from other 11 sites (opticseek.com, go4seek.com, shangrilaa.com, tobuy.com, delmonicos.net, emberhseach.com, kiligaga.com, petovia.com)

(And galaxysearch is run by what sounds like a slime-ball (read here: http://galaxysearch.com/i.html?arg=4) famous for being the first to registering sex.com. The list of coersion bragged about on galaxysearch certainly gives me no confidence that his searchers are any kind of target audience.)

3. Two of the referrers actually showed keywords used to search. They were single words of 'cycle' and 'thermal'. Hardly target searches! Note no clicks from internet.com or other major sites listed on their partner page (http://www.business.com/info/partners.asp).

4. 89% of the hits were on just one of my five registered pages with business.com. And the normal search terms for this page draw very little result from Google or Overture.

When I get a chance, I'm going to see what I can do with this information. Stay tuned.

Where did the order go?

Email is great. It's elevated the efficiency of 'inside' sales people tremondously. But is has created some new problems. Suppose an important sales message, like a PO or a quote-request, is sent to the email account of someone who is out for a day or more. Like most people, I don't turn on my email 'vacation message' unless I'm out for more than three days.

Here is a solution one purchasing agent recently used as part of his email text:

PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL TO CONFIRM RECEIPT OF THE RFP. Should a reply not be received by Friday Oct 8 at 1:00PM I will send a paper copy via fax to your number in order to ensure timely receipt of the RFP.

What else can a sales team do to help make sure POs and RFPs aren't left ignored for days? This is one reason people feel compelled to check their email even while on vacation. Does it have to be that way? Any suggestions? What works for you?

Making a marketing plan

We're starting a marketing plan for a new product here...not something that happens often. So I found my self Googling for a guideline on creating a marketing plan. What I found is great: just enough to get launched and make sure we don't forget anything. And its just a friendly little website called KnowThis. It is just for marketing. It's a little incomplete, but I'm really happy with what they have.

Three Free Prizes

I've run across three interesting marketing ideas recently. They may not be Purple Cows or B2B oriented, but they are Free Prizes worth pondering.

1. A columnist in the local paper recently commented on how his vet and the animal hospital called him to check on his dog after it was accidentally poisoned. Why don't our doctors do the same thing? He actually made a good operating plan, suggesting that employees of the doctor's office have a rotation to call patients who've had a serious ailment or were referred to a specialist. A great CRM lesson.
2. At church yesterday, the pastor told about the White Dog restaurant that has created affiliations with restaurants in other countries in which the USA has a poor dialog. The idea is that food conquers all. They sponsor trips to these sister restaurants to help their customers learn about the country and create dialog over food. Some people like to try new, foreign foods (and cultures), and this is a great way to attract them.
3. General Mills will be changing all their cereal to whole grain. As someone trying to eat healthier (and trying to influence my kids), this is great. A great example from my previous post about what a company being #2 in a market should do--be different.
   

Fixed Firefox

Last week I complained I was Undone by Firefox. Seems my guesbook form on our website didn't work in Firefox. I've investigated it and fixed it.

Turns out my first assumption that the ASP script was the problem was wrong. ASP scripts are run on the server, just called by the browser. Then I checked two other forms on our site and they worked in Firefox!

So there was some code in that form throwing Firefox off. I ran a HTML validator and fixed some minor tag-labels. Then I tried changing some other things, but still it didn't work. Then I took the form section from one of the other webpages and dropped it in...still didn't work. Finally, I copied one of the other forms, pointed it to the correct ASP script, then slowly modified it and tested it until I had replicated the original webpage/form while ensuring it works.

I know code-monkeys do this kind of thing all the time, but I was a little distraught recreating the same exact webpage and have it work. What was the difference? Who knows.

Expand your blogoshere

Like a lot of blog-readers, I've started using Bloglines. Its really great, saving me enough time to get in a couple races of Need For Speed at lunchtime.

I've added their blog-roll tool to my blog, so, assuming you like my taste and interests, you can expand your blogoshere by checking my selections out. Or you can see my blogroll on Bloglines. For new visitors to my site, I've added a 'Subscribe with Bloglines' link under my picture.

Now I'm looking for more things to 'subscribe' to. I'll try out changing my company's website 'what's new' page into a blog format just to get a RSS feed. For those of you without a working feed on your blog, I'm not getting to reading you nearly as often.

Currently, I'm up to 33 subscribers. Why don't you sign up and boost my numbers...and my ego? Then download the demo of Need For Speed to play in the time you'll save.