Data hygiene: Keeping your lists clean

I received two pieces of snail mail this week from companies who were attempting to reach me at old email addresses, requesting that I update them with my new email address.

Granted, they were B2C organizations (FasTrak and a winery), so there was a good chance that I was still at my physical address. However, with database quality degrading at a rate of approx. 2% a month, it got me thinking - How can B2B marketers leverage similar techniques to keep their databases clean?

Here's a few things to ponder:

1) With mergers and acquisitions, companies often change domain names, while employees might still be in the same cube.
2) Increased spam issues can force users to change their email address - let's say from a hotmail account to a gmail, or even their corporate email from trish @ domain dot com to treilly @ domain dot com. (Keep in mind that a lot of business people use personal email accounts for research - think whitepapers, articles, webinars, etc.)
3) If you're frequently getting bounced emails and not doing anything with them, chances are you're wasting money attempting to email and/or mail them. Why not send a quick postcard and ask them to get back in touch? Or better yet - pick up the phone and call them to see if they're still at that company, and if not, who has replaced them.

Finally, your marketing campaigns are only as good as your lists. As much as we marketers tend to focus on creative and messaging, the response rate almost always comes down to offer and list. So, invest in your list. Have a plan for dealing with return mail and bounced email. It's sure to pay dividends.

An Open Letter to American Airlines Chairman Gerard Arpey

Here's an excerpt of a letter I wrote following an abysmal experience I had with AA. There are a lot of lessons for a B2B marketer in this (summarized at the bottom). Enjoy!

Dear Mr. Gerard J. Arpey,

Since I read in American Way (your in-flight magazine), that you wanted to hear from customers about how you’re doing, I thought I’d share my story.

My outbound flight from San Francisco to Boston was just as I like it, uneventful. On time, pleasant, and rather unremarkable. I wish I could say the same about the return. After what seemed like quite a long time with no pre-boarding announcements, I went to check the monitor only to discover that my flight to Chicago (where I was to catch a connecting flight to San Francisco) had been cancelled.

As word spread amongst the awaiting crowd of passengers, a single flight attendant arrived with no information. She politely informed me that she had just found out and was going to try to find some information. At this stage, all of the passengers were becoming incredibly nervous and agitated. She returned approximately ten minutes later with pieces of paper expressing the airlines apologies for the cancellation and a phone number to call to rearrange travel.

I made several attempts to reach your call center via this 1800 number only to be further disappointed by the fact that your speech recognition system wouldn’t allow me to speak to an agent by pressing zero or saying “agent” until I had provided it with various pieces of information.

I was eventually able to get through to a call center agent who was sympathetic and tried to get me on a USAir flight via Las Vegas, only to have the line cut half way through the process.

Finally, two ground agents arrived. Given the fact that the flight was full, I would suggest a few more than two ground agents to deal with the now angry mob (see photo attached). When I finally reached the desk along with a fellow San Francisco-bound traveler (at the end of the line consequently because I had stepped out of line to better hear the call center agent!), I was not greeted by an apologetic representative of your airline, but rather a rude and somewhat unpleasant person.

Now I will admit that my own attitude was not 100% helpful at that stage, but I was the one being inconvenienced! If you are going to work in a service role, you are going to have to expect that people are going to be less than thrilled when you tell them that first of all they aren’t going to get home anywhere near the time that they had intended to and secondly that because it is due to weather it is “not the airlines fault” and therefore your accommodation will not be covered.

I arrived back at the airport the following morning, boarded a direct flight to SFO, and finally made it home around 24 hours later than I had initially planned.

So following are my suggestions for how to handle these types of incidents in the future (by the way these hold true for a lot of businesses!):

1. Deliver bad news personally. Your passengers are customers and should be treated as such. It’s a relationship – if you have something bad to tell me, cowboy up and have the decency to send a human person to deliver the news. If you don’t have enough info yet, then don’t post the news. (If you're a B2B marketer, this means your customers should get bad news from you directly, not the 11 o'clock news, WSJ, CNET, etc.)

2. Make sure your customer service reps are prepared to deal with angry people. Telling a passenger whose flight has just been cancelled and who has requested that you call a flight (which is leaving in five minutes) and asking them to hold it “You must be kidding me,” is not acceptable. You have to expect that people who have personal and professional lives which are being impacted in ways you cannot imagine are going to make ridiculous requests. All that your staff can control is how reasonably THEY react. But snide remarks like that have NO place in a customer service interaction.

3. Get your stories straight. If the party line is, “Bad weather in Chicago,” then make sure that everyone is getting that message. It’s disconcerting to be told one thing and then another. It feels like you’re being lied to, and we don’t like that.

4. Try to do something to help your customers out. I don’t care that it’s not your fault that the flight was cancelled. You have an obligation to at the very least try to help me out. You could have easily had one customer service person make a few calls to nearby hotels and ask that they extend a discount rate to everyone who shows their boarding pass upon check-in. I mean, you’re an airline for crying out loud. You have relationships with hotels near the airport and all over Boston.

5. Amend your voice self-service system or have an alternate number for cancelled flights. I find it comical that your call center only allows speech recognition. I mean the people who are probably the most in need of speaking to an agent are the ones for whom the speech reco system will not work, because they are in a noisy airport! I realize that this is all a cost cutting measure (and I used to work for Genesys who probably sold you the software), but you have to have a reasonable response to an issue like this.

6. Add some peanuts back to the flights! I know that you sell sandwiches now, but come on. It’s a six hour flight – you can’t at least throw me a bag of peanuts. Unbelievable.

And one final note – your customer relations site online only allows 1500 characters for email submissions! Definitely not enough space to write this whole sad story. You might want to change that.

So that’s my feedback – do with it what you will. But keep in mind, your customers are people. We understand that stuff happens. But it’s how you handle the stuff that really defines who you are as a company and a brand. I’ll definitely remember this interaction next time I go to book a flight anywhere and think twice about flying on AA.

Sincerely,

Tricia Reilly

eBay Live! 2007 in Boston

Solutions Center Floor
Originally uploaded by reillytricia2003

I got back yesterday from Boston where I attended eBay Live!. If you're not familiar with eBay Live!, it's eBay's biggest event of the year, gathering thousands of buyers and sellers from all over the world for three days of education, entertainment, and networking.

I'm not a big eBay user, but as I have worked on the demand gen plans and creative process for the event over the course of the past 8 months, I really wanted to see it come to life. And with guest speakers like Andy Sernovitz and Seth Godin, there was really a lot for a B2B marketer to make it a worthwhile event.

So here are my key takeaways from Andy Sernovitz's session:

1. Be remarkable and give people a reason to love you - The whole idea of Word of Mouth marketing is to give people a reason to talk about you and make it easy for them to do so. Think of the beautiful wrapping paper on a gift from Red Envelope, or free samples at Kiehl's.


2. No one talks more than a lover scorned - Piss off your customers and they'll tell five times as many people as they would if you had done something to delight them. With the permanent record that is the Internet (reviews, blogs, etc.), users have the ability to tell the world about how wonderful or awful your product/service is. So make sure the good stuff is going on your permanent record.


3. Marketing is what you do - not what you say - As B2B marketers, we tend to focus on the message when in reality the customer experience IS the brand. How professional are your sales people's emails? How does your call center treat a prospect? Is your company easy to do business with? All of the advertising in the world is not going to overcome the fact that your business isn't customer focused.


4. Find the people who tell your story and engage them - The "talkers" for your business might not actually be customers, but merely fans. Make sure that they are opted in to receive information from you (email, blogs, etc.) and get them to spread the word for you. If they are blogging, join the conversation but not with the intention of "selling." Dinner party rules apply here - speak if you have something to add but not to jump in merely to self-promote. Ask them to tell a friend.
   

Seth Godin's presentation on Flipping the Funnel touched on similar topics such as permission marketing, being "remarkable", and knowing when to quit. He talked about the "superstar shortage" and how you need to be an expert in your field. Once you get started there's a cumulative advantage which means that once you have a bit of a headstart, Google and the network effect will propel you ahead of your competitors. Here are a few of his nuggets of insight:

1. Flip the funnel - Marketers love the 100 to 1 rule (100 leads will result in 1 deal), but what we need to do is make the funnel a megaphone - focus on your happiest customers and let them tell your story for you.


2. Create a story about what you do - We are all selling to people, even in B2B, so tell a story about how your product works, how you came up with the idea for your newest product feature, etc. It helps people to connect with your brand.


3. If you're not blogging, start now -Blogs are given the highest ranking in Google's algorithm so it's a great way to improve organic search results. And the Facebook generation doesn't want to know about email, so you have to be prepared for what is coming next. Don't stop emailing just yet but Seth predicts that in three years, email marketing will be dead.

More Salesforce Google Coverage

Check out the interviews with various Salesforce for Google AdWords customers and partners. Scroll down and check out my interview. :-)

Salesforce and Google Announce Group Edition with AdWords

I've been meaning to start my blog about business to business marketing and sales enablement for some time now, and I thought yesterday's announcement about salesforce.com and Google forming a formal partnership was the right opportunity. I was privileged to be invited to the launch event, which was a small gathering of customers, partners, and employees. The biggest news of the day was the launch of Salesforce Group Edition, which will replace Team edition, and comes complete with Salesforce for Google Adwords built-in.

Group Edition is a great way for small businesses or start-ups to get up and running with Leads, Google Adwords, Opportunities, Contacts, and Dashboards. Erin Jacobs, Director of Marketing at TFC Inc., a Salesforce customer, commented that implementing Group Edition is the equivalent of the first sales and marketing hire, which I thought was an interesting perspective for small business owners. Because they wear so many hats, they need a CRM system which will automate a lot of the intial interactions with customers, before they are ready to pick up the phone.

The product is targeted at small business, but no doubt enterprises will benefit from an improved UI and tighter integration between the two solutions. It seems that they are also working on additional technology integrations such as the Google One Box, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and intend to work together to help non-profits.

When I asked Marc Benioff and Sheryl Sandberg of Google if the Group Edition roadmap included plans to integrate Google Analytics, he gave me the usual corporate response that they were looking at a number of different features and that they had a lot of ideas. It seems like the plan was to get this product out the door and figure out what comes next based on customer feedback and requests, which tends to be Salesforce's development MO.

Another downside is that at least for now, Group Edition doesn't appear to include access to the AppExchange, Salesforce's marketplace for on-demand applications which integrate directly with their platform. So if you're hoping to get AppExchange services like email, landing pages, data tools, etc. you might have to upgrade to either Professional or Enterprise or wait for it to be added to Group. Although not all apps are available to Professional users. All in all, it's good news for B2B marketers. And at $10 per user per month (max 5 users), it's a no brainer.