B2Blog

Some of my posts slowly collect comments over time. A number of those regard certain companies and scams. I let them live as dialogs for those who are interested in those things.

Somehow, the comment someone posted earlier today on one of my posts from 2007 gets the lucky distinction of being linked back-to by me. It’s probably not good protocol to do this for an anonymous poster, but I don’t think they are posting with any vendetta. Its written as an advertiser (well, someone who is told to advertise with TN).

Basically they are questioning the value of ThomasNet in 2009. Here is a snip:

“They are now a cookie-cutter-web-‘development’ company who simply CANNOT compete against the INTERNET. PERIOD. So, what am I to do? Ever since the massive set of ‘GREEN BOOKS’ arrived each year and the internet was considered a child’s toy- Thomas was the creme de la creme- they had a lock on the ‘yellow pages’ of industry. No longer.”

Maybe they got me nostalgic for the green books. Boy, those were the days. And then the days when they showed up and you never took them out of the boxes.

Anyway, you can read their riff and let me know what you think … about what they have to say, or whether I should be highlighting it.

2009 Big List of B2B Marketing and Sales Blogs by Galen De Young & Mike Marn

“It’s been more than two years since anyone had tried to pull together a list of B2B marketing and sales blogs. Jon Miller of Marketo did it in early 2007. When we reviewed that list, we found a lot of those blogs were no longer active.

So we went searching…

And we found some really great B2B blogs. More than 200 of them. Hats off to all who made the list! Thanks for your continuing contribution.”

The list includes 28 blogs that start with ‘B2B’, which, alphabetically, all precede mine. I do like that the list has given the ‘sniff test’ to the blogs to make sure they are active and relevant.

A great list to fill up a new RSS feed-reader account like Bloglines. (Yes, I still use Bloglines.)

Oh, yea, if you want to see my Bloglines account/blogroll go ahead. It’s also tucked away in the sidebar of the blog. Lots of non-B2B in there, but certainly some gems.

I remember the early dial-up days of the web. I used to carefully study each product picture in a file-size optimizer program. Did the 16K image look good enough compared to the 18 or 24K image?

Broadband effectively killed such attention to file size and page load speeds.

But Google and Yahoo have brought back the issue of speed. They have introduced code analyzers Page Speed and Yslow. Yslow has been around a while, but Google’s strategic discussion about why we webmasters need to revisit speed optimization.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWWBnJEsUtU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

The faster the site, the better the experience, the happier the visitor. And a happier overall internet experience for everyone. Makes sense.

So I asked my developer, Mike Boyink, to take a look at our website. He took about three hours to make some recommended tweaks. (Not all noticably helped.) Here are the results:

Before:
3.12 secs after clearing local cache before doing anything
2.758 seconds reloading cached locally

After
2.16 seconds after clearing local cache
1.118 seconds after tweaking server side caching

So a second, or a second-and-half were shaved off the load times. Doesn’t sound like a big deal.

But seeing my pages now is impressive … because the page loads differently, it seems to pop into view almost immediately.

While the visitor may not notice the speed like I do, they certainly aren’t going to be groaning ‘come on’ while they watch their browser load my pages. And you certainly don’t want your future prospect’s first experience of your brand to cause groaning.

It’s no surprise when I say business is slow this year. We’ve tried a couple ‘special offers’ as incentives for inducing a buy-now urge in our clients.

But the offer I saw another company offering this morning shocked me. (I’ll leave the actual company out of this.)

A $300 gift card with purchase.

I’d guess the purchase would run in the range of $5K. The landing page for the offer was the product registration page.

Wow, $300 in my pocket if I submit an order for their equipment. Is that ethical? Is that a bribe?

Somehow the directness of the offer makes me unnerved. Sure they could spend that same amount of money on a golf outing and it wouldn’t seem so wrong.

What do you think?

Are your website’s visitors looking for prices? Choose one:

1. Duh. Of course they want prices.
2. Okay … prove it!

If you’re the marketing guy, you choose #1. If you are the CEO, you’ll choose #2.

Dale Underwood at his B2B Conversations Now Blog has an easy plan to ‘prove it’: Publish B2B Pricing? Test the traction without actually doing it.

“In a previous post I discussed how the old rules of holding back budgetary pricing has put companies at a disadvantage with self-service oriented prospects doing research for solutions.

At the end of that post I posed a way to test the effect of offering budgetary pricing, not publishing it. It struck a chord with several readers saying they might try it and it gave me the idea to expand on how to test it…safely.”

So you basically take your ‘contact us’ page and duplicate it, but call it ‘pricing’. Then look at the traffic (as well as differences in submissions).

Dale’s company, EchoQuote has a unique tool that enables quick/easy budget quoting for your website. Because he thinks you might need his help after you finish this test. At the very least you’ll have a better conversion rate. And maybe the fodder to show management how much is being left ‘on the table’.

Our company needs to renew our telecom/internet services this year, and I’ll be working with our Controller to do so. I thought it might make a good case study in B2B sales & marketing. And my blog would make a good place to vent about the experience.

Unfortunately, rather than a case-study, it already feels like a saga. We’re two months into it and it’s nothing but a chore. Our existing contract is with the #1 player in the field. In the past we’ve had limited options due to our factory-in-a-cornfield location.

Two real alternatives I looked at:

• My first look was at microwave-wireless service, which promises more bandwidth at less cost. But without any savings in phone service, it isn’t enough. I really liked this choice otherwise.
• My second look was at VOIP phone system, which would save telco costs and add cool & helpful features. But the price tag on buying new phones is a sticking point. The VOIP dealer also proposed their own telecom service.

Then the existing-vendor (we’ll call AAA) game started:

• The direct-rep called and told me he was now independent. He emailed me a pretty reasonable quote for VOIP service that didn’t require new phones and added bandwidth.
• An AAA appointment setter cold-called me and said they would connect me with a new rep.
• The AAA guy visited for an hour with his tech guy, who wore a bluetooth earpiece the whole time. He seemed especially excited to help us limit internet usage of our staff. They left in their shiny BMW.
• Several requests to the AAA guy failed to get us a summary of our existing usage. It appears to me his primary goal is face-to-face meetings.
• I’ve probably heard from three other AAA independent reps in the meantime. And AAA appointment setter re-called me about a month later.
• All that and I still haven’t heard from the rep who sold us our current contract.

Now I’ve been cold-called by a communciations consultant service. Maybe I can turn this ugliness over to them? But the caller is just an appointment setter so I can talk to their sales manager in a week-and-a-half. Sheesh. Qualify me now, send me some literature, or have a decent website, please.

My core problem is that I don’t have a record of long-distance minutes used over the last year. So I can’t judge the proposals accurately. Our bill just shows a cost, without showing minutes used. A separate call-records report is something we haven’t been getting. And AAA’s customer service wasn’t too helpful in getting this info. Blah.

I update you here as more drama and stupidity of the telecom saga continues.

Let’s assume that digital is the future of Trade Publications. If you want to ponder how much work its going to take to get there, take a gander at this publication’s home page:

Since it’s cut-off at the bottom (the page is 3800 px tall), let me tell you that there are 53 links in the left-hand navigation, plus they are repeated across the bottom of the page as a sitemap.

Of course there is a pop-up asking you to subscribe when you first land on the page.

But it is the 30 separate content areas in the main section of the home page that worries me (and each of those may have multiple items). What a cluttered, unfocused home page!

We’ll say that this is just a visual symptom of the internal challenge truly ‘going digital’ is going to require. Starting from scratch doesn’t look like such a bad idea.

This post is inspired by a promotional email that I’m not sure why I received, or why I opened. The subject line was ‘Customer Service’.

The email was from an Italian company promoting availability of product support via Skype.

Hmmm. Not a bad idea.

Today, our customers are working more globally, and more likely to use Skype to connect with their associates. So why not meet them where they are and let them use a tool they already like using?

Heck, we are already using it ourselves to communicate with our overseas agents.

I imagine for a European company, the country-to-country differences in phone service makes such a choice all the more compelling.

I’m glad I opened that email!

I think at one time I looked up some blogs from the other side of the fence…you know, the buyers. Professional buyers.

Well the announced closing of ThomasGlobal.com led me to a very readable purchasing/sourcing blog called SpendMatters. Jason Busch responded to this news by posting The Future of Supplier Directories and Supplier Search. Its a great review of the current status of directory services, which he groups into four categories.

“But is Thomas Global’s closing — and the general downsizing of Thomas over the years since the big green book — indicative of the beginning of the end of supplier directories (including online directories) or does it just signal a more general shift in the direction of the market? At this stage of my investigation, I’d probably argue the latter. And that’s because companies are now gaining access to supplier information primarily through four types of online directories and information sources.”

Be sure to read the comments for further discussion, thankfully without any borish anti-Thomas posters.

Okay, I wanted to wrap up my thoughts about what I “Unlearned” at the BMA conference. In my last post, I highlighted this tweet of mine: “Sessions at #bma09 feel like a twitter stream about social media.“

Yes, the repeated chatter pushed the ‘social media’ agenda. Unfortunately, for industrial marketers like myself, ‘social media’ itself is in the someday/maybe pile. Hard to implement, and with limited direct benefit.

But lets not throw the social media baby out with the bathwater.

Authenticity is needed
The first challenge in approaching social media is also what one NEEDS to approach in marketing today. Social media tactics require authenticity. AND they need to align with your existing marketing/brand. THEREFORE we need to make sure our marketing/brand is authentic.

So our marketing needs to be authentic as a minimum standard to be up-to-date. Then we stand ready to move toward social media (if/when we choose) without having alignment issues.

Those industrial marketers that talk in third-person, arms-length language about being ‘an industry leader’ with additional non-specific marketing-speak, are not only looking dated, but are becoming irrelevant. No one is listening. A possible advantage of social media is the chance to find an authentic voice.

“Real Real”
In fact, one presenter, Joe Pine (link to Amazon), said that we need to render authenticity. Much like how we would control how our logo is used by other departments, we need to control the tone of our outbound communications to assure authenticity. Of course, this is much easier if the culture and in-house communications uses the same authentic tone.

Joe laid out a chart of authenticity, and I think industrial marketers have no choice but to be in the ‘real real’ quadrant–where the customer’s experience matches with the real company behind their product. Its as simple as ‘do what you say you will do’ (Joe calls this the Polonius test: “to thine own self be true.”)

Unfortunately, this is bigger than a marketing problem, it becomes a systematic, cultural, and management challenge. Lucky for me that I work in a very flat organization that has no choice but to be authentic, but for others with top-down bureaucracy and a detached C-suite, authenticity is going to be a struggle. (Reference the challenges of Twitterer @comcastcares.)

Functional Bonus:
Authenticity requires meeting, listening, and connecting to the marketplace, which enhances the quality of our communications. Great. But there is a greater value

Being connected to the market, along with the instant access social media provides, enables us to launch incomplete campaigns and tune them on-the-fly, based on response. In the past you had to have everything ready to go at launch, because you didn’t have that chance to fix things.

Starting points:
I’d look at the written content you are using. Is the tone and message authentic? Websites are the best place to work on this. If it is just cut/paste from a brochure, you’ve got work to do. Outbound emails and blogs, too.

Start Unlearning now, or I truly think you will find yourself behind the eight-ball very quickly. (I’ll talk more about that eight-ball soon.)