Author: Dave J.

Next week is our annual sales meeting. I always prepare a ‘technology’ presentation to help our reps take advantage of their computers and the internet. This year I am going to present web content that can help them be better salespeople. Four distinct categories quickly emerged: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and ‘tools’.

Podcasts may be the ultimate ‘on the go’ tool for the salesperson of the 21st century, but I’ve only found two so far.

Can you help add to my list? I’ve created a del.icio.us account to track my selections and tag them by category.

I’ve spent more time shopping for lesser things. It was a great price, its a Honda, and it suits my needs. Yea, its not exactly what I wanted, but at several thousand less, I’m willing to compromise. Part of the the compromise, too, is that I need to share it with my wife, who now has a long commute to grad school 2x a week.

Making major purchases is always a lesson to me about salesmanship, marketing, and the customer experience. The honesty in the auction listing was certainly a confidence builder. Part of the reason for the good price was that the car had been rebuilt after an accident. They explained what they checked and fixed. The low price makes the decision easier, because if I don’t like it, I can resell it and not be short a bunch.

Now gotta plan a train-ride to Chicago to pick it up.

Honest, I’m not getting lazy, I really like what Kathy has to say at Creating Passionate Users blog. Can I assume all my readers are reading her blog, too? No, so that allows me to make what looks like a fresh post to some of you. Three good posts I didn’t want to slip by:

The Smackdown Learning Model talks about how to have a smackdown fight between alternatives to help the user learn about their choices. I thought this was a great lesson in writing competitive material, especially when one of my new goals is to make the user’s choice clear (ref: Paradox of Choice)

Reference vs. Learning: Pick One allows Kathy to get on her high-horse about the advantage of conversation writing to improve user learning. But to a marketer (and we all are marketers), its a good lesson in limiting or separating your messages depending on the task: reference or learning. I’ve seen too many pieces with reference content written in a learning/conversation style that is awkward and unreadable.

You can out-spend or out-teach is today’s lengthy rant that contained this gem about creating passionate users/customers:

But passion requires real learning. Nobody is passionate about skiing on their first day. Nobody is passionate about programming in Java on their first day. Or week. It’s virtually impossible to become passionate about something until you’re somewhere up the skill/knowledge curve, where there are challenges that you believe are worth it, and that you perceive you can do.

There, I think she drove the point about why her learning mantra is so compelling, so spot-on. Learn what doesn’t work (like using a paddle-boat for fishing), and insist on the right gear next time.

Probably your marketing program is like mine—its in auto-pilot. Programs and products are in place, salespeople are closing orders, and customers are happy. More-or-less, anyway.

The point I want to make is that we don’t often realize how much is depending on us marketers. The blunt extreme is this: if there are no sales, there are no jobs. We hold the fate of people in our hands, whether we realize it or not.

Catching fish:

I am not a sportsman. Just this year I started fishing with the nudge of my neighbor and my kids. Its actually fun, but I don’t like holding the fish (or cleaning them). The fish are just too slimy and wiggly to securely hold, so I use a towel or glove. And tossing the fish back eliminates the cleaning part.

While on vacation a couple weeks ago, one of my boys (8) and I were on a paddle-boat fishing, after unsuccessfully trying from the shore of the small lake. My son quickly got two that we threw back. As we were paddling, I got a bluegill. Because we were moving, the hook was deep in the fish’s jowl and I couldn’t get it out.

Suddenly, the fish flipped, I flinched, and my pliers went flying into the water. Now I had a fish with no way to get the hook out (it is one of those three-hook spinners) and no equipment to keep him. My son had a pocket knife, so I cut the line and let the fish keep its new jewelry.

Being prepared:

We paddled back to shore, my nerves jangled and feeling guilty. And pondering a lesson about being prepared, being confident, or something bad may happen…to someone or something else. Since then, a couple other personal and work incidents had me feeling the same way.

I think that President Bush and a lot of others got caught on auto-pilot last week. They were assuming the SOP as they had done well with Charley last year would work. Instead, they should have been actively engaged in the situation, actively changing their response based on the situation and threats. And so should you and I! Lives are on the line, after all.

I wouldn’t normally attempt to be a Google watcher/pundit, except that this touches my post about pay-per-call last week. Well, and the implications of what Google is up to is huge. WebProNews posts an article that brings all the pieces together, but is unclear and loses the true implications, IMHO. They start with a good quote from another publication:

“In a Business 2.0 article, Mr. Malik wrote that Google could ‘use VOIP technology to dial phone numbers that appear in local search results.’ With a massive rollout of Wi-Fi and the first version of Google Talk on the Web, combined with Google’s scheme of providing Gmail invites to US mobile phone users, the potential use of pay-per-call becomes clearer. “

Google’s buying up ‘dark cable’ and plans for stock issue to raise a bunch of capital they otherwise don’t need are also part of the puzzle.

Here’s my take: Google will help grow the connection between phone and internet networks, enabling pay-per-call on a widespread basis. So much more than niche pay-per-call like I blogged about. Think about it…

1. If one uses Google on their cellphone, they are much more likely to call based on the search results.
2. On your PC with GoogleTalk, one can click on a hyperlink that automatically calls the advertiser.

Shedding my sales responsibilities has given me a bit more time to take closer looks at marketing data and resources. I feel almost like I’m squandering my time, but I hope what I may find is valuable. This morning I ran my web-access reports for August. Studying them closer, I noticed a referrer from a competitor’s site–so I started digging. Here are some tidbits I found looking thru my server logs and reports:

• Above mentioned referrer is junk, caused by a crawler/bot called Zeus.
• There are a number of other bots hitting my site heavily, including noxtrumbot, ichiro, & nutch.
• Hmmm, are these bots inflating my access stats?
• Back-tracking on a Google Syndication referrer brought me to a link/engine-spam farm.
• Firefox hits are now 9.9% of accesses!

Overall, I’ve decided that the access data has been pretty uniform over time to the point where trend-tracking is not valuable. That means that I can change to a different web-access tracking method. Why change? Well, to get those bots out of my access-stats for one. That might give me a better view of actual site traffic. And the client-side tools give a better picture of usage, too. Client-side measurement has been on my to-do list for a while.

Over the summer, our inside sales team started running into problems tracking who would be off on vacation or traveling. We have been using a write-on calendar to track our schedules, but this isn’t convenient for our sales manager or others who need to this info regularly.

After some mental wrangling, I found that this was a great situation to combine Goldmine with Sunbird. Let me explain: Goldmine (CRM Software) has a group calendaring application which would be silly for me to ignore, but it’s calendar reports suck. However, Goldmine can export calendar info in the universal *.ics (called iCal) format.

Since I last discussed iCal here, the calendar software has become Sunbird, a SourceForge open-source program. I simply set up Sunbird to display the Goldmine *.ics file, so that we can print out calendars or have other non-Goldmine users view it. Soon I will set Goldmine to automatically export the iCal file to the web, where I can use the php iCalendar web software to display it for our independent field reps.

There are some details on how to do this to make it go right. If you are interested, here is a pdf file with my written instructions. Anyway, I’m really excited this worked out so well and took advantage of the *.ics format.

I’m back from a very pleasant vacation week. Digging thru my mail this morning, I found this gem (click for full view):

What is says:
Public Training Catalog, SUMMER/FALL 2005
Public Training, Onsite Training, e-Learning, Webinars, Standards, Publications

Why pick on BSI Management Systems: What the heck is the training for???

The only way to figure out what their training is for is to read the acronyms in the white-on-orange text at the bottom! If I were a QA manager who regularly received their catalog, this would be forgivable, but they are using this for a purchased list. Regardless, the road and ball images are a waste of valuable real estate and leaves me wondering if they have any relation to each other.

I’ve often looked at training and service brochures with “happy people” images as being cheesy, but this catalog shows that going without is even worse.

A new marketing tool is starting to roll out to track calls generated by web advertising. They simply generate a new phone number for that specific client’s listing every time it is displayed. This number is then forwarded to your main number. Usage of this technology is limited now, but a ‘pay per call’ charge will be collected.

One company with the technology to do this, eStara, contacted me about discussing the subject here. At first I passed, as it doesn’t really apply to me right now, but after seeing the article
Can pay-per-call search really ring up sales? in BtoB Magazine, I changed my mind.

Per the article, one early tester of pay-per-call on Superpages.com is Tower Tech, a B2B company that might sell water-cooling towers to some of my clients (which is why I was suddenly interested). Tower Tech says they have gotten up to 30 calls in a month using the service. They are budgeting spending about $7,500 a year with Superpages.

This technology is being positioned for supporting advertising of service companies and local businesses, where a phone call is much more useful to the prospect than a website. EStara has an example of a hotel/spa directory using the technology, which makes a lot of sense.

Tower’s marketing mix (or not):
I was curious about Tower Tech’s web marketing, so I investigated. At Superpages, they were #1 for ‘cooling tower’. Superpages lists their URL, but you have to click on ‘phone’ to get the auto-generated number. Googling ‘cooling tower’ shows them at #10, and no AdWords listing. ThomasNet is overloaded with tower companies, but not Tower Tech. Nada on GlobalSpec, too.

Perhaps in a competitive industry, they have found a niche with Superpages, especially since their B2B sales seem to be done primarily through local distributors rather than direct sales like a good part of their competition. And that might also support using pay-per-call, too. I will say that their website is very good, too.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz

I found this book’s premise strangely compelling. Why, when shopping with so many excellent choices today, do I feel stumped as to which to choose? The book explained why and delivered much more. As a marketer, it was also a helpful reality check of what our prospects face.

As background, know that Barry Schwartz divides consumers into two groups: maximizers who want the absolute best value, and satisficers who are willing to settle for ‘good enough’.

Points learned:

More choices actually means less satisfaction with your selection because you can’t feel sure you got the best value. Barry Schwartz’s best example is a taste test with six flavors of jam that significantly outsold a taste test with sixteen jams, even though the larger selection attracted more testers.
Marketing lesson: Make the prospect’s choice as clear as possible.

The challenging issue with making a choice is not satisfaction, but regret. He says the larger selection of jam actually caused the taster to perceive future regret that they didn’t pick the best flavor.
Marketing lesson: How can you ease the prospect’s regret before, during, and after the sale? Surprisingly, Schwartz says a reversible deal, such as a trial period will not help with regret.

One other strong example about the reality of choice that he uses: 65% of people without cancer said that would want to choose their treatments if they got it, while 88% of cancer patients said they would leave treatment decisions to the doctor.
Marketing lesson: Don’t rely on customers’ opinions about what choices they want to be able to make. In actuality, they would rather trust the ‘expert’, which is hopefully your marketing materials and/or salespeople.

For some, the amount of choice actually drives past indecision and regret and leads to depression. Maximizers, he says, are especially vulnerable.
Personal lesson: By personally limiting choice and freedom, more happiness can be experienced, which seems contrary to what we would think. Marriage was a prime example.

Overall, the book helped me understand much about myself and the material world I navigate. Why do I buy everything online from Ebay or Amazon? The choices of where else to buy are so overwhelming that I can’t bother. And as a marketer, making the customer’s choice clear and apparent is so, so important.