Author: Dave J.

More on pricing: Rick Short of Indium Corp. posts Dangerous Editorial where he rants about a CEO publicly complaining about too many vendors and price pressures in his industry.

While the focus of his rant is the poor signal that this CEO is giving to his customers and competition, this also relates to our recent discussions of published pricing. Rick’s concern is that this information becomes a signal for a price war…something published pricing also can do.

As a marketer, he reacts this way:

“In essence, only the savvy low-cost producer (and there is only ever ONE of those) can ever win a price war. That arena ia almost NEVER the place to steer things. Focusing on YOUR key points of DIFFERENTIATION is the only way to help your customer choose you.”

Are we trapped? If we publish pricing on our websites, our prospects are happy and more likely to buy. But if we do, we risk them making a commodity decision and thus forcing a price war. Different marketplaces and different brands may be affected to different degrees, but this may be one of the strongest challenges of the pricing issue.

Someone suggested I take a little time to consider the ramifications of Google personalizing search results. And it is worth some thought.

The biggest impact to us marketers is loss of true tracking of SERP standings, because they will vary from user to user. After doing a few searches today, I think this holds much less impact for B2B because the results are pretty strong already. (I also didn’t see any indication of personalization when making a comparison logged in vs. out.)

You might not know you are #1 on your favorite keyword-phrase anymore, but you traffic shouldn’t be impacted. Hopefully, tho, this reduces some of the gaming for the top slot and focus on results instead. There are some B2B terms with double meanings that could benefit from such personalization.

Apparently this has renewed some concern about the Google-monster taking over vertical search again. If search is personalized, vertical sites/directories may be rendered useless as a distinct filter of content. I wasn’t so sure, and needed some empirical data. Luckily I found something useful:

Taking a closer look at Google’s recommendation page for me (which is a part of the personalization program), everything relates to consumer-related searches. I suspect that B2B searches don’t have enough traffic to generate useful recommendations. As a matter of fact, I’d say the recommendations were actually an inaccurate reflection of my search behavior.

While we could have long discussion of whether users will give up privacy to benefit from this new service, I think it is just a red herring. Results are not going to change much either way, IMHO.

First it was the appearance of the SEO consultants, now the PPC consultants are coming.

I just learned of this specialty last week. Up till now, I assumed that Search-Engine-Optimization services were the appropriate (and only) place to turn over management of your Pay-Per-Click programs. It makes sense, tho. PPC is tightly focused on three things:

1. Keyword/placement selection
2. Ad content
3. Landing page

which don’t have anything to do with SEO except keywords.

One key difference in how you work with PPC consultants is money. No matter how much control they promise you, they are still spending your money. “SEO Clare” (co-worker of “SEO Ruby”) is looking out for those venturing into this outsourcing with a PPC Customer’s Bill of Rights:

1. The right to comprehensive reporting
2. The right to ask questions
3. The right to participation
4. The right to ongoing support
5. The right to responsiveness

In other words, this is a relationship, not a simple ‘outsourcing’ or purchase. But I hope anyone going this route has enough sense to be nervous about giving up control. Ruby just helps put that nervousness in a check list.

With me high on the poor effectiveness of fear tactics from reading Change or Die, I was stunned by the title of this week’s newsletter from SalesDog.com: Teaching Consequences to Your Prospects. Are we supposed to threaten them? LOL

Actually, the article opens up well with a couple good points and stories:

“Like a miserable plague, the educated, experienced buyer confronts and confounds us. What happened? How did buyers get better at buying than we are at selling? How can we adjust to this epidemic of enlightenment that is taking money out of our pockets?”

Then about halfway, that ugly title rears its head again:

“In selling, you want to talk about how the repercussions of not buying from you can damage the prospect’s business in some way. Consequences might include a slowdown in sales, diminished production, angry shareholders, or serious damage to the future of the business. Your job is to point the prospect to the real aftermath of his or her unsolved problem.”

Holy mackerel, how old school is this sounding? As we learned in Change or Die, fear doesn’t affect change, and that means you aren’t going to change the prospects actions with this approach…or can we?

The newsletter writer, Dan Seidman of SalesAutopsy.com, then gives us an example. Turns out he is asking questions about the prospect’s situation and relating to him to the point that the prospect actually ends up asking Dan what he has for a solution. So, its not really fear of consequences that is being used, but exploring with the prospect to find out what the consequences are.

I’ve been playing chess with my kids lately. It’s a teaching situation. If they make a bad move, I don’t tell them “you can’t do that or the queen will take you”, or at least not right away. No, I’m more likely to say “are you sure about that?” or “why did you do that?” Asking questions, letting them explore the situation and consider other solutions.

Getting someone to do what you see they need to do is a tough job for sales, marketing, and parents. Taking you time and not firing off your solution is probably the biggest lesson here: Relate first.

You may know that I like the podcast Motivation on the Run and its host Larry Hendrick. Larry, like myself, was just ‘working for The Man’, enjoying what he does. Well, MotR’s weekly shows have been less consistent lately, but with good reason. Larry has stopped working for The Man and has started his own venture.

Larry is now selling state and US flags at www.flagsbay.com. It’s front page is actually a blog titled the Daily Flag, which is off to a great start with appropriate content. The flag store itself is a WordPress plug-in that Larry has promised to tell us more about. As simple as the site is, it is well executed, I think.

I share this with you for two reasons:

Shameless plug:
I think his risky step forward deserves some Page-Rank 6 love from b2blog.com.

Inspiration:
Am I the only one who looks at the web trying to think of a winning business, then realize that someone has probably done it already, or other ‘reality checks’?

Larry just steps ahead and launches anyway with a simple product that certainly has competition. Its the execution that counts, as Seth recently admonished: “The hard part is actually executing the thing you’ve thought of.”

So even without a podcast to listen to this week, I still am feeling motivated. Thanks, Larry, and best wishes on FlagsBay.com!

Submitted by yours-truly:

“Submitter’s comments: Saw this post at Wired that referenced ‘the most useless site ever’. Had to check it out. And it is useless. First it was the musicians with the sucky sites, now it’s the equipment they use. BTW: Loved the 2006 worst-in-review list. Holy crapola!”

Click over to see what I found:
Web Pages That Suck — Examples of Bad Web Design

And yes, that Worst Webpages of 2006 is a hoot. Check em out!

Since I posted about ThomasNet’s new forums, I’ve got a few comments and wanted to update a few things:

• I posted a thread about pricing-on-websites in the marketing section (yes, I will get back to this subject soon).
• One user said his post linking from ThomasNet forums to GlobalSpec got deleted. I’m not dissing TN for doing so, that’s a pragmatic business decision. A quick search confirms no posts referencing GS.
• That same user pointed out that GlobalSpec has their own forums called CR4, which I didn’t know about. The home page is a little crowded, but it’s got good posts.
• In fairness, I searched CR4 and found only one reference to ThomasNet.

I was offered a comp-copy of Change or Die by Alan Deutschman because I had posted about the original Fast Company article previously. I found the article profound, and jumped at the opportunity to get the book.

Here is the quick summary of what the book is all about:

Old School motivation: Change or Die, based on:

• Find —Find the source problem first, before trying to change
• Facts —The facts should be compelling to motivate change
• Fear —Authorities dictate change based on fear
• Denial — why motivation fails

New School internalization: Change and Thrive:

• Relate —connect with others to understand the change process
• Repeat —keep working on the change (with support from your connections)
• Reframe —until you can internalize the change
• Bonus: small victories get you through the ‘repeat’ process.

The stories that Alan tells are great, much like you would expect from a magazine writer. To me, I reframed the points of the book by comparing them to my boot camp experience:

• Relate —You are in this together with your squad and platoon
• Repeat —You keep saying ‘weapon’ everywhere you go, not ‘gun’.
• Reframe —The surprising thing is that at the end of boot camp, you have internalized the military culture.

Review:

The stories are great, as well as the pop psychology. Alan does give some advice about applying the three Rs, but it isn’t a how-to book. The greatest benefit to me is learning that the old school motivation doesn’t work, and why. This is profound and alone makes the book worth reading, because fear and facts are so commonly used with the same pathetic results.

The greatest challenge of his new school is the ‘relate’ part. Finding a leader, partner, or group that can provide support, training, and leadership is critical to the success of this methodology.

Fun:

Now that I am done with the book, I’m going to give it away. Send an email to change-at-b2blog.com to enter. Drawing to be held on January 27th.

Everyone is talking web 2.0 these days, so it was inevitable:

“ThomasNet.com has rolled out the ThomasNet Forums, providing an integral component to building an active community amongst not only Industrial Market Trends readers or all ThomasNet.com users — but to anyone online.”

Read the release here: In Your Own Words

There are a number of posts there already, but no focus yet. Most seem to be general-interest engineering items under a number of different categories. There is one for marketers, but no discussion of Thomas (yet). We’ll have to watch these forums and see where they go.