Marketing with Technology and More

Salesforce.com Forgets Email's Power

I have been one of the most ardent supporters of Salesforce.com.  I think their product is great, and it has been extremely useful in our business.  I have probably sent them at least 10 corporate customers because I have liked what they do.  Until now.

Last week, Salesforce went down for about two hours in the middle of the day.  The week before that the API did not work for an entire day.  Our sales force has found the tool extremely slow for the past three weeks.  To date, not a word from the company.  It seems they have forgotten about the power email has in communicating with their customers. 

On their system status page it states, "In the highly unlikely event of extended service unavailability, all customers will receive timely email updates on system status".  I guess I am missing what they would call "extended service unavailability."  When you log on to their site, nothing.  It is like they are pretending nothing happened, it was business as usual.  In this day and age, when word of mouth can have such an impact.  How can the company be so uncommunicative to their customers.  Especially when it is so easy to do.Unless you pay for their premium support, you do not have access to the system status page (although according to  the Salesforcewatch blog, they may make this page available to all customers next week). 

I'm sure Salesforce CEO Mark Beinoff is concerned the way Wall Street beat up the stock on Friday.  This is nothing compared to the damage being done to the goodwill and fantastic word of mouth evangelism that is rapidly evaporating.  Ironically, earlier this month Beinoff sent a memo to employees  about SAP's entrance to the on-demand CRM world.  It was titled  SAP on the Defense (a copy of the full memo was included in Steve Hamm's Tech Beat).  Perhaps Beinoff might be wise to try some defense and use email to stay in touch with his customers. 

The Art of Misdirection

In the past week, both Iowa and Hawaii have jumped on the child protection band wagon with because of what has to be one of the most misdirected lobbying campaigns designed to get legislators to believe that one state’s law can impact the flow of spam and pornography on the internet.  As the father of two children, I abhor some of the pornographic emails and adult oriented promotions that flood inboxes.  It is easy to get any parent or normal adult upset at the thought of such email ending up in a child’s email box.  That’s why lobbyists seem to have no difficulty in getting legislative sponsors for the ridiculous child registry legislation that has been surfacing in many states.

There is a major missing component in this concept.  Any organization willing to send such email today is unlikely to be deterred by the laws in one state, and this is complicated by the fact that much of this material is being sent from foreign countries.  With limited state resources, it is doubtful whether the states of Hawaii or Iowa will be sending the state police to Russia very soon to arrest the sender of any such mail.

What is not difficult is to see the financial motivation behind this legislation.  On the surface, the concept of new dollars flowing into state coffers from emailers who have to comply with the laws sounds wonderful.  Unfortunately, this money is going to flow from legitimate businesses that sell products that shouldn’t be sold to minors (i.e., automobiles, real estate, motorcycles).  These types of organizations that are legitimately sending relevant permission-based email will want to comply with the laws.  However it doesn’t take a Harvard economics professor to calculate that sending email in the future will become financially prohibitive if each state is charging more to process an email list against their registry than many companies are paying to send their mail, and these costs are incurred on a monthly basis.  When you dig a little deeper, and you look at the two states where such legislation has passed, Michigan and Utah, and realize that 80% of the revenue from those two states is ending up in the pockets of the single company that is able to process and house the registries, that the true objective of the lobbyists, who are so persuasively moving legislators is revealed.

The one good thing in the entire procedure is knowing that sometimes the legislative process does work, and sanity rules.  Recently Representative Jack Franks of Illinois made the decision to withdraw a similar bill, which he had initially sponsored after learning the true impact and effects that this poorly conceived legislation would cause. 

So for now, keep your eye on all of the states that haven’t passed this legislation and hope that other legislators see through this thin veneer of deception and misdirection.    If you would like to read more about how legislators in Utah and Michigan were hoodwinked, read Brian Livingson's great article published last year