More Bad Marketing and Salesforce — Say It Isn’t So
This week’s stupid marketing has us focusing on emails from a residential solar services and equipment leases company, as well as a geographically challenged one from Salesforce.
Why would anyone think a company that provides information to the information industry (sounds a little meta!) needs financing for residential solar equipment? It starts with poor Tyler who works for some company whose name I can’t pronounce. He started sending Twitter links and emails about meeting with their CEO. Their business, get this, is in drop testing. I don’t know whether PDF reports need to be drop tested. Our online platform certainly can’t. Our analysts? Well, that would be dire — and … no, we’d never do such a thing.
I am simply flabbergasted by the poor marketing that is going on out there and how little time people take to review their lists or think about whether their material is relevant. Email marketing, and I’ve written about this before, is turning into a wasteland of junk mail. Even so-called B2B marketing is rife with irrelevance due to poor list management and targeting. Plain and simple: I am not in the ag business. I don’t need drop testing (well some who report to me may think I do from time to time), but really — why are we getting such nonsense. I can’t be the only one.
I mean, how is this relevant?
Anthea, if you could identify one piece of equipment that would help your business succeed this month, what would it be?
My next question is — what’s keeping you from getting it? Q2 is coming to a close and the second half of the year is right behind it.
I want to help you get ready. Give me a call and we can chat through some of your equipment financing questions.
Take care,
Tyler
Oh please.
But the capper this week was this inbound message to us from Salesforce:
Hi Harry,
How’s it going?
I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself as your new account rep at Salesforce and I would like to start by saying thank you for your business. At Salesforce, we truly value our relationship and our customers are the main priority.
With that in mind, I want to make sure you are getting the most of your investment and ensure we are aligned with your goals for this year. Do you have availability to grab coffee/lunch in the next 2–4 weeks? On a similar note, I wanted to share with you an awesome event coming up on June 27th. We will have Salesforce product experts available.
Our inbound chatter went something like this:
I wonder if this rep uses their own Salesforce system to look up our account before sending out an email blast?
If he did, he would have known:
A) I am not involved as either a key decision maker, budget holder, or implementer.
B) It would be very expensive for him to come out here and drop into my local Dunkin Donuts to grab a coffee.
You see, the Salesforce rep is in the 415 area code and Harry is in Boston. Whoops.
And this is the fourth rep we’ve had in a short period to boot. No account knowledge transfer, apparently. We are small, but still, Salesforce? We expect more.
I hear executives lament the slowing of sales. I hear them speak about the future of marketing. I hear the popular refrain about how hard it is to get our attention.
Well, with all this noise, we can’t help but tune out. A lot of our industry spends time doing email marketing. It’s time to sharpen the saw. We don’t always get it right, but you can bet 99% of the people we are marketing to are in the information businesses. They might not want to hear from us, they might opt out, but you can bet we are not trying to sell them saws, solar devices, and gosh-darn drop testing.
Anthea C. Stratigos is Co-founder & CEO of Outsell, Inc., the leading research and advisory firm focused exclusively on data, media, information, and technology. Get professional and personal lessons from a career spent mentoring successful leaders. Tell your story or ask a question — confidentially. Ask Anthea!