Author: Dave J.

I’ve been slow to blog the last week because I have been gearing up for our company’s annual sales meeting. I always enjoy these. I get to see everybody, stand up in front of an audience, look smart, and eat well!

Tomorrow, I get almost two hours of our sales team’s time. I am going to spend the majority of my time helping them with computer/software issues, email, and ‘where can I get a PDF of that?’ I’ll share some of my content later this week. I’m opening with this one:

I’m tempted to leave this post up on top for a week, I think it so compelling. This recent newsletter from the SitePoint Tribune: tells you how to sell yourself when looking for a job, from someone trying to hire marketing types. Here is the jist of the article:

I couldn’t care less about the applicant’s qualifications (unless they can show me how those qualifications will make me money).

…

Out of the 140 applicants, only two addressed the application to “Brendon Sinclair, Executive Director.” The rest were to “Whom it may concern”, or “Dear Sir/Madam.”

Naturally, those two applicants who addressed the letter personally got an interview. And it was simply because they showed initiative enough to figure out who the Executive Director was. It was right there on the Website — that’s pretty basic stuff.

In an interview, everyone says almost exactly the same thing. It’s almost impossible, in my experience, to get a straight answer to any question in an interview.

The applicant is not going to say, “Actually, I don’t think I’m the best person for this job. I’m quite lazy, frequently dishonest, and usually insolent.”

…

But of our 140 applicants, only two actually demonstrated any initiative. And the best indicator of future performance is past performance.

I liked the latest post by Justin Hitt about using language that is about the customer and the benefits they are looking for. Used correctly, and in the right situations, it is powerful. You need to avoid creating these responses in the form of questions that have mechanical answers. The idea is to engage your reader.

Makes a good headline-writing tool, too, engaging your audience to read the content.

This selling doesn’t mean a hard pitch, often just confirm a prospects interest with a few targeted questions and they become ready to buy. Remember, you want customers who will be around for the long-term, so you’re not selling them on a product as much as interviewing them to receive the benefits you provide.

Marketing is not a Post-Processing Step by Eric Sink: “Marketing is not just telling the world about your product. Marketing is also deciding what product to build. You have to design and build your product to fit the market position you want it to have.”

Thanks to Dana’s blog for first linking this great article.

I just saw this ‘tag line’ in an email from a potential CRM supplier: “providing customer centric solutions to today’s business challenges”. Whoa–sounds like a bunch of BS, doesn’t it?

Then I remembered that I had heard about a tool to help the BS-challenged. A free program, Bullfighter from Deloitte, can help find BS in your Word and Powerpoint documents.

If you are need of BS, or a chuckle, check out the classic Dilbert Mission Statement Generator.

I’m starting to feel like this is the year that ‘wasn’t’. I thought by now I would have implemented a new CRM system for our sales department. Instead, I am stuck in limbo waiting for a green light to spend the (budgeted) money. I atribute the delay to a fear, by executives, of spending money in a tight business climate, something blogger Justin Hitt has mentioned before.

I’ve felt compelled to start seeing how I can make the decision to go ahead obvious. I’m a straight shooter, but maybe I need to get my message more crafted. The following article helped remind me of how I got a twinkle in my manager’s eye when we first looked at this…by involving him in the creative ways we could use CRM. Need to find that opportunity, again, and make him think it was his idea!

Pitching Ideas

I’m not a fax-marketer, but the new rules requiring permission don’t sound to friendly to senders. Who’s going to send back a permission form anyway? And why aren’t the senders using email instead? I bet they will now!

One thoughtful request for my ‘permission’ just came in offering a drawing for a MP3 player or PDA. Smart idea…but they really should also tell me in more detail what their company does, as I haven’t a clue.

I’ve been slowly reading the book given to me by my TR rep called Marketing on the Internet for Industrial Companies (see post below, too). Overall, I’ve found it to be an honest, readable book with solid advise and very little bias towards Thomas Register.

That said, I found an interesting table in the book that I’m sure my readers are interested in. The table (click here to see it) refers to a ‘survey of Internet users’ showing popularity of search engines used on a regular basis:

1. Google 67%

2. Yahoo 52%

3. ThomasRegister 43%

5. GlobalSpec 4%

9. Industrial Quick Search 1.7%

I was instantly suspicious of this information just because of the very industrial bent, while the caption doesn’t distinguish that the ‘Internet users’ are engineers, which they must be. And then other questions abound…searching for what?…how were the surveyed users found?…what industries are they from?…etc. The second chart at least identifies the search to be for ‘industrial product information’. Perhaps TR is keeping the valuable demographics that go along with this chart to themselves.

Okay, I was also very suspicious of 43% saying they regularly use TR website and found their results to be the most useful.

Now that I’m aware of how TR handles linking to their client’s sites, I’ve found another problem. Perusing their Internet marketing book they gave me at lunch, I found this call-out-box :

Internet Users Bookmark Suppliers

57.3% surveyed said: "After finding a supplier at ThomasRegister.com, I often bookmark the site."

But if the TR is framing the supplier site, the user isn’t actually bookmarking the site they found, but the TR frame page. Of course, as a user, I hate framed pages for this exact problem. How do I escape the frame so I can bookmark the found site?

And as a side note, I nearly had a heart attack when I used the number one search term (according to my stats) for my product line when I searched on thomasregister.com. The major category for my products use a different term in TR, so it didn’t come up. I thought…what happened, is the TR database screwed up? TR, of course, has many redundant category names, so one that sounded appropriate with just two listings showed up in my results. Now the IQS postcard makes even more sense.

It was suggested I take an even closer look at the way the EZ sites link to the listed sites. They do have a direct link to the supplier’s website on the main page (I just assumed the name of the company would do that for me…I didn’t notice the link “website” under each listing).

If you click on “website”, the supplier’s website pops up in a new window…so why don’t I get any referrers from the EZ site in my log files? The pop-up is executed via a javascript command like this:



<A HREF="#" onClick="window.open('http://www.anysite.com')"><B>Website</B></A>

And the javascript, from what I can learn, doesn’t register a referrer page when calling up the new window. Not to mention search engines supposedly ignore java, at the very least costing the supplier PageRank.

Did you (TR) really think visitors wanted to keep your EZ site open, or did you think that if you did this, they would continue to use your site because it is still open? I think pop-ups are dumb, plus your clients don’t even see that you are gaining referrals from this website. Really, really dumb Thomas Register.