Keeping the momentum

The latest thinking is that cold call operations via Harte Hanks, third party, or internal team would not be a cost efficient method to generate leads.

HH program has come to an end and the stat's are: 173 hours of call for 180 completed interviews and 21 appointments. According to HH's own matrix in their project proposal, they have exceeded their expectation of 110 completed calls. My thinking, however, is that HH probably sandbagged the numbers so that they can exceed expectation. I would. But, at the same time, I also think that we cannot expect much more than completing one call per hour which is what HH has done. And, this, again, leads to the conclusion that this is a very expensive way of generating leads.

The highly recommended consultant got back with me and advised that she is not willing to drop her prices. (If she can get people to pay that kind of money, more power to her.) I think partly, this is a function that she deals mostly with enterprise solutions costing from several hundred thousand dollars to a few millions. In that price range, her fee would be quite minuscule. But, this is not how it works for us.

I have finally finished the first case study and fired up to the customer for reaction and approvals. Writing case study can be a bit exhausting mentally, so I have outsourced that operation to Mr Whup-ass since he volunteered. I am not sure if it is a good idea. Case study writing is a specific way of thinking and takes somebody with ability to feel detached so you can keep up the BS while having a nice touch with the language so that the story/case maintains a momentum to the logical conclusion. Mr Whup-ass does not seem to have that touch from the first draft that he came up.

I am too lazy to deal with it for now. But, I will probably take a crack at it myself and find a professional writer for this kind of work. Mr Whup-ass is excellent as an editor in providing additional perspectives. But, as the first draft, I need somebody else.

My major focus is now on PR and website update. PR is moving along. I am loading the PR agency with information and ammunition. So, I expect to see some firework in August. Otherwise, I will change pitcher.

The website thing is kind of interesting. I am now set up with Contribute which is a website collaboration solution where I can go into our website and make changes directly without having to wait for the change by the webmaster. This also significantly speeds up the revision process because I can see the change in real time and make adjustments accordingly. For non-technical (HTML) editing and some light technical work, I highly recommend Contribute.

So, we are making some additional changes to the existing site while a new site is being designed. The major ones are the new landing pages. I commissioned a design house to give us a landing page design and we now use it as a template for three different type of landing pages. The key things about the new design are twofold: the color coordinates and there are two female images on the top banner. I know it seems silly, but studies have shown that attractive images helps with recall and conversion. And, since we target technical people who are mostly male, two female images are surely better than one. Ha! The other thing is that we will be starting a weekly webinar program so there is a series of stuff that need to be taken care of. Actually, most of the work is done and, theoretically, I can push the changes from staging to live tomorrow. But, since our webmaster is out for the rest of the week, the head of engineering and I agree that we should wait in case the process did not work as planned that the webmaster is there to fix our mess.

For the new site, design work is just starting. For my part, I am collecting user requirements and putting the outline on a board to review. My plan is to have a detail listing of each page in a Word document including all the links, images, and functionality. This will serve as a guide to the designer on what are the needs of the new website as well as being the blueprint when we actually implement the site. This is a daunting task since there are many conflicting demands on the site. I have done the easy parts and will embark on the difficult ones.

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