Toasting and roasting

This week is pretty nuts. We have all the department heads flown in from all over the world for senior management strategy meetings. It is a good opportunity to meet the rest of the team with whom I have only talked via phone and Skype. On the other hand, meetings of this sort is a huge drain on time and it is not like I have too much time on my hands to begin with. But, truth be told, the past few days have been quite productive. Face to face meeting has the benefit of allowing contextual and real-time reaction that I have not seen reproduced in any meaningful manner via phone or internet.

The other good thing is that this is a good team. People have opinions and are not afraid to express them. At the same time, we do not hold fast to our views and readily accept logical counterarguments. In a way, it is a lot of fun. It is so important to have a team that is competent and have compatible social skills while maintaining heterogeneous views. This does not guarantee our success as a team or the company, but it sure gives me a lot more confidence than otherwise. (And, trust me, I have seen it all in this startup-land.)

I did my song and dance piece on what had transpired since I took over the marketing position as well as the various marketing programs that we will be doing in the next 90 days. The emphasis is to do more lead-generation and more publicity with the same budget. Specifically, I need to ramp up the lead-gen quantity to match the projected hiring of additional Sales people so that Sales gets enough through the funnel up front.

Harte Hanks is part of the story. The program just got underway last Friday and the response has been reasonable for the first few days. We are still working through some of the kinks. For example, there were entries where a request for meeting was setting for May (that is LAST month, in case you wondered what was the problem.) There are also some questions on what each responses were relative to the calling script. While these are important details, I feel pretty good that we will be able to overcome these issues. The bigger problem for now is the "lemon problem" in the case of who would talk with the caller. Ideally, we want people who are high-powered decision makers. Reality is that people who would take the time to talk tend to be lowly employees who was glad to talk because there is not a lot of interesting things going on. This problem, unfortunately, I am not sure how to fix unless we bring this function in-house.

But, overall, it looks okay. As of the first three business days of the program, we have generated six requests for meeting and some 25 contact information for future use. The hope is that as the caller ramps up with the program, we will have both faster and more efficient calls. I am also waiting for tapes of current calls as an on-going check-up of these calls. This is going to be an interesting program to monitor and learn from. Then, I want to get this function in-house as soon as possible with the assumptions that it will be less expensive as well as more efficient/effective. We will see.

For a high level PR spin approach, my song and dance piece consists of three prongs: vertical, geographical, and functional. By vertical I mean the specific market verticals that we have seen some success and have some good names to leverage. By Geographical, I want to focus on metro areas where we are seeing clusters of users. For functional, it would be an on-going process of touting the specific features and benefits of the product.

The key philosophical change is that I will be taking a much more component level approach to these prongs. One of the major failings with our past publicity effort has been that we have a consistent message. Now, this is great in principle because nobody is confused. But the problem for us is that it also becomes old news very quickly and I am having the darnedest time drumming up interests amongst press. By mix and match these components, I hope to weave different angles and hooks to pique interests and maintain a continuing level of exposure in the public space.

The other key philosophical change would be what I termed "the George W Bush's approach to publicity", namely we will undertake the program assuming no additional cooperation from the usual suspects - customers, analysts, and partners. This has been a major problem with the marketing program so far where we are constantly hampered by customers who are holding back and/or take forever to agree to press releases and case studies for one reason or another. So, I am putting together a slate of press releases and case studies/white-paper to be launched without getting customer help.

Finally, this is mostly tactical but interesting to note, I plan to make a consultant an industry expert for a field that he has no idea on. This guys is a hired-gun when it comes to white-paper and articles. And, originally, my plan is to hiring him to do one article. However, upon further consideration, my plan is to get him to "do" a series of at least four articles to establish himself as an expert in our particular product vertical. Of course, the part that I am particularly interested in as a marketer is that I will be writing these articles and spinning the story that defines the world view according to me. I am sure that I will have more to report on this intricate marketing dance as time goes on.

As I said, these were productive meeting.

In these meetings, there were dinners and lunches where we work on our team spirit by debating the merits of wine and food. There was almost a bet on what is the percentage of merlot grape in Petrus. Good thing that bet did not happen because I would have lost since I held the position that it is 100% merlot. Turns out, Petrus uses 95% merlot and 5% cab franc. I also got a list of New Zealand winemakers to try. And, most interestingly, our European head has a friend who just inherited 70,000 bottles of Austrian wine via a wine estate and this new owner is looking for ways to unload the wine cellar. Now, I would not be able to handle 70,000 bottles. But, with wines going back to the 1920's, I would not mind checking out some of the early ones to see how they turned out. This will be a small project that I will work on the side - playing the role of a match maker to get one or more wine import merchants in the San Francisco area to take these wine. And, maybe I can get a few cases as a finder's fee? We always need interesting wine.

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