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Are YOUR Product Marketers
the Anti-Sales Department?
March 14, 2002 - We all know that
sometimes one part of an organization can seem like it's working against the
interests of another. Here's an interesting example I came across recently. It
sounds unbelievable, but it's true.
A friend of mine is one of a team
working on a market research project which will soon be publishing a series of
major reports on (let's call them, for the sake of this article) CRM software
companies. These will typically cover analysis of all aspects of the publishers
and products and will be bought by big ticket users, probably for hundreds of
dollars for each copy. Each report is typically based on many days of meetings,
and includes inputs from the vendor, one or more marketing analysts, a techie
etc. Now as we know, the CRM market has hit a bit of a brick wall recently, and
the revenue growth curves for many companies have been mainly flat, or pointing
in the wrong direction. So you would think that all these companies would be
glad of any independent effort to tell the power users in their industry a bit
more about their company.
Because the reports are very detailed,
vendors have been offered a chance to correct factual errors in the reports
before they go to press. Now this is where the anti-sales department comes in,
because one of the companies (let's call them the "stealth vendor")
has requested that much of the detailed information about their product should
be removed.
"This is much more information than we normally like
customers to know before they buy the product" is a paraphrase of the
reasoning behind the request. And the argument goes on that because much of this
information was supplied, for the purposes of these reports, but under a non
disclosure agreement, they have the right to do so.
Well, I'm not the
publisher, or even remotely connected to the publisher, but I do know what I
would do with a company who asked a report of this kind to be gutted for such a
trivial and stupid reason. As you can imagine, the request to pull content for
this spurious reason has not created a good atmosphere.
What's going
to happen next?
I don't know. But if you were a sales person in the "stealth
vendor" company or a shareholder, you might feel a little bit hacked off
with your product marketing people, because if they get their way the
influential report on the product you're trying to sell is going to have a lot
of blanks in it with a comment saying why...
"The software vendor
asked us to remove these pages because they don't think customers should know
this before they buy the product". is one possible example.
Or
worse still, the whole attitude of your company and the "need to know"
basis for supplying information to your customers could become the main
feature of the rewritten report. The implication being that if you treat your
customers like idiots, then you will get idiots for customers. So be warned! The
anti-sales department is still alive and well and thriving in the 21st century.
Some members of this species, hitherto thought to be almost extinct, may be
working in a stealth product marketing department near you...
Editor's
comments:- later... a couple of weeks after writing this article the "stealth
vendor" got acquired by another company. It's traditional in such cases
(and very desirable in this case) for the acquiring company to go in for a new
Spring clean of the old marketing department. |
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Why it's a Bad Idea to
SPAM: Your List May Include Editors
March 13, 2002 - From time to
time I get spammed via email or fax from computer companies who should know
better. What's new? I hear you ask. Doesn't this happen to everyone, every day?
Well, as I've mentioned before in this column, mailing lists
(including fax and email lists) get compiled from all kinds of places, and you
can't be too sure who is on the receiving end.
If your company
occasionally does the spam thing and ignores requests to remove the offending
fax or email address from these communications, here's a warning. You may be
spamming the editors of important publications in your market, and the
consequences may not be what you expect.
As the editor of some
leading computer publications I occasionally get spammed by companies which are
in the vertical markets covered by my publications.
My assumption is,
that if a company spams me, it won't be too choosy about spamming my readers if
it gets the chance. So I make sure they don't! - As a preventative measure I
keep a blacklist of such companies, and when their company sends me a press
release, or tries our "add url" function, or even inquires about
advertising, it's going to get blocked out or removed for about 3 years from the
last incidence of spam. I see that as an important community service, and hey, I
enjoy my job!
PS - in case you're worried, I don't count getting two
copies of the same press release from different people or agencies as spam.I'd
rather get two copies of an important press release than none at all. But even
one copy of your latest price list counts as spam if I've asked to be removed
from your list and been ignored. |
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Beware of Snail Mailing
Lists Compiled From The Web
March 12, 2002 - Got a catalog in the
mail this morning from a reputable computer distributer called Inmac. I was
about to bin it, when I noticed the details on the label. The address was
accurate, but the name, was that of a niece, who has never lived or worked here.
It only took me a few seconds to make the connection.
A few years ago
I registered a dotcom domain name with Network Solutions, for my niece, who is
an artist. For various reasons this never progressed to a functioning web site,
but the domain is still registered. To simplify the process of setting it up,
and because she was a student and moving around, I used this address as the
billing and contact address. This would be a similar situation for many
companies who might, for example use their web design company or marketing
agency to set up their web site.
Anyway, it looks like someone is
datamining the "whois"
registry and reselling mailing lists compiled from that data.
In the
same mail today, my wife, who runs a marketing services company, received
several offers from the very repuatble Harvard Business Review magazine to
become subscribers. The several named contacts were all in her company, but they
work out of different office locations, not the location which had been
attached to their address labels. Looks like that mailing list was
compiled from attaching the contact names mentioned on the web site, with the
address listed in "whois". (The physical address does not appear on
their web site, only the email contacts) .
You may think I'm a sad
person who studies labels on junk mail. But as a direct marketer, I think about
the enormous sums of money which are wasted by using unreliable data. Experience
tells me these "generated" contacts will be in circulation for many
years. So next time you rent a mailing list ask if it's been compiled from the
web. Two and two is not always four. |
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Other news on this page
Are
YOUR Product Marketers the Anti-Sales Department?
Why it's a Bad Idea
to SPAM: Your List May Include Editors
Beware of Snail Mailing Lists
Compiled From The Web
earlier news (archive) |
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View from the Hill:-
What If?... Speculation
About Mergers Which Might Have Been
Although the official
count for the HP-Compaq merger could take weeks, it's likely that both companies
will do better this year, regardless of the outcome, because of the IT recovery
that's already started. Maybe it's the Spring weather, or maybe when a market
has already been in recession for a year, the quarterly comparisons with the
year before don't look so bad any more. And even PCs do start to look a bit
tired and need replacing if you hang onto them for a third or fourth year. If
the options are to replace old systems or decomputerise, then eventually
companies will have to buy some new stuff.
There have been over 100
mergers and acquisitions in the storage market since January 2000, and this got
me speculating about matches which, unlike the HP-Compaq merger, wouldn't be so
synergistic.
In the mid 1990's there was strong speculation that Sun
Microsystems was planning to buy Apple Computer. Imagine what the results would
be now, if that had gone ahead. When a customer buys a iMac they have to go on a
two week systems administration course on the SunMacOS operating system before
they're allowed to turn it on. Or when you order your next SPARC mainframe for
the datacenter there's a four week delay before delivery, because the color you
wanted (to match your carpet) is not in stock, and you don't want to risk the
faster delivery but tatty appearance offered by a gray Sun VAR of an ex-stock
model with a garage respray.
Then there are those other possible
mergers, which even their managements haven't considered yet, and I want a
percentage of the proceeds if this article gives them ideas.
Suppose
EMC were to merge with Palm? You'd get the amazing PalmBack, a PDA with 10
Terabytes of data including all your favorite DVDs, CDs and business reports etc
(much more than 4 hours of music!) connected to your neat little hand sized
device connected via a BlueTooth wireless interface to a backpack weighing 60
pounds which straps to your shoulders. The PalmBack standard model would run for
30 minutes with its built in power source, but you could get an optional UPS
based on ten car batteries strapped together which you pull along on a little
trolley behind you.
Then there's the merger between Microsoft and the
entertainment industry which we've been waiting to really happen for the last
ten years or so. Only let's give it the proper name, the Content Delivery
Industry. If Microsoft merged with Lucas Films, you'd be half way through
watching the next episode of Star Wars, delivered down your broadband pipe,
when, fifteen minutes from the end, the screen would go blue with a message
saying "There is a fault with this system, please press control-alt-delete
to restart, and contact your software vendor." You reset the system, but
like Groundhog Day, it doesn't resume from where it crashed, instead you have to
start watching the movie all over again from the beginning... That's what you
get for being a beta site, and buying the new content delivery system in the
first year after it came out. You should have known better. Version 4.3 will fix
that problem.
OK maybe those later mergers might never happen, so I
won't get any credit for proposing them. But you never know, if the Nasdaq heats
up again we're going to see some crazy things again. (I'm going to watch CNBC
tonight to see if my suggestions get a mention, just in case.) And maybe the
HP-Compaq merger doesn't look so strange now that we've had enough time to get
used to it. | | |
