Using Goldmine Calendar & Sunbird

Over the summer, our inside sales team started running into problems tracking who would be off on vacation or traveling. We have been using a write-on calendar to track our schedules, but this isn’t convenient for our sales manager or others who need to this info regularly.

After some mental wrangling, I found that this was a great situation to combine Goldmine with Sunbird. Let me explain: Goldmine (CRM Software) has a group calendaring application which would be silly for me to ignore, but it’s calendar reports suck. However, Goldmine can export calendar info in the universal *.ics (called iCal) format.

Since I last discussed iCal here, the calendar software has become Sunbird, a SourceForge open-source program. I simply set up Sunbird to display the Goldmine *.ics file, so that we can print out calendars or have other non-Goldmine users view it. Soon I will set Goldmine to automatically export the iCal file to the web, where I can use the php iCalendar web software to display it for our independent field reps.

There are some details on how to do this to make it go right. If you are interested, here is a pdf file with my written instructions. Anyway, I’m really excited this worked out so well and took advantage of the *.ics format.

Marketing Nitwit: Useless catalog cover

I'm back from a very pleasant vacation week. Digging thru my mail this morning, I found this gem (click for full view):

What is says:
Public Training Catalog, SUMMER/FALL 2005
Public Training, Onsite Training, e-Learning, Webinars, Standards, Publications

Why pick on BSI Management Systems: What the heck is the training for???

The only way to figure out what their training is for is to read the acronyms in the white-on-orange text at the bottom! If I were a QA manager who regularly received their catalog, this would be forgivable, but they are using this for a purchased list. Regardless, the road and ball images are a waste of valuable real estate and leaves me wondering if they have any relation to each other.

I've often looked at training and service brochures with "happy people" images as being cheesy, but this catalog shows that going without is even worse.

Your phone number may be changing

A new marketing tool is starting to roll out to track calls generated by web advertising. They simply generate a new phone number for that specific client's listing every time it is displayed. This number is then forwarded to your main number. Usage of this technology is limited now, but a 'pay per call' charge will be collected.

One company with the technology to do this, eStara, contacted me about discussing the subject here. At first I passed, as it doesn't really apply to me right now, but after seeing the article
Can pay-per-call search really ring up sales? in BtoB Magazine, I changed my mind.

Per the article, one early tester of pay-per-call on Superpages.com is Tower Tech, a B2B company that might sell water-cooling towers to some of my clients (which is why I was suddenly interested). Tower Tech says they have gotten up to 30 calls in a month using the service. They are budgeting spending about $7,500 a year with Superpages.

This technology is being positioned for supporting advertising of service companies and local businesses, where a phone call is much more useful to the prospect than a website. EStara has an example of a hotel/spa directory using the technology, which makes a lot of sense.

Tower's marketing mix (or not):
I was curious about Tower Tech's web marketing, so I investigated. At Superpages, they were #1 for 'cooling tower'. Superpages lists their URL, but you have to click on 'phone' to get the auto-generated number. Googling 'cooling tower' shows them at #10, and no AdWords listing. ThomasNet is overloaded with tower companies, but not Tower Tech. Nada on GlobalSpec, too.

Perhaps in a competitive industry, they have found a niche with Superpages, especially since their B2B sales seem to be done primarily through local distributors rather than direct sales like a good part of their competition. And that might also support using pay-per-call, too. I will say that their website is very good, too.

Book Review: The Paradox of Choice

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz

I found this book’s premise strangely compelling. Why, when shopping with so many excellent choices today, do I feel stumped as to which to choose? The book explained why and delivered much more. As a marketer, it was also a helpful reality check of what our prospects face.

As background, know that Barry Schwartz divides consumers into two groups: maximizers who want the absolute best value, and satisficers who are willing to settle for ‘good enough’.

Points learned:

More choices actually means less satisfaction with your selection because you can’t feel sure you got the best value. Barry Schwartz’s best example is a taste test with six flavors of jam that significantly outsold a taste test with sixteen jams, even though the larger selection attracted more testers.
Marketing lesson: Make the prospect’s choice as clear as possible.

The challenging issue with making a choice is not satisfaction, but regret. He says the larger selection of jam actually caused the taster to perceive future regret that they didn’t pick the best flavor.
Marketing lesson: How can you ease the prospect’s regret before, during, and after the sale? Surprisingly, Schwartz says a reversible deal, such as a trial period will not help with regret.

One other strong example about the reality of choice that he uses: 65% of people without cancer said that would want to choose their treatments if they got it, while 88% of cancer patients said they would leave treatment decisions to the doctor.
Marketing lesson: Don’t rely on customers’ opinions about what choices they want to be able to make. In actuality, they would rather trust the ‘expert’, which is hopefully your marketing materials and/or salespeople.

For some, the amount of choice actually drives past indecision and regret and leads to depression. Maximizers, he says, are especially vulnerable.
Personal lesson: By personally limiting choice and freedom, more happiness can be experienced, which seems contrary to what we would think. Marriage was a prime example.

Overall, the book helped me understand much about myself and the material world I navigate. Why do I buy everything online from Ebay or Amazon? The choices of where else to buy are so overwhelming that I can’t bother. And as a marketer, making the customer’s choice clear and apparent is so, so important.

Playing the name-game with AdWords

I remember struggling to find rules on Overture, and later Google, about using other companies' names as part of keyword advertising. I've probably blogged about it, too. Well, now it looks like we now have a legal case that has defined the rules clearly. As posted by MarketingVox:

"In her written opinion, issued last week, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema sided with Geico, ruling that the use of trademarked terms in the text of Google ads was 'likely to cause confusion'; but she also ruled that Google can use trademarks as keywords to trigger the appearance of ads."

The article also quotes someone at Google saying that their ad technology is already set up to block use of trademarks in AdWords ads.

Read more: Google Chews on Choices after Geico Rulings

Microsoft is good for something

How many home-made calendars have you seen people make in Word or Excel? Aren't they horrible? Microsoft has a number of templates that come with Office, but a bunch of others that you can download from their website including calendars.

I needed to make a agenda for our annual sales meeting yesterday. Rather than use the same Excel one we've used for years, I downloaded a very professional one from Microsoft Office Templates: Word.

Last year we needed to create a business plan for a new product. After cobbling a format together, I found that PowerPoint has a template for that exact purpose, with descriptions of the content that is required. I ended up exporting it to a Word Outline format.

But let's not get caught using the standard Office templates for faxes and memos--then everyone knows how lazy you really are!

RTFM is not a solution

With my new duties, I'm finding business processes that need to work better. Recent experience with a couple of our salespeople has shown me a "I've followed the process, what more do you want" attitude, partly as a result of the futility of the broken process they are supposed to follow (the other part is laziness).

So I want to change the process, only find the issues Creating Passionate Users Blog wrote about recently:

The systems, policies, procedures aren't set up to incorporate your proposed change, and nobody's willing to think about changing things. It would just be too disruptive. It would make too many people uncomfortable.

Kathy Sierra points to one possible response you may get from your organization, that you don't "have all the facts and don't see things from the 'higher' perspective of management." Or, in my experience, the answer is that the process does handle the issue, its just that the employee or customer doesn't understand how to follow the process. When the answer is RTFM, I'd call that a signal that there is a broken process, not in-attentive staff or clients.

But, like Kathy acknowledges, sometimes you may find the mountain too steep. I've got enough mole-hills to stomp on right now, anyway. Choose your fights wisely.

Read More: When process goes bad

ThomasNet launch effectiveness reported

It's been about a year since ThomasNet.com was debuted. (Read my comments-and some by my readers-about the site here.) Part of the debut was an appropriate contest to give away an OC Chopper.

Well, now that the motorcycle is given away, MarketingSherpa has blogged how ThomasNet promoted the contest and managed the launch of the new site.

"The idea was less-far-fetched than you might think. 'All the parts on the Chopper can be sourced on ThomasNet,' explains Higgins. 'And small machine fabrication shops, like OCC, are part of our target audience.'"

The article is probably of most interest to Thomas watchers and those considering contests as part of a promotion of a site relaunch.

Read more (full article now $3): MarketingSherpa.com:

A promising B2B vertical newsletter

In my previous post, I pointed out how vertical B2B media companies need to focus on their strength, which is knowing their audience, as blogger Prescott Shibles posted. And now I just realized I had a good example on my desk...

We talked to a sales rep for WWJ radio in Detroit, which is weird for a small, B2B company like ours. Turns out that what he was selling wasn't air time, but sponsorships in a newsletter they send out. Seems they have been able to parlay their close ties with the automotive industry into a publication called "Autobeat Daily", which is a daily digest of auto industry news. They also have a sister publication called "Autotech Daily" which focuses on automotive technology.

They have 80,000 subscribers to Autobeat, which is a $125 annual subscription. But here is what they deliver that makes them a good example of what Prescott Shibles was saying: They have a demographics on their readers that makes every ad and click all the more valuable to those who are marketing to those types. For example, 43% of readers work for tier-one suppliers. Even more compelling is the fact that 76% of readers read it daily, and before noon.

Technically, the publication is in a PDF file that is easy to get passed around, too. The layout of the newsletter is made to be easy to scan-and-scroll, which I think is a great simplification that makes having to open an attachment acceptable. And they have a pro editor who has been in the auto industry for years. All that being said on the positive, their ad rate is $1,100 per issue for a banner ad, which is apparently still a hard sell based on the filler ads they've been running.

B2B websites niche is not vertical search

Shibles.com is a new blog by a B2B media player, pointed at by B or not 2B Blog. And here's a post worth noting:

"While vertical search is going to be a means of competing, don't try to do exactly what Google does but in your industry. Trust me, they've got legions of PhD's thinking about how Einstein's theory of relativity can be applied to make search more relevant. You're not going to beat them at their game, Web search."

Tip 2: "Play to your strengths... your deep, data-rich understanding of your highly qualified readers."
Tip 3: "Understand that Google IS (I repeat IS) an ally as well as a competitor." "At the end of the day, our goal isn't to keep Google out of our markets, it's to grow and expand ours."

B2Blog's take? Tip 2 is the biggie, and often the one that I, as the client of B2B media, don't see enough follow-through on. Most vertical websites just offer 'exposure' and 'clicks' without giving any additional value over what Google is already doing. Prescott Shible is right, but execution is not easy.

Read more: Three Tips on Competing with Google