Mr. Scott is a veteran marketer, who cut his teeth with big companies, and now (surprise!) has his own lead generation marketing firm. He knows a lot about a lot of things and he has put most of it in this book. Maybe a little too much. Did I mention it’s comprehensive?

The first few chapters are a really terrific primer in the nuts and bolts of lead gen. What it is, what it isn’t and why it matters. I’m not sure I quite agree with the assertion that there are two marketing activities: brand awareness and lead generation. I think there is one marketing activity, which is demand generation. Leads are a symptom of demand, not a separate thing. But that doesn’t change the fact that just because we’ve created demand, doesn’t mean everyone is going to give us money.

Each chapter in this book comes with a handy review bit at the end, which is good because if you’ve been a marketer for more than about ten minutes, you are going to get bored pretty fast with the basics here. If you’re just starting or you’re considering marketing as a deliberate career move, it’s not a bad place to start.

In fact, if the book had ended here, it would have been an excellent guide to the basics of lead generation, and one that would stand up nicely over the years with not a lot of revisions. But it doesn’t stop after Chapter Five. It keeps going. There are another ten chapters of tactics. Really, really, really granular tactics.

Everything from display ads to cold calling and two, yes two, chapters on social media. Each tactic is explained, deconstructed, analyzed and put very slowly back on the shelf. Which is not a bad thing but one that will date this book in about ten minutes. The minutiae behind Google ads and Twitter promotions changes hourly, which is pretty bad news for a book in analog format that seeks to explain them. I don’t doubt for a minute that Mr. Scott will update the book regularly, but I’m not sure it’s wise to try to keep up with social media bidding models in your spare time.

Then there’s the creative advice. I understand the temptation, after you’ve explained all about how to run an email campaign that drives to a webpage, to then assert some best practices about how to design said page, but that’s seriously a whole other book, and the advice here is rudimentary and not helpful.

There are a lot of very helpful bits of advice here, though. His guidance on testing campaigns, particularly SEM and email, is very good, and something I’m going to try. He advocates a lot of testing and tweaking and A/B tests, but suggests you hit a large piece of your list at the outset instead of doing what most of us do and dribbling it out in tiny bits. The logic is that you’ll learn a heck of a lot more if you test and learn on 25% of your list than on 5%.

He also makes a fine point about SEM, which most of us forget, and that is that it’s okay to finish second or even third. Chances are the first place winner paid way too much for their click-throughs and you are the beneficiary of a little keyword dumpster diving by pulling off great return-on-marketing-investment (ROMI) for way less money.

He also makes a very strong case for not letting sales people anywhere near their cold call scripts. Amen.

Mr. Scott has a long and distinguished career in strategy and management. He’s worked for electronics manufacturers, Fortune 500 companies and now owns a lead generation agency. So why are there so few examples or case studies in this book? Surely it’s more instructive to show us lead generation in action than to lecture on abstract concepts. The few examples we have are personal things like this one:

“When I leased my BMW I received a hat, a shirt and a coffee mug with a BMW logo on it. Over the term of the lease, I received branded BMW magazines with reports on new car models, customer testimonials, and travel articles… BMW also entered me into various drawings for road trip excursions in Europe. Also, a friend of mine who had just bought a BMW roadster received a set of branded luggage the fit perfectly in the trunk of her new car.”

Well, based on that massive sample size of two, I’m more convinced than ever that LTV is a problem we can solve with loot bags and propaganda instead of with great products and responsive service.

The direct mail section features a campaign the author “heard about” where a bank gave away toy helicopters, plus he once received an adorable thing in the mail from a marketing agency. Really? Dude, there are thousands of amazing and terrible lead generation campaigns in market on any given day. About 90% of them are entered, for no good reason, into marketing awards programs. It’s just not hard to find examples of great lead generation, and it’s disappointing that a book like this doesn’t find them and then do the leg work of showing us how they worked, or didn’t and why.

The final chapter on integrated lead generation marketing is a bit disappointing. Integrated marketing is one of those things we claim to do since all the tactics are listed on one spreadsheet that must make them integrated right? But it’s sadly something few of us pull off. This tiny chapter does little to tell us how to pull it off, and offers a strange example of fictitious car insurance campaigns that are simultaneous but not, to my mind, integrated.

The chapter on trade shows reads like it was written for someone who has just crawled out of a cave and started up a technology company. Skip it, unless you have literally never been to a trade show before.

The book is well written and the chapter summaries are helpful, but it’s a very dry read with few anecdotes, war stories, case studies or examples. This is not a way to kill time on a long flight or inspire you to brilliance on your next campaign. It’s a solid overview of a large subject that would benefit from a bit of focus, a lot of research and a bunch of success stories with metrics.

Bottom Line: If you’re looking for a comprehensive Marketing 101 text book, this one is a great place to start. If you’re past that and wanting real world examples of lead generation that works, you should look elsewhere.

The same is true of mail merges in Word. Once a year I spend a frustrating morning printing the same address 40 times on a sheet of labels or managing to get different addresses that don’t line up properly, or the damn template goes missing. Usually the whole thing just doesn’t work and I address them by hand.

Malcolm Gladwell says you need to put in 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. So I’m thinking that half of that makes you pretty good, a quarter of it means you can fake it and a tenth is probably the lower limit for doing whatever it is without adult supervision. That explains a lot about why I can’t do pivot tables, mail merges, embroidery or origami.

Let’s see how I rate for interviewing job applicants. Assuming I interview a dozen people a year for an hour each and I do that for 20 years, let’s see…that makes me …uh oh.

I am willing to bet that just as most managers have no idea how to write a job description, the majority of us have received exactly no training in how to recruit, interview or evaluate candidates. I blame HR.

For some reason, it is far easier to yell at managers about screwing up onboarding, training, managing and retaining new hires than it is to help them make the right decision in the first place. These are all important things, to be sure, but they are really only matter if the right bottom is in the right seat to begin with. They are mere formalities if the wrong bottom got through the gate while HR was being strategic.

That would be the last of our four gates. The one we guard, the one where somebody knew somebody who had coffee with somebody and ended up calling you at precisely the moment you were so bored in your Ethics at Work course that you were considering eating a paperclip just so they’d call an ambulance to get you out, but instead you agreed to have a meeting with this random person you would never meet anyway because by the time the appointment came around you would surely be dead of boredom.

But that didn’t happen. You met the person. The one ART rejected on account of keywords and your lousy job description, and who Bethany rejected because when she connected the dots between your lousy job description and their resume it didn’t make the pleasing igloo picture she was hoping for. And you liked that person. And it was time to bring them in for a real interview.

Or maybe Bethany finally found someone who could get past her dim understanding of the role and out of the sand bunkers of her behavioural questions so she sent them around to your gate. It’s also possible that ART managed to flag a decent resume and send them your way.

It matters not. The problem is, they’re in front of you and all you have for a map through this is your lousy job description and their resume. No training. No corporate guidelines and a vague sense that it’s wrong to ask about anything involving lady parts, but you can’t recall what.

What to do?

Do what thousands of untrained hiring managers have done before you:*

• Show up late. Not a cotton-candy-assed ten minutes; make them sit in the lobby for at least 20 and then in the airless meeting room for another ten.
• Forget to offer coffee or water
• Read their resume for the first time in the elevator on the way down
• Read the job description during the interview, for the first time since you wrote it
• Ask ridiculous questions like “where do you see yourself in ten years?” “What can you bring to ABC Company?” ”Why should we hire you?“
• Bring in the HR director who can pull out a computer and type through the entire conversation, periodically interrupting to update you on an unrelated project
• Give them an “assignment” like this one: based on the lousy job description, and your limited knowledge of the company, come in and present a comprehensive marketing plan for our new product.
• Don’t take a single note
• Don’t provide additional info like an organizational chart, to help the candidate sort out the role despite your lousy job description
• Inform them at the end of the interview that even though the lousy job description says senior manager, they thought it over and it’s really more of an analyst role
• After half an hour of making them read their resume aloud to you, pass them off to your equally unprepared colleague for a second look
• Wonder why they turned down your offer
• Blame HR

* Every single one of these things happened to me during my last job search.

So broken.

Visit any job board or any corporate website and pull out any job posting or job description, and you will see a disaster. You will see lists of duties that go on for pages, you will see requirements that no one person could ever fulfill in a lifetime, you will see preferences for this and demands for that and a chirpy little footer about how they value diversity but most certainly won’t call you. What you won’t see is any sense of priorities, opportunities to work on cool things or long-term possibilities for greatness. Are you still wondering why you have mediocre applicants?

There are two ways these ridiculous things come into being. The first is that they are automated. I once worked for a company where hiring managers were required (yes, required) to select from a set of standard job description templates before their role could be posted online. Can’t find one that matches your open role? Well just come as close as you can… They’re just a guideline.

The second way these come into being is Some Manager. Some Manager who has never seen a decent job description, and who has certainly received zero training about how to write one. If you are Some Manager, what can you do? HR is now strategic so don’t expect help there…

I know, why not go online, find something close and copy that? There’s the ticket! Now add in all the specific projects you want this person to tackle, list all the skills you and your team lack, demand a Nobel Prize in PhotoShop and make sure you ask for exceptional communication skills. Don’t worry, Bethany in HR will edit it and it’s just a guideline.

But here’s the problem: Bethany won’t edit that thing. It’s not in her job description. Bethany’s incompetent job description is all about keeping people out of the corporate East Gate by matching up their resume with your job description. Bethany doesn’t do guidelines, Bethany plays word search.

All of which assumes a resume even gets as far as Bethany. Chances are, the guard at the West Gate, ART, our automated recruiting technology, has turned your hideous list into a dataset that promptly rejected bunches of great applications because they didn’t match your stolen keywords. Algorithms don’t do guidelines either, it seems.

Welcome to the South Gate, the one your corporate city-state secures with incompetent job descriptions, guaranteed to impale even the most earnest applicant on the portcullis of your collective laziness and lack of imagination. It’s time, Lords and Ladies of the Spin Cycle, to teach ourselves a new skill: writing decent, professional job descriptions.

Your friends in the Productivity Prevention Department are probably pretty screwed on this one, but we’re marketers and we know how to sell things to people who don’t want them; we know how to write compelling copy; heck, we know how to define a value proposition for a soul-destroying market segmentation role.

It’s all about perspective. Bethany and ART and the other strategic sorts view job descriptions like screens. They’re there to keep the bugs out. As hiring managers, we need to think of them as spider webs: sticky enough to engage candidates, strong enough to hold them and capable of keeping them interested (or at least struggling) until it’s time to poison them and suck their insides out for lunch. Okay, this metaphor needs work. But if you’re still with me, you’ll agree that our job descriptions will look a lot better if we start from the point of view of selling something instead of preventing something.

On a day when you should be doing a budget or something tedious, try drafting a job description that:

• Fits on one standard page
• Does not include any of the following phrases: attends meetings, prepares reports, other duties as assigned (anyone who is surprised to find these things in the workplace probably won’t get too far in the interview process)
• Has no more than six areas of responsibility (fewer is better)
• Has five key skill requirements, and nothing stupid like proficiency with Outlook
• Lists no education requirements (I’m fairly certain high school students won’t be applying anyway, and it’s Bethany’s problem if they do)
• Lists no specific platforms and applications (you can train for those)
• Does not demand industry experience (marketing is a transferable skill, people)
• Does not say anything like this: “… works collaboratively with sales, IT, finance and shipping in a fast paced environment..” (First, it isn’t true and you know it, second, it isn’t interesting and third it doesn’t sell the job)
• Resists the urge to demand anyone be “an enthusiastic self-starter who works well with others” (that’s a job description for a Golden Retriever)

Next week, we’ll look at the final gate, the one with the bug zapper.

Great. now if you could just fill in a bit of contact information….

Lovely. Could we trouble you to fill in your work history, beginning with the most recent role and not skipping any fields at all? Go ahead, cut and paste it from your resume. Don’t worry, it looks like crap at this end too. But don’t let that stop you from fiddling with it for ages.

Well, that’s two hours you’re not getting back. But we’re almost done. Select your top ten skills from this list of 50,000 known skills and drag them into this adjacent list where you need to rank them. Only a few more steps…

Now select your college from this drop down list. And your major. And your minor. And your roommate’s GPA. That’s swell…

Now sign and date this declaration, and this one here, and this other one here. Did you attach your resume? That’s it, just click submit….

Oh, dear. You’ve missed a required field on screen 46. We’ll just reset the form to blank and send you back to try again.

Have you met ART? That would be the automated recruiting technology that guards the Western Gate to the corporate city-state where you want to work. Last week we met Bethany, who guards the Eastern Gate and keeps out the riff raff. Just in case you had it in your head to find a job inside without gong past Bethany, you can always s try your luck with ART.

ART must have seemed like a great idea at the time. Imagine, automating the tedious, time-consuming task of sifting through the dross to find those hidden gems who would be your next star employees? Who wouldn’t want that? What job-seeker wouldn’t want to spend hours updating your database for free with their information using clunky, slow software? This is the part where you stop wondering why all the employed superstars aren’t falling all over themselves to apply to your open positions. The only people with the time to put up with this crap are the ones you don’t want to hear from because it’s bad to be so unemployed you have time to apply for jobs.

And what hiring manager wouldn’t want a machine-vetted list of people who have the time and the patience to fill in a multi-page form? That’s a pretty hot skillset all on its own these days. But wait, there’s more. This fabulous system will rank all of the applicants using the aforementioned algorithm. Did we mention the algorithm was written by someone with the recruiting acumen of a tulip? See, that explains why you have 300 resumes from people who have worked in markets, as opposed to people who have worked in marketing.

And those highly skilled marketing people who are watching their salary continuance drain away while they fill in forms instead of having conversations, are swirling about at the bottom of the list, where you will never look, all because someone thought it was a great idea to automate the single most important decision any company can make (if I’ve lost you, that’s the one where they decide who to hire). Why not automate the purchase of motivational posters with pictures of rowers and geese? It won’t save as much money, but it will save a few souls.

Marketers: if you are staring at another stack of useless resumes, that came from an email address that doesn’t accept replies, then the problem is not a lack of candidates; the problem is a lack of imagination on your part. Shut down that stupid application and get off your arse and get on LinkedIn and find someone. I promise they are out there. Or better yet, send a note to your network and ask for recommendations from and about real people.

And when I’m in charge (which should be any day now), the first thing I am going to do is make all HR people everywhere reapply for their jobs using a fancy automated system.

Hmmmm I’d better draft the thank you screen. How does this sound?

Thank you for your interest in a human resources career with our company. Unfortunately, your qualifications do not match our current requirements. We will keep your resume on file for six months and will contact you should a suitable opportunity arise. Have a great day and please don’t smoke within 9 meters of the door.

Friends, before you scamper off in search of the next gate, let me warn you that it’s well guarded by a Useless Job Description. You’ve been warned.

The great cities of antiquity had walls. Walls were a terrific way to keep out unpleasant people who might depose the ruler, knock-up the debutantes and forget to make the bed on the way out. But I think we can agree that the city-states which rose to greatness owed more to who they let in than to who they kept out. Sure, the odd Vandal slips in with the poets, blacksmiths, bakers and video game designers, but on the whole, a locked-down city is a pretty dull and temporary place if all you do is pour boiling oil on everyone who rings the bell. Which brings me to the HR department. Stay with me.

Deep within the bustling centre of the modern equivalent of the city-state we affectionately call the workplace, there are countless managers stressing out about the talent shortage. Projects are not getting done, existing staff are starting to hoard crackers and empty desks are being used to store the holiday ornaments. Economists tell us North America has a giant productivity gap. Can’t think why.

Meanwhile, down at the East Gate, Bethany the 25-year-old HR analyst stands with her pointy Hello Kitty pike pole in hand, firm in her resolve to keep out the Wrong Sort of People. This is her job and nobody is getting past her until they satisfy Bethany of their worthiness for an interview. Once past the nasty, hissing swans in the moat below, job seekers are confronted with Bethany’s potentially lethal behavior-based screening questions. “Tell me,” she will whisper, “about a time when you thought of bringing a gun to work?” and on it will go.

Pity the job seeker who thinks the behavioural shibboleth is all they need to nail down. Bethany’s next instrument is the Job Description. Easily the least competently produced document in most organizations, This is two or three pages of random and mostly meaningless twaddle against which Bethany must measure all who pass before her. Never mind that Bethany doesn’t really understand what demand generation strategy design means, her job is to match the words on her little card to the resume in front of her. Only when Bethany shouts “Bingo!” does the job seeker gain entry.

And don’t try to ask Bethany any questions that aren’t in the Job Description:

“What is the work environment like?” you will ask.
“Why it’s a challenging and fast-paced environment,” she will say.
“What kind of marketing automation tools do you use?”
“Why, we use challenging and fast-paced tools.”.
“Do you serve muffins in breakfast meetings?”
“Only the challenging and fast-paced kind.

Well at least she’s consistent.

As unpleasant as Bethany might be, let’s not hate her for it. (we should hate her for being 25, though) She never got the memo about the projects and the crackers and so forth. She’s in HR and, dammit, she’s going to keep things safe. And just because Bethany is super cute and knows more emoticons than she does integers, it is wise not to underestimate how nasty she can be when you sneak a candidate in through the loading dock. Bethany most certainly will have none of that going on. She’ll find that candidate, even if they’ve already been hired, and make them tell her about a time they knew they were right but New Girl was on and they couldn’t say anything.

I am fairly certain that Pam has not met Bethany. All Pam knows is that she put in a requisition months ago, along with a job description she found in the elevator, and the few candidates they’ve sent along are totally not going to work out.

Now if the problem were only Bethany, it would be easy to solve: Bethany isn’t stupid and, without much effort, she can probably be turned into a decently informed recruiting machine who goes out and finds amazing applicants for all of the open roles. But we have some other gates in our corporate walls, and they are guarded just as fiercely. Next week we’ll look at the one guarded by ART. And I don’t mean Garfunkel. I mean Automated Recruiting Technology.

In case you were wondering, Ron and Pam had coffee last week and he’s going in for an interview. Don’t tell Bethany; it’ll just make her sad.

I also like old business books because they tend to be Apple-free and resist the urge to drool over or worship Steve (like he needs a last name). It would seem that 11 years is the threshold for AFBBs (Apple-Free Business Books. )

Weird Ideas That Work: 11-1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing and Sustaining Innovation by Robert I. Sutton, sadly, is not one of them, but Apple is a bit player, and the author is free to point out that before Steve Jobs came along, people did invent cool things.This book came into the world in 2002; into a remainder bin around 2008; onto my Leaning Tower of Things I’ve Been Meaning to Read around 2010 and to the top of the heap a few weeks ago.

The first five and a half ideas have to do with choosing who should and shouldn’t work in your business. Rule One is to choose people who are going to be slow to adapt to the prevailing corporate culture. These “slow learners” are necessary to remediate the status quo and the toxic systemic sycophancy ( my term) that prevents innovation. Loners and misfits are people to be hired, protected from the cultural missionaries and paired up with people who do understand the system well enough to actually get things done. Richard Fennyman, John Lennon and Francis Crick are famous slow learners.

Sutton’s half rule follows and it is this: hire people who make you uncomfortable or even those you dislike. If you’ve been finding it difficult to tell your Corporate Overlords apart, chances are your company isn’t driving new thinking by hiring people who are different enough, or even objectionable enough, to effect change. Our first Apple occurrence comes in here in the example of Jobs versus Mike Markkula. Jobs versus Mike Scott. Jobs versus,well, almost everyone else. Unless your discomfort in a new hire stems from the livestock they bring to work, you should consider shaking things up a little with more of them.

The second rule is one I suspect most of us won’t get away with but it goes something like this: if you interview someone and you think they are just what you might need in, say, a year or two, go ahead and hire them now just in case they come in handy. It doesn’t say how you explain a hire requisition for Spare Parts to the HR people.

I didn’t actually know the third idea was supposed to be weird. I have always used job interviews as a way to pick through a new brain for free. I figure since someone is sucking up a bunch of my time anyway, why not lob a few problems I can’t figure out at them. Or go fishing for some juicy industry and competitor gossip. Or see if they know how to fold fitted sheets. I just can’t hear that one enough.

The fourth idea isn’t weird anymore: I don’t think encouraging people to ignore and defy superiors and peers is new; it’s like encouraging them to steal office supplies and park badly– they’re going to do it anyway. But in this case the idea is not to make them feel bad about it. Atari games, HP monitors and even a technology to rescue stranded submariners are all the fruits of people who went ahead and did exactly what they were told not to. Sort of like a productive Charlie Sheen.

I like Idea Five a lot: find some happy people and get them to fight. Sometimes this is as simple as leaking the payroll to the entire company on a Friday night, though that rarely ends well. But if what you really want is innovation and not Cheez Whiz in your boss’s gas tank, try locking up a grumpy, contrary know-it-all without food for a while and then send them in to completely unhinge the bunch who are working so nicely together. The idea is that by fostering a rigourous or even ugly debate, the project team subjects itself to more scrutiny than it might if they were just giving each other foot massages and happy ohms. Me, I just love a good bun fight.

Idea Six suggests rewarding both success and failure, while punishing inaction. Now before you make popcorn and settle in to watch the public flogging of your Productivity Prevention Department, you should know that the punishment in question seems to be to simply cancel useless projects rather than actually making anyone suffer. This blows, I know, but Honda, SAS and HP have all used this idea successfully.

The seventh idea suggests you decide to do something that will probably fail, then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain. Despite sounding like the Mitt Romney campaign, our friends Galilleo, Geoffrey Ballard and the Xerox printer guys are all examples of people who made this work. The rule isn’t so much about rewarding willful stupidity with popsicles as it is about backing apparently risky projects, thinking the very happiest thoughts about them and, if needed, quietly killing them before they do too much damage.

Rule Eight asks us to Think of Some Ridiculous Things to do. By asking your people to think up the dumbest ideas, the intent is to help identify opportunities that maybe aren’t so dumb or those that are not just stupid but entirely likely to occur to somebody. Everything from Pet Rocks to Palm Pilots to space probes has emerged from deliberately putting absurdity and reality on a collision course and seeing what pops out. The trick here is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable enough to share their very dumbest ideas, but doesn’t necessarily think they should act on them. I think I’ve worked for that company before…

The ninth and tenth ideas deal with knowing when to get others involved in a project and when to give them something else to worry about. This is sort of like pulling the fire alarm every time there’s a budget review. Eventually, they’ll stop wondering who likes fire trucks more than budgets and leave you alone to overspend. The advice here is solid enough: protect your key projects from nosy people who could kill them too early, but remember to invite the Sniveling Classes in when you need an honest opinion or a little bit of animosity to move the team ahead.

The final idea, and it’s one that all companies, even Apple, should heed is not to spend too much time celebrating past success and depending on it as a predictor of anything good. IBM learned that the hard way, though interestingly, GM is held up in this book as an example of looking forward with its sad Saturn brand. Which is exactly the delicious irony I seek in old business books.

Bottom Line on this book: If you’re really stuck for some ideas to get innovation moving, this is an easy read and offers a few ideas that, while not weird, are probably still effective. If you’re really struggling, though, I’d put my money on Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro.

Last week we met some lazy, ill-equipped and dangerously eager sales people bungling the basics of a first meeting. Let’s see how they did on the second serve:

Dinner Party Rules Apply:
Your mother taught you that a thank you note for a dinner party had better be hitting your hosts’ hall table within 24 hours or whenever the food poisoning symptoms subside, whichever comes first. If this is news to you, it could explain why don’t get out much. The same is true in sales. You need to have that follow-up email screeching across the ether within one business day. There are three reasons for this. First, certain under-medicated middle-aged marketers have trouble remembering their children’s names; recalling a meeting that’s more than three days in the past is asking way too much. Second, it’s an appropriate expression of eagerness, but eagerness grows stale faster than a motivational poster, so better fire that thing along. Third, see above. It’s polite. You chewed up 30 minutes or more of someone’s time. That is a thing to which you are not otherwise entitled and therefore it deserves a big, fat thank you. Even if you screwed it up.

And It Was Going So Well…
I’m not sure why anyone would follow a terrible meeting with a terrible email, but this one was turning into a fun train wreck so I poured a coffee and watched. You may remember our friends who attempted to sell video services without any video, all the while demonstrating a complete ignorance about my company. Well this same crack team, which should have been filling my email with links to their riveting work, chose as well to give me this: “We felt after our meeting that we didn’t have enough factual information on why you should be utilizing video for your internal and external communications.” Is this my date sneaking out the back door before dessert? Well, good riddance. I say.

Oh, wait, there’s more: ” attached is a brief you can send if you require our services”. So you’ve left me at the table but I’m on the hook to get your car back from the valet? Fine. What’s this? A voice mail from you? Whatever can you want? Excuse me? Was that you asking if I have any projects you can quote on? I’m going with no.

My friend with the Powerpoint about how great it is to use iPads for selling sent me a note. He’s really happy we could have that chat and he could learn more about our company: like all the stuff he couldn’t be bothered to look up on Google. Well he can’t wait to participate in my next RFP, by which he must mean the agency review I’m not going to invite him to. Where is the Powerpoint he was updating? Where is all the relevant B2B work that they’ve allegedly stacked up? Must be holding up the trophy case

When You Scrape it off Your Boot, It’s a Good Idea Not to Step in it Again:
I spent some of last Friday in yet another pitch by some agency which had been circling the building for years. You’d think with all that time staring at our logo, they’d have been curious about what kind of work we do. Pretty sure if they had done that Google thing, they wouldn’t have spent 45 minutes showing me their campaigns for cars, condos, toe nail fungus clinics, transmission shops and a travel industry association’s dog. It didn’t end well. I used my ten minutes at the end to ask if they had any B2B experience. Oh, tons, it seems. Binders full. What about digital work? Oh, tons of that too. Facebook is apparently a great way to sell condos. “How is Vine being used by your client base?” I ask, hoping for something that doesn’t involve a model suite. Long silence. Exchanged glances. “What’s Vine” they say in unison.

Monday morning, here comes the do-over: lovely note, perfectly timed. They even attached a PDF. Must be all that B2B work they’ve done. Well, you can guess what it was. Cars, condos and toe nails.

Fault.

Loss of Service.

Sigh.

I’m in a new role these days, one that spends more than the old role. Plus I’ve been pretty fast and loose with my business card at trade shows recently, so it’s not really a surprise that I am sitting through more than my usual number of pitches lately.

What is new is how absolutely atrocious they are. Unprepared, inarticulate, unprofessional, unrealistic and just plain bad sales meetings are sad and unnecessary. If you are selling something, or supporting the people who sell something, here are some basics for not sucking at this.

1. It’s spelled G-O-O-G-L-E
And when you go there the day before your sales meeting, it will tell you things about your prospective customer. Things like what they do, how they make their money, who they sell things to, their history, their products and ever so much more. Armed with this information, you can sound like you tried and you can avoid wasting the meeting asking dumb questions or making insulting generalizations.

2. That’s LinkedIn, all one word
Why would you even think of meeting with someone you hadn’t previously checked out on LinkedIn? This nifty tool will help you understand the buyer’s background, so you needn’t waste precious meeting time patiently explaining how, say, newswires work to someone with 20 years of experience in PR. If they aren’t on LinkedIn, try that Google thing. If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you are either eleven or you need a new line of work.

3. The Thing About Different is that It’s Not the Same
Here are some things that were offered up to me recently as competitive differentiators:

• we have a form our clients fill out before we work on a project
• our creative people talk to each other
• we write things down
• our creative department has its own air hockey table
• we take the time to get to know our clients
• we have been in the same location for 14 years
• we have cases of awards (and, no doubt, binders full of women)

This sad list isn’t a symptom of stupid sales people; it’s all about lazy marketers.

4. Bring Your Shoes
I have complained about the shoemaker’s children thing in the past, and I still think it’s ridiculous when design companies work in ugly offices, creative agencies have terrible websites and printers don’t have business cards. This week, I had a pitch from a video production company during which we viewed not a single video. But there was a lovely pocket folder with a brochure in it. Even the follow up email managed not to include links to their work, though it helpfully included the form (see stunning differentiator above) and a suggestion to just go ahead and fill that in if I need some work done.

The very next day I sat through a printed out PowerPoint that purported to come from a top digital agency ( I know they’re a top agency on account of the two slides with all their awards on them). One of their claims to fame was building fancy interactive sales tools that work on iPads. I wondered, out loud, why I was looking at a PowerPoint on paper instead of a fancy demo on an iPad. I don’t recall the answer but he took the printout when he left. He should be mad at his marketing department for sending him out with that piece of crap.

5. That Thing About Open-Ended Questions? That’s a Real Thing
I deliberately book only 30 minutes when I’m meeting a squirrel for the first time. This is partly because I’m busy but mostly because I’m mean and I want to see what they do with 30 minutes. The ones who practice have no trouble. They do five minutes of business cards, hockey and social fishing then ask me things for ten minutes, then tell me things for ten minutes and, if they are any good, they ask me for a next step, shake my hand and go away.

The bad ones, like the dude I had last week, talk and talk and talk about their business and then ask which of the 300 things they do seem like a nice idea. I like to flip it back to them, like the steaming biomass it is, by asking which of our products they feel has the most resonance with our target markets. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no, I have never pulled the wings off anything that wasn’t first trussed and roasted.

6. Eagerness is not a KPI
It should be but then all those interns would get ideas. My boss recently scraped a squirrel off his plate and onto mine by email. That rep sent an email about ten seconds later. Then he called. Then he called again. Then he sent another email. Darn. Must have accidentally deleted all those messages because it me took a week to reply. Can’t think why.

Then there is the lady who really, really wants to talk to me. Like in ten minutes. It’s very nice that she set up a Webex, sent me the link, called me four times and then sent me a text message and a LinkedIn request all between 10 and 10:08. I’m not sure why she sounded so surprised that i was otherwise occupied at 10am on a Tuesday morning.

And don’t get me started on the follow up notes. Seriously. Or I won’t have anything to write about next week.

I probably spent hours constructing presentations about the new age of customer conversations, the inevitability of one-to-one marketing and, naturally, the immense efficiencies of this incredible new relationship tool.

Well now that the enthusiasm has been replaced by spam filters (that’s our fault, I think) and legislation and more legislation (I’ll blame bored lawyers there), marketers are walking away from email in favour of brighter, less regulated ways to interrupt and yell at people.

But is it quite time to pasture this old plough horse? I don’t think so. It’s probably time to go back to what it was always pretty good at and use it that way. If you’re having trouble remembering why it was such a great idea, recall that email is a two-way medium.

Take this a little further and consider that, for most business people, it’s the communication platform of choice. This is how most professionals ask for and receive information from other professionals. And sometimes it’s not about the holiday party or the fantasy football league. Sometimes, professional people want to buy stuff, ask a question, get help or, heaven help us, have a conversation with another professional person at a company, like, say, yours.

So let’s suppose I would like to buy a thing from your company, and let’s suppose I make my way to your website to ask about it. What would my experience be? Will I go to the Contact Us page and get a list of telephone numbers to call? Will I click on “Contact Sales” and get a lead form that requires (yes, requires) that I spit out my company’s revenue, employee count and IT budget before anyone will call me back? . When I click submit will the message go to Doris who left three years ago to start a mung bean business?

Please, please, please don’t make me have a Live Chat with some perky Millennial in New Brunswick.

Let’s pretend I do actually find a mailto link for your Sales or your Customer Abuse Department. What happens then? Does it go to a dedicated person with the mandate and training to reply or assign it to someone who can reply? Or does it swirl endlessly in the bowl of unqualified leads until it finally drops out the bottom because I didn’t follow up with a phone call? If you aren’t sure, try sending an email to your sales and support addresses (do it from home or get a buddy at an outside company to do it) and see what happens.

Can I share with you a nasty thing I do when I want to have an email conversation with a company? If I can’t find a general email address, I go to the Investor Relations page. It seems that for public companies, the only place that really, really wants to hear from the outside world is the IR department. It takes a very small amount of time to find a real person and a real email in there.

If I still can’t find a way in, or if the company is private, then I go one better and I look for a press release. Guess what you put at the bottom your press releases? Someone’s name, phone number and email address. Sometimes the someone is at your PR agency and sometimes the someone is you or your PR person. I’m not picky. Because I know that once real names and not department names are involved, there is an implied accountability that comes into play and more or less guarantees I’ll get a response.

This is good news for me but a fairly tragic waste of resources at your end. Which brings me to the real reason I think most of us don’t do anything about email as an effective two-way channel. It’s our back-ends.

You remember your back-end, don’t you? Once upon a time when email was new and marvelous, you had a lovely, tight back-end that got plenty of exercise and stayed in perfect form. Perhaps it was nice enough that other companies came over to gaze upon it with wonder. But time is cruel, especially to back-ends, and yours is probably looking pretty flabby these days, what with the Productivity Prevention Department shutting down your email accounts due to lack of use (don’t blame them, it probably took you months to notice).

Hours of yoga and power-walking await the marketer who truly wants this channel back on track. It means figuring out where the email addresses actually go and getting them rerouted to people who are still with the company (can I suggest it not be a summer student?). It means writing protocols and processes and reply scripts and internal SLAs and escalation paths (admit it, you love writing escalation paths).

But at the end of the day, what it really means is that your business customers can do what you promised so many years ago and that’s have a conversation with you on the platform of their choice, not your choice.

It must be the lack of rain, flies, noise and threat of Mongol hoards that makes us lazy and not very bright when it comes to trade shows. Last week we looked at four cardinal sins: eating, popcorn, staring and reading. This week, I have a couple of more to share and then I will move on to other marketing things:

Did You Want Some Privacy for That Call?
If you are expecting a customer to walk into your office at any minute, do you make or accept phone calls from other people? When that customer actually arrives, do you continue to talk, right in front of them, or do you have the decency to take your conversation someplace else? This dude did not get that memo. Just for fun, I watched for about five minutes as customers (remember, folks, these are the people with the money that you want to take) slowed down for a look and then moved on. Maybe it’s just that Canadians are too polite to interrupt a phone call, or maybe it’s just so over-the-top rude that we don’t want to do business with someone like that.

Hunting Wabbits:
One of my favourite designers, Bruce Chapman, reminded us in a comment last week, that another trade show distraction for Sales Squirrels is the regrettable presence of the Booth Bunny. To refresh your memory, these creatures are the 18-year-old students hired by unimaginative marketers (or highly imaginative sales people) to jiggle about the booth and stop traffic. Sadly, it’s not a bad way to stop traffic but it can attract the attention of fellow vendors, whose Squirrels keep turning up, um, nuts-in-hand (sorry) to have a chat. When they do that, the booth looks like this one. If someone walked into your office and found an empty reception area, how long do you think they would wait?

The Worst Ambush Ever:
You will recall that I am a fan of doing your marketing in the shadowy outskirts of large shows. If budgets are tight, I think it’s perfectly okay to skip the crappy booth and throw an amazing party or hospitality suite nearby. Show producers hate that but I don’t care. So I was quite pleased to be ambushed on my way into the convention centre one day by a young lady handing out these postcards for a relocation company. Clearly a booth was out of budget range. Sadly, so was a marketing person who can proofread. Folks, if you’re going to do street lamp marketing, you need to pull it off with some class. The back of this postcard is tragically bad too and does no favours for its poor brand.

And a Ray of Hope:

If you think I spend my time at shows looking only for bitchy blog fodder, you will be mostly right; but sometimes I see something that gives me hope. Something new, something different, something compelling. And here is such an example (apologies for the terrible photo). Hats off to the Ian Martin Group which chose to collect something at their booth instead of giving something away. The poster is hard to read but explains the company’s charitable giving program and asks passersby to throw in a little change. A vase full of coins, believe it or not, stops traffic dead. I hope they raised a ton of money.

Last year we saw Angry Birds staffing booths, coffee cups greeting visitors and what happens when you let marketing people do what they do best, which is not selling.

Let’s say it together: trade show booths are very, very, expensive inside sales calls that happen to have nicer carpet than your office. So why is there so little selling?

Why are we paying people to sit in spaces that cost more per square foot than an Apple Store in Chelsea so they can eat, read, drop popcorn and stare open-mouthed at prospective customers?

I think we need to apply a new, simpler standard. I think we need to ask ourselves the following question when it comes to booth stuff: would you do this if you were in the Real Office?

Eating:
In the Real Office, would you greet people in your boardroom by cramming a giant shawarma into your face and chasing it down with a Diet Coke while they look on, waiting for you to speak?

Reading:
I once worked in a bookstore. You’ll never guess the one thing we weren’t allowed to do in the store. That’s right, we weren’t allowed to read. Just as you wouldn’t sit in your Real Office lobby deep in a book while customers waited to see you.

So why would you sit in your booth, full of books as it is, and read?

Trust me, we know how to operate one of those new-fangled book things; you needn’t demonstrate.

Staring:
If somebody walked into your Real Office and said hello, would you stare at them without replying? When they smiled and asked what your company does, would you wordlessly hand them a brochure without making eye contact? If your co-worker saw this behaviour, would they keep typing away on their computer?

This is what happens when marketing people are in the booth. Say what you will about Sales Squirrels, they know how to stand up (seriously, you need to stand up), look at somebody, and, just for a giggle, sell them something. Marketing people just resent the interruption to their busy day on the trade show floor. The kicker on this one is that the lone Squirrel in the booth was speaking to someone ( i.e. doing his job) while watching me struggle to sell myself something, and nearly snapped an ankle lunging across the booth to plant a business card in my hand before I walked away with a brochure from the still-seated marketing twins.

There is no photo of this because I thought it rude to snap The Children of the Corn while they were ignoring me.

The Fuc*ing Popcorn:
How many times a year does your company throw popcorn on the floor of the Real Office lobby and invite customers in to drop more? Exactly. And this is why it’s a stupid idea at a trade show. It’s even dumber to order black carpet to go under your popcorn trolley. Your booth should not look like a multiplex on a Saturday afternoon.

Yet even as that New Budget Smell lingers in the hallways, the Sales Squirrels are already screwing the whole thing up.

Their nine-year-olds are re-templating your PowerPoint, their Call of Duty buddies are rewriting your sales letters and they’re offering discounts on things that are practically free to begin with. I’ll bet they’re already asking you for hockey tickets.

Go ahead. Swallow that Nyquil and have a little cry in the service elevator, if that takes the edge off. It’s all going to Hell, just as you knew it would. But this year, let’s try something different. Something more daring than hiding your Wednesday tequila in the telecoms room (we all remember how poorly that ended, don’t we?). Something that’ll have those Squirrels dropping their nuts all over the place. I know, let’s try saying “Yes” every now and again.

Here are four things you can start with:

Yes to the Mess:
Let them destroy the PowerPoint templates you paid some guy with a soul patch $10,000 to over-design. Does it matter, really, if they redo the whole thing in Brush Script bold? It’ll be ugly and illegible, but is it worth arguing about? Maybe not.

Yes to the Stress (balls):
Give them trinkets for heaven’s sake. You have the budget, and you’ll want to get that Cupboard O’ Crap nice and full before the Keebler Elves come looking for a reforecast in a month or two. Travel mugs are always nice, and you can’t go wrong with logoed golf balls. Imagine the Squirrely surprise when they ask for three dozen things and you produce them, as if by magic, in hours.

Yes to the Press:
Squirrels love press releases. If they had their way, you’d issue them every time they won the fantasy basketball league or repainted the parking lot. But we know releases about every account win or product update are bad media karma. That’s why you should go ahead and publish them but don’t release them. I wrote dozens of press releases at a software company that never saw the newswire. I simply stuck them on the website and emailed them to the Squirrels. Everyone went home happy.

Yes to the Integrated Cross-Functional Project Task Force:
These are not quite as painful as being on the social committee and much more fun than arguing about why the Squirrels can’t have a print-on-demand, fully-customized online direct mail generating system that also figures out their golf handicap. When they come asking for a better billing system or lead-scoring platform, set up a giant committee to write the business requirements document, technical specification, RFP, and critical path. A strategic “leak” to the Productivity Prevention Department should produce an under-employed project manager who can spin this thing like a well-sugared toddler for most of the year. Naturally, it’ll get cut in the third quarter, but at least you gave it a good ol’ try.

There are countless other things you can start saying “Yes” about in 2013, and I encourage us all to try. Not because it sends a positive vibe to the universe, but because it means that when you say “No”, they’ll take it seriously.

Say No to the Show:
Now, I love a trade show as much as the next Swag Hag, and my supply of branded lens cleaners and blinky things is sadly low, but I can’t honestly think of a bigger waste of money in a shorter amount of time than your average trade show. You can see my rants on the subject in the related links below, but suffice to say that I think most of these things are a pretty poor excuse for marketing, and we’re egged on by sales because, when all the booths, celebrity look-alikes and, heaven help us, popcorn machines are put away, all we really have is a bunch of names. And names are what the Squirrels collect in their pudgy little cheeks.

I will grant you that a good show is also a wonderful place to build credibility, discredit your competitors, and launch a product, but I would challenge you to drop one show from your calendar this year and try doing some other lead generation with the budget.

Say No to the Foursome:
A foursome in a golf tournament hosted by ANYONE is a sales expense. Period. It’s a big steak dinner with a sunburn. Make sales pay.

Say No to the Warm-and-Fuzzy:
I love warm and fuzzy. Kittens, orphans, rain forests—the whole shebang. I think corporations have a responsibility to fling rude amounts of money to help fix stuff. I am almost constantly approaching businesses for money in the course of my volunteer work, and I think marketers need to say “No” to the vast majority of these requests for one reason: it’s NOT marketing; it’s much more important than that. Decisions about supporting charitable organizations should not be made by sales, marketing, finance or anyone south of the Corporate Overlords. Our job is to push those things up there and be a relentless, annoying voice that urges them to get on with helping out. Let’s not confuse charitable giving, however, with sponsorship. That one is ours.

Say No to Sponsorships:
Not all sponsorships, but most of them. My experience is that the majority of them deliver very little value, and serve only to make us feel briefly noble. For the most part, sponsorships are a lot of phone calls, a vague agreement, a whopping big cheque and a lot of logo files being transferred. Then we sit around like the AV Club on prom night hoping someone will call and not being even slightly surprised that they don’t. If you’re over-run by sponsorship renewals you don’t even recall agreeing to in the first place, say “No” to every single one of them. Then make them earn their crust by showing you some value. Your logo on a banner in a hallway is not value. Neither is a speaking session at 4pm or having your name on the dessert table (see charitable giving above).

And here it comes: Diana knows me from soccer and can’t possibly endorse me for anything more than falling over; Sylvie is a freelancer I have worked with for years but who has never watched me build anything more than a pile of sugar packets once at an airport; and Martin serves with me on a volunteer board where whatever skills I may demonstrate, they don’t include corporate communications.

An interesting side-note is that Martin invariably endorses me a day or so after we disagree about something in a board meeting. Is an endorsement the social media equivalent of an apology or an offering?

I am a huge fan of LinkedIn, and not just because I’ve twice been unemployed in the past ten years. I have vigourously defended this platform against my too-cool-for-charcuterie friends and the likes of Jesse Hirsh, who described LinkedIn as a place for “old people who are afraid of Facebook” in this piece for CBC .

Good thing he doesn’t waste his time with 500+ followers and a bunch of endorsements. This profile is surely someone else’s.

But I’m just not sure I’m liking this endorsement thing. Far from being a place for people afraid of Facebook, I’m worried that LinkedIn is becoming a place run by people who are bored of Facebook. Endorsing the skills of your connections is feeling a lot like the random “Likes” that are the currency of Facebook credibility. But without any context, it looks like what it is: people gaming the platform to drive their own visibility.

Now I just feel cheap and a little bit grubby.

We need some rigour, here folks. Just as I think it’s a terrible idea to befriend anyone on LinkedIn that you haven’t actually met, it’s an equally terrible idea to go around endorsing people whose skills you can’t possibly evaluate. Let me help you. The following must be true before you can click the Endorse button:

• You must actually know the person you are endorsing (see my previous post is you are unclear about what this means)
• You must actually know what the skill you are endorsing means. If you have no idea what it looks like when somebody installs a new Large Hedron Collider, then you probably shouldn’t be commenting on how good they are at it.
• You must actually have seen your LinkedIn buddy do this thing you say they’re good at. “Well she’s really nice and makes the best guacamole” does not translate to “And she’s got outstanding budget planning abilities.” They are not related skills.
• Let me know if you want the guacamole recipe

So here is what I’m worried will happen if the Facebookification of LinkedIn continues unchecked. I’m worried that unwarranted endorsements are just the beginning of the end. I’m worried that someone is going to start a game called Cubefarm. In Cubefarm my bored friends will start sending me pivot tables and three-hole punches. They will expect me to care that they have successfully offended 80% of their customers or harvested the Q2 crop of trinkets. They will want me to join their Cubefarm. Side note: check out the Cubefarming blog here.

And then it’s a short, slippery slope to the equivalent of the Facebook Poke. Perhaps they’ll call that an “Interrupt”. That’ll be fun.

So let’s all promise that we’ll stop endorsing people just for the hell of it or to make them feel better or to rank a little higher for recruiters. Let’s use LinkedIn for good, not for time-wasting evil. That’s what YouTube is for.

And once you do that, if you’re Guy Kawasaki, you write another book about what you learned about self-publishing. Especially if you’re Guy Kawasaki, you make it the new gold standard for everything (and I mean everything) you need to know about writing, publishing and selling your book.

APE, which stands for Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur is more than an oddly-named how-to guide. It’s a comprehensive text on the dismal state of old-style publishing, the promising new world of self-publishing and the confusing, often frustrating road from great idea to successful book launch.

If you have children, you will remember the baby book that practically dissolved in your hands from constant use, and this will feel like familiar territory as you tackle your magnum opus.

The first bit of the book is part rant and part sorry tale of how traditional publishing has, for decades, stewed in the juices of its own self-importance and gross inefficiencies. If you don’t care, you can jump past this bit. In fact, the authors tell you early on to jump about in the book to the parts that can help you on any given day. But before you rocket out of the second chapter, do check out their links to Slush Pile Hell and So You Want to Write a Novel.

If you’re new to e-books, fear not! You’ll get a good tour of the platforms and offerings to be found in this new medium, and some great tips on all the equipment and software you’ll need to fire up your writing career. If you and MS Word have not previously agreed on style sheets, Kawasaki and Welch helpfully provide the template they used to format this book. Even if you’re an old pro at the publishing thing, give the Utilities list on page 48 a look for a list of tools that will make you a model of efficiency and fairly boring at parties.

There follows a chapter on the actual mechanics of getting down to writing and being productive about it. If you were expecting a lonely garret and sharing your outline with your Basset Hound, forget about it. Crowd–reviewing is the new way to get feedback:

“After I’ve taken my best shot at an outline, I place a copy on Google Docs and invite a few million close friends
to read it and send me the feedback. “

Interestingly, despite the automated, crowd-sourced, template world in which modern self-publishers exist, the advice for finishing the whole thing up is strictly old school. That’s right: print your final, take it to Starbucks and go at it with a red pen until your fingers bleed or they throw you out for crying in public.

The middle third of the book explains the minutiae of publishing your book. All that stuff those smug old-school publishers do as “value-added” are firmly in your control. Everything from editing to design to indexing is now your problem. Oh dear. Since most of us have exactly zero skills in those departments this book steps in with a rich set of resources to help us get through.

And while there are plenty of detailed assessments of online tools, there is a refreshing acknowledgement that sometimes you just need to pay an expert to do the hard stuff. Like editing:

“… every time I turn in the “final” copy of a book, I believe that it’s perfect. In APE’s case, upward of seventy-five
people reviewed the manuscript, and Shawn and I read it until we were sick of it. Take a wild guess how many
errors our copyeditor found. The answer is 1,300.”

Or design:

“Unless you’re a professional, hire a professional to create a great cover because, in spite of how the old saying
goes, you can judge a book by its cover. Or at very least (sic), people will judge a book by its cover.”

There is a comprehensive chapter on writing for style and clarity: though I doubt it will help a poor writer be a good one, it may remind a good writer to be better.

The next few chapters are all about how books are sold and distributed in the post-publisher age. Kawasaki and Welch take us through all sorts of business models from Kobo to Apple to author services and print-on-demand, with clear pros and cons for each. This is the bit of the book new authors, like terrified new parents, will return to over and over again. It’s well-researched, helpful, accessible and incredibly detailed. It will also be the bit that ages the fastest. There’s a particularly funny bit called Amazon from Cradle to Gratitude near the end of the second section, which illustrates how pervasive this company is to all aspects of writing and publishing.

The final third is about the delicate art of marketing your work, and Kawasaki is an expert at this bit. Which is good, because most publishers, despite their claims to the contrary, are pretty bad at it. The more specialized your subject matter and audience, the less likely your traditional publisher will be to have a clue about how to move copies.

This is a textbook on marketing anything with social media platforms, as it patiently explains infographics, branding, Twitter, online profile photos, etiquette, being nice to bloggers (well someone has to like us) and pretty much everything else you’d need to know.

Bottom Line:
If you have a manuscript you’ve been terrified to do anything about, this is a great book to kick you off. If you are ready to sit down and kick out a book, this is also a great place to start. If you think you might one day like to publish something, wait until you’re a little closer to actually doing it before you buy this book. The detail here is far too great to have a shelf life (is that ironic?) of much more than nine months. The platforms and players are simply too fluid in this space for APE to make much sense without an annual revision.

Title: APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur–How to Publish a Book (ISBN 978-0-9885231-1-1)
It’s $9.95 at Amazon and makes a heck of a Happy New Year gift to yourself.

Many marketers spend years in the asteroid belt around their Corporate mother-ships, never getting to play with the master brand. Yet they’re routinely charged with figuring out value propositions for cans of compressed air, software that helps other software manage software or industrial thickeners. If this is you and you are lost, here is a wonderful blog post from Marketing Experiments that’s full of helpful downloadable worksheets to get you going and make you look like the genius you really aren’t.

Got a Social Disease?
Not the kind caused by lemon gin and questionable standards; we’re talking about that new-fangled social media. Some of us in B2B climbed reluctantly on the social bandwagon last year and many of us promptly screwed it up. This post from Avenue L Marketing looks at the five things you’re probably doing wrong and offers some advice on how to fix them before anyone finds out.

Want to Get a Social Disease?
Just don’t yell at me until you’ve read this. It’s about social. It’s mostly about B2C. But it’s from Hubspot and we like them, remember? You will find at least a few things you can steal from their newest e-book: 55 Brands That Are Rocking Social with Visual Content. I’m pretty sure that’s the true spirit of social.

Good Data are Pretty Data. Or is it the Other Way Around?
According to this post from our friends at Eloqua, 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Which explains a lot about my recycling bin. But that’s not the point. This post is about infographics for marketers and it has a link to both a site and an e-book just chock full of the little beggars. I’m willing to bet that just one or two of these babies stuffed into that strategic plan you’re building will blow some minds. At the very least they will amuse the heck out of you while you procrastinate on that plan. Note: As I was writing this, Oracle announced it had bought Eloqua. I think I may have caused that. I apologize.

They Still Don’t Know What You Do
It doesn’t really matter that your mother doesn’t understand your job (mine thinks I work in make-your-own-wine shop). It’s almost okay that your Corporate Overlords don’t understand what you do. But according to Michael Brenner, there’s a fairly good chance that in our content-is-kicking-your-display-ad’s-ass world, even you may no longer have a decent grip on what you should be doing. I don’t entirely agree with this post but I like Michael and his ideas are always worth considering.

Whatever it is You Think you Do, it’s Probably Not This
Mitch Joel is always worth reading, even when he’s irritating. But this recent post at HBR is one of those stunning smacks across the back of the head that all of us need. Sure it’s about B2C, but the lessons are transferable and attention must be paid.

Don’t You Just Hate Top 10 Lists?
Like this one from the folks at Ragan Communications with the 10 best and 10 worst communicators of the year? Face it, you’re going to look. We all look. Unsurprisingly, most of the entries on this list got there via the U.S. election, but it’s a fun list.

Sally’s Still Missing from Email
About a year ago we discussed how to become the Sally Field of Email Marketing. Some of you are obviously not listening because poor Laura Hale Brockway (who writes a terrific blog at ImpertinentRemarks ) had to take time out of her busy day to show us the crap that’s been washing up in her Inbox. People, this really isn’t difficult.

Common Sense is Still Missing from Landing Pages
I don’t know why, almost 20 years into this, we can’t make landing pages that actually work. It isn’t hard. In fact, the less work you put into it, the more effective it’s likely to be. And this nifty visual from Formstack makes it simple enough even an exhausted marketer three non-alcoholic drinks into the office party can work it out.

And We Still Hate Our Customers
We’ve talked a lot about the sorry state of our Customer Abuse systems, and marketing’s terrible culpability in the whole thing. So in the grandest tradition of extended family holiday dinners everywhere, let’s use humour so we don’t have to deal with the depressing truth. Here is a great blog post from Corporate Executive Board with links to classic Customer Abuse pranks and humour.

Whatever you may be celebrating just now, I hope it’s fun. This little marketer is curling up with a stack of food porn and a giant bottle of Jameson’s. See you all in January.

Here is what authors of books like this should know:

1. If you must self-publish, hire an editor.
2. If you publish something like this book, and you did hire an editor, you should ask for your money back.
3. It’s bad enough that Tom Peters uses random fonts, styles and punctuation – you don’t need to do it too.
4. If you are going to promise “a set of Coach-sulting ERA²®” cards in the back of the book, you ought to actually have them there. Anything less is In-sulting in any ERA. Dude, you owe me a Jack Welch rookie card.
5. If you are going to write things like “…a myriad of surveys and assessments clearly show that 75% of employees have been mistreated by managers with low EQ”, you should cough up the sources.
6. Have something new to say. Anything at all.
7. OIC is not an acronym for “Oh, I seeeeee”.
8. Irony looks like this line on page 50: “Credibility is being true to your words that match actions.”
9. When you want to include a sample running dialogue between a leader and an employee, don’t call the employee Bryce and name the leader “Leader”. Only space aliens get away with that one.
10. Sample dialogue should sound like two people speaking, not like a couple of automated voice systems arguing over an Ikea order.
11. Sentences like this make readers wonder where you got your PhD. “Understanding how prospect’s (sic) ‘think’ (sic) equips you with the necessary tools to communicate better, establish trust and credibility to help prospects make a buying decision.”
12. — is not a type of punctuation.
13. The personal pronoun, “I” is always in upper case. Always. See number 2 above.
14. All sentences deserve a subject.

This book has three bookmarks in it promoting other books like this one. It also has a sticker on the front that says “Autographed Edition”. The autograph inside says “Your thinking is who you are.”I have no idea what that means either. It’s like a double rainbow that way.

In fact, I have no idea what this book means. It opens, ominously, with this: “The 21^st Century has ushered in a new era where leadership is superseding management, teaching is replaced by thinking and discovery, and “coaching” has become the new leadership paradigm.

Maybe if you make part of the sentence bold, it means something

We wander around in EQ-Land for a while and there’s a helpful self-evaluation EQ quiz at the back that doesn’t really reference anything. We visit the subconscious and learn that it doesn’t understand the word “not” so what we think we don’t want we end up wanting. Or maybe that’s backwards. No matter. On page 23 we learn that “Studies show that we have little to no control over what our brain processes. While we cannot control our thoughts — we can choose to rethink positively and control our ACTIONS by consciously deciding how to act.” We know this because Studies show it. But since we can’t control what we process I guess it doesn’t matter that there is no reference to the studies in question.

The rest of the book is an overview of coaching basics, which would be okay except that it’s so badly written, it’s almost impossible to focus on the message. For the most part the odd constructions and terrible grammar are just distracting. But there are far too many unintelligible sentences like this: How event will each be measured?

So who publishes a book like this? Here is what it says at the back: Robert is an internationally recognized executive coach, international consultant, facilitator, author of popular leadership books, business articles, keynote speaker at international conferences, talk show guest and adjunct professor at well-known universities.

Exactly. Don’t read this.

Lately, I have to fend off the “experiential” marketers and their 20 second facials. Or bypass the freshly-wrapped turnstiles, ticket booths and slow- moving transit employees promoting ketchup-flavoured chewing gum. But once in the subway it’s an advertising wasteland featuring questionable medical schools, government reminders to wash my hands and kind offers to help me lose weight while I eat cheese in front of the TV. B2B marketers know to steer their meagre budgets well clear of transit, don’t they?

Uh oh. Forgot about commuter trains. At least on commuter trains you have a pretty good chance of landing in front of a bored P-Cuber, G-Spotter, or F-Worder. Here are two ads, presumably targeting these folks, and guess what? The space cost just the same for each of them:

This is a good ad. It targets managers or IT people in medium-sized companies who are afraid (aren’t we all) of the day the Muppets finally turn on us and attack our server arrays. They’re aiming for a movie poster look and don’t quite get there but they manage to achieve a lot. The headline is: The World Can be Unpredictable and it’s nicely placed by the angry monster.

The subhead pops up in just the right spot and proposes the resolution as we travel downward to see our confident Productivity Prevention Engineer heading out for lunch. (If you click the image, you can see more).

It’s visually arresting and, trust me, there isn’t a lot else on that train car to look at. The strong visuals convey a pretty clear value proposition, even if you’re two rows back watching the guy across from you drool in his sleep.

The copy manages to stay away from cute and delivers the benefits statement in just a few words, which basically say that locusts and stupid people can mess with your systems and this company can help you mop up the mess and stop it from happening.

Here’s where I think they hit a home run. In the call to action we have our toll-free number and email and, interestingly, no URL. But the QR code, which has become my personal symbol for disappointing wastes of time, actually tells you what you are getting if you click. The copy tells you that you’ll see an interview with a customer talking about their high-availability solution. And it does. And it’s great.

What we’ve learned: Put a description beside your QR code to drive clicks.

Then there’s this ad:

Like the monsters it’s visually arresting. Who doesn’t want to be that guy flying across a beautiful ocean on his sailboard? I’ll bet everyone who looks at that ad knows deep down that dudes like that don’t ride trains like this. Imagine the Possibilities, the headline reads. Okay, okay, I’m imagining the heck out of the possibilities at 7:15am. Wait, the possibilities of what?

Oh, I see the possibilities of a rewarding career. As a windsurfer? Is that even a job?

I have to call to find out, apparently. And who’s John? Is he the windsurfer? He’s not. John is a sales guy at Freedom55 Financial. John wants you to open a Freedom55 office near you. Or, failing that, he just wants you to give him all your money to invest so one of you can go windsurfing (it’s not clear which). Dude, you could have said so in the ad. Or at least buried it in some mouse text at the bottom. Guess how inclined I am to call you now, John?

But even before a bored commuter indulges their diminished expectations by clicking the code thingy, this ad fails. There is no connection between the image and the product. There’s no connection between this ad and the product. There is some naïve creative thought that, on the strength of a compelling image and copy that echoes the Success Without College matchbook covers of my ill-spent youth, that a reader will take action.

What we’ve learned: Don’t do this.

I hope John didn’t pay too much for that campaign and shame on the agency who gave him that atrocious creative. They’re probably at the beach right now waiting for a decent onshore breeze.

You read that right, folks. Your Sales Squirrels are spending less than one-fifth of their time actually in front of customers. I’m sure you promptly went where I did which was, what the hell are they doing the other 82% of the time? So I did an informal survey of some buddies and asked them to stick their heads in the sales bullpens and find out. Here, with no statistical validity whatsoever, is what we determined:

• Spraying Febreeze on their telephone headsets -2%
• Setting up the fantasy football league – 2%
• Arguing about the fantasy football league – 3%
• Bragging about their prowess in the fantasy football league -5%
• Watching Dumb Ways to Die (or just about anything else) on YouTube (thanks to my Friend Eve-Lynn for this one) – 5%
• Glaring at the expense reporting application (hoping perhaps that money will come out of the screen) – 3%
• Complaining about product delays – 9%
• Mucking with the corporate PowerPoint you spent days getting approved – 2%
• Re-designing the collateral you spent weeks getting approved – 2%
• Not entering leads and contact information into the lead and contact management system- 4%
• Rejecting perfectly good leads because they came from the website- 3%
• Looking at new golf bags online -1%

I know at least one of you just did the math on that and, despite a Liberal Arts background, realized it adds only to half of the non-customer time. And that’s actually good news because I very much doubt we can do anything about this 41%. Here’s where I think the rest goes:

• Waiting for contract approvals from the Hand Wringers
• Waiting for proposals from the proposal writers
• Waiting for discount approvals from the Keebler Elves
• Waiting for pricing from marketing
• Waiting for sales materials from marketing
• Waiting for positioning and scripting from marketing
• Waiting for leads they can use from, you guessed it, marketing

Oops. Now I know that what we consider a pricing document, most Sales Squirrels consider a starting point for negotiating with us; and I know that sales materials and scripts aren’t actually necessary if you know the product.

I also know that there is a vigourous debate in most companies around what constitutes a lead. Marketing tends to come down on the side of anything furry and dead, whereas sales would rather see something plucked, glazed and trussed with little paper hats on the drumsticks.

So let’s agree instead that part of marketing’s role is to keep sales people busy doing things that don’t involve Nerf products. For 2013, pick one thing that could put sales people in front of customers another 2% of the time. Fix a broken process, speed up another process, help the Keebler Elves off the discount ledge and work on new guidelines (I know the Squirrels will ignore them, but not right away). Two percent more time in front of customers could mean serious revenue or better retention or nothing much at all. But two percent less time scurrying about in the office has a value all its own.

I’ll bet you’ve got one of these Q4 offsite things in your calendar, don’t you? Did they make you “whiteboard” the challenges of the day? Are the flip charts your breakout group spent hours filling still sitting in some hotel meeting room? Or did you cheat and use the flip charts left behind by the previous group? Don’t worry; nobody noticed.

Did they outsource your engagement to a motivational speaker? How was the team building mini-golf? I thought so. Now that you’ve solved the United Way campaign, was your creative genius used to raise the bar on executive PowerPoint presentations? Well at least the food was really excellent, right?

Friends, I have terrible news. While you were busy trying to build a submarine out of pencil shavings and a shower cap, the 2013 ball was being snapped to you. All those strategy meetings, budget fights, organizational charts and urine-soaked corners come to this: the beginning of the year. And, if we do nothing else, we need to get this sucker off the ground in a big, big way. Which means only one thing — break out the big tent and clear the cow patties off the common, it’s time for a revival meeting!

Yes, Brothers and Sisters of the Spin Cycle, iron those vestments, tune up the choir, wipe off the babies and rent some chairs. Marketing needs to climb into the pulpit and start preaching the gospel of business growth and profitability.

We need to bring our flock into the great tent of Sales Kick-Off and show them the Promised Land of the New Fiscal Year. And what’s more fun than a flock of squirrels with a crushing quota?

Forget about the milk, leave the honey for the vegan tea drinkers—you need to give your flock the religion with pulpit-thumping sermons from your product development people, branding guys, market research gurus, marketing geniuses and even the Squirrel Kings themselves. Heck, that Q4 leadership thing was just a dress rehearsal for the thundering Shock & Awe Ministry Quota Crusher Crusade you’re planning.

Put away the flipchart markers, hire the light and sound guys and make really, really pretty presentations with lots of video and a thumping bass and make sure you include this stuff:

Product roadmaps:

Start with this and don’t let the product guys weasel out, and they will try. Sales sells to a future state, never to a present one. They need to know what’s coming and more or less when. Of course you’re going to miss some launch dates. Of course half the features will be de-scoped before the thing ever hits QA, but that’s not what you’re selling here. You’re selling the ability of the company to innovate and respond to the market. Squirrels love that stuff because they need to believe that stuff. It’s what gets them out of the hot tub and into their suits every day. Wishy-washy Gantt charts don’t cut it here – this is demo time, folks! Make the geeks put on a clean shirt and a tie without spray cheese residue and do their best Steve Jobs glower.

Brand value propositions:

Value propositions are like old-fashioned toy cars. You need to pick them up every so often and turn the key a bunch of times to remind everyone what they do and what they sound like. Sales Squirrels spend a lot of their time in the nasty details of deals and meetings and sometimes they forget the higher-order mission of the whole endeavour. You need the choir to make this joyful noise over and over and over again throughout your Shock & Awe Ministry Quota Crusher Crusade.

Q1 creative:

This is the part where even your amazing PowerPoint prowess is simply not enough. It doesn’t matter if your creative consists of three banner ads and an updated press release template, you need to make it look like the King James version of the media buy. It needs to crackle with passion, creativity, newness and moving pictures. Get the agency to earn some of its retainer by putting together a reel for you. Better still, make the agency present it.

Compensation plan details:

By the end of the first day, the Squirrels will be so tired from witnessing, they won’t know which end is up. This is where you walk them through the compensation plan. It’s boring, highly political and almost never goes well. That’s why you need to get someone from Finance to do it. Coax them in with a pretty robe and a hymnal, then lock the door and run. You never liked the finance guys much anyway, did you?

Marketing Programs:

The keys to salvation or at least a spot on the Sales Champs cruise are in the marketing programs. All those special discounts, bundles, extra quota credits and free toaster ovens with every purchase are what the Squirrels believe close deals. We don’t need to correct this thinking because then we have some existential explaining to do. Our job is to sell the marketing to sales. Make your Marketing VP spend a morning walking through all the fun programs for Q1 and Q2. Speak quickly, ask questions, throw golf shirts into the audience and make sure you play some Pointer Sisters music and it will all end well.

Competitive landscape:

Here is what the Squirrels know about the competition: They are waaaaay better than you are. Their products have more features, their sales quotas are lower, their commissions are higher, and their products are practically free. They know this based on a sample size of one – that being the last deal they lost. This is where you dust off that research person and ask them to put some very little words on a slide and explain very slowly, once again, who the competitors are, what they sell, how much they sell it for and why, despite such towering opposition, we continue to fight the powers of darkness and lead our customer segments to Revenue Ever-Lasting.

Competitive positioning:

The lesson, my friends, endeth not there. Now that we have laid out the manifold sins and wickedness of the competition, we need to arm our Squirrel Soldiers with the gospel that will lead bring the customers to our enlightened corner of things. This is a job for the Squirrel King. Only he or she (oddly they’re still Kings when they’re women) will shake the tent poles with incandescent rhetoric bright shining as the sun that will have them on their feet and ready to fight for the nuts of righteousness. If they end up speaking up in tongues and aspirating an olive, you’ve probably got a winner on your hands.

Go unlock the church.

Onward, Squirrel Soldiers.

Amen.

So with enormous respect for the good works of United Way and the corporate fundraising teams they rely on, I will answer on behalf of the marketing department in your company:

• No, I don’t have 7,832 branded items you can use for prizes.
• No, I will not help you set up your mini golf tournament on the 11th floor.
• No, I don’t have a “connection” who will cough up a family cruise for the top fundraiser.
• No, I don’t have any funky, cool, revolutionary or outside-the-box ideas for your campaign.

If I had any of those things, guess what? I’d be on the fu@#ing committee.

I don’t know why but well beyond dismal United Way campaigns, it seems that marketers get stuck with the larger charitable to do list. If this is you, here are my tips:

Step One: Try as hard as you can to punt ownership to someone else: HR, Corporate Communications, Shipping & Receiving all come to mind.

Step Two: If you are unsuccessful, divide the budget into thirds. If you have no budget, you are off the hook.

Step Three: Give one third to your local charity teams (HR can help you set these up; or just recycle the social committee; they clearly have time on their hands). This is what funds hockey team jerseys, ads in the high school yearbook, the hole-in-one contest in the Rotary golf tournament and other worthy local things.

Step Four: Put another third into an emergency fund. This gives you a way to respond to natural disasters, the CEO’s mother’s sudden interest in Saw-whet owl habitat and a little free cash to help out here and there with matching grants.

Step Five: Take the final third and start thinking about these things:

• What problems do you, as a company, solve?
• Whom do you ultimately serve? Techies? Children? Contractors? Small business owners?
• With what issues do these ultimate users, have an emotional connection? Illiteracy? Access to technology?
• Which organizations work to solve these issues? Take the religious and political organizations off your list.
• Which of these receive money from your competitors? Take them off the list.
• Which of the rest seem to be run by crazy people or Shih Tzus? Take them off the list

Step Six: You should now have a short list of organizations with actual charitable status, a relevant mission and no competing sponsors. Pick three of these and meet with them in person, ideally in their office (check for Shih Tzus). Ask them to design a three-year program with your budget. Make them come back with a detailed plan of how they (not you) will administer your program, measure its impact, support your brand, change the world, communicate your generosity to the community and help your Corporate Overlords score some karmic points (a board seat is a nice start, so are tickets to their fancy dinner)

Step Seven: Pick a charity. Present it to the Overlords. If you can bring a tear-jerking video to the presentation, do it. Once approved, write the press release, set up a quarterly review and get back to the toilets; the United Way committee is still looking for you.

On the left, we have things like the $300 scotch my very pregnant ( and incidentally tea-totaling) friend received from an agency one year. Turns out the distributor was a client. Now there is nothing wrong with a nice bottle, and I will be happy to help you should you find yourself infested with such things, but a gift like that violates two rules: first, nobody gave the slightest thought to the person receiving it, and second it’s too much money. Most companies have rules about what and how much their employees can receive in the way of graft; you might want to make gentle enquiries about it before you lob Superbowl tickets over the wall.

Other things you’ll find on Cape Inappropriate include:

• car blankets with your company logo
• anything else with your company logo
• your products
• make up
• jewellery
• small animals
• large animals
• golf club memberships
• airplane tickets
• real estate

These are not things most of us are in the position to give or receive. The real action of the holiday season takes place on Are You Kidding Island. This is the home of disorganized, misinformed and innocent gift-pickers. This is where ideas that sound inspired in October don’t look so nice when the shipment arrives in early December. Here are some souvenirs I have personally received from Are You Kidding Island:

• A hockey puck with Canadian and U.S. flags on it
• A toque
• A gift certificate for cheese
• A bouncy ball with a flashy light and the logo of a long-past trade show on it
• A hugely inappropriate calendar
• A Santa key ring

The problem with Are You Kidding Island is that nobody there spends a lot of time actually thinking about gift recipients. They are too busy sampling the delights of supplier catalogues and washing it down with Budget Juice. A few hours of that produces statements that sound like these:

“Let’s just clean out the trinket closet this year”

“Who doesn’t love chenille?

“My cousin has a store that sells those.”

“Let’s think outside the box this year.”

If you’re hearing that, you’re on Are You Kidding Island (AYKI). My first whiff of AYKI came many, many years ago when, on returning to the office after the holidays we were greeted to a vile, vile odour. Convinced one of our senior execs had crawled under a desk to die, we started opening offices. Sure enough, after about a dozen offices, we found our victim. One of our customers was thinking outside the box (and the cranium, it turns out) and had shipped ducks he’d shot himself to his executive buddies. Naturally, he didn’t label the gifts, just wrapped up a bunch of frozen ducks and couriered them out. Never, obviously, considering that some people would be away and their gifts would languish, thaw and rot. Fowl play confirmed.

Another mistake that wanders around on AYKI is the one-gift-fits-all philosophy. That may make sense where you sell one thing and the value of the sale doesn’t vary a lot. But most businesses have a pretty great range of customers and their attendant LTVs (lifetime values). So why would you send the same thing to a customer who produces $1,000 in revenue per year as you do to the customer cranking over a few hundred thousand?

I received this beautiful calendar last year from a supplier that pockets seven figures from my company. Granted, not just from me, but if this is what you think of my $200,000 contribution to your top line, then I am not feeling the love, guys.

My advice is to come up with three tiers of gift baskets for your Sales Squirrels. Something tasteful and small for your newer or lower value customers, something that looks a lot more expensive than it is for your top customers, and a thing in the middle. And I recommend you make it edible, non-perishable and outsource the whole thing.

If you’ve ever received a gift basket, you know they look more expensive than they really are. Plus there are dozens of companies with the ability to put them together and ship them to arrive in decent condition and on time. No more cellophane parties for you! Just put in your order and send over the shipping list.

Here is another reason why I like gift baskets: they can be shared. When you send a big, juicy basket of gourmet stuff to a customer, if they’re any kind of decent person at all, they’ll open it up and share it with their whole team. The vegans, allergics and pregnant people each get a little something they can use and nobody feels left out. Remember, these are the people who will be signing your contract a few years down the road. A little tin of fois gras now, can pay off later.

My final bit of advice about the whole thing is to let the Sales Squirrels decide who gets what. I know, I know, they’ll want everyone will get the biggest, nicest basket but they will also know (or ought to) who is considering a supplier change just now and might need a nicer-than-called -for gift. They will also know who can’t accept gifts under any circumstances and who is about to fire your company and needs either a bribe or a punishment.

And isn’t that what the holidays are all about?

Sales will respond thus: “Go away, Marketing Monkey, we’re doing our bit to hold the line on expenses. We will not be giving gifts to our customers this year.”

But we know that’s just Act One. Keep those catalogues handy, because about a month from now, the first of the Sales Squirrels will hit quota, bury his nuts and start looking around for a customer to take to lunch. You can expect a call the next day that sounds a little like this: “Yo, marketing person! King of the Squirrels here. Say, I’m taking my customer to lunch tomorrow and was planning to give him a little gift to thank him for paying your salary over the past year.”

Naturally, you’ll smugly forward the previous message about expenses and holding the line and all that, but you’ll also be reaching for the catalogue because you know what’s next: The Pas de Deux of Exceptionalities. This usually takes the form of a huffy note pointing out that while gifts are an extravagance, some customers really ought to be recognized with a little something. And that something had better be festive and it had better have a logo on it and it had better be here next Tuesday.

The I-Told-You-So Dance you’ll do through the sales bullpen can be performed as either a solo or a line-dance involving clogs. Either way, you don’t really win because you’re stuck trying to order things that sold out weeks ago, while at the same time writing a letter to other clients explaining that in lieu of holiday cards, you’re donating to charity this year. Now that’s classy too.

So much needless debate goes on around holiday greetings and gifts and parties. Thank goodness I’m here to set things straight for you. Here it is: Give gifts and greeting cards to your customers this year and every year. Do you know why? Because you have a reason to reach out to them. A real reason, not a pretend one like you use to inundate them with junk mail, up-sells, cross-sells and telemarketers.

The end of the calendar year is a natural time to pause and reflect. Things slow down a little for most of us. Why wouldn’t you use that brief interlude to do the one thing you probably haven’t managed all year: saying thank you to your customers for spending money with you?

At the very least, every, single one of your customers should receive a holiday card in the mail. It should be a nice one, it should be signed by at least one human being in your company and it should arrive between December 1^st and 15^th. If you can order it from a charity such as UNICEF then that’s good too.

Decent E-cards are fine if you are a) a teenaged entrepreneur b) an entirely online venture with no customer-facing people c) just reading this and it’s December 15th. Otherwise, let’s do this up old style with a paper card.

If possible, your customers should each receive a phone call from their sales rep wishing them a happy holiday and thanking them for their business. Some customers, probably not all of them, but some of them, should receive a gift. We’ll talk about what those gifts should look like next week.

Please, please, please don’t advertise your abject laziness and lack of creativity by sending a form letter suggesting you have done the noble act of giving to charity instead of sending cards. Or that your staff have forgone their Christmas party in favour of packing boxes at the food bank. That’s bullsh*t and your customers know it.

Including postage, a greeting card probably costs about a buck. So let’s assume you have 5,000 customers. Gee, that’s less than you spent on golf balls this year, and we all know it and so do your customers. So go ahead and send your cards AND write a big, fat cheque to a charity that needs it. And do us all a favour and don’t tell us. We assume that successful companies pay it back.

Staff going to the food bank or collecting warm coats or serving in a soup kitchen? Great. That’s part of being a member of a community. Why are you telling your customers? If they’re part of the same community, chances are you’ll see them out there helping too. Let’s make a promise to stop using our acts of kindness as marketing messages. It demeans everything. And that goes for pink ribbons on yogurt. I’m coming after you too.

Many of us are going to spend at least one morning this week slurping down under-cooked hotel eggs and listening to patronizing speeches to small business while we network with other big business marketers and mid-level politicians. Guess who won’t be in the room? Guess who won’t be looking splendid in a yellow suit on a barge? Small business owners, that’s who. They aren’t at the small business events. They’re where they ought to be in their businesses, running things and trying to stay out of our gun sights as yet another Small Business Week declares open season on them in the form of endless phone solicitations, stuffed mailboxes and nasty junk in their email.

Those of us whose bonus depends on moving some products to this market will be anxious to count the revenue from this season. And most of us will be disappointed. Sure, we’ll spike some sales because we’ve conditioned the market to expect a discount in October. And sure, we’ll add some good leads to the funnel from our phone harassment campaigns and maybe from our events. But mostly we’ll be wondering why the small business shows were full of big business people and consultants and why these bloody people won’t obey the call to action on the postcard we spent most of July getting approved.

The reason why, and also the secret to selling to small business is that they don’t have time. Study after study reveals that the biggest challenge facing small business owners is having enough time to get everything done properly. In fact, most will pay more for a product if it gives them back a little bit of time. So the idea that a small business owner would blow off a valuable morning at a Small Business Week event is ludicrous, as is attending almost all trade shows, particularly the ones for small businesses. Equally ludicrous, is spending time with your annoying telemarketers, your unannounced door-to-door guy, your spam or your elaborate junk mail package.

The marketers who will miss their numbers this fall are the ones who continue to work under the dangerous assumptions that small business owners are stingy, uninformed, naïve and waiting patiently for a trusted advisor to burst through the door and sort it all out for them.

The smart marketers will be the ones who stop offering runny eggs and start offering a ROTI. They’ll be the ones who can position their products and services with a succinct Return On Time Invested (ROTI) discussion. Here are some ways to do that:

• Quantify how your product/service saves time over whatever they use now (use real numbers, you can actually prove and stop hiding behind percentages – if you can save them 30 minutes a day, that’s a very compelling thing)
• Show how your installation or delivery is faster than the competition’s
• Demonstrate that your Customer Abuse Department will keep them on the phone for less time than the competition’s – consider extending the service hours – many small business owners tackle their paperwork at night and on weekends
• Make sure you have a live chat support service so the customer can multi-task while you help them
• Create instructions, statements and invoices that small business owners can read and understand quickly
• Offer to train their staff for free on your solution or even on related issues like compliance or best practices
• Have your sales people make appointments, show up on time and get out of the customer’s face quickly
• Demonstrate a respect for their time by sending simple junk mail
• Build a website that’s easily navigated from a smart phone or a tablet
• Get short testimonials from other customers that speak to ROTI
• Stop talking TCO (total cost of ownership) and start talking ROTI
• Send brief, tightly written updates instead of ponderous, boring newsletters and white papers
• Try marketing to small businesses the other 11 months of the year

So if you’re going to participate in the cruel hunt that is Small Business Week, remember to take an entrepreneur out for a little ROTI.

Alas, no bodies. Just a business fable.

I blame Patrick Lencioni for the rise of puerile business fables. And this starts out as a fine example of the genre. There’s the wise, seasoned practitioner role (why are these characters always tall and always men?) and there are the troubled but passionate professionals, about whom we find out far too much. There are detailed descriptions or sandwiches too. All of which serves to introduce the topic of why 68 percent of corporate change initiatives fail.

Ok. I’ll play along. It would seem, after dozens of tedious pages about rain, that change fails because organizationally we are not paying attention to managing the innate human resistance to it. People have a baked-in tendency to form attachments to other people (think Mummy) and objects ( think Mumm’s). Or is that a substance? Either way, the issue is that change or the threat of change or a really robust gossip mill, can trigger in all of us an atavistic dread of loss.

If we get nervous enough, we can end up with a rollicking case of anacritic depression. Yikes!

But mostly change brings on one of the following fun workplace conditions:

• Anxiety
• Frustration
• Retardation of development
• Rejection of environment
• Refusal to participate
• Withdrawal

And you thought that was your last holiday party planning meeting.

Now each of these symptoms of change resistance can be identified by signature behaviours. Like these:

• Decreased morale
• Decreased productivity
• Decreased motivation
• Increased conflict
• Increased absenteeism
• Increased turnover

Happily, Table 3 will tell you that anxiety requires leadership, training will help with frustration, individual coaching is the thing for decreased motivation and to fix conflict, you’ll want to communicate. Engagement will fix up that refusal to participate and a little monitoring should deal with your withdrawn staff.

Problem solved? Well not really because the authors really want to sell you their consulting services, which is why this book falls short. If 68 percent of change efforts fail, what does the other 32 percent look like? I’m a lot less interested in what it looks like when it goes wrong than in real-world examples of how it can go right.

And this is just where we go from over-written fable (still no bodies) straight to the other ditch full of scientists and studies and clinical evaluations and refutations and papers and speeches. In other words all the stuff that business fables are supposed to make digestible to the average marketer. Like this:

“Similary, Bowlby lists the following attachment behavious resulting form separation and/or loss: ‘…protest…despair…detached…’ (1973, 26). Elsewhere, he also lists ‘agitation…, crying, rejection of comforting gestures, and axienty at a level that may lead to panic…lethargy…reductions in the level of activity, and altered sleeping and eating behavior…detached…” (Ziefman and Hazan 2008, 443). and ‘…numbness, yearning and protest, disorganization and despair’ (Bretherton 1992, 13).

Numbness, yearning, protest, despair! I don’t know about you but that sounds a lot like my last performance review.

If you plow through you find the meat of the whole thing: we don’t fear change, we fear loss. The only way to get people past their real or perceived loss of objects, leaders,lucite, software, processes, traditions, blankets, or coveted seats by the window is to find a temporary substitution until the change is fully implemented. Kind of like giving the baby a fan belt to chew on after you toss the binky.

The way to know what you need to substitute is by hiring some experts to measure your disaster of a change initiative on the old LOE (loss of effectiveness) Index. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, this, and some qualitative interviews will tell you just how fu*cked is your cluster.

Good things about this book: it confirms a few things you’ve always known about your coworkers and puts up some good warning signs for your next big reorg. Bad things: it isn’t nice to read, and the only actionable thing in it is to call a consultant.

Personally, if I want to know what kind of misery lies ahead in Corporate Change Land, I refer to my dog-eared copy of Knoster’s chart. Then I have a little cry, put on my big girl hazmat suit and get on with it.