Author: Dave J.

In my industry, we sell a quality product, but its fit to the application is of prime importance to the end customer. So I enjoyed reading an article yesterday from ‘Sales and Marketing Management’ about why high quality still beats price any day (online content requires subscription, so no link). The writer, Tate Williams, said he was a ‘technology salesman’ as opposed to his competitor who was a ‘commodity salesman’. So I cheer for the technology salesman who gets the order.

Later that day I talked to a potential client from Honeywell, who is very interested in two of our products. But there is a very strong barrier to buying…his purchasing department. He cannot get quotes from us, formal RFQs need to be made, and months will pass before his order can get placed.

What he is most frustrated by is that once he writes the equipment specification, the decision is made on price. For this reason, our normal salesperson for this account doesn’t work hard on it. The client already has equipment from low-bidders who will likely be asked to bid on this RFQ, and he has a very low opinion of the quality of their product. He says he wants to try to sole-source our equipment, but the bar for that is high.

He can try to write-out certain brands by the way he creates the purchase-spec, but how can a purchasing structure like this judge quality? Most engineers make a gut decision on quality, but such a logical process would require some kind of definition and measurable guide.

Perhaps, worse yet, we as salespeople and marketers depend on this gut feeling to create a perception of quality. So I have little resources to help define quality in a measurable (and useful) way. How does one make the intangible easily comprehended? Figure this out for your product, and you will make selling so much easier.

GlobalSpec seems to be doing what Yahoo recently did–downplay its directory of industrial suppliers and serve-up search engine results.

The pitch is that the search results are filtered for engineering-related sites and also finds the ‘hidden’ web pages that other search engines miss. My quick test showed relevant sites, but hard to distinguish from other search engines.

One wonders how this affects their existing clientele. In practice, their search box has a pull-down menu that you need to select ‘the engineering web’, otherwise you get their directory results. But when searching the ‘engineering web’, I expected a stronger pitch to use their directory or list their suppliers ala AdWords, but this wasn’t the case.

The next logical step would be going to a PPC model for the search results. That’s when I can afford (and justify) advertising with them.

This week I will be acting more like a reporter, giving you the scoop on the latest B2B marketing news (as far as I’m concerned, anyway):

Last year I said: “Imagine being able to have articles about your company’s new innovations published in a peer-reviewed setting, much like a scholarly journal? Imagine it is powered by the web, allowing publication within ten weeks. Very targeted, very truthful, very timely.”

Well, that time has finally come, and Vertilog is delivering the goods for with their first ‘journal’, Advances in Electronics Manufacturing Technology. They have stayed focused on their task. The only important change they have made is offering multiple languages, which is helpful for the growing Chinese market for electronics. Marie Mayer of Vertilog says they plan to publish 6-8 papers a month.

The focus they offer is terrific, aiming to let suppliers educate their potential clients in the new processes and technologies that they can apply to their products. This type of article is hard to get published in a trade publication and scholarly journals for industry have very limited reach. With a published eight page paper costing $3,650, it is a fair price to get a quality marketing tool on the web and in the hands of potential clients. The quality comes from a significant editing and review process.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but its spring-break week and I’ve been off to visit my family. A pleasant surprise is to find my contribution to This is Broken posted. And with some lively discussion, too.

This Is Broken – New Uno card design: Sample comment from someone who understood my point: “The poster’s point is that what used to be dissimilar and easily distinguished — if arbitrary — are now similar and easily confused.”

In other words, while RTFM (Read The F’in Manual) may give the right answer, it doesn’t mean the product isn’t Broken.

Last week I told you about my experience with creating an iCal format calendar and posting it to the web. I had ‘cheated’ and used an online service to generate the calendar, framing it into the site.

Not content with that solution, I decided to try installing the latest version of iCalendar, the open source web calendar tool (the service I was using is still using 0.9, I installed 1.1). I deeply appreciate the geeks who create this stuff, but they don’t provide a lot of documentation. The coolest thing about this new version is that I can display more than one calendar at a time. Anyway, here is a walk thru in installing the application for non-code-geeks, assuming you have a host with PHP capability.

1. Download the package, which is a tar.gz file. This was one of my big problems. The gz file is easy to open with an unzip tool (I use PowerDesk Pro), but I didn’t know how to open the resulting .tar file. Instead of just double-clicking it, I had to manually select it for extraction from PowerDesk. Now I’ve got a bunch of files in a folder.
2. Open the readme file. Not as easy as it sounds, since the file doesn’t have an extension. I found WordPad the easiest to work with (or use Word). The readme doesn’t tell you too much about installing, and is targeted at Mac users installing on their own Mac server, so let me summarize for you: Create a folder on your server (‘phpicalendar’ is the most convenient name, to match their defaults) and then copy the files you expanded into the folder. How simple!
3. Here’s where I screwed up at first. I would check to see how the default installation worked out by going to www.mydomain.com/phpicalendar/index.php. I didn’t do this, but if you do, I think you should find that it is up and working. There are three sample calendars installed already (something I didn’t know until later). I jumped right to the next step:
4. Edit on your local machine the config.inc.php file. I used WordPad again, which automatically formats in a readable layout and saves the file as php type. Go thru the settings…most you don’t have to worry about, but there are a few regarding ‘paths’ which you should pay attention to. If you are hosting your .ics (iCal) files elsewhere like me so you can use WebDAV publishing, don’t worry about the paths to them. This slowed me down considerably.
5. When editing the config, set the admin.php page to be active, and leave verification via FTP (uses your FTP account logon/password).
6. Save and upload your config.inc.php file to overwrite the one you initially put on the server. Now go check to see how the calendar looks on the web.
7. Go to the admin.php page by typing it in your web browser. After logging in, you will see that the only thing you can do is add and delete calendar files. I cut-and-pasted the URL for my .ics file at my webDAV host to add it. I tried deleting the sample ‘home’ and ‘work’ calendars from here, but it didn’t work. Instead, I deleted them via FTP.

With all that done, your calendar should be up and working. I still need to figure out how to integrate it with the rest of my website, but you can take a look at the result. I think this is sooo cool!

I had an overall pleasant purchase experience over the weekend. Our clothes washer wasn’t doing the high speed spin, an indication of a transmission repair. Just like a car, this can be expensive, so my wife and I decided to invest in a new washer.

I headed out to shop around solo–a great strategy because I can always tell the salesperson that I’ll need my wife to take a look before deciding. First Home Depot, then Best Buy, and last at Lowes. The guys at HD and Lowes were polite and helpful.

I was nervous walking into Best Buy, expecting a sales shark, despite their ‘no commission’ pledge. I actually walked around the store once so I could spy out the sales people and tactics. I had gotten by the clutch of staff at the front of the appliance area un-noticed, but was soon approached by a cheerful saleswoman. She told me that her service guy recommends Whirlpool…then she walked over and pulled him over (turns out he was one of the people in that clutch).

So I talked to Ron for a few minutes. Says he sees a dozen Maytags to repair a week, compared with one or two Whirlpool. Then said he told his kids to buy Whirlpool, as well as the salesperson I was talking to. Then he said that Whirlpool has only ever had two mechanical systems for their washers, while the other companies have had several, and “they still can’t get it right”. He also helped confirmed my suspicions about my existing washer.

I headed out to Lowe’s after that, where the salesperson recommended a Maytag as a good basic choice. While he was trying to help me, I had to feel he was not well informed.

Best Buy did everything right as far as pricing, model selection, and sales. But, by far it was the service person who made the decision easy. The fact that the sales and service people communicating and acted as a team certainly was a competitive advantage. I wonder if Home Depot or Lowe’s even has a serviceperson on staff!

Here is some analysis from InfoCommerce Report on the deal, from their weekly newsletter:

ICR wondered why Thomas has set up a joint venture instead of just licensing FindWhat’s technology, and after further research, it became clear that this announcement is much bigger than it might seem. What Thomas and FindWhat are planning to do, in effect, is create a specialized version of FindWhat for the global industrial market. The new venture plans to set up a network of distribution partner sites in the same way that FindWhat has built a network of mass market consumer sites.

What we’ve got here is two huge developments rolled up in one: a major directory publisher moving to the pay per click model, and the launch of a specialized business-to-business pay-per-click network This is an innovative and aggressive response by a directory publisher to the pay-per-click phenomenon, which has adversely impacted most advertising-based directory publishers.

True students of database marketing will find the link at the end of this article useful in understanding the (pdf) different business models for selling database info.

Thomas Global (international division, not USA’s Register) is going to try a new portal approach using PPC advertising technology from FindWhat.

Aren’t portals an idea whose idea has come and gone? Thomas should have enough experience to know that. There are some good ideas here, but what will drive users to use it?

FindWhat, Thomas To Create B2B Portal: “Also, “a good proportion of advertisers sign up on their own with FindWhat,” said Savage. Thomas Publishing has 600 to 700 representatives selling ads in the U.S, but hot overseas market China, for example, isn’t covered. With this system, any company with a valid credit card can buy advertising, Savage said.”

Here’s a great, easy-to-read article by Nadji Tehrani (Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine) about how lead generation is connected to sales and marketing and CRM. It tells it like it is and how it should be. It justifies my feelings that marketing is getting more complex.

Why Lead Generation?: “As vital as lead generation is, it is mind-boggling that so many companies ignore this phenomenally important part of business and simply give it casual attention, if any at all.”

Geeks aren’t prone to community, unless it is online. With that thought in mind, I recently installed a discussion board on my church’s website. It was surprisingly easy to do.

Here are the instructions I found for non-code-geek like me to get the FREE phpbb board installed.

It was cool just to be able to upload something like this. While some pundits (i.e. cluetrain types) talk about conversations with and between customers, the practical application for most industrial marketing is less compelling right now. It is useful, however, for us to know what tools there are out there and how to implement them.

They have just posted a new version, so I guess I’ll learn how to upgrade online php packages next.