Quote me on this

This classic came up on my iGoogle home page today, where I have the Quote of the Day widget turned on:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
John Wanamaker
US department store merchant (1838 - 1922)"

Have we all gravitated toward the half of advertising that we can measure, thinking we have finally won the battle of not knowing what we are wasting? It certainly seems to be going that way. B2B and B2C certainly is gravitating to PPC advertising, tracking website traffic, calculating ROI.

Unfortunately, after a little pondering, I think we are still stuck with the same essential problem Mr. Wanamaker stated. The closer we get to thinking we've solved the problem, the more acutely aware we are that we have a long way to go. A corollary is in order:

"Half the money I spend on measured advertising is wasted, and is best spent elsewhere. I just don't which half, dang-it!"
David Jung
www.b2blog.com (1967 - )"

What do you think? What corollary would you make?

The TMI Trap

A trap in the jungle:
I wanted to start this blog citing a movie where someone gets lured into net or lasso in the jungle, and hung upside until rescued. As I started thinking about it, a number of movies blurred in my mind. Why do so many movies use this gag? Because it is true.

The sucker in the movie sees the object on the trail and is drawn to it. In the movies it seems to always be food or something valuable. How stupid you think as you see them propelled upward into the trap.

Why does this work? Because people's self-centeredness thinks that what is open and available could be valuable to them. What they grab for deceives them, unfortunately. Its obvious to the natives setting the trap, and to the viewer, but the adventurer doesn't have a clue until it is too late.

Traps in the sales jungle:
Prospects are just as astute as those natives. Those in active buying mode may call, even announcing that they are going to buy soon. They start asking a number of detailed questions about your company or product, or service. The trap has been set.

Oh, not me, you think. I'm not going to be trapped into losing this order because the customer doesn't know enough. I'm going to answer his questions clearly and confidently. The phone call finishes and you pull up your CRM system to log all the exciting details and update your forecast.

You fool! Don't you feel all the blood rushing to your head as you hang upside down? You should! You've just fallen for the TMI Trap.

The TMI Trap:
TMI in today's slang is used to reference "too much information". The prospect called looking for reasons to eliminate your product from their short-list. The questions they asked are about unique features of your product, but the prospect has already decided he doesn't like those. He just wants to learn more to help him justify it to his boss.

The blood-rush comes when your hang up the phone and realize you've talked too much. Or realize the icy, yet rational tone of the conversation. Unfortunately, sometimes the blood-rush doesn't come until you learn you've lost the sale.

Stay safe:
Once you've been caught in a trap a couple times, you learn to recognize it (hopefully). You walk around it warily, poke it with a stick until the trap is sprung and you are still on the ground. I wrote this because sometimes we can let our guard down and get trapped despite our previous experience. But that would never happen to me, would it? Would it?

Talking to customers--details count!

You know I say 'the devil is in the details'. All the best marketing can be screwed by salespeople or service/support staff who do or say the wrong things.

I was sent a copy of the book, How to Talk to Customers to review. It was written by customer-service consultants Diane Berenbaum & Tom Larkin, distilling all their basic knowledge. It was written for the front-line staff, as if they were getting a seminar.

It really is a great book. Basic, straight-forward, with lots of fun stories of good and bad service. In summation, it really encourages the reader to engage the people they talk to. Jim Berkowitz also received a copy and had a similar reaction to the book.

I liked their 'four levels of listening':

1. Transactional dialogue (think supermarket checkout)
2. Rapport building (start asking questions)
3. Focusing on empathy (listening without judging)
4. Personal and patient understanding (more like a friend)

So, if you feel your front-line staff is blowing your best-laid plans, you may want to consider passing around a couple copies of this book.

Test drive of GlobalSpecs' new PartFinder

InfoCommerce has cranked up their blog with news, not just their weekly newsletter. This morning I found them with this news from GlobalSpec, introducing a new tool called PartFinder that "can assist those users in re-ordering parts, placing new orders, ordering replacement parts or finding a second source for their desired parts. Users can search for parts through a variety of criteria."

Sounded interesting for component shoppers, which is the life-blood of GlobalSpec. A database of parts by part number certainly sounds handy.

A trip over to GlobalSpec.com (after trying 'partfinder.com' with no luck) showed no sign of the service. Turns out it is just one of the categories in their 'engineering search' tool. If you've got a specific part number, a handy little 'best matches' category shows up at the top, kind of like some Google searches. Or do the search on the PartFinder tab and you get detail such as manufacturer, source, and product category. Not bad.

For the above examples, looking to buy these parts from onlinecomponents.com is not so simple. You have to register to click-thru to their info. Unlike most distributors, these guys are smart enough to have a URL as their company name.

And some cases, they dump you to the source website for the information, if it is another directory. The one in the above results puts you to mectronic.com which also requires registration.

Okay, why all the testing?
Just because info-marketers can collect data and publish it, doesn't mean we b2b-marketers have to trust that it will be of value to our target audience. The data has to be accessible, usable, and useful. If the engineers won't use it, we should be smart enough to figure that out.

(And while I said it sounds 'handy', I haven't discussed the question of what situations engineers would really need such a tool.)

Since GlobalSpec is just repurposing the existing data they have and embedding it in their existing search tool, there is little harm in this feature. But how much value will it add to their service?

This is just plain silly

I was just flipping thru my bookmarks and found one I had made for Barnstead International. Firefox (and IE) use the page title as the default title for the bookmark, right? Well, this bookmark was 114 words long!

Turns out that every page in the site has this same 114 word title. It might be a byproduct of the site being done in ColdFusion.

Barnstead is also trapped in the whole Thermo/Fisher merger (a merger of two major lab-supply catalog companies). It looks like a nightmare of branding confusion, which only makes all of their sites pretty confusing. Take a look at this 'brands' page that is supposed to clarify all this.

The Barnstead site alone accounts for fourteen different brands (look at the header) and multiple web-domains all going to the same website. What a mess.

I've changed my mind since I started this post. This isn't silly, this is a nightmare.

Mud on my guestbook

I've been tinkering a bit with our website's guestbook form. I've always prided myself in how simple it was--not one asterisk indicating required details! Its short enough that all the information should be obviously needed, if not required. Eight fields, total.

For the address, in particular, there is just one multi-line box. No pull-down state menu, thank you very much! No having to make the user tab-thru multiple fields. This one step makes the whole form so much easier and inviting for the user, and I would hope it would show respect for the visitor. Polite, even.

The recent tinkering hasn't been with the form, but how visible it is--which is attracting additional guestbook submissions. Great.

But these new guests seem to be getting less polite. They aren't filling out the form completely, skipping (or skimping) on the address and phone number.

Folks used to do that, and we would have to do a little Googling to figure out where they are from. Location is important, as in other countries other divisions need to send price quotes, and there are questions of local electric power. But the frequency is now way up.

So I added a line above the address "Please include at least your city and state", which has had the opposite effect, I think. They have figured out that this block is optional, and are skipping it even more.

I just had one come in from a major multi-national firm that had no address or phone number. Doesn't he realize that location could matter in getting his price quote? Don't they run into multi-site problems all the time? Did he see my word 'please'? And, of course, his request is for pricing "ASAP". Ughh!

As salespeople and marketers, we need to tolerate and accommodate our prospects. But with this kind of behavior, I can understand how some guestbooks are filled with asterisks. I won't do it. But, I will rant about it, apparently.

Kicked by The Dip (book review)

The Dip, by Seth Godin, does what a book from a guru should do—it points out the obvious and kicks you in the gut with the truth.

Seth is pointing out facts that we’d rather not acknowledge. He creates insecurity where there once was security and confidence. That we are likely trapped in the mediocrity of ‘the dip’. We’ve plateau’d and are not moving forward, while the world (and probably our true goals) is.

And worse, he tells us that getting past the dip will take some soul-searching and hard-work. All the work to get to the point of the dip was somewhat easy and obvious—now the real work is necessary.

And if, after evaluation, you decide that the dip isn’t worth punching-through, we should quit. Start over or start something else. Just quit and throw away all that work? Yes, says Seth. And if you are gonna go for it, you'd better quit other things so you can focus, he tells us.

The good news is that he lets us define what ‘best’ is and ‘world’ is when we decide to “be the best in the world”. Not so fast...those buying also get to decide what they think is 'best in the world'...and if you don't make their cut, you don't win.

The really good news from this book is that getting past the dip is a fantastic place of reward where success becomes increasingly easy. Picking the best is the easiest choice for customers--that's the secret of the success of the iPod, for example.

Maybe this review and earlier posts on the subject are enough for you to understand, or maybe you’ll find this ChangeThis manifesto enough, or his book-blog. But the book drives the point home like only Seth can.

"The point is that in a world of infinite choice, in a world where the best in the world is worth more every single day, the only chance you’ve got is to find a Dip and embrace it. Realize that it’s actually your best ally. The harder it is to get through, the better your chance of being the only one to get through it.

Sticking with something just so you can be mediocre at it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Being average is for losers."

Kick in the pants rendered, Seth. Thanks for the advance copy of the book.

Writer's Dip: stuck in a cul-de-sac

I was writing yesterday in a predefined template. Templates are great for organizing your information, which in my case, I considered a help. I had lots of details and data to include that would easily be broken down according to the template.

It didn't work.

Okay, it helped me get started with my ideas and information. But soon, I found I was listing the same things twice, in different sections. I ran into a cognitive stumper, not sure where the info made sense listing, and worse, I wasn't sure what if my message was going to get across. I was in a writing 'dip': I had gone down the road till I hit a cul-de-sac, and couldn't see a way out. Exactly what Seth has written about in his book The Dip.

So I didn't save myself any brain-work by going with the template. I still had to do hard thinking about my information and message. Then I had to act on it and clean up the mess. I ended up combining the sections, tossing some info, and make the best stuff better. Again, exactly what Seth talked about in the book about how to get out of the dip--the path often is not there, you have to make it on your own.

So when you hit a cul-de-sac, you have four choices:

• Go back to the beginning (give up)
• Park the car (and settle for good-enough)
• Drive back up the road till you find a different route
• Or make a new road (even if it means driving thru someone's yard)

The point is that these are things we do every day. The Dip has always existed, Seth has only pointed it out. Next time, we'll talk about the implications he raises about The Dip.

Me? A Lustrum Blogger

Hans De Keulenaer, at B2Bridge (a European business blogging site) interviewed me via email on the occasion of B2Blog's 5th year. He called me a lustrum blogger. I had to Google that word, but now I understand. Thanks Hans for the opportunity to share.

The Dip according to Alton

Have you been reading Seth’s book-promo-blog, The Dip? As someone who feels stuck in a couple ‘dips’ (and don’t we all?), I’ve eagerly followed along. (In short, ‘the dip’ is the point between ‘good’ and ‘great’.) Heck, I’m a Seth fanboy.

Seth sent out a request for ‘quitters’, those who got out of a dip and forged a new destination of greatness. I suggested Alton Brown, whom I am also a fanboy of (currently blogging Feasting On Asphalt 2 for you other fanboys/girls). Alton quit being a cameraman/producer to go to cooking school specifically so he could make a show like Good Eats (with video sample).

Interestingly enough, AB has a diagram of ‘the dip’ in his baking book, which I just completed reading, which is what I really wanted to share with Seth. AB’s point was slightly different:

“Why take any journey? Why did the chicken cross the road? Because in moving from one place to another, we learn something about both. Maybe you’re not the kind of person who needs to know how things work, but if you have your eyeballs on this page, I’m betting you are. And people like us tinker—that’s how we find things out. For me, following the trail from pizza to brioche just shows the lay of the land. Seeing how everything is connected rather than just following directions makes me a better cook.”

That’s why they call him a ‘cooking geek’. And I think it applies 100% to becoming a ‘marketing geek’. We need to cross the ‘lake of doubt’ to arrive at the ‘plane of understanding’.

Longtime readers may recall, I've connected AB to Seth's principles before, when I talked about 'Edgecraft' as described in Seth's book The Free Prize. Apparently I love making these connections.

Tomorrow: A closer look at the book, The Dip (I got a preview copy for sending in AB as a quitter.)