A grab bag of stuff

December 30, 2004 | Mathom Room

I’ll be posting about lead ranking, metrics and CRM systems sometime within the next few days. Right now, though, I have a bunch of random links that need to "escape."

1. Tsunami. There are not enough words in the English (or any) language to describe the horror that must be South-East Asia right now. Boing-Boing is a good source for links to eyewitness blogs and other information about the tsunamis. Please donate to one of the many aid organizations; we gave to the American Red Cross using Amazon’s very simple one-click process, which at the moment is at the top of the Amazon home page.  Update 12/31: Great post on Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick suggesting that President Bush cut back on the costs of the upcoming inauguration in light of the tsunami tragedy.

2. Searching the Web. I’ve started using a couple of new tools that I really like. Feedster searches RSS feeds, so I can search blogs as well as the traditional news sources that I follow with Yahoo and Google alerts. Eliyon is a search engine of business people.  The data isn’t perfect, but I have used it to find a few people with whom I had lost touch. Don’t look for me though. I managed to delete the profile they had built for me while I was messing around with it and haven’t had time to update the information.

3. Great article in The Register: Let’s play the Magic Quadrant game  If your company has ever been in the wrong corner of a magic quadrant, you will truly appreciate The Register’s humour. If you don’t know what a magic quadrant is, don’t worry about it, and read the article anyway. It’s very funny.

4. Item on Future Tense with Jon Gordon about an 8-minute film that forecasts the end of traditional media and the rise of participatory/personalized media. Very thought provoking, and makes the important point that as we celebrate the growth of participatory media like weblogs, we shouldn’t sacrifice journalistic integrity nor the breadth, depth and objectivity of the reporting of broad-based media like The New York Times. It may not be perfect, but the NYT reports the news whether it likes it or not. Blogs include personal commentary and usually a point of view. We must avoid reducing our news diet to only reading material from those that agree with us. The Future Tense page links to both Gordon’s interview with the film-makers and the film itself.

That’s it for my random links. Happy New Year.

Lead Nurturing

December 22, 2004 | Integrated Sales & Marketing

Great article on Marketing Profs about lead nurturing –  Lead Nurturing: Ripening the Right Bananas, by Brian Carroll. Carroll discusses an approach to leads that I have long advocated: Suspects and prospects must be nurtured in marketing until they are ready for a sales person to close them. I truly believe every company should take this approach, from day one if possible, and having a cooperating sales and marketing team is what makes it really work.

The other two things that really  make lead nurturing hum are Lead Ratings and Metrics. More on that next week.

And now for something completely different…. Sales & Marketing Strategy

December 20, 2004 | Integrated Sales & Marketing

In my last few columns, I have talked a lot about blogging and its potential as a marketing and communications tool. For the next few weeks, I am going to turn to a much more “traditional” set of marketing topics, aimed mostly at small to mid size companies in their early stage/start-up, or spin-outs of larger companies with brand new, possibly revolutionary products.

The main theme of our discussion is how the marketing decisions you’ll make today define your future possibilities and will eventually drive, for good or ill, the decisions the company makes two … five… and if it is lucky, 10 years from now.

The positive abstract of this is: 10 marketing decisions you can make today, and make your future. The negative (think Ebenezer Scrooge) is: the 10 things you’ll wish you did two or three years from now. You decide

Our first topic: Integrated Sales and Marketing strategy focused on Sales Opportunities. Marketing is more than just generating leads and Sales is more than just getting a purchase order. Yet there is a tendency to reduce them to these functions, with marketing’s box at the front of the sales cycle, followed by some hand-off point, where it becomes a sales lead and thus the province of the Sales Department. Eventually no matter how close the two teams were when it was just one marketing guy and one sales gal, the two departments develop into fiefdoms with little or no MEANINGFUL communication about the task at hand. This dynamic is hard to change once it gets a stranglehold on your teams, so prevent it. How? Here’s my prescription

1. Make dead sure that Sales and Marketing are EQUAL functions in your organization, and that everybody supports this from the CEO on down. Yes, of course, in the early days, Sales will be more critical than the longer term view represented by Marketing. If you don’t get the sales, there is no long term

   However, even as the sales are rolling in, your brand is being defined and not simply by what YOU say and do – customers, prospects, the general public, etc. all influence the brand. So, don’t wait too long before you take charge of your brand’s future. That’s the Marketing job. 

   What happens if you don’t have balance? If the Sales perspective is the sole perspective, your business strategy becomes a series of reactive, 6-month sales plans. And the reverse, if you focus too much on brand and long term strategy, and not enough on sales, you probably won’t have as many sales. In the early days, this could mean the success or failure of your business.

   You need both functions, in balance.
   

2. Insist that your Sales head and your Marketing head work as a team to develop the business plan. Make certain that this does not end up with one function driving the plan and informing the other of what it intends. See warning above about lack of balance between the two functions. Develop an integrated sales and marketing plan with input from BOTH organizations, and not just at the top level.
   
3. Develop a mantra that informs everyone that Business Opportunities belong to and are the responsibility of EVERYONE in the company. Everyone is a lead generator, evangelist, sales person, customer service representative; it’s just that each of us has our specialties and specific day to-to responsibilities for which we are compensated.   
   
4. Resist resist resist the temptation: when business is good, and the orders and leads are flowing in, it is very easy to let the Sales Department degenerate into an order taking machine and to allow the Marketing Department to morph into a lead generation/sales support organization. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN. You need the maintain a high quality sales organization that is capable of feeding itself and closing business… even when it becomes harder as you move through the product lifecycle. You must have a marketing organization that is capable of thinking long term about the future needs of future and untapped markets as well as feeding the current machine.

I cannot guarantee that your business will be successful if you do this – there’s a lot more to it than just having a well oiled sales and marketing machine. However, I truly believe that you create a far stronger foundation for success with integrated and balanced sales and marketing teams that work as colleagues, instead of viewing each other as competitors.

The Death of the Urban Legend?

December 6, 2004 | Mathom Room

Are blogs the end of the urban legend?

Twenty years ago, urban legends were commonplace — among them,  the Mrs. Fields and/or "the department store" cookie recipe story, Kentucky Fried Rat and the little boy dying of cancer who collected postcards/stamps/pins etc etc. These stories spread in a societal version of the game Telephone. Some (the little boy) actually had basis in fact, but he had recovered from his illness long before the solicitations for help stopped coming. Others were out and out fable. They spread through viral networks, aided by the telephone, the early online services (CompuServe and BBSs), the photocopy machine and real bulletin boards in offices, schools and grocery stores.

A story becomes an urban legend when it spreads quickly and broadly without an easy method to verify the facts. The Internet has certainly changed the shape and nature of urban legends. For as long as it has been a mass medium, there have been Web sites devoted to debunking urban legends, and before that you could find the truth in Usenet news… if you knew where to look. But,  the Internet — e-mail — also contributes to the spread of the stories.

In the end, while traditional Web sites, a one to many channel, and e-mail, a one-to-one channel, can both spread and debunk the stories, they just can’t do it fast enough to prevent the legend from getting started.

I think blogs can. I don’t believe the urban legend is dead… yet. But today, I read some blog traffic that indicates that blogs may have created a profound change in the urban legend dynamic. The blogging phenomenon lets people communicate, and converse, quickly. Information can be spread among regular people and experts as fast as we can type. Yes blogs can spread a story — true or not — quickly, but just as quickly, we can get to the TRUTH. Before the legend really begins.

Witness this example:

Over Thanksgiving weekend, a number of blog reports surfaced about Target selling marijuana and other unusual products on their Web site. You can find examples of bloggers that initially believed the report as well as others that clearly understood it to be some sort of prank or technical error (see Boing-Boing). In the end, it turned out to be related to the fact that Amazon provides the back end to Target (Boing-Boing post, News.com story).

There are a lot of things you can discuss around this example — just search on the topic in the blogosphere and you’ll find plenty of discussion on everything from the intelligence of bloggers to Target’s PR strategy.

But, what really interests me about the whole thing is that a wild story that in the old days would have been perfect fodder for an urban legend was dead in one week.

Whatever else they turn out to be when they grow up, blogs may signal the end of the urban legend.