Two Business Development Tools You Must Use

1) Google Alerts and 2) LinkedIn Groups.

OK, yes, there are more than two "musts" for Business Development tools, but if you are not using these, then start now.

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Don't Give Up On Your Blog (or Your e-Newsletter) Just Yet.

Tracking your readership is the easy part. Tracking your impact? Not so easy.

Your blog seems to get decent viewership, but has almost no followers and the only comments seem to come from SEO firms and spammers promoting E.D. pills or Russian brides. Your e-newsletter gets good opens and acceptable click-throughs, but, to outsiders looking in, it looks very much like a one-way street.

Should you give up? No. Not based on a lack of comments, anyway. At least not a lack of public comments.

Take heart from the following unsolicited comments from readers of two separate clients' efforts:

"Nice job David, I appreciated your insights and content this month especially."

(Not edited since I had permission to post. In fact, the "David" here, David Spitulnik, Managing Director of Blackman Kallick's Strategic Services Group, specifically asked me to create this blog post.)

If you looked at the Strategic Service's blog, you might wonder if anyone was actually reading it. But instead of judging its value by the number of comments you see, simply ask the author if he is getting any reaction or seeing any value. Actually, no need for you to pester him. David sent me a message after his most recent post: "Not sure what it is, but I have received more direct feedback this month than usual. One of them being a 'saw this note and passed it and your name along to a friend who needs help with succession planning.'"

And here's another unsolicited comment, in response to a different client's e-newsletter.

"Enjoyed your newsletter. Very interesting. I wasn’t aware of the _____ deal. We regularly have clients who are preparing their _____ but need to improve _____. I will be happy to send these folks your way."

Sounds just like the type of impact anyone would want from their efforts!

And, wait a second... let's go back to David's note. Did he say "direct feedback?" Let's consider that comment for a minute.

I'm frequently the voice of reason (against type, I know) when it comes to blogs and e-newsletters. My advice is often: Be patient. Build it slowly. Trust in your voice, your message and your readers. They'll come around.

Oh, and don't expect that you'll receive a Huffington Post-level comments. What makes you think you should receive that number of comments to your posts? More to the point: Why do you even want that?

Of course interaction is nice (like a pat on the back or the sound of a tree falling in the proverbial forest), but that's not how you should judge your blog or e-newsletter.

So, how should you judge it?

Don't ask me. Take a look back at your marketing plan and see why you created the blog or built the e-newsletter. If you are not realizing those specific goals, then do turn it off. If you don't know why you created it, then either turn it off or, quickly, come up with some goals. And then measure your success by those goals.

All that being said, if your goals included a specific number of comments to your every post, then you should change your goals and better manage the expectations of those judging the time (and money) you sink into these efforts.

But wait a second... am I really saying that you should simply trust that the blog is working?

No. Not at all.

If you are seeing no engagement (readership, click-throughs, etc.) then you can't be having any impact … and you need to charge course, since there is no there there. But if you are seeing decent engagement levels, and feel discouraged by a lack of public comments, then stay the course for a while longer.

What I am saying, simply (and admittedly not very succinctly), is not to judge your efforts solely by comments, but to look for other proof of engagement and impact. Such as direct feedback. Or people starting conversations with you based on what you wrote.

And I am also telling you not to judge other people's blogs by the number of comments. Judge them by the value of the content.

To end: Take heart and take your time. Building thought leadership takes patience and persistence.

Happy blogging.

Marketing is the Art of Managing Failure

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one." - Elbert Hubbard

Are there any roles out there where failure rates as as high as what we marketers expect?

But first, what do I mean by failure?

We send out an e-blast to 1,000 people for an upcoming, free webinar. 320 open the e-blast. 50 click-through. And 6 register for our upcoming event. (Marketers right now are thinking, "If only...")

Here's the math:

32% open rate. 5% CTR. 6 registrants. A decent conversion rate for a single e-blast.

But let's turn the math around:

680 people (68%) never got* the invite. 950 people (95%) either didn't got it or didn't care. 994 people (99.4%) failed to register. If this were a test, you would get an A+ ... for failing.

I often explain that marketers are in the business of managing failure.

Only once in my career can I point back to a marketing effort with a 100% success rate, where every single recipient (105 of them) took the desired action (agreed to a meeting.) I can also point back to a campaign where we estimated a 10% acceptance rate and hit 30+%, which put the customer service folks in an untenable position for delivering on our promises**.

Unfortunately, I can also point back to efforts with 0% success rate. Yes, goose eggs. Where we wondered if the marketing actually dropped. (It's a sickening feeling, even for someone who knows that success is measured in partial percentages.)

OK, so why am I writing this?

Because marketers are often sitting across the desks from professionals who cannot fail. People for whom imperfection is career-threatening. 88% of your shipments arrived on time. 92% of your products worked as promised. 96% of your financial reports were accurate. 99.5% of the food your restaurant served today was safe for consumption. (Bear with this example...I'm coming off a bout of food poisoning courtesy of a mid-scale restaurant.) None of these are acceptable rates.

So when you, the profession marketer, talk excitedly about a "whopping" 32% open rate, these can't-fail professionals wonder if they could do your job with both hands tied behind their backs, pecking at the keyboard with their noses. When you talk about the 15 people who attended the webinar, they wonder just how far away from an actual monetary transaction this might be, only wishing that they also got credit for jobs partially done.

Marketers are more like kids at a party trying to get candy from a pinata. Sometimes our first swing hits the empty air.

We need the people sitting across from us to understand that we are in the business of managing failure. Our success is measured in small percentages. And, often, the target moves, so our next attempt has even less "success." But we recalibrate and take another shot. Then we measure the results and, if they are higher, we move in that direction some more.

When we clip the pinata, we readjust our aim, hoping this one will be more on target.

So, I repeat, marketers are in the business of managing failure. We do not expect anything close to a 100% success rate. And if you, our CEOs and Managing Partners and Presidents, expect we will succeed every time, then you are judging us by the wrong criteria.

Our job is not to get it perfect the first time, though that would be nice. Our job is to take calculated risks that, if we do our jobs well, can eventually create predictive results that provide a valuable and sustainable return on investment.

And when we hit the pinata just right ... everyone gets candy!

*Yes, I know that "got" is the wrong word. They "got" the e-mail, it just bounced off their cranium like a gnat off a motorcycle helmet. Not a technical bounce, but a functional one.

**The resulting sales for the product, however, made up for any short term grief.

E-mail Advice That Makes People Angry ... or How to Keep Your E-mails Typo-free.

One of the toughest jobs of a Marketing Director is telling people that they had a typo in their e-mail or sent an unprofessional e-mail.

People don't want to hear it.

"I was going 100 miles an hour that day. Of course, I'd have a small typo."

"A typo? Who cares? Every e-mail has typos these days."

"So I forgot to include a subject line. Stop being so picky."

But the truth is that you are judged by your work and your work includes the e-mails you send. And here's a tougher truth: People are looking for reasons not to hire or keep you. They are actively looking for any excuse so they can justify their business decision of not using your service or not buying your products.

When I see a typo, I wonder:

a) Are they careless? Or

b) Do they simply not care?

When the CEO of a client company sends me an e-mail with a typo I think it's (b) they simply don't care. Why should they bother to proofread internal e-mails or e-mails to vendors? And while this might surprise people who know me... I agree. I hope they have better things to do than proofread internal e-mails. In fact, I hope everyone does.

So, we are only talking about typos in external e-mails.

But I really don't want to write a post on why sending unprofessional e-mails is bad. If you don't agree, you've already stopped reading. But if you do care that the people in your organization write proper e-mails, without typos, but don't want to get that snippy nasty-gram back for actually trying to help... here is your solution:

Send them the below portion of this blog post. Say it's from me. With love.

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Three e-mails you should never send and how to ensure you never (or at least very rarely) do.

1) An e-mail with a typo.

First of all, go to Preferences in your Outlook® and select all the check spelling options. This will add squiggly lines under all your misspelled words as you compose them and it will also ask you to "ignore" or "change" all misspelled words before you send the e-mail.

However, this will not stop you from sending homonyms or other typos that are correctly spelled, but not the correct word. (Think back to the old poem with the line: "My checker tolled me sew.")

The most common one here seems to be "their" and "there." Another example, my personal demon, is using the word "from" when you mean "form."

Here's a trick to avoiding this kind of typo: Read the e-mail aloud before you send it.

Your eyes might not catch the typo, but your ears will.

Try to catch the errors below.

• "You should receive the PDF form Nicki by 5pm today."
• "I now you like sushi, so let's meet at Yasu."
• "I never did here from Marc. Did you?"

A spellchecker also won't catch contraction errors such as the very common "your" instead of "you're" one. Since the "read aloud" trick doesn't seem to work all the time on these errors, here's an additional trick: Read all contractions as if they weren't contractions. That is, when reading the e-mail aloud say, "you are", even when you wrote "you're."

Try to catch the errors in the two following sentences.

• "Every sentence should stand up on it's own."
• "I haven't seen you're boss around lately."

The spell checker should also catch typos in the subject line, but, for some reason, this tends to be a good place to find typos, anyway.

Simple advice here: Proofread your subject lines, too.

2) An e-mail without a subject line.

I seem to receive a greta deal of these and I am unsure how it happens. Outlook should pop-up a message line that reads: "This message has no subject. Are you sure you want to send it?" If you get that message, click "cancel" and add a subject line.

Try, right now, to send a message without a subject line. If you don't get that message box, contact your IT person. In the past you must have selected the "Don't show me this message again." option. Why you did that is beyond me. But you did and, sadly, there is no preference you can check to get it back. Your IT person can, however, fix it. And once it's fixed, there is never (not ever!) a good reason to choose the "never show" option, since you should only see that box when you accidentally forget to include a subject line.

Let me put that more directly: You should want to be notified when you are about to make a careless mistake. Don't stop your computer from helping you.

Also, if you proofread your subject lines and see that there is nothing to proofread, then, well, add something to proofread.

3) An e-mail without a body. ("Subject line messaging")

For some reason, people think this is efficient.

Subject line: Please send me the updated Petrovich file. I also want Version 2 of the Montrose one. Thanks.

Body:

Yep, I get it. What more did you need to say? The whole message was in the subject line.

But let me explain how e-mail works in this century.

1. There is a preview pane now. So I can read most of your e-mail without opening it.
2. The 'In' box is actually a thin column where people can see the sender's name and only a few words of your subject line. So I have to open up the e-mail anyway.
3. When I open the e-mail, Outlook puts the subject line in a grey box, making your amazing creation harder to read.

So, when your recipient opens your e-mail, he likely sees only the body of your message, which reads:

Body:

Then it's a treasure hunt for the message. This is the opposite of efficient.

In fact, if I'm looking at your message on my smart phone, I could read your whole two sentence message without actually opening the e-mail unless you use your special trick of putting the entire message in the subject line.

It's funny, since there is really no reason why "subject line messaging" is actually unprofessional (albeit lots of reasons it's inefficient), but my informal poll of about two dozen people revealed that NO ONE likes this and EVERYONE thinks it's unprofessional. A few of them used pretty choice words about the, and I quote, "D-bags" who do this.

So, stop it. Even (read: especially) for internal e-mails, since it'll come across as bossy and rude, not efficient.

END PART I. PART II WILL BE POSTED...SOMEDAY.

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Here is the full "Candidate for a Pullet Surprise" poem, which includes the line: "My checker tolled me sew." (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)

Are You (Unwittingly) Wearing Red or Blue During Your Presentations? Start Wearing Purple.

All apologies to Gogol Bordello. But listen to this song as you read this post. Or instead of reading this post which might be more entertaining.

Many businesses (if not all) are subject to governmental regulations and law changes.

Because of this, there are many experts who cover – either directly or tangentially – updates and pending law changes during their speeches and presentations. When they do, with a word, eye roll, or even tone of voice, they can quickly disengage half their audience.

Did you just use the term, "Obamacare?" Bad idea! Half the audience now believes you are the local leader of the Tea Party. They stopped thinking of you as an expert at anything. Now they see you in a bright red jacket with a gun in one hand and misspelled rally poster in the other.

Did you sigh when an audience member used the phrase "liberal agenda" in his question? Oops! Half the people in attendance have just decided you are anti-business. They now see you in a blue jacket (with leather elbow patches) handing all their hard-earned money to a welfare cheat.

It's a fact that Congress' decision on extending Bush's tax cuts is a critical business issue right now. But if you can't say "Bush" without verbally painting yourself red or blue, you need to call the tax cuts by another name.

|> Unsure if your words, looks or tone are betraying you and disengaging half your audience? Ask someone who sits on the far side of the aisle from you to attend your practice session. <|

You don't practice your presentations beforehand? Let me know when you are speaking next, so I can avoid it.

You don't know anyone who has stupid politics (i.e. disagrees with you politically)? You need to widen your circle and, again, let me know when you are speaking next, so I can avoid it.

In short words: If you are a true expert, you can keep your personal politics out of your presentations.

In shorter words: Start wearing purple.

Technical Ability vs. Marketing Ability? It's Time to Graduate from this High School Mentality.

Back in high school, there was peer pressure to actually do poorly on tests. Why? Because getting straight A's and being cool were mutually exclusive. Cool vs. Smart. Pick one.

We knew, then, that this was stupid. Not simply because the dichotomy was imaginary, but also because acting on it would limit our future success.

Fast forward to our career lives and there is an equally stupid either/or proposition: Technical ability vs. Marketing ability.

And the syllogism is just as stupid as it was when we were fifteen.

Then:
1) He gets good grades.
2) Therefore: He must be uncool.

Now:
1) She can make it rain.
2) Therefore: She must have, at best, mediocre technical ability.

Back in high school, I heard good students called 'losers' by others who didn't even know them.

Now, I hear strong networkers and marketers dinged for having 'poor technical skills' by people who have zero insights into that person's work product.

Do we think we get so many points and have to assign them to one category or the other? Of course, we don't. But we do believe that if we are technically able and cannot market, then we have made a positive choice.

Let me rip off your blinders and give you a new syllogism:

1) You are unable to be good at both marketing and service.
2) Therefore: You are jealous at others who might actually be good at both.

And, though this news will make you really unhappy, you need to hear it: There are plenty of rainmakers who have far stronger technical ability than you.

We do not get a fixed number of points and the skill sets that make people good marketers do not conflict with the ones that make people good at their craft.

Life is unfair. You are jealous. << Let's admit to both of these RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW.

Done? Good.

Now you can stop assuming that people who can bring in business cannot also service that business or engineer innovative solutions. They can. And they do. And, very likely, they make far more money than you. And they deserve it.

So, why am I writing this? Because I am tired of companies rejecting strong marketers since they assume that these people cannot deliver on the technical side. And I am tired of the technical snobs rolling their eyes in marketing meetings, believing that marketing is for people without technical abilities.

All you are doing is limiting your own future and your company's future. Just like others tried to do to you back in high school. But now you are doing it to yourself and, worse, to others and to your organization.

It's not their fault you are bad at developing business; it's yours. And it's not because you have (or believe you have) superior technical ability. It's because you stupidly think that people only get so many points to assign.

It's time to graduate from high school. And, if you haven't noticed, the economy is weak right now. So, it's also time to improve your marketing skills.

The only thing holding you back is your belief that marketing ability and technical ability are on the same slider knob. They are on different controls and they can both go up to 10. (Or 11 for you Spinal Tap fans.)

Turning Tough Times Into Triumph

Keith McFarland, author of The Breakthrough Company and Bounce and a regular columnist for Business Week, gave a speech entitled "Turning Tough Times Into Triumph" at a Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce event on September 30th.

David Spitulnik, Managing Director of Blackman Kallick's Strategic Services Group, and I wrote a synopsis of the talk, along with some tactical next steps for business owners.

You can read the article at The Strategy Insights blog.