Author: Dave J.

As I posted last month, we are currently implementing Goldmine as a CRM tool at our company. We have it installed now. Making it ready for use is the real task. Some commentary on the experience so far:

In such a ‘flat’ organization, I’m not used to asking permission to do what I need to do, so it seems I forgot to talk to the manager in charge of IT. I talked to our IT support/consultants and they were willing to help, but didn’t suggest I talk to the manager. I wouldn’t have known exactly what to ask for until we were installing the software. Turns out that admin access for an outsider is a big deal, I guess I should have expected that. Also a big deal is enabling remote access to the server, both for the admins, as well as my remote users. Until VPN is authorized, we did cheat and use WebEx to get some needed work done remotely.

The best news so far is that the company president has asked if he can have a Goldmine account so that he can ‘peek in’. The promise of real-time forecast data has to have him excited. Cool!

We have imported customer data from our ERP system, but will start fresh with a blank system for ‘prospects’. Too many of our current prospects are also listed as customers, and too many of our listed prospects aren’t worth uploading. We can upload them individually, as needed.

One of our larger tasks will be to create a completely new quotation system. We will be using QuoteWerks, which integrates with Goldmine nicely. QuoteWerks integrates a price list, which will be one of the major benefits over our current Word template system. The biggest challenge is being able to present all the product information we currently do in a quotation format that is usable by clients and acceptable by our salespeople.

Populating Goldmine with useful fields and drop-down menus is surprisingly hard. It’s hard to imagine how process-related fields will be used and how the data will be used. How is an ‘appointment’ different from a ‘call’ and how many categories for appointments should there be? While having a consultant helping is great, we haven’t had a chance to discuss these things yet.

One complaint about Goldmine so far: its customer look-up method is poor. You have to select the field you want to search from a pull-down menu. It can be set to default to ‘contact’ or ‘company’, but by ‘contact’ it is starting with their first name, which can be a hard thing to search on (is it Mike or Michael?). We must have been spoiled with our software from 1996 that allowed you to search company and contact simultaneously. Holy-mackerel, there isn’t a short-cut to pull up the search screen, either! When I’m in a hurry to look up someone on the phone, I’m sure this is going to frustrate me every time.

Its great to find good research on the dynamics of searcher’s use of search engines, especially when it is specific for B2B. Here is a great report by MarketingSherpa and Enquiro:

How B-to-B buyers use Search (at the bottom of the article is a link to actual survey data/analysis by Enquiro)

Here are some take-aways:

• Google rules, preferred by 83% of users. This goes up with income/education, too.
• The first place on the web users go is search (64%), followed by going directly to a known manufacturer (19%).
• For equipment valued over $5,000, known manufacturers website are selected first 25% of the time. If you are a known manufacturer, that’s a great opportunity to capture a sale.
  
• Even for equipment valued over $50,000, 11% of searching is done within in a week of a planned purchase (20% for $5-10,000). While this is not a majority, in my experience, they are the ones who can quickly be captured by having the right information and product available.
• 70% of searchers click on organic listings first, 25% on sponsored listings. This varied by search engine, but as most are using Google, that’s what I’m watching (Google was 77%).
  
• The top listing got 27% of organic clicks, while the top sponsored listing got 51% of those who clicked sponsored ads. These just confirm the strength of being #1 on SERPs.
  
• The good news, if you aren’t #1, is that the majority of users look at organic listings first (65%) and then 91% scroll down the page to see more results.
• More good news is that these organic-listing readers tend to select ‘side ads’ at a rate of 69%, which is more good news if you aren’t #1.

This is great information to tune your PPC and SEO programs, targeting Google and top listings. However, the ‘gold in the cracks’ might be targeting the minorities in this survey. One agency, Cube management, recently reported how they found using Overture gave their client significant results at a lower cost than Google. While not true for every industry (mine is up to 16 dollars a click on Overture), it is a worth checking out, especially as sponsored listings were shown to be more effective on Yahoo in this survey.

As I am implementing CRM, we wanted to create ‘touch points’ with existing customers to develop loyal relationships. As we aren’t currently a proactive sales organization, we aren’t really sure where to start. But this article at Marketing Profs has some good, but basic ideas:

The ‘Marshall’ Plan (or, Customer Aftercare)

• “Thank You” letter
• Letter from “Mr./Ms. Big”
• How did I/we do?
• Happy anniversary
• At random, customer appreciation letter
• “How are we doing?/How have we done?” survey cover letter
• Birthday cards
• Hand-written “Congratulations” cards
• Thanksgiving letter

Now I can’t say I would use all of these, but I especially like “Letter from Mr. Big”. One of our loyalist customers was so partially because he had the phone number for our president.

Up until recently, I was one of the many undecided voters. It was interesting to hear news stories and commentary about undecideds. The pundits wondered how we could still be choosing when the differences were so clear. They don’t seem to understand what is going on in our heads.

The fact of the matter is that the candidates bellow about issues and sling accusations and none of us our listening. Recently, I complained how poorly I thought Kerry did in an interview on NPR. What we are looking for is not answers to the issues, because we find them too complex. What we are looking for is a leader who we can trust these issues with. We want to ‘connect’ with the candidates so we can trust them. The best part of the debates was Kerry and Bush complementing each other on their families.

So, unable to ‘connect’, I’m left making my choice based on facts of trustworthy leadership. Unfortunately for Bush, he has a track record to judge, and I don’t particularity like it. He made a decision to invade Iraq that I trusted him to make. It may have been the right decision, but I am suspect of the reasons why.

The fact that he and Powell sound like they had satellite photos of WMD activity the way Kennedy had pictures of Cuba is upsetting now that there has been very little evidence of any threat at all. Instead, it seems that Saddam pushed him hard and he had to call the bluff. That’s fine if he would admit it, but he won’t. It appears that he has a chain of ‘yes-men’ who supported his decision with pseudo-facts and opinion. He would have been better to be like Marty McFly (in Back to the Future III) and just call him an asshole and ignore him.

And Bush failed to ignore why Saddam was such an asshole–it was the only way to keep Iraq in one piece. Now we have the threat of a real quagmire on our hands…and Bush refuses to see it as such.

(Would it have been a much better to spend the billions of dollars to help fight AIDS in Africa? Politically useless, with no real benefit for Americans, but money better spent, IMHO. )

So, based on past performance, I’m saying to President Bush “You’re fired!” Or from a post at Closing the CRM Gap, that refers to the writings of Robert Heinlein:

There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for … but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

I had an email reply to a proposal I sent out this morning. I noticed that he had received the message labeled as ‘possible spam’. Now why is that?

Then I had a sales rep call wanting to talk about the emails he had sent. What emails I asked. Turns out they were in MY spam folder. He is using an AOL account. They were labeled spam by Spam Assassin run on our host’s mail server. I am running Cloudmark on top of that, which hadn’t tagged it. While looking for those emails I found one from an employee in my spam folder.

I’d try to be a little more cautious about thinking your emails are getting thru right now.

BTW, this blog’s host, 8-95.com started making spam as an attachment and then puts the body copy in plain text so you can’t accidentally ping their servers to let them know you read their email. This does make it harder for Cloudmark to separate, though.

It took almost two years to finally get my CRM project approved and order placed. We went with Goldmine. Why? It may not be the best software, but having a local consultant to support us is a major plus, especially when he is interested in helping us. That gives me two distinct benefits:

• I don’t have to find myself in the role of ‘administrator’.
• The consultant will help encourage us to do more than just ‘use’ the software. Otherwise, my fear is that management will think that once it is installed and live, the work is done.

So, what have we done so far?

1. I put together a implementation team with our: sales manager, inside sales leader, support leader, and sales secretary. This gives views and expertise from different angles.
2. I held a general meeting with everyone in the sales and support departments, as well as having our president sit in. Having the president there was a major plus, so he could hear my plans, as well as gauge the reaction of the staff.
3. With our consultant’s template, put together a outline & calendar for implementation. The plan does not detail the ‘pilot testing’ and modifications done by us internally. I’m going to have to exert my own leadership to get through this valley. We scheduled pilot testing for about one month.
4. The consultant spent two afternoons here learning more about our needs, goals, and processes so that he can provide a recommended configuration of Goldmine, as well as changes in the process. Having processes in a flow chart (ala ISO 9001), made this an easy task for us.

I’m really excited about how many immediate fixes we will have to the way we do business. My head does swim with the multitude of issues that need to be settled an implemented. However, there are a number of ‘800 lb. gorillas’ we’ve gotta wrestle first:

• Segmenting customers
• What data to import
• Revamping our quotation format

Thanks to Rank for Sales blog, I learned that the evil Traffic Power (my previous post) has resurfaced. This time they are showing how evil they really are.

They are now 1P.com. Read the FAQ and it sounds like the same stuff. Second to last FAQ states no refunds.

What is interesting is that they are setting up their own web forums. You would think that they would do this to create link traffic for clients, but it is worse than that. They are actively dissing major SEO companies and personalities. There is a surprising amount of effort here, and to the sites they link to that do further slander.

DMOZ link in comments is dead, here is why. (at cornerstonelinks.com)

I’ve been advertising on Business.com for a few years. At 70 cents a click, I started out thinking that it was a reasonable way to promote our business, knowing that our listings would be shown in a ‘contextual’ mode. Exposure is good, right?

But nowadays there’s such a thing as click fraud. In this article from Wired on click fraud published today, the author says no one is doing anything about it. So here I am doing my part.

Why? My referrals from business.com have been increasing and this month they jumped. Here are the numbers from last month:

• business.com 606
• rd.business.com 55
• billed click-thrus 478

I don’t want to reveal my company’s site-traffic, but I will say that this puts them as #2 referring domain! This is double last month’s traffic, which was also high. Suspicious? Oh yea.

I used FastStats to filter analysis to only hits from business.com. Doing so does skew some of the numbers, as the referral is only for the first page that the visitor hits. So total time on the site and click-paths are not useful data. And then I looked at the log file for one day, when I got 117 hits! Here’s some observations:

1. 559 of the page requests came from searches using their ‘frame the destination page’, suggesting that the clickers are using that to seach and click.

2. Referrals came from these partners on the single day:

23 from partner=2627803

52 from www.galaxysearch.com

Results from other 11 sites (opticseek.com, go4seek.com, shangrilaa.com, tobuy.com, delmonicos.net, emberhseach.com, kiligaga.com, petovia.com)

(And galaxysearch is run by what sounds like a slime-ball (read here: http://galaxysearch.com/i.html?arg=4) famous for being the first to registering sex.com. The list of coersion bragged about on galaxysearch certainly gives me no confidence that his searchers are any kind of target audience.)

3. Two of the referrers actually showed keywords used to search. They were single words of ‘cycle’ and ‘thermal’. Hardly target searches! Note no clicks from internet.com or other major sites listed on their partner page (http://www.business.com/info/partners.asp).

4. 89% of the hits were on just one of my five registered pages with business.com. And the normal search terms for this page draw very little result from Google or Overture.

When I get a chance, I’m going to see what I can do with this information. Stay tuned.

Email is great. It’s elevated the efficiency of ‘inside’ sales people tremondously. But is has created some new problems. Suppose an important sales message, like a PO or a quote-request, is sent to the email account of someone who is out for a day or more. Like most people, I don’t turn on my email ‘vacation message’ unless I’m out for more than three days.

Here is a solution one purchasing agent recently used as part of his email text:

PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL TO CONFIRM RECEIPT OF THE RFP. Should a reply not be received by Friday Oct 8 at 1:00PM I will send a paper copy via fax to your number in order to ensure timely receipt of the RFP.

What else can a sales team do to help make sure POs and RFPs aren’t left ignored for days? This is one reason people feel compelled to check their email even while on vacation. Does it have to be that way? Any suggestions? What works for you?

We’re starting a marketing plan for a new product here…not something that happens often. So I found my self Googling for a guideline on creating a marketing plan. What I found is great: just enough to get launched and make sure we don’t forget anything. And its just a friendly little website called KnowThis. It is just for marketing. It’s a little incomplete, but I’m really happy with what they have.