Author: Dave J.

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:

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

Selling to engineers and other technical people can be adversarial, as they don’t consider a salesperson as a peer. Being technically proficient (and listening) can bridge that gap, but its not necessarily enough to close the sale. You still need to be a salesperson (or marketer) that enables their decision.

That’s where this week’s newsletter from SalesDog.com, titled How to sell to Techies picks up. The article is much more detailed than these key points I culled here:

1. Technical types prefer to have an authority set the rules, and then they can do the right thing. They prefer to use standards whenever possible.

2. Understand their centers of influence. Their purchase decisions often come from consulting with others.

3. Establish and prove that what you sell is an industry standard.

7. If anything at all smacks of manipulation, eliminate it from your discussion. Techies prefer to draw their own conclusions, thank you.

8. Give them all the data they need to make a decision.

The author, Mark Smith, was hammering on the ‘industry standard’ idea. Being ‘standard’ eliminates risk, justifies pricing, and removes the sense of manipulation. It’s a powerful concept.

Without a long, embarrassing story, I post this link:

eBay Guides – BEWARE of FAKE USB Flash Drives on eBay

“CAVEAT EMPTOR, BEWARE of Counterfeit USB Flash Drives. Millions of eBayers have been deceived by fake, low quality, unpopular cheap drives!”

I talk a lot about business directories here. Their kissing-cousin, the Yellow Pages, aren’t relative to my kind of marketing. But they struggle a lot with the same changes caused by the internet.

The Yellow Pages & Small Business Commandos Blog is a bit infrequent, but Dick Larkin’s posts are good stuff. His latest post tells about one yellow page publisher that is ignoring the internet. But its really a business lesson. Here’s the sum of his post titled Zig vs. Zag:

“The print strategy will probably not carry Seig for the next two decades, but by that time, a company with an Internet strategy will have paid through the nose for the deep market penetration that Valley has achieved.

See, it’s all about picking a strategy and sticking to it.

That is one of the toughest business strategies of all.”

Well said Dick! Looks like Seig is being business-smart and market-savvy.

I hate ‘webinars’. They just seem to promise too much while reeking of sales pitch. Then there is all the technology required to ‘log-in’. Often they are just talking heads and PowerPoint slides. And you’ve got to sit thru the whole thing to get to the good stuff, if there is any.

All the classic collateral tools work well enough, but is there a way to make them better, leveraging the web? MarketingSherpa posted a new report that may be an answer:

Marketing Collateral Adored by Reps & Prospects Alike — PowerPoint-Style Libraries With Audio

Malvern Instruments found a service that provides such presentations over the web, giving them great usage data and flexibility to let their folks put together their own presentations. You can see a sample ‘On Demand Training’ presentation here.

Because of its slide-by-slide navigation, the user has control to skip slides or browse around to find if the presentation is really worth it. Malvern says they try to keep each ‘training’ to less than five minutes. They are requiring registration to see most of the presentations.

In the comments to the article, other services besides Brainshark (that Malvern uses) are listed. Very cool stuff!

If you missed my post a couple months ago, I’ve come to the opinion that Adsense ads aren’t a particularly good value for B2B advertisers. To ad to your thinking about what each of those clicks represents, up-and-coming blog Caffiene Marketing posts Google Adsense Clicking Rationale Explained:

“There is a new topic titled “The Behavior Behind Users Clicking On Google Adsense Ads” on the WebmasterWorld discussion forum the I recommend checking out. The discussion covers the rationale behind internet users decision making process involved in clicking on a Google Ad. Some of the possible explanations are below:

1. “Compelling on topic or relevant supplemental information”
2. “They don’t know it’s an ad (well “blended”)”
3. “They know it’s an ad but want to get the hell out (of the page they are on)”
4. “Just boredom””

…and on to number 11. While WebmasterWorld is $150 a year, this list gives a good summary of what webmasters think is going on. Not sure if these opinions come more from those running AdSense on their websites or those looking for click-thrus. The sad part is less than half of the reasons have to do with actually being genuinely interested in seeing where the ad-link goes.

(I hope its not too much ‘inside baseball’ for me to assume you understand the difference between Adsense and Adwords ads. Adwords run strictly on Google search pages.)

I thought the beginning of the school year and the resulting schedule change with be a demarcation that would allow me to raise my energy and productivity, both in my work and personal life. Having the kids in bed an hour earlier and getting to work a half-hour early would seem to open up my day at bit, plus no soccer on Saturdays this fall. A chance to get off cruise-control and crank things up a notch.

And I do feel a bit freer, but nothing dramatic.

But instead of thinking just of me, I’ve found myself thinking about friends and acquaintances in challenging situations. Some situations I’ve been involved in, and others just a witness. Regardless, their combined struggles so closely grouped in time becomes greater than the whole.

When my son was in the hospital (twice in the last year), the people who came to visit him/us, or offer help really taught me a lesson about the value of reaching out in a time of need. And the pained regret of missing someone’s funeral last year was uncovered last night, making the realization that ‘cruise control’ is something that needs to be turned off sometimes…to slow down, not speed up.

When did it happen that we went our separate ways, that we stopped looking after each other? How is it that we forgot the still true warning of revolutionist pamphleteer Thomas Paine: “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately”? –Big Picture Guy

Tonight I need to make a phone call.