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We are 85% along with our membership goal for the year. Please welcome these new members:
By Elizabeth Blozan, The Mojo Factory
Trade Service Corporation, based in San Diego, went into business back in 1931, providing subscriptions to trade materials pricing catalogs for electrical contractors. By collecting, updating and packaging this information, Trade Service became what we of the computer generation now call "information specialists."
As technology for information handling grew, so did Trade Service's customer base. Now Trade Service provides data services to electrical, plumbing and mechanical contractors; and the entertainment industry; packaged in print, on disk, and even CD-ROM. This year, Trade Service introduced a CD-OM kiosk for video rental stores that allows customers to search for movies by key words, send an order to the cashier, and even take a look at movie reviews by Siskel and Ebert.
Trade Service reaches new customers through advertising in trade journals and direct mail campaigns, providing an 800 number for customers to call for more information. Because its customer base is so diverse, advertising varies from stylish four-color display ads to instructional "advertorials."
How does Trade Services Corporation effectively select and track return on the ad dollar spent to reach a target market?
At GMA's March meeting, Chuck Pollard, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Trade Service, discussed how his department tracks results of advertising costs.
Trade Service found great success using Telemagic, a customer-tracking software package. Telemagic provides a simple process for recording all prospect data and ensuing contacts, as well as the ability to extract information for merging mailing lists and automatic dialing. By integrating Telemagic with an automated call distribution phone system, Telemagic can also track how many out-going calls are placed to a prospect, call and hold duration, and call load.
Last year Trade Service installed a suite of 800 numbers and assigned a unique number to each advertising campaign. This not only made tracking in-coming calls easier, but improved customer service by cutting down on the time a customer spent in the voice-mail queue.
This technique not only helps measure the effectiveness of a given campaign, but can also calculate the income that a campaign generates for the company. By transferring data to Microsoft Excel, Trade Service was able to select the batch of calls stimulated by a specific campaign. Dividing call volume by the cost of advertising gives the advertising cost-per-lead generated. The sales and marketing department can then generate monthly and year-to-date analysis of cost per lead with a minimum of research and data entry.
Applying tangible measurements to the intangible world of advertising can help a marketing manager make some shrewd decisions about his or her budget. Trade Service discovered that the cost of generating leads ranged from $71 per call with ads placed in expensive entertainment magazines, to only $11 per call for ads placed in electrical trade journals. With these figures in hand, Trade Service was able to recognize that direct mail campaigns were far more cost effective for reaching prospects in the entertainment industry, and led to the decision to eliminate display advertising in this market.
This year Trade Service plans to use similar measurement tools to evaluate the advertising and operational cost of closing a sale.
By Christine Hinton, Capella Marketing Communications
"Every company has interdepartmental rivalry; it's human nature," reminds Craig Schwartz, Director of Marketing at Emerald Systems in San Diego. "If you realize this applies even to yourself, you're halfway to improving the process, whichever department you're in." With a marketing background in big-league organizations, such as NCR and Europe's multibillion-dollar conglomerate ICL, Craig's management experience spans departments and continents, but his recommendations stay on a human level.
The source of interdepartmental rivalry, quite simply, is lack of communication. And this doesn't just apply to people in the same building. "As a marketing person, you need to be sensitive to the fact that you're dealing with people who are not in your building." For instance, sales reps on the road or stationed in their territories can feel cut off if they're not involved in the decisions made back at headquarters.
Creating synergy between the marketing and sales teams starts with an open mind. When you find those brochures you made last year sitting untouched in a desk drawer, your first reaction may be to take it personally: "They didn't use my brochures," Craig admonishes. "That's what you've got to be looking for. Don't be afraid someone will tell you you're screwing up; you want to get it right."
When ICL faced flagging sales in the U.S. market of a newly acquired Xerox subsidiary, marketing responded with "bigger and better" brochures. But they didn't seem to help sales at all. By querying the sales staff, Craig discovered a simple problem with name recognition. American customers knew who Xerox was, but ICL was an unknown in the States. New brochures were created introducing ICL, and touting its worldwide good reputation and accomplishments. Craig found the change "not only impressed clients, but took that whole sales call up a level in the organization. The sales reps had the answer, but no one had ever asked them."
Another example of communication paying off: Emerald Systems began questioning the cost of trade show exposure when it spotted a trend towards local attendance vs. regional or national. Now it's the sales reps who recommend trade show sites. After all, they know the field better than anyone. "It's my budget they're spending," admits Craig, "but I have to trust that they know what they're doing. If they don't, I've got worse problems than just picking the wrong trade shows."
Management can set the tone for communication across the entire organization. In one company, for instance, Craig sent the names of the people working on each product and service the company offered to every sales rep in the company. "My boss came charging down the hall and said, 'I wish you'd shown me that first; we're going to get deluged with calls from the field.' I said, `Well, that's why we're here.'" The purpose of marketing isn't to create a separate world, then blame the rest of the organization if there are problems. We all have customers within our organizations. As a member of the marketing team, your customers are your sales force. Naturally, the way to best serve your customers is to talk to them and find out what they really need to succeed.
By Ron Marcus, Overland Data Inc.
Reacting to change is hard. And today it's harder than ever. In the past, major changes in your life, like a major organizational shift at work, came only once in a great while. It was a shock at first, but in time, you adjusted and moved on with a smile.
These days, you've hardly had time to take in the effects of one change when another change is already happening. One writer calls it "permanent white water." Instead of some parts of the river having roaring rapids and other parts having serene pools, the whole river is racing, and you're bobbing up and down with it.
What effects are the rapids having on you?
"Many," says Victor Bond, president of ChangeNet, a San Diego consulting firm that helps companies, executives and leaders deal effectively with change. There are so many effects in fact, that Victor hardly had time to scratch the surface at the April GMA meeting.
So, Victor used the time he had to talk about how change affects our ability to communicate, and how our ability to communicate affects how we deal with change.
Three Variables
Communication is all about three things: content, contact, and context. Take the word "fire" for example. The content of "fire" can be any number of things: "fire that employee," "get fired up about something," "fire the kiln to make pottery," "ready, aim, fire!" and "there's a fire in Malibu." The contact is the way the word is presented. Joe could say, "I'm real fired up about this." with a smile and wide eyes, and you'd think that Joe really is. Or Joe could say the same thing while grimacing and rolling his eyes. From that contact you might think Joe's being a little sarcastic.
Finally, you have the context of the communication. The yelling of "Fire!" to a bunch of people aiming firearms would be interpreted differently than the same exclamation in the proverbial crowded theater.
So, you have three variables that determine how your communication is interpreted. All you have to do is be in control of all of them, and you'll get the point across every time. Unfortunately, you'll never be entirely in control, and in a situation of change, it's even harder.
All of our actions and words send out communications, many of them unintended. Often what we don't say tells more than what we do. When in a situation of change, our frenzied actions can speak volumes, and sometimes they're not the volumes we want people reading. Which means we need to be more in tune with what we're communicating, especially in times of change.
Says Victor, "Pay attention to communication just a little more than you already do in your everyday lives, and I absolutely promise you that you will be radically more effective than you are today. RADICALLY."
Doing this means more than taking control of the three variables. Whenever you deliver a communication, you've abdicated responsibility for understanding it to your recipients. Which means you also have to confirm that you were understood the way you had intended.
Life And Death
In some professions, confirmation is a matter of life and death. Surgeons giving instructions during an operation better not be misunderstood. Pilots in battle also have to understand correctly the information they're receiving. Victor told the story of a friend who had flown in Vietnam, who actually turned off his Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) radar warning system because it distracted him from everything he had to pay attention to. It was easier to avoid an oncoming missile if he could see it himself than to rely on the growls of the warning system. The only instance where SAM radar could see what he couldn't was if a SAM was coming from behind ... in which case it just wasn't his day anyway.
In these life-and-death contexts, people are trained to focus and narrow-cast, filtering out extraneous communication. In everyday life however, we don't focus like that. It is unbelievably difficult to deliver messages accurately.
Compound that with the stress and emotion brought on by change, and communication is even more difficult. Yet it's during change that clear communication is most important. The more people know about their changing situation, the more they can adapt to it and overcome it.
In today's "permanent white water," people no longer have the time to find out what's going to happen to them. They have their hands full just finding out what's happening to them now! With context changing at a dizzying rate, people want to get a grip on what is actually reality. They want straight facts. Victor describes this as a struggle for validity, for honesty.
The Quest For Honesty
Call it the "New Candor." And see it amply demonstrated in advertising today. Take a recent Benson & Hedges print ad for cigarettes, which shows a group of passengers sitting on the wing of a flying jet because they're not allowed to smoke in the plane. The headline reads, "The lengths you'll go for pleasure." An ad for Prudential tells you that in ten years, the cost of college tuition will be an ungodly sum...and that's just a state school. You have two kids, and neither of them has a jump shot. These ads exemplify the New Candor. Telling it like it is. This is what people need in today's context of non-reality to believe whatever message you send them.
At this point in Victor's presentation, time had run out, and despite his attempts to talk fast and flip frantically through his color overheads, he really only had just begun to tell his story. But, in his short visit, he gave us a good picture of today's fast-paced environment and how vital communication is to coping effectively.
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