I.R. Gilyeat & Company - Our Latest Thinking

I.R. Gilyeat & Company - Our Latest Thinking 2008-09-08T12:59:43Z http://blog.iangilyeat.com/atom.aspx Quick Blog Loyal customers are not always profitable customers tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-09-05:b2eb7174-629b-467d-a5e1-4603eb18d8cb Ian Gilyeat 2008-09-05T15:03:36Z 2008-09-05T14:44:00Z loyal customers do not always equal profitable customers. This may sound counter intuitive but it is true. Think about your active customers. Now consider your cost to serve each customer. Is it possible that you have some customers that consume large amounts of service from you but their payments to you don't cover your costs?

This was a striking lesson to me a few years ago when I was marketing to a large consumer base of technology buyers. Their average order size was about $380 and they gave us a 90%+ customer satisfaction rating year after year. They typically were attracted by special offers. This group of customers was also our highest users of free technical support services and were more likely to return a product than other customers.

Unfortunately, the sad fact was that the gross profit dollars earned from these customers did not cover our cost to serve them after they made each purchase. So although these customers were "loyal" and loved the service that they received. Economically it was not a viable business model. So what did we do?

We got rid of them. We changed the service offering to limit their access to technical support. We made return privileges a little less liberal and we did our best to remove them from our marketing mix.

As a result, our "customer retention" metrics plummeted and the size of our customer base dropped. If you were looking for a problem known as customer churn - you would think we had it. However, profitability and revenue both accelerated - by a large measure. We matched our customers to our cost structures.

So - I ask you - how many of your customers do you need to get rid of? Is there a body of customers that are draining profits from your company? Do you have a group of customers that are better served by a competitor or by a different channel?

It's not always popular, but it's just as important to know who you don't want to do business with as it is to know those that you do want to do business with. In economic downturns this can be a very viable and useful method for cutting expense, increasing revenue and improving profits. I know - it works.

www.iangilyeat.com]]> Aberdeen CMO Summitt - a few observations tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-09-04:14729592-201a-4ebe-84da-6eb151ce3d00 Ian Gilyeat 2008-09-05T14:06:22Z 2008-09-04T21:26:00Z
The executives in this group were very candid about what they know that works and what they are still learning about. The social marketing scene is definitely a place where world-class companies are still learning. Event-triggered marketing is another area where many learnings are still happening. The jury is out on how best to take advantage of these approaches to messaging platforms...

And yet, the event has been encouraging in that we are all in this together - figuring out how to adapt to the new interactions and what appear to be new rules that are in the market place. Let me offer one example:

Your brand can be hijacked. A reality check offered up by one speaker - if you have a world-class brand; go to Google and type in your brand name followed by the word "sucks". It is highly likely that your brand has a few critics and perhaps even a web site devoted solely to slamming your brand. So, you can either get out their and participate in the conversation or leave it to those who are going to slam you. The point being, when your brand is online, it's pretty easy to hijack the brand if you're not participating.

One more comment from another speaker - we love our data. One marketing executive that presented is working with 5 terabytes of data. 5 terabytes! In the olden days this would have been considered unrealistic and probably would not have made it through the IT vetting process. However, the digital world and the low cost of storage makes it possible to capture, analyze and act on massive amounts of data. My advice on this one - get used to it - and get in the game. If you're not committed to a serious analytics tool set for analysis purposes - get there as fast as you can. Otherwise, you will be at a large disadvantage now and in the coming years. Terabytes of data are here to stay and some very smart people are figuring out what to do with it.

www.iangilyeat.com

]]> SaaS switching costs are less than with traditional hosted apps tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-09-01:f9edcbf1-031e-4e53-a86a-2d080602dbd2 Ian Gilyeat 2008-09-01T14:14:41Z 2008-09-01T13:58:00Z Software industry pundits assume that SaaS solutions have lower switching costs and low barriers to entry. These positions are repeatedly showing up in commentaries on salesforce.com and the related SaaS sector. I question whether these are valid positions for the following reasons:

Switching costs - as noted the assumption is that switching costs are lower in SaaS solutions than in traditional software solutions from Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, IBM and Symantec; the sister thought of this is that barriers to switching are lower. The reasoning is that, hey, I can subscribe to a SaaS caution and be up and running in an hour or two or less. This is not necessarily true from a user experience or for a functionality perspective. The ease of customization in the SaaS model, at least in the approach that salesforce.com brings to market, is in my view a strong point for keeping customers attached, raises the barrier to switching in usability and functionality, even if it doesn't do this in hard dollars. The ability to customize the SaaS experience through the AppExchange, I believe will add strong barriers to switching in the future. My own personal example: I use the Enterprise edition of salesforce.com and have added new functionality from Conga Courier, FaceForce, Vertical Response and ZoomInfo. As my use history expands and my interactive data continually gets richer, the less likely I will be to switching to a competitive product. I mean, how many companies will be able to match my exact setup?

Second, the point about using only what you need also has a flip side that is positive. The user that is not encumbered with the overhead of fat client applications with its inherent licensing and maintenance fees, also brings barriers to switching. The penetration and adoption of a SaaS solution may be much deeper into an organization when reaching out to key decision makers that only need certain portions of information or functionality from the SaaS offering. Whereas previously certain employees would rely on other team members to access and use the system, now a simple interface that is custom and only gives them the functionality that they need can be delivered to their desktop or mobile device. This creates a barrier to switching due to superior ease of use and distributed functionality.

Just because a product is easy to implement on the front-side does not mean it will be quick to discard on the back side. Time will tell for Salesforce.com and others like them, but I'm betting that peoples resistance to change will win out over the long-haul. Like many relationships as software adapts over time and gets comfortable barriers to entry to up.

www.iangilyeat.com

]]> Censorship - it's a wonderful thing! tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-08-22:9f13b772-152c-4dca-9efe-a7f502a778a5 Ian Gilyeat 2008-08-22T08:13:13Z 2008-08-22T07:25:00Z
Censorship is alive and well in marketing. I believe we call it brand experience and defend it vigorously. "Mr Manager you can use these words, this font and these colors only - and if you have a problem with it and can't follow the guidelines - I'll just role your head right out the door." Maybe you've heard of the brand police in your company... Sometimes censorship shows up as customer experience. In the ecommerce world we design customer experience in the store front, in the check out process and in the products that we choose to sell on our web sites.

If my company sells, Dora the Explorer products to children, I defend my right to censor the inclusion of Playboy, Bud Light or other products that I deem inappropriate to my customers and what they expect from me. I censor them regularly in every path of communication that I control to my customers.

At home as a parent I regularly censor my children. If they threaten me or verbally assault me and the rules I have in my household - I defend my right to censor them and expect them to behave differently in my home - in my domain.

In the work place, IBM, Microsoft and others censor their employees and many of us defend their right to do so. It is common practice to have workplace rules against the distribution of pornagraphic material. Other materials are also censored. Examples might be instructions on how to build a pipe bomb and blow up your boss or slanderous materials that are used against certain races of people. These companies censor their employees and do so vigorously. I support their ability to do this.

So why is it that we don't support censorship on a much grandeur scale? Consider Yahoo, Google and others that want to do business in China and must submit to the censorship of China for the content that they can distribute inside of China? China censors what content is deemed as appropriate for their citizens. They claim the same right to censor that we defend for IBM, Microsoft and others. What gives us the right to impose our standards of censorship on China when we so vigorously defend the right to censor in the United States at home, on the Internet and in the workplace?

Hmmm - it seems to me that censorship is a good thing and that individual entities each have the right to censor according to their own defined standards within their own defined domain. Whether that be a home, an ecommerce storefront, a workplace or a nation.

The right to free speech, is perhaps a unique American expectation that even the marketing profession adapts, curtails and changes to fit their own self-serving needs. Hear, hear for censorship and the ability to define and defend the brand experience!

Now, if I can just get a copy of the brand guidelines for China and how they have applied it to the Olympics - that would make for interesting reading and a noteworthy case study for the Harvard Business Review. It would also help me know how to automate and build censorship into my email marketing, messaging systems and CRM platforms. After all I have an obligation to protect the brand...

www.iangilyeat.com

]]> Michael Phelps and the GE "vitality curve" tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-08-14:a23a8db6-f630-4f68-82c2-5e395c528387 Ian Gilyeat 2008-08-15T15:22:07Z 2008-08-14T15:39:00Z Jack Welch of General Electric fame made famous a simple formula for creating high performance teams. His approach was simple: 20% are top performers, 70% are average performers and 10% "can't get the job done." This was translated into 20% get hefty raises, 70% get a solid raise and 10% get nothing or get fired.

I have worked under this scenario several times and have always found it to be lacking. In some situations it can be useful and justify decisions. In others, where companies blindly follow it and hold to it as if it is the guiding light to nirvana, I find it to be hollow and vacant of good judgment at best.

Consider the Olympics and the demanding requirements of competing on a world-class level. Hours and hours of practice, discipline and flawless execution. The 4x100 relay that was won by the Americans in world-record time becomes my reference point for persuading you that the 20/70/10 rule from Jack Welch and GE is only as good as your own good judgment dictates.

Michael Phelps has thus far won five gold medals. He is attempting to win eight in a single Olympic games. On the 4x100 relay team he swam the lead-off leg, while Jason Lezak swam the anchor. Lezak come from behind and impressively "won" the gold medal that Phelps needed. However, I find it very noteworthy that a total of five teams beat the previous world record time in this single race. World class performances for every one of them... and yet only three teams received medals. This proves the point - Jack Welch and GE are right. All other teams failed, didn't get the job done and received no reward. Well sort of...

Let's apply the rule to the four swimmer's on the American team. Which one of the four should be fired? Which one didn't get the job done? Which one gets no reward? Which one had such a poor performance that he should get nothing or get replaced?

The 4x100 relay is a team event. It requires the best effort and performance of all four... and yet, at times one swimmer may swim an individual leg faster than another. In another event, a different swimmer may have the fastest leg. The noteworthy situation - from Jason Lezak, the same swimmer who swam on the previous two losing American Olympic efforts in the 4x100, is quoted as saying, "I just got tired of losing". This is a competitor who dug down in the last ten meters and won a gold medal for himself, his friend Michael Phelps and the entire American team because, "I just got tired of losing."

The next time you feel compelled to give no reward or fire the bottom 10%, think about the 4x100 and ask yourself, "do I have a world class team?". And if you do, reward the entire team and ignore the 20/70/10 rule from Jack Welch and General Electric. It's just another tool that requires your good judgment. It does not guarantee a world class team or even the "best team on the street."

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> Never... the short-sighted adverb of fools? tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-08-10:c71ca455-df15-4c4f-99e2-a52ffe713220 Ian Gilyeat 2008-08-10T07:24:04Z 2008-08-10T06:35:00Z The Six Secrets of Change Management. While skimming through the introduction, I came upon the following statement, "the world has become too complex for any theory to have certainty. There can never be a blueprint or silver bullet." He next quotes, Robert Rubin, fomer Secretary Treasure as saying, "Once you've internalized the concept that you can't prove anything in absolute terms, life become all the more about odds, chances and trade-offs. In a world without provable truths..."

So let me propose a silver bullet theory that I believe is an absolute truth that is at odds with the "never" position so eloquently expressed above by Mr. Fullan: "there is no space in which there is no law... and unto every law there are certain bounds also and conditions."

So, let's noodle on this for a few seconds - or perhaps even a decade or a century or two...

First, I'd like to suggest that science and scientific methods help us discover laws that operate upon space even when we do not understand the laws and how they operate. As an example, the "law of gravity" is something that was undefined by the scientific community for hundreds if not thousands of years - and yet, it has operated on this planet for a very long time.

Or let's consider the "law of inertia" from Sir Isaac Newton: "every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it". When Newton identified and defined this law, he significantly changed our understanding of the Universe. However, to be clear - he changed our understanding - he did not change the Universe.

So, let's go back to the silver bullet theory, "there is no space in which there is no law" a statement that is in stark contrast to that proposed by Mr. Fullan, "the world has become too complex for any theory to have certainty."

I sure hope Mr. Fullan knows what he is talking about and can see forward into the next 500 years of scientific discovery. Never is a very long time... and I suspect that science will discover a new law or two along the way that will help us make sense of the space in which we live and will possibly even simplify some of the apparent complexities that we just don't understand.

So what does this have to do with marketing and building companies? Everything... too often, I hear someone make the claim, "this will never work" only to be proven wrong in the market place. If you're fond of using "never" in your business, be prepared to swallow both feet and to be counted among the fools...

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> Do you even exist if you're not online? tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-07-30:a5f0cfa0-b4d1-42c7-8ec1-32f44fa6f396 Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-30T18:58:56Z 2008-07-30T17:48:00Z
Sometimes we ask ourselves funny questions - a few examples being noted above. I'm in the marketing profession. I meet people on a regular basis and use technology extensively. Lately, when I meet people, I go online and check out the various social networks, people finders and search engines to see what I can learn about them. If I can't find them I wonder where they've been and what they do. If they're in the marketing profession and I can't find them online do they really exist? Or if they do, where have they been hiding for the last five years?

Funny questions, but take a short list of people that you know or have recently met and search for them on Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Spock, Wink, Bebo and Spoke. If you can't find them anywhere - especially in the marketing profession - should you be worried?

In my own background, I know lots of people that I are a little challenging to find online. Plantation workers on remote islands, lumberjacks, welders, tree pruners and sawmill workers. I don't see much of them online but they truly exist and remain good friends.

Its funny how technology paints our perspectives of life and those around us. I like to think of technology as an enabler of making informed choices... and yet, even with its grand ambitions - it remains quite limited.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> SAP's dilemma - the unraveling of big software... tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-07-21:0fb8321b-df71-46ac-80f5-069497e1726d Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-21T10:13:12Z 2008-07-21T06:15:00Z
The real issues in my experience are simply connectivity, integration and usability - and these three can probably be netted down to how we get things done.

Take the simple example of lead generation. The marketing team generates a bunch of leads for the sales team. This is good so long as those leads land in the CRM system that the sales team uses. Supply management will also be happy with many new leads - but please make sure they can see the leads coming in and they have advance notice of what they need to buy in order to satisfy customer demand. Oh, and let's not forget about accounting. A stack of new leads has just arrived, supply management needs to buy new inventory in order to satisfy customer demand and purchase orders need to be approved and sent to the suppliers. The chain of issues rolls through the company like a set of dominoes.

As I see it, many individual functions are easy to port to a SaaS solution - at least in isolation. It's easy to find an outside company or supplier to generate leads. But the real problem lies in everything else that is effected by this simple act. Big companies have large legacy processes and systems. They have these because large companies chase the dream of knowing everything about every customer - all the time. You know, the 360 degree view of your customer. In reality, this only happens when everything is tied together - and yet, it's kind of tough to define everything, and even more challenging to tie everything together in a useful fashion. And yet, that is the purpose of big software.

Breaking the cultural expectation of tying everything together, because we have to know everything, could be the unraveling of big software. However, I don't believe the expectation of knowing everything is going away any time soon. It seems to me if I can take a single function, like lead generation, and ensure that my big beautiful software stills receives the information that it wants (this happens through connectivity and integration) then I can improve usability and lead generation results.

Now, if I can just talk my boss into letting me take a piece of our company (how we get things done) - outside, to another party, just maybe I can prove that it works...

Hmmm... it's no wonder why SAP continues to think about big software... oh, and isn't this the same company that wants us to believe they are becomming a SaaS provider to small and mid-sized companies...?

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> Seth Godin's Long Tail thinking and why it's not about the "unreachables" tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-07-18:ded8df66-f46d-4110-a1ba-595e4e4123a0 Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-18T17:26:00Z 2008-07-18T16:58:00Z Seth Godinwrote about Long Tail thinking. The illustration he uses explains why the front part of the curve is all about the block buster and the customer that is "unreachable". Although I appreciate his thinking and the illustration, there is another way to benefit from Long Tail thinking.

I began using long tail thinking, and a very simular illustration, back in 1995 when I joined Insight(NSIT), the large computer reseller. Back then I used it to train my staff on the practice of matching direct response orders to headcount and resource commitments in the sales center. At the time, we established the long tail as it related to half-life analysis and whether or not the campaign sold through in 3 days, 3 months or 9 months. The long tail was used to describe the time frame in which responses from a campaign were received. Unique phone numbers, isolation of customer segments through RFM modeling, A/B splits, etc., were all used. We did our first email campaign of 500 records in 1995. It had a very short tail. Not much good for driving sustainable quarterly revenues. Wonderful for the end of quarter push. Catalogs, back then, had a long tail - 9 months worth. Buyers on the front part of the response curve (see Seth's chart - pocket 1) were typically those that were extremely loyal buyers. These were the customer segments where we had 30-80% order rates. This was the ideal place to introduce new products. This was an easy home run. Further out on the curve (pocket two) was our bread and butter customer. Consistent loyal buyers. Out on the long tail (pocket three) were the late bloomers. Slow to make a decision, challenging to deal with when prices changed or we sold out of stock - but having a long tail was wonderful. It provided a sustainable business that took dramatic bumps out the day to day sales numbers. Long tail thinking is great, but it’s not limited to reaching the unreachable - it’s also about reaching your core, raving fan.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> There are no secrets on the Web tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-07-16:bdabe7c6-d3ac-45e7-a4cf-96756b92f8e4 Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-16T11:57:22Z 2008-07-16T11:03:00Z
I'm okay with the Web being a public place. It doesn't bother me to shop in public, visit public venues, study in public, or spend money in public. So I'm okay with the fact that I'm on a public network. This seems to run counter intuitive to the expectation of privacy concerns...

Technology will always advance. None of us are perfect so there is always an opportunity to improve. What surprises me is that many people take offense and get up in arms whenever a new advancement improves our ability to communicate with one another - to make our lives more efficient - to observe one another when we are in a relationship with someone we trust.

Therein lies the secret. New technologies like NebuAd, Facebook, Phormand others are not intrusive so long as bother parties agree and acknowledge that they are observing each other in order to improve the relationship that they have. As I think about the NebuAd purpose of categorizing my browsing habits on the Web, I'm okay with it so long as I get to set limits on the relationship. If my ISP wants to categorize my Web activities, fine, but ask my permission about which categories I want them to track on my viewing habits. It's not a one size fits all relationship. They can track my movie searches, cars and clothes, but I don't want them tracking medical issues. Those are private.

Having said that - I must ask the question - is the ISP relationship a public place or a private place? If the pipeline they provide to connect to the public Web, public or private? If it is public then I know I'm in a public place and I won't use the Web for medical searches. If it's private, then my ISP and I get to have a heart-to-heart conversation about our relationship and what information I willing to share with others.

Sounds like the same kind of conversations my wife and I have with our children. It's all about the relationship and knowing what is personal and private and what is for public consumption.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> It's nice to see there's still some integrity in business... tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-07-15:91ec21f7-2833-47c8-971a-0edb8c0ad75d Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-15T15:35:11Z 2008-07-15T06:08:00Z WSJ I caught an article about a former HP executive that may get jail time for stealing IBM trade secrets. The article caught my eye because I have provided marketing services to IBM and HP over the years. Both organizations have always impressed me with the people in their companies. They have been tough negotiators and smart business people, but always fair and honest. I like to do business with them and continue to have friends in both companies.

The infraction under report is all too common in the business community if you ask me. An employee leaves his current employer and goes to work for a competitor. He/she happens to have inside knowledge of pricing, product plans or other trade secret information. This person shares the information with one or two individuals at his new place of employment and they become a little smarter about how to compete with the employees former employer. In this instance, the former IBM employee had pricing information, which he shared with a couple of HP executives.

Assuming the article is accurate, the HP executives did a little internal research, found that their new employee gave them information that he had no right to share. They fired him, notified IBM and the local authorities. This person now faces a possibility of jail time, a $250,000 fine and 3 years of supervised release time. All from a simple email and sharing pricing information that was now his.

Kudos to HP and their executives that acted on this lapse in good judgment. We need more executives like this in business. These kinds of decisions are always tough because it's rare that the infraction is simple, black and white and without complications. I hope it was in this case.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> The direct marketing gorilla - we all know and love - Google! tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-07-10:43d7d386-cfd4-4c53-96e0-9c950daa232f Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-15T06:40:01Z 2008-07-10T03:16:00Z Wall Street Journal has a lengthy story on Google and their push into selling ads on YouTube. Although this is an interesting headline, the real story is in the chart that shows an advertising market of $510 billion. They accurately point out that Google's real objective is to conquer the entire advertising market. This is a point that I completely agree with...

The beauty of the Google platform is not only that it is focused on measurability, but that it is also media agnostic. I know - it's primary driven by search and the Internet today, but the mentality inside the company and the strategic objective is not geared toward search alone. Newspapers, radio, television, outdoor, gaming, virtual worlds, etc. As the media world continues their march toward all things digital, this plays very well into the systems, processes and capabilities of Google.

Tim Armstrong, the fellow inside Google that is responsible for streamling the cumbersome processes at the company, has a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished... and it's the same vision that Mr. Schmidt has - an advertising model that continues to grow 30% a year for the next ten years and perhaps a little longer.

Part of the fun in watching this play out is in the fact that Google like many other companies in TV land (ABC, NBC, ESPN, etc) is struggling with what to do with a billion channels of distribution... or in the case of YouTube - figuring out how to match a billion producers with a few million advertisers.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> The marriage of social networking to CRM applications tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-06-02:6fc14cc5-21e0-4b6e-a310-df20c4403943 Ian Gilyeat 2008-07-09T15:13:32Z 2008-06-02T07:06:00Z LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and many others... but perhaps not for the reasons that you think.

In my view, these are wonderful additions to the business landscape and hold great potential. In my own business I am currently connecting Facebook and LinkedIn into my CRM platform - Salesforce.com. Naturally I would like to do this in an automated fashion. Unfortunately, this thought appears to be on the front side of the market. Meaning, I have yet to find a clean solution that helps me entirely avoid manually entering each piece of information.

A brief commentary on the effort:

LinkedIn provides an export function - unfortunately, the export function does not include the public ID/address in the export file. Although they provide a public ID/address for each LinkedIn user that can be made available, I can't export my own list of contacts and include this ID/address in the export file so I can match it and import it into my CRM application. So, although LinkedIn provides a wealth of business information that can be useful to me and many others in recruiting staff and selling solutions, the only option I have found thus far is to manually key whack each link into my CRM app.

Faceforce has a neat little application available through the AppExchange (FaceForce) that enables Salesforce.com to connect to Facebook based on an email match; it then pulls information into Salesforce.com... well not really. In reality, it places a link inside of Salesforce.com and shows the Facebook picture inside of Salesforce. It's a step in the right direction, but it needs to do a lot more - and it rough at best.

The promise of these technologies is pretty interesting and is holding my interest - especially where I can help companies that offer services or products that are highly experiential in nature such as outdoor sports, music and entertainment.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> 3 Marketing Game Killers on Salesforce.com tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-05-22:380a0d7a-d131-4900-9eb7-1913cb8f8795 Ian Gilyeat 2008-05-22T12:46:14Z 2008-05-22T06:33:00Z Little by little I'm finding the practical limits of Salesforce.com(SFDC). For those of you that are considering or using a CRM package like SFDC and this includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SugarCRM, Oracle/Siebleand others, you need to consider the following limitations:

Variable "From" line
Dynamic content
Template management

The variable "From" line is a killer if your company is trying to perform marketing services or other services "On Behalf" of another company. Let's suppose that you need to send reminder notices to customers on behalf of a group of magazine publishers (let's assume 5 publishers). You want the email to come "From" the Publisher of each magazine. This is important when embracing personalization and 1to1 marketing principles. Well, with SFDC, if you have a single seat Enterprise license, you have one "From" email address from which you can send. You can create and enable multiple email templates, each with the logo, copy and signature of each publisher - but one email address. You can also store the name of each publisher in a designated field within SFDC. However, every email will be sent "From" a single email address. Within the SFDC world, one way around this is to add a new seat for each publisher so that you create a user ID and an email for each one. This quickly becomes fairly cost prohibitive if you have a large group to serve.

Second game killer for marketers - dynamic content. Building on the previous example, assume that instead of 5 publishers you're providing services to 200 jewelry stores. Every holiday you want to send a special offer to the customers of each store. You need a logo, an offer, return address, personalized signature, etc for each store. The easy answer for store production is to create one template and pull content into the template during the send process - just like you would with your personalization attributes (name, address, etc.). Unfortunately SFDC does not support dynamic content assembly during the email send process. You can pull fields of text and numbers into the template, similar to a merge process, but you can't do this with logo's and other graphic files - at least not straight of out the box.

Finally - this leads us to the third killer for marketers -which is managing templates. SFDC makes it very easy to setup up a template and pull data from the leads, accounts or contact fields into these templates. They provide a nice Header and Footer where you can drop in your logo or other graphic file. It really is easy to use. However, that's where it ends. The Header and Footer are fixed and single. This is not a variable value that you can pull from a file. So instead of setting up one template and automatically pulling the logo or graphic from a file during the send process, like you can with text fields (Name, Address, Phone Numbers, etc.), if you want to support multiple Header styles (e.g. a different logo for each jewelry store) you must manually setup each template for each store - and keep in mind that you may still have only one "From" line from which to send your emails.

Each of the above limitations are killer barriers for marketers that are providing services to different groups or "stake holders" as some would say. This is pretty significant for marketing agencies, outsourcing providers and publishers of magazines and newsletters with multiple titles. It is also significant for internal marketing departments within larger companies where the marketing department supports multiple product lines, multiple brands or even separate segmentation strategies.

The good news is that each barrier can be overcome. Sometimes it is as simple as adding a new user license. In other cases it may simply mean manually maintaining a sizable library of templates within the SFDC document library. Ideally though, if you need a robust solution for marketing that really overcomes these limitations, you need to extend the capabilities of SFDC through a company like ExactTarget.

ExactTarget has fully integrated their email service capabilities into SFDC and they overcome all three of these killer marketing barriers. Dynamic content, variable "From" lines and strong functionality for marketing "on behalf of" other parties.

If you've already jumped into the CRM game, look for ways to extend your application with outside parties and you will be much happier with the core capabilities that you've already embraced.

www.iangilyeat.com

]]> All things connected... tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-05-19:9ef1a8a6-dbdf-46a1-9c1e-4a7801ab8cb8 Ian Gilyeat 2008-05-19T21:45:22Z 2008-05-19T20:52:00Z
Can anyone think of a single application, computer system, network or entertainment system that is better by itself - standing alone in a vacuum? If you can think of something, let me know because I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that would not be better by being connected.

As an example, a friend of mine works for a software company that has created a solution for doctors to stay connected to their patients while they're out and about. They've developed a messaging system that tracks infectious agents in patients and sends alerts to the doctor whenever certain thresholds are exceeded. These messages are sent from monitors in patient hospital rooms, labs and other systems that track patient progress. As a result, the doctors are very aware of the their patients' progress or decline and can treat them nearly instantaneously if their condition significantly changes - even when they are not with the patient.

On a completely different note, the last few days I've been building out work flow processes on a CRM platform that will improve vehicle registration processes. It's a system that will completely bypass State Motor Vehicle departments. It maintains the pleasantries of face-to-face conversation and yet takes advantage of the Internet and the anywhere - anytime world that is enabled because of it.

I have the pleasure of designing the conversation stream that will help people remember to renew their vehicle tags and thank them for reliving congestion in the State run offices by taking their business elsewhere.

It's a win-win kind of solution - and watching it become a reality continues to reinforce my opinion that all things benefit when they are connected or talking to other things.

Mother nature is very connected and eco-systems abound in every aspect of planet earth. Although we like to think we are smart and understand what is happening to our planet, in reality, our understanding has barely begun to scratch the service. The exciting part to me is that the technology and scientific communities are intentionally mimicking the designs and capabilities of mother nature. National Geographic calls this biomimetics. A very cumbersome way of saying "designed by nature." No matter how you say it - the benefits of innovation will continue to pay large dividends for many, many decades to come and one of the key building blocks of this innovation is messaging oriented architectures. Just ask Mother Nature.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> Messaging systems - are they more than just email? tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-05-06:0dc7b3a0-e86e-4b2c-a302-29c0999b62bf Ian Gilyeat 2008-05-06T10:42:19Z 2008-05-06T09:14:00Z AIM, Google Talk, IBM Sametimeand Microsoft Messenger. We could also very easily talk about Ma Bell and new renditions like Skype and Vonage.

However, we suggest that when thinking about messaging systems we need to talk about EDI (eletronic data interchange), ACH (automated clearning house), FTP (file transfer protocol) automation and social neworks like MySpace, Facemail, Bebo, Flickr and many others - oh, and let's not forget OnStar from General Motors.

The point is, message oriented architectures are a core enabling capability that we all should be thinking about and working to understand. Messaging systems will use many different technologies over the coming years, but it is clear that the core capability will be pervasive. Software subscription services depend on this capability. Music and video services that are "on-demand" will fail without them. Identify theft and banking systems depend on messaging routines to protect us and keep the economy running.

Messaging logic and systematic controls must be thoughtfully created and organized in order to meet the needs of society at large and your customers on an individual basis.

If you work for a large organization like IBM, CA, Accenture, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard or any other company we recommend that you look at messaging as much broader than just email and that if you care about your customers that you audit and organize all of your messaging systems. How you manage your messaging systems is at the core of having satisfied customer relationships.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> Selling through a recession... why automation is your best friend tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-04-30:af64f38b-4080-4a3e-8d40-184cbe0f35a8 Ian Gilyeat 2008-04-28T14:10:31Z 2008-04-30T20:30:00Z
Last week in conversation with an executive at a Fortune 100 company, he asked me, "so how do you feel about launching a new company in the midst of a recession?" My response, "I'm fine with it. There is always some sector that is down and another sector that is up. I'm not overly concerned. I recently saw a chemicals company that is raising prices by 25% because demand is so high."

This comment may come back to haunt me, but if your company is suffering the ill effects of a recession and you're laying off sales people, automation can be your best friend.

Let's consider a simple view on a company with 10,000 customers. We'll assume some are large, some are mid-sized companies and some are small. True to form in most companies, if sales are down and headcount is being cut, then upward migration in your customer base is happening. The sales force will be re-aligned to serve the largest and most profitable customers. The small customers, those on the bottom of the stack will be left behind, under served or simply ignored. If the bottom 20% are ignored, suddenly there are 2,000 customers that become ideal candidates for automated marketing solutions.

Automated marketing can keep in contact with these 2,000 customers via email, print, telephone and personalized web sites to name a few. Personally visiting or calling each of these customers may not be the most effective use of your sales team in tough times but their needs can be partially met through the use of business rules, relevant content and pragmatic uses of technology.

Having said that, the same can be true for caring for high-value customers. Your approach may be, that instead of cutting customers from your sales team, you're doubling the quantity of customers for each person by cutting head count. Again, automation can be your best friend. In this scenario you need to identify those repetitive tasks or communications that can be automated. Think of it in terms of enabling your sales person with tools that double their efficiency and productivity. One experience in my past where this worked exceptionally well was in the sales of personal computer products and the establishment of company extranets. Headcount was cut, customers were enabled with self-service procurement portals and revenue went up significantly.

In both cases mentioned above, automation really was a "best friend" solution. In tough economic times, you need to think through the business logic and your customer needs to find those situations that are best suited to automation. It can be done - it just requires patience, an ability to pay attention to the details and pragmatic use of technology.

www.iangilyeat.com]]> Should you make one workflow object or many? tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-04-28:c65e1037-7844-4aaa-8870-3285cb05ffa0 Ian Gilyeat 2008-04-28T14:00:45Z 2008-04-28T22:26:00Z salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM Dynamics 4.0 and others is their ability to setup workflow processes for time-based and sequenced marketing communications. As an example, we can setup a series of 4 emails to be sent at 7 days after a new lead is received, another one on day 21 and so on. This is in addition to auto-responders that get sent when the lead initially arrives.

So for the next few minutes let's pretend that our email series consists of 12 unique messages over the course of 12 months. The series is triggered based on the value of the customer. Let's further assume that we have segmented our customer base into three divisions based on value: low value, medium value and high value. Each segment receives a string of 12 email communications... and once the email is sent, a task is scheduled for the assigned sales person that owns the customer relationship and this task is placed on their "to do list" in the CRM system. Sounds pretty good so fare, doesn't it?

Well, if we add this up, we have 3 segments, times 12 messages equals 36 emails to be scheduled and an equal number of tasks to be assigned to the sales team. Total number of workflow items is 72.

Okay, now let's assume that we have 1,000 customers in each customer segment. Add it all up and voila! - 72,000 workflow items. Now remember this is not a single marketing campaign, but instead is a series of communications that is personalized with the customers name, account executive information and segmented according to the value of the customer and will be sent over the course of 12 months.

The question that I posed at the top of this email is whether you should create one workflow object or many? If we create one workflow object for each of the three customer segments and place the 12 email messages and each related set of tasks within each object then in reality we only have 3 objects to manage. That's pretty reasonable if you ask me... but wait...

Salesforce.com (I don't know about Microsoft yet) provides you with a monitoring "que" in order to see and manage your automated workflow objects and rules. Very cool! Unfortunately it has a visual limit of 250 items. It's not that the other items go away, you just can't see them. So in our example, we have three objects and 72,000 workflow items... Also, it appears that the entire workflow stream is qued at the beginning and loaded whenever the first rule condition is met. In essence all 12 email messages are loaded up and emailed out according to the time based intervals that are defined (e.g. 7 days, 21 days, etc.)... but wait...

What happens if I want to deactivate the series so I can modify my content, etc.? Well, you can deactivate but the entire que remains loaded and intact and will be sent unless you delete each item. Deactivating the workflow objects does not cancel those workflow items that have already been qued up. Remember the 250 visual limit? This is also the maximum number of items that you can select "at once" and delete en masse (e.g. in salesforce.com).

So back to my question - should you create one workflow item or many? In our opinion, you create one if you can modify the content as necessary along the communications stream, knowing that you have visibility to the que and can delete emails scheduled for tomorrow by editing the que. Otherwise, take the time and effort to setup each and every workflow object separately (e.g. 12 separate workflow objects times 3 customers segments equals 36 workflow objects.) In essence, by separating your workflow objects with greater granularity you obtain a more management que, but the trade off is, your workflow objects become a little more cumbersome. This approach doesn't automatically improve manageability of your que... although there are options for doing so.

Net/net think through carefully how you want to manage workflow objects, workflow items and the workflow que.

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> On the cutting edge? Or just another painful experience...? tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-04-23:78e454ce-c371-4e28-a32a-decb3d66e758 Ian Gilyeat 2008-04-28T14:12:09Z 2008-04-23T12:47:00Z salesforce.com. After spending a fair amount of time trying to find the function that allows me to automatically run a pre-defined report on a scheduled date and time (e.g. every Friday night at midnight) I am convinced that its not available.

Fortunately, a third party company, AppExtremes! has written an application called Conga Courier that does provide this capability. I'm grateful that they have because I come out of an old IT experience consisting of the IBM 360, the VAX and Unix where scheduled jobs is just taken for granted.

Why do I care? Well, you see, salesforce.com only lets you export data up to one time per week, although not on a scheduled basis. I can manually go into the app and export data - but only one time. Mind you, I have an Enterprise license. The purpose of course is to provide me with a secure backup option. Now everyone with an IT background knows that backups also tend to be highly automated and scheduled and have been for decades.

Now, in fairness to salesforce.com, it does appear that they are creating a platform for development more so than an application that meets all needs, but scheduled jobs seems like a fairly basic requirement if you want my opinion.

Anyway, AppExtremes! provides a reasonable solution that automates the running of reports, which in this instance will allow me to automate a portion of the marketing process we are redefining. Once the csv file format becomes available in Conga Courier, it will be much, much easier and we'll have a fully automated communications stream that flows from the marketing department through salesforce.com, onto a digital press and into the mail stream for weekly demand generation.

Now that will be sweet! And highly efficient...

www.iangilyeat.com ]]> WOW! This is an eye popper! If you use business data you gotta see this! tag:blog.iangilyeat.com,2008-04-16:f86840e7-e1b0-46da-99ea-5cddd0af06ff Ian Gilyeat 2008-04-16T03:28:46Z 2008-04-16T02:41:00Z Where was I when the press release went out on March 21st from LinkedIn? Talk about a disruptive move into the corporate data business...

If you missed it like I did, go onto LinkedIn and look at the new company offering that recently rolled out. Click on any contact, then scroll down into their work experience and click on a company. Pick a large company like SAP, Microsoft or IBM. I picked SAP... it's called "Companies Beta"

I can see all of the SAP users on LinkedIn together... recent promotions, their new hires by name and title and where terminating employees go... as in who is hiring from Google?

As an example, Paul Applegate, this month was promoted from Senior Director to Vice President, EMEA Alliances. Now if Paul keeps his LinkedIn profile current, the information is current, otherwise I'm not sure when the promotion actually occurred, but it looks pretty recent...

Looking at this level of detail - why do I need Hoovers, InfoUSA or Dunn & Bradstreet?

These companies spend millions every year calling into businesses to interview them in order to compile their lists of contacts with title information, etc. Why should I pay for their data when this stuff is free!

I know, I know there are still many reasons to use the other guys, but this is impressive and useful...

Now, wouldn't you like to have this linked into your CRM system? I would...

If you missed the announcement from LinkedIn here's a snippet and link to the release:

"LinkedIn members who are interested in a company can also access data on the typical career paths of people entering and exiting the company, as well as view common job titles at the company. Members can see how their LinkedIn network connects them to current employees of the company. The data on company profiles is based on information from the over 20 million professional profiles on LinkedIn and as well as data from its partners, CapitalIQ and BusinessWeek." LinkedIn press release

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