I have a story to tell

Seth Godin tells us that stories sell product. Even if we don't really have a real story, we lay our literature or powerpoints out in a sequence that makes sense, in essence telling a story, something like this:

Logo > product shot > features > benefits > detailed shots > detailed specifications > options > contact/order info

Logical order right? Slowly introduces the reader to the product and all of the concepts and details that go with it. Salespeople can use it as a guideline for making presentations. Customers can absorb full concept of what is being offered. The story gets told!

The Web
But the web is different. It isn't linear. Okay, you can try to make it linear, but the prospects may land on a deep link, or skip leading content to get to the specifications. Or to the price, god forbid.

Don't agree with me? Look at the average page-view times for your product pages.

Yes, I realize that users may do the same with our literature, but I would argue that it doesn't happen nearly as much when you have paper in your hands. It would be nice if we had view-times for paper to prove the point :)

I just think that the way surfers use the web, and the way we build our product pages, throws out the whole concept of 'story'. They are hunting up info, and we are 'writing for the web' and serving up snippets of info for them to find.

But the story is important to making the sale.

Solutions???
How do we slow them down and convince surfers to listen to 'the story'? Change their mode of surfing to model other behaviors:

• Literature PDF to print out
• Embedded PowerPoint (ala SlideShare.net)
• Embedded video

The point being is that to make the full case for our product on the web, we need to have some tricks up our sleeve. Changing their mode of surfing and consuming info is the way to accomplish this.

Gmail for the company domain

Whoo-hoo! We just finished switching our company's email hosting to Google's Gmail service.

After switching my personal B2blog email to Gmail a couple months ago, I couldn't resist having our corporate email using it. Number one benefit? Spam stays at the server, never hits Outlook at all. (Yes Gmail otherwise works invisibly with Outlook.)

Some hiccups we had doing the switch:

• Setting POP to pop.google.com instead of pop.gmail.com
• Forgetting to activate POP service in Gmail first
• Some computers had Outlook versions that needed a software patch to send
• Users creating new Outlook 'profiles' instead of editing the existing one, thus missing some existing settings like outgoing SMTP authentication.

The big issue I had planned ahead for is that our Goldmine CRM software doesn't do SSL encryption, which Gmail requires. Instead, I created email accounts in another domain for users, while maintaining the 'reply to email' address as their regular email address. The other choice is a shell program called Stunnel (instructions for doing so here and here.)

A couple quick tips for easy transition:

• Remind people over and over that their email addresses won't change.
• Make the change over the weekend, so that the DNS change can propagate and hopefully no emails get sent to the old server on Monday when business resumes.
• Set your web url for Gmail as gmail.yourcompany.com, so that the old email account can be accessed easily to pull any lingering emails at mail.yourcompany.com that arrived before the switch.

So, now everyone is back to running Outlook and has forgotten about Gmail. I hope they start to go back and play with the online Gmail the other Apps. Wow, a step forward for the whole company!

Push-you or Pull-me marketing

A basic strategic question came up today: Are we 'push' or 'pull' marketing? Which should we be?

At most organizations this decision was probably made almost at inception, and is so a part of the company that it isn't even questioned.

A quick review of the difference is here: Push and Pull Strategy

• "Push strategy makes use of a company's sales force and trade promotion activities to create demand for a product." These organizations make lots of cold calls.
• "Pull strategy is one that requires high spending promotion to build up demand for a product." These organizations receive calls.

Push strategy, I think, is more suited to selling products that customers don't know they need. But it also can be used when there is no effective channel for promotion that Pull requires.

My products only sell to those who truly need them, so Pull strategy has worked extremely well. Especially since the advent of the Internet, making us so easy to find. But, in searching for additional business, can we find the customer before they go looking (using either Push or Pull)? And which will be more effective?

As the pragmatic marketer that I am, I willing to consider an option that falls somewhere in the middle. That option would be 'nurture marketing'. You are pushing-out your message more directly than traditional promotion, but with a goal of pulling-in demand. The change here is at the marketing level, which means me. Can I do this effectively? Or is it easier for me just to let the sales team try to Push?

Going to the show on a shoestring?

Rick Short posted the following picture of someone's booth and complemented them on their frugality while still getting the message out--that equals ROI.


What do you think?

Me? As long as that's not candy from a two-dollar assortment bag, I'll defer to Rick's professional opinion (he does a lot of shows). If that is $2 candy, then the booth was a waste of time. It's that close to being bad. And I HATE trade-show candy bowls full of cheap candy.

Just demo it?

Forgive me before I start for the potentially circular discussion of 'demos'. This post comes in two parts, each a different 'demo'.
Last week, at the National Manufacturing Week et. al. show, I ran across the opportunity to get a T-shirt for 'doing a demo'. Truthfully, I stopped because I was interested in this for what they were doing, not for the shirt (here I am wearing the T, "Just Demo It"). So I was led to a laptop linked to a website and was shown the product.

(I'll skip the side-discussion about whether this demo made sense to do in the first place.)


The company: New Equipment Digest (NED)
The product: IndustrialProductDemos.com (IPD)
The demo: A website tour

Essentially, NED is a general digest of new equipment (Wow, just like their name implies). The IPD product is an online service to expand on the new equipment releases it's advertisers publish.

Here is a link to a IPD demo to give you an idea of what they are like. Essentially, you get a pop-up flash-driven demo, that has 5 pages: intro, zoom, image swap, features, & applications. There is an option to add video, as well, which I liked. Price? $2,700.

IPD reminded me what of 'CD catalogs' tend to look like: content crammed into a cookie-cutter window. The image zoom and swap pages are good things that many folks don't do on their websites, even though the easily could. The benefit hopefully is that the advertisers can rely on NED's perfection of the cookie-cutter format so that users actually look at the demos.

And that's the big question--will users actually come look? NED certainly has a readership that wants to learn about new products. But will they slow down and go to IPD? Will they be able to navigate to the content that interests them? Will they actually find the demos useful? Will they 'just demo it'?

It is a admiral try to fill the existing gap of 'how do I get my new product info in front of people in the 21st century?' This approach seems a bit dated, and unless NED can commit to a lot more than just T-shirts to promote it, I don't see a long future for this initiative.

Toxic meltdown

The Mets didn't make the National League baseball playoffs. They should have. I'm a Mets fan, and this year has been great, with the Mets leading their division...up until last Friday.

Earlier this month, they were ahead seven games, with just 17 left to play. But they were in meltdown mode, losing games to the Nationals and Marlins, teams they had tromped all season. In all, they lost 12 of those last 17 games.

Fans can deal with their team losing, after all there can only be one World Series champion. But this was different. It was gut-wrenching, with more than one fan referencing 'watching an accident unfold in slo-mo'.

To me, it was obvious that something mentally toxic was going on. I don't have to go any farther than the start of yesterday's (Sunday) game, when star pitcher Tom Glavine got pulled in the first inning, after seven runs and just one out. He got pulled after hitting Dontrel Willis with a pitch.

The amazing thing, in the middle of this toxic environment, was the absolute zen of pitcher John Maine, who struck-out a personal best of 14 on Saturday, shutting-out the Marlins. I use the word zen because I think he sensed the toxic conditions and put his brain in a different spot.

Why share this with you, other than get some of the pain and emotion out of my system? Well, its a life and management thing. Toxic vibes spread. I even think it made for a rather crappy September for me. Be aware of the vibes. Find the zen to rise above them.

Must be why I found this story of men pursuing weightlifting in Afghanistan so inspiring.