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Interesting goings-on at Dell lately. After losing all their mojo in past years and getting surpassed by HP as #1 computer company, they’re making all kinds of changes. Just the other day came news that they were abandoning the direct-only model and starting to sell some models at Wal-Mart– for $700 or thereabouts, which makes you really wonder how much they must be selling those machines to Wal-Mart for? $150?

Perhaps even more interesting, Dell finally broke ranks with Microsoft and is now offering models with Linux installed, as they announce on their website. From the perspective of Linux’s positioning in the market, this certainly has to go a long way towards establishing legitimacy amid something broader than the X-treme Geek crowd.

Obviously Microsoft has noticed since their army of lawyers is trumping up all kinds of patent lawsuits which Linux allegedly violates. Patents on the blue screen of death perhaps? Actually, Linux probably wouldn’t ever violate that one.

In any case, you would expect that Linux may start to get exposure to a somewhat more mainstream audience now. And just a few years ago it seemed that Microsoft would control the world for all time.

This keeps coming up, but I just posted the other day about the danger of using a business model where your profit stems from policies like causing your customers to hate you. For example, being a monopoly and selling buggy, crash-prone software.

I’m a music afficionado. As someone who grew up in the 80’s, I’m also a Police fan. The Police were one of those bands that most everyone liked, since they had the rock edge, the pop tunes, and even (especially on their earlier material) that punk/early new wave sound which they had in common with bands like the Clash and Elvis Costello.

You had to assume that done was done with the Police when they broke up. Sting is talented, but he was and is certainly one of the more egotistical people on the planet, and the rest of the band was holding back his genius. Usually musicians who think that way crash and burn after they leave their band, but it turned out Sting was kind of right. His huge success post-Police kind of proved that.

But, nothing brings former friends back together quite like money! So here we are in 2007, and the Police are back together. They have some US shows, and I’d love to be able to catch one. From a marketing perspective, the tour is going to do wonders for their back catalog. Kids today probably aren’t familiar with the band at all, but it’s a sound which I really think will still resonate.

At this point, my cassette collection is dying off one tape at a time, and my LPs are hard to listen to since I don’t have a record player. So it’s time to start thinking about replacing some of the band’s classic albums. Or, you could go pick up the new greatest hits police cd and get all the best tunes in one shot.

Check out the track listings on the cd:

Disc: 1
1. Fallout
2. Can’t Stand Losing You
3. Next to You
4. Roxanne
5. Truth Hits Everybody
6. Hole in My Life
7. So Lonely
8. Message in a Bottle
9. Reggatta de Blanc
10. Bring on the Night
11. Walking on the Moon
12. Don’t Stand So Close to Me
13. Driven to Tears
14. Canary in a Coalmine

Disc: 2
1. Do Do Do de da da Da
2. Voices Inside My Head
3. Invisible Sun
4. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
5. Spirits in the Material World
6. Demolition Man
7. Every Breath You Take
8. Synchronicity I
9. Wrapped Around Your Finger
10. Walking in Your Footsteps
11. Synchronicity II
12. King of Pain
13. Murder by Numbers
14. Tea in the Sahara

Another reason to check out the Police website (http://www.thepolice.com/exclusives/) aside from the police cd is that you can see and hear footage of the band rehearsing for the tour. Get with it. The band ‘can’t stand losing you.’

This post sponsored by thePolice.com

I posted just a few days ago (Do your customers hate you?) on companies which pursue policies that make their profit dependant on irritating their customers (or worse).

Tonight, I watched a dvd documentary on Wal-Mart, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price“, and it really irritated me. Over the past year or two (since this flick was filmed), Wal-Mart has really lost its mojo. Possibly jumped the shark. And the thing is, over the past few years, you could see it all happening in super sl0-mo. How can one company be so incredibly tone-deaf to the culture and its customers, never mind its workers.

I have to disclose that I own some WMT stock, so I’m not out to gut them like some are. I’m not happy with some of their practices either. I bought the stock figuring that eventually, they’re going to have to change, and it’s going to result in a much more attractive company. Being liked by customers hasn’t been a bad policy for Target, so it could do some good for the big boy from Arkansas as well.

I’m not going to harp on Wal-Mart, but I think there’s a takeaway lesson for small-fry business people– it may be possible to make money by slashing and burning your way through your customers’ lives, but a better long-term policy is to have customers and workers who feel good about you. You might have to leave a little money on the table to do so, but consider it an investment in your future.

And don’t chain the doors shut on your night shift employees, that’s just stupid.

Customer Relationship Management (more commonly known as crm) has been a major corporate buzzword for some time now. In a nutshell, CRM aims to give you an organized, methodical way to track all of your sales leads. Ideally, fewer leads fall through the cracks, your sales team closes a higher percentage, and management gets better visibility into what is going on in the business.

One of the dark secrets of CRM is that many implementations fail– you’ll see estimates from 30% to 75% bandied about. I believe one of the biggest reasons for this is that CRM is often sold as a sort of turnkey software package, as opposed to a complete process which needs to impact how the company approaches its day-to-day operations. People don’t like change, that’s a basic fact, and developing good CRM requires change, unless your sales process is so great that it doesn’t have any room for improvement. But if that were the case, you probably wouldn’t be reading my blog, would you?

CRM can cost an awful lot of money, easily running into tens of thousands of dollars (if not millions) at many mid-size and larger companies. So how about CRM for the small business? Are you limited to living with Microsoft ACT?

No, there are options out there. A very brief google survey brings up 2 which I’d mention. The better known is Salesforce.com, which is the Big Daddy of CRM, and well known for their web-based programs which don’t require you to install software. That’s attractive. However, Salesforce is expensive, with big up-front payments. You may also have trouble getting them to call you back and respond to your inquiry. It took them a few months to get back to one company I worked for, at which point we’d already gone with another vendor.

As a contrast, look at someone like AIM promote. I haven’t ever used the software, but a few things about it are attractive. It’s got all of the typical crm lead-management basics. Most importantly, there is no upfront setup fee. That’s important, because it lets you try out the offer to see if it works for your business. Any time you can limit your front-end risk, I think that’s a good move.

Whatever you do, don’t go into a CRM implementation effort expecting to have one program or website turn your company around. It’s important to analyze your sales process first to look for the gaps and the problems (as well as the things you do well), and then make sure that any program  you use can help you address the problems and preserve the strengths. You might also need a big club to counter the change resistance in your organization. But if it’s done right, the impact can be great.

A quick example of great CRM– a few years ago I was browsing the InfoUSA website. They ar a mailing list broker where you can search certain demographics or company profiles and then buy a list of company names, addresses and contacts for direct marketing. In any case, I set up an account and did a search for something, checked it out for a few minutes, and then moved on to another task. Rrrrrring. My phone rang. I picked up… “Hi, this is John from InfoUSA, I noticed you were browsing our site, and wondered if I could help you find anything.” Fastest response time I’ve ever encountered, I’m still amazed at how they could respond so quickly. The answer: world class CRM.

This post sponsored by aim promote.

Through Digg I came across a blog post called  4 Signs Your Customers Hate You. Good post referring to a Harvard Business Review article on companies which profit by policies which tick off their customers (for example, miss your credit card payment due date by a day, get hit with a $25 late fee– of COURSE the credit card company is hoping every single one of its customers will be a day or two late every time!).

The post cites 4 signs you may be guilty of these sort of practices:

1. Your most profitable customers would tend to be the ones most unhappy with you, rather than the ones who like you the most.
2. You create rules which you would prefer customers to break (ie. the credit card payment due date), since it is profitable for you if they do so.
3. You create rules which are hard for your customers to understand.
4. Your preferred method of ensuring customer retention: contracts locking them in.

It’s all well and good until a new competitor comes along and lets the sunshine in. Then you’re dead in the water. I’m talking to you, cell phone service providers.

I just got back from a tradeshow last week. I’ve done quite a few shows as an exhibitor (well, ‘quite’ is relative since some people probably do 20-30 a year). I exhibit at 8-10 a year, including some of the big ones such as the Consumer Electronics Show. Over a few years of doing this, I’ve tried to develop a system for what should happen AFTER the show so that momentum isn’t lost on leads established at the show.

This requires coordinating with sales (grrrr) which is a topic sure to raise the hackles on any marketer’s neck. Talk about herding cats! The minute the show is over, the sales guys are running off chasing butterflies as the leads get stale.

In any case, here’s what I do:

• We always spring for the show-provided badge scanners / lead readers which typically get you a shiny new USB key at the end of the show loaded up with a delimited file with all your leads. Typically you also get a paper printout of all the leads (which you need to treat like gold in case the USB key is a dud). During the show, we make notes on the printout to give ourselves a few hints as to what we discussed with the prospect.
• After returning to the office, I load the lead file into an Access database template I’ve created. I create one field for the notes, and have someone transcribe any handwritten notes from the printout tapes. Good luck if it’s in my handwriting, even I can’t tell what I scrawled sometimes.
• Then we assign each lead to a particular sales rep

Now the followup starts:

• I’ll create a bulk email followup to all of the leads, basically saying “hey, remember us?”, and showing some of the products we featured. Sometimes I’ll include a photo of the booth from the show in order to job their memory. I like to get this email out 5-7 days after the show ends– long enough for the attendees to return home and dig out from the pile of work waiting for them, but not so long that they forget about us.
• Simultaneously we’ll also send a mailer, usually an info package on the company. I like to create a mail-merge cover letter so that it can be personalized with the recipient’s name and address. Ideally this goes out within 7 days of show end, so that they receive it within 10 days of show end.
• It’s also time to distribute leads to the sales team so that they can start contacting people by phone.

If all goes according to plan, the prospects will hear from us a minimum of 3 times, in 3 different ways. Before you know it, the money starts flowing in from sales (at least, we hope).

So, does anyone have any comments or suggestions of their own on tradeshow followups?

If there’s one thing American marketers excel at, it’s pulling off the publicity stunt. A stroll down (recent) memory lane brings to mind:

• guy in a chicken suit on webcam promoting burger king
• buxom woman in tight t-shirt offending censors and promoting Go Daddy
• Michael Moore filming part of his healthcare expose Sicko in Cuba, and loving it as the guv’mint takes the bait and starts talking about prosecution, thereby ensuring a successful launch of the film.

It’s not all roses, though. Recently we had freelancers for Comedy Central shutting down Boston after causing a bomb scare by placing suspicious-looking packages bulging with wires beneath bridges all around town.

Assuming you don’t do anything illegal, the successful PR stunt is probably the world’s best bang-for-the-buck marketing effort. Get creative enough, and execute well, and you too can be the talk of the water-cooler crowd for a few days.

That brings me to a new contender for PR glory… a backgammon resource website (!? there really is a website for everything!) called Gammonish has announced that backgammon online site BackgammonMasters intends to send Paris Hilton a personalized backgammon board in order to make her 45-day jail term more pleasant.

In a (I hope) tongue-in-cheek press release, they note that they’re “regretful to see her have to serve hard time” and “would like to make it possible for Miss Hilton to pass this unpleasant time more enjoyably.” Snicker.

As far as stunts go, this one has the most crucial element: Paris Hilton. It seems whatever she does gets in the news, so why not try to leverage off the media frenzy surrounding the jail time she may or may not be due to serve?

The other crucial element is… backgammon? OK, I can’t tell you the first thing about backgammon, except that it seems to involve a board and dice. Some kind of strange chess strategy variant. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest it may be beyond Ms. Hilton’s intellectual capacity, which would probably be better served by Chutes & Ladders. (Or, given the episodes which got her in this legal bind in the first place, perhaps Beer Pong, Beirut, Mexican, or other such college classics…).

I was curious enough about this strange press announcement that I looked up Backgammon Masters. It looks like this is a site which allows you to download some software and then connect with other players around the world. There is a ‘play with real money’ option, so I imagine the ultimate goal is to attract players who want to gamble a bit. I didn’t even know backgammon was a gambling game.

So will the PR stunt work? Will backgammon make entertainment tonight and displace World Series of Poker as the latest national craze? I think it’s a long shot, but anything is possible. Maybe Paris will marry O.J. and then we can get them a nice backgammon set as a wedding present.

This post sponsored by Pay Per Post.

We can’t all be in the movie business. Someone has to market the other stuff too, like sandpaper, or car insurance. So does that rule out the possibility of interesting, maybe even fun, marketing efforts? Not at all, especially if you’d rather not position your product as a commodity. Check out Six Steps to Give a Boring Product Some Buzz, which gets at the importance of marketing through emotion. Fact sheets are nice, but lists of specs and measurements generally don’t get most people’s pulses racing.

One of the things I learned growing up was that you can’t pick your own nickname. In fact, any effort to do so will probably backfire when your friends turn it around on you. I had a friend who announced he wanted to be called Goldfish. Within 15 seconds he had been christened Buttfish, and it stuck for a few years.

In the same way, you can’t write your own PR, and you can’t control what people say about you. The best way to control what people say about you is to do good things. The sure-fire way to have it backfire is to demand that people say certain things about you.

Consider Cingular’s idiotic attempt to control how other sites choose to use hotlinks to its website. Cingular apparently had a team of web-ignorant lawyers put together a policy that a) you’re only allowed to link to the home page, b) Cingular can ‘revoke’ your ‘limited right’ to link to its site at any time, and c) you can’t portray Cingular in a derogatory manner.

The sure-fire result of this silliness is web posts tooling on Cingular filled with hot links using keywords such as Cingular Sucks. For example:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/095003.shtml

You would think Cingular would perhaps instead concentrate on operating a good business and maybe establishing customer friendly policies which would cause its customers to WANT to say positive things. It sure worked for Apple.

I came across this Harvard Business Review article looking at software companies’ practices in giving pricing discounts. A Case For Discount Discipline reveals that most companies tend to discount on a case by case basis, and without the sort of overall consistency you might expect to find. Or not expect to find, depending on how many sales people you know and how closely they resemble the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Discounting practices vary so much by industry it’s a little hard to generalize. If you’re in the luxury car business, you probably don’t discount at all. If you’re in the mattress business, fuggedaboutit, discounts go with the territory.

From a business management perspective, there really should be consistency (or at least firm logic) used in determining who gets a discount, in order that customers are treated with consistency.

Check out the article, it’s interesting and just 4 pages.