Author: Dave J.

We just sold some of our equipment to Apple. So why not send a picture of that product to iPod My Photo and use it for a promo piece? I suppose I should ask Apple if I can refer to their company if I go any father than casual usage. But for twenty bucks, its worth it just to email to all our sales reps to get their attention. This is soo cool.

Thanks for the viral link, Greedy Girl! (She’s got a great blog, check it out)

MarketingProfs.com asks whether companies in B2B, service or complex products can take advantage of the holiday season in their marketing.

The answer is yes, of course, but why? What would you do? Answer their question here:

MarketingProfs – What’s Your Best Advice? – Marketing wonderland during holiday season

If you like, you can copy and paste your answer in my comments section. I will put my response there if you want to cheat or do me one better.

Blogs are a great place to vent, although dangerous if you insult someone. Here are my slightly neutered gripes:

• Emails regarding ‘my account’ that don’t actually tell me what to do. So I use the email address in the message to ask what to do and I get an automated reply on how to check my account. (This is Ariba, a major e-commerce service.)
• People who blame their own personal agendas on other people.
• People who want to make pointy-haired decisions to help without asking what is needed.
• People who don’t trust their team and take control of a decision, only to delay the project.
  
• Teams who act like the “United Front of Judea” from Monty Python Life of Brian. (More time talking about ‘doing’, than actually doing.)
  
• Team decisions that end up with compromises that dilute the final product.
• Door-to-door solicitators (especially when they start calling you afterwards).
• Spell check at Blogger that doesn’t have ‘blog’ in its dictionary.
  

(I’d also like to say that these are not necessarily internal issues here, but may also be with outside groups that affect me. It’s not that bad here!) Thanks for listening.

Well, we’ve done it: we’ve started using Goldmine after just a scant period of pilot testing. I figured that even bare-bones, Goldmine is better than what we were using. So far, that’s been a good call. It does leave me with many things to do yet, like populating fields and implementing features. If I had too many features ready, I think they would have been overwhelmed (which means I would have been overwhelmed with questions).

The biggest learning curve has been with email. Part of what I liked about Goldmine is the ability to see emails sent or received by others to customers, which makes it easy to cover for each other, which we do a lot. To do this, Goldmine needs to become a primary email tool. So we are letting people wean themselves off of Outlook. The feature people seem to miss the most is the ‘auto-fill’ of addresses. The ability to link emails to contacts is great, but it makes it a more complex tool, worthy of its own training class, I think.

How am I weaning off of Outlook?

1. Sending all customer correspondence from Goldmine is an easy way to start.
2. You can view your Outlook email from within Goldmine, and then just drag relevant emails to the Goldmine Inbox for linking to a contact. I can’t do this because my Outlook inbox has over 7000 emails, bogging down Goldmine.
3. I’ve set my Outlook email to leave messages on the server for one day. If I get an email from a contact, I can then check email from within Goldmine (manual check, not auto check) and import the message by dragging to the Goldmine Inbox. Goldmine actually shows you what email is on the server and doesn’t upload it until you’ve dragged it to the Inbox. I’ve been emptying my deleted items folder in Outlook regularly, which also removes those items (spam) from the server (this is an Outlook setting) to keep Goldmine less crowded.

I think I may stay in this configuration for a while, as I still see to many advantages to having Outlook handle general correspondence.

Apparently there aren’t enough directory sites yet.

This one looks a little cheesy, even with an “Get Internet Explorer” logo on the home page. I assume it is mostly useful to the search engines. The one good thing they have done is labeling links to sites if they have pricing on the website, which engineers will love (if they ever find or use this site).

MotionNET.com – About Us

I’d thought I’d share a link to another blog with relevant and worthwhile content.

Church Marketing Sucks

A great blog–Makes me wish I was running marketing at my church…or somebody was. Here’s a great recent post: (Marketing) Lessons from U2.

Note another quote from Bono: “Two crap albums and you’re out. That’s our deal with our audience.”

Click and enjoy the feast! And cheers to all my faithful (and sometimes) readers.

Got a press release in the works (I do)? Make the most of it by considering it as a SEO attempt, too. Here is a good article detailing the success of one such attempt for a new wine retailer:

Press Releases New SEO Back Door To Top Rankings

News searches rank based on how many news sites are writing about the topic of your press release, how recent or “fresh” stories are, the length of the story when covered by the press and the frequency of the search term. One element of news search algorithms that’s vastly different from standard algorithms is that number of sites linking to the release is hugely discounted because news is expected to be new, and as such, won’t have time to gather links.

Getting your Press Release in the “news” section of Google and Yahoo can be done through PRWeb for as little as $120. They actually offer SEO-enhanced services there, too, for a reasonable cost.

Wow, this one is right up my alley. A test equipment manufacturer, B&K Precision, documents with MarketingSherpa how they boosted sales using the internet. The difference for me is that I am selling capital equipment using reps, not ‘tools’ via distributors. But this is great insight on how to make the most of the web:

How to Use Search Engines to Market Engineering Equipment (Without Paying a Cent to Google)

Instead of Google, they did spend money is with GlobalSpec and Direct Industry. In this case, GlobalSpec is a great fit, and they used Direct Industry to boost international exposure.

For the search engines, they targeted their competition, which is bold move. And by tailoring the targeted pages (sample) to aid in the user’s search, they had 60% click past these pages.

They were also smart to be sure to answer the questions searchers need to make a decision: features, price, and delivery. Delivery was a key component that took an extra effort to keep track of stock levels at their distributors. This saved the searcher from having to hit several distributor sites to find out about stock. It also allowed B&K to centralized lead generation, so that they knew which distributors were getting leads (helpful for negotiating co-op ad fees).

It all looks like a well run program based on aiming at the core strategic issues needed to win. Be sure to read the case study to get all the details.

Mike Boyink points to a great study at Consumer WebWatch showing that consumers judge the credibility of websites (and by extension, the company behind them) primarily by design and architechture/navigation. I’m sure this applies to B2B sites. Great ammo to get $$ for next years budget to upgrade the website.

But don’t get to carried away, the article warns:

Slick-looking Web sites frequently received negative comments. Participants seemed to make judgments about the people behind the site on the basis of the Design Look. Many comments were indicative of this attitude: “It looks like it’s designed by a marketing team, and not by people who want to get you the information that you need.”

How does the title of this post strike you? If you think it is vague, imagine that it is the subject line of an email from someone you don’t know. I only opened it because I was curious how it got past my spam filter (and the fact it doesn’t also say ‘gummed envelope’ or other odd phrase).

It was actually a follow-up email from salesforce.com warning me that they are going to call tomorrow.

The body copy commits the additional marketing sin of being all about them and not me (highlights are mine):

I’m following up on your company’s past interest in salesforce.com to see if we should re-engage.

Since the last time we connected we have experienced tremendous growth. We have completed a successful IPO (NYSE: CRM) and now have over 12,000 customers and 185,000 subscribers.

This weekend we went live with our Winter 05 release which includes over 100 new features in sales, marketing and support.

CRM doesn’t kill customers, only nitwits using CRM do. Its bad when the nitwit is the CRM company itself. Besides the poor email, I’ve already had my PO for Goldmine out a month.