Hartey Hanky

Wow! It has been a while. I guess I have been busy. Honestly, I meant to write more frequently.

Life in Google land is going well. The Conversion matrix is yielding some interesting numbers. One of the things that I did not think of, but should have, is the fact that as we test new web pages that lead to conversion events, sometimes the conversion number can be overstated. Hmm.. A statistical details that I need to think about.

Life on the ranking side is going well too. We have now become the number one site for the two terms that I really wanted on Google. I have not checked our Yahoo ranking, but it should not be too bad either.

The LL Bean promotion idea is coming along. We will be offering a $25 gift certificate if you take our product for a spin (demo). Different pieces are getting ready and I hope to have it rolled out next week. What is particularly interesting is that I had a good discussion with an on-line marketing guru who company generates several hundreds million in revenue by helping corporations run their on-line marketing campaigns. Long story short, he gave me some very specific pointers on how to make it better and I have asked our web guru to implement like changes. It will be interesting to see if our promotion page will perform better than our current standard design.

Actually, I was inspired by the on-line marketing guru’s examples and thought that I should come up with a small quiz that people can take to find out how they are doing in the Ace product areas. This could be a fun way to spread our names around, even if it is self-serving.

Oh, also signed up for Yahoo/Overture. Still in the early stage of figuring out how everything fits together at Yahoo. You know, maybe I am just too in-grained in the way Google AdWords work, but the Yahoo interface and flow does not make a lot of sense so far. But, this is probably too early for me to say any6thing until I have all of my lists approved and running.

Product Launch is stalling a bit. Quotes. For a miserable quote, I have been begging in different parts of the world asking customers to take pity on me. Not a lot of luck so far. But, come rain or shine, we will do a product launch the week after next. Fortunately, this is a marketing launch so the stake is not as serious.

Have you heard of Harte Hanks? It is the 800 pound gorilla of the telemarketing/direct-sales space. So, we will be hiring Harte Hanks to run a 30 day telemarketing campaign to generate some warm leads. Harte Hanks has been very easy to work with, it is obvious that the systems are in place. But, they can be pretty rigid on what they can do and how they can do it. For example, we want to get a list of non-leads from the campaign so that we can also gage what did not work. It took a few back and forth to get the intent across and we still have to pay an additional $1,500 to get the data so we can run the correlation internally. This could have been much easier done automatically inside Harte Hanks. But, that is a just a small pet peeve. Will start the wheel going with Harte Hanks starting tomorrow. This should be another interesting learning experience.

Finally, how long do you or your sales people get back to a lead? One minutes? One hour? One day? The expectation varies and the actual performance varies wider still. So, I was looking for an alternative source to Harte Hanks and there is an outfit that comes highly recommended by a trusted source. An introductory e-mail was sent. Nothing. I called the second day to get to a sales person and got the CEO instead. We chatted and he told me that one of the sales people will get back with me. Nothing. I called the third day and got to talk with the CEO again, and he promised that the sales person will call and gave me the person’s name. An hour of so after the call, I call again and asked the receptionist to put me through to the sales person, now that I have the name. Turns out that this person is a consultant to the firm and only the CEO has the contact info. Nothing. Day four, I talked with the CEO again, and the receptionist and I are pretty much on first name basis now, he was most apologetic and gave me the sales person’s contact info. I call and left a message on both the office and cell numbers. A few hours later, I got a call from the sales person. Now, call me crazy, but it ain’t a good idea to make your potential customers run around like that. It does not engender good karma and does not make you look too good either. Like I said about Harte Hanks above, HH makes it easy to work with them and we will go with HH this time.

Well, time to go.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out