Category: Uncategorized

Since I posted about ThomasNet’s new forums, I’ve got a few comments and wanted to update a few things:

• I posted a thread about pricing-on-websites in the marketing section (yes, I will get back to this subject soon).
• One user said his post linking from ThomasNet forums to GlobalSpec got deleted. I’m not dissing TN for doing so, that’s a pragmatic business decision. A quick search confirms no posts referencing GS.
• That same user pointed out that GlobalSpec has their own forums called CR4, which I didn’t know about. The home page is a little crowded, but it’s got good posts.
• In fairness, I searched CR4 and found only one reference to ThomasNet.

I was offered a comp-copy of Change or Die by Alan Deutschman because I had posted about the original Fast Company article previously. I found the article profound, and jumped at the opportunity to get the book.

Here is the quick summary of what the book is all about:

Old School motivation: Change or Die, based on:

• Find —Find the source problem first, before trying to change
• Facts —The facts should be compelling to motivate change
• Fear —Authorities dictate change based on fear
• Denial — why motivation fails

New School internalization: Change and Thrive:

• Relate —connect with others to understand the change process
• Repeat —keep working on the change (with support from your connections)
• Reframe —until you can internalize the change
• Bonus: small victories get you through the ‘repeat’ process.

The stories that Alan tells are great, much like you would expect from a magazine writer. To me, I reframed the points of the book by comparing them to my boot camp experience:

• Relate —You are in this together with your squad and platoon
• Repeat —You keep saying ‘weapon’ everywhere you go, not ‘gun’.
• Reframe —The surprising thing is that at the end of boot camp, you have internalized the military culture.

Review:

The stories are great, as well as the pop psychology. Alan does give some advice about applying the three Rs, but it isn’t a how-to book. The greatest benefit to me is learning that the old school motivation doesn’t work, and why. This is profound and alone makes the book worth reading, because fear and facts are so commonly used with the same pathetic results.

The greatest challenge of his new school is the ‘relate’ part. Finding a leader, partner, or group that can provide support, training, and leadership is critical to the success of this methodology.

Fun:

Now that I am done with the book, I’m going to give it away. Send an email to change-at-b2blog.com to enter. Drawing to be held on January 27th.

Everyone is talking web 2.0 these days, so it was inevitable:

“ThomasNet.com has rolled out the ThomasNet Forums, providing an integral component to building an active community amongst not only Industrial Market Trends readers or all ThomasNet.com users — but to anyone online.”

Read the release here: In Your Own Words

There are a number of posts there already, but no focus yet. Most seem to be general-interest engineering items under a number of different categories. There is one for marketers, but no discussion of Thomas (yet). We’ll have to watch these forums and see where they go.

“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.” –Martin Luther King Jr.

(More quotations worth pondering here: Quotation Search – Martin Luther King Jr.)

I am heartened by the blogging of Martin Luther King Jr. today. Despite those who think that his birthday/holiday (and thus, his person/message) is not respected by *not* taking the day off, these personal riffs show that a more personal, valued interest in him on this day than almost any other holiday of remembrance during the year.

Yes, it is progress. Perhaps blogging will change the way we honor the past. It is precarious, though…will we remember next year…or the year after that? When will MLK Jr. be irrelevant?

A couple blog mentions just from my regular reads:

• Reveries posts about how his speeches built on the familiar.
• Seth also ponders the enomity of it all.
• Yellow Pages Commandos tells a personal-history story about a cross burning
• Even Wired posted a special message in their RSS feed (that interestingly enough doesn’t link to a story)

Why should you try to publish pricing on your website? Do we really have to have this discussion? It is pretty obvious, isn’t it?

• Price is one of the most important features of your product. Site visitors want to know!

• Price is a reality check that what they are looking at is appropriate for what they need and can afford.

• In the B2B world, pricing drives budgets ala the Dilbert cartoon I posted earlier this week. During the budget process, the prospect is really just a ‘suspect’, and knows it. He wants to avoid being treated like a prospect by an overeager salesperson.

• Corollary: Your eager salespeople don’t waste their time with ‘suspects’.

• Getting your price in the budget keeps you ‘top of mind’ when the budget is approved. It’s yours to lose now.

• The visitor will be able to spend more time evaluating your products and drilling down to the one with the best value for their needs…instead of flipping back to Google.

• If you don’t do it, someone else in your industry will.

• Someone else already has pricing on their website and visitors are flocking to their products.

Published pricing is definitely going against established sales conventions, so perhaps there are other answers about ‘why you should’ based on improvement in your sales cycle. For example, publishing a ‘suggested retail price’ may solve a problem with distributors who excessively mark-up or discount your products.

Will any of these win over your management or sales force to agree to put pricing on your website? That is probably the greater question here. The need is obvious, but convincing others to do it takes a compelling argument. Any suggestions?

I love finding timely posts from others for what I want to write about. Vincent Flander’s Web Pages That Suck to the rescue!

In today’s Daily Sucker 1/11/07

“Submitter’s comments: ‘Contact us for a quote.’

What? You mean you don’t know what the price is? I can think of few more effective ways to drive away potential customers.

Vincent’s comments: Absolutely right. It’s even harder to understand why we can’t get a quote for a scale to weigh babies when it’s no trouble to get the price of a scale to weigh light aircraft ($2,495 to $6,995 USD).”

Saying ‘Contact us for a quote’ means that your website is sucky? Vincent has never taken up this issue before. In this case the inconstancy only highlights ‘the problem’. Is there perhaps one of my reasons from yesterday why they can’t list the price for this specific scale?

And of course this webpage is sucky in general. Go over to WPTS and check it out.

I know most of you will just scan the following list, but that’s okay…thanks for being there and reading what I’ve written for the last year.

I especially enjoyed these posts of mine for their ‘aha’ effect, or the frankness of my opinion. The Marketing Eye series was probably my favorite effort of the year.

1. Gizmos Week: PowerDesk Yes, you need this!
2. Buyers are looking for sellers “Buyers are looking for, but not finding, the following information on our websites: Pricing, Tech support details, Shipping, & Ordering online.”
3. Is It Really That Difficult? “In B2B, haven’t we all assumed that product knowledge is #1 for an effective salesperson? Have we been that stupid?”
4. Is B2B marketing really this bad? “Some of B2B products get sold without a customer ever looking at a website, while others are web-intensive. You can’t just “leave these outmoded methods behind.”
5. Techie prospects like industry standards “Being ‘standard’ eliminates risk, justifies pricing, and removes the sense of manipulation. It’s a powerful concept.”
6. BtoB advertisements Crappy ads pervade…let me prove it to you.
7. B2B content trapped in need for completeness? “How much smarter is it to leave your marketing incomplete and let the reader do the heavy lifting? The conclusion may be obvious, but now the conclusion is theirs.”
   
   
8. Marketing Eye for the Sales Guy series My intro to this series: “These salespeople have only one chance to do it right, in most cases. And being on the receiving end of the pitch, I’m constantly amazed by how salespeople blow it. Top crimes, IMHO: Wishy-washy voice mails; Not asking the right questions; Barking up the wrong tree; Not following up; Pretending the Internet doesn’t exist”
9. Small and ugly can be a winner Get the most of your partial-page ad.
10. Quality is free! Freely abused, anyway “In today’s online world where marketing-speak is not tolerated, the marketer may just avoid the subject of quality and let the buyer assume that your quality meets whatever minimum standard he or she has.”

Now that IE7 is widely installed, users may come across your website and get a warning something like this:

Russell at Info-Commerce Group does the due-diligence about this new feature and shares in his weekly newsletter: Go Phish!

Essentially, the tool runs off a blacklist. The blacklist is based on verifying if the URL is registered to a incorporated business. Now that sounds risky.

Actually, the first time I ran across this warning, I did a double take at the website I was accessing and then turned off the phishing filter. But what is someone who isn’t savvy going to do when they get this warning?

Robert Rosenthal at his blog Freaking Marketing posts a little rant titled: Why Most Business-to-Business Marketing Campaigns Are Uninspired Or Just Plain Awful.

So what’s he gotta say? The truth, pretty much. He uses B2C marketing as a foil to compare B2B marketing.

“B-to-B marketers view themselves differently — Ask the CEO of the soda company what business they’re in, and she’ll probably say, “We’re a marketing business that happens to sell sugared water.” Ask her counterpart in a software company the same question and he might say, “We’re an engineering firm that has to do marketing and advertising and all that sh*t.””

Here is the rest of the list:

• Marketing managers aren’t in charge of marketing
• Sales steals money from marketing
• Accountability is insufficient
• Not enough first-rate talent

You can head over and read his comments on each of these bullets.

The last one aught to get your attention: Not enough first-rate talent in B2B marketing? Okay, I’ll agree. But if you look at the rest of his list, you can see why.

I do want to add one thing:
B2B marketing is not a consumption/demand generation process. Engineers don’t buy my products because they are cool or fulfill some previously undiscovered need that only a good ad campaign can enlighten them to. They buy because they have a new requirement or a justified reason to improve what they have.

So, Robert is right that B2B marketing campaigns suck. He’s right that we are not the drivers of our businesses. But that isn’t where our focus is. There is a lot that B2B marketing does extremely well that B2C marketers don’t even understand.

I was just sitting at my desk opening my mail. There was a small envelope from Google.

Obviously a Christmas card. What would Google send? A reward for sending thousands of dollars their way and helping inflate the value of their stock?

Nope. Just a rather plain card with ‘Happy Holidays’ in a couple dozen languages. Yawn.

Then I turn to my PC and see an email waiting from Google.

“Adwords Service Level Enhancement”.

Seems I’ve qualified for human-voice support via a toll-free number.

It was interesting how the email was a reward that arrived just as the Christmas thank-you did. I may never use the toll-free assistance, but the offer is appreciated.

Thank you Google.