Author: Dave J.

Swell, I give Larry a plug for his podcast, and he returns the favor with a ‘tag’ for a blog-meme thingy. 😉 Seems, I am up to share eight random things about myself. I’m sticking with recent things.

The Paperwork

When you are tagged by me, you must link back to this website. Then when writing your meme, post the rules before your list, then list eight random things about yourself. At the end of the post, you must tag and link to eight other people.

Now … let the fun begin!

The Meme

1. Current song stuck in my (and my family’s head) Ding Fries are Done (sorry)
2. Item I really want on my Christmas list: Genius Graphic Tablet (poor man’s Wacom)
3. How I spend my Saturdays: Making powerpoint slides for my church’s worship service. Lots of fun surfing Flickr for pictures.
4. Recently celebrated 18 years of marriage on 11/18 by finding our #1118 geocache. At night, after the kids went to bed. Nerds. (Click for a pic and story.)
5. Just had to order a new iTrip FM modulator for my iPod-mini, via eBay. The current one started going all crackily, so must have a loose connector somewhere.
6. My wife finishes her Masters of Library/Information Science degree in two weeks. The light at the end of the tunnel. Anyone need an archivist?
7. Right now, listening to a Randy Newman Cover Story via Coverville podcast. The Tom Jones track at the end is very cool.
8. My cell-phone is almost four years old. Its an antique. Still holds a charge, and drops don’t hurt it. I look it as two bonus years of not having to step foot in a cell phone store.

Tags
I’ll tag some quality marketing bloggers worth noting for this silly little game:

Rick Hendershot
Mike Gerholdt
Pat McGraw
Paul Gibler
Gary Slack

Oh well, that’s five. Close enough.

Larry Hendrick has restarted and renewed his podcast Motivation on the Run.

One of the things I realized as I listened to his show last year is that motivation can be just an artificial stimuli to gain results. Apparently, Larry realized that, too, as he has shifted the focus a bit, to what he calls ‘live the dream’. While its not touchy-feely, he is encouraging introspection and self-awareness to find your dreams and live them out.

Check out the last show, titled Motion, as a sample:

This week I discuss the importance of Motion in our series on “Live the Dream.” If not obvious, it is a critical component of the process. We are either in Motion or Hung on High Center.

I survived the Thanksgiving weekend very well. I hope you did, too. I’m back and facing a week of crunching numbers and my first cub scout pack meeting. A bit stressful and focused, it will be. So a rant is in order just to let out some stress…

Coming in this morning, my mind flipped back to a phone survey I endured last week. It was a marketing survey for a major telco services company. Since buying such services is one of my ‘hats’ here, I assented, then suffered, the survey.

“When you think of phone and data services, which brands do you think of?”

And so it started. I rated different brands in youthfulness, trustworthiness, pricing. I replied with answers that were quicker and duller as the questions got more…more…insipid….circituous? Well the questions just got to be more and more. Then when they started asking me about TV commercials, I knew what brand was behind all these questions.

In all, the survey probably ran 20 minutes. Good grief!

And all this data of these vague questions will end up on some VP-Marketing’s desk as a 360-degree-view of the marketplace and their new ad campaign. And the data will be so muddy it will all be thrown out.

Can’t they ask the questions they really want to ask:

• Have you seen our new ad campaign?
• Do you think this boosts our brand image?
• Will these ads help you remember our brand?
• Did you learn anything about our services?
• Are you more likely to buy or renew our services?

Yes/no questions only, because, unless your brand and campaign are stellar, I’m only going to vote somewhere in the middle, and so is everyone else.

Let’s not beat around the bush when making survey questions, folks. You get crappy data and you waste my time and patience. And please, keep it focused to 10 questions or less.

The latest issue of BtoB Magazine (Nov 12 issue) had three pretty critical letters to the editor, two focusing on their recent ‘BtoB Best’ feature.

Some snips:

• “Ge, yeah; AT&T, yeah; HP, yeah, yeah–yawn. Same old bunch saying the same old things…What about those of us slugging it out in less glamorous trenches?…Next year dig a little deeper.” –Frederick Sitter
• “You must work for a Fortune 500…average years in your current job is 2.3…steer projects like ‘ecomagination’ and ‘people-ready business’…and it helps if you are white. … Let’s face it, Forbes you ain’t.” –Steve Lundin

Then Bob Bly takes them to task for their selection of best BtoB direct marketing campaigns, which were likewise from big companies and heavy on the gloss:

• “The accompanying articles don’t talk about response rates, leads, or sales generated.”

Indeed, why focus on the big boys?
So do we read BtoB to see, and maybe learn, how the rock stars of B2B marketing do it? Or do we snicker at them the way we do at models in $300 jeans in Men’s Health or GQ magazine? Or are the editors just to lazy to look at real, results-oriented B2B marketing. Personally, I think their location in NYC is probably part of the problem.

Beginning of Story
“Its the easiest job in the troop. You just have to be fun,” the organizer announced.

Mary was there with to help my twin boys’ (10 year-old Webelos) cub scout troop rebuild after its cubmaster had politely quit, and we found out how much he was really doing. We were the parents who cared, there waiting to see what position we might volunteer for, or be volunteered for.

We already had the key volunteer, the committee chair, selected ahead of time. The chair is the CEO, we were told, and that was what we were missing before. Now Mary was looking for a new cubmaster.

The chair smiled and tapped me on the shoulder. “That’s you,” he whispered. As he stepped away, he attached a qualifier along the lines of ‘only if you want to.’

I listened to Mary and her husband share about how easy it is to be cubmaster: You get to have fun, give out awards, and have boys look up to you. “We need someone who can be the goofball,” Mary explained, while my head swam.

The chair handed me a sheet with the job description. Not like I could read that right now. But now I knew he was serious.

Dramatic Part of Story
I looked around the gymnasium at the other parents. I don’t know most of them, and its hard to pick out a goofball in a crowd by looks. Someone had already volunteered to be treasurer, to which I was very grateful. Could anyone of these want the job and save me?

I had already proved my goofball-worthiness in some scout events the year before. The chair knew me well enough. He had confidence that I could be the figurehead they were looking for.

I dug around for excuses, reasons to say no. Life is too busy, I don’t have time for this, of course, but who does. Len thinks I can, he is actually excited to be nudging me. I’ll take his confidence in me for the lack of my own confidence.

My hand thrust up and I announced my intention, humorously, that I would be the cubmaster. Followed by a smattering of applause. Mary then started her hunt for an assistant-cubmaster.

Funny Conclusion of Story
And do you know what I did next? I can’t believe I did it.

I waved at my boys’ friend’s mom, and whispered “that’s you.” I know she is way busy, but she ‘likes fun’. She leads parties at the kids school.

That’s right, I volunteered someone else. My first act as leader. 🙂

Moral of Story
My friend Larry told me this: “The best leaders are those that don’t mind getting involved. Remember my definition of leader? Someone who is willing to step up and make a difference. “

Stepped or nudged. Who me? Yes, me, the leader, the figurehead. Whatever–watchout, here comes the goofball!

So last week I said we need to consider content formats that tell ‘the story’ online in a linear fashion, as websites are often not read linearly and therefor don’t tell stories well. PDFs were one suggestion, and an easy one to implement, as we can just post our existing collateral. Right?

Wrong.

One of my field guys related this story to me this week:

• After pulling out a brochure for the product being discussed, he asked the prospect if they had received a copy already. He said yes, but as a PDF sent with the initial quotation. The prospect went on to say that he would like the printed copy the rep had. The client explained that the very colorful cover had dissuaded him from printing it out.

And since that conversation, I’ve printed three different PDFs from online where I have purposefully skipped printing the first page. So its not just weird prospect, this must be a common reaction. (Or I’m weird, too.)

Why? Maybe we just hate printing using a lot of color that doesn’t have any useful content. It seems wasteful both in printing cost and our attention.

Another problem with that same brochure is that it has two ‘spreads’ that look don’t work well in PDF. If you keep them as a spread, they really become one page, and become hard to read on screen or when printed. And if the spread is separated into two pages, it is also hard to read. You can’t win this one.

(Oh, yea, and then there is the constant battle with file size for PDFs, but that is better as bandwidth has increased and Acrobat has improved over the years.)

Lesson: We need to think beyond paper when creating brochures these days. And once again, content trumps style.

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:

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.

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!

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?

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.