Do you ever get the feeling that the world is really running in reverse. Talk of petrol rationing, strikes, negative equity, Rick Astly back in the charts, drain pipe jeans (I still haven’t recovered from the return of flares and corduroy jackets), all lead me to believe that whilst we think we are progressing we are actually quietly and steadily moving backwards. This was further brought home to me today when I learnt about Blackle.

Blackle is a search engine like Google but sports a black screen and consequently uses only 59 Watts of power. Google with its white screen lighting up your face uses 79 Watts of power. If you are concerned about the environment, saving 20Watts of power when you search the internet is (I am sure) a worthy thing to do; along with offsetting your carbon footprint and riding your bike to work.

But com’on, this is marketing at its best. The creators of Blackle are building their brands and they have tapped into the growing concern about power consumption. You have to admire their Australian audacity. However, it does beg the question: how much additional power does it take to use a search engine based in Australia when your data is going through all those additional switches and routers and bouncing off satellites. I don’t know the answer to this one but I like to beg questions occasionally.

I am, however, old enough and ugly enough to remember the days when computers could ONLY display black screens with green writing. I wonder if one day soon we will wake up and realise that all these pretty windows on our screen are just a waste of energy and going back to black screens with green text would be just fine after all.

I say bring back hot pants, Led Zepplin  and Bruce Forsyth. Oh, sorry we already have.

Over the years I have experienced the foibles of many many CRM systems from SAP to Seibel , Oracle to Onyx, Pivotal to Peoplesoft. Why is it that most out of the box CRM systems seem to apply all the sophisticated work flow to opportunity management and leave lead management  as an after thought.

I think this largely due to the history of CRM and its roots in SFA. The workflow associated with SFA is relatively mature and the major demand for CRM is most often sales led.

Lead management on the other hand is often more complex with many stakeholders crossing multiple departmental boundaries and applying a generic workflow is often problematic. I’ll give you an example.

We recently worked on an event for a major IT hardware manufacturer. To encourage attendees several product offers were designed spanning several product lines. The invites to the delegates were personalised for each market segment. Invites (both electronic and printed) were sent at intervals of three weeks starting six months before the event. The first three invites contained additional “early bird” offers. Click-thru ads were distributed amongst various publications and websites with offers matching the specific target segment. At the event itself leads across the different product streams were captured and collated. All the offer take-ups, leads and enquiries required distribution to the appropriate sales team. The Sales teams were given the option of accepting the lead or passing it back for nurturing into a telemarketing queue. Attendees/non attendees  were contacted after the event to follow up and further enquiries required assignment to the appropriate sales team.

Now this event was an annual conference and the workflows and matrices were relatively complex and intensive and required tailoring to the clients needs. But in many companies, especially in retail where volumes are high the general lead management process is equally or yet more complex.  Campaigns may last a few weeks or a few days. The workflow for a campaign may not be reusable having been tailored so specifically.

As a result the workflow required for modern campaign and lead management is most often beyond the scope of a standard CRM package. They are not designed  for project based “throw-away” workflow.

This leaves a huge gap. Campaigns often start life as a record within a CRM system but it is then necessary to move to another system or agency to run the campaign. Then leads need to be import back into the CRM system – possibly losing vital information. Only then can the leads be assigned and generate opportunities.

We have been helping companies run campaigns such as this for the past  8 years. We know that the limits of campaign management in CRM systems. We have helped plug this gap for many successful companies. Whilst CRM vendors continue to rely on static and inflexible workflow management techniques the need for services such as ours will remain necessary and lead management will continue to be the poor relation.

Marketing is about change. It’s the nature of the job. We are constantly trying to re-invent the way we present ourselves/our companies. Marketers are judged on their creativity and it is likely to consume all your time and effort. Creativity has always been the most highly prized skill. But recruiting marketers with the right credentials and experience seems to be well nigh impossible. Some research says that 95% of companies are finding it difficult to recruit the skills required.

It appears that training for marketers is still light on the technical aspects of marketing including: Digital marketing, eMarketing, Social marketing, Data Protection legislation, building communities. Courses do cover these aspects but its no good having a great idea if you have no idea how or if it will work in practice.

Marketing has become a more  technical discipline.  You either need technicians with marketing acumen or marketers with a technical bent. This is where providing a Marketing Operations service to marketers has been successful. It’s a blend of the right skills. Our agency model allows marketers an interface  they know and understand.

If we are expecting marketers to perform creative summersaults everyday they need to understand the deeper technicalities of marketing. The lack of appropriate skills and the rapid changes in marketing techniques reinforce the need for services provided by CRM.

The loss of data on this scale by a Government is understandably headline news. But what of your companies data being shipped too and from your regional offices, lying in forgotten FTP folders on your website. Do you know if its been lost. More to the point - do you know if someone has found it! Your company will hold the personal or business details of many individuals, not just your staff but your customers and suppliers. Legally your company is responsible for the security of that data. Each time you ship that data on a CD or it is transmitted via the internet you are vulnerable to compromising the security of that data. You are likely to have a privacy statement on your website. Hopefully this refers to your data security procedures and your staff are fully trained in their use. If not then its time you thought about it.

Management of data is especially important for Marketing departments. They may be dealing with lots of unsolicited information on prospects – who don’t yet have a legitimate relationship with your company! Marketing is constantly shipping contact data here and there – to Email Service Providers, Printers, Telemarketers. Furthermore there may be lists you have bought from list brokers – data you don’t yet own  and has cost you lots of money!  Putting the right systems in place to manage access to this data, with historical tracking and to manage the ownership is a critical function of Marketing Operations.

The Government’s had a few months to wade through the civil servants sports kits and odd shoes looking for the missing CDs. I presume if they ever find it they will let us know. In the meantime don’t be caught with your shorts down.

I love conspiracy theories. I am also superstitious; routinely avoiding ladders and black cats. Furthermore, I am sure I am being followed. It may be due to my cold-war childhood but I can’t help thinking someone is watching my clicks on Google ads. They are probably watching you too.

Now “they” may not be the US Government (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060119-060352) but it is likely to be Google themselves. And what a valuable source of information that is. Google routinely gather information not only about the innocent search words you use (I’ll neatly sidestep the issue of porno search’s - what you do in your spare time is your business) but also information about each click you make when using Google or its affiliates.  You may never intentionally visit Google.com, but the clicks on the Google Ad links on affiliates websites will leave a trail of footprints in the snow. All these clicks will be gathering useful stats on your habits back at Google HQ.

The value of click-through information cannot be underestimated. By monitoring the clicks people make as they pass through your website is hugely informative. It can show the level of interest for a particular service or product on your website and tools these days can identify the location of the visitor and even in some cases the visitors company. You should be monitoring the website “hits” particularly after a marketing campaign. Are you driving visitors to the right page, are they moving off too soon? Monitoring web clicks can help identify problems too, particular support pages with a  high level of clicks for instance.

As Google position themselves to over take Microsoft as the corporation we love to hate (this is not due to any fault of their own, its just a cynical world we live in) you can’t help admire their fortune (monetary as well as luck). They struck gold. But there are valuable nuggets of information in your web presence too, so don’t neglect them.

As my good friend and comrade Anatoly used to say, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t meant to say no one is watching you”.

I have just returned from a from a lengthy discussion with a client. We have beed asked to review the client's sales processes with particular emphasis on why sales personnel haven't been using the systems. The issues were not driven by a need for greater detail in corporate reporting or lack of information about forecasting, but simply that sales don't use the systems put in place to help them do the selling. It seemed that the client had done all the right things, involving the sales teams in building the systems, making it as easy as possible to complete forms online, monitoring usage, getting feedback. But none of these good things had produced the desired results. "They still don't use the system".

Sales people are notorious amongst the IT fraternity with respect to using (or not using) IT systems. It perplexes the developers who have conscientiously responded to the gripes from sales and added little tweaks and changes to make the system just that little bit easier to use. "We added an interface to their Blackberry to make it easier for them to work but they still don't fill in the g'damm product number! and they said that was their biggest problem!".

The issue is that Sales staff are also conscientious. They are out there doing the selling and their time is best used in this way. Who wants to be filling in some arcane form on a website at 9pm at night after a long day on the road.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to getting people to use systems correctly, but I have listed below some techniques we think are useful.

·  It has to come from the top. Its no good having a system which is not sponsored by the senior people in the business - who understand it, know its benefits, expect it to deliver and can communicate this to their staff. The boss expects you to use the system!

·  Reasons for using the system. Its no good having people fill in mandatory fields on forms when they don't know what the fields do. Worse still having fields that are necessary and everyone knows no-one ever looks at them on a report - this can easily be resolved by the developers - Review the forms and remove unnecessary fields or hide them on and "Advanced" tab. However, for necessary fields, explain what they are used for why they are there, who is looking at them and what the consequences of not completing the form correctly can do to the business.

·  Communicate early. Non-use is often a result of poor training (or no training). Induction training for new sales staff should include an introduction to the systems. Where possible use sales staff (as opposed to IT or operations) to do the training. Better still have your top flight sales guy (no gender implied), winner of this year's porsche 911, do an introduction. Tips and tricks for getting the best out of the system wouldn't go amiss and use real world examples with nice big numbers.

·  Online Training. You should have good (and up-to-date) on-line documentation. 5 Minute spoken tutorials on specific subjects, How to log a quotation, How to promote a lead to an opportunity etc. These are easy to create using something like PowerPoint or adobe's range of tools and can be done incrementally. Saleforce.com have spent a lot of time creating online tutorials but they apply to the out-of-the-box system. Your system is probably customized for your business needs, you should customize the training at the same time.

·  Monitor usage. This is the big brother approach yes but it doesn't need to be an intrusion on anyone's civil liberties. If a user hasn’t logged on without legitimate reason for a lengthy period of time then flag it to their boss. But be sympathetic you wouldn’t want to be told off for not logging onto a sales system as you breast feed your newborn.

·  Monitor Time Spent. "but it take 20 minutes to fill in an opportunity form!". It probably doesn't but how do you know? A simple timestamp on opening and saving a form might give you an heads up on time spent. If this isn’t possible then ask the question on your regular usage feedback survey - how long does it take you to complete an opportunity.

·  Regular user feedback. A simple set of survey questions on usability emailed to your sales force would suffice. 5 questions at the most with radio button selections. Bottle of Champaign draw for all those completing the survey.

·  The big stick. Tie system usage and accuracy into the bonus.

This is not exhaustive but its a good start.

We were recently asked to comment on why a company's emails were not arriving at their destination. The company in question had recently sent out an invitation email to a list of clients and subsequently ended up on a black list. This was our advice.

It’s difficult to make a complete assessment since we don’t have some relevant technical details however there are several possible causes: 

a)      Local black lists: If you have been black listed once then it’s possible that email systems at the recipients sites could have cached this information and it will take some time before your IP address is removed from the local black list – it’s possible that it may never be removed in a small number of cases on poorly managed sites. I think this is least likely of the possible problems but I include it for completeness.

b)      Junk Inbox: Email could be ending up in the personal junk mail of recipients. This is the downside of junk filters, they use weird and wonderful algorithms to identify junk mail characteristics. This often means that legitimate emails end up in junk mail. If an email goes to junk once (for whatever reason) then other different email from the same recipient may also end up in junk. There are a couple of ways around this: subtly changing email address policy (for instance tony.sprague@crmtechnologies.com instead of tsprague@crmtechnologies.com) then make sure that the recipient adds your address to their safe-senders list.

c)       SPF records. This seems to be emerging as the standard means of identifying legitimate email senders (there are other methods SenderID and DomainKeys). SPF is the easiest to set up. Again I think this is unlikely to be the root of the problem, unless you have an incorrect SPF record in which case this would be bad. You need to talk to your technical guys about SPF and if its set up for the DNS record for your email server http://www.openspf.org/

d)      Reverse DNS look ups. Make sure you have “reverse DNS” looks ups to your Email server. You need to talk to your ISP for this. They don’t know you need them unless you tell them. Some corporate email recipients may block emails that cannot be identified by reverse DNS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_DNS.

e)      Open Relay. It’s possible that you were placed on a black list because you had a period where your email server was an open relay. This is like a hole in your firewall that is exploited by spammers. They use your email server to send thousands of emails. You get blacklisted or you close the hole then they move onto some other poor unsuspecting sod. In my experience this is the easiest way to get on a black list. To be honest, sending a load of invite emails from your outlook email address is an unlikely reason to be blacklisted. Black lists make use of thresholds which are sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of emails. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_mail_relay

f)       Domain Name : Backlists use IP addresses to identify the source of spam so its unlikely to be the domain name. Although the heuristic algorithms in some email content filters maybe prudish bordering on puritanical.

g)      Delivery monitors. There are several services out there that can check your deliverability against blacklists and the most popular junk mail filters. Lyris.com has a good one. These are most useful if you are sending lots of emails.

Conclusions: Personal Junk folders is the most likely issue you have. Because you ended up in the junk folder some point (probably due to a corporate junk filter) the personal junk filter (most often on Outlook) may remember this and score you highly. This would also account for the fact that some people at an organization get your email whilst other do not – the ones who get your email probably didn’t receive email from you whilst you were black listed. We had a similar issue when testing an email blast with some high scoring spam characteristics in the content. The first email went into Junk. From then on all subsequent emails arrived in the junk box even thought we changed the content. Try subtly changing your email address to test this.

Welcome,

As we've been working in the Marketing Operations environment for 8 years we thought it might be worth sharing some of our experiences and expertise through a irregular blog.

We welcome your comments, be they good or bad, on our ramblings. But we are wish to make this relevant to marketers who face the day to day problem of reconciling technology and creativity.

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