The dispute is over a small amount – about $220.

The reptile brain doesn’t have complex emotions. It thinks in simple terms: fight or flight.

My reptile brain wants to fight. Maybe post a video of their shoddy customer service practices to YouTube, register a yourcompanysucks.com domain, and generally bitch and moan so loudly that their senior management gets headaches.  I guarantee I can create a headache that costs far more than $220 with just a few hours of reptile effort.

But I won’t.  At least not yet.

Why not yet? We’ll, maybe I can turn them into a customer for BrandProtect (one of my clients) and it wouldn’t be good if I slammed them publicly.  And also because it just too easy to make myself a nuisance. With the power of the Internet, it is possible for one person to tell his story to thousands of people.

This power illustrates just how effective a single “guerrilla” can be in the face of a corporate superpower.

In the past, given a superpower brand’s supremacy in marketing, customer service, public relations and legal support, few rational opponents would deliberately seek a face-to-face confrontation.  It was almost always a loosing battle.

But today, any idiot, including myself, can resort to asymmetric, or David-and-Goliath, strategies. I may not win the battle but I can make myself a nuisance or even bloody the nose of a superbrand by using some extremely affordable weapons such as GoDaddy.com (less than $10 to register a yourcompanysucks.com domain), Twitter, a blog, and the Flip (a hi-def video camera that costs less than $100).

Although it would only take one letter from a superbrand to make me cease and desist, the cost of just the attorney writing that letter is already way more than the $200 in dispute. Now matter how simple the cease and desist, escalation from the superbrand would be costly.

Superbrands are also seeing public relations backlash from stepping on bloggers and vocal complainers. In effect, a legal victory can still equal a PR defeat

So what should the superbrands do to protect against the asymmetric customer with a chip on his shoulder? Should I find someone to help me make a video about this company’s poor customer service? What would you do?

At MaconRaine we’re well known Epicureans when it comes to our appetites. After hearing about Quizno’s new Torpedo sandwich I decided to treat the office to what I hoped would be a delicious diversion. Unfortunately the Torpedo turned out to be more of a limp toothpick than the sub-sinking terror promised in the advertisements. 

 What I received wasn’t the robust sandwich I’d hoped for. I could have dealt with its floppiness if it had come through with the promise of “over a foot of Quizno’s flavor”.  At $4 dollars that’s 3 inches of delicious taste per dollar and I can accept extra cost if the quality is there. However, unless Quizno’s has partnered with DuPont to manufacture its ingredients there’s something seriously wrong with this sandwich.

As you can see from the picture below, amidst the scant scattering of lettuce lies a single layer of ham and some vagrant tomato chunks. A small, limp, sandwich deserves something to bolster its reputation; unfortunately it seems Quizno’s has gone to great pains to put quality behind them.

The amount of plasticized taste they were able to pack into such a small sandwich, with so few ingredients, should be the real tag line on their ads. Not only does it have the consistency of a Tupperware container it also tastes like the manufacturing floor where the containers are made. I guess that’s the value proposition on this inedible disappointment.

Having the right contact information makes it a little bit easier to get some time with potential prospects. You know the sales and marketing process; simply finding an excuse to get in the door is a round-about, adaptive, gradual and hybrid process.  

To perform basic data hygiene and campaign targeting, we use all of the data services: Hoovers, Jigsaw, and a variety of value added list services.   Some of the services are licensed (but seldom used) by our clients and some of the services we license directly.

We use JigSaw the most because we can get prospect email addresses. We don’t spam. All of our email contact is one to one and extremely personalized. 

Unfortunately with Jigsaw my major complaint is the inability to filter and remove unqualified prospects from my queries before I close out my list. When I’ve got to edit my search in the Shopping Cart it slows my workflow and can be incredibly frustrating. For example, I recently conducted a JigSaw search for VPs with keyword “Security” in the title. While reviewing the search results in the shopping cart, I noticed a number of contacts were actually responsible for physical security instead of network security.  Removing those contacts was time consuming.

Recently, we were contacted by ZoomInfo’s PR department, given a membership and asked to evaluate it on our blog. Since I love free stuff, here goes…

For sheer personalization what we like about ZoomInfo is the in-depth profiles kept on each individual. We can quickly research a prospect and craft custom outreach that references past press clippings or web-mentions.  Zoominfo calls this capability “deep” data because it improves how we target and keep tabs on client competitive activity.

Zoominfo’s lead sources are updated daily and, as I said, the service allows for powerful list segmentation. I can also upload key account lists to expand my baseline understanding of organizations in my clients’ target market. This more than meets my criteria for a good prospecting application.

If forced to pick one of these services over another, I don’t know if I would be able too. Each one of these services (ZoomInfo, JigSaw, etc.) does things slightly different and different projects require a different set of tools. In a best case scenario I’d recommend you buy them all, but the economy being what it is sometimes we have to make decisions. So for bulk prospecting I recommend Jigsaw. For surgical high level prospecting, Zoominfo is the way to go.

Which do you prefer and why?

I can’t keep up! There was no way I could have predicted even five years ago that so much of my world would depend on the Internet. Take a look at a few of these apps. Good luck and enjoy.

A few weeks back, I emailed Pete Burgeson at Crowdspring and asked him to share his thoughts about what the agency of the future would look like. As background, CrowdSpring crowd sources graphic design. Companies put graphic design jobs out for bid on Crowdspring then graphic designers submit their ideas. The company picks a favorite, the designer gets paid. As you can imagine, this model threatens the livelyhood of some agencies. But some forward looking agencies are starting to explore crowdsourcing as a possible opportunity to reduce cost, better manage freelancers and possibly reinvent the way they engage with clients.

According to Pete, the agency model is going to be changing in a number of ways.  “One of the more interesting and relevant to us is going to be how I think agencies will interact with clients.  What we’re seeing is more and more shops crop up that have little to no interest in supplying the creative work in-house.  Sure, there will always be those shops – but they’re called creative shops and they’re very different.  The more ‘traditional’ shops are all trying to figure out how they can use more freelancers or (maybe one day) crowdsourcing to come up with ideation phase of the project.  From there, they can sort through the ideas and bring their true expertise to the table – strategy – and then hone in on a winner, perfect it and execute the shit out of it.”

JungleDisk uses Amazon’s web services and allows easy transfer of files to and from our local machines to a file server in the cloud. It is simple to use. I simply map a remote folder to my local Z: drive and can save files or even access my files from Panera.

The price is right. 1GB can be stored for just $0.15 cents per month. The hardest part is signing up for Amazon’s S3 service. The sign-up is confusing and since I am not a developer I had to read some of the instructions. I prefer not having to read instructions and like sign-ups that are more intuitive.

What is SharePoint? For those of you living in a cave, SharePoint allows individuals within an organization to quickly and easily create and manage their own collaboration websites. Once SharePoint is part of your organization, there is no need to ever call IT for support or to set up permissions. Individuals are empowered to define and manage access to specific information. SharePoint is pretty slick and it is often overlooked as a project management tool.

I read the book because I believe most marketing failures can be traced back to failures of project management. I wanted to see how SharePoint could be used to quickly manage marketing projects and help my clients avoid marketing project failure.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no shortage of great project management tools. ProjectCompanion. Microsoft Project Server. Primavera. Basecamp. ProjectTurf.  But many people don’t know that they probably already have SharePoint running somewhere within their organization. When budgets are tight, leveraging technology that you already have can help stretch a strained budget.

I emailed Dux to get a better understanding of some of the essential capabilities marketing managers should look for when evaluating project management tools. His response was succinct:

·         Supports the generation of a project charter, schedule and budget

·         Facilitates communication and feedback

·         Monitors project activities

·         Controls project changes

·         Analyzes and forecasts project performance

·         Disseminates project status to relevant stakeholders

·         Provides real time information essential for initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing a project

In response to my question: “When should a marketing manager start thinking about using a project management tool,” he responded:

1)      No standardized systems for integrating project goals: project schedule, cost and quality objectives are individual silos. For example, financial information in Excel is not automatically recalculated anytime the project schedule is adjusted. Making manual updates takes time away from other project activities.

2)      Inefficient document management: project documents are not stored in a central location. Tracking, undoing changes, and the ability to roll-back to prior versions are limited. Additionally, varying levels of access permissions are unavailable. IT/IS can only do so much in supporting information access requirements.

3)      Lack of appropriate tools to facilitate team collaboration: Project information is not accessible anytime, anywhere. In addition, the team is incapable of developing or working with information at the same time.

4)      Inability to report accurate and timely status of the project: project status information is only available whenever the project manager makes it available. How do you deal with project sponsors who want to view real time project status information?

5)      Not achieving organizational strategic goals: lacking a standardized tool to facilitate consistent project management processes throughout an organization can limit the ability to effectively support strategic goals.

Any marketing manager should quickly realize that these five issues alone more than justify the need for investment in reliable project management tools.  Dux’s book gives a deep dive for any marketing manager investigating how to use SharePoint to better manage his or her department. Pick it up at Amazon.

After reviewing Making the Number, there are a number of points about sales benchmarking that apply to our own theories about marketing.

The scoreboard for sales professional is and always has been the pay stub – this is the crudest form of sales benchmarking. For marketing, it has always been a bit stickier and this is because there has been a disconnect between sales and marketing in most organizations. Ironically, now it is more important than ever to make sure these two are aligned.

Here’s why.

Sources of competitive advantage have shrunk. What it really boils down to is customer satisfaction and customers are harder than ever to satisfy. The Internet has contributed greatly to this trend by arming consumers with a plethora of information before marketing departments have the opportunity to bombard them with ineffective, corporate messaging efforts. “Citizen marketers,” as the book refers to them, have made it impossible for marketing and sales to exist solely within the four walls of corporate America, and away from scrutiny. Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, social networking and so on – allow buyers to self-service, bypassing corporate marketing’s efforts. Therefore, the sales team plays a vital role as the buffer between customer experience and marketing. The sales force must execute the positive customer experience that marketing departments are communicating.

Thus, sales campaigns become like a chess match, where you need a solid strategy and where the ability to think trumps the ability to work hard. And data driven decision-making arms salespeople with the tools they need to be successful.  

Sales benchmarking requires companies to review the sometimes unseen links between process and result. This review encourages an objective look at practices, systems and metrics and challenges business methods that should be scrutinized; and provides a means for driving change in the sales process.

In the sales process, there are a number of intangibles – things we would rather measure by how they “appear” or “seem.”  The same is often true with marketing. The soft metrics of appearance make it difficult to measure.

The authors of Making the Number point out that successful benchmarking is only possible through data. By assigning key performance indicators (KPIs) to reflect key parts of the sales process, a sales manager can assess whether or not a campaign is successful and what needs to be continued or abandoned.

The authors are quick to point out that benchmarking is not merely a comparison of your current performance with that of past performances or a collection of meaningless data that cannot be applied to positive change. The benchmarking process must be repeatable, consistent, reliable, trustable, measureable and comprehensible. In other words, it must first lend itself to multiple iterations. There must be no logical contradictions. The same results should be produced when the process is followed correctly. All process activity must be described and defined. There must be metrics that enable the measurement of work within the process and it must contain instructions that are understood within all roles of the process.

Benchmarking is not an instant fix for companies who have broken sales and marketing processes, and it is not a way to force the organization to make the necessary changes. It is a merely a dashboard of what is going on inside and outside of the organization – a way to evaluate what processes are working and which are not. Only leadership and management can enforce and implement positive change.

The key is to making this change happen is implement best practices with benchmarking. First, identify the companies that excel in their business. Get their buy in to study their policies, technique and operating environment. Discover ways to transfer their best practices to your organization in a way that makes sense. Finally, implement these new best practices within your own organization, evaluate the process and continuously improve upon this method.

Part of this process is determining your sales management’s maturity level. Level one is the chaos level where activity is mostly ad hoc. The second level is the defined level where processes are documented but not necessarily consistent. Level three is the reportable level where the process has actually been adopted. Level four is the managed level which consists of quantitative sales management and level five is the predictable level where sales management is predictive and casual. Once you determine what sales maturity level your organization is at, you can work on advancing to higher levels through the employment of a consistent winning strategy.

The next step is the actual data collection, which is the most labor-intensive part of the benchmarking process and also where the organization begins to get a detailed view of internal and external operations.

A company will experience a sustained competitive advantage when sales benchmarking moves from being a one-time event to being embedded in the operating procedures of the company. You must understand that your peers will not stand still. Sales benchmarking needs to become a standard operating procedure and part of your company’s long-term strategy for success.

One of the biggest excuses companies see against adopting benchmarking as a regular business process is “Things are going well – we don’t need it.” The problem with this attitude is that you are looking behind instead of ahead. It may be very likely that if you are successful today, you will be successful tomorrow. But it is not a given and it would probably do you well to be sure that your company is doing what it needs to in order to stay on top.

Regardless of the obstacles presented by companies or employees that are hesitant to adopt benchmarking, each can be overcome. It is important to keep future successes in mind and to know that the sooner you implement continuous benchmarking, the sooner you will find the facts you need to make sure your sales organization is consistently a success.

I could run like the wind blows

As if I wasn’t addicted enough to the Internet, I’ve now managed to integrate my exercise to the web, thanks to the Nike+iPod Sport Kit.

I just bought this device over the weekend but already I am pleased. My online OCD behavior, coupled with cool charts and graphs of running and workout times is actually motivating me to run more. I was cruising around the neighborhood all weekend like a young Forest Gump. In fact, I’m running more now than I ever have. Julie Cerone (www.juliecerone.com), my personal trainer from hell, is monitoring my workouts and using the data from my runs to make my life even more miserable.

It was easy to set-up, worked right out of the box, has a cool online display for all my statistics, personal goals, etc.  Definitely recommend this to anyone that likes gadgets.