Strategic marketing breakthrough – Point of Decision

Earlier I commented on VC Fred Wilson’s smart quote “Marketing is for companies who have sucky products” and the failure of companies that focus on tactical programs when they should be thinking strategic.  I wrote:

Marketing is THE customer expert and advocate. … Marketing ensures that the product has the right features, optimal positioning, pricing, packaging, and promotion, and a market and customer-oriented product roadmap.

That’s only part of the solution.

For far too long marketing has been a custom, personnel-intensive, and thus costly part of company operations.  The lack of coupling between marketing and sales is the single largest failure, if not albatross, of Marketing today.

This is especially so at high performance companies that develop tech products that generate exponential returns or tighten the supply chain to wring out a magnitude of inefficiency and costs.  How can the Marketing department be just as responsive and productive?

The answer is not the “sucky” marketing that Fred Wilson so accurately wrote about.  Yes, you’ve got to have tactical marketing programs like a web site, newsletter, blog, social media, PR, etc.  But they’re akin to the modules of a software program – necessary but not the strategic organizational driver that’s going to make your business a huge success.

Let’s step back and look at this from an evolutionary perspective.

• Fair marketing is product-driven.
• Decent marketing is sales-driven.
• Good marketing is customer-driven.

There is a clear trend that’s moving from me the provider to you the customer.  The next step is to dive even further into the customer to understand not just what he wants and needs, but how he makes decisions.

A typical product close is not one decision but a series of customer buying decisions that have their own individual marketing and sales processes.

The implementation of this Point of Decision  (really, Decisions) approach  is through a marketing system with  campaigns that  automatically and seamlessly work the lead through the sales ladder, deliver the offer, and promote the customer to the campaign on the next level and ultimately your target market.

One example that scratches the surface of Point of Decision is the free version of many software and web services today.

Point of Decision avoids the brute (and blunt) force trauma associated with much of today’s marketing with sales conversion rates that are a fraction of a percent. It’s a natural customer-centric process that puts the customer in control, while subtly selling at the same time.  As your prospect and then customer naturally arrives to and makes each individual buying decision, he gains trust in your company and product and becomes increasingly engaged.  The result is hugely more leads, more closes, and more revenues.

This is what we do at Power CMO Consulting and the Revenue Typhoon Marketing System.

LinkedIn – another design failure

Here is yet another example of LinkedIn updating a feature that is one step forward … and two back.  They continue to use an architecture that fails its top users.  It stuns me that a billion dollar company can release code like this with insufficient testing.

Here’s the challenge.  I’m trying  to send an update to my local Dallas LinkedIn connections.  I have over 4,000.    I’d be happy to simply export my connections and send it directly via my email marketing service.  But LinkedIn hasn’t allowed top users to download their own connections for about 5 years now. The process times out.  LinkedIn has never fixed this or provided a solution.   Even if you’re a paying customer.

So I’m forced to use LinkedIn’s own messaging.  LinkedIn limits messages to 50 recipients.  You can do the math.   That’s a LOT of group sends.  Previously, unless your tag or filter results were under 50 you had to individually click each connection to add him to the recipient list.  Yes, you can see how wonderfully yummy that was.   It would take several hours to go through the forced machinations to  reach a few thousand of your own connections.

Note that one of LinkedIn’s many limitations in connection filtering is that you can only apply one at a time.  So if you have a filtered group like my Dallas connections there is no way to have Location is Dallas AND Last name is ‘R’ connections, or Location is Dallas AND Industry is Recruiting.  To message or tag connections in a filtered group,  you have to run the filter and page through it repeatedly.  This is painful if the group is large.

There’s been a recent update.  Now when LinkedIn displays a page of connection results you can click a box to select all of connections on the page.  Yippee!  No more individual clicks. …  But not so fast, buckaroo.  They also hugely reduced the number of  connections displayed in the results from 50 to 10.

So let’s say you’re contacting 1000 people.  Bear with me so you can see the insanity they force on their users.  To select the first 10 connections  is just one checkbox click. Hey, that’s much better than clicking each connection individually, right?  For a moment. It only goes downhill from here.

The next ten connections require a scroll or page down in the filtered results, click Next, click the checkbox. That’s three clicks. Repeat for five pages to select the 50 recipient max. That’s 13 clicks. Not bad. Be sure to tag that group if you may use it again in the future.

After you send your message to that group does LinkedIn return you to filter state and display you just had?  Of course not, you have to start from the beginning.

So click your filter, scroll or page down, click Next, repeat 5 times to get to the next batch.  That’s 11 clicks plus the 13 to select 50 recipients once you get on those pages for a total of 24 clicks. We’re already nearing one click per connection.

Let’s fast forward through the process to the end of 1,000 connections. You just sent your 199th message to a batch of 50 connections. You start at the beginning of the list again. There are 95 pages that you have to wade through, or 196 clicks. This batch of 50 connections requires 209 clicks, far more than one click per connection.

But it only gets worse.  LinkedIn’s filtering and connection display remains highly unstable. The display can easily freeze, time out, or quit. What’s common here is that you click Next page.  Instead of displaying a new page the connection results pane blanks and the connection detail pane displays “Quickly view and organize your connections? Select a category or individual to see contact info, send a message and more.”

When this happens you’re screwed in this AJAX display where the display state is lost and reset. There is no way to go back and redisplay the last connection page, to resume and try to go to the next page again, or otherwise recover where you were. Your only option is to start all over again. So whether you were on page 1 or 100, you have to start back on page 1.  All those clicks you spent time on to get to page 1 or 100 are totally wasted.

I tested this with about 200 searches and over a thousand Next page clicks on two different browsers. The blanking error appears to happen randomly. It has happened on the first Next click. It virtually always happened by the 15th page displayed. And to get to the 10^th or 15^th page means dozens of tries and hundreds of clicks in addition to the many clicks required if it worked without error.

That’s not all.  Given that the error forces a page restart, that’s a hard limit. So the discussion on the ridiculous amount of clicks to reach 1,000 connections, much less the 4,000 that was my goal, is moot. The effective capability of contacting your connections in one filter is 10-15 pages or only 100-150 connections.

You will never be able to reach the connections in a group after that, whether it’s to send a message or just to tag them.

More like one step forward and ten backward. Oops, LinkedIn reset that at seven.  Gotta start all over again.

UPDATE: 10:16 pm.  The random error where clicking Next resets the filter display and forces you to start over again is fixed.  For now.  Paging works quickly and smoothly.

On the flip side an annoying problem that’s been around for several months (a few years?) has returned – duplicate listings, apparently random,  in the filter results.  While a page may display 10 connections, only 8 or so on average are unique.  Now when you select the page LinkedIn doesn’t select the phantom dupes (which it used to do), but the dupes do require additional pages of filter results to get to the 50 maximum and they do screw up the tag counts, which are inflated.

An efficiency tip to reduce time and clicks – LinkedIn resets filter results on message sending but not tagging.  So you can avoid the annoying filter reset and paging described above.  The optimal strategy is to work your way one time through the filter results to select 50 connections, create a tag even if you’ll never use it after this, clear the selection, and then repeat so that all filtered connections are tagged.  Then click on each tag just created to send a message to that group of 50.

UPDATE: 7:30pm CT April 15. It’s baaaaaaaack.  The random error where clicking Next resets the filter display and forces you to start over again has returned.  This flavor of flakiness, where  an error happens intermittently or more typically and in this case most of the time, has been around for five years or so on LinkedIn.  It unfortunately shows both the brittle nature of its architecture and the lack of care by the company in letting such problems persist.

 

The Civil War anew: U.S. economic slavery 150 years later

The New York Times commemorates the Civil War’s 150th anniversary with an ongoing series called Disunion.  The closed patriarchy of slaveowners clashed with the freedom and opportunity of the West.  The article Mitchel Thompson’s War documents the strong support for the war in the Union Midwest.

Slave ownership made for bad economics …

[F]uture governor Richard Ogilvy told how, as a young laborer in Kentucky, he could charge only $6 a month, lest he lose out to slave labor, which could be rented out at $75 a year.

… and bad culture.

Rev. Charles Beecher  said the question was not “ whether black men are forever to be slaves, but whether the sons of Puritans are to become slaves themselves.”

The country was growing up and recognizing the externalities of an unjust and imbalanced socioeconomic system.

Northwest Illinois farmers’ mantra became “free territories, free homesteads, and protection to free labor.”

Is it any different today as billionaire industrialists have created their own plantations of wealth, often squirreled overseas to save every last penny … where their enterprises are too big to fail … their jobs are guaranteed with golden parachutes … their adverse actions have no consequences?   Their money has bought the political power to increase their holdings at the expense of the rest of the country.  They’ve destroyed the middle class, weakened the social network, gutted job security, increased poverty, and cheapened life for those who are not privileged.

150 years ago:

[A] new Republican Party alliance was struck between Western free farmers and Eastern industrialists.

Where is the alliance, Republican or otherwise, that will break today’s slavery?

When will the technology and innovation industries meet their social obligations and join with the people to make the US great again?

LinkedIn is stupid, part 265

In our last chapter our hero discovered the unknown country of tags wherein he thought “Aha!  I don’t need to click every single freaking connection to send a message to the same group.  I can just create a tag and use that in the future.”

In today’s episode he learns how naive he truly was …

It was a sunny Texas winter day, the kiss of warmth on my forearms a promise of the luxurious heat to come in a few months.  I was excited to try out my sexy new LinkedIn tags.  I’d click a tag of 50 connections, click Send message, write and send my note, repeat a few times, and be done in a few minutes.

That LinkedIn was quite the complicated lady.  You’re sailing the seas of business.  A friend charts you a new path to her moist island.  From afar she’s a goddess, easy on the eyes, mysteriously alluring.  You couldn’t keep away.  But as you sailed closer and got friendly, you knew something was up.  That sexy black dress was festooned with razor wire and spikes.  You could feel it in your bones.  She was a dangerous siren, not a plucky mermaid.   Get too personal and she slapped you back time and again with restrictions and limits.  Too many invitations.  Too many connections.  Too many messages.  You can’t download your own connections.  She was in control, not you.  You had to play by her rules.  Treat the dame right though and you can sail on by to the land of new opportunities.   Yeah, I learned the hard way.  Crashed a few times on her rocky shoals.  But I had her mapped out.  I knew her game.

And so I started with a smile.  The only happy moment of my miserable experience to come.

View connections.  Find tag.  Click Send message. See, it’s easy.

But LinkedIn says there are too many recipients.  It will take only the first 50.

But there WERE 50.  Because that’s how I created the tag. Click. Click. Click. Until Linked says 50 are selected.  Click to make tag.  Find tag. Click tag.  Click Send message.  And it worked fine.  LinkedIn wouldn’t have sent that original message when I created the tag if there were more than 50.

Not today.  So I sent the first 50, or whatever number LinkedIn thought it was.  Back to connections.  Find tag. Now it says there are 60 connections (give or take a few).  Hmm.  Click tag.  Examine tag contacts.  Several contacts were duplicated.  So the original tag of 50 unique connections had suddenly expanded to 60 connections with phantom LinkedIn-created dupes. WTF?

The irony is that when I first created the tag several days ago I clicked the same 60 or so contacts with some phantom dupes. LinkedIn ignored the dupes.  It displayed the 50 real selected contacts.  When I saved the tag there 50 contacts in the tag.  When I used the tag to send the message, it put the 50 real contacts in the recipient field.

But now LinkedIn magically added dupes back in in the tag count and connection display.  Even worse, LinkedIn went amnesiac on me.  It suddenly lost the ability to ignore the dupes in the tag member count and when Send message was clicked.   Tags and messaging have been out for years. Did ANYONE do real testing on it?

I thought I had it figured out.  But now I was back in a fairy land where unicorns kissed, pigs flew, and the acrid odor in the air was your skin being eaten alive by the acid of LinkedIn’s twisted logic.

Deep breath.  Press on, soldier.

I had sent the first “50″ connections, which really were only 40 or so.  I had to determine which connections were missing.

Back to connections.  Find tag. Click tag. Click Send Message. See the message again with warning that only the first “50″ were used.  Find the last name in the recipient field, right?  … Of course not.  The names are not ordered alphabetically.  It’s impossible to eyeball the last alpha name when you’re looking at 40 of them.

I refuse to quit.  Lesser mortals would have poured a tall scotch,  smoked a joint, or made love with a partner or handy pet.  Me?  LinkedIn will have to pry my frozen fingers off the keyboard. I copy all the names on the message web form.  Paste them into a spreadsheet.  Convert to columns.  Delete cells where people have middle names or use funky characters.  Finally get last names in a column.  Sort.  Now I know the last name.

Back to connections. Click on the tag.  Does LinkedIn display 50 names at a time like the regular connections pane display? … Of course not.  LinkedIn intentionally makes it hard.  Only 10 at a time are displayed.  Scroll down.  Click Next for the next page.  Scroll down.  Click Next. Scroll down.  Click Next.  Scroll down.  Click Next.

Find the last name that was sent.  Click the selection checkbox on the next name on the list.  Click the rest of the names in the window. Page down. Click more names.  Click Next. Click more names, page down, repeat to the end of the tag connection list.  Click Edit tags.  Write and save a new tag name.  So I now have a 2nd tag with a subset of connections from the first tag.  Thanks, LinkedIn.

Back to connections.  Find new tag.  Click tag.  Click Select All.  Send message. Message displays but NO addresses.  Doesn’t work.  B. U. G.

Back to connections.  Find new tag.  Click tag.  Don’t click Select All.  Just click Send message.  That works.   Create and send message.   Finally the LinkedIn fog lifts.

Now we have a process, no matter how contorted, that works.  Don’t think.  Just do.  Repeat for all tags for original mailing.

I’d accept these technical problems and dreadful customer experience from a bootstrap startup beta.  LinkedIn though is a multibillion dollar valuation mature company.

Is your startup too old to fail?

I review several hundred startup business plans a year.  Many ventures have been fighting and struggling for years.

I especially see that here in Dallas where the pressure and the cost of living is much lower than the West Coast.  It’s easier to drift in a zone where your business is making progress but slowly.  You’re trying to survive and so may have other work.  Your venture gets just a slice of your mindshare.  You learn to survive without funding and bootstrap.

Compare that to Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs are more apt to deem their effort a failure.  They move on if they haven’t had huge traction and funding in 1-2 years.

What is your goal?  Is it a true hypergrowth startup,  a linear growth venture, a small business that will provide employment for you, or a lifestyle (hobby) activity?  If your choice is the first, are you truly focused on that?  Are you committing 100% of your time and effort to your startup?  Managing your startup is not about velocity.  It should be about acceleration.

Startups stand for change.  That includes your own business.  As the saying goes, you have to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.   While it’s critical to engage your passion and invest yourself, don’t drown to the point that you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and will never leave.  Listen to the universe and the cards you’re dealt. Sometimes you have to exchange a few cards and pivot.  Other times you need to deal yourself a whole new hand.

Most successful entrepreneurs have had to brave a few failures before they find the right combination of concept, timing, team, and, yes, luck. If you never let yourself fail, you will never get that shot at the big win.

While the entrepreneur’s determination and persistence are to be admired, they also can be your enemy, as Jason Calacanis writes in Moderate Success Is the Enemy of Breakout Success.

Startups, Investors, and Networks Dance Closer

The StartUp Health incubator has launched the StartUp Health Network, a vertical ecosystem directory service. Read more about it in TechCrunch.

The network looks like a home grown effort.  I’ll share a few insights here.  What do you think?

• This service aggregation reminds me of various law firms, investors, and networks developing startup legal docs and generators.

• It’s a nice step in the startup ecosystem world as entrepreneurs, startups, investors, and service providers dance around one another to find the right fit for deals and partnerships.  But innovation has been excruciatingly slow over the past 15 years with limited service innovation.  It reminds me of  a galaxy rotating billions of years (that’s real years as opposed to Internet years) with only rare and random star collisions.

• I’ve long been a champion of the transparency and social good of free information.  The first generation was wikis, then directories, and now networks.  Nice move, StartUpHealth.  But it’s more than helping others.  It’s strategic. If you own the info, you own the market.  It’s also a valuable marketing tool for lead generation, SEO, and partnerships.  Gust has done a nice job using part of this approach.

• At their core such networks are a basic directory app with a social coating.  There is a low barrier to entry.  AngelList led the way with a Web 2.0 product. They solidified their leadership with their API.  Where are the branded and white-labelled platforms?

• Market segmentation has been slow, confined primarily to investors and natural geography. StartUp Health points to the potential for integrated startup services, including investing and networks.  There are opportunities, assuming adequate business models, by location, industry, funding level, and technology sector, as well as at large events, associations, and corporations.

• Where will this innovation come from? The primary source right now are ventures riding the crowdfunding wave.  But do be cautious amid the explosion of crowdfunding activity and interest this year.  Contrary to the US Congress’s best intentions, that wave will crash hard due to the SEC’s delay and concerns and the universal need for due diligence and disclosure.

 

Are we living in a simulation?

… And what happens when it ends?  Does God roll the dice and start again?  Does some other God, higher being,  conscious entity, or multi-tentacled blue alien pick up the pieces and give it a different try?  Or does one of us sentient programs get sent up to the big leagues?  Kind of like a promoted angel or being picked to be the one to leave Earth on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Or Fourth Kind in this case.

What if you subscribed to the Do Not Simulate list?  Surely there is some way to opt out of this spammy digital existence short of death.

The world is becoming increasingly digitized. 3D printers are already here.  You won’t have to sorry about losing your car keys for the 20th time or building that collection of orphan socks.  Just print another.  Politicians are worried about people printing guns.  But that’s small potatoes.  Soon we’ll be able to print money, dogs, babies, and lovers.  And clones, especially clones.  Think of how productive you could be with your duplicates.  It’s just a matter of time.

What happens when we expand beyond the limited computing capacity in our brain or outlive our bodies, even despite our cloaned body parts?  When we just get tired of having to take a shower every day and say hello to the annoying neighbor next door?  Futurists say that in our digital world we’ll download into a virtual life.  I’ve already got my name on a hot little petrabyte drive when I go.  But it’s clear now that I’ll just be zapped into the “cloud.”

Of course we’ll just repeat the same mistakes we did when we were meat in our funky simulated real life. In our virtual lives you know what we’ll all be doing.   The same things we do on Second Life and the Net.  We’ll be having sex with hot busty MILFs that wouldn’t have looked at us on the outside, drowning in trivial gossip, and watching LOLcat videos.  Our fantasies will come true where our husbands actually listen and the kids are well behaved.

So we’ll be in a simulation in a simulation in a simulation.  And that doesn’t count the sick fucks, aka Gods, who will want to create their own universes and play with their own galaxies, planets, and dues-paying citizenry that cling to such quaint ideas as free will.  And eventually create their own simulations just like we’re doing.

There must be some limit to the potentially infinite recursion of simulations.  I read a science fiction story where time slows as finite simulation processing resources approach full use.  Just like using a Windows computer that gets clogged up every few days and is going to crash.  So be sure to create your own universes before your neighbors do the same.

This isn’t just theoretical fun. We’re deconstructing the simulation through science and learning its rules now.

We see this digitization at the incredibly small nano scale where we’re reaching the limits of the known universe.  Reality there is different.  Albert Einstein got it wrong.  God does play with dice.  Quantum mechanics is just like magic.  Quantum computing allows data to be transmitted immediately anywhere.  Right now the distance may be microscopic.  But again, it’s just a matter of time until it’s thousands of miles to anywhere else in the world, light years, or all the way to the other side of our simulated galaxy.   Combine that with 3D printing and consciousness uploading and you have teleportation.

The scientists are finally getting with the program, so to speak.  Check out The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation.

Is Value-Based Venture Investing Returning?

The Wall Street Journal and others are noticing that Internet startup valuations are coming back to Earth.  Aggregate numbers show industry rebalancing.  Health and consumer services investment sectors are down big.  Energy is up.

The press and Wall Street love a great story, which means sex and financial gore.   Silicon Valley has grown large enough to accommodate.  From billionaire moguls to VC and superangel glitterati and seductive new products to painful lawsuits, there is always a tale of intrigue.

But the players in the news are just the tip of the investment iceberg.  There are about 600 angel networks that represent 12,000 accredited investors.  That’s less than one percent of the estimated  1.6 million angels.

The real story is that value-based investing never left. As Ralph Patterson notes, “the majority of VCs and Angels haven’t strayed very far from the belief in ‘traction.’”

Funding fashions come and go in the top strata of Bay Area and other venture capitals.  But everywhere else value investing in the best deals available was and continues to be the norm.

 

 

 

Balance, not Bluster: Free market ideology is anti-science

Research from the University of Western Australia sheds light on the irrationality of extremism, typified by the far right of the Republican party in the U.S.

The data is from a survey called  NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. While the study finds support for crank magnetism (if you believe in one anti-science theory, you believe in others), it found an even greater correlation with free market ideology where believers rejected science from humans causing climate change to smoking causing lung cancer and HIV causing AIDS.

Science Blogs has excellent commentary at More data on why people reject science.

The survey unfortunately doesn’t break down free market ideology.  The free market is a proven part of modern economics.  But it’s just one cog in a strong and healthy civilization. A strict belief that elevates the free market at the expense of the other pillars of society is a fundamental part of what caused the global recession and the breakdown of the middle class in the U.S.

Of course if you are one such believer you’ll reject this piece of science as well.  Please continue on to the next blog on fairies, unicorns, little green men, the drug war, universal forces that take an interest in your personal affairs, and  the salvation (i.e. continuing destruction) of America through greed and anarchy.

A real gun license

Gail Collins writes in Arms and the Duck in the New York Times:

[I]t’s only in movies that people are good shots during a violent encounter. In 2008, Al Baker reported in The Times that the accuracy rate for New York City officers firing in the line of duty was 34 percent.

And these are people trained for this kind of crisis. The moral is that if a lunatic starts shooting, you will not be made safer if your fellow average citizens are carrying concealed weapons.

I’ve been kickboxing for ten years.  I’m a muscular macho guy in great shape.  When I began sparring I had the false confidence of the pro-gun crowd, as well as the oil rig workers in Collins’ article, and got creamed.  I could barely last one round.

The first lesson any fighter must learn is to conquer your fear.  A combat situation is fundamentally different from any exercise, class, or simulation, including shooting at defenseless animals.  It’s biologically impossible to keep your wits about you.   The natural adrenaline rush is conducive to running, not effective fighting … not thinking … and absolutely not firing a gun. Be very afraid of those with concealed guns.

Now if you really have to have a License to Kill, there should be a way to qualify where you’re trained and have proven you can be effective under extreme pressure.  Perhaps a Marines Boot Camp.  With copious live and accurate return fire. That ought to cull the herd.