YAD: Zibb by Reed Business

(YAD= Yet Another Directory)
John Blossom, in his excellent marketing/publishing/communications news blog, lets us know about a new B2B search/directory called Zibb. His review reveals that Zibb was created by Reed Business Publishing to make their trade pubs' contents easily available on the web, but was expanded to include much more information. "The result is a portal that provides content from leading B2B trade publications as well as product and company content from KellySearch and content from weblogs and Web sites", John summarizes.

Read more from John: Zibb Jab: Business Search Engines Take on Google and Enterprise Aggregators

Okay, Zibb may not technically qualify as YAD because it is more than a directory. But, like John, I see potential and flaws. Of course, the biggest problem for YADs is getting users. InfoCommerce recently pointed to SourceTool.com (a previously reviewed YAD) as being successful, while Alexa shows that after initial hype, the site traffic has dropped way off.

Tweaking your documents

I like to be a master of my computer toolbox. So I post a link to the article Give your résumé a face lift at LifeClever (found via LifeHacker.org) simply because it is a good lesson in taking a typical Word document and making it look professional. The techniques offered here are great for product spec sheets, feature lists, and other documents that normally wouldn't be given much attention.

"You can improve almost all résumés with four steps:

1. Pick a better typeface
2. Remove extra indentations
3. Make it easy to skim
4. Apply typographic detailing"

(At the end, he posts the final Word file, which makes a great style template if you are working on a resume.)

Is It Really Difficult, part two: 19 Months!

Just after I finished the previous post, I found this slam against sales managers, pondering why the average tenure of a sales manager is 19 months:

"Think about this: The sales department of most organizations lags other departments in the areas of compliance in documented processes (think GAAP for accounting and ISO 9000 for manufacturing), performance measurement, technology support, and in many cases the employment of best practices."

So, if you take the fact from part one that salespeople have the wrong approach to making sales, this part puts the blame on the sales manager.

My take: You try to be the sales manager to make and enforce new rules/processes for an entrenched sales force and see if your tenue is longer or shorter than 19 months!

Is It Really That Difficult?

I really enjoy the SalesDog weekly newsletter. The authors vary but the quality is the same. Even so, with information being so free and all these days, today's piece, High-Tech Selling: Is It Really That Difficult?, seemed especially unique and powerful. Take a peek:

"3. Premature selling efforts leave a lasting negative impression, and dramatically reduce the odds of ever doing business with that prospect.

'Forced' appointments and communications result in closed sales less than 14 percent of the time. When feeling pressured, prospects who do not commit to doing business on the first visit are even less likely to ever buy. The probability of ever getting the sale drops to five percent."

The author, Jacques Werth, has a book and (surprise) consulting service for his sales approach, called High Probability Selling. He wraps up his article with this rip:

"High-tech salespeople who are strong on product knowledge and weak on the one-to-one sales process help perpetuate the myth that high-tech sales is difficult. The truth is that selling high-tech products and services is easy when an effective selling process is utilized with each and every individual involved in the buying decision."

Wow, salespeople strong on product knowledge make high-tech sales look difficult??? In B2B, haven't we all assumed that product knowledge is #1 for an effective salesperson? Have we been that stupid?

Sales 2.0?

Here's an interesting brainstorm from Dana VanDen Heuvel on how Web 2.0 is enabling Sales 2.0. Not everything applies to every situation, but certainly these are creeping into our (pro-active) salespeoples' lives.

"Areas affected by Sales 2.0:
- Voice communications (VOIP, cell, Skype)
- Sales rep availability (always on)
- Conference calling (free)
- Sales force automation (web based)
- Customer communication (blogging, email)
- Customer community (wiki, jotspot)
- Project management
- Messaging
- email (mobile)
- IM (in office, sidekick, etc)
- Pre-call planning / customer research
- Collaboration (internal blogs, wikis, IM)
- Collateral (real time, PDF, POD (print on demand)
- Document authoring (web document authoring)"

The above is just one section of a long post of ideas and observations. And if this is how our salespeople are going to be selling, what does Marketing 2.0 look like? Hmmm.

Read more: Starting the conversation on Sales 2.0

Business.com goes Google and 2.0

I'm not sure how much anyone really cares about Business.com. They spent a bunch for their name (it was big news at the time), but have never really risen to prominence, but they did escape the dot-com melt-down. I think they are more popular with the business services sector. I received two announcements from them this week:

1. Ranking based on performance

They will be using popularity/performance of your directory listings to rank, ala Google AdWords. So ranking will be a combination of your PPC rate and click-thrus. I don't know how competitive some categories may be, or if this is just a way to encourage folks to increase their PPC rates.

2. New Work.com website

They have unveiled work.com as a new website with the tag line "how-to guides for your business'. User generated rankings and content make it 'Web 2.0':

"The site features unique 'How-to Guides' for more than 1,000 business topics, ranging from start up basics to advanced management techniques...The community platform we created allows users to rate guides, connect with experts, and most importantly, allows our users to write guides on areas of their expertise."

Generally, I've become jaded by the availability of this kind of content on the web. But it is good fodder for displaying their biz.com listings. The articles are nice that they also have sections that link to other sites and blogs/forums which is nice.

Stuck in the middle

Which do you want: to be right...or to win? If you said both, you must be a B2B marketer...

Fact: Salespeople want to win.
Fact: Engineers want to be right.
Therefor: Marketers are stuck in the middle!

Creating RSS for CRM appointments

Man, I've been a slow blogger recently. I've got some stuff to talk about, but apparently have been to distracted. Here's what I've been up to:

Goldmine CRM Calendar RSS
A couple years ago I set up a simple online calendar for our service department to use so salespeople would be able to find out when their customers were getting service calls. Its there, but how many salespeople are going to check it regularly? While discussing this system with a rep, I suddenly had an idea: Make a calendar RSS feed!

Now what we were using doesn't have RSS feeds. Besides, it predated our installation of Goldmine CRM. So I'll generate a schedule in Goldmine, export a 'iCal' file, then use Google Calendar to display it and generate RSS.

Google experiment:
I took an existing '.ics' calendar file from Goldmine, then FTP to a spot on the web. In Google, I added an 'external' calendar...and Google didn't like it. Maybe its a problem with Google, maybe it is a problem with the way Goldmine generates the file. Experiment over.

Plan B: PHPiCalendar:
I've played with PHPiCalendar (PiC for short here) before, so I checked out its current version. Guess what: it does RSS! I made a new spot on the web for PiC and uploaded all the files. Unlike other PHP programs, it doesn't use a database, so no tinkering with mySQL. I did have to figure out how and where to create a 'temp' file for it to use, which took some experimenting. Then I manually FTP'd my '.ics' file and it worked.

Now Goldmine:
Goldmine is actually pretty cool when it comes to calendar functions. I selected what 'users' schedules to publish and what type of events, then put in the FTP information. It sends one iCal file with their combined schedule to the website. Then I set-up a 'server agent' to run the publishing of the file automatically a couple times a day.

What Goldmine doesn't do, however, is add any info to the iCal file about the contact the appointments are linked to, so we have to manually add this to the comments section when an event is scheduled.

RSS feeds:
PiC offers daily, weekly, and monthly feeds. Or you can create a custom feed for a date range. Now the reps and other non-Goldmine users who use an RSS reader will be able to be up-to-date on our service schedule.

Overall I'm very pleased with the way things turned out. I'm testing for a week before rolling out to our folks.

Is B2B marketing really this bad?

I've certainly picked on enough B2B marketers over the years here at B2Blog, but do we need a makeover? Laura Ramos, vice president of Forrester Research has just published a report titled: B2B Marketing Needs a Makeover -- Now. Really?! Let's see.

The executive summary of the $249 report reads:

"Business marketers cling to marketing tactics that they admit fail to work as well as they would like. It's time to leave these outmoded methods behind, embrace interactive media, address prospects directly, and measure the impact of marketing on revenue and market share. By moving their marketing online, business-to-business (B2B) marketers will evolve from tactical demand generation to strategic ownership of the customer relationship, and they will regain their rightful place as the corporate head of customer experience, knowledge, and influence."

Keep in mind the source of her data: 569 top marketing/corporate executives with 50% from companies with over $1 billion in annual revenue, and 30% spending at least $10 million per year on marketing alone. Not exactly the typical reader of this blog.

No, the typical reader of this blog would probably be satisfied in reading this review at 1to1media.com: Where Does the Customer Fit in the B2B World?

"To fix B2B marketing's woes, Ramos suggests looking at online marketing as a crucial but integrated component of the company's overall branding and lead generation efforts...There needs to be a plan to distribute your message and position the whole company, and those tactics need to be thought of consistently, across all channels.'"

I'm probably a bit more pragmatic and positive that she apparently is. My response:

The survey is flawed because it forgets two key groups in the marketing process:

1. Salespeople
B2B marketing has to be more tactical because it supports a field sales staff (that most B2C doesn't have). 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," because they are designed to support a sales staff, and can't be duplicated any other way. Salespeople love the web because it makes their jobs easier. But if embracing technology means going to webinars, WebEx meetings, and PowerPoint, I don't agree.

2. Customers
Going online won't guarantee "strategic ownership of the customer relationship"...in fact the customer likely sees the internet as giving them control of the relationship. The true 21st century B2B marketer needs to have the information prospects need where and how they want. Yes, the web is a great resource for this, and is already being used in this way.

Okay, maybe I'm over-reacting. Or maybe I missed something by not buying the report. But, if "tactics need to be thought of consistently, across all channels" is the summation of the report, it seems a bit overpriced.

What do you think--Does B2B marketing really need a makeover? Or have we adjusted well to the internet over the last ten years?