Marketing with Technology and More

Marketing's Philosopher

When I was out at TED this year I ran into Seth Godin.  I wish I had more time to spend with him as I think he is a marketing genius.  He's often referred to as a guru.  I think that is the wrong moniker.  I think he is really a marketing philosopher.  Sometimes he makes simple statements that boil things down to their essential nature.  Today he posted the following:

"Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over."

If more salespeople and marketers paid attention to this advice, the world would definitely be much more enjoyable (and less annoying).

Navigating to success

My daughter is in college, and is working on a project for one of her classes.  She is working on a presentation for her speech class about the effect of web design on consumer behavior.  She sent me a copy of the speech outline and one of the key items in her talk really hit me as it relates to web interfaces:  “Shopping patterns and consumer behavior are not just random acts.”

This is basic marketing, but it is amazing how often major organizations forget about this.  From experience I know that the challenges related to user interface design is that many organizational factions get involved and everyone has a perspective.  What you often end up with is a design that looks like the elephant that was described by six blind men. 

Never forget that in most situations, people come to your web site with a specific goal in mind.  Very few will end up there by random chance.  Don’t design a website or email message from your perspective as a marketer, but from the perspective of the visitor.  Marketers are so used to push marketing that sites are often designed from the perspective of “here is where we want to push you” or “this is what we want you to buy”.  When you do this with little regard to ease of navigation, your website is doomed to underperform.

A great example she uses to illustrate this is walmart.com.  Just visit the site and move your mouse around.  There are so many navigation components that you can easily get lost.  Her research indicates that on an average day, the number one retailer in the world has .2 percent of all global internet traffic (compare this to Amazon, whose daily reach is as high as 5 percent).

In addition to these points, as a father, it is wonderful to see your daughter have such insight – she makes me very proud.

Just Published - The Ultimate Guide to Sales Force Automation: 100-Plus Links and Resources

Inside CRM just published a great set of resources related to Sales Force Automation on their site.  Everything from articles about products, great tools and tutorials.  If you deal with a sales force, it is worth checking out.

I’ll Trade You My Steve Jobs for Your Bill Gates

I have been remiss in writing about a great web-based marketing tool. Not because I didn't want to tell you about it, but because it took me a while to become comfortable with the concept.  When I first heard about it, I found it a bit on the creepy side.

The tool is called Jigsaw, and is an online list compilation service with a difference. The difference is that the compilation process is based on trading and buying business cards. 

I used to work in the list compilation business. In those days we combed through phone directories to build lists of businesses and consumers (a practice that still goes on today). The problem is one of accuracy.  A phone book is only a snap shot in time. As soon as it is printed it is already out of date, so anyone who rented one of our lists could count on a fair amount of bad data (we didn’t sell it that way of course). 

As I thought about Jigsaw, I realized that it is nothing more than a list compilation service, only one that is much more accurate.

The basic concept is simple. It is designed to be a business card exchange system. If you give me your business card, I can log onto my jigsaw account and enter your information. If you are not already in the system, I get "points” for entering your data. If you are already in the system, but your data is incorrect, I also get extra points for correcting it (and the person who put in the inaccurate data loses credit).  If I want to find a contact, I simply go to the Jigsaw CRM type interface, enter any sort of select parameters such as:

• Search for a specific person
• Search for a specific business
• Search for all people in a specific business in a specific area

When I find who I am looking for, I download the contact, and I am charged “points” for the contact.

It is easy to argue that when you give your business card to someone, you are not expecting it to get entered into a database. The reality of the world is that your name is being compiled all the time in many ways, this is just a new way of doing it.  The benefit to the user of the product is that you are able to get very accurate information on key contacts within companies that you are looking to connect with.  The data includes correct names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

To use Jigsaw however, you don’t have to be willing to surrender your data.  The company allows you to purchase data also by buying points.  What I have found great about the product is the accuracy.  Of course accurate data also requires that it be used in a responsible manner, so my hope is that Jigsaw will continue to monitor how the product is used and reinforce responsible usage (ie. don’t download a  list and then spam it).